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.
Part Two
CORRIDOR COUNTY
14
SOLOMON WADE MADE HIS first appearance the next day. By then they’d gotten the yard cleared and all the damaged siding repaired and had turned to the back porch. The railing could be salvaged, but many of the spindles were lost and the pillar that supported the roof had been smashed and sheared in half. They got the railings in place easily enough and then Arlen went to the roof pillar, turned the pieces over in his hands and studied them, looking at the jagged ends.