Praise
Title Page
Copyright page
Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition
A Note from the Narrator
Prologue
Part I: Serendipity
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part II: The New Paradise
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part III: The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman
Chapter 13
Part IV: The Legend of Josef Steinmetz
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
About the Author
Praise for
The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman
“A marvelously piquant satire on the American Dream.... Fleming's insights into mythmaking are keen, and his narrative skills and humor finely honed. A marvelously inventive, thoroughly enjoyable tale about our capacity for self-invention, adaptability, and perseverance.”
—Booklist (**starred review**)
“A gem of a first novel...deftly narrated in a wry, tongue-in-cheek style reminiscent of Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce.... Fleming's prose is not only first-rate but ingeniously evocative of 19th-century American parlance.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“An engrossing and highly entertaining tale... The author is a gifted storyteller whose rich style and language provide genuinely treasured moments for all readers.”
—Library Journal
“Winningly satiric.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“You have everything in this novel—history, adventure, humor, and a strong study of the American character. The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman is as much Americana as Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, or Huckleberry Finn: all are searching for what is supposed to be the American Dream.”
—Ernest J. Gaines, author of A Lesson Before Dying
“A patchwork job perfectly suited to a lazy author who would rather indulge his passing whims than visit a library.”
—John Thomas, ex-New York Times reporter, deceased (from the introduction)
The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman
A NOVEL
[20th Anniversary Edition]
John Henry Fleming
Copyright 2014 by John Henry Fleming
ISBN: 978-0-9849538-8-2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Jane Mjølsness
Electronic Reprint Edition, Burrow Press 2014
Print: burrowpress.com
Web: burrowpressreview.com
Flesh: functionallyliterate.org
INTRODUCTION TO THE 20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
by John Thomas, ex-reporter, The New York Times, deceased.
EVERYONE IN THIS STORY died a long time ago. They condo-ed up to the Sweet Hereafter with a view of the Eternal Strand, while I hitched my star to a legend and stayed put. Now I’m the one who walks the beach, bereft of shoes but also of feet—of bodily substance in general. Yet I’m not bitter.
So why do I linger?
I think about it. I have time.
My own book is forgotten, yet the legend survives. Some time back, gliding the shore at dusk, my moonish glow reflected in the mirrored picture windows of seaside mansions, I paused beside an abandoned beach umbrella. I observed a crab digging a home in the sand and flicking clean a hardcover’s mildewed corner, eventually revealing the book’s dampened-and-dried pages, reshaped by the sea into a wavy image of itself. Soon the entire volume emerged—a discarded ex-library copy, a first edition of the very story in your hands.
A story I thought I knew.
Its crusty pages had been marked up in blue ink, edited by an unknown hand. I read it. I was intrigued.
I don’t come off so well. I had ambitions back then. I was opportunistic and greedy for fame. When I lost it all, I blamed everyone. So far so good. But no accounting of a life can be complete without a view of its entirety. How could this writer leave off my final years? I wasn’t fired by Southwind Cruise Lines, as the book claims; I jumped ship in Biscayne, where I wrote tropical romances for lovelorn ladies under a pseudonym. I don’t deny I drank too much.
One night, deep in my cups, I was jumped by a wonderfully buxom Indian woman who tossed me into a gator hole. Once sober, I found myself admiring her spunk. I sought her out and wooed her with my advanced vocabulary.
And so it went. In our later years, we lived on and off as husband and wife. She’d disappear for weeks at a time, during which I’d pen my next romance. When she’d return with money and valuables, I asked no questions. Her thieving and my drinking obtained a delicate balance.
Until at last she disappeared for good. It didn’t surprise me. She’d been complaining about her eyesight, how everything around her had turned white. I thought she was going blind or senile. Reading this book, I discovered another possibility.
I wasn’t bitter when she left. I’d had my pleasures and died happy enough. Yet I had unfinished business . . .
So here I am.
You’ll find none of these facts in the first edition. And there are other problems. Anachronisms. Historical inaccuracies. Brazen misrepresentations. Rookie mistakes. If I weren’t dead, I might have been outraged.
But to whom would I complain? I know nothing of the author. And who’s this narrator who introduces himself in a preliminary note, withholds his biography, then promptly unspools his yarn like a self-appointed deputy of fate? I’ve sifted through the narratorial possibilities, deliberating over the minor characters, rooting for one or the other. Mely! Weimy! My very own China! (The exclamation points are added for effect; ghosts don’t exclaim.)
The mystery rankled.
I read and re-read the book. I had time.
This is not, I concluded, a historical novel. Rather, it’s a book about Florida, assembled from, among other things, scraps of Florida’s history—a patchwork job perfectly suited to a lazy author who would rather indulge his passing whims than visit a library. Still, the book has its charms. Whatever the inaccuracies, the story followed a pattern I knew well, having lived it in part, and later having walked its beaches gathering newfound perspective since my death.
In the end, a second edition seemed in order. Clearly, the author is not around to do it himself. If he was indeed the owner of that beach umbrella, he may have been washed to sea by a rogue wave and drifts now in the Gulf Stream or cavorts with mer-people in the murky depths. Those are best-case scenarios.
Besides, in addition to adventure, love, and laughs, the story has me. Me, the centerpiece of the whole enterprise, the only man with a dedicated part. That’s Part III, if you’re keeping track. As the man who begat the legend, it is right and proper that I should disseminate accordingly.
I honored those edits uncovered by the crab, resisting the urge to rewrite the whole thing myself, deciding only to add this introduction to set the record straight.
Time has passed. The world has changed. The beaches today are squeezed between a swelling ocean and a crowded shore. Yet I’m not bitter. It’s been a century since I was bitter. I’m just incomplete.
And now a little less so.
A NOTE FROM THE NARRATOR
THIS IS A STORY of fortune, which to my mind is not unlike a miscarried letter. It is passed from hand to hand, from mail carrier to mail carrier, from post office to post office in a desperate search for its rightful owner. Too often it remains undelivered, thanks to the postal service’s lack of perseverance or the smeared and cryptic handwriting of the address. Sometimes it is delivered into the wrong hands, and then it may as well end up in the dead-letter box, since the fate of one man can do no good—indeed, may even do harm—to another. But then there is that happy circumstance where, usually by sheer good luck, such a package falls into the lap of its intended, and a man receives what is justly his. Here is the story of one such happy coincidence.
IT BEGAN ON THE first day of an unusually hot summer in the latter half of the previous century. A carrier for the United States Postal Service walked the Florida beach route between the Town of Biscayne (on Biscayne Bay) and the Town of Figulus (on Lake Worth). The man was friend to no one and acquaintance to few. There wasn’t a soul within five hundred miles who’d even know his name, and that was probably for the best. It had been so long since he’d heard his own name spoken that it is not impossible he’d forgotten it himself.
Though not yet forty, the man was old before his time. Too old, he knew, for what was surely the most strenuous mail route in America—sixty miles each way on an empty, superheated beach, with nothing to break the monotony or ease the pain.
He tottered achingly as he moved, falling forward to be caught always at the last instant by his unsteady legs. His hunched shoulders and overtanned skin seemed fixed in a squint, as though his body had collapsed inward in a kind of desperate, protective measure and now had the look of something impenetrable that nevertheless would be beaten in the end—by sheer persistence, by something as slow and constant as the sun. And if he were to meet a fellow traveler and exchange a few words, the traveler would come away with a similar impression of the man’s personality—bitter, self-reliant, and inevitably beaten.
But the carrier was unlikely to cross another’s path here. South Florida was then still a frontier, and one that had been passed over by the hordes of westward-looking pioneers. Its beaches were empty but for the refuse of shipwrecks, its settlements few and far between, its native presence dwindling from years of brutal wars, deportation, and disease. This stretch of beach was lonelier and wilder than it had been in perhaps thousands of years, before the Spanish had built forts here to keep watch while they siphoned off the Fountain of Youth, and even before the natives had begun to clear land and plant their way into a short-lived prosperity.
The carrier would not find more than a few ghostly remnants of these civilizations: shards of a Spanish cannon sticking from the sand just far enough to stub his toes, or clumps of burial mounds fading like blemishes on the dense, flat coastal jungle.
Most of all the carrier would find heat. This day signaled only the beginning of summer’s long and hellish reign, an endless succession of unbearable heat and humidity, enough to drive any man to delirium. His shirt was already drenched in sweat, though he dared not remove it and expose himself to the blistering sunlight. His pants were rolled above his ankles, starched by the sun, and jeweled with crystallized seawater. From time to time the lip of a swell would creep up the beach and soak his feet, but the water was too warm to provide much relief. And these feet, in any case, were being crucified by his shoes—the standard, government-issue, rubber-and-canvas carrier’s shoes, not designed by any person familiar with the heat of a Florida summer.
The pain he felt in his feet had intensified through years of walking the beach, had gradually worked its way into his consciousness, and now threatened to occupy his every waking thought with itself and with its source: the shoes. As he walked in agony, he cursed the stupidity of the shoes’ design, the way the material sponged up the water and heat, the way the low tops let in just enough dirt and grit to sandpaper his feet as he walked, and the way the buckles cut into the skin on his ankles if they were loosened enough to make the shoes fit properly. He imagined the committee of Yankee politicians who’d commissioned the design of the shoes, specifying the need to keep the postman’s feet warm during the sleet, hail, and snow of a northern winter. He pictured the unveiling of the prototype before the committee some months later, and the politicians smiling approvingly and passing the shoe around as they comment on the uniqueness of the design and its pliable, one-size-fits-all material. Reporters ask them questions; pictures are taken with the politicians gathered behind the shoe as it sits on a pedestal in the middle of a huge oak table. Then one reporter suggests that someone try on the shoe, and the politician from New York volunteers laughingly as he curls one end of his waxed moustache and wedges a foot into the prototype. He is a fat politician, and the shoe doesn’t fit him properly, though he smiles anyway. Everyone sees that the shoe is about to burst from the pressure of the politician’s foot, but no one says anything, and the one-size-fits-all claim is carefully avoided for the rest of the press conference. For in reality, the shoes fit well only on a man whose feet are exactly average in every way. Average, that is, according to statistics compiled by a government committee.
This postal carrier’s feet were not average by any measure. They were a basic ingredient of his lurching gait and a souvenir of his duty to the Confederacy. Early in the war, he’d done battle with a Union scouting balloon, running swiftly and fearlessly into harm’s way when he saw it float into view above the Tennessee treetops. He’d leapt over bushes and torn his shoulders on the thorns and bark, firing with his rifle when the forest allowed him a glimpse of the sky. At last he broke into a meadow and saw that the balloon had begun to sink. He waited directly below it, imagining with great pride how he was going to take this Yankee back to camp, dead or alive. It was his first encounter with the enemy, and this victory was sure to mark him for a hero, was sure to lead to high praise and a rapid series of promotions and commendations.
The balloon fired up like an injured beast, sinking anyway, its roar sounding to him like little more than a death rattle. He smiled as he watched it grow, the basket like a neatly wrapped gift falling from the heavens into his open arms. He remembered his rifle then and turned his head down briefly to reload the barrel. When he heard a snap and looked up again, he saw the Yankee scout peering over his basket not more than sixty feet above and a sudden, disorienting upward motion to the balloon, though there wasn’t time for his brain to register that fully. Later he’d remember, too, that in those few moments of heightened reality he’d also seen a knife in the scout’s hand and a rope dangling over the side of the basket.
But at the time he saw only a blur of the sandbag that hit him, heard only the fuzzy crescendo of the cracking bones in his feet. And so crazed with pain was he that his first and only thought was a strange one indeed, that the scream he heard was coming from the sandbag itself and not from his open mouth.
He felt the pain all over again when the field doctor ordered the bag lifted from his feet. Unveiled before him were the flattened and misshapen dogs that would never fit properly into any pair of shoes again.
This was the incident that had embittered him for life and aged him prematurely. Rather than become the brunt of jokes and the object of pitying stares, he retired from the military and withdrew from society altogether, eventually landing this painful but solitary job with the postal service. He didn’t care that a walking job was probably not the best line of work for a man with his condition; he could tolerate the physical pain so long as he was left alone with his bitterness, his self-pity, and his occasional drunken binges. He carried the mail all day long in isolation, pacing himself so that he always arrived at his P.O. stops in the dead of night. That was an arrangement he’d made with the government man in St. Augustine who’d hired him: he’d never have to speak with a postmaster unless he chose to. Instead, he’d hang his sack of mail on the “Incoming” sign nailed to the back of the post office, he’d take a second sack off the “Outgoing” nail, and then he’d disappear into the hot, silent night.
So of course he blamed the government shoes for his pain, transferring his guilt and his self-loathing onto the generous dispensation of the conquerors who’d crippled him for life. Yet there was nothing he could do about it, because he could not afford or could not bring himself to purchase a more comfortable pair of shoes, and because the only alternative was to walk in his bare feet, which, under present conditions, would mean a slow, certain descent to the human limits of pain.
This frustrating knowledge now made him all the more angry. It intensified the pain and the heat and made the salty air sting like pin pricks on his cracked lips and his brittle lungs. It made the postal sack heavier until the strap seemed to gouge his neck and shoulders with every chafing step. It drove him to delirium and made him search for something—anything—that might serve as a better scapegoat and so provide some temporary relief.
To this end he stopped, trembling and out of breath, removed his sack and rifled through its contents, searching angrily for the heaviest offending package. He dug from the bottom one thick box, tidily wrapped in brown paper and twine and addressed to “Josef Steinmetz, Town of Figulus.” He weighed it in his hands while he cursed its sender, its intended recipient, and the entire U.S. Postal Service for allowing such a heavy wrench to fall into the delicate machinery of mail delivery. All of his delirious anger and intense discomfort suddenly took a new shape. To him the box was monstrous and single-mindedly evil.
It had come from Brooklyn, and, like most mail out of the North, by steamer to Key West, and then up to Biscayne on a little mail skiff. The journey could take anywhere from three weeks to three months, depending on the weather and the dispositions of its handlers. But this package, now only twenty miles from its destination, was about to take a long and scenic detour.
A drop of sweat fell into the carrier’s eye, blinding him for a moment and finally sending him over the edge. He flew into an animal rage, leapt to his feet, cursing and holding the package above his head like some frenzied gorilla about to break the skull of its keeper. Then he ran down the beach and into the hot, slow surf, yelling something primal, and tossed the box as far as he could out into the mirrored waters, where it plunked below the surface, bobbed for a moment, and then began its drift out to sea.
“Goddamn Yankee rats,” he said.
For one brief, beautiful moment he felt a sense of power and relief.
Then the moment faded, and he continued in his agony, dragging himself slowly up the beach toward nightfall and the faceless little town of Figulus.
PART I
Serendipity
THE FIRST SIGN came when Earl Shank pulled his face out of the shallows of Lake Worth and felt a sudden breeze brush across his salted lips. He’d begun the morning as he always did, waking up well after his wife and slipping out of the house while she fed the chickens. It was best for him to get over to the post office before she could invent something for him to do. He could check on whether his undependable mail carrier had shown up in the night with a new bag of mail. If not, he could always re-sort some mail, or re-check the figures in his accounts receivable ledger, or just wait around for someone to post a letter—at least until Mely showed up and told him there were better things he could be doing around the house. And then he’d say to her, “Mely, you jest don’t understand. I got a responsibility to the nation. I got to guard against snags in the system.” Then she’d give him that look, like his idleness was a sin against God and nature. And when he’d finally return to the house, she’d work all the harder just to punctuate her quiet argument. But by the time he felt the first pangs of guilt it’d surely be almost noon, and she’d have most of the chores out of the way.
Expecting the morning to run just like that, he’d started down the path that ran along the shore, where the strong morning sun had already made things quiet. The water moccasins had curled up in the weeds for the day. The gators had quit their yawning and moved off the banks to cool themselves in deeper waters. But there was something there—maybe even the hand of fate itself, he’d think later—that tripped him up and made him fall face first into the murky shallows, where he tasted the salty water and remembered his very first day here.
Twenty-two years ago, he’d clung to the side of a lifeboat whose oars smacked the ocean waves into his gasping mouth. There hadn’t been room for him in that lifeboat, just as there hadn’t been room for him in his family—he’d decided that just a few weeks earlier, when he’d left them to take a job on a trader. As the waves had pressed in on him and the ocean reached out to make him one of her own, he resolved that his young life was a cursed failure and it would probably be for the best if he let loose his grip and give himself freely to the depths. The moments in which he worked up the courage to do so were the most difficult of his life.
He finally threw his hands out and fell backward, closing his eyes, expecting the mildly annoyed face of his captain to be his last sight on this earth.
Instead, when his rear end hit the sandy bottom, he’d opened his eyes again and seen the first mate yelling at him to get off his lazy ass and help them beach the boat. He was just a few feet from shore.
Cheated of even the brief solemn glory he’d expected in death, he no longer had the courage to try it again. He obeyed the first mate’s command and helped drag the boat across the strip of ocean beach. Then he clung to the boat again as the shipwrecked crew crossed Lake Worth to the little town the captain had heard of called Figulus.
They’d found then exactly what there was today: little overgrown paths branching away from the shoreline, so little used that one might easily mistake them for gator trails, and not a single house that could be seen by its closest neighbor through the trees. They walked those little paths and found no sign of human life—only houses that appeared to be deserted and a few hogs and chickens ambling around in the shade of the thick stands of cabbage palms. When they pushed in the door of one house, they found a husband and wife in a cluttered and dusty room, moving almost imperceptibly in a pair of rocking chairs. The man looked up from the fish he’d been whittling out of a piece of driftwood, the woman from the Confederate flag she’d been crocheting to hang on their wall. The entrance of sixteen men—some, like Earl, dripping wet—did not seem to disturb them in any way. That very fact had an instant and profound effect on Earl, who stood in the back, poking his head through the door. Those expressionless and ageless faces of indeterminate color struck him as a couple of perfectly blank slates, the kind of clean, smooth paper on which he’d only recently printed the publicity notices for his family’s variety show. He smiled at them involuntarily, forgetting already his recent desire to end it all.
“What’ll we do fer ya?” asked the man.
“We are shipwreck survivors of the SS Seaworthy,” stated the captain, a hint of annoyace already showing in his voice, “and we would like some assistance in returning to our home port.”
The man thought about this and rocked in his chair for a minute.
His wife said, “You ought to try ol’ Jake. He’s good at gettin around.”
Her husband nodded in agreement.
“Down the path a stretch.”
The captain breathed an exasperated sigh, dumbfounded by the insignificance assigned to his shipwreck.
When the men filed out after their captain, Earl stayed behind. He smiled again at those beautiful empty vessels smiling back at him from their rocking chairs. His job as ship’s accountant for the Seaworthy had splintered itself on the reef offshore. His destiny lay elsewhere, and those faces and the raw and unexploited land had a curious effect on him.
He stepped outside and looked around, breathing in the ocean air and the fruits of the trees and the warm sunlight that bathed the land even in winter, and it all smelled to him like solid potential. He imagined a challenge for his natural publicity talents. He spied his limitless future. He embraced Florida for its inevitable becoming. So he stuck his big foot in the door of opportunity, determined to squeeze himself through to the other side, to the champagne and dainties he could practically taste when that warm breeze brushed across his salty lips.
AND THAT WAS the taste he remembered this morning, when a little breeze came out of nowhere and mixed with the salt water he was still spitting out of his mouth. It was the first sign that things were going to change, though he didn’t recognize it yet. It wasn’t until much later that he’d piece it all together. Then he’d think, It was almost like somebody kicked me in the butt, jes so I could fall in an taste that water again, jes so I could wake up an smell my destiny.
Because he’d forgotten it. And that was on purpose. Just as his neighbors tried to hide their houses in the trees, Earl had tried to hide the memory of his failures from himself. He’d given up on his fate, letting his life live itself. He didn’t consider himself a lazy man, at least in his thoughts. His problem, he once told himself, was that his thoughts were too big for his body to know what to do with, though his body was by no measure small. But Florida had a history as a haven for good-for-nothing laggards who used laziness to their advantage—pirates and treasure seekers, wealthy retirees, pale convalescents, idlers rich and poor, con men and carpetbaggers, exploiters of people and ravagers of the land, entrepreneurs with big visions and flexible morals, anybody looking for a free lunch and a day in the sun. And though he wasn’t schooled in the names and dates of history, Earl was sensitive to the attitudes and ideals of that long lineage, as though he were part of some old and venerated aristocracy whose values, the usefulness of which was now long forgotten, would perpetuate themselves anyway, solely on the strength of history. Not that Earl fancied himself a prince, not even a prince of laggards. He was a man mediocre in every way. This he knew, and yet he’d always held his mediocrity itself in high regard. He’d counted it among his blessings. He’d used to believe that mediocrity, idleness, and a faith in the value of the imperfect were all a man needed for success. He’d used to think that that would be the moral of his autobiography, should the public demand he write one.
But for years now, he seemed to have lost his connection to the glory of that mediocrity. There’d been no easy success, no instant triumph for a wink in the right direction. He’d developed instead a personal history of failure and maybe a little too much effort for the tastes of his spiritual kin. That had beaten his confidence and his oversized scheming into a small, wistful pebble lost in the tired folds of his brain.
His first taste of failure came early in life, his real kin trying unsuccessfully to shape him in their own image. They were known as . . .
THE SHANK FAMILY
VARIETY, DRAMA, AND ENTERTAINMENT REVIEW
Featuring Caleb and Cassandra Shank
—of noted Shakespearean fame—
AND INTRODUCING…
Those Adorable Shank Children,
Young Performers of Extraordinary Talent.
As Earl grew up on the stages of the small-town South, he performed his simple magic tricks, danced the little numbers choreographed by his mother, sang the adorable childish songs well into his teens, and juggled a few apples and oranges when one of his brothers was taken ill. But his magic tricks failed more often than not, his dancing was flat-footed and stumbling, and he hated singing and could never smooth the twang nor the adolescent cracks out of his voice. While his brothers and sisters developed bigger and bigger stage presences and joined their parents in more serious drama, Earl shied away, and his parents stopped encouraging him. The whole family understood that he simply did not have the talent to make it in theater.
At nineteen, he fell into the role of company bookkeeper and publicity manager. This he came to enjoy. He designed elaborate publicity notices, contacted the prominent citizens of each town, and generally got the word out while the rest of the family rehearsed. Then, with the show under way, he tallied the daily receipts, the bottom line of which he attributed solely to his hard work in the publicity department. He took great pride in this. He knew he had a natural talent. With publicity, he thought, he could provide great opportunities for himself and his family.
He worked up grand schemes for highly publicized world tours and hitherto unheard of variety stunts, like “Shakespeare Performed atop Camels—Those Odd and Mysterious Ships of the Desert,” or “Bring-Your-Own Snake Wrasslin.” When he brought his ideas to the attention of his family, they could only laugh. They treated them as childish fancies and saw his role in the family business as inartistic drudgery, which they were only too happy to leave to the less talented. In their eyes, Earl would always be the failed artist.
It wasn’t long before he felt this and knew that he was underappreciated, and would be as long as he remained with his family. One night, concluding sadly that his destiny lay elsewhere, he packed a small bag of clothes, leaving all his childhood costumes behind, and stole away with only a brief note of explanation:
Family,
Leaving to seek my fortune. The books and money (less my wages) are in trunk by my bed →
Y’alls acting talents never rubbed off on me, but I think I got a talent for publicity. So there’s my future for you. Sorry for the trouble I’ll cause.
Great Adoration,
Your Lone Stray Son Earl
It was 1861, and with the war between the states fast approaching, Earl walked to Savannah and took that fateful job on the SS Seaworthy, a Caribbean trader, hoping eventually to work his way off the ship and into the main office up in Charleston, where he could make his publicity skills pay off. When the Seaworthy foundered on the reef just a few days later, he was certain his young life was cursed. But those beautiful empty faces and that salty breeze awakened something boundless and exhilarating within him. The crew finally found a guide to walk them the day and a half north to the new Jupiter lighthouse, where they could signal a passing ship. “Y’all go on ahead,” Earl said, martyr-like. “I sorter like it here.”
The decision was easy. The only satisfying moments of his life had come when he’d seen those crowds pour in for his family’s variety shows and he could sit back in the door of his family’s tent and total the receipts, knowing it was all his doing, thanks to his publicity skills. Of course those moments were tinged with pain, too, because his family had already branded him a loser. Now he had a chance to renew his satisfaction on the grandest of scales. He would create fame and fortune where none had existed before. He would create a thing of beauty from the ground up. Then he could watch those crowds pour in and those receipts pile up bigger than his family would ever have imagined possible. And in a town like this, the credit would have nowhere to fall but on him.
In the early years, Earl’s big ideas made the town a little fidgety. They were a collection of loners and stragglers, all hiding from something—the law, or civilization, or conscription in the Confederate Army. Since they’d all come here to get away from people in the first place, these boatloads of tourists and new settlers Earl talked about would bring the risk of the pasts they’d left behind. But the settlers of Figulus had two traits in common, if nothing more: they were not disposed to dwell on the future, and they avoided trouble and conflict at all costs. These were exactly the qualities that had brought them here, after all. The idea that the area could ever become a tourist haven sounded so preposterous to them, and this newcomer came across as such a wide-eyed goof, that in the end they chuckled the whole thing away and let Earl go about his business without interference.
After the war, Earl’s first great idea was to get the town incorporated and make himself postmaster. That would put him in touch with a vast network of cheap publicity. Since the town had no governing body, he’d be its only official and could act by default as its representative. He’d be the conduit between Figulus and the outside world, and the destiny of the town would lie in his hands.
When he sent a letter to the Postmaster General’s office up in Washington, he was told in reply (some four months later) that the town would have to have a minimum of fifty residents to qualify for a post office. So began Earl’s first publicity campaign. He spent his last ten dollars at the print shop in Fort Pierce, making flyers and sending them to post offices in all the major Florida settlements:
SETTLERS WANTED
To Incorporate the Beautiful, Bounteous
TOWN OF FIGULUS
Located on the peaceful shore of Lake Worth,
Along Major Trade Routes,
With Plans in the Works for
A MAJOR SHIPPING PORT
and UNTOLD NATURAL RICHES
Available to all Residents
—FAMILIES, LONERS, NATURE-LOVERS, AND ALL HONEST, HARD-WORKING MEN AND WOMEN
WANTED IMMEDIATELY.
Paid for by Earl K. Shank,
POSTMASTER-ELECT.
The settlers came, mostly of the loner variety. Some left immediately when Earl could not produce the plans for a shipping port. The ones who stayed made the original settlers uneasy again, and they were uneasier still about Earl, whose ridiculous plans were beginning to work, and who seemed to want eventually to make their sleepy town into a home away from home for rich old Yankees. Eventually, the town’s cowardly nature shone through. No one could complain when they got approval for their post office. “I reckon that’s what he’s really after,” they said as they hammered together the driftwood walls of the new post office building. “A good job with the government.” Because they all were downtrodden or in hiding, they could appreciate a young man’s efforts to get ahead. So they simply withdrew into their homes and stayed away from the newcomers.
The success of this first action filled Earl with great confidence, and he began to implement the next phase of his plan—to attract major business interests to build a small port and trade with the locals. The shipping and trading companies would provide an astronomical boost to the local economy, and then he could begin to prepare the town for tourists by building hotels, restaurants, and theaters; such a setup would interest the up-and-coming pleasure-cruise industry, and then Figulus and Earl Shank would be well on their way.
He encouraged the local small farmers to begin planting their citrus crops in huge quantities, and the local fishermen to gear up their boats for a commercial fishing industry, and the local trappers to stock up on alligator hides, because they were all going to get rich when the trading companies opened for business.
And nothing happened. The trading companies did not want to invest in an unproven area and its evasive local population. Few companies bothered even to respond to Earl’s inquiries, and several trips north to Fort Pierce and south to Biscayne netted him nothing but sore feet and closed doors. Things began to go terribly wrong. Slowly, the settlers he’d attracted began to slip away. Some made excuses at first, but eventually they told Earl right to his face, “You done us wrong, Shank. There ain’t nothing here but a jungle full of skeeters, and there ain’t likely to ever be anything else.” They shook their heads. They spat on the ground. Then they packed their few belongings and left, most of them back up the coast, looking for any small town with a street and a few horses, maybe some single women. The town soon dwindled from fifty-three to the twenty-two original residents.
These events took their toll on Earl. He tried bigger and bigger schemes and made bigger and bigger claims about the town, as though each failure necessitated an even bigger success to undo the injury. The Fountain of Youth Spa attracted some interest for a while, until he was caught filling the little waterhole with decidedly unhealthful and unrestorative swamp water. He never got more than a few cypress trees cut for the five-hundred-room Lazy Palms Resort. The president never turned up at the Presidential Vacation Retreat, despite Earl’s repeated invitations. And the organizers of the World’s Fair declined even to respond to his letters, despite the sketches he sent them of the “nearly complete” Exposition Center.
Within a few years, after all his plans and his invitations and inquiries were met only with silence, Earl was reduced to desperation. He felt cursed again, and the townsfolk reinforced this notion, peering out of their windows with fright as he walked up and down the paths in a fidgety sweat. He couldn’t stand the sight of those blank faces he’d once thought so beautiful. He started spending his days at the beach, where he jumped and waved at freighters as they passed, hoping to bring someone—anyone—ashore, to show them the town, how beautiful it was and how rich with possibility if only a few investors had a little foresight. He did succeed once. A small trading ship anchored offshore and a small group of the crew paddled in, thinking Earl was a shipwreck survivor. When they found the truth, Earl waving his arms and ranting about natural riches and honest working folk and inlets and harbors, the sailors grew enraged and pummeled Earl to the sand, then buried him up to his neck. It took a couple of concerned townsfolk to travel out to the beach and locate Earl’s mosquito-bitten, delirious head and drag him back to his little shack behind the post office, where they splashed cool water on his sunburned cheeks, saying, “You’re a lucky man, young Shank, a right lucky man.”
HE REMEMBERED