“Half.” He said it flatly. Owen rocked his head back and stared with wide eyes.
“Bullshit, he gets half. He’ll be gone ’fore anything even starts to happen! He ain’t playing a role in this, ain’t helping, ain’t—”
“He gets half,” Arlen said, and there was a challenge in his voice that shut Owen’s mouth for once. He went tight-lipped and angry and stared at Arlen with distaste, but when he spoke again his tone was softer.
“There’s four of us here,” he said. “Fair split would be twenty-five hundred. That’s more than fair.”
“That boy’s got a mother was counting on CCC checks,” Arlen said. “He’s got to look after her and himself. He gets half.”
Owen started to shake his head again, but Rebecca cut in.
“That’s fine,” she said. “That’s right.”
She counted out half the money and placed it in a burlap bag and handed it to Arlen. He put it on a high shelf behind a sack of flour and then he and Owen both watched as Rebecca replaced the rest of the money in the black case and fastened the latches and set it beneath the table.
“One day left,” she said.
42
PAUL RETURNED AT THE height of the storm. The rain had lessened just a touch, but the lightning and thunder were gathering energy, the walls and windows of the inn trembling consistently, wind howling in off the Gulf. It wasn’t yet sundown but might as well have been; no sun would shine on this day again. The three of them had returned to the barroom, ostensibly to discuss the plan, break down each movement and time it out to the last second. Nobody had much to say, though. It was as if the delivery of the money, that first squeeze on a trigger nobody else even saw, had somehow silenced them.
Instead they sat and listened to the storm and drank. Arlen and Owen passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth, and even Rebecca had a short one. Her eyes moved from the beach to the fireplace to the clock, flicking from place to place as if taking inventory.
“What’s on your mind?” Arlen said.
“I was thinking that it really isn’t such a bad place.”
It was the same notion he’d had that morning, working on the boathouse.
“I came to hate it, you know,” she said. “To almost blame the physical location for everything that was happening here, for everything that had happened. But you know what? My parents were right. It’s a gorgeous spot. It will be special someday. Someone will probably make a nice living doing just what my father always hoped to do here. They will be different people, though, and it will be a different time. Right now, it’s as if this place is infected. The sickness will pass. But no time soon. No time soon.”
Arlen nodded. She wasn’t alone in those thoughts, and they weren’t limited to this place. It was an infected world right now. He remembered reading newspaper pieces about the black dust that had risen in the plains and driven farmers to take shelter in the ground, dust clouds so mighty that they’d drifted all the way across the country and darkened the skies above New York. It was a hell of a thing. Grasshoppers had descended over the same farms like a biblical plague, picking crops to shreds and ruining any hope of a cash harvest. At the same time banks were going under and women and children standing in breadlines, and young men like Owen Cady and Paul Brickhill were willing to throw in their lots with the Solomon Wades of the world because they saw no other way to climb out of the trenches in which they lay.
It would pass, though. Arlen believed that, had to believe it. You kept your head down and you weathered what this life brought you and believed it would pass. He looked at Rebecca now and thought, You are all that I need. She was, too. Through all the hell that might come to pass in a few short hours, he had no qualms about staying around to endure it. Just the chance to be with her, it was enough. It was something the likes of which he’d never hoped to find.
A memory caught him then, Paul in the darkness on the dock while Tolliver and Tate McGrath prepared to kill in this very room. Paul saying, I feel like I’ve been traveling through time to get here, Arlen, just to find her.
Damn it, why did it have to afflict them both? Why couldn’t love be parceled out evenly and easily?
It was then that a sheet of white light filled the room, and for a moment nobody reacted because they’d grown so used to the steady, brilliant flashes of lightning. This one held, though, and Arlen turned and looked through the window, and, as a snarling, raging clatter of thunder shook the sky, he saw Thomas Barrett’s delivery van parked at the top of the hill, its headlight beams cutting across the yard. The passenger door swung open, and Paul burst out and ran through the rain. Barrett gave the horn a little double tap and turned the van around and headed back up the road.