knew how, but it was. He saw one of the wires snag a letter for Roscoe Thibault and push it into the correct sifter - RFD 2, which was the Hammer Cut road - even though it had been misaddressed to Haven Village.
He wanted to ask her how it worked, but he didn't want to look like a goddam dummy, so he asked her where she got the wires instead.
'Out of these telephones I bought at Radio Shack,' she said. 'The one at the Bangor Mall. They were on sale! There's some other stuff from the phones in it, too. I had to change everything around, but it was easy. It just ... you know ... come to me. You know?'
'Yeah,' Joe said slowly, thinking about the bookie's face when Joe had come in to collect his sixty bucks after the Pirates beat Gooden and the Mets. 'Not bad. For a woman.'
For a moment her brow darkened and he thought: You want to say something? You want to fight? Come on. That's okay. That's just about as okay as the other.
Then her brow cleared and she smiled. 'Now we can do it even longer.' Her fingers slid down the hard ridge in his pants. 'You do want to do it, don't you, Joe?'
And Joe did. They slipped to the floor and he forgot all about being mad at her, and how all of a sudden he seemed to be able to figure the odds on everything from baseball games to horse races to golf matches in the wink of an eye. He slid into her and she moaned and Joe even forgot the tenebrous whispering sound those wires made as they sifted the first-class mail into the row of flour-sifters.
5
When Joe entered the living room, 'Becka was sitting in her rocker, pretending to read the latest issue of The Upper Room. Just ten minutes before Joe came in, she had finished wiring the gadget Jesus had shown her how to make into the back of the Sony TV. She followed His instructions to the letter, because He said you had to be careful when you were fooling around inside the back of a television.
'You could fry yourself,' Jesus advised. 'More juice back there than there is in a Bird's Eye warehouse, even when it's turned off.'
The TV was off now and Joe said ill-temperedly, 'I thought you'd have this all wa'amed up for me.'
'I guess you know how to turn on the damned TV,' 'Becka said, speaking to her husband for the last time.
Joe raised his eyebrows. Damned anything was damned odd, coming from 'Becka. He thought about calling her on it, and decided to let it ride. Could be there was one fat old mare who'd find herself keeping house by herself before much of a longer went by.
'Guess I do,' Joe said, speaking to his wife for the last time.
He pushed the button that turned the Sony on, and better than two thousand volts of current slammed into him, AC which had been boosted, switched over to lethal DC, and then boosted again. His eyes popped wide open, bulged, and then burst like grapes in a microwave. He had started to set the quart of beer on top of the TV next to Jesus. When the electricity hit, his hand clenched tightly enough to break the bottle. Spears of brown glass drove into his fingers and palm. Beer foamed and ran. It hit the top of the TV (its plastic casing already blistering) and turned to steam that smelled like yeast.
'EEEEEOOOOOOARRRRHMMMMMMM!'Joe Paulson screamed. His face began to turn black. Blue smoke poured out of his hair and his ears. His finger was nailed to the Sony's On button.
A picture popped on the TV. It was Dwight Gooden throwing the wild pitch that let in two runs and chased him, making Joe Paulson forty dollars richer. It flipped and showed him and Nancy Voss screwing on the post office floor in a litter of catalogues and Congressional Newsletters and ads from insurance companies saying you could get all the coverage you needed even if you were over sixty-five, no salesman would call at your door, no physical examination would be required, your loved ones would be protected at a cost of pennies a day.
'No!' 'Becka screamed, and the picture flipped again. Now she saw Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, notching his father in the sight of his .30-.30 and murmuring Not you, Em, not tonight. It flipped and