Hit Man

cup, and sat down with one of the weeklies. A front-page article discussed the proper method for mounting the new self-adhesive stamps. On the “Letters to the Editor” page, several collectors vented their anger at postal clerks who ruined collectible stamps by canceling them with pen and ink instead of a proper postmark.
    When he took a sip of his coffee, it was cold. He looked at his watch and found out why. He’d been reading without pause for three straight hours.
    “It’s funny,” he told Dot. “I don’t remember spending that much time with my stamps when I was a kid. It seems to me I was outside a lot, and anyway, I had the kind of attention span a kid has.”
    “About the same as a fruit fly’s.”
    “But I must have spent more time than I thought, and paid more attention. I keep seeing stamps I recognize. I’ll look at a black-and-white photo of a stamp and right away I know what the real color is. Because I remember it.”
    “Good for you, Keller.”
    “I learned a lot from stamps, you know. I can name the presidents of the United States in order.”
    “In order to what?”
    “There was this series,” he said. “George Washington was our first president, and he was on the one-cent stamp. It was green. John Adams was on the pink two-cent stamp, and Thomas Jefferson was on the three-cent violet, and so on.”
    “Who was nineteenth, Keller?”
    “Rutherford B. Hayes,” he said without hesitation. “And I think the stamp was reddish-brown, but I can’t swear to it.”
    “Well, you probably won’t have to,” Dot told him. “I’ll be damned, Keller. It sounds for all the world as though you’ve got yourself a hobby. You’re a whatchamacallit, a philatelist.”
    “It looks that way.”
    “I think that’s great,” she said. “How many stamps have you got in your collection so far?”
    “None,” he said.
    “How’s that?”
    “You have to buy them,” he said, “and before you do that you have to decide exactly what it is you want to buy. And I haven’t done that yet.”
    “Oh,” she said. “Well, all the same, it certainly sounds like you’re off to a good start.”
    “I was thinking about collecting a topic,” he told Wallens.
    “You mentioned dogs, if I remember correctly.”
    “I thought about dogs,” he said, “because I’ve always liked dogs. I had a dog named Soldier around the same time I had my stamp collection. And I thought about some other topics as well. But somehow topical collecting strikes me as a little, oh, what’s the word I want?”
    Wallens let him think about it.
    “Frivolous,” he said at length, pleased with the word and wondering if he’d ever had occasion to use it before. Not only did you learn the presidents in order, you wound up expanding your working vocabulary.
    “I’ve known some topical collectors who were dedicated, serious philatelists,” Wallens said. “Quite sophisticated, too. But all the same I have to say I agree with you. When you collect topically, you’re not collecting stamps. You’re collecting what they portray.”
    “That’s it,” Keller said.
    “And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what you’re interested in.”
    “No, it’s not.”
    “So you probably want to collect a country, or a group of countries. Is there one in particular you’re drawn to?”
    “I’m open to suggestions,” Keller said.
    “Suggestions. Well, Western Europe’s always good. France and colonies, Germany and German states. Benelux—that’s Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.”
    “I know.”
    “British Empire’s good—or at least it was when there was such a thing. Now all the former colonies are independent, and some of them are among the worst offenders when it comes to issuing meaningless stamps by the carload. Our own country’s getting bad itself, printing stamps to honor dead rock stars, for God’s sake.”
    “Reading the magazines,” Keller said, “it made me want to collect everything, but most of the newer stamps. . . ”
    “Wallpaper.”
    “I mean, stamps with Walt Disney characters?”
    “Say no more,” said Wallens, rolling his eyes. He drummed the counter. “You know,” he said, “I think I know where you’re coming from, and I could tell you what I would do in your position.”
    “Please do.”
    “I’d collect worldwide,” Wallens said, warming to the topic. “But with a cutoff.”
    “A cutoff?”
    “They issued more stamps worldwide in the past three years than