The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  He supposed he should be angry. He wasn’t, though. Just couldn’t muster it, not with her, and not over this.

  “I won’t see that boy die,” he said. “I won’t let it happen. It isn’t this place that threatens him, it’s Wade. I’ll put an end to Wade.”

  “We could just leave,” she said. “I still think we could just—”

  “No,” he said. “You will leave. You and your brother and Paul. And I expect to catch up with you at some point. I fully intend on doing that. But not while Solomon Wade remains to follow.”

  41

  TIME WAS SHORT, and moving fast. Tolliver was to bring the money down that evening, and on the next the Cubans would arrive with their boat packed with orange crates. They would, if everything went without a hitch, sit out on the Gulf and wait for lights that never came and then they’d turn around and return to their own country, still with the orange crates on board. Paul would be on a train, perhaps, and Rebecca and Owen driving north, and Solomon Wade would be dead.

  All of this had to be done in less than forty-eight hours.

  Arlen went down to the boathouse that morning and cut boards and sanded them down same as he would on any other day, thinking that if McGrath or Wade happened by it would be best for them to see things as they always were, no indication of a change in plans.

  He spent most of the morning considering what he’d say to Paul. He wanted to prepare him for what was to come but didn’t think the boy would hear him out. He would have to wait until Owen had the money, break off a portion of it for Paul, and drive him to a train station. If Paul wouldn’t listen to Arlen, he’d listen to the money. He was looking for a way out. They’d give it to him.

  That was what was in Arlen’s mind when he walked back up from the boathouse shortly before noon and discovered that Paul was gone.

  “Said he was walking into town,” Rebecca told Arlen. “Owen offered him a ride, but he said no, he wanted to be alone and wanted to walk.”

  Arlen didn’t care for that.

  “What in the hell does he want in town? He doesn’t have a dime to his name. What’s he going to do?”

  Rebecca spread her hands. “I don’t know, Arlen. He wasn’t holding discussions over it. He just left.”

  He thought about borrowing Rebecca’s truck and going after him but decided against it. He was probably the reason Paul had wanted to get out of here; it would serve no purpose to chase him down.

  The day dragged by, and Paul didn’t return. The heat had gone unbroken for a full week, but there were thin, swift-moving clouds skidding over the sun today, and Arlen thought there was the promise of rain in the air. The sea was riding stronger swells than normal, the Gulf carrying a green tint, the gulls shrieking and fighting the wind currents above him. All the things that had become standard to Arlen now, the smell of the salt breeze and the feel of that intense, near-tropical sun on his neck and arms, the rustle of palm fronds. It should have been a beautiful place. Was a beautiful place, were it not for the men who’d invaded it. Reminded Arlen of the Belleau Wood, once he got to thinking about it. That had been a pretty parcel of land in its own right, field and forest. Damned gorgeous spot until the wrong men came across it, and then it was tangled with bodies and barbwire and the cries of the wounded.

  By four Paul had still not returned, and the clouds had thickened and begun to move slower, like troops massing for an advance. When the first fat drops began to fall and the woods around the inlet took to swaying and rattling in the wind, Arlen gathered his tools and retreated to the house. It was really starting to come down by the time he got inside, and he joined Rebecca and Owen at the back window and watched the rain lash down and pelt a gray, tossing sea.

  The rain fell different here than in other places Arlen had been, thicker and faster, turning the yard into an ankle-deep pond in a matter of minutes. The beach drank it in easier for a time, but then it began to form puddles even on the sand, and the waves raced up and chased the rain as if they intended to work together and turn the whole world to water.

  It had been raining this way, Arlen recalled, the day they’d returned from the jail. He remembered how he and Paul had broken into a run on their way up to the porch, laughing like children, bursting through the door feeling like they’d just stepped out of the worst of it in more ways than one.

  That seemed a mighty long time ago.

  He was lost in that memory when he realized Rebecca and Owen had turned and gone to the front windows, were looking out at a car parked at the top of the hill, its headlights glowing against the gray gloom of the storm. The sheriff’s car. Tolliver was parked up there in the exact place where he’d let Arlen and Paul out that day before the hurricane.

  He’s come with bad news, Arlen thought, a sudden certain clench going through his gut, images of Paul stretched out in the back of that car with a white sheet over his body. He’s come to tell us—

  But right then Owen said, “He’s here for me. He’s here with the money.”

  They all turned and looked at one another as a gust of wind shook the inn and lightning sparked almost on top of them, filling the dim barroom with one blinding flash. Thunder crackled, an angry, aggressive sound.

  Arlen said, “You best go get it, then.”

  There was another silent pause, all of them realizing this was it, the starting point. The moment that money passed from Tolliver’s palm into Owen’s, the plan was under way, no longer about ideas and possibilities and only about execution. They’d need to do it as they’d planned, and do it right. Most of that burden rested with Arlen and the Smith & Wesson upstairs under his bed.

  Owen blew out a breath and started for the door. Arlen called, “Hey,” and brought him up short, his hand on the doorknob.

  “You got to look relaxed,” he said. “Same as any other day. You ain’t doing anything but helping. The sheriff up there, he’s your buddy, and so is Wade. Don’t show them anything else.”

  Owen nodded.

  “The rain’ll help,” Arlen said. “Sheriff will be in a hurry. He doesn’t like driving in the storm.”

  Owen gave another nod and then pulled open the door. The wind was blowing hard out of the south, and it caught the door and wrenched it from his grasp and banged it off the wall. A spray of rain showered in and soaked the floorboards before he got his hand on the door again and slammed it, and then both Arlen and Rebecca moved closer to the bar so they could watch him.

  He ran across the yard with his shoulders hunched. Watching him go, Arlen had the bad feeling again, dark images flickering through his mind—gunfire opening up from inside the car and dropping Owen out there in the mud and the rain; the window sliding down as Owen approached and a knife blade glinting ever so swiftly as it snaked toward his throat.

  I wish I’d checked his eyes closer, Arlen thought. I didn’t see anything, he was looking me full in the face and I didn’t see anything, but maybe I didn’t look hard enough…

  Nothing happened, though. The door to the sheriff’s car swung open and then Owen had a black case in his hand, same sort of case that Walter Sorenson had carried. He stood beside the car, head ducked against the rain, and said a few words. Arlen couldn’t see Tolliver from behind the door, but Owen looked relaxed enough. The rain was a help. Made any tension on his part easier to explain, as if he just wanted to get the hell back inside and out of the downpour.

  It wasn’t but thirty seconds before Tolliver slammed the door and Owen turned and began running back toward the house. Rebecca let out a breath, and Arlen looked over his shoulder at her and realized she’d been sharing his dark thoughts. He managed to get a grin on his face.

  “We’re good,” he said. “All right? Wade thinks your brother is in league with him, and he thinks he’s got you owned by fear. They aren’t waiting on trouble. Not from us.”

  She nodded, but her face was pale and she couldn’t match his smile.

  The door swung open, and then Owen was back inside and dripping rain all over the
place, his blond hair turned dark with water and plastered over his forehead and down into his eyes. He gave them a stare and lifted the case high.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  Arlen nodded. “Here we go.”

  They counted the money back in the kitchen, hidden from windows. Arlen saw the stacks of bills inside and thought of the money he’d worked so hard and saved so long to gather, those 367 stolen dollars. He wondered if they were included in this pile.

  Rebecca did the counting. She fingered the bills swiftly and familiarly and didn’t say a word as she riffled through the stacks, kept a silent count in her head until the last bill had touched the edge of her thumb. Then she turned to them and said, “Ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand dollars?” Arlen echoed. He’d been watching her count it, had seen the bills with his own eyes, but he still wasn’t sure he believed the number. The CCC paid thirty dollars a month. There were more than twenty-five years of work sitting in that simple black case.

  “Yes,” she said, and then, for the first time, she smiled. “He’s not going to like losing it.”

  “Hell,” Arlen said, “he’s going to lose something else he’ll like even less.”

  Somehow that got them all to laughing. It wasn’t a healthy kind of laughter. More the sort born out of fear, jangling through nerves strung tight as bowstrings, but it felt good all the same. They had their laugh together, and then a particularly strong racket of thunder struck and shook the walls of the inn and they all fell silent again.

  “Paul gets his cut,” Arlen said. “I’ll give it to him, and I’ll take him to a train station and see that he gets on one headed far from here.”

  “How much are you intending to give him?” Owen said.

  “Half.” He said it flatly. Owen rocked his head back and stared with wide eyes.

  “Bullshit, he gets half. He’ll be gone ’fore anything even starts to happen! He ain’t playing a role in this, ain’t helping, ain’t—”

  “He gets half,” Arlen said, and there was a challenge in his voice that shut Owen’s mouth for once. He went tight-lipped and angry and stared at Arlen with distaste, but when he spoke again his tone was softer.

  “There’s four of us here,” he said. “Fair split would be twenty-five hundred. That’s more than fair.”

  “That boy’s got a mother was counting on CCC checks,” Arlen said. “He’s got to look after her and himself. He gets half.”

  Owen started to shake his head again, but Rebecca cut in.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “That’s right.”

  She counted out half the money and placed it in a burlap bag and handed it to Arlen. He put it on a high shelf behind a sack of flour and then he and Owen both watched as Rebecca replaced the rest of the money in the black case and fastened the latches and set it beneath the table.

  “One day left,” she said.

  42

  PAUL RETURNED AT THE height of the storm. The rain had lessened just a touch, but the lightning and thunder were gathering energy, the walls and windows of the inn trembling consistently, wind howling in off the Gulf. It wasn’t yet sundown but might as well have been; no sun would shine on this day again. The three of them had returned to the barroom, ostensibly to discuss the plan, break down each movement and time it out to the last second. Nobody had much to say, though. It was as if the delivery of the money, that first squeeze on a trigger nobody else even saw, had somehow silenced them.

  Instead they sat and listened to the storm and drank. Arlen and Owen passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth, and even Rebecca had a short one. Her eyes moved from the beach to the fireplace to the clock, flicking from place to place as if taking inventory.

  “What’s on your mind?” Arlen said.

  “I was thinking that it really isn’t such a bad place.”

  It was the same notion he’d had that morning, working on the boathouse.

  “I came to hate it, you know,” she said. “To almost blame the physical location for everything that was happening here, for everything that had happened. But you know what? My parents were right. It’s a gorgeous spot. It will be special someday. Someone will probably make a nice living doing just what my father always hoped to do here. They will be different people, though, and it will be a different time. Right now, it’s as if this place is infected. The sickness will pass. But no time soon. No time soon.”

  Arlen nodded. She wasn’t alone in those thoughts, and they weren’t limited to this place. It was an infected world right now. He remembered reading newspaper pieces about the black dust that had risen in the plains and driven farmers to take shelter in the ground, dust clouds so mighty that they’d drifted all the way across the country and darkened the skies above New York. It was a hell of a thing. Grasshoppers had descended over the same farms like a biblical plague, picking crops to shreds and ruining any hope of a cash harvest. At the same time banks were going under and women and children standing in breadlines, and young men like Owen Cady and Paul Brickhill were willing to throw in their lots with the Solomon Wades of the world because they saw no other way to climb out of the trenches in which they lay.

  It would pass, though. Arlen believed that, had to believe it. You kept your head down and you weathered what this life brought you and believed it would pass. He looked at Rebecca now and thought, You are all that I need. She was, too. Through all the hell that might come to pass in a few short hours, he had no qualms about staying around to endure it. Just the chance to be with her, it was enough. It was something the likes of which he’d never hoped to find.

  A memory caught him then, Paul in the darkness on the dock while Tolliver and Tate McGrath prepared to kill in this very room. Paul saying, I feel like I’ve been traveling through time to get here, Arlen, just to find her.

  Damn it, why did it have to afflict them both? Why couldn’t love be parceled out evenly and easily?

  It was then that a sheet of white light filled the room, and for a moment nobody reacted because they’d grown so used to the steady, brilliant flashes of lightning. This one held, though, and Arlen turned and looked through the window, and, as a snarling, raging clatter of thunder shook the sky, he saw Thomas Barrett’s delivery van parked at the top of the hill, its headlight beams cutting across the yard. The passenger door swung open, and Paul burst out and ran through the rain. Barrett gave the horn a little double tap and turned the van around and headed back up the road.

  When Paul broke through the door and stood before them in a sopping mess, everyone stared at him in silence. He had a paper sack clutched to his chest.

  “Some storm,” he said.

  “Where in the hell you been?” Arlen said.

  “Went up to the store, if it’s any of your business. Which it isn’t.”

  “That store’s every bit of five miles away.”

  “Felt about like that,” Paul said, flip and indifferent. “Once it commenced to storming, Mr. Barrett said he’d give me a ride back or I’d be waiting till morning. He thinks this one isn’t blowing off quick.”

  “Come on over here and get dried off,” Rebecca said, rising and pulling a towel off the bar. “Maybe we should start a fire. It’s warm, but on a night like this it just might be—”

  Paul had been crossing to her, and everyone stopped short when Arlen reached out and grabbed the paper sack from his hands.

  “Hey!” Paul cried, and reached for it, but Arlen turned his shoulder and blocked the grab long enough to open the sack and see the contents. There were some penny candies and a few packs of cigarettes.

  “Give me that,” Paul said, and this time Arlen let him take it. “What’s the matter with you? Got to steal everything from me, is that it?”

  “I haven’t stolen a thing from you in the past,” Arlen said. “Never took a damn thing that was yours.”

  Paul gave him cold eyes and didn’t answer.

  “You don’t smoke cigarettes,” Arlen said.

  “What?”

&nb
sp; “You got cigarettes in that sack, smart guy. Why?”

  “Because I wanted a few, that’s why.”

  “I’ll say it again,” Arlen said, “you don’t smoke.”

  Paul drew his shoulders back and looked Arlen in the eye. “They’re for Owen. I figured he’d appreciate them. You probably would have, too, but I’m not of a mind to give you anything.”

  “Hey, thanks,” Owen said, and Arlen wanted to backhand the fool right through the window.

  “So all you got is candy,” Arlen said. “You walked five miles up the road to fetch yourself some candy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Arlen, what does it matter?” Rebecca asked softly, passing Paul the towel. He took to drying his face and neck, and Arlen looked at Rebecca in silence. He didn’t have an answer, really. All he knew was that he didn’t like this. It didn’t feel right, Paul taking a walk that long in this kind of heat just to get some damn candy.

  “You happen across Solomon Wade in your travels?” he said.

  “No. Didn’t happen across a soul but Mr. Barrett and his wife. What it matters to you, I have no idea. It’s none of your concern what I do.”

  “How’d you pay for it?”

  Paul stopped with the towel over one side of his face. “What?”

  “This shit you went hiking for. Cigarettes and candy. How’d you pay for it? I was under the impression you were busted-ass broke.”

  Paul switched the towel to the other side of his face and dried it slowly. He seemed to be thinking.

  “Mr. Barrett let me have it on credit,” he said.

  “Credit,” Arlen echoed. “Son, this is a Depression. That man don’t know you from Adam. Why in the hell’s he giving you anything on credit?”

  “I told him I’d be coming into some money shortly,” Paul said. “Owen here set me up with a bit of work.”

  “Let me fix us something to eat,” Rebecca said, nervous, bothered by the tension in the air. “We’ll all sit in here where it’s dry and have some food.”

  Arlen and Paul held a long stare, and then Paul turned away and tossed the cigarettes to Owen.