Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

For a long time our government denied what was going on and the speeches continued through the night. I bought a Spanish to English dictionary and translated one word I’d catch out of the one thousand perhaps that flashed by, leafing through the book until I found something I thought sounded like what I had heard. He’s talking about a ship, I’d think. And he is sitting or he sat once. Overlooking the sea specked with ships. Now there are roosters. Ships, the holds filled with roosters, who crow out the watch. Mothers waiting for the ships, I thought, at the clocks, shielding their eyes in the sun, empty baskets balanced on their heads.

WOWO’s ratings went up as people stayed awake late into the night to listen to the interruptions, the speeches with the static of applause. And, as if they realized they now had an audience, the programmers in Havana began to salt the broadcast with cuts of Latin music, bossa novas and sambas, anthems and pretty folk songs plucked out on guitars with squeaky strings. Downtown, during the day, I began to see people napping at their desks, sleepwalking to the copying rooms and the coffee machines. More men smoked cigars. High school Spanish classes were assigned to listen to the station at night, meeting at their teachers’ houses for slumber parties. So tired, we were infected by our dreams. The days grew warmer. I had been unable to sleep for so long the measured pace of the people around me matched my own endless daily swim through the thick sunlit air. We moved like my cats, lounged and yawned, stared at each other with half-closed eyes.

I listened for Fidel at night. Over time, I counted on him. I translated his rambling monologues in my own dreamy way as he talked about his island with its green unpronounceable trees, the blooming pampas where butterflies from the north nested in the fall, lazy games of catch performed by children in starchy white uniforms chattering in a dialect that predates Columbus. You see, I was ready for someone to talk to me, to explain everything to me. How I looked like a movie star in those sunglasses I wore continually. How fires smell in the cane fields as the sugar caramelizes. I thought I understood romance for once and martyrdom, maybe even revolution. This ropy language, the syrup of its sound, an elixir, was on the air now all the time, crept into my bed each night.

What would my father say? It filled me up, crowding out the mortgaged furniture, the old sad music, the phone calls to the police, and all the names, especially the names I’ve now forgotten were ever attached to those other frequencies through which I drifted.

The kids on the stoops with the dogs are still confused. They tackle the overgrown puppies, tangling themselves in the harnesses and leads as the whining dogs lunge and stumble. Panting. Lots of panting.

“It’s the mailman lady,” the kids shout. I kind of throw the mail their way with just enough velocity for the postcards to strip away from the bundle, startling the dogs, who soundlessly bark at the spinning envelopes. The kids hang on, use their sweaty faces to spear an animal back, grope for a purchase of fur and skin.

“Letter carrier,” I say over my shoulder. Each stride a sidewalk square. The next stoop of the row house has another dog, another kid already mixing it up. The dog’s ears are pointing my way. It’s stepping all over the kid. And now the whole block of children and animals senses me. “The mailman lady,” they howl. The dogs bob and focus, then snap and tumble with the kids, slough them off, cock themselves again. The dogs know. The kids are still confused, don’t know what to make of me. Never seen one of me before. The dogs are attentive to ancient messages. The uniform. The territory. I smell just as sweet.

I’m a letter carrier in a town whose main industry is raising dogs. Guide dogs for the blind. Shepherds and retrievers mostly. Big brains and bones. Steady mutts with substantial paws, plodding beasts. Slobberingly loyal. Obedient, of course. Easy to clean. It’s still a mystery to me just how the training works. The school is on another route, but I’ve seen the Quonset huts, the kennels, the field of stripped obstacles at the school. Every year the newspaper does a feature story with a page of pictures of the graduating dogs staring into the calm faces of their new masters. I only know the puppies come here to this bedroom community and are parceled out to families who keep them just like pets. After a while you’ll see the dog in the station wagon. A mom is driving, dropping her husband off at the train platform, the kids at school. The dog commutes to work also, comes home for the night, a pillow to a pile of kids in front of the TV.

I run into the older dogs, already on the special lead, as volunteers walk them around the town. There isn’t a street where you won’t see a couple of pairs plowing the sidewalks. The sighted volunteers, waving to each other, nudge their dogs around a corner. They slug their way through a cul-de-sac. At the corners, there are patient instructions. They wait for the light to change and for the scramble bell to sound. The dogs walk through the aisles of the stores downtown. They wait in packs for the special bus that distributes them in the neighborhoods. In fact, the town is overly complicated for its size, presenting to the dogs every possible distraction. Too many cats. Dummy fire hydrants. Revolving doors in the butcher shop. The park has been landscaped in levels. Stairs lead by fountains and reflecting pools. I see the dogs taking cab rides. There is an escalator leading down to a subway station with turnstiles but no trains. They take the elevator back to the surface, where there are flower carts, news kiosks, street singers, three-card monte games, people selling watches spread out on towels, and other volunteers who pretend to be drunk and passed out on benches. Everywhere there are trees. Lots of trees. And people who have signed up to be people today walk their dogs and eat ice cream, read newspapers they then throw in the white wire trash bins scattered everywhere on the avenues. The dogs slog through it all as a car, slow enough to chase, cruises by blowing its horn. I’m part of this too, I know, though the mail I deliver is real. My satchel is strapped to the back of this tricycle cart, and I slalom through the plodding dogs and trainers on the street. The dogs sniff the wheels of the cart. The walkers, for a second tense, lose the strange connection with their animals. My cart speeds up, pulls me along. Up ahead, a wailing fire truck skids around the corner on its way to an imaginary fire.

Along with the letters, we all carry a repellent. It comes in a canister with a pump action like a purse-sized cologne. It is standard issue with the uniform and fits neatly in a leather holster. At Brateman’s, the store that carries all the uniforms, I attracted a crowd of men — cops and firefighters, other postal workers, meter readers — as I tried on the new uniforms. The skirt, the shorts, the dusty blue acrylic cardigan still patchless but with stamped buttons. The baseball cap, the pith helmet. I stepped out from the dark dressing room, wire hangers jingling, and the men stopped talking with the clerk who was sucking on pins. They leaned on the glass cases of badges, whistles, and utility belts and watched me look at myself in the mirrors. There were piles of canvas coveralls on the floor, boxes of steel-toed shoes. I tried on a yellow slicker. “How does that feel?” the clerk asked, his mouth full of pins. It felt slick already with sweat. A sheriff’s deputy twirled through a stand of string ties. They talked under their breath, examined a handcuff key. A dog and trainer glided through the racks of khaki shirts. I came out in pants that I had rolled up. I have always liked the stripe, that darker shade of blue, and the permanent crease that lets me fold everything back into the shape it started with. The clerk soaped the altered cuffs. In the dressing room, I stood there in the dark, my new clothes folding themselves into neat piles. I listened to the damped voices of the men outside, the dog whining, then yawning, and scratching, panting outside the door. The clerk made out the bill, punched the register. I had clothes for every weather and season, a week of shirts and calf-length socks. Shoes. At last he handed on the key chain and the repellent in its shiny case. “To keep the boys away,” he said. I smiled and thanked him, poised over the charge slip ready for the total. I knew it would take at least two trips out and back to the car to load the uniforms.