The Cypress House(9)

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.”