The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  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.

  “What you have here,” he’d said, “is the next great engineer this country will see.”

  It didn’t fly. Seems they’d had trouble in the camps down there, and the old Veterans Work Program was becoming something of a black eye thanks to circulating national news reports about the violent and troubled men who populated the camps in the Keys.

  “You want to go down there, we could use you, Arlen,” the enlistment officer had said. “Matter of fact, I’d appreciate it were you willing. We need some steady men in those camps. But we won’t be sending juniors.”

  Arlen figured that verdict would close the discussion with Brickhill. It didn’t. The boy simply said that if Arlen accepted the transfer and went south, he’d tag along and talk his way onto the project. It was, Arlen had discovered, a situation typical of the boy. He had a sort of focused determination you just didn’t come across much, and when you did, it tended to be held by men who got things done. Paul Brickhill would surely be such a man.

  “Once I’m down there, I bet the tune changes,” Paul promised. “They need workers. And if it doesn’t sort out, I’ll go on to one of the other Florida camps and reenlist.”

  “Might be so,” Arlen said, “but that requires me going as well, and I ain’t looking to transfer, son. This is my camp.”

  “Why?”

  Well, because he’d happened to be in the area when he hired on. It was that simple. A local experienced man, that was what they called him, but truth was he was hardly more local than the boys he supervised. Experienced, yes. Local, no. Wasn’t any place where Arlen could be considered a local.

  “You don’t have any reason not to head down there,” Paul said. “You’re not one with family around here, or…”

  He stopped as if fearing he’d said something offensive, but Arlen just shook his head.

  “No, I don’t have any family here.”

  Here, or anywhere. The work at Flagg Mountain was nearing a close—there was a reason these boys were about to be transferred west—and it might be interesting, as Brickhill suggested, to work on an ocean bridge…

  That was how Arlen Wagner came to be sitting beside a boy from New Jersey in a muggy train car on the last day of August 1935.

  For a time after the train had left, they just stood there in the glow of the station platform and stared off down the dark rails. The flat air billowed up one long gust and pushed the trapped wet heat out of the woods and into their faces, and Arlen dropped his hand for his flask and then stopped when Paul’s eyes followed the motion. He didn’t want the kid to think this was all due to liquor. Wasn’t drinking that caused it, was drinking that could ease it.

  “All right,” Paul said at length, “we aren’t going to die on that train tonight. We also aren’t going to get anywhere on it. So unless you intend to spend the night right here…”

  “Hold on. We’ll find someone to ask.”

  There was a station attendant, a stooped man with a squint that seemed permanent, who met all of Arlen’s questions with the same statement: I don’t understand—why didn’t you get back on your train?

  At last he was made to accept the idea, if not understand it, and informed them that there was a boardinghouse five miles up the highway.

  “Look here,” he said, “why go five miles away to spend the night if you’re not looking to stay around here anyhow? Now that you got off your train, where is it you’re bound?”

  That was a hell of a question. Paul looked at Arlen, a challenging look.

  “Next train to the Keys?” he said.

  “If’n you still want to go to the Keys,” the attendant said, “why in the hell didn’t you stay on your damn train?”

  Arlen ran a hand over his face. The next train for the Keys might well be safe, but it might well not. How could he explain that to the boy? All he knew for certain was that those men they’d just left were heading toward death. And if somehow he’d been wrong, then he wasn’t real eager to chase after them, set up in a camp down where every man looked at Arlen and chuckled and whispered.

  “You said you’re with the CCC?” the station attendant said.

  “That’s right,” Paul said.

  “Well, there’s a camp down in Hillsborough County, out toward Tampa, and I could get you on a train headed that way tomorrow afternoon. Bunch of you boys are down there. Working on a park.”

  “We aren’t heading to a park,” Paul said. “We’re going to build a bridge. A highway bridge. In the Keys.”

  “Well, don’t know that you can get on another train to the Keys till late tomorrow. If you’re still headed that way, then why did you—”

  Arlen interrupted him and pulled Paul aside.

  “Here’s the problem, as I see it,” he said, fumbling out a cigarette and lighting it. “It’s not just a matter of finding another train. It’s a veterans’ camp, not juniors, you know that. They didn’t want you down there in the first place. Now those fellows are going to show up ahead of us and tell this tale, and we’re going to have ourselves a reputation before we arrive. Understand?”

  Paul gave him a long look, one that said, You’re going to be the one they’ve heard tales about, not me, but he didn’t let the look turn into words.

  “So there you’re going to be,” Arlen said, “in a camp where you don’t belong, and now they’ll see you coming and see a problem. That’s my fault, not yours, but it’s the fact of the matter, son. I wasn’t sure I could get you a hitch down there to begin with. Won’t be near as easy now. So could be time we think about a different direction.”

  All of this sounded like wheedling even to Arlen, and it dropped Paul Brickhill’s face into a sullen frown. This was the first time in their short acquaintance that Arlen had actually seen him show displeasure.

  “We had it all set and planned,” Paul said. “You got a worry with that train, okay. We need to get on another one, though!”

  “I don’t know,” Arlen said. “Let’s just hold on a minute here, all right? I’m not sure of what we need to do now.”

  What Arlen wanted, now that they were off the train, was to head in the opposite direction, try to forget this had ever happened. He’d drifted on his own for so many years and it was so much easier to do that. Now he had Paul with him, and with every word that came out of the boy’s mouth Arlen wanted to walk off alone, the way he always had before.

  “Not sure?” Paul echoed in disbelief. “Arlen, shoot, there’s no question about it! We’re due in the Keys, and we better find the next train!”

  That fed Arlen the inspiration he required. The kid was ardent about rules, one of those who just shook and rattled at the idea of balking orders. He was arguing now because Arlen had been trying to convince him instead of giving him the boss voice and the boss attitude.

  “Look here,” he said, “ain’t going to be a debate held. Fact is, we got off the train and changed the plan. Something about that you don’t understand? You too dull-minded to realize that your pretty little schedule just got altered, boy
? Not going to be a damn thing decided tonight, because there’s no more trains passing through. So let’s get on to this roadhouse and find a bed for the night.”

  Paul wanted to argue. He scowled again and then wet his lips and lifted his head as if a retort would be forthcoming. Arlen hit him with the stare then, a partner to the voice, perfected in places he’d rather not remember, and the kid couldn’t hold his eyes.

  “He said the boardinghouse was five miles away,” Paul muttered.

  “At what point between here and Alabama,” Arlen said, “did you lose the use of your legs?”

  4

  IT WAS A LONG, dark walk. The highway was bordered with scrub pines and tall grasses that rustled even when the wind was flat, and the summer night pressed down on them like a pair of strong hands, made each step feel like ten. They were both lugging bags, tossed to them by a sneering Wallace O’Connell as the train pulled away. They’d been at it for an hour, had probably gone four miles, when a car came up behind them and slowed. Cars had been passing occasionally, maybe five during the whole time they’d been walking, but this was the first that had slowed. Neither Arlen nor Paul had stuck out a thumb, and though the boy said, “Hey, they’re stopping!” with delight in his voice, Arlen dropped his bags and put a hand in his pants pocket, near his knife. There were different reasons a car would stop for strangers on a lonely midnight highway, and some drifted far from acts of kindness.

  The car was a newer-model sedan with gleaming chrome and whitewall tires. The window cranked down, and the driver called, “ ’Lo there.” Cigarette smoke rolled out in a haze.