Barely a day into our road trip across the Sunshine State, this does not come as news to me or John Brandon. We are standing in the sun at Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, which is home to the fountain in question. Well, afountain, anyway. Also, a scattering of re-created colonial and indigenous structures, a wedding venue, and a collection of peacocks that periodically let out screeches so hideous they invoke the tortured souls of men who made some terrible long-ago bargain to sip from the Fountain of Youth. John and I stand among a group of tourists as the man in the pantaloons demonstrates how to load his old-fashioned rifle. He wears red stockings, a vest, and a floppy hat, which we presume are authentic to the period, and speaks in a heavy Boston accent that we presume is not.
The aforementioned hot, wet misery wreaks hell on gunpowder, he explains, a condition that made the use of these firearms much more difficult than for colonists with the luck or foresight to do their colonizing in friendlier climes. He pours a measure of powder down the barrel, follows it with a wad of Spanish moss, and tamps it down.
“Fire in the hole!” he shouts. The gun goes off with a sharp clap. We all applaud.
“The next weapon demonstration takes place in fifteen minutes at the cannons,” the man says, sending us on our way. “Go Bruins.”
Afterward, we duck into a dim room containing a running spigot connected to an underground spring. There is a diorama of nearly naked Native Americans. We fill small plastic cups from the putative Fountain and sip. The water is warm and sulfury.
“I wonder if it makes you young again but smart,” John says. “Or young and dumb all over again.” The pamphlets sitting nearby offer no illumination. Outside, a peacock screams.
John Brandon and I are old friends, in strange times, on a somewhat absurd mission. Our aim is to follow in the footsteps of Gussie Dwyer, the twelve-year-old protagonist of John’s fourth and most recent novel, . Set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the book falls somewhere between and Cormac McCarthy, shot through with John’s own sly humor and joy in language, and animated by a chorus of characters: fools, knaves, villains, and heroes. Gussie is very much in the last group. By the end of page two, Brandon has dispatched him on a classic Hero’s Journey: His beloved mother, a prostitute in a small town on the Atlantic coast, is dead. She has left behind little except for a gold
