Lawrence Holmes wasn’t a man to be nervous but he was that day. Lawrence was a hero of the Second Battle of the Marne, or so the story went. He had served in the Great War with supposed distinction and had learned, as men do, that the vaguer he kept the story, the more mysterious it became on its own. Truth was, old Lawrence was just running letters in the War for the men of the Illinois 16th and, when the battle kicked off, stayed way to the side. Then, once the shelling and the gas started, stayed way to the rear. Still though, old Lawrence figured he was due the mystery. Some of his friends died, carried down the line on stretchers with missing arms or the sickly look of men gassed.

There were things about this day that reminded him of some of those over in France. One was the bleakness of the landscape. Though Access Road 17 held no pockmarks of explosions or blackened cut-in-half trunks of trees, the bleak Illinois landscape could pull a fellow back. The dustbowl had cut through something harsh this land. Gave it a hollowed-out feel. The sun never did cut right, the whole two weeks he’d had this mail outfit job. And the little car they gave him, with that little engine rattling right in front of his knees, did remind him a little of the ambulances from the war.

But none of this was making Lawrence nervous, really.

What made his knees shake a little more than was necessary even with the rickety engine was the next mailbox. It was half a mile up the road. He could see it there shimmering in the not-too-bright sun, airborne dirt obscuring it like a cloud of fresh mustard gas in the afternoon.

He’d been warned. About the widow who lived near there. About Alma Berta Jones, AKA Ma Jones.

Lawrence remembered the lessons that had kept him alive. Hurry but don’t go to fast. Be worried but don’t let it affect you overly so. Make damn sure that you go just slow enough that you don’t have to do nothing twice.

He slid the package in the mailbox and raised the flag with his left hand. Then he closed the lid with a shaky right. Hopped back in his little machine and puttered off down the road. The little cart only got up to 20 miles per hour, but it felt a damn fine 20 per.

He checked the little rearview mirror rather than turn around, and never saw the widow. Only saw the road stretching longer a little more each second, a growing buffer.

Lawrence smiled a bit and pulled his flask from inside the heavy wool coat he was required to wear even in the summer, during the Depression, out on this new incarnation of wasteland.

He wouldn’t have to come back this way for a week and, as Lawrence well knew, people died all the time.