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.”