The Postman Read Online Free PDF

war.
    “But
this
, Mr. Mailman”—he lifted the flask—“this goes beyond anything I’d come to expect! I consider my taxes very well spent.” He drank to the postman, coughing a little but relishing the warm glow.
    He settled deeper into the mail sacks and looked at the leather jacket, ribs serating its sides, arms hanging loosely at odd angles. Lying still, Gordon felt a sad poignancy—something like homesickness. The jeep, the symbolic, faithful letter carrier, the flag patch … they recalled comfort, innocence, cooperation, an easy life that allowed millions of men and women to relax, to smile or argue as they chose, to be tolerant with one another—and to hope to be better people with the passage of time.
    Gordon had been ready, today, to kill and to be killed. Now he was glad that had been averted. They had called him “Mr. Rabbit” and left him to die. But it was his privilege, without their ever knowing it, to call the bandits “countrymen,” and let them have their lives.
    Gordon allowed sleep to come and welcomed back optimism—foolish anachronism that it might be. He lay in a blanket of his own honor, and spent the rest of the night dreaming of parallel worlds.

2
    Snow and soot covered the ancient tree’s broken branches and seared bark. It wasn’t dead, not quite yet. Here and there tiny shoots of green struggled to emerge, but they weren’t doing well. The end was near
.
    A shadow loomed, and a creature settled onto the drifts, an old, wounded thing of the skies, as near death as the tree
.
    Pinions drooping, it laboriously began building a nest—a place of dying. Stick by stick, it pecked among the ruined wood on the ground, piling the bits higher until it was clear that it was not a nest at all
.
    It was a pyre
.
    The bloody, dying thing settled in atop the kindling, and crooned soft music unlike anything ever heard before. A glow began to build, surrounding the beast soon in a rich purple lambience. Blue flames burst forth
.
    And the
tree
seemed to respond. Aged, ruined branches curled forward toward the heat, like an old man warming his hands. Snow shivered and fell, the green patches grew and began to fill the air with a fragrance of renewal
.
    It was not the creature in the pyre that was reborn, and even in sleep, that surprised Gordon. The great bird was consumed, leaving only bones
.
    But the
tree
blossomed, and from its flowering branches
things
uncurled and drifted off into the air
.
    He stared in wonderment when he saw that they were balloons, airplanes, and rocket ships
. Dreams.
    They floated away in all directions, and the air was filled with hope
.

3
    A camp robber bird, looking for blue jays to chase, landed on the jeep’s hood with a hollow thump. It squawked—once for territoriality and once for pleasure—then began poking through the thick detritus with its beak.
    Gordon awakened to the tap-tapping sound. He looked up, bleary-eyed, and saw the gray-flanked bird through the dust-smeared window. It took him moments to remember where he was. The glass windshield, the steering wheel, the smell of metal and paper, all felt like a continuation of one of the night’s most vivid dreams, a vision of the old days before the war. He sat dazedly for a few moments, sifting through feelings while the sleep images unraveled and drifted away, out of grasp.
    Gordon rubbed his eyes, and presently began to consider his situation.
    If he hadn’t left an elephant’s trail on his way into this hollow last night, he should be perfectly safe right now. The fact that the whiskey had lain here untouched for sixteen years obviously meant the bandits were lazy hunters. They had their traditional stalks and blinds, and had never bothered fully to explore their own mountain.
    Gordon felt a bit thick-headed. The war had begun when he was eighteen, a college sophomore, and since then there had been little chance to build a tolerance to eighty-proof liquor. Added to yesterday’s series of traumas