“Unbelievable!”
“This is the real McCoy. The stuff you don’t find in books!”
“Somebody ought to write one!”
“And our host—what an actor! That man’s gonna be famous one day.”
“Handsome devil, too!”
“A man like that has a future in state politics, I say.”
Earl took his bow that night, as he did every night from then on, though that was the only time he threw the punch. He tracked down and hired China, the Indian guide, to come in and throw the punch for him, because she’d seemed to enjoy so much hitting the reb that first time, when Rathmartin and his doctor were present. And China, who’d felt the only real satisfaction in her life when she threw that punch at the white man’s face, found it difficult to refuse the job. She was paid a generous salary to come in nightly and punch the lights out of the drunken mail carrier, who got so drunk every night he’d forget he’d just been punched out the night before. When he did remember and stayed away from the restaurant, Earl had Josh McCready on call to come in and act the part. When that happened, no real punches were supposed to be thrown, but sometimes China couldn’t resist, and then Earl would have to pay Josh something extra for combat duty. Each night, when the punch-out was over and the man was dragged out by his feet, Earl gave a little speech about the constant battle that raged in Florida between civilization and the untamed wilds. Sometimes the jungle crept into a man’s head and took control of his actions, but there were always men like himself who bore the torch of civilization, and personally, he was confident that civilization would win in the end and we’d tame the wilds, just like we’d tame the beasts within ourselves. Then he bowed, basking in the round of heartfelt applause, applause that he seemed to hear constantly now, a sort of background noise in his head.
For China, it was a bitter event. She heard Earl’s speech and it enraged her the way he glorified his people, the same people who’d massacred her tribe. But even more it enraged her because she knew he was right—that his civilization was going to win out in the end and there was nothing she could do about it anymore. They were coming in droves now, far faster than she could ever hope to escort out. There were hotels being built on the beaches just to the north, and a railroad line had already extended its steel grip as far south as Fort Pierce. Soon it would pass through here, and its churning locomotive and its multitudes of tourists, settlers, and fortune-seekers would wipe clean and purify any regrets that civilization might have had about what it had done to her people. So she resigned herself to the one last thing on this earth that could give her any pleasure: to punch a white man nightly in the face.
Epilogue
APRIL 2, 1894, WAS a windy day. Elias Rathmartin was sailing the Atlantic in search of mermaids, having commandeered an old sailing ship from his company. He was getting very old and, the crew said, senile. His mind slipped into such distant imaginings that at times he thought himself a merman who’d somehow been changed into a human—he told his crew that he’d been transformed at an early age and sent among the bipeds to make contact and teach them the ways of the mer-people. The problem was, he’d forgotten their customs, or hadn’t learned them well enough—after all, he’d been only a tyke when he’d left the sea. So now, he said, it was more important than ever that he find one of his mer-friends and relearn their ways.
He spent long hours in the crow’s nest, eyes peeled for the tell-tale splash of a mermaid’s tail. On this day he did spot something—but something only a demented mind could truly believe was a mermaid. In a fit of crazed ecstasy, he leapt from the top of the crow’s nest, yelling his merman’s call and believing that he was at last going to rejoin his kind, that he had only to open his arms and embrace the mother ocean to return to his watery paradise. The crew looked up in horror when they heard him yell, and they followed his graceful swan dive through the beautiful blue sky, all the way down to the mid-ship deck. There was at least someone, however—perhaps a man with some romantic notions himself, a man who thought that just maybe there was the slimmest of possibilities that the admiral was right—who looked not at the admiral’s fall, but at where the admiral’s eyes had been fixed. As the admiral made his final descent, the man took a step to the ship’s rail and spotted, fifty yards off starboard, what looked like a pair of leather shoes, bobbing in the waves with little splashes that seemed mischievous and beckoning.
The crew prepared to ice Elias Rathmartin’s body and return it to his family. But before a makeshift casket could be built, the ship ran up against a strong gale and murderous seas. In the scramble, the crew forgot about their boss’s body until it was spotted sliding toward the stern, whereupon it was flipped into the consuming waves. It was a burial at sea, performed by the sea herself, and it was exactly how Elias Rathmartin would have wanted it.
When it was all over and the crew had stopped blaming each other and themselves, they agreed that it was really the proper way, and that just maybe the old admiral hadn’t gone so crazy after all, that maybe he did belong to the depths, and that when the sea calls back one of her own, she’s going to get him, one way or another.
This was the last recorded sighting of Josef Steinmetz’s famous loafers, and signaled the beginning of the end of the Barefoot Mailman legend. John Thomas continued to write about it, but found the public’s attention span remarkably short and its loyalty to its heroes remarkably tenuous. His readership declined rapidly, and reviewers and critics accused him of beating a dead horse. When he could no longer find a publisher, and when all of his business investments went under, he was forced to take a job as the editor of The Barefoot Daily: News to Kick Your Shoes Off By, the shipboard newspaper of the Southwind Cruise Lines. He was a bitter man, eventually fired from even this job because of his sour and unsuitable editorials.
The Steinmetz loafers never did reach their intended destination, of course. Let loose in the sea, it seems probable that they’ve gotten caught up in the current of the Gulf Stream and, floating on their soles and slashing through the waves, continue to circle the Atlantic like a pair of beckoning mermaids or sharks on the prowl.
About the Author
JOHN HENRY FLEMING is the author of Songs for the Deaf (a story collection), The Book I Will Write (a novel-in-emails originally published serially), and Fearsome Creatures of Florida (an eco-conscious literary bestiary). He’s also the founder and advisory editor of Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art. For more information and news of upcoming events, please visit his website at johnhenryfleming.com.
The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman Page 21
