CAPTAIN MELMAN SCROTCH had lied in his letter to the postmaster of Figulus. He was not the one who’d given the order to move in and retrieve the package of shoes. In fact, he’d strongly advised against it, given the rough seas and the ship’s proximity to the reef. But a ship’s captain is not truly the master of his ship when the ship’s owner is aboard, and Captain Scrotch had had the dubious honor of playing host to Mr. Elias Rathmartin, millionaire adventurer and owner of Southwind Cruise Lines and Shipping and Trading Company, New York, New York.
If anyone had made good the promise of the American Dream, it was Elias Rathmartin. He was a poor orphan who’d climbed his way up the great ladder, and he hadn’t stepped on all that many hands in the process. In past years, Mr. Rathmartin had liked to boast that his company had more ships in its fleet than the United States Navy. He was proud of Southwind; he’d built it from the ground up. He was proud of himself, too. But there came a time, at sixty-eight years old, when his business stopped being the most important thing in his life, and he at last began to break his inveterate work habits and live just as he’d always wanted to.
Over the last two years, he’d slowly relieved himself of responsibilities to his company, leaving the day-to-day operations to his sons, Merwyn and Stanislaw. Then he took to the sea. It was a funny thing for a shipping magnate, but he’d never once stepped foot in the ocean. As a youth, he’d devoured the high-seas adventure tales that had been donated to his orphanage. The whaling adventures, the conquests of new lands, the shipwreck tales, the tales of bare-breasted island women and nose-ringed cannibals—all of these had filled his youthful fantasies and led him, when he was just nineteen, to seek investors for the purchase of a well-worn trading ship. Still, though he continued to read the adventure tales throughout his adult life, he’d never once ventured out of his home port, on vacation or business or otherwise. He was too caught up in the day-to-day operation in his New York offices, too driven to tear himself away.
So it wasn’t until he was seventy years old that Elias Rathmartin even stood on one of his ships while it was docked in the harbor. Only then did he set off in search of the great adventure he’d always read about. But no one had ever dared to tell Elias Rathmartin that mermaids and sea monsters weren’t real, or that lost cities of gold didn’t sometimes reappear from the depths. Respectful acquaintances and Southwind employees might call him eccentric; another possibility occurred to those who knew him best.
One ship in the company’s fleet was commissioned for his personal use, for netting mermaids and tempting the monsters of the Sargasso Sea. This was distressing to his tightfisted sons, who wanted nothing more than to keep careful account of their much-deserved inheritance. But they dared not say anything to his face.
It was on one of these adventures that Rathmartin had ordered Captain Scrotch in for a closer look at what he suspected was a foundering mermaid. The results of this maneuver landed Rathmartin in the hospital in Biscayne and landed Captain Scrotch in jail. Scrotch had only obeyed orders, but he was a company man, and he took the fall to save his boss the embarrassment, knowing he’d be restored to captain after a few unpaid weeks in jail.
The experience of the shipwreck, although every bit as perilous and exciting as he’d always hoped, turned out to be a bit much for Elias Rathmartin. Though he’d never once touched the water—the ship’s mate had lifted him into the lifeboat and lifted him out again when they reached the shore—his personal physician had detected a slight murmur of the heart and thought it best that Elias rest up for a few weeks in the local hospital.
Always a man of action, Rathmartin scribbled a note as soon as he got ashore, assuring his wife and two sons that all was well and requesting that they send another ship as soon as possible, for he’d heard of several recent mermaid sightings down off the north coast of Barbados and was most anxious to check into it. He had his traveling companion, the good Dr. Weimaraner, post the letter for him while he checked into the twelve-room Biscayne Hospital.
It was an untimely posting, however, for no sooner had Weimaraner left the Biscayne Post Office than our friend Josef Steinmetz showed up and retrieved the northbound mail on that fateful day, only to fling it with laughter out into the hot blue sea. Perhaps someday a few tattered fragments of the letter would wash up unnoticed on a beach in Long Island, carried there by the current of the Gulf Stream, but it would certainly never reach the offices of the Southwind company in Manhattan.
So Rathmartin waited, recovering at first, and then merely relaxing in the tropical environs. When he checked out of the hospital, he moved to a suite at the Biscayne Grand and rented a room for his doctor right next door. He began to relish the Florida tropics, the way he could wander just a few hundred yards up the beach and feel absolutely free of the encumbrances and responsibilities of civilization, yet still know, somewhere in the back of his mind, that there was a comfortable bed, a swimming pool, and a fully stocked bar just a stone’s throw away. So, during the day, unbothered by the heat, Elias took long, boyish hikes up and down the beach, sometimes venturing a little ways into the bush, imagining that he was the sole shipwreck survivor on an island full of hungry cannibals and sensuous women. When the good doctor Weimaraner tagged along, Rathmartin referred to him as “Friday,” and the doctor answered to it because he knew that somewhere in his contract there was probably a line that required him to do so. Then, each evening, they’d retire beside the swimming pool for some French cuisine and a bottle of Biscayne’s best.
They waited, and still no ship came. But Elias Rathmartin was having such a time that he accepted the insult without the slightest hint of anger. “Well, Weimy,” he’d say to the doctor, “no ship again today. I’ll bet my boys have got things running so smoothly that every ship is out earning me profit.” And the doctor would answer, “Yes, Admiral, I believe you’re right,” though inside he was fuming with impatience. The doctor was anxious to escape the heat and the mosquitoes and the mediocre service at the hotel, and he’d come to hate Rathmartin, because Rathmartin was the kind of man who wouldn’t notice the heat or the service when he had other things to occupy him. And Rathmartin was the kind of man who didn’t get bit by mosquitoes.
After five full weeks, a cruise ship finally came to port. It was a ship from a rival line, one that Rathmartin would never consider boarding. But he never missed an opportunity to engage in corporate spying, so he had Dr. Weimaraner sneak aboard under the pretense of booking passage.
The doctor returned with a handful of newspapers. “Look at this, Admiral,” he said. “I found these scattered about the deck. Back copies of the Times.”
Rathmartin thought for a moment. “What a capital idea, Friday. The news is old, of course, but it makes the passengers feel at home.” He pulled on his mutton chops. “Yes, this is something to think about. Of course, we’d have to one-up them. What if we were to hire a paperboy, the sweetest little freckle-faced youngster we can get our hands on. Have him deliver the Times right to the door of their cabins. Bright and early. We’ll tear off the dateline—after all, people don’t care what day it is while they’re at sea. If my boys are ambitious enough, they might even set up a little printing press on board and then we can print our own paper. Now, what do you think of a bicycle, Weimy? Can we get a boy skilled enough to ride a bicycle from cabin to cabin? Surely we can, and we’ll get one of those quaint little children’s bikes with lots of chrome and a little toot-horn. Are you getting this down, Weimy? My memory’s not what it used to be, you know.”
“I’m taking mental notes, Admiral. I’ll write them down in my journal this evening.”
“You might consider putting this in a letter to my sons if a Southwind ship doesn’t arrive soon. This is an idea that can’t wait.”
“Yes, Admiral. I’ll do that.”
“Well, let’s just have a peek at what’s been happening back in the rotten old world of civilization, shall we?”
Rathmartin took a newspaper out of the doctor’s hand and began to flip through the pages while he sipped his wine at their poolside table. The sun was just setting, and the ocean and sky in the east worked slowly toward a coordination of their nightly attire.
Rathmartin happened across the third installment of John Thomas’s series on the new legend of the Barefoot Mailman. He was instantly hooked, and called for Dr. Weimaraner to hand over the other papers, one of which the doctor himself had been reading. Rathmartin read the series from start to finish, continuing to read even when it grew dark and the doctor led him by the elbow upstairs to their rooms. There, the magnate read by lamplight, late into the night, a sucker for all the thrills and adventure the reporter had injected into the tale. Suddenly, for the first time, he felt it was happening for real, all around him, that he was at last at the center of a unique and thrilling tropical adventure. After all, it was a true story. And here he was, by good fortune, smack in the middle of the best tale he’d ever read. He had to meet this man, this stoic mail carrier, for this was a man worthy of great admiration. This was a man who could be a true friend to Elias Rathmartin, who for so long had commanded a great fleet of ships and had loved and provided for a family, but who’d always felt misunderstood even by those closest to him. They’d laughed at his bent for high-seas romance and adventure, and yet they could never see that his business success and his thirst for adventure were one and the same. He was a man driven by an unquenchable yearning for something he could never quite put his finger on. Just like this barefooted man from the town of Figulus, he thought.