This Week's Theme:
"a letter arrives from an old circus performer who has found an undiscovered island"
Week: Zero
Due Date: January 5, 2009
Leon Crawshanks
Peter Fernandez
Leon Crawshanks breathed in deeply, ignoring his lit cigarette and stared up blankly at the moon. He didn't even like to smoke, but it gave him an extra fifteen minute break, once every four hours, so he took it.
"So, I hear ya worked on one of them fishing riggs back east" said Ralph trying, for the second time in as many minutes, to engage his older co-worker. Leon looked down at the teenager, his face marked with the scars of childhood, and sighed inwardly. It wasn't hit fault.
"Break time's over! Get back to work!" came a voice from the open doorway. "Probably Larry", thought Leon, unwilling to turn around. Unwilling to learn the names of his various managers. They all of treated him like the replaceable cog that he was, and held them in the same regard. "I should be grateful. Saved by the bell" he thought as he gave a half-hearted smile at Ralph, who had already taken the hint and had occupied himself by staring at a rotting banana peel on the ground.
"Yeah" said Leon outloud, "I fished for tuna for three seasons. Not all it's cracked up to be. I'll tell ya about it next break".
It came off as a little more patronizing than he had intended, but so did everything he did anymore. Leon Crankshanks, the man once known as both the fiercest, and most restrained bounty hunter in Louisiana, had lost his ability to regulate his tone in the last six months.
It probably happened about the time questions about his time as a fisherman began to outnumber everything else by four to one. He had lost his leg working as an assistant Sherpa trying to climb a mountain in Tibet for Christs sake! He had lived a life of adventure, moving wherever the winds took him.
After the leg though, the winds didn't seem to move him anymore. Instead they settled him down just outside Tifton, Georgia with a peg leg and a penchant for bad habits that no longer seemed so romantic.
Leon Crawshanks was a tall man. So tall that he had once been recruited by the Washington Generals on the strength of his height alone. But he hadn't been much of a team player. So tall that it was a liability working on the fishing boats, but the agility of his youth saved him there, where he had earned the nickname "Swifty McGee", sailors being low on wit.
Leon Crawshanks was so tall that he had to duck at the doorway from the alleyway back into supermarket. So tall that even with a peg leg, it was his job to stock the top shelfs.
Walking back into the storeroom, he tried to level with himself. Bring a little reality into his bitter remembrances.
The proximate cause of the problem was really Willie, his new drinking buddy. Sober, Leon kept the chatting to a minimum, preferring to let his reputation and closed mouth create rumors that were more effective, and more satisfying than anything he could possible say. But whiskey brought out the braggart in him, and he couldn't resist spinning tales of a time when his life had seemed important, if only to him.
Back then the whiskey had seemed to be only his due after a long days climb, to take the edge off the chill of the train cabin or a million other adventures that most men didn't have the stomach for. A day spent pulling in nets full of more fish than...
Fish... Gah!
He knew why that was the story they latched onto, it was the peg-leg. Frostbite halfway up the mountain. He'd never even made it to the summit.
From there it had all gone wrong. From there he had moved to Tifton, the reading capital of the United States, a backwater town in Georiga.
Leon wondered if there was a time when he would have walked out of the store without a word. Or if he had never really been that man. If his time as a bounty hunter had been a grand adventure, or the romanticizing of uneducated white trash.
All he knew, was that he did not leave until his shift was over, and on the way home he bought a 12-pack of bud light from a drive through liquor store. He ignored the man dressed as Santa Clause.
He was half in the bag by the time he got home, pulling into the driveway like a teenager who had just gotten his license and didn't want to lose it. He was so tall he hit his head on the doorway to his apartment the first time he tried to get in. As a result, he noticed the clear glass bottle sitting in the middle of the brown stain where a doormat was supposed to reside.
He brought the bottle into the apartment with him and fumbled for a light. Inside the bottle was a rolled up note with a sticker on the front. Next to a large Candy Cane the sticker read:
To: Leon
From: Thomas
Leon remembered Thomas from his summer with the circus. Thomas had been a juggler and a mime who had joked that Leon belonged in the freak show tent because of his height.
Thomas, whose favorite joke, had been to say, while juggling five real axes and two plastic anvils "I never trust a mime further than I can throw him".
Leon tried to read the note, but it didn't make any sense to him in his current state, so he set it aside and so he watched old episode of Gilligan's Island instead.
**********************
The next morning upon waking, Leon Crawshanks opened his eyes slowly, turned off the television, and went back to sleep.
**********************
A few hours later, he got up again, keeping his eyes half closed, he took his time getting out of the lazy boy and made his way to the kitchen, where he made himself some eggs. After breakfast, he sat down on the kitchen floor and pulled out the note from his pocket.
Leon Crawshanks had many vices, and there were things about himself that he hid from everyone, including himself.
As for everything else however, Leon rarely tried to hide. His life had taught him to accept the insane as natural, to be able to wake up with a gun pointed at your head, or the building on fire and not waste time complaining that the circumstance was imposable.
Leon Crawshanks knew that most decisions were made within the first twenty seconds of taking in new information, and did not waste time pretending differently.
So it was that one hour, forty-five minutes, and seventeen seconds, after Leon finished reading the letter for the seventh time, he left his apartment for the last time.
He left behind a note and a check, both designed to buy him time with his landlord should he find the need to return to this place. The job at the supermarket was left to rot.
*********************
Three hours later he arrived in Brunswick, and an hour after that he found a marina that suited his needs.
By the end of the second night, he had identified seven potential boats. All seaworthy, all with insurance papers.
Leon Crawshanks enjoyed calling them boats, even to himself. It was a way of walking across Pauline's grave. Too bad she wasn't dead yet.
At noon on the third day, he saw what he thought he wanted, a man with his mistress. But that night he did not leave. He tried to tell himself that it was because he didn't know the man well enough to judge him, but long before his twenty seconds were up, he admitted that he was still hoping for the Starlight. Idiot neuvo-rich name, beautiful boat.
At 5 A.M. on the fourth day, he woke up to hollers from the park. Looking out his window, he saw three teenagers, all male, bearing down on one of the homeless who slept there. The marina guards didn't care what took place outside there gate, so he got out to do his duty.
Coming back to his car, he slumped in carelessly onto his duffel bag, and heard a crack. The bottle, which had appeared on his doorstep without warning, floating in on the rain, had broken into shards.
Leon Crawshanks, who had not cried in four years, not even when he lost his leg, shed a tear.
Two hours later, he stood over a Styrofoam cooler full of salt water, purchased at the same supply store where he had purchased his duffel bags full of food, water and other various supplies, and dropped the glass shards into the water.
The floated, and slowly drifted eastwards. Leon Crawshanks did not cry a tear of joy, but he smiled in his heart.
*********************
And then... providence. Not in a man with his mistress, but in a woman wearing a bright yellow sun dress, showing extreme disinterest as she showed a man in business attire aboard the Starlight.
Clues he remembered from on board fell into place, and the story of the broken marriage told itself.
That night Leon Crawshanks waited until the guard had made his third round, and crept on board with his four duffel bags. He left behind a copy of the insurance papers from the boat, under a rock, and a note that explained nothing, but expressed his apologies.
On board he stared down at the cooler, and watched as the shards of glass collected themselves into the corner, and grinned.
Once he reached international waters, grateful for his time in the marines, he hobbled down the stairs, leaning heavy on his peg leg, and read the note for the eighth time.
Leon,
I am writing you because I know that you have the soul of an adventurer. I have known it since the night we dropped acid together in Iowa. Remember the blue? I saw your soul that night, and I know that if you can, you will come, danger or no. Not for me, but for you.
I have found an Island, a place of great riches and wonder... and I should admit it now, danger. Danger such that I need help, or I honestly may not have thought of you. This is, after all, a trap.
Place this bottle in water, and it will make its way back to me. Hopefully you will come with it, but if not, I implore you to return this to water so that I can try again soon, although I do not know who I will send it too or if it will be too late.
Self-pity aside, I will not hold it against you if you do not come, who knows where this may find you. I have not seen you in years, but though this may seem like an elaborate prank, I assure you that it is not.
Bring no weapons more complex than a blade, they will fail you here. I am four days out from the Space Coast.
Live long and prosper.
Remember, never trust a mime further than you can throw him.
Thomas