The Cypress House Read Free

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."
    ----
        

Chapter 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 in1918 , 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.
        He
was staring, entranced, when the American gunners opened up. Opened up and
mowed them down, sliced the vicious Hun bastards to pieces. All around him men
lifted their rifles and fired, and Arlen just lay there without so much as a
finger on the trigger, scarcely able to draw a breath.
         A
trick of the light, he told himself as dawn rose heavy with mist and the
smell of cooling and drying blood, the moans of the wounded as steady now as
the gunfire had been earlier. What he'd seen was the product of moonlight
partnered with the trauma from a day of unspeakable bloodshed. Surely that was
enough to wreak havoc on his mind. On anyone's mind.
        There
were some memories in his head then, of course, some thoughts of his father,
but he kept them at bay,