“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.