The Cypress House

1

THEY’D BEEN ON THE TRAIN for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men.

To that point it had been a hell of a nice ride. Hot, sure, and progressively more humid as they passed out of Alabama and through southern Georgia and into Florida, but nice enough all the same. There were thirty-four on board the train who were bound for the camps in the Keys, all of them veterans with the exception of the nineteen-year-old who rode at Arlen’s side, a boy from Jersey by the name of Paul Brickhill.

They’d all made a bit of conversation at the outset, exchanges of names and casual barbs and jabs thrown around in that way men have when they are getting used to one another, all of them figuring they’d be together for several months to come, and then things quieted down. Some slept, a few started card games, others just sat and watched the countryside roll by, fields going misty with late-summer twilight and then shapeless and dark as the moon rose like a watchful specter. Arlen, though, Arlen just listened. Wasn’t anything else to do, because Paul Brickhill had an outboard motor where his mouth belonged.

As the miles and minutes passed, Brickhill alternated between explaining things to Arlen and asking him questions. Nine times out of ten, the boy answered his own questions before Arlen could so much as part his lips with a response. Brickhill had been a quiet kid when the two of them first met months earlier in Alabama, and back then Arlen believed him to be shy. What he hadn’t counted on was the way the boy took to talk once he felt comfortable with someone. Evidently, he’d grown damn comfortable with Arlen.

As the wheels hammered along the rails of northern Florida, Paul Brickhill was busy telling Arlen all of the reasons this was going to be a hell of a good hitch. Not only was there the bridge waiting to be built, but all that sunshine and blue water and boats that cost more than most homes. They could do some fishing, maybe catch a tarpon. Paul’d seen pictures of tarpon that were near as long as the boats that landed them. And there were famous people in the Keys, celebrities of every sort, and who was to say they wouldn’t run into a few, and…

Around them the men talked and laughed, some scratching out letters to loved ones back home. Wasn’t anyone waiting on a letter from Arlen, so he just settled for a few nips on his flask and tried to find some sleep despite the cloaking warmth and the stink of sweating men. It was too damn hot.

Brickhill finally fell silent, as if he’d just noticed that Arlen was sitting with his eyes closed and had stopped responding to the conversation. Arlen let out a sigh, grateful for the respite. Paul was a nice enough kid, but Arlen had never been one for a lot of words where a few would do.

The train clattered on, and though night had settled, the heat didn’t break. Sweat still trickled along the small of Arlen’s back and held his hair to his forehead. He wished he could fall asleep; these hot miles would pass faster then. Maybe another pull on the flask would aid him along.

He opened his eyes, tugged the lids up sleepily, and saw a hand of bone.

He blinked and sat up and stared. Nothing changed. The hand held five playing cards and was attached to a man named Wallace O’Connell, a veteran from Georgia who was far and away the loudest man in this company. He had his back turned, engaged in his game, so Arlen couldn’t see his face. Just that hand of bone.

No, Arlen thought, no, damn it, not another one.

The sight chilled him but didn’t shock him. It was far from the first time.

He’s going to die unless I can find a way to stop it, Arlen thought with the sad, sick resignation of a man experienced with such things. Once we get down to the Keys, old Wallace O’Connell will have a slip and bash his head in on something. Or maybe the poor bastard can’t swim, will fall into those waves and sink beneath them and I’ll be left with this memory same as I’ve been left with so many others. I’d warn him if I could, but men don’t heed such warnings. They won’t let themselves.

It was then that he looked up, away from Wallace under the flickering lights of the train car, and saw skeletons all around him.

They filled the shadows of the car, some laughing, some grinning, some lost to sleep. All with bone where flesh belonged. The few who sat directly under a light still wore their skin, but their eyes were gone, replaced by whirls of gray smoke.

For a moment, Arlen Wagner forgot to breathe. Went cold and dizzy and then sucked in a gasp of air and straightened in the seat.

They were going to have a wreck. It was the only thing that made a bit of sense. This train was going to derail and they were all going to die. Every last one of them. Because Arlen had seen this before, and knew damn well what it meant, and knew that-

Paul Brickhill said, “Arlen?”

Arlen turned to him. The overhead light was full on the boy’s face, keeping him in a circle of brightness, the taut, tanned skin of a young man who spent his days under the sun. Arlen looked into his eyes and saw swirling wisps of smoke. The smoke rose in tendrils and fanned out and framed the boy’s head while filling Arlen’s with terrible recollections.

“Arlen, you all right?” Paul Brickhill asked.

He wanted to scream. Wanted to scream and grab the boy’s arm but was afraid it would be cold slick bone under his touch.

We’re going to die. We’re going to come off these rails at full speed and pile into those swamp woods, with hot metal tearing and shattering all around us…

The whistle blew out shrill in the dark night, and the train began to slow.

“We got another stop,” Paul said. “You look kind of sickly. Maybe you should pour that flask out.”

The boy distrusted liquor. Arlen wet his lips and said, “Maybe,” and looked around the car at the skeleton crew and felt the train shudder as it slowed. The force of that big locomotive was dropping fast, and now he could see light glimmering outside the windows, a station just ahead. They were arriving in some backwater stop where the train could take on coal and the men would have a chance to get out, stretch their legs, and piss. Then they’d be aboard again and winging south at full speed, death ahead of them.

“Paul,” Arlen said, “you got to help me do a bit of convincing here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We aren’t getting back on this train. Not a one of us.”

2

THEY PILED OUT OF THE CARS and onto the station platform, everyone milling around, stretching or lighting cigarettes. It was getting on toward ten in the evening, and though the sun had long since faded, the wet heat lingered. The boards of the platform were coated with swamp mud dried and trampled into dust, and out beyond the lights Arlen could see silhouetted fronds lying limp in the darkness, untouched by a breeze. Backwoods Florida. He didn’t know the town and didn’t care; regardless of name, it would be his last stop on this train.

He hadn’t seen so many apparitions of death at one time since the war. Maybe leaving the train wouldn’t be enough. Could be there was some sort of virus in the air, a plague spreading unseen from man to man the way the influenza had in ’18, claiming lives faster than the reaper himself.

“What’s the matter?” Paul Brickhill asked, following as Arlen stepped away from the crowd of men and tugged his flask from his pocket. Out here the sight was enough to set Arlen’s hands to shaking-men were walking in and out of the shadows as they moved through the cars and down to the station platform, slipping from flesh to bone and back again in a matter of seconds, all of it a dizzying display that made him want to sit down and close his eyes and drink long and deep on the whiskey.

“Something’s about to go wrong,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Paul said, but Arlen didn’t respond, staring instead at the men disembarking and realizing something-the moment they stepped off the train, their skin slid back across their bones, knitting together as if healed by the wave of some magic wand. The swirls of smoke in their eye sockets vanished into the hazy night air. It was the train. Yes, whatever was going to happen was going to happen to that train.

“Something’s about to go wrong,” he repeated. “With our train. Something’s going to go bad wrong.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do, damn it!”

Paul looked to the flask, and his eyes said what his words did not.

“I’m not drunk. Haven’t had more than a few swallows.”

“What do you mean, something’s going to go wrong?” Paul asked again.

Arlen held on to the truth, felt the words heavy in his throat but couldn’t let them go. It was one thing to see such horrors; it was worse to try and speak of them. Not just because it was a difficult thing to describe but because no one ever believed. And the moment you gave voice to such a thing was the moment you charted a course for your character that you could never alter. Arlen understood this well, had known it since boyhood.

But Paul Brickhill had sat before him with smoke the color of an early-morning storm cloud hanging in his eyes, and Arlen was certain what that meant. He couldn’t let him board that train again.

“People are going to die,” he said.

Paul Brickhill leaned his head back and stared.

“We get back on that train, people are going to die,” Arlen said. “I’m sure of it.”

He’d spent many a day trying to imagine this gift away. To fling it from him the way you might a poisonous spider caught crawling up your arm, and long after the chill lingered on your flesh you’d thank the sweet hand of Providence that you’d been given the opportunity to knock the beast away. Only he’d never been given the opportunity. No, the stark sight of death had stalked him, trailed him relentlessly. He knew it when he saw it, and he knew it was no trick of the light, no twist of bad liquor upon the mind. It was prophecy, the gift of foresight granted to a man who’d never wished for it.

He was reluctant to say so much as a word to any of the other men, knowing the response he’d receive, but this was not the sort of thing that could be ignored.

Speak loud and sharp, he thought, just like you did on the edge of a battle, when you had to get ’em to listen, and listen fast.

“Boys,” he said, getting at least a little of the old muster into his tone, “listen up, now.”

The conversations broke off. Two men were standing on the step of the train car, and when they turned, skull faces studied him.

“I think we best wait for the next train through,” he said. “There’s bad trouble aboard this one. I’m sure of it.”

It was Wallace O’Connell who broke the long silence that followed.

“What in the hell you talking about, Wagner?” he said, and immediately there was a chorus of muttered agreement.

“Something’s wrong with this train,” Arlen said. He stood tall, did his damnedest to hold their eyes.

“You know this for a fact?” O’Connell said.

“I know it.”

“How do you know? And what’s wrong with it?”

“I can’t say what’s wrong with it. But something is. I got a… sense for these things.”

A slow grin crept across O’Connell’s face. “I’ve known some leg-pullers,” he said, “but didn’t figure you for one of them. Don’t got the look.”

“Damn it, man, this ain’t no joke.”

“You got a sense something’s wrong with our train, and you’re telling us it ain’t no joke?”

“Knew a widow back home who was the same way,” spoke up another man from the rear of the circle. He was a slim, wiry old guy with a nose crooked from many a break. Arlen didn’t know his name-hell, he didn’t know most of their names, and that was part of the problem. Aside from Paul there wasn’t a man in the group who’d known Arlen for any longer than this train ride.

“Yeah?” O’Connell said. “Trains talked to her, too?”

“Naw. She had the sense, just like he’s talking about. ’Cept she got her sights from owls and moon reflections and shit like you couldn’t even imagine.”

This new man was grinning wide, and O’Connell was matching it. He said, “She was right all the time, of course?”

“Of course,” the man said, and let out a cackle. “Why, wasn’t but nine year ago she predicted the end of days was upon us. Knew it for a fact. Was going to befall us by that winter. I can’t imagine she was wrong, I just figured I missed being raptured up and that’s how I ended up here with all you sinful sons of bitches.”

The crowd was laughing now, and Arlen felt heat creeping into his face, thoughts of his father and the shame that had chased him from his boyhood home threatening his mind now. Behind him Paul Brickhill was standing still and silent, about the only one in the group who wasn’t at least chuckling. There was a man near Wallace O’Connell whose smile seemed forced, uneasy, but even he was going along with the rest of them.

“I might ask for a tug on whatever’s in that jug of your’n,” O’Connell said. “It seems to be a powerful syrup.”

“It’s not the liquor you’re hearing,” Arlen said. “It’s the truth. Boys, I’m telling you, I seen things in the war just like I am tonight, and every time I did, men died.”

“Men died every damn day in the war,” O’Connell said. The humor had drained from his voice. “And we all seen it-not just you. Some of us didn’t crack straight through from what we seen. Others”-he made a pointed nod at Arlen-“had a mite less fortitude. Now save your stories for somebody fool enough to listen to them. Rest of us don’t need the aggravation. There’s work at the end of this line, and we all need it.”

The men broke up then, drifted back to their own conversations, casting Arlen sidelong stares. Arlen felt a hand on his arm and nearly whirled and threw his fist without looking, shame and fear riding him hard now. It was only Paul, though, tugging him away from the group.

“Arlen, you best ease up.”

“Be damned if I will. I’m telling you-”

“I understand what you’re telling us, but it just doesn’t make sense. Could be you got a touch of fever, or-”

Arlen reached out and grabbed him by his shirt collar. Paul’s eyes went wide, but he didn’t reach for Arlen’s hand, didn’t move at all as Arlen spoke to him in a low, harsh voice.

“You had smoke in your eyes, boy. I don’t give a damn if you couldn’t see it or if none of them could, it was there, and it’s the sign of your death. You known me for a time now, and you ask yourself, how often has Arlen Wagner spoken foolish words to me? How often has he seemed addled? You ask yourself that, and then you ask yourself if you want to die tonight.”

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… there’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.”

3

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.

“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.

“Hello.”

“I see two men with bags walking down this road at this hour, I figure they’re either lost beyond hope or headed to Pearl’s.”

“Pearl’s the name of a roadhouse farther up this highway?”

“Not but a mile ahead.”

“That’s good to hear,” Arlen said. “Thanks. We’ll carry on now.”

“Why walk that last mile when you can ride?”

Arlen didn’t much want that, but Paul stepped up close and said, “Yeah, why walk when we can ride? This is an Auburn.”

“The kid knows sense when he hears it,” the man with the shadowed face said, and then he slapped the side of the driver’s door. “And he knows cars-this is indeed an Auburn, and it moves like you won’t believe. Climb on in.”

So they climbed in. The car was clean and new, and Paul was clearly impressed, running his palm over the seat and looking around with appreciation.

“Say, this is nice. The twelve cylinder, isn’t it?”

“It is. Fastest damn car I’ve ever held the wheel of.” To demonstrate, he accelerated-hard. The car’s engine gave a throaty howl and they lunged forward. Paul gave a chuckle and the driver grinned. Tall guy, lean, with big knobby hands wrapped around the steering wheel.

“What’s your name, friend?” Arlen said.

“Sorenson. Walt Sorenson.” He tucked the cigarette back into his mouth and reached a hand out. Arlen clasped it, and then Paul, offering their own names.

“Wouldn’t ordinarily so much as slow for any poor soul walking on this road at night,” Sorenson said. “I’m in no hurry to have a knife stuck in my back.”

Arlen released his hand from the knife in his pocket.

“Bad area?” he said.

“Isn’t everyplace after the sun goes down? Can’t trust the world anymore, you know? Was a time strangers helped strangers. That time’s gone. Too many people out to do harm, is my point. It’s hard to pick good from bad, and takes too much energy trying. But then I see you two, with bags in your hands, and I say, Walt, you’d be a bastard if you drove on by. Where are you headed?”

Arlen kept quiet while Paul explained that they were CCC and had gotten off the train en route to a camp in the Keys.

“Why’d you leave the train?”

“Arlen wanted to get off,” Paul said uncertainly. “He had a bad feeling.”

“A bad feeling?”

“Let’s not worry over it,” Arlen said curtly. Lights glowed ahead of them then, a two-story building with a wide front porch coming into view. When Sorenson came thundering off the road and jerked the Auburn to a stop, Arlen could hear music from inside, somebody plucking at a guitar.

“Pearl’s,” Sorenson said, and then the conversation was done, and Arlen was grateful for that.

The only connection Arlen could see between Pearl and her name was that she was round. Plenty round. Looked to go every bit of three hundred pounds, in fact, and to call her an ugly woman would be an offense to the word-woman or ugly. She was in the midst of a profane shouting match. The argument sounded harsh but didn’t seem to stir much true heat from anyone in the bar, including the participants. She cut it off fast when Walt Sorenson flagged her down and told her that the gentlemen with him would need a room for the night.

Arlen got some dollars out, and Paul started to reach in his own pocket but Arlen waved him off. He wasn’t sure how much money Paul had on him, but it couldn’t be much; the juniors in the CCC were required to send twenty-five of the thirty dollars they made each month directly home to help their parents. Pearl wouldn’t even accept Arlen’s money, though.

“Friend of Walt’s,” she said.

“Lady, we just met him ten minutes ago. Nobody owes us anything.”

“Friend of Walt’s,” she repeated.

Paul was gawking around the bar. It was a rough-looking crowd. One man wore a long knife in a sheath at his belt, and another had a raw red gash down the length of one finger, the sort of thing that could be left behind by a tooth. It wasn’t an old injury. At a table just inside the door, a man with a cigar pinched in the corner of his mouth was talking to a woman in a green dress that was cut so low the tops of her large white breasts were exposed completely. She had red hair and bored eyes.

Pearl led them up a set of stairs so narrow that she had to turn sideways to wedge her way along. She jerked open the first door they came to, then lit an oil lamp and waved her fat hand out over the two cots.

“Privy’s outdoors,” she said. “Wasn’t the Astor family that built this, you might have noticed.”

“It’ll do fine,” Arlen said.

She clomped back out the door and down the hall, and they could hear her let out a grunt as she started down the stairs. Paul caught Arlen’s eye and grinned.

“Don’t be getting any ideas,” Arlen said. “She’s too old for you.”

“Oh, go on.”

“I’m going downstairs to buy that fellow a drink. Thank him for the ride. You get some shut-eye.”

Paul nodded at the wall and said, “Hear that? It’s raining.”

Yes, it was. Coming down soft but steady, would’ve soaked them to the bone if they’d still been out walking on the dark highway.

“Good thing we caught that ride,” Paul said.

“Sure.” Arlen pulled his bag up onto his bed and sorted through it until he found his canteen, unscrewed the cap, and shook the contents down, tugged a few bills out. He had $367 in it, savings accrued over the past twenty months. No fortune, but in this driven-to-its-knees economy, where men bartered heirlooms for bread, it felt close.

Outside, the rain gathered intensity.

Yes, Arlen thought, it was a good thing we caught that ride.

The bar was dim and dusty, with a crowd of men Arlen could smell easier than he could see bunched at one end, keeping conversation with Pearl. The guitar player had given up for the night, but the redheaded woman in the green dress was still at the table with her cigar-smoking companion, and Walt Sorenson sat alone at the far end of the bar, counting out small white balls with black numbers and placing them into a burlap bag. Arlen dropped onto a stool beside him and said, “Mind telling me what you’re doing?”

Sorenson smiled. “You ever heard of bolita?”

“I have not,” Arlen said. The woman in the green dress stood up and walked to the bar, her breasts wriggling like something come alive. Her hips matched the act, but the eyes stayed empty. She disappeared up the stairs, never casting a look back at the man with the cigar who followed her.

“Bolita,” Sorenson said, “is a game of wagering. You should put in a dime, Mr… what’s your name? Wagner, was it?”

“Arlen Wagner, yes.”

“Well, Arlen Wagner, I’ve developed what some might call an unusual ability-I can feel luck in the air. I mean, just taste it, like when you walk into a room where something good’s been on the stove. And I’m telling you, sir, that luck rides with you tonight. There’s no question about it. Luck rides with you.”

Arlen thought of the station platform again, all those men with bone faces and bone hands climbing back onto the train. His mouth was dry.

“All right,” he said. “Sure. I’ll put in a dime.”

“There you go. Now, pick yourself a number. One through one hundred.”

He waited with a wolf’s grin.

“One,” Arlen said. “As in, how many times I’ll try this game.”

“Very nice, very nice.” Sorenson chuckled and sorted through the balls until he found the number one. He held it up so Arlen could inspect it, then leaned it against his whiskey glass, which was now mostly ice. “I’ll rest it right there so you can keep an eye on it.”

“I’m going to expect such a game is illegal in this state,” Arlen said.

“A good many of the best things are.” Sorenson spent some time studying his betting sheet, cleared his throat, and called, “All right, boys, gather round, the losing is about to begin for most, and the winning for but a single soul.”

He scooped the balls off the bar and into the bag. By now the crowd had gathered around Sorenson, and he wrapped the top of the bag until the balls were hidden from view, then gave it a ferocious shake.

“Here,” he said. “Someone else take a try.”

A man with skeptical eyes stepped forward and took the bag. He shook it for a long time. Sorenson took the bag back, opened the neck, and slid his right hand inside. He closed his eyes and let out a strange humming sound. This persisted for a moment as he felt around the inside, and then he snapped open one eye and told the crowd, “I’ve got to tune into the winner, you know. It’s not so simple as just pulling one out. There’s one man here who deserves to win tonight, one whose destiny is victory, and I must be sure that I hear his selection calling my name.”

“You’re so full of shit,” one onlooker said, “I’m surprised it don’t come out your ears.”

Sorenson smiled, then snapped his hand out of the bag, his fist closed. “Gentlemen, I give you our winner.”

He unfolded his hand and twisted the ball so the number was visible: 1.

“And who had number one?”

Arlen lifted his hand, and a few of the men grumbled.

“He come in here with you,” the one who’d shaken the bag said. “It’s a damn swindle you’re running.”

“Ah, but you’re wrong,” Sorenson said, unbothered. “I’ve not met this man till this evening, and he’ll tell you the same. But if that’s how you feel, then I suggest another round, only this time our current winner must sit out.”

There was no interest in further wagering.

“Hard to believe it here,” Sorenson told Arlen, “but there are places where this little game is treated with respect. I’ve known men who became millionaires off this little game.”

“Running it,” Arlen said, “not playing it. And thanks for cheating me into the profit.”

“Cheating?”

Arlen nodded at the glass of melting ice near Sorenson’s hand. “You left the ball up there long enough to hold the cold. Then you could pick it out of the rest. It’s a neat trick, but it may get your arm broken with the wrong crowd.”

Sorenson gave a low chuckle. “You’ve got a sharp eye, Mr. Wagner.”

Arlen lifted his hand and got Pearl’s attention, asked for two whiskeys. When she’d shuffled off again, he said, “So is this your business, Sorenson? A traveling entertainment, that’s what you are?”

“Oh, no. This little game is nothing more than a pastime.”

“So what is it that you do?”

Sorenson smiled as Pearl set their drinks on the bar. “You’re an inquisitive man. What I do has evolved a bit, but these days I’m an accounts manager.”

“Accounts manager?”

“That’s right, sir. I check in on clients all over the hellish backwoods of this forsaken Florida countryside. And once in a while, I get to the coast to do the same. I’ll assure you, the ladies are of a finer breed on the coast.” He nodded at Pearl’s enormous rear end. “Ample evidence, you might say.”

“Quick with a pun, Sorenson. Mighty quick.”

“Quick with so many things.”

He laughed at that, so Arlen laughed, too. Arlen’s whiskey glass was empty, and Pearl had disappeared, so he slipped his flask out and poured his own. The flask was nearing empty now itself. Sorenson watched him and gave a soft sigh.

“It hasn’t been so long since such an act was illegal.”

“You don’t appear to be a teetotaler, yet you say that with some sorrow.”

“Sorrow for what’s been lost, Mr. Wagner.”

“And what was lost? Purity?” Arlen said with a snort.

“Purity, no. What was lost when Roosevelt kicked Prohibition in the ass was a business environment the sort of which we may never see again.”

“Ah,” Arlen said. “A bootlegger. That’s what you are.”

“Now? No, Mr. Wagner. You can’t bootleg something that’s openly bought and traded. So a new commodity must be found and…” He shrugged. “I just miss the simplicity of booze. But let’s talk about you for a change. You and the young man departed a train in the middle of the night and lit out down an abandoned highway in an unfamiliar place. Due to a bad feeling, the boy said. It strikes me as a most exceptional decision.”

“Paul said all that needed to be said. I had a bad feeling. End of story.”

“I like it. Sounds ominous. A feeling of what? Impending doom?”

“I didn’t see a black cat walking under a ladder or any such foolish shit,” Arlen said, feeling anger rise, Sorenson watching him with calm interest. “If you had any idea…”

He let it die, and Sorenson said gently, “What did you see?”

Arlen shook his head. “Let’s leave it at a bad feeling.”

“And so we will. Make no mistake, Mr. Wagner, I’m a man who appreciates the art of the premonition.”

“Mine are a little different than yours. Less manufactured.”

“Than mine, sure. I’ve known others, though… there’s a village not far from here in which every resident claims to be a medium. The place is called Cassadaga. Anytime I pass close to the area, I pay a visit. A friend introduced me to a fortune-teller there. She’s remarkable.”

“What does she tell you? Winning numbers for your games?”

“Yesterday, she told me there was death in the rain.”

“In the rain?”

“That’s what she said. I asked her if it was my own death, and she said it was not. Then she told me, as she has before, that I worry too much about death. All that dies, she said, is the body. That’s all. And she believes, quite firmly, that she can continue to communicate with those whose bodies are no more. Do you believe in such a thing?”

“Absolutely not,” Arlen said, thinking, I’d better not. Because if I do, then I’ve got something to answer for.

“You say that with conviction,” Sorenson said. “Yet you abandoned a train you needed to be on due to your own unusual perception.”

“There’s a world of difference there,” Arlen said.

Sorenson had set his hat down on the bar and shed his jacket, revealing a sweat-stained white shirt and suspenders.

“The lad who travels with you was not in favor of the change of plans. He did not support the… bad feeling.”

“He supported it enough,” Arlen said. “He got off the train.”

“Hell, man, you’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

Arlen turned to face him, the whiskey wrapping its arms around him now in such a way that he didn’t fear the man’s mocking.

“You think your fortune-teller can sense death coming?” he said. “Well, brother, I can see it. Tell you something else-I ain’t ever wrong. Ever.”

Sorenson gazed at him without reaction. Arlen held the stare for a time and then turned away, at which point Sorenson finally spoke.

“I am most taken with games of chance and those who purport themselves as capable of beating them. And life, Mr. Wagner? That’s the best game of chance in this world. You think you can beat it.”

“No,” Arlen said. “I do not think that.”

“Sure you do. We’ll see if you can. The fate of that train will tell the tale.”

“It may not be the train,” Arlen said, his voice starting to thicken with drink. “Could be something will happen that has nothing to do with the train. But the Keys aren’t safe, damn it, and I want to keep that kid from going.”

“You say that as if you suspect it will be difficult.”

“He’s determined. I’d like to get to Hillsborough County, to the CCC camp there. The boy doesn’t belong down in the Keys.”

“I see.” Sorenson twirled his glass on the bar, watching the warm amber liquid devour his ice. Arlen had a passing notion that he was surprised such a bar even had ice; perhaps this was what Sorenson provided in these days of open liquor trade. “Well, Wagner, what I said during our game holds true-luck rides with you tonight. Not only did you win the game, not only did you escape the train to the Keys, not only did you hitch with me just in time to avoid the rain, but you’ve found a ride to Hillsborough County. I’ll make a few stops along the way, but by sundown I’ll be within twenty miles. Can’t pass on a free ride.”

“Generous offer, but all the same, I think we’ll stick to the trains.”

“You wound me,” Sorenson said. “Think logically-it’s a five-mile hike back to the station and then you’ll have to piece together a day of travel at considerable expense. You will also have to convince the lad to change his plans. He likes that car, Mr. Wagner. I imagine he’d like to drive it.”

Arlen looked up at him and frowned. “Why so interested?” he said. “What’s it to you, Sorenson?”

“There are plenty of reasons. For one, I find you a most fascinating man, you of the bad feelings, you, the seer of death. For another, I could use the company. These highways get lonesome, Mr. Wagner. And a third reason? My fortune-teller in Cassadaga, the one who warned me of death in the rain? Her guidance for me on this visit was quite limited-all she said was that I needed to be aware of travelers in need.”

“You expect me to believe that, you’re crazy.”

“On the contrary,” Sorenson said, “if you’re anything close to the man I suspect you are, I know that you will believe it. Because it’s the truth.”

Arlen held his eyes for a time, then looked away without speaking.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll ride with you tomorrow.”

5

HE DID NOT SLEEP WELL. In the room beside them, an ancient bed creaked a sad, hollow rhythm beneath first one man’s grunting efforts and then another’s. The redheaded woman who had once worn a green dress did not make a sound. Arlen lay in the dark and listened and wondered if Paul was awake. If he was, he didn’t speak. By three Arlen’s flask was empty and then so was the room beside them, the door swung shut one final time as the voices downstairs fell silent.

He dozed off sometime around four but slept in uneasy fits, jerking awake often to the sound of an unrelenting rain. It was sweltering in the constricted, windowless room, and Arlen’s sweat soaked into the sheets as the night carried on and finally broke to dawn.

“Get on your feet,” Arlen said, giving Paul a shake. “We’ve got a ride. Sorenson’s going to take us south.”

“To the Keys?”

“He isn’t going that far. All I know is he’s going south, and we can ride with him in that fancy car you liked so much. Beats waiting all day for a train.”

Arlen felt a twinge at his own words. It wasn’t a bald lie-Hillsborough County was indeed south, but it was also west, when the train lines that would carry them to the Keys were on the state’s eastern shore.

They drove away in a gray, windy dawn, the Auburn gleaming as if freshly washed after the night of steady rain.

“Shouldn’t take but five or six hours,” Sorenson said. “I’ve a few stops to make along the way, but they’ll be swift enough. I appreciate you joining me on this short sojourn.”

Arlen winced, and Sorenson noted it. “What?” he said.

“Nothing,” Arlen muttered. “You just… it reminded me of something my father used to say.”

They’re only dead to people like you, Arlen. Truth is they’re carrying on, bound to a place where you can’t yet follow. This life is but a sojourn.

“A story you’d like to share?” Sorenson said.

“No,” Arlen said.

Their stops were roadhouses similar to Pearl’s. At each of them, a large black case with two metal locks entered and exited the establishment with Sorenson. The stops were swift indeed, short disruptions as they drove through a green, saturated land. The ditches on either side of the road were swollen with muddy water. Arlen’s father used to caution about dreams of muddy water, claiming they warned of impending trouble. Arlen wondered if his father had such a dream toward the end, or if dreams had failed him.

They pushed west as the heat continued to build and with it the thickness of the air. Sorenson had the windows cranked down on the Auburn, and out on the back roads he opened the engine up and let the big car run, Paul grinning as the speedometer hit seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred. Sorenson let it fall off then but kept it closer to ninety than eighty for most of an hour. Their next stop was at a place called the Swamp. Unlike the previous roadhouses, this one seemed to be booming-the building was outfitted with electric lamps and glossy wood on the front patio, and cars filled the parking area already, new Plymouths and Chryslers and one Essex Terraplane that turned Paul’s head.

“That one would blow your doors off, Mr. Sorenson,” he said.

“You say.”

“Oh, it’s a fact.”

“Busy place,” Arlen said. “And one with some money.”

“Casino inside,” Sorenson said. “They do it right, too.”

“Let’s have a look,” Paul said, but Arlen shook his head.

“We’ll wait on him.”

“Oh, it can’t hurt to wander around in there a bit, Arlen.”

“We’ll wait.”

They leaned against the Auburn and watched people come and go through the doors, women in dresses and heels, men in suits with drinks in their hands. I guess we drove out of the Depression, Arlen thought. Be back in it another mile down the road, but somehow it doesn’t exist right here. Must be nice.

“This is what Key West is supposed to be like,” Paul said. “Saloons all over the place, people having a good time just like here. That writer’s down there, Hemingway, and I saw a picture of Dizzy Dean, taken on his vacation. All sorts of famous people pass through. Why, we could have a drink with them.”

Arlen regarded him with surprise. He wouldn’t have imagined a kid like Paul would give the first damn about saloons and Dizzy Dean. In his mind, the only thing the boy had been after in the Keys was work on the bridge. Well, that had no doubt been a naive, idealized notion. Paul was nineteen, probably wanted himself a taste of many things. All this time Arlen had seen the kid eyeing his flask, he’d assumed Paul was antiliquor. He was probably just curious.

When Sorenson returned, Arlen said, “Say, weren’t you going to let the kid drive?”

“He probably won’t want to if it isn’t that Terraplane he’s so sweet on.”

“I’ll drive,” Paul said, and Sorenson grinned.

The funny thing was, once he got behind the wheel, he was scared to let the big motor run. Wouldn’t take it beyond forty until Sorenson said, “Boy, if I’d wanted my mother to drive, I’d have brought her along.” Then the kid finally laid into it, got them as high as sixty. Arlen wondered when Paul had last driven a car. Hell, if he’d ever driven a car. He handled it well, though, seemed comfortable behind the wheel even if hesitant of the engine’s power.

“Mr. Sorenson?” Paul said after they’d gone about ten miles. “I thought we were going to head south today. We’re driving due west.”

Sorenson flicked his eyes over to Arlen, then looked back and said, “Didn’t know I was required to stick to a specific compass point when I agreed to give y’all a ride.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, I was just wondering-”

“We’ll be southbound shortly. Only one stop left. And it’s on the beach.”

“The beach? Now that’s better. I’ve always wanted to see the ocean.”

Arlen frowned. “Thought you grew up just south of New York.”

“That’s right.”

“Hell, the ocean can’t be but an hour from there at most.”

“It’s not,” Paul said, and there was something different in his voice, an edge Arlen had never imagined him capable of. “I just never saw it, okay?”

“Okay,” Arlen said. It struck him then how little he knew about the kid. His name, his age, his home. He knew those things and the undeniable fact that he was the closest thing to a mechanical genius Arlen had ever encountered.

Forty-five minutes later they caught a flash of blue, the expanse of the Gulf of Mexico ahead, and for the first time Paul seemed unsteady with the car, drifting across the center line for a blink before he brought it back. Sorenson told Paul that if he wanted to gawk at the water, he’d best give up the wheel.

It did look pretty. The sun had broken through-though there were dark clouds in the mirrors and more massing to the north-and the breakers glittered. There wasn’t a boat in sight, the water an unbroken vastness of prehistoric power.

“Wow,” Paul said. And then, softer, “That is something. It really is.”

The road curled away from the coast again. There wasn’t much development out here, wasn’t much at all except for the road, in fact. Once, they crossed a set of train tracks-Paul going over the rails so gingerly Arlen thought he might get out and try to carry the Auburn across-but then those were gone and nothing showed ahead. Eventually they came to a four-way stop, pavement continuing south, dirt roads to the east and west, and Sorenson told Paul to turn right, west, back toward the Gulf.

They went maybe a mile down this mud track before the trees parted and the road went to something sandier, shells cracking beneath the tires. A moment later the water showed itself, and in front of the shore was a clapboard structure of white that had long since turned to gray. It was a rectangle with a smaller raised upper level, steep roofs all around. At the top of the second story was a small deck with fence rails surrounding it. A widow’s walk. A porch ran the length of the house, and an old wooden sign swung in the wind above: The Cypress House.

“Tell you what,” Sorenson said, “let’s all go in here.”

Paul passed him the keys and popped open the door, eager to step out and gawk at the sea. Arlen started out, too, but Sorenson put a hand on his arm.

“You might want to bring the bags in.”

Arlen tilted his head. “Why?” They’d never been so much as invited in at any previous stop, and now Sorenson wanted the bags out of his car, too?

“This area,” Sorenson said, and let the words hang.

Arlen looked around in every direction, saw nothing but the shore ahead and tangled trees and undergrowth behind.

“Looks peaceful to me,” he said.

“Mr. Wagner,” Sorenson said, and there was a bite in his words, “you ever been here before?”

“I’ve not.”

Sorenson nodded. “Then perhaps you should reconsider my advice.”

Arlen held his eyes for a moment and then turned without a word and grabbed the first bag and hauled it out with him. He tugged them all free from the Auburn and then hailed Paul to help carry them in, and while he worked he pretended not to notice that Sorenson had retrieved a small automatic from beneath the driver’s seat and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

6

WHATEVER ILL FEELINGS Sorenson had about the Cypress House were not justified by their entrance into its humid, shadowed interior. They were standing in the middle of a long, narrow room without a soul inside. There was a fireplace on their left and a bar on their right. Behind the bar, liquor was displayed on thick wooden shelves, and atop the shelves was a massive brass-ringed and glass-faced mantelpiece clock that went about two feet in diameter and was clearly broken-according to the hands it was noon. Or midnight.

Between the bar and the fireplace were scattered a handful of tables, and the wall opposite them was composed of wide windows that looked out onto another porch and beyond that the ocean.

“Hello!” Sorenson bellowed once they’d stepped inside. Arlen set his bags down beside the door, and Paul followed suit. A minute after Sorenson’s cry, they heard footsteps and then a figure rounded the corner from some unseen room Arlen took to be the kitchen and faced them across the bar.

It was a woman. Her silhouette stood out starkly against the light from the beach, but the front of her was lost to darkness.

“Walter,” she said, in a voice that seemed to come from behind a gate with many locks.

“Becky, baby, how are ya?” Sorenson approached the bar with his big black case in his hand, and Arlen and Paul followed a few paces behind.

“Grand,” the woman said in a tone that implied just the opposite. As they drew close enough to see her, Arlen felt the boy draw up taller at his side and understood the reason-she was a looker. She wore a simple white dress that had been washed many times, but beneath it the taut lines of her body curved clear and firm. Her face was sharp-featured and smooth, framed by honey-colored hair, and she regarded them with cool blue eyes.

“Who are your companions?” she said.

“Road-weary travelers, and parched,” Sorenson said. His standard grandiose demeanor seemed to have risen a notch.

“I see.”

“Might I have a pair of beers and one Coca-Cola?”

She didn’t answer, just turned and slipped into the kitchen and then returned with two beers and a bottle of Coca-Cola.

“Thank you,” Paul said, and even in the shadowed room Arlen could see red rise in the boy’s cheeks. She was that kind of beautiful. The crippling kind. Arlen himself said not a word, just took a seat at the bar. She gave him no more than a flick of the eyes before returning her focus to Sorenson.

“You need to finish your beer, or can we handle our business?”

“No need to rush,” he said, and was met with a frown that suggested she saw plenty of need.

“Well, when you’re ready, I’ll be in the back,” she said. Arlen had the sense that she was unhappy Sorenson had brought strangers along.

“Aw, stay and talk a bit. I’ve neglected to make introductions. This here is Arlen Wagner, and his young companion is Paul Brickhill. They’re CCC men.”

“How lovely,” she said in the same flat voice.

“And this,” Sorenson said, “is beautiful Becky Cady, the pride of Corridor County.”

“Rebecca,” she said.

“Ah, you’re Becky to me.”

“But not to me,” she said. “Walter, I’ll be in the back.”

She turned and went through a swinging door into the kitchen, and then it was just the three of them in the dim bar.

“Another dry county?” Arlen said.

Sorenson shook his head.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I told you last night, Mr. Wagner, business isn’t about booze these days.”

Sorenson took a drink of his beer, and now Arlen could see that sweat was running down his face in thick rivulets, more sweat than the heat deserved. He looked over his shoulder at the door, had another drink, and then looked again.

“You expecting company?” Arlen said.

“Huh? Um, no.”

Paul said, “Why’s it called Corridor County?”

“The waterways,” Sorenson answered. “There are inlets and estuaries all over the shore here, and they wind around and join the river about ten miles inland. It’s a crazy tangled mess, though, and every storm that blows through shifts things around and puts up sandbars where there didn’t used to be any. Nobody but a handful of locals can navigate the whole mess worth a shit.”

He got to his feet. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.”

He picked up the heavy black case and walked around the back of the bar and through the swinging door where Rebecca Cady had gone. Arlen looked at Paul, saw the question in the boy’s eyes, and shrugged.

“Go look at your ocean,” he said, hoping to distract the kid until Sorenson came back out and they could get on the road.

Paul got to his feet and walked over to the windows, gazed out at the sea, waves rolling in with their tops flattened by a freshening wind, and then went out on the porch. After a moment Arlen picked up his beer and followed. The smell of the sea rode toward them in warm, wet gusts, and seagulls screamed and circled the beach. South, there was nothing but sand and short dunes lined with clusters of grass, but to the north the shore seemed to curve inland and thickets of palms and strange green plants that looked like overgrown ferns traced what Arlen assumed was one of the inlets Sorenson had mentioned. He could see the roof of another structure through the trees. Some sort of boathouse, probably, sheltered from the pounding waves of the open water.

Paul stepped off the porch and walked down to the beach. He slid his shoes off and rolled his pants up to his knees. Arlen leaned on the weathered railing and felt a smile slide across his face as he watched the kid pick his way over the sand and down into the water, wade in until the waves broke over his knees and soaked his trousers. Paul seemed to have forgotten anyone else existed, just stood in the water, staring out at the line where sea met sky.

The wind was blowing steadily now, and that was probably why Arlen didn’t hear the car. As it was, he caught a lucky angle. He’d turned back to glance in the bar, checking to see if Sorenson had reappeared, and saw a flash of movement through the windows at the opposite end of the building. It was gone then, and he took a few steps to the side and still couldn’t see anything. After a glance back at Paul to make sure he was still standing in the surf, Arlen set his beer down on the rail and walked off the porch and around the side of the building. There, parked at the top of the sloping track that led down to the Cypress House, a black Plymouth sedan had pulled in beside the trees. The sun was shining off the glass and Arlen couldn’t see anyone inside, but the car hadn’t driven itself here.

He pulled back, leaning against the wall to get himself out of sight. Felt foolish doing it, but all the same he didn’t want to be seen staring. Sorenson had been acting damn strange since the moment they’d arrived, and now someone had parked up at the top of that hill and stayed in the car as if waiting on something. It didn’t feel right.

Paul was walking along the shore now, shin-deep in the water, his eyes still on the sea. Arlen went quietly back up the porch steps and then stepped inside the bar, taking care to move sideways, keeping out of view of the front windows.

“Hey, Sorenson,” he called, voice soft.

Nobody answered. The place was empty.

“Damn it,” he muttered, and then went around the bar and rapped his knuckles on the swinging door. “Sorenson!”

“Hang on, Wagner.”

There was something in the man’s voice Arlen hadn’t heard before, and it gave him pause. For a few seconds he stood there on the other side of the swinging door, and then he said the hell with it and pushed through and stepped into the tiny kitchen. There was a grill and a stove on one side and a rack of shelves on the other and nobody in sight. Another door stood opposite, closed. He crossed to it and knocked again.

“Damn it, I said give us a min-”

“I think somebody’s looking your car over,” he said. “Or maybe Miss Cady’s used to guests who park at the top of the hill and don’t come inside.”

There was a long silence, and then the door swung open and Sorenson stood before him with the black case wrapped under his arm. All the good humor and genteel demeanor had left his face.

“Where?” he said.

“Just where I said-top of the hill, above where you parked.”

Sorenson shoved past him and walked through the swinging door. He kept the case wrapped under his left arm, pressed against his side, but let his right hand drift under his jacket. Arlen paused just long enough to look back into the room, a cramped little office where Rebecca Cady stood with her hands folded in front of her and a blank look on her face, and then he followed. When he got out to the barroom, Sorenson was standing with the front door open, looking out.

“There’s nobody there.”

“Was a minute ago. Black Plymouth.”

Sorenson reflected on that for a moment, then manufactured an uneasy grin and said, “Good thing I had you bring your bags in, see? This area is fraught with lazy crackers who’ll steal anything they can lift.”

Lazy crackers don’t drive new Plymouths, Arlen thought.

“Where’s the kid?” Sorenson asked.

“Down on the beach.”

He nodded as if that pleased him, then said, “Why don’t you bring him in? I’m going to drive the car down a little closer in case our visitor returns, and then we’ll have another drink and head south.”

“I don’t need another drink. Let’s just head.”

“Not quite yet,” Sorenson said, and then he stepped outside and let the thick wooden door bang shut behind him.

Arlen swore under his breath, wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, and then went onto the porch and hollered for Paul. The kid was nearly out of sight now, well down the beach, but he turned and lifted a hand and started back. Arlen picked his beer up off the rail and drank the rest of it while the boy returned and pulled on his socks and shoes. He jogged up to the porch.

“We leaving already?”

“Soon as we can,” Arlen said. “Sorenson wants to linger, but I’m in favor of pushing on and-”

On the other side of the building, something exploded. A bang and a roar that came so fast they were just a heartbeat from simultaneous, and for a moment the beach disappeared in front of Arlen’s eyes and he saw instead the dark forests of Belleau Wood, snarls of barbwire guarding the bases of the trees, corpses draped over them, grenades hurtling through the air. Then he blinked and found himself staring at Paul Brickhill, whose mouth hung agape.

“What was-”

Arlen ignored him, turned and ran back through the bar to the front door, opened it and then took a half step back and whispered, “Son of a bitch, Sorenson.”

The Auburn was on fire. All of the glass had been blown out, and twisted, burning pieces of the seats lay on the hood. As Arlen watched, there was another explosion, flames shooting out of the engine compartment and filling the air with black smoke, and the thought of running back to the bar for a bucket of water died swiftly in his mind. He let the door swing shut and walked out onto the sandy soil and approached the Auburn with an arm held high to shield his face.

He was still fifteen feet from the car when he saw the body in the driver’s seat. Black flesh peeling from white bone, hair curling with smoke above a suit jacket that lay across the body in smoldering strips. On the passenger seat beside the corpse, a black case with silver latches melted and dripped onto the floorboards.

Arlen turned and looked back at the bar and saw Rebecca Cady watching from the doorway.

“You got a phone?” he said.

“No.”

“No?”

She shook her head. She was staring past him at the car, and her hand was tight on the door frame.

“Who does?”

She made a distracted gesture up the road and didn’t answer.

“Well, let’s go call the police,” he said. His voice was so steady it seemed to come from another place, and he knew that it did. It came from over an ocean and within a field of wheat dotted with poppies red as roses, red as blood.

“Shouldn’t we get some water or-”

“It’s past the time for water.”

She wet her lips and glanced backward, where Paul stood in the middle of the barroom, peering out, and said, “You two go on down the road and call for help, and I’ll-”

“No,” Arlen said. “We’re all going together.”

7

REBECCA CADY HAD A TRUCK with a small cab and a bed surrounded by homemade fence rails. Arlen told Paul to climb in the bed and then he got into the passenger seat as the woman started up the truck without saying a word. She had her lips pressed in a grim line and never glanced at the still-smoldering Auburn as she drove past. At the top of the hill, Arlen saw a place where the beach grass was matted down and tire tracks showed in the sand.

“Who around here drives a black Plymouth?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Rebecca Cady’s tone was as flat now as it had been during their introductions in the bar. If the idea of a man being incinerated just outside her place of business was a concern, it was hard to tell.

“Well, you might want to be thinking on it,” he said. “I suspect the sheriff is going to have plenty of questions, and that’s only going to be one of them. He’ll also want to know what Sorenson was doing at your place to begin with.”

She was silent. The breeze blew in and fanned her hair back, showing a slender, exquisite neck.

“You own the place?” Arlen asked.

“That’s right.”

“People die out there very often?”

“No.”

“Well, you sure don’t look rattled. And again, if I’m the sheriff, I’m going to be-”

“You’re not the sheriff,” she said, “and if I could offer any advice, it would be that you let me talk to him alone and you two go on your way.”

“Go on our way? That man is dead and-”

“Dead he will stay,” she said. “Whether you talk with the sheriff or not.”

“Hell, no. There’s not a chance, lady. I’ll be talking to the law before I head out of this place.”

He watched her for a long time, but she never looked over at him. They’d left the dirt road for the paved now, but there wasn’t another vehicle in sight. It was isolated country, forested once you got away from the coast. They’d gone at least two miles down the paved stretch of road before a gap showed in the trees and a single gas pump appeared in a square of dusty earth. Rebecca Cady slowed the truck, and then they were past the trees and Arlen could see a service station set well back from the gas pump. There was a two-bay garage and a general store, with crates of oranges stacked beside the front door. Rebecca Cady pulled the truck in next to a delivery van and shut the engine off. Only then did she turn and look at Arlen.

“I’ll go in now and call the sheriff, since that’s what you want me to do.”

“You’re damned right it’s what I want you to do. A man was killed!”

“Yes,” she said. “Welcome to Corridor County, Mr. Wagner.”

The sheriff told her to return to the Cypress House, and he was waiting on them when they arrived, standing beside the ruins of the Auburn while a young deputy with red hair poured pails of water onto the wreck. The flames were gone, but the metal steamed when the water touched it.

The sheriff had the look and charm of a cinder block-a shade over six feet but 250 at least, with gray hair and small, close-set brown eyes. His hands dangled at his sides beneath thick wrists and sunburned forearms. When they got out of the truck, he didn’t say a word, just watched the three of them approach as the deputy emptied another pail of water onto the car in a hiss of steam. The sheriff didn’t break the silence until they were standing at his side.

“Becky,” he said then, “what in the world happened to your guest?”

“His car blew up,” Rebecca Cady said. She was standing at Paul’s side, facing the sheriff with her arms squeezed tightly across her chest, as if she’d found a cold breeze hiding in the ninety-degree day.

“So it did,” the sheriff said. “So it did.”

Arlen was struck by the man’s voice. He’d expected the heavy southern drawl that seemed common in these parts, but the sheriff’s accent had a touch of the Upper Midwest in it, Chicago or Minnesota or Wisconsin.

“Who are you boys?” the sheriff said, acknowledging their existence for the first time.

Arlen told it. Said they were CCC, had missed a train heading down to the Keys and caught a ride with the dead man.

“You’d never seen him before? Strangers, you say?”

“That’s right. We’d just met him last evening, Mr… what was your name?”

“Tolliver,” he said after a pause and a darkening of the eyes that suggested he didn’t like Arlen treating the conversation as a two-way street, “but all you need to call me is Sheriff. Do you know Becky?”

“Just met her. Again, we’d come this way only because we hitched the ride. I’ve never set foot in this county before, and neither has Paul.”

Tolliver pursed his lips and looked at his deputy, a freckle-faced kid with a sour scowl. He stared at him for a long time, like he was musing on something, and then he said, “Burt, put them in handcuffs and get them in the car.”

Arlen said, “Whoa. Hold on, there. I just told you-”

Tolliver dipped one of his big hands to his belt and came out with a.45, held it loose, along his thigh.

“I know what you told me. I also know that Walt Sorenson, poor dead son of a bitch that he may be, was not the kind of man who took on riders he’d never met. So I’ll give you two a chance to work on adjusting your story until you come out with the truth. Take another try right now if you’d like. Why were you riding with Sorenson?”

For a moment there was only silence, a light salty breeze blowing in, and then Arlen said, “A fortune-teller told him to be aware of travelers in need.”

The sheriff nodded as if this were what he’d expected to hear. “It’ll go that way, will it?” he said, and then snapped his chin at the deputy. “Burt.”

The redheaded kid shook out a pair of handcuffs and advanced on Arlen. Paul Brickhill said, “Arlen, what… we didn’t… Arlen,” as the deputy grabbed on to Arlen’s wrist and twisted it, and the big sheriff stood with the gun in his hand and a dare in his eyes. Rebecca Cady squeezed her arms tighter and stared past them all, over the top of the demolished car and off to the horizon, where clouds hung low over the water. She stood that way until both Arlen and Paul were in handcuffs and in the back of the sheriff’s car.

8

PAUL TRIED TO TALK to Arlen when they were under way, but Tolliver said there’d be no conversation in the back unless someone wanted a skull-cracking. Arlen didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt cuffs close around his wrists, and he knew the drill by now-you’d eat some shit, wait till they tired of feeding it to you, and then they’d kick you loose.

They drove past the service station where they’d called for Tolliver originally and on down the road. A few miles south they arrived in a small town laid out on a square, buildings lining a total of four roads and lasting for two blocks in each direction. A few of the signs indicated the place was called High Town, which was intriguing considering it was as flat a place as Arlen had seen. There were cars parked on the street but also two horse carts in view. The modern world had touched this place, yes, but it had made limited headway so far.

The deputy parked in front of a single-story building with clapboard added on to an older stone section in the rear. They went up the steps and into the station, and Tolliver said, “Keep the boy out here,” and then led Arlen through a narrow hallway and out into a room where three small cells lined the back wall. He took a key from his belt and unfastened one of the doors and swung it open. Arlen went in without comment or objection.

“You walk around here like you been in a jail before,” Tolliver said, facing him with his legs spread wide, a hint of a grin on his face.

“I’ve seen ’em.”

“Prison, too?”

“Not a one. And I’ve never been charged with anything in my life except having a drink in my hand when it wasn’t legal to do so.”

“You say.”

“It’s the sort of thing can be checked on.”

Tolliver cracked his knuckles, slowly and deliberately, and then said, “You call yourself Wagner.”

“It’s my name. Check on that, too.”

“I believe it’s pronounced Vagner,” Tolliver said. “I believe I shot some men who may well have had the same name. I shot a lot of Germans in my day.”

“So did I,” Arlen said. “Probably more than you. And where I’m from, the name is Wagner.”

Actually, it hadn’t been. Arlen had pronounced it Vagner until his second day on the transport ship, when he determined it would be wise to alter that German sound, distancing him not only from the enemy but from his father. The latter felt like a more valuable gain than the former.

“Where might that be?” Tolliver said.

“All around,” Arlen answered. “I’ve done some drifting.”

Let the sheriff make his calls to Alabama, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, or any of the other places Arlen had spent time over the years. Let him make calls to everywhere except Fayette County, West Virginia. The only secrets Arlen had worth hiding had been left there many years ago. The first blood on Arlen Wagner’s hands hadn’t come in the war.

“You want to keep drifting,” Tolliver said, “you’ll need to be on the other side of these bars. And for that to happen, I’m going to need to know the truth.”

“Sheriff, you’ve already heard it.”

Tolliver shook his head, the smile showing clearer now, as if this were what he’d expected, and it pleased him. He opened the door of the cell and stepped out, then swung it shut and locked it.

“I’ll talk to the boy first. You think you’re a hard case. He doesn’t.”

“He’ll tell you what I will,” Arlen said, “because it’s all we can say. Let me tell you something else, Tolliver-you lay into the boy, I’ll see it dealt with. You’re the law here. You ain’t the law all over.”

“Nothing I enjoy more,” Tolliver said, “then a handcuffed man who offers threats. I’ll see you shortly.”

Arlen leaned back on the cot until his head rested against the stone wall, wishing for his flask. This journey had been a mistake from the first. You didn’t leave a good place to go to an unknown one. He’d let the kid talk him into it, and more than a year of comfort and steady work had lulled him, allowed him to think it was a fine time to move on, and the Keys a fine place to go. What he knew now was that from almost the moment they’d crossed the state line, trouble had swirled around them like an angry wind.

The sheriff wasn’t with Paul Brickhill for long-twenty minutes, maybe-and when he came back he wasn’t alone. There was a tall, broad-shouldered man in a suit and a white Panama hat at his side. He wore glasses that glittered under the overhead lights and turned his eyes into harsh white squares. Tolliver glanced at the man twice as they approached, and the look held a quality of deference. Tolliver was no longer in charge of the show.

The sheriff unlocked the cell and held the door so the new man could enter first. Then he stepped in behind him and banged the door shut.

“Arlen Wagner,” the sheriff said, pronouncing it with the V again. “This here is Solomon Wade. He’s the judge in Corridor County.”

“You going to charge us?” Arlen said.

Solomon Wade blinked at Arlen from behind the glasses. They didn’t seem to suit his face; he looked too harsh for them. He was young for a judge, but the youth didn’t suggest a lack of assurance. Rather, every step and glance bespoke a man who was used to having command.

“What brings you to Florida?” he said as if Arlen hadn’t spoken. His voice was thick with southern flavor, and soft, but still had a timbre that would hold men’s attention, and hold it fast.

“I expect the sheriff has told you,” Arlen said. “I came for work. We were bound for the Keys.”

“This isn’t the way to get there from Alabama.”

“We had a detour.”

“Bad time to head to the Keys,” Wade said. “Bad time.”

“Yeah?”

“Storm coming. It’s all they’re talking about on the radio. They’re going to have a hurricane down south, down Miami way.”

“A damned hurricane,” Tolliver said under his breath, and a frown creased his broad face. He seemed genuinely distressed.

“All due respect,” Arlen said, “but if we’re going to talk about the weather, I’d like to be on the other side of these bars.”

The sheriff looked at Solomon Wade and gave a rueful shake of his head, a What did I tell you? gesture.

“I’d likely imagine you would,” Wade drawled. “But that’s going to take some cooperation on your part.”

“I’ve been cooperating.”

“Al here disagrees,” Wade said. “He suspects you of dishonesty.”

“Al is wrong.”

“Al is not often wrong. In my experience he’s been a fine judge of character. And you, sir, will address him as Sheriff. I believe in a culture of respect in my jail. You don’t show much of it.”

“Everybody has an off day now and again,” Arlen said.

Solomon Wade looked at Tolliver but didn’t say anything. Tolliver ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. His shoulders were relaxed, his demeanor casual, as if they were all strangers on a train, pleasant but unfamiliar. He didn’t appear to do so much as tense a muscle before he swung one of those meaty hands and caught Arlen flush on the side of the head. It was more slap than punch, but it rang Arlen’s bell, knocked him sideways and put a flash of color in his eyes. He caught himself sliding off the cot, stood, and allowed a smile.

“Aw, hell,” Tolliver said, “you’re one of those kind. Enjoy being hit.”

“No, Sheriff, I’m not.”

“Just a cheerful son of a bitch, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

He expected another blow, and Tolliver seemed prepared to administer one, but then Solomon Wade raised a hand.

“The boy sticks to his tale,” he said. “And he’s too damn green to be a good liar. I’ve got an expectation that the part about you all coming down from Alabama will check out well enough. What will not check out is the notion that Walt Sorenson drove you for a full day out of the goodness of his black heart. I’d be willing to believe, maybe, that he gave you a ride a mile up the highway. But the story the boy tells? Of you riding with him all day and making stops along the way at establishments that are well known to me? That don’t carry water.”

“It’ll have to,” Arlen said, wondering why in the hell the county judge seemed to be heading up the investigation.

Solomon Wade said, “Al,” and at the one soft word, the sheriff put his right fist into Arlen’s belly. A snake of cold-to-warm pain rippled through Arlen, and his knees tried to buckle, but Tolliver kept him upright and smiled in his face.

“So we begin,” he said.

It went that way for an hour at least. Wade asked questions, and Arlen answered them, and when he couldn’t, Tolliver swung. He was ox strong and knew all the soft spots, and it wasn’t long before breathing was difficult and Arlen’s kidneys were coiled flames.

Mostly Wade wanted to know where they’d gone and what had been said. He showed no interest at all in the explosion that had taken Sorenson’s life. No mention was made of the Cypress House or of Rebecca Cady. No, just questions of what Sorenson had said and where he’d stopped and whether he’d had any money on his person. Arlen answered what he could, and he didn’t resist the blows. Tolliver had a gun on one side of his belt and a hickory billy club on the other and a deputy waiting outside. Giving him even a taste of the fight he wanted was going to work out poorly in the end, and so even as Arlen marked the weaknesses in the larger man’s approach, saw the openings and envisioned the bloody shattering of that broad nose, he kept his hands down and took what was offered.

Tolliver was a strong man but not a fit one. Before long the exertion of knocking Arlen’s ass around the hot, clammy room had taken its toll, and he was breathing damn near as hard as Arlen and mopping sweat from his face and neck.

Wade reached up and adjusted his glasses. “Doesn’t seem to have been very productive.”

“He’s a stubborn son of a bitch, I’ll give you that,” Tolliver said.

“Could be he’s telling the truth.”

“You think?”

Wade shook his head.

“That’s where I landed, too,” Tolliver said. “Shall I keep at it?”

“No.” Wade came off the bars and looked down at Arlen as if he were studying a carcass. “We’ll let him sleep, let him get used to the way that cot feels and stare at those bars and begin asking himself if it’s worth it. We’ll let him remember that if we’re so inclined, it can be arranged for him to stay here a powerful long time.”

He tilted his head at the cell door, and Tolliver opened it and Wade stepped out, then turned and looked back at Arlen with cold eyes.

“On behalf of the good people of Corridor County, we’d like to thank you for being such a helpful witness, Mr. Wagner.”

Arlen dragged in some of the dusty air and didn’t answer. Tolliver locked the cell and followed Wade out the door. For a long time after they were gone, Arlen stayed down on the floor, sweat dripping into his eyes and salting the corners of his mouth. Outside, the wind gusted hard against the stone wall and found it solid. Still it pushed, though, undeterred, driving on as night settled and the slanted light in the empty jail edged toward gray dusk.

9

THEY BROUGHT PAUL BRICKHILL in before it was full night. By then Arlen was back on the cot and breathing normally, and the deputy locked Paul in the cell next to him and brought them each a plate of buttered bread and a mug of water. When he was gone, Arlen said, “How rough did they go on you?”

“He did some shouting.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. Why? They didn’t try anything more than that on you, did they?”

“No,” Arlen said. “No. Was the judge there?”

“Yeah. He didn’t say much. He just listened. But I don’t know why he was even there. I mean, you don’t think… Arlen, there’s no way they’ll keep us here, is there? We weren’t anything but bystanders, we’d-”

“Settle down,” Arlen said. “They’ll kick us loose soon enough.”

Paul said, “We should’ve taken our chances on that train.”

Neither of them spoke much after that.

Night passed and dawn rose and with it the heat, and no one set foot in the jail. Paul couldn’t sit still-he paced the narrow cell most of the night and then in the morning began to do push-ups on the floor, grunting out the count as he went. Poor as this predicament was, Arlen still couldn’t help grinning. The kid was acting like a con from some prison flicker. Before long he’d probably start laying escape plans, set to work sawing on his cell bars with his fingernails.

“Aren’t they going to feed us any breakfast?” Paul said when he tired of exercising. “That’s a legal requirement, Arlen! They can’t deny a man food.”

“They’ll feed us.”

“We should have a lawyer. Not one we have to pay for either, but one they provide. You know, to protect our rights.”

“Uh-huh.”

At noon the sheriff and deputy brought them their meals: buttered bread and a strip of beef so tough it ate like jerky and tasted like boot leather. They remained in the room while the inmates ate. The redheaded deputy stood with his arms folded and glared into the cells, and Tolliver sat on a stool in the corner of the room and read a newspaper. At one point he gave a grunt of disgust and shook his head.

“If they had two boys who threw like Mel Harder, my Indians would win the pennant going away, Burt,” he told the deputy. “Win it by ten games.”

Arlen, chewing his stale bread, heard that and thought, Cleveland. That’s where Tolliver was from. He surely wasn’t local-both his voice and his sunburned skin spoke of a life spent far north of this place. How did a man from Cleveland find himself as sheriff of a backwater Florida county, though?

When they were finished eating, the deputy gathered their plates and Tolliver crumpled the newspaper and asked without interest whether they’d like to offer any changes to their stories. They did not. Paul inquired-a great deal more tentatively than he had with Arlen-why they were still in the jail if they hadn’t been charged with anything.

“Have to ask the judge about that.”

“When will he be back? I don’t believe it’s legal to keep us-”

“You know who decides what’s legal?” Tolliver said. “Solomon Wade.”

That was the end of it. Arlen never said a word. When the sheriff was gone, Paul said, “Arlen, this isn’t right.”

Arlen said, “Kid, you been around long enough to know ain’t much about this world that’s right. Leastwise not lately.”

“They could keep us locked up in here for weeks. Shoot, for months.”

“It won’t be months,” Arlen said, “and it won’t be weeks.”

“How in the hell are you so sure?” the kid snapped with an unnatural harshness. “You see that in your head, too, like the dead men on that train?”

“No,” Arlen said. “This one’s more of a guess.”

It was quiet, and then Paul said, “Arlen, I’m sorry. It’s just that-”

“I know,” Arlen said. “For what it’s worth, kid, I’m sorry, too. But you’ll see a lot more of this in your time. Foul deeds done by men who have themselves some power. They’ll beat on you in some way or another just ’cause they can, and most times they won’t answer for it.”

“When we get out of here,” Paul said, “I just want to get back to one of the camps. Doesn’t even have to be the Keys. I just want to get back to a CCC camp.”

That brought some comfort to Arlen. He said, “We’re going back to Flagg Mountain. It isn’t wise to stay in Florida after this. We’ll have trouble even if we don’t deserve it. Word gets around.”

“When do you think we’ll be back?”

“End of the week at the latest.”

“That sounds good,” Paul said. “Be nice to be back by Friday. Today’s Monday, right? Today’s Labor Day. Some holiday we had.”

He was right, Arlen realized. It was the end of the holiday now, the end of Labor Day, 1935.

Arlen had felt some swelter in his time, but not much that rivaled the way that jail got by midafternoon. The back wall faced west, and the sun came on and baked into the stone and there wasn’t so much as an open window to let the heat breathe. Paul Brickhill shifted and muttered and paced, and Arlen lay on the cot and felt the sweat bead on his flesh and waited for Tolliver’s return.

It never came. That evening a new deputy brought them food, and then it was night and they were still in their cells. The next morning Arlen woke to the sound of rain, stretched, and ran a hand over his face. When he did it, he winced. The stubble was thickening up. Arlen shaved every morning, no matter what, refused to miss it. He hated to see the hint of a beard when he looked in the mirror. Even a touch of dark shadow on his broad jaw changed his face, made him look so much like his father it was frightening. Isaac Wagner had always worn a beard, and because of it, Arlen stayed clean-shaven. Less he resembled that man, the better.

He was still on his back, studying moisture marks that seemed to be darkening in the old ceiling, when there came the sound of a key in the door and he sat up to see Solomon Wade stepping through.

“Paul,” Arlen said in a low voice.

“Yeah.”

He’d just wanted to make sure the kid was awake. The judge walked over to Arlen’s cell and stood leaning forward with his hands wrapped around the bars. At the sight of him, Paul and his worries about prisoners’ rights had fallen silent; he offered nary a question.

“Those beds aren’t too bad, are they?” Wade said.

“I’ve had better,” Arlen said, “and I’ve had worse.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Wade twisted his head to study Paul. “You know there’s men all over this country don’t have a bed for the night. Women and children, too.”

Paul said, “Yes, sir. I know.”

Wade nodded. “Just so we’re clear on that. Wanted to be sure y’all had a sense of appreciation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have a sense of appreciation?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. Because I was worried you were lacking in appreciation after I heard from the sheriff. Said there’d been talk of lawyers and lawfulness and a general quality of bitching, not a hint of gratitude in the air.”

“He was mistaken,” Arlen said.

“You calling the sheriff a liar?” Wade said, swiveling to look at Arlen.

“I’m not.”

“A fool, then?”

“No, sir. Just mistaken.”

Wade nodded sagely, as if this were a philosophers’ debate of intense interest.

“I’ve made some calls,” he said. “Seems the CCC actually recollects the two of you. So does a train station attendant out in Bradford County.”

“Good to hear,” Arlen said, still wondering why in the hell a judge would be making calls in an investigation. Seemed like Tolliver’s job.

“Not a one of them answered the question I needed answered,” Wade said, “which is what you did to find yourself inside Walt Sorenson’s Auburn on the day of his demise. I’ll tell you something-it’s a question that vexes me.”

“If we could ease your suffering,” Arlen said, “we surely would.”

Wade cocked his head sideways and gazed in at Arlen. “Why’d you get off that train? Station attendant told me you didn’t miss the train, you just got off and didn’t get back on.”

“I didn’t like the look of the crowd we were traveling with,” Arlen said. That was true enough.

“Well, I’ll tell you something: you have fool’s luck watching over you.”

The words gave Arlen a tingle, one that started low in his back and shivered all the way up his spine and tightened the muscles in his neck.

“Train you were on was bound for the Keys,” Wade said. “Would’ve put you off down there, what, late afternoon day before yesterday.”

He dropped his hands from the bars. “You know what happened to the Keys last night?”

He waited, so Arlen said, “No. We’ve been in here. Nobody kept us posted on the news.”

“Well, let me get you posted, then-the Keys are gone.”

Paul said, “What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean obliterated. Nothing left but sand and shells. And blood.”

“The hurricane?” Paul said, voice soft.

“ ‘Hurricane’ isn’t even the right word,” Wade said. “That’s what they’ll call it, yes, but sounds like this was more devil than storm. I’ve been listening to the radio reports; they say they’ve got bodies in the trees down there. Whole towns blown to the ground, men and women and children swept out to sea. They sent a rescue train, and it was torn right off the tracks.”

Arlen couldn’t find his voice. Solomon Wade was staring in at him like he wanted to hear a response, but Arlen simply couldn’t muster one.

“They say it’s coming here now,” Wade said. “This rain’s the first of it. Wind’ll come next, and with it? We’ll have to wait and see. Could be as bad as what the Keys got, could be that it’s tasted enough blood by now. Either way, I ain’t got time to deal with you sorry bastards. But if a complaint rises to your lips about your stay here in Corridor County, you remember where you’d be if we hadn’t locked your asses up. You remember that.”

10

THE SHERIFF WAS WAITING in the car, parked just in front of the station, no more than fifteen steps from the door. Even so, they were soaked by the time they fell into the backseat. The rain was coming down in a way that made Arlen wonder if the power of gravity had been increased while they’d waited in the jail; things didn’t fall from the sky now, they plummeted.

Tolliver didn’t say a word to them as they sat dripping in the back of the car, just put it in gear and drove slowly away from the center of High Town, back into the shrouded woods that today looked more black than green. Arlen watched the rain come down, pouring so furiously the sheriff had to keep the car at a crawl because he couldn’t see out of the windshield, and wondered how in the hell they were going to get to a train station today. Be a mighty wet walk. And if there was a hurricane on the way…

Shit, hurricane or not, he wanted out, and he wanted out now. Regardless of the rain, the wind didn’t seem all that powerful yet, had the trees swaying and shaking but not stretching out sideways the way they would when it really began to blow, like they were roaring mad at the roots that bound them to the earth, determined to get free. He’d never seen a true coastal hurricane, but he’d been in Alabama in ’28 when the remnants of a bad one blew out in the wooded country where he’d been staying. The sheer power of that storm, the ferocity of the wind, had lingered in his mind. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to experience hiking down the highway. No, they’d best grab their bags and hitch whatever ride they could, get inland and find housing for the night.

“I’ve never seen rain like this,” Paul said. He had one hand on the seat in front of him, squeezing it as he stared out the window and into the downpour.

“It’s heavy,” Arlen agreed.

They limped along a ribbon of gray that looked more like a creek bed than a road. Here and there the sheriff slowed and eased them one way or the other to avoid washouts of mud and gravel. He moved his hands on the wheel constantly, shifting their positions as if he weren’t sure which one worked best, and Arlen realized he didn’t like the rain any more than Paul did. He was breathing shallowly and there was sweat on his face. Twice he swore at the storm, and his voice was uneasy. This was the first hurricane he’d seen. Arlen was sure of it, and with that recognition the old questions returned: How had he found his way down here, and how had he gotten elected sheriff in a place where strangers had to be scarce?

“Hey, Arlen,” Paul said.

“Yeah?”

“What the judge said about the hurricane… you think the men we were with on the train… you think they died?”

Arlen turned his head from the kid, looked back out the window, and said, “No. I don’t.”

“That’s a lie,” Paul said softly. “You know they did. You always knew it.”

There were answers for that, but Arlen didn’t offer any of them.

Down near the Gulf, without the woods as a screen, the rain actually seemed less imposing. The sheer expanse of gray sky lightened things up, and the ocean winds pushed the rain sideways and sprayed it around. There were no cars parked in front of the inn, but lights showed inside. The sheriff drove them to the top of the hill, just where the Plymouth had parked, and then said, “Get out. I’m not trying the hill in this mud.”

“It’s been a real pleasure,” Arlen said. He pushed open his door and felt a spray of rain drill into his face, stepped out and let the wind swing the door shut as he walked for the inn. He intended to go all the way down there at a stroll-couldn’t get much wetter-but then Paul passed him at a run and Arlen thought, What the hell, and followed suit.

Paul beat him to the door and jerked it open, but Arlen slid on the wet boards of the front porch and knocked right into the kid. They fell through the door together, stumbling, and by the time they had it shut they were both laughing, acting like a couple of schoolboys instead of two men who’d just been released from the county jail.

“Well, we’re out,” Paul said. “I didn’t think I’d ever be so happy to stand outside and get rained on!”

“You’d have thought we were in there for ten years, way you talk.”

The kid grinned and wiped rain from his face. “Felt close enough to me.”

Arlen was sweeping his palms over his clothes, trying to shed the water, when he looked over Paul’s shoulder and finally saw the woman. He’d thought the room was empty when they entered, but Rebecca Cady stood in the corner nearest them, a hammer in her right hand. When he saw her, neither of them spoke. Then Paul followed his eyes and spotted her and blurted out, “Hey.”

“Hey,” she said.

“The sheriff just dropped us off,” Arlen said. “We had a nice couple nights in jail. Evidently it didn’t matter to them that we were in here with you when Sorenson’s car blew up.”

“I didn’t expect it would,” she said, stepping forward and dropping a handful of nails onto the bar, then setting the hammer down.

“Don’t seem awful concerned,” Arlen said.

“Would my concern mean much? You seem to hold me responsible.”

“I’m just wanting to let you know that we’re damn lucky the judge didn’t decide to keep us in those cells until the end of the year.”

Something changed in her face. “You met the judge? Solomon Wade?”

Arlen nodded. “That’s right. You a friend of his?”

That put fury in her eyes. “No.”

There was something odd here, but Arlen had no wish to pursue it.

“We’ll take our bags,” he said shortly, “and be on our way. I’d appreciate it if you’d give us a ride to a train station.”

“I’m not driving you anywhere in this weather.”

“Seems the right thing to do. We were visiting on your property when our last ride was killed and we ended up in jail.”

“That may be,” she said, “but it was not my fault and is not my responsibility. You were Walter’s guests, not mine. I didn’t invite you here.”

“Hell of a way to run a tavern,” Arlen said. “Real sense of hospitality.”

Paul shifted uneasily, touched Arlen’s arm, and said, “It isn’t any of her doing. Let’s just find our own way.”

Arlen turned and waved his arm at the wide window facing the beach, where rain drummed off the sea and wisps of pale fog hung over the water.

“Find our own way through that? It’s many miles of walking, Paul. She’s got a truck. She could-”

“She could do a lot of things,” Rebecca Cady said, pulling her shoulders back and tightening one slender hand back around the hammer, “but she won’t. Your bags are behind the bar. Take them and go.”

She and Arlen stood and stared at each other with naked dislike, but she kept her head high and those blue eyes firm on his. Hell with it, he thought, no use arguing with the likes of her. We’ll have ourselves a wet walk, but it’ll take us away from here, and that’s the only thing I want right now. That, and a drink.

“Fine,” he said. “Let it never be said that you’re lacking in generosity, Miss Cady.”

She didn’t answer, and he walked around the bar to find their bags. They were stacked back by the swinging door that led into the tiny kitchen. Arlen sorted out his and saw immediately that the contents had been disrupted.

“Sheriff and his deputy did that,” she said.

“They never touched our belongings. Didn’t set a foot inside the door.”

“They came back. After you were in the jail, they came back. To talk to me.” She gave him a long look, enough pause to let him imagine what Tolliver might have been like with her, and then said, “They tore through all your things and left them on my floor. I put them back as well as I could.”

“Thank you,” Paul said, joining Arlen behind the bar. Arlen just grunted, fingers searching through his shirts and under his jacket for the canteen. It was there. He withdrew it, unscrewed the cap, and tilted it.

There was no familiar rustle of paper. He shook it, feeling a cold rope tighten around his throat, and then turned it all the way upside down and reached inside with his index finger, slid it in all directions.

Nothing.

He stood there with the canteen in his hand as Paul shuffled around beside him. At length the boy went still, too, and then spoke in a soft voice.

“Arlen… my money’s gone. All I had.”

“Yes.”

Paul looked up. “You, too? They took-”

“Yes,” he said, and turned to look back at Rebecca Cady. “Someone did. Someone stole every dime we had.”

She held her palms up. “I didn’t touch your money.”

“Did you see them steal it?”

“No.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“The sheriff talked to me while the deputy went through your things.”

“Easy story for you to tell,” Arlen said.

She smiled. It was the first time he’d ever seen her smile, and even though this one was anything but an expression of pleasure, it stung him. She was something beyond beautiful.

“You want to see how much money I have,” she said, “you’re more than welcome to search the place.”

Arlen didn’t answer. He dropped the canteen down on top of his bag and leaned on the bar and stared out the windows into the building storm. He’d been worried enough about getting to a train station. Now they had no means of obtaining tickets once they got there. Outside the rain fell relentlessly and the wind had already begun to rise. It was miles just to get back to High Town, and what waited there for them? A sheriff who’d shown little interest in legality the first time he’d locked them up.

Almost four hundred dollars, he thought. Nearly two years of saving, with no goal in mind but to keep this dark damned world at bay. Gone, gone, gone.

“Arlen,” Paul said. “What are we going to do?”

The row of liquor bottles stood before him, glittering. He found a bottle of whiskey and took it off the shelf and located a glass and poured.

Paul said, “Arlen?”

He took a long drink, closing his eyes when he felt the wet heat spread through his chest.

“We’ll take advantage of Miss Cady’s hospitality.”

Rebecca Cady didn’t say a word.

“What do you mean?” Paul said.

“We’ll wait here for the rain to break. Then we’ll start walking.”

“Could be a long wait.”

“Yes,” Arlen said, topping the glass off. “It could.”

11

IT WAS AN AFTERNOON of pouring-for the rain, and Arlen. He sat at a table beside the cold, empty fireplace and drank whiskey and didn’t speak. After a few glasses the gentle burn turned to a pleasant, protective fog, and he put his feet up on the table and lifted his glass to the storm in a toast. Come on in, you big bitch. Let’s see what you can do. No worse than what’s already been done to me. Think I’m scared of some wind and rain? Then you weren’t in the Wood, friend. You weren’t there when the gas went off and the men too slow with their masks ended up choking on their own insides, spitting and sneezing out pieces of pink and gray while I watched it all with a gun in my hands. No, I’m not scared of some wind and rain.

Paul had wandered off somewhere. He and Rebecca Cady both. Hell with her. Arlen still wasn’t certain she hadn’t stolen the money herself, but she damn sure wouldn’t be telling him to leave until this storm was past. He wasn’t about to go walking down that dirt road in the rain without so much as a nickel in his pocket, turned into just another beggar in a country full of them, no better off than the migrant pickers or hoboes in search of a breadline.

Three hundred sixty-seven dollars. Three hundred sixty-seven…

It was his own fault. Hid his money in a canteen, like a child saving coins for the candy store. Back at Flagg Mountain, though, it had been safe enough. Safer than the banks, where your only question was what would happen first: Would the bank fail or get robbed? Either way, you lost. His canteen had looked more secure.

In a small room on the other side of the bar, something shook and rattled. The generator, probably. He’d not paused to think about it until now, but the place was lit with electric lights, there’d been an icebox in the kitchen behind the bar, and a fan hummed and pushed warm air around the room. There were no electric lines out here, so the Cypress House had to have one of those kerosene generators. They cost some dollars, though, and this place didn’t seem to be thriving. So where’d the cash come from?

He sat with his head against the stone that surrounded the fireplace and closed his eyes, trying to focus on the feeling of the liquor in his belly. Outside, the wind had pulled something loose and was banging it against the house. An incessant hammering. He scowled and snapped his eyes open, wishing Paul were here so he could tell him to find the source of that damn noise and make it stop. That was when he saw that his view of the ocean had been cut in half and understood the hammering sound was truly hammering. Paul was out there with Rebecca Cady, out in the rain, nailing sheets of plywood over the windows. She was holding the boards in place while he drove the nails, and even under the overhang of the porch the rain had found her and drenched her. That dark blond hair hung in wet tangles along her neck and shoulders, and the pale blue dress she wore was pressed tight to her body, her breasts pushing back against the wet fabric. Arlen stared at her for a moment and felt a stirring, then frowned and looked away and took another sip of the whiskey.

Beautiful, yes. The sort of gorgeous that haunted men, chased them over oceans and never left their minds, not even when they wanted a respite. But was she trustworthy? No. Arlen was sure of that. Whatever had led her out here was nothing honest. Whatever paid for the electric generator and the icebox and the liquor behind the bar, whatever brought someone like Walt Sorenson on a long drive to see her, it wasn’t on the level.

Shadows deepened around the room, all but the last window on the ocean side boarded up now. Arlen cast one more glance that way, and when he did he saw Rebecca Cady staring in at him as water dripped out of her hair and ran along her cheekbones, tracing her jaw. She looked him full in the eyes.

Go out there and help.

The thought flicked through his mind, and he shook it off. Be damned if he’d help this woman who’d shown no inclination to help them, who may well have stolen from them, who’d stood in silence as the sheriff put them in handcuffs. Let her work in the rain. He’d stay inside with the whiskey.

By late afternoon Arlen’s head was beginning to pound, that pleasant fog turning into something with teeth, and he went in search of a privy. He’d seen no outhouse; seemed this place had indoor plumbing to complement its lights.

He found the bathroom upstairs, full of white tile and a ceramic toilet and a large claw-foot tub. He’d relieved himself and turned to the sink before he caught a glimpse in the mirror and stopped short.

His beard, always swift-growing, had filled in his face with nearly three days of shadow, the same dark brown shade of his hair and eyes, covering weathered skin turned brown by the sun and wind.

You look just like him. Look just like the crazy old bastard.

He braced his hands on the sink and leaned close to the mirror, fascinated by the way a living man’s face could so resemble a dead man’s. He hardly trusted his own eyes in the mirror; were they Arlen Wagner’s or Isaac Wagner’s?

The sight of the undertaker’s shop came back to him then, the coffins lining the wall, the sound of his father’s chisel working the wood, shaping final homes. And his voice… his conversations. With them. With the dead.

Arlen shook his head, ran water over his hands and splashed it onto his face, blinking it out of his eyes. He kept his head turned away from the mirror and went downstairs in search of his razor.

Yes, it was time to shave.

He was drunk by the time they finished working. Sitting back by the fireplace, talking to himself with his head down on the table. Eventually Paul came over and told Arlen he needed to lie down.

“Go on, then,” Arlen said, that or something close to it, but evidently the boy had been referring to him, because he got his hands under Arlen’s arms and heaved him to his feet. Arlen didn’t like that, and he tried to shove him away and prove that he could stand on his own two, thank you very much. When he did it, though, he knocked the ladder-back chair over and tripped on its legs, would’ve sprawled right into the fireplace if Paul hadn’t caught him. He stopped struggling then, let the boy wrestle him upright and leaned his weight onto the kid’s side as they moved across the room. Rebecca Cady stood behind the bar in front of the electric fan, drying her hair and dress, and she watched Arlen with knowing eyes. He grinned at her, a wide, mocking smile. It earned no response.

The stairs were difficult, but Arlen had traversed stairs on unsteady legs before, and this time he had Paul to help. At the top, he stopped and gripped the railing because the building had taken to tilting and swirling around him, and he thought it prudent to hold off on any further steps. Paul kept pushing him ahead, though, down the hallway and past the bathroom, and then he opened one of the closed doors and guided Arlen into a hot, dusty room with a bed. It was stifling, and Arlen growled at the boy to open the window, let some air in.

“It’s boarded up. They’re all boarded up.”

That was foolishness; why in the hell would anybody put boards over a window in a place so hellish hot as this? Arlen was ready to raise the question when the boy stepped out from under him and let him tumble down onto the bed, and it was soft, so soft. He forgot his planned remark and pulled himself higher on the bed, using his elbows to move, got his boots kicked off.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

“Not yet,” Paul said.

“No, I’ll rest, but then… we’re leaving, Paul. Got to leave. Got to.”

Paul was standing in the doorway, staring at him with a frown. “Those men from the train… they died in the storm, didn’t they, Arlen?”

Arlen looked into the kid’s eyes and for a moment felt as if he’d stared his way into some small circle of sobriety. The men from the train. Wallace O’Connell and the rest who’d climbed back on board with laughter on their lips… yes, they were dead.

“You already asked me that,” Arlen mumbled.

“I know it. And you said you didn’t think they were dead, but honestly you’re sure of it. That night at the station, you were right.”

The kid had begun to shift in front of Arlen’s eyes, tilting first one way and then the other, and there were three or four versions of him now, each one staring with intense eyes.

“How did you?” Paul said. “How in the hell did you know?”

Arlen flopped his head back down on the bed and squeezed his eyes shut. “Go away. Lemme sleep.”

Paul didn’t say anything. There was no sound from the doorway, and after enough time had passed Arlen was sure he’d left, but then he heard a footstep followed by the thud of the door swinging shut and knew the kid had been standing there the whole time, staring at him.

How in the hell did you know?

He just knew, damn it. Wasn’t a thing could be said to explain it; Arlen Wagner saw the dead, knew when the hour tolled and the lives of men both friend and stranger would come to a close.

They didn’t have to die, he thought. The selfish bastards. All I can do is give a word of warning. The boy believed me simply because he is a boy. Grown men aren’t allowed to believe such tales, even when they must. Even when it’s all that can save them, they won’t allow themselves to believe.

He thought of Walt Sorenson leaning close to him at the roadhouse the night they’d met, that story of the fortune-teller who’d seen death in the rain and told him to be aware of travelers in need.

He might have believed, Arlen thought. He was one of the few who might have believed, and I didn’t see a damn thing before he died. Couldn’t warn him.

Why couldn’t he? The man had died; Arlen had watched his body burn, had seen his flesh melt from his bones. Why hadn’t Arlen been offered any warning? Why hadn’t he looked into Sorenson’s eyes and seen smoke?

It’s this place, he thought. There’s something wrong with this place. Death hides here, even from me.

The Cypress House, it was called. The Cypress House. That brought back memories, too. Not of a highway tavern, though. No, no. The cypress houses of Arlen’s youth had been quite different than that. They’d been houses of

death

another sort entirely. The last Pope was in one now. Every Pope who’d passed on was, as far as Arlen knew. Always would be. Cypress wood was required in the sacred burial rites of many faiths in many lands. The branches of the trees themselves were symbols of

death

mourning. Arlen’s father had carved them many times. The trees were not an uncommon symbol among German gravestones. The leaves stayed evergreen even after the tree had been felled, and this was believed to be a sign of spiritual immortality, a representation of the insignificance of the body’s passing. It went back to the Romans or the Greeks or some such, went back countless years, this idea of the cypress as an emblem of

death

morbid significance. What a terrible name for an inn. The Cypress House. He was edging toward sleep in a cypress house. He was edging toward-

death a coffin sleep in a cypress house death you are edging toward death

“We’re leaving soon as we can,” Arlen said, speaking to no one. “Soon as we can, we’re going home.” Then he brought his hands up and dropped them over his face, because keeping his eyes shut in this room with the boarded-up windows still didn’t offer enough darkness.

12

HIS SLEEP WAS RESTLESS and oppressive, the tossing-and-turning, half-conscious slumber of a drunk. Dreams blurred with reality, and coherent thoughts spun a tangled dance with dark visions and memories. Men with skeletal faces leered at him, then vanished and turned back into the dark walls of the room before another blink conjured up a rattlesnake coiled on a slab of West Virginia stone and another brought forth a slick of burgundy liquid on soil in France, mustard gas after it had settled to earth.

He heard Paul’s voice and Rebecca Cady’s and tried to listen to them, but they became his father’s voice and then Edwin Main’s, the man who’d come to kill his father many years ago. Life was rushing past, stacking days upon days, but still some things wouldn’t stay buried. Not Isaac’s face, not his voice.

You’re all I have in this world, son, that death can’t take. This world isn’t anything but a sojourn, to be sure, but death removes every trace unless you’ve taken pains to leave one behind. You’re my trace, Arlen.

Isaac Wagner’s bearded face split into a smile of crooked teeth, and he started a laugh that ended in a howl. The howl went on and on, a howl of madness, a howl of… wind.

The wind was roaring now, pushing at the walls of the Cypress House, the building shuddering in its grasp. Arlen tried to open his eyes, but the lids slid down again. He had to get on his feet, had to get out of here. There was something wrong in this place, terribly wrong, and he’d brought Paul Brickhill here and now was responsible for getting him out. They had to get out. It was time to get on his feet, and then they could hike to a train station… but he had no money. Someone had taken his money. His protection from hard times was gone, taken from him so easily when it had been so hard to build.

A voice whispered again, and he expected Isaac’s and cried out against it, but this voice was disembodied, distant.

The seawall may not hold… most of the water has been drawn out of Tampa Bay… the storm will be weaker than when it passed through the Keys, but if the seawall fails…

A radio. They were listening to a radio. Let them listen; listening wouldn’t change a thing. The storm would do what it would do, and they would be here for it. He had nowhere else to go. He was but another soldier in the trenches again, in a place where the trenches were filled with desperate, lost men.

He woke when the wind reached a scream. The door swung open, and he spun with a grunt and found himself facing Paul Brickhill.

“Arlen? Rebecca says you’d best come downstairs. It’s getting close.”

Arlen just stared at the kid for a moment, too disoriented to speak or move. Then he managed a nod and struggled out of bed. A blanket was snarled around his foot and he almost fell, but caught himself and tore free. The motion set off a bolt of pain that began in his head and ended in his gut, nausea sliding in behind it. He bent over, bracing his forearms on his knees, and sucked in a few breaths until it passed. Paul moved from the door as if to help, but Arlen held a hand up, breathed a few more times, and then straightened. His eyelids scraped like sandpaper with each blink, and his throat was dry and scorched.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice harsh as a rasp on a cedar plank. “I shouldn’t have… I didn’t mean to drink like that. It’s just the money was gone and I-”

Something tore on the side of the house, and Paul looked at the window as if he might be able to see through the boards to the other side.

“Let’s get on downstairs, Arlen.”

“Time is it?”

“Noon.”

Noon. He’d been up here for an entire night and morning.

They went down the steps and out into the barroom. The electric lights were still on and the fan still blowing, but even so the room was dark and hot with all the windows and doors sealed. Rebecca Cady was sitting with a radio at a table in front of the bar. The radio was off. She looked up as they entered, let her eyes hang on Arlen’s for a moment, and then said, “The water’s coming up.”

“Out of the ocean?” Paul said it like he didn’t believe it.

She nodded.

Paul crossed the room and went to one of the windows. Arlen noticed now that there was a jagged shaft of gray light where a piece of the board had been torn away. Paul put his face to the glass and stared at the beach.

“How high will it get?” he said. “It’s getting close to the porch.”

He was trying to say it calmly enough, but there was a tremor in his voice.

“I’m not sure how high it will go,” Rebecca Cady said. There was no tremor in hers.

Arlen crossed the room and joined Paul at the window, nudged him aside and looked out at the shore. The palm trees to the side of the back porch were bent at an incomprehensible angle-how the trunks didn’t split, he couldn’t imagine-and the Gulf of Mexico had turned into a wild, thrashing expanse of gray water speckled with white froth. Where the beach had once ended, now there was only water, furious water, pushed ahead by the wind and climbing with ease. The waves splashed no more than twenty feet from the base of the porch now, and even as Arlen watched, they seemed to grow closer.

“House is raised?” he said.

“Yes,” Rebecca Cady said.

“By how much?”

“Three feet,” Paul said quietly. “Block pylons. It’ll move through them instead of around the sides of the house. Higher than that, it’ll be on the porch.”

Arlen didn’t answer, still looking out at the water. A frond tore loose from one of the palms and snapped through the air, plastered onto the window just below Arlen’s eye with such force that he gave an involuntary jerk. The wind’s scream rose, as if it were laughing at him as it flattened the tops on the waves in the tossing sea. He stepped back from the window and shook his head. How could anything unseen have such savage strength? You could only watch its effects; the beast itself was invisible.

He followed Paul to the table and sat with Rebecca Cady, each of them listening to the sounds of the storm. He nodded at the radio.

“What do they say?”

“That it’s here.”

“That’s all they say?”

“The seawall failed in Tampa. There’s flooding.”

“How far away is that?”

“Fifty miles south. That’s nothing like what happened in the Keys. They still don’t have a death toll settled on.”

Arlen and Paul looked at each other until something crashed against the back of the house and gave them an excuse to turn away.

“Why don’t you turn it back on?” Arlen said, pointing at the radio.

“Saving the batteries.”

“I can’t believe your lights are still on.”

“It’s a good generator.”

“Sure is,” Arlen agreed. “How’d you pay for it, with no business?”

This time her silence lingered. He’d just about given up on a response when she said, “My father put that in. Things were different then.”

“Where is he now?”

“In a coffin.”

“A lot of good men are,” Arlen said.

She scowled and turned away. Arlen said, “Is there beer in that icebox?”

“I should think the last thing you’d need right now is another drink.”

“Actually, the one thing I need right now is another drink.”

He stood up and walked around the bar and into the kitchen, found the icebox. He took a bottle of beer out, then hesitated and withdrew two more.

When he came back, he set a bottle down in front of Paul, then in front of Rebecca Cady. Both of them looked at him like he was crazy, and he shrugged. The wind shrieked around the house, and Paul reached out tentatively and touched his beer, then moved his hand away when Rebecca Cady shifted her eyes to him.

“Go on,” Arlen said, “just one ain’t going to bite you. It’s a hurricane, son. If that isn’t a special occasion, what is?”

It wasn’t strong stuff, but it was enough to settle Arlen’s stomach and ease his headache. Paul let the bottle sit untouched in front of him for a few minutes and then lifted it and took a small swallow.

About ten minutes went by, and then there came a crash and a tearing from the back porch. Arlen and Paul got to their feet and went to the small exposed portion of glass to look out. One of the porch railings had ripped free and blown into the back wall, and the corresponding roof support had buckled. The porch roof was still standing, but on just three legs now.

“That porch is almost finished,” Paul whispered. “I wonder what’s happening to that dock and the boathouse up in the inlet.”

Before Arlen could answer, there was another crash, this one far louder and on the southern side of the house, out of sight at their angle. The entire building trembled with impact, and then the lights went out. There wasn’t so much as a flicker; they simply snapped off. The electric fan whirled down to a crawl and then a stop, and now there were no sounds but the storm.

Arlen led the way back, picking past chairs and tables that existed as shadows. Rebecca Cady was where they’d left her, and though she hadn’t said a word, she was moving in the darkness. It took Arlen a minute to realize that she’d begun to drink the beer.

13

IT WENT ON THROUGH the afternoon and into the evening-wind and rain and the sounds of the house threatening to break up around them. One of the back windows splintered from the squeezing and shifting of the frame, then fell to the floor in shards when another gust shook the house. Paul and Arlen set to work cleaning up the glass and waiting on the rest of the windows to go, but they never did. The storm surge covered the beach and reached the porch and sloshed under the house. They could hear it moving beneath the floor, and Rebecca Cady kept her eyes downcast for at least an hour, looking for signs of it, expecting the water to begin seeping through. It didn’t rise high enough, though. Now and then a particularly inspired wave would splash up onto the edge of the porch, but it never made the door.

The three of them went out onto the front porch once, with the building offering shelter between them and the wind, and took in the yard. Everything was awash with water, the sea moving all around them, as if they stood aboard a ship rather than a porch. The heavy Cypress House sign banged on its iron chains. Up the hill, the trees bent almost to the earth and the undergrowth had been picked clean by the wind. The air was thick with spray and sand, peppering the trees.

“You ever seen one like this before?” Paul shouted in Rebecca Cady’s ear, his hand cupped to the side of her face. She shook her head.

It didn’t begin to lessen until evening, and then it was subtle-the wind shriek losing its voice just a bit, as if its lungs were worn from the day’s ravings. An hour later it was noticeably calmer, and the rain had faded to an ordinary, steady summer shower as the ocean mustered a slow retreat, as if displeased with the results of its reconnaissance mission on land. Maybe it would invade sometime, but it wouldn’t be now and wouldn’t be here.

As the storm eased away, real darkness settled in, and Rebecca lit more oil lamps. She had two lanterns, and around nine that evening, when the wind dangers seemed past, she lit them both and handed one to Paul and kept the other herself, and they all went outside.

The yard was littered with pieces of siding and porch rails and shingles. The back porch was in shambles, but the roof had held; the widow’s walk deck hadn’t fared so well.

Rebecca Cady looked everything over without comment and then said she wanted to go to the boathouse. She led the way, holding the lantern out in front of her body, picking over branches and planks and other debris. There was a narrow path that led north from the house and into the palms. It curved away from the Gulf, then opened up on an inlet that appeared to wind back into ever deeper undergrowth. The boathouse stood before them, little more than a tall shed built out onto the dock. Most of its roof was gone. Rebecca walked to the edge of the dock and lifted the lantern high. A third of the floor planks were missing, but the pilings that supported them were intact.

“You have anything in that boathouse?” Arlen asked.

“It was moved,” she said shortly, and then turned and started back to the house. “Let’s look at the generator.”

“We might be able to get it running again tonight,” Paul said, full of forced optimism.

That idea lasted for the amount of time it took them to get back to the house. The generator was in an enclosure that had been constructed on the north side of the building. Where it had once stood, nothing was visible but tangled branches. A tree of at least forty feet in length-it was some sort of coastal pine whose branches and needles had been pruned away by the storm-had blown directly into the side of the building, crushing the shed. The smell of fuel hung in the air, and when Paul leaned over the tree and lifted his lantern, a piece of an engine became visible.

“It’s ruined,” Rebecca Cady said. “Destroyed.”

Paul set his lantern on the ground and tried to heave the tree off the generator. After watching him struggle for a few seconds, Arlen fell in to help, and they rolled the tree back enough to see the damage more clearly. It looked to Arlen to be catastrophic-the generator had been broken into pieces and was now covered with wet sand. He could see a metal plate with the words “Delco-Light” stamped onto the side. Arlen was a damn fine carpenter, but he was no mechanic, and even a great one wouldn’t be able to put this wreck back together.

“Going to need a new one,” he said.

“I can’t afford one.” She looked up from the ruined generator and out at the rest of her property-shanks of damaged siding littered the yard, pieces of the back porch lay half buried in the sandy hill above the inn, the bed rails from her truck had been ripped off and deposited somewhere in the darkness.

“We’ll get it cleaned up,” Paul said, and Arlen looked at him with wide eyes. The hell they would. They were leaving.

“I can take care of it,” she said.

“No, you can’t. You going to rebuild that porch?” He shook his head. “We won’t leave until it’s cleaned up.”

Arlen said, “Have you lost your senses?”

“We have to stay long enough to help-”

“We don’t have to stay long enough for anything! I don’t recall that we invited the hurricane here, and I’ll be damned if I take any sense of neighborly kindness at a place where I was jailed and robbed. We’re leaving in the morning.”

Paul shook his head, and Arlen wanted to knock it right off his shoulders.

“We came in together,” Paul said. “That doesn’t mean we have to leave together. I’m staying at least long enough to help her get this place cleaned up.”

They stood there for a while in the lantern light and the soft rain, looking out at the inn that was now bound by darkness.

“Come on,” Arlen said at last. “Won’t be able to do anything out here till daylight, and there’s no use burning the lantern fuel. Way that generator looks, you’re going to need it.”

Nobody came by to check on the Cypress House until the next morning, and then it was a man in a white panel van. Arlen was in the bathroom and Paul and Rebecca Cady were already outside, pulling the boards off the windows. They hadn’t reached the second floor yet, so when Arlen heard the sound of the approaching engine, he had to go downstairs to see the source. The van had parked and the driver got out, a short, squat man in a watch cap. He stood with his hands on his hips, looked around the tavern, and shook his head.

Arlen opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, lifting a hand. The man lifted one in response and walked up to join him. “How’d you folks fare?”

“Well enough,” Arlen answered, “but it’s not my place.”

“Oh, I know that,” the visitor said. He had a heavy drawl, a spray of freckles across his face, blue eyes that held good humor. “Y’all are the criminals.”

Arlen raised his eyebrows, and the man laughed.

“You best expect that to be known by now. Think a pesky thing like a hurricane will keep folks from talking?” He put out a hand. “Thomas Barrett. I reckon you’re Wagner, not Brickhill.”

Arlen didn’t take his hand, and Barrett laughed again. “Relax. I’m nothing but a delivery driver. You can put away your guns.”

“Sorry,” Arlen said, finally reaching out to accept the handshake, “but I’m a bit leery of folks out here. They kill some men, lock others up, and probably steal from everyone.”

Barrett’s smile went sour as he pulled his hand back. “Ain’t everybody around here that’ll do you that way.”

“I’d hope not. But it’s who I’ve met so far.”

Barrett nodded. “You met the sheriff, and maybe you met the judge?”

“That’s right. What do you know about them?”

“Enough to stay out of their way. Enough to know that most folks with half a mind are scared witless of them.”

“They’re elected positions, aren’t they?”

Barrett threw his head back and gave a bull snort. “Elected, sure. And I ran against Tolliver for sheriff, so you ever want to hear about Corridor County politics, I can talk on it. But you probably don’t, and I probably shouldn’t.”

“I got the impression he was from Cleveland.”

Barrett gave him a surprised glance and a nod. “You had the right impression.”

“How in the hell did he become sheriff down here, then?”

Barrett’s smile was forced this time. “I wouldn’t waste your thoughts worrying on a thing like that. It’s Corridor County’s problem, not yours.”

“Is High Town really all there is to the county?”

“Most people are scattered. You know, live in the woods or out at places like this. Was a lumber mill outside of High Town that kept the place alive, but it went under five years ago, and, all told, a few thousand people probably went with it. Workers and their families and such. Take away the only real industry in a place like this, and it empties out powerful fast.”

“So what do people out here do now?”

“They try to get by,” Barrett said. “Just like Becky.”

“How’d she end up alone in this place?”

“Was owned by her parents. They came down from Georgia years back to try and build a sport fishing business. It didn’t take. Her mother drowned right out from the house. Some said it was tides that caught her, others believed she went willingly enough. Tired of her husband’s methods of getting ahead.”

“What methods were those?”

Barrett gave him a long look, then turned away and said, “A few years later, Rebecca’s daddy took his boat out, lost the engines, and then lost himself. They found the boat but not him. All that was left of her family by then was her brother, and he’s in prison.”

At that moment Rebecca Cady appeared around the side of the house, wiping her hands on a towel.

“Hello, Tom.”

“Becky, you survive all right?”

“Better than the inn,” she said, and then added, “Stop calling me Becky.”

“I know, I know. Is there anything left of the back porch?”

“Not much. I lost the generator, too. No icebox.”

Barrett groaned. “Can it be fixed?”

“Probably not. You can have a look if you’d like.”

“I’ll do that.” He turned to Arlen and winked. “We’ll talk in a minute, gunslinger. Don’t shoot me in the back now, hear?”

“Awful witty boy, aren’t you?” Arlen said, and Barrett gave another of his loud laughs and walked away. Arlen went in search of Paul.

He found him up on the ladder on the side of the house. He’d gotten the boards off the windows and was now nailing a torn piece of the wooden siding back into place. Arlen called for him to come down.

“We’ve got a job,” Paul said before his feet had even touched ground.

“I’m sorry?”

“Here,” Paul said triumphantly. “I talked her into it this morning. She sure needs the help, and we sure need the money. I know you don’t want to stay, but it’s a different tune if we’re getting paid, right?”

“What we need is a ride, boy, and there’s one out front.”

Paul frowned. “A ride where, Arlen? We don’t have enough money for a meal, much less a train ticket. You want to walk all the way back to Alabama? Rebecca said she could pay us ten dollars each if we get this place cleaned up and the porch put back together. Shouldn’t take more than a few days. That’s enough for train tickets at least.”

Arlen stared at him. “Paul… you remember where you are? You remember what happened to the man who drove us down here?”

“Arlen, it’s not like she blew his car up!”

“I don’t care if she did or not, he ended up dead and we ended up in jail and this ain’t a place I intend to stay around.”

“So where are you going to go?”

“Away,” Arlen said. “Hitch a ride into a town and figure it out.”

“Wouldn’t you rather do that with a few dollars in your pocket?”

“They’re probably my own dollars,” Arlen snapped. “I’m still not sure she didn’t steal it herself.”

Paul sighed and shook his head again. “You know that’s not the case.”

“I don’t know a damn thing, son! Neither do you.”

“Arlen, she’s here by herself. We can’t just leave. It isn’t right. I mean, if she were my mother and somebody walked off and left-”

“You aren’t confusing her for your mother,” Arlen said. “I’ve seen the way you look at her.”

Paul flushed and looked down, twirled the hammer in his hands. “I got off that train when you asked me to.”

“Aren’t you glad you did?”

“Yes. But now I’m asking you: stick for a few days. Just long enough to help her get this place put together.”

Arlen stepped back and ran a hand over his face. He didn’t want to leave the kid here on his own. Not in this place.

“Listen,” he said, his voice sharpening in a way that brought Paul’s eyes up. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, son? Look me in the face and lie?”

“No. Of course not.”

“All right. So when you tell me we’ll stay just long enough to get the tavern cleaned up, and then we’ll go back to Alabama… that’s the truth?”

“Yes.”

Arlen said, “Shit,” and sighed.

“Won’t be so bad,” Paul said. “Working right on the ocean like this? It’ll almost be a vacation.”

“Just find me another hammer,” Arlen said. “Faster we work, faster we can leave.”

They walked back to the front of the house together in search of the second hammer. Barrett was leaving, pulling away in his van with a honk and a wave, and Rebecca stood on the front porch with a newspaper in her hands and a grim look on her face. She glanced up at them, said nothing, and passed the paper to Arlen. The front page was half covered by an enormous headline that shrieked: 1,000 PREDICTED DEATH TOLL IN KEYS.

Below that, a promise of the “complete hurricane carnage in pictures” stood above a photograph of corpses stacked on the front of a ship.

Arlen didn’t want to see the complete hurricane carnage in pictures. Nor did he want to read about the dead. Paul had seen the look on his face, though, and he said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Paul came up and looked over Arlen’s shoulder at the photograph of the dead men and that headline. One thousand predicted dead. One thousand.

“Let me see,” Paul said, his voice hushed. Arlen passed it over, fished a cigarette out and lit it and smoked with his back to the boy and the newspaper. Every now and then Paul would let out a murmur of horror or pain. Rebecca had joined him and was reading at his side.

“Arlen,” Paul said, “most of these pictures are of the veterans’ camps. They were just waiting there for it. Waiting in tents and shacks.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s got an editorial in here someone wrote for the Washington Post. Says it was a tragedy, but then says that the men in those camps were ‘drifters, psychopathic cases, or habitual troublemakers.’ ”

Arlen lowered his cigarette and smashed it out on the deck rail. He’d heard the camps were rough. It’s why the CCC hadn’t wanted to send juniors. But something else those men were, every last one of them? Veterans. Soldiers. Men who’d listened to Washington when Washington told them to go across an ocean and pour their blood into the soil of a place they knew nothing about, men who’d taken bullets and bayonets and breathed in mustard gas. Heroes, Washington had called them back in ’18 and ’19, the war won and the economy strong. Now they were “drifters, psychopathic cases, or habitual troublemakers.”

“You think those men on our train died?” Paul said.

“Yes,” Arlen said. It was the first time he’d given the boy a flat, honest answer on that question. The dead deserved that much right now. They deserved a little honesty.

Rebecca had been staring at Arlen, but when he looked over she turned away. Paul folded the paper, but Arlen shook his head, took it from the boy, and lit a match and held it to the edge, watched as the flame caught and licked along until the rolled paper was a torch in his hand. Then he dropped it out into the sand, and they watched it burn down to embers.