The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

by John Henry Fleming

  “I won’t!”

  Now the other men circled around Mick.

  “Arr. You’ll do it, Mick. You’ve no choice.”

  “I won’t do it! The little bastard Yank’s lyin. ’E’s lyin, can’t ya see it!”

  Josef saw Mick’s face between the shoulders of the men. Mick suddenly looked scared and even younger.

  One of the men slapped Mick’s cheek and the color went out of it. “Shut up an swim, ya stupid orphan brat, or you’ll end up like yer mummy and daddy!”

  Several hands gave Mick a shove toward the ocean. He looked back at them once, then spit at Josef’s feet.

  “Ya’d best not be lyin,” said a voice in Josef’s ear.

  Mick waded in up to his waist. The waves broke across his chest, causing him to stumble back. Then he dove in and came up on the other side of the break, already out of breath. He started swimming, not gracefully, but with some confidence. He disappeared for seconds at a time as the waves rolled over his head. The wind had picked up and threw a spray back off the crest of the waves. Mick was nearly lost in the turbulence and mist.

  “’E’s not sech a bad swimmer,” said one man.

  “Na, he’ll make it yet.”

  As Mick approached the wreckage, he began to disappear for longer periods of time, up to ten seconds. His swimming became more uneven as it took more effort to stay afloat. The waves dwarfed him out there, as if he were little more than a clump of seaweed. When he finally reached the wood, it seemed to be breaking up into two sections, each at least twice as big as Mick. He turned around at the last moment before he got there, as if to yell something. A victory yell, maybe, or some sort of curse he’d never say to their faces. Or maybe, Josef hoped, it was just to tell them he was okay. But if he did actually get any words out, they were lost in the ocean’s roar, and the very next moment he was struck from behind when a monstrous wave slammed one section of wood into the back of his head and knocked him below the surface.

  On shore, no one spoke for a moment, expecting him to come back up and wave again.

  “Mick,” said one of them. “Little Mick.”

  They waited a minute longer and Mick’s head did not reappear. Someone finally spoke up.

  “Who’ll go out for Mick?”

  Right away, a hand grasped Josef’s shoulder. “’Ere’s the man ought to do it. It’s his skin Mick saved.”

  “Aye. Look at ’im. There ain’t a ounce of grief in ’is face, and Mick volunteerin out of the goodness of ’is heart.”

  “What about our government ransom?”

  “That money belongs with Mick, now.”

  “Aye.”

  “But I can’t swim,” said Josef, still trying to play by the rules of his lie.

  “Way I see it, yer hide ain’t worth the sand between yer toes, seein as how the boy who saved yer life is out ta sea drownin as we speak.”

  “Sure, and ’is only chance to make good is to bring in poor Mick.”

  “Or what’s left of ’im.”

  “Arr, who’d’ve thought we’d miss ’im?”

  “Like family, ’e was.”

  Another hand slapped Josef on the back, blowing all the air out of him.

  “It’s time you learn to swim, mate.”

  The other men agreed, and they shoved Josef forcefully toward the water, where he fell face first into the surf. He looked back at them just in time to catch a clump of sand in his face.

  “Get to it!” said one man, coming to him and kicking him into deeper water. “Mick’s waitin fer ya.”

  Josef dragged himself in, and when he got past the break, he began to dog-paddle. He tried to look as though he were struggling, because he was still an easy pistol shot. Before he was out of earshot, though, he heard them shouting.

  “You bloody liar!”

  “’E swims like a fish!”

  “The lyin bastard!”

  Then he heard the pistols and the plunk of the bullets breaking the water around him. He swam as fast as he could, using the Australian crawl Uncle Mordy had taught him in the Hudson River. Yet every stroke filled him with guilt; he’d denied the beautiful memories of those swimming lessons, but still used the skills to save his cowardly hide.

  The pistols kept firing, and Josef felt he had no strength at all in his arms and legs, but somehow, with the stamina of fear, he moved forward, every few seconds diving beneath the thick green whitecaps that twisted his body to rags and soaked his postal bag and all the mail in it. Somewhere between the shore and the wreckage, he understood that his entire life had amounted to nothing but failure, and now he’d failed morally as well. He felt his life was worthless, and that by all rights he deserved to die here and now. Still, something kept him going, perhaps only fear, but maybe it was the hope that he could one day redeem himself, if only in some small way.

  At last the guns stopped sounding. He reached the wreckage and between waves seized hold of the ship’s siding. There was no sign of Mick. The piece Josef had grabbed made a rectangular, arched raft with splintery edges. After several attempts, he pulled himself up and lay flat, clinging to the sides as the waves washed over him. When he caught his breath he heard something thumping hollowly against the underside of the wood, directly below him. He stiffened at the thought of what it might be, and then, a few waves later, his fear was confirmed. The pate of Mick’s head bobbed in front of Josef’s face, Mick’s light hair splayed out in the water like the arms of a jellyfish, his face almost lost in the green shadows. When the next wave struck, the face turned upward for just an instant. It looked completely different now, in death. All the tenseness and the hardness that had been forced upon it had fallen away. Its features had softened so much that it hardly looked like the same person. A thought struck Josef all at once that was difficult to accept, but seemed to make perfect sense at the same time. That face he’d been looking at had not been the face of a young boy at all. For whatever reason, probably out of a desperate fear, Mick had only posed as one. He’d lived a lie since he’d been shipwrecked and captured, and that’s why he’d known all along that Josef was lying about his swimming ability. Mick had seen the diverging worlds forming in Josef’s mind, and knew what a person had to do sometimes to save his skin. Mick had understood that sometimes living a lie was the only alternative when you wanted nothing more than to live. Because Mick had done it herself.

  Chapter 12

  WHEN JOSEF LIFTED his head again, it was to rub salt out of his eyes. Hours must have passed. The sea had calmed and the scavengers were nowhere in sight. Still, the hollow sound of Mick’s head bobbing against the raft had not rung itself out of Josef’s ears.

  He seemed to be drifting southward. He’d drifted out to sea a little way, too, though the shore was still in clear view. The wind had calmed, and for the first time in two days Josef felt the full brunt of the sun. His shirt had ripped, and part of his back was exposed—he could feel exactly where.

  He lifted himself to a sitting position and looked nervously at the sea around him. No sign of Mick. Thinking it was safe now to head for shore, he yanked up one of the loose planks of wood and began to paddle. He propelled himself at an almost undetectable speed and filled his hands with splinters, but if he let himself drift, he might come across the Gulf Stream, and then there’d be no hope at all—he knew that from his books. In the Gulf Stream, he’d be carried north up the coast, toward the Carolinas, past Long Island and agonizingly close to his wife and aunt in Brooklyn, then up to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and beyond! Perhaps he’d catch other currents and then drift down along the coasts of Europe and Africa and back across the Atlantic in an endless and unbreakable circle. The current would hold him in its watery grasp, and what grief to drift eternally like that, nearly always within sight of land!

  That fear alone was enough to keep him paddling. He put everything he had into it, and within an hour he saw he’d made progress. After two hours, his raft split apart in the break, and he swam the last hundred yards to shore. B
ut the ocean currents had only been half his trouble. As he stumbled out of the surf, he was cured and marinated to perfection and ready to be roasted by the midday sun.

  He looked down at his mail sack. It had hung from his neck throughout the entire ordeal and now, thoroughly soaked, it was an emblem of his incompetence. He dared not look inside it. If the letters and packages had not been shredded to pulp, they were at least unreadable.

  Seeing no humans or animals to endanger him, Josef continued south along his mail route. At first he felt some contentment and relief. The simple, regular action of walking in the sand helped him to forget his recent troubles for a moment. He’d been through a lot, and it felt good to be back on the job again, though now the delivery was probably pointless.

  But he was quickly reminded that walking the beach at this time of day was little consolation. His feet hadn’t had time to heal. Still red and sore, they began to throb in the heat. His skin began to blister where his shirt had ripped open.

  The waves had kicked up a thick mist of ocean that hadn’t yet settled. This made breathing heavy and unsatisfying. He wheezed as he walked. He’d had little food since Lena left him, and he suddenly grew desperately hungry. There’d be food waiting for him at the Biscayne post office, but Biscayne seemed like a dream to him now, a faint image of his unreachable paradise.

  The pain from the hot sand seemed to be the only thing keeping his feet moving. After a while, the sand grew too hot and his reactions too slow to make it bearable; he had to descend the beach and splash through the surf, so his pace slowed to a crawl.

  It wasn’t long before his mind began to wander, perhaps in a natural defense against the torture of the elements, or perhaps in a prelude to madness. He tried to think joyful thoughts, of happier times. Yet every thought from his past led him down a fateful path to the horror of young Mick’s death, and the lying cowardice that caused it. He saw clearly how weak-willed and deceitful he truly was, how truly unfit for the New Paradise he’d only recently imagined so vividly. Even that image he now saw as little more than a cowardly haven to justify his own fears and prejudices. It hadn’t taken long for him to exclude the breeds of animals he didn’t like, or to admit the Indians as mere slaves working the great fans so Josef alone (and maybe a few close friends and family) could be happy and comfortable in the breeze. It hadn’t taken long for him to raise carnal pleasures to the one supremely important ingredient. His view of paradise had become little more than a Roman bath house! A self-aggrandizing fantasy! It hadn’t taken him long, either, to prove himself unworthy of even the most pale replica of Paradise. He hadn’t the purity of heart, or even a morsel of human compassion. Here was the paradise he deserved—alone and aching, on a beach too hot to walk and a surf that made him deny the happiest moments of his life, where the waves washed up and poured salt into his wounds and the sting of his sweat burned tracks in his raw skin, and the hollow thunk of Mick’s blonde pate cursed every step of his blistered and overexposed Brooklynite’s feet.

  He saw Lena now, in her flowing white wedding dress and her great innocent smile of hope. She’d trusted him with the fulfillment of her own dreams, and he’d let her down in selfish pursuit of his private fancies. What a fool he’d been to bring her to the tropics! Any clear-thinking person could see she was not suited for it. Why did he think she’d grow accustomed to such a place? Why would she want to? She’d come only because she loved Josef, and he’d destroyed their marriage for the sake of his greed for glory. Like a fool, he thought he’d been meant for greatness. But it was clear he was an ordinary man at best, weak-willed and cowardly, deceitful and selfish, full of foolish dreams.

  He saw Lena in her white dress, standing before him on the beach, always just out of reach, as though he were trapped forever in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Lena. Then her image began to waver and her features hardened and her hair shortened and changed color and suddenly there was young Mick standing before him, her foot cocked and ready to kick him for the injustice he’d done her. And he begged her, “Please kick me, please kick me, Lena. I deserve to be kicked by the one I love, painfully and forever kicked.” And he got down in the wash of the waves and begged her, “Kick me!” but always as the foot began its motion toward his ribs, the image disappeared with the sound of a thunk.

  It was a hollow thunk, like a book slammed shut or a fist striking a nose. Delirious, Josef attributed the sound to his own feet splashing in the surf, and he edged deeper and deeper into the water until the waves crashed across his waist, soaking the mail sack before it had fully dried out. He waded slowly, the sun’s reflection blinding him, his legs driven with a dumb life of their own. He was crazed and stumbling, and his whole body burned and ached. He mumbled as he walked, “Kick me, please kick me, Lena!” But always he was let down, and he cringed at the sound only he could hear: thunk.

  IT WAS LATE afternoon when he stumbled, breathless, dehydrated, and half crazy, onto several dozen men and women grouped on the beach just up from the posh Biscayne Grand Hotel. The group was fancily dressed in whites and pastels they’d had tailored just for their trip to the tropics. The women carried parasols. They were watching a salvage operation offshore, where a ship had broken up on the reef.

  Josef walked through them, perhaps a little faster now, knowing he’d almost made it. As he did so, he bumped into some of them, and they turned and looked on him with horror—his face was red and taut, and his blackened eyes and broken nose had still not fully healed from that night in the postmaster’s restaurant. He wheezed and snorted as he dragged himself through the sunny crowd, some of whom made comments on his appearance and odor. But after their initial shock, they merely stepped back and let him pass, because they were wealthy Northeast-erners whose tropical holiday had already been interrupted, though not unpleasantly, by the excitement of the ship-wreck. All of them agreed, without having to say a word about it, that one bit of excitement could be dandy, but two at once was probably a strain to one’s constitution. And what with the ladies here and all, it would be better just to ignore this strange creature—this medicine man, or this alligator breeder, or whatever he might be—and keep one’s attention focused on this interesting shipwreck, so that each and every detail could be gathered into a fascinating tale to relate to one’s friends and colleagues back home.

  Yet there was one man who stood out from this group, if only for the darker colors of his attire and the general carelessness—almost slovenliness—with which he wore it. He was a short, blank-faced gent with a thin moustache and dark, dark eyes. His bowler was pulled down just a little too far for the day’s fashion, and that made him seem as though he had something to hide. He was a reporter on assignment for The New York Times and had been sent to file a story about the growth of the transportation and trade industries in Florida, and the problems encountered in laying tracks and roads, and dredging channels and harbors. He was also to focus on the toll that the inhospitable subtropical climate took on the hundreds of northern workers who’d been brought in to do the work by big northern holding companies seeking footholds in the untapped marketplace. This shipwreck was timely and served his story to a tee, yet something in the corner of his eye made him stop his note-taking and look up.

  He saw Josef moving in his direction, and he took a good look at Josef’s blazing red skin, the broken and discolored nose that hadn’t set properly, the trickle of blood that had dried on Josef’s upper lip, and the crazed and black-ringed eyes that seemed unable to focus, and the reporter thought he was looking at some evil apparition, lacking only the claws and horns to be a full-fledged voodoo devil. But he also knew he was looking at a damned good story.

  “Say, bud,” said the reporter.

  Josef stopped at the voice and his head fell to his chest. He couldn’t pull it up to look the man in the eye.

  “You from the wreck out there?” asked the reporter.

  “Wreck,” repeated Josef, his hoarse voice barely more than a whisper.

  “SS Hu
dson Valley. Captain put her into the reef last night.” He laughed. “Some of the locals say he must’ve been mesmerized by a mermaid or a siren or something. Company doesn’t buy it. He’s got a history with the bottle, you know. Local sheriff’s holding ’im while they investigate. Say, you look like you’ve been through hell. You don’t know nothing about it?”

  Josef turned the weathered and damp mail sack in front of him to identify himself as a carrier. It hurt too much to speak.

  “Ah,” said the reporter, “you from that town up the coast? What’s it called?—Figulus?”

  Josef lifted his head a fraction of an inch to nod.

  “I heard they got plans for a shipping terminal up there—any truth to that?”

  Josef coughed the sweat away from his lips, and the reporter took this as a negative.

  “Well hey, bud,” said the reporter. “I’m John Thomas. New York Times. Thanks for the info.”

  He held his hand out, but Josef couldn’t raise his more than twenty degrees, so John Thomas was forced to stretch his reach. He was shocked at the heat he felt coming from that hand. It was as though it had an energy source all its own.

  Then Josef started forward again, remembering he was nearly there. The reporter followed him with his eyes, and noticed for the first time and with great surprise Josef’s burned and uncovered feet. They were astonishingly weather-beaten, and it was amazing they could still be of any use at all to their owner.

  When Josef turned inland, toward the post office, John Thomas turned his attention back to the wreck. But he found it difficult to concentrate on his story. The encounter with Josef had started his mind whirring. There is something to this man, he thought. It was something he could not as yet define, but something that had begun, in fits and flashes, to take shape in his reporter’s brain.

  THE BISCAYNE POSTMASTER, Elijah J. Partridge, read what he could of the note from Postmaster Shank and gave Josef a surly welcome: Josef was a day late; he had let the postal sack drag in the water, and few of the letters and packages would ever reach their destination now—the addresses had been washed away by the surf, and some of the letters were nothing but tattered rags; this was an outrage in the eyes of the U.S. Government, a disservice to the entire country; furthermore, what had he done with his government-issued postal shoes?—only a fool would lose the shoes off his feet and expose that sensitive skin; those shoes had been expressly designed, and at great cost to the nation at large, to protect the carrier’s feet from the elements—snow, sleet, rain, hail, what have you—that fool postmaster in Figulus must have left his wits at home when he hired such an imbecile for so important a position!