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16

Arlis came up the stairs, bent and slow, at the pace of an old man in a rest home. But became momentarily younger when he said, “I probably don’t have to tell you there’s a naked woman out back’a your place washing her hair. If she’s your girl, I apologize for lookin’ but I couldn’t hardly not look. She’s standing out there naked for anyone to see.”

He shuffled through the door, into the lab, adding, “I didn’t stare, though. I averted my eyes. But even a quick look at something like that makes me wish I was twenty years younger.”

Arlis stopped, rested a hand on the lab station’s marble counter. He was wearing coveralls, rubber boots, a Bing Crosby hat over his thick glasses, his eyes moving around the room. Taking in details—the pine beams, the thick walls—appreciating the craftsmanship, before he asked, “Where’s your hippie friend?”

I said, “That was him. Tomlinson.”

“What?”

The person showering. It’s not a woman; it’s Tomlinson.”

Arlis’s rheumy gray eyes stared at me, letting the words register. Then he made a face as if he’d just stepped in something nasty. “That’s a man out there?”

“By all reports, he’s a man. Yes.”

Arlis shuddered. He thought about it a moment longer, then shuddered again. “Gad! I was havin’…thoughts.” He asked it again, not wanting to believe. “The naked woman out there’s really a man?”

“Um-huh. You must of seen him from the back,” I said. “Otherwise, it’s obvious. At least, that’s what the ladies say.”

Arlis groaned and shook himself. “God Aw’mighty, I’ve just about had it with this getting old shit. One minute, I’m damn happy my body’s showin’ it’s still got some perk. Next minute, I got the heebie-jeebies ’cause these worthless eyes a’ mine got me lusting after some dope-smoking hippie, thinking he’s got a good ass.”

The old man hacked as if to spit. “You got anything to drink around here, Doc?”

“Beer,” I said. “All I’ve got’s beer.”

Arlis said beer would do.

T wenty minutes later, keeping some distance between himself and Tomlinson, who was toweling his hair, Arlis said, “It’s some kinda Kraut badge. A fancy one. That eagle, too, with the square head. They both come from WW II. When we whupped the Nazis.”

In his nasal, Cracker accent, he said the letters—double-u double-u two—and pronounced Nazis Knot-says.

Arlis was leaning over the tray of sodium hydroxide, inspecting the medals, telling us what we might not know because his generation had done it, not ours. He looked like he wanted to reach and touch the things. The space of all those years now separated only by a few inches of clear water.

“They operated around Florida, you know. Nazi subs—U-boats, we called ’em. They sunk a lot of our freighters.” He looked to confirm that we were interested. “Sanibel, Captiva, and the barrier islands off Sarasota. We had coastal patrols, by boat and on foot. Coast Watchers, they called themselves, all volunteers. I did a few of them beach walks myself before the Army finally let me enlist at sixteen.

“People who lived near the Gulf couldn’t burn lights at night for fear they’d silhouette merchant vessels, and U-boats would sink ’em. So we had to black out our windows or the Coast Guard would come along and shoot the damn things out.”

It was a relief for him to be talking history now, something he was strong and sure about because, only a few minutes before, he’d nearly broken down when he told us how ashamed he was to have ever worked for a snake like Bern Heller, and he was glad they’d fired him yesterday after what happened to Javier.

“Getting old and dumber is about the most surprising thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “I was a strong man for so long, it takes some getting used to, being weak.”

This was the way Arlis was dealing with it: getting in his boat, burning energy by taking his apology from island to island, meeting friends.

Being on the water would help.

A rlis said he’d been in my house once before, long ago, just after the war, when it was still being used to store ice and fish, and to house fishermen.

“It smells the same, a good smell,” he said. “Pine lumber and creosote. I can smell the bay coming through the floor. Same as I remember when I come back from the Army.”

The war—that was something the old man was comfortable talking about. The war, and how it had changed Florida. Arlis had lived it, and he’d done some reading. The subject served to reestablish him as the man he once was. It also distanced him from the breakdown we’d witnessed.

I’d asked him to take a look at the Nazi medals lying in the sodium solution and tell me what he thought. Any ideas about how they’d ended up in forty feet of water, twelve miles off Sanibel Lighthouse?

That got him started; gave him a reason to stick around and finish the second beer Tomlinson poured. Also, the medals were right there to be seen, artifacts from another era. Like him.

Arlis’s gray eyes were huge through his glasses when he leaned to study detail. Hypnotic, that was the effect.

Tomlinson and I left him alone for a while so he could get himself under control. We retreated to the lower deck, where I chipped away four dollar-sized objects from the cable. I selected them randomly—there was no telling what lay beneath the armor work of calcium carbonate and barnacle scars.

As I worked, Tomlinson had glanced at the upper deck—empty—before he said, “It still bothers you, doesn’t it? I immediately picked up on the vibe. Because Arlis and Hannah were once lovers.”

I’d made the mistake of admitting my uneasiness about their relationship years before, and I was still paying the price. “Doesn’t bother me a bit. Besides, they weren’t lovers. Hannah was just…extrafriendly to the guy because he’s old. It was more like a therapeutic sort of deal.”

Among Tomlinson’s catalog of facial expressions is a superior all-knowing smile that, more than once, I’ve been tempted to slap off his face. I was tempted now. “Oh, great. Sure, that explains it, then. Therapy. So there’s no reason for you to make silly judgments about Hannah being with a man his age. Seems like I remember you saying it was…disgusting?”

Before he could find the right word—I’d said distasteful—I held up a warning finger. No lectures! Then handed him the four barnacle-coated objects, sharing their black sulfide stain now that he was freshly showered.

A few minutes later, the objects were soaking in sodium hydroxide as I prepared a third electrolytic reduction system. Hannah was a valued memory. I wouldn’t allow my own petty feelings about her relationship with Arlis Futch to impose on that memory.

Well, I’d try, anyway…

I readied copper wire, and another steel plate, as we listened to Arlis tell us how World War II had transformed Florida. Changed it more than any state in the union, he’d bet money. Florida had so much coastline, lots of deepwater ports, and we’re so close to Cuba, the Panama Canal—“Strategic location, understand?”—it made sense for the military to build a hundred new bases between Key West and Jacksonville, and order tens of thousands of personnel south.

Florida’s population nearly doubled in six years, he told us.

“South Florida used to be Southern. The war brought in Yankees from New York to Colorado. That’s why it’s Northern-like today.”

And the weather? There was another attraction. Troops could train here all year. Mess halls had fresh produce, even in January. And, in an era when coal and oil were rationed, buildings didn’t need to be heated. Which is why, Arlis told us, the government also built POW camps in Florida.

Arlis had a know-it-all manner that was irritating, but I paused when he mentioned prisoner of war camps.

“POWs in Florida? I never heard that before.”

Arlis said, “Hell, ’most no one knows it, ’cause no one really gives a tinker’s damn, these days. There was twenty or thirty POW camps in Florida; nearly a hundred thousand German prisoners. I should know, I worked at the camp in Fort Myers. You didn’t know about that? It was at Page Field, one of the smallish ones. Two hundred and seventy-one POWs, we had—I did the head count lots of nights.”

I listened to him tell us that his brother, Lexter, had served in Europe two years before the Army finally took Arlis, so Arlis did what he could for the war effort as a civilian.

“Some of them prisoners were pretty decent guys. They were off U-boats, the African Tank Corps, pilots in the Luftwaffe. Some of them, though, were bastard Kraut Nazis. Superior acting, like their shit wouldn’t draw a fly. So I wish’t they’d given me something other than a club to carry, but I was civilian staff.”

Page Field was on the mainland, fifteen miles from Sanibel. The county’s population has exploding southward, so the little transit airport was now a snag of open space in a flood of shopping malls and traffic.

“The camp was active all four years of the war?”

“Longer. All the camps stayed active. The earliest POWs came off U-boats that the Brits killed before Pearl Harbor got us into it. I didn’t leave for Army boot camp ’til late in the war, and when I come home on leave in ’46 we still had the POW camps.

“Some people said it was because the Krauts didn’t want to leave Florida. But I also heard we kept ’em around for cheap labor. We used them in the fields, picking citrus and such stuff, for eighty cents a day plus meals. Everyone needed workers because our men were away at war. Like the mess left by the hurricane of ’44—who else was gonna deal with it? The POWs were a hell of a big help, cleaning up the mess.”

Tomlinson said, “The hurricane of ’44? I’ve never heard of that one.”

“That’s because the war was still going on, so it didn’t make much news. Not like the hurricanes of ’28 and 1931—they’re the ones you read about. But bad? You want to talk about a bad hurricane? The ’44 hurricane was a hell of a lot worse than what just hit us. Worse than the storm that hit the Keys awhile back. It flooded Sanibel, a direct hit. Almost washed the lighthouse away. Three hundred and some people were killed. Check the history books. It came late—October 19th—ask anyone who lived through it. We didn’t get no early warnings then.

“Boys,” Arlis continued, “you have never seen a hurricane if you didn’t live through the storm of ’44. It reminds me of some of the stuff that went on in them war years…”

I turned away.

Jesus, the old know-it-all was feeling his beer already. Chattering along, no longer bothering to confirm we were listening. He was in the early stages of a talking jag, and it wasn’t going to be easy to get him out the door if we kept feeding him beer.

Next, he’d be talking about the good old days if we didn’t find a way to stop him. What it meant to be a native Floridian, fifth or sixth generation. How good the fishing used to be before everything went to hell.

I heard Arlis saying, “…we’d catch so many mullet in a single strike, you couldn’t even pull the damn net in…”

Here we go.

The man was already into it, talking nonstop, and now also looking at his empty glass so that Tomlinson would notice.

I interrupted, “Tomlinson, what time is that party supposed to start? Shouldn’t we be…”

Too late. Tomlinson was already crossing to the galley. Came back with a quart bottle, saying, “Our pal here’s getting thirsty.”

He filled Arlis’s glass with beer, and kept the rest for himself.