The Cypress House (3 page)

    He
released the boy's collar and stepped back. Paul lifted a hand and wiped it
over his mouth, staring at Arlen.

    "You
trust me, Brickhill?" Arlen said.

    "You
know I do."

    "Then
listen to me now. If you don't ever listen to another man again for the rest of
your life, listen to me now. Don't get back on that train."

    The
boy swallowed and looked off into the darkness. "Arlen, I wouldn't
disrespect you, but what you're saying . . . t here's no way you could know
that."

    "I
can see it," Arlen said. "Don't know how to explain it, but I can
see
it."

    Paul
didn't answer. He looked away from Arlen, back at the others, who were watching
the boy with pity and Arlen with disdain.

    "Here's
one last question for you to ask of yourself," Arlen said. "Can you
afford to be wrong?"

    Paul
stared at him in silence as the train whistle blew and the men stomped out
cigarettes and fell into a boarding line. Arlen watched their flesh melt from
their bones as they went up the steps.

    "Don't
let that fool bastard convince you to stay here, boy," Wallace O'Connell
bellowed as he stepped up onto the train car, half of his face a skull, half
the face of a strong man who believed he was fit to take on all comers.
"Ain't nothing here but alligators, and unless you want to be eating them
come dinner tomorrow, or them eating you, you best get aboard."

    Paul
didn't look in his direction. Just kept staring at Arlen. The locomotive was
chugging now, steam building, ready to tug its load south, down to the Keys,
down to the place the boy wanted to be.

    "You're
serious," he said.

    Arlen
nodded.

    "And
it's happened before?" Paul said. "This isn't the first time?"

    "No,"
Arlen said. "It is not the first time."

    The
first time Arlen Wagner saw death was in the Belleau Wood. That was the
bloodiest battle the Marines had ever encountered, a savage showdown requiring
repeated assaults before the parcel of forest and boulders finally fell under
American control, and the bodies were piled high by the end. The sight of
corpses was not the new experience for Arlen, whose father had served as
undertaker in the West Virginia hill town where he was raised, a place where
violence, mining accidents, and fever regularly sent men and women Isaac
Wagner's way to be fitted into their coffins. No, in the moonlight over the
Marne River on a June night in
1918
,
Arlen saw something far
different from a corpse—he saw the dead among the living.

    They'd
made an assault on the Wood that day, marching through a waist-high wheat field
directly into machine-gun fire. For the rest of his life, the sight of tall,
windswept wheat would put a shiver through Arlen. Most of the men in the first
waves had been slaughtered outright, but Arlen and other survivors had been
driven south, into the trees and a tangle of barbwire. The machine guns pounded
on, relentless, and those who didn't fall beneath them grappled hand to hand
with German soldiers who shouted oaths at them in a foreign tongue while
bayonets clashed and knives plunged.

    By
evening the Marines had sustained the highest casualties in their history, but
they also had a hold, however tenuous, in Belleau Wood. Arlen was on his belly
beside a boulder as midnight came on, and with it a German counterattack. As
the enemy approached he'd felt near certain that this skirmish would be his
last; he couldn't continue to survive battles like these, not when so many had
fallen all around him throughout the day. That rain of bullets couldn't keep
missing him forever.

    This
was his belief at least, until the Germans appeared as more than shadows, and
what he saw then kept him from so much as lifting his rifle.

    They
were skeleton soldiers.

    He
could see skulls shining in the pale moonlight where faces belonged, hands of
white bone clutching rifle stocks.

    He
was staring, entranced, when the American gunners opened up. Opened up and
mowed them down, sliced the vicious Hun bastards to pieces. All around him men
lifted their rifles and fired, and Arlen just lay there without so much as a
finger on the trigger, scarcely able to draw a breath.

    
A
trick of the light,
he told himself as dawn rose heavy with mist and the
smell of cooling and drying blood, the moans of the wounded as steady now as
the gunfire had been earlier. What he'd seen was the product of moonlight
partnered with the trauma from a day of unspeakable bloodshed. Surely that was
enough to wreak havoc on his mind. On anyone's mind.

    There
were some memories in his head then, of course, some thoughts of his father,
but he kept them at bay, and as the sun broke through the mist he'd done a fine
job of convincing himself that this was nothing but the most horrifying of
hallucinations.

    It
was midafternoon and the Marines were readying another assault, seeking to push
deeper into the Wood, when he turned to two of the men he'd known best over
there, known best and liked best, good boys who fought hard, and saw that their
eyes were gone. The flesh remained on their faces but their eyes were gone, the
sockets filled with gray smoke that leaked out and formed wreaths around their
heads.

    Both
of them were dead within the hour.

    For
the rest of the war it was like that — bones showing in the night battles,
smoke-filled eye sockets smiling at him during the daylight. That promise of
death was all he ever got. Never did a ghost linger with him after the last
breath rattled out of tortured lungs, never did a phantom version of one of
those lost men return in the night to offer him some sense of the reason behind
it all. No voices whispered to him in the dark, no invisible hand guided him in
battle or menaced him in sleep.

    He
spoke of it only once, knew immediately from the looks exchanged around him
that if he kept telling the tale he'd soon be hospital-bound with all the other
poor shell-shocked bastards who gibbered on about things far from the grasp of
reality. Arlen kept his mouth shut and kept seeing the same terrible sights.

    As
the war went on, he discovered some of them could be saved. They would perish
if left to fight alone, but if he could keep them down and out of the fire
line, sometimes they made it through. Not often enough, though. Not nearly
often enough. And there were so, so many of them.

    After
the armistice the premonitions ceased, and for a time Arlen thought it was
done. Then he'd walked into an Army hospital back in the States to visit a
buddy and had seen smoke-eyes everywhere he looked, stumbled back out of the
place without ever finding his friend. He'd gone to the first speakeasy he
could find and tipped whiskey glasses back until his own vision was too clouded
and blurred to see smoke even if someone lit a match right in front of his
face.

    He'd
worked in a railyard for a time, had seen a man with bone hands and a gleaming
skull face laughing over a joke just minutes before the chains on a log car
snapped and he was crushed beneath one of the timbers. The last time Arlen
ventured back into West Virginia — it wasn't a place of warm memories and
welcoming embraces — he'd gone hunting with a friend from the war who'd turned
into a bitter drunk with a stump where his left hand belonged. One-handed or
not he'd wanted to go hunting, and Arlen had agreed, then saw the smoke
swirling in the man's eye sockets about thirty seconds before he stepped into a
snarl of loose brush and a rattlesnake struck him in the calf, just below the
knee. Arlen had shot the snake, whose thick coiled body would've gone every bit
of five feet stretched out full, and cut the wound to bleed the venom, but
still the smoke wouldn't leave those eyes, grew thicker and darker as Arlen
dragged his old friend back to town, and he was dead by noon the next day.

    So
there were incidents, but in this warless world they were far less common, and
he worked hard at burying the memories just the same as they'd buried the men
who created them. Drinking helped. Even through Prohibition, Arlen always found
a way to keep his flask filled.

    Like
many of the men back from the war, he'd wandered in the years that followed,
taking work when and where he could, unable or unwilling to settle. When the
Bonus Marchers had moved on Washington, demanding wages for veterans, only to
be driven away with tear gas, he'd watched the papers idly, expecting nothing.
But after Roosevelt allowed that some veterans might join his Civilian
Conservation Corps, out to save the nation one tree at a time, Arlen had some
interest. Dollars were getting scarcer, and the idea of laboring outdoors
instead of down in a coal mine or inside a foundry sounded mighty fine.

    In
the end he'd signed on in Alabama as what they called a local experienced man.
It was CCC labor, same as any else, but he didn't have to join up with one of
the veteran companies. Instead, he was tasked with providing instruction to a
bunch of boys from New York and Jersey, city kids who'd never swung an ax or
handled a saw. Was the sort of thing that could try some men's patience, but
Arlen didn't mind teaching, and just about anyone could be shown how to drive a
nail or square an edge.

    Paul
Brickhill, though . . . he was something special. The closest thing to a
mechanical genius Arlen had ever seen. A tall, dark- haired boy with serious
eyes and an underfed frame, same as almost all the rest of them, he had not the
first bit of experience with carpentry, but what he did have was the mind. The
first thing that caught Arlen's attention was how quickly the boy learned. In
all those early days of instruction, Arlen never repeated himself to Brickhill.
Not once. You said it, he absorbed it and applied it. Still, he'd appeared
little more than a reliable boy and a quick study until they got to work
building a shelter house. They'd laid masonry from foundation to windowsill and
Arlen was checking over the rounded logs they'd set above the stone when he
caught Brickhill changing his measurements for the framing of the roof.

    He'd
been ready to light the boy up—took some first-class ignorance to dare pick up
a pencil and fool with Arlen's numbers, make a change that could set them back
days—when he looked down and studied the sketch and saw that the boy was right.
Arlen had the angle off on the beams. He would've discovered it himself once
they got to laying boards, but he hadn't seen it in his measurements.

    "How'd
you know that?" he asked.

    Brickhill
opened his mouth and closed it, frowned, then steepled his hands in the shape
of a roof and then flattened them out and said, "I just . . . saw it,
that's all."

    It
wasn't the sort of thing a boy who'd never built a roof should see. Not a
fifteen-degree difference without a single board set.

    They
got to talking a bit after that. Arlen had been in the habit of telling the
juniors only what was needed — cut here, nail there — but Brickhill wanted to
know more, and Arlen told him what he could. Didn't take long to see that the
boy's innate understanding of building was such that Arlen's experience didn't
seem all that impressive. A few months later it was at Brickhill's suggestion
that Arlen approached the camp foreman with the idea of constructing a
three-hundred-foot-long chute to get concrete down to a dam they were building.
The chute worked, and saved them who knew how many days.

    It
was getting on toward the end of summer and things were winding down at Flagg
Mountain when Brickhill's six-month hitch finished up. He intended to
reenlist—expected he'd continue to for some time, long as they'd let him, he
told Arlen — but he didn't want to stay with his company, which was set for a
transfer from Alabama to Nevada.

    "I
got something else in mind," Brickhill said. "But I figure it's going
to take your help to get me there."

    The
boy proceeded to inform him, in exorbitant detail, of a new CCC project in the
Florida Keys. They were building a highway bridge that would conquer the ocean,
same grand thing that Henry Flagler had done with the railroad. Labor for the
project was being provided by the Veterans Work Program, but the CCC had just
taken over the management. As they didn't have a junior camp down there, it was
going to take a bit of work for Paul to join up. Considering how Arlen was an
ex-Marine, same as the local officer in charge of enlistment, and might have
some pull, Paul was looking for help.

    Arlen
agreed to it, and what he told the enlistment officer had been true enough —
the boy needed to be working on such an endeavor, not planting trees and
clearing drainage ditches in Nevada.