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for his new journal.
    He avoided thinking about the loss of the old volume—sixteen years’ tiny scratchings, now doubtless being perusedby that onetime stockbroker robber. It would be read and preserved, he was sure, along with the tiny volumes of verse he had carried in his pack, or he had misread Roger Septien’s personality.
    Someday, he would come and get them back.
    What was a U.S. Postal Service jeep doing out here, anyway? And what had killed the postman? He found part of his answer around at the back of the vehicle—bullet holes in the tailgate window, well grouped midway up the right side.
    Gordon looked over to the ponderosa. Yes, the shirt and the jacket each had two holes in the back of the upper chest area.
    The attempted hijacking or robbery could not have been prewar. Mail carriers were almost never attacked, even in the late eighties’ depression riots, before the “golden age” of the nineties.
    Besides, a missing carrier would have been searched for until found.
    So, the attack took place
after
the One-Week War. But what was a mailman doing driving alone through the countryside after the United States had effectively ceased to exist? How long afterward had this happened?
    The fellow must have driven off from his ambush, seeking obscure roads and trails to get away from his assailants. Maybe he didn’t know the severity of his wounds, or simply panicked.
    But Gordon suspected that there was another reason the letter carrier had chosen to weave in and out of blackberry thickets to hide deep in forest depths.
    “He was protecting his cargo,” Gordon whispered. “He measured the chance he’d black out on the road against the possibility of getting to help … and decided to cache the mail, rather than try to live.”
    So, this was a bona fide
postwar
postman. A hero of the flickering twilight of civilization. Gordon thought of the old-time ode of the mails … “Neither sleet, nor hail …” andwondered at the fact that some had tried this hard to keep the light alive.
    That explained the official letters and the lack of junk mail. He hadn’t realized that even a semblance of normality had remained for so long. Of course, a seventeen-year-old militia recruit was unlikely to have seen anything normal. Mob rule and general looting in the main disbursement centers had kept armed authority busy and attrited until the militia finally vanished into the disturbances it had been sent to quell. If men and women elsewhere were behaving more like human beings during those months of horror, Gordon never witnessed it.
    The brave story of the postman only served to depress Gordon. This tale of struggle against chaos, by mayors and university professors and postmen, had a “what if” flavor that was too poignant for him to consider for long.
    The tailgate opened reluctantly, after some prying. Moving mail sacks aside, he found the letter carrier’s hat, with its tarnished badge, an empty lunchbox, and a valuable pair of sunglasses lying in thick dust atop a wheel well.
    A small shovel, intended to help free the jeep from road ruts, would now help to bury the driver.
    Finally, just behind the driver’s seat, broken under several heavy sacks, Gordon found a smashed guitar. A large-caliber bullet had snapped its neck. Near it, a large, yellowed plastic bag held a pound of desiccated herbs that gave off a strong, musky odor. Gordon’s recollection hadn’t faded enough to forget the aroma of marijuana.
    He had envisioned the postman as a middle-aged, balding, conservative type. Gordon now recreated the image, and made the fellow look more like himself, wiry, bearded, with a perpetual, stunned expression that seemed about to say, “Oh, wow.”
    A neohippy perhaps—a member of a subgeneration that had hardly begun to flower before the war snuffed it out and everything else optimistic—a neohippy dying to protect the establishment’s mail. It didn’t surprise Gordon in the slightest. He had had friends