The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  Arlen and Paul watched from the trees, silent. It felt like the war again to Arlen, crouched in the brush with a comrade, treachery nearby. When he saw the Plymouth, his throat tightened, and he thought for a moment that he ought to get the license number. Who would he give it to, though? Sheriff Tolliver? Judge Solomon Wade? No, he didn’t need to have any more knowledge of that car.

  A man and three boys who couldn’t be out of their teens filled the lead vehicle. Country folk. Wore clothes you wouldn’t see in a department store, the sort that you ordered from a farm-supply catalog, with tattered hats that had been kicked around in the dust a time or two. The man had a thin string of gray hair that hung down past his neck. The watcher from the boat in the inlet. The three boys followed at his heels like obedient but wary dogs.

  There was only one man in the Plymouth, a sharp-looking, tidy boy in a suit. Tolliver had also traveled alone, no deputy along for this ride. He stood in the yard and looked around with a suspicious stare while the rest of the group went inside. His gaze floated over the trees where Arlen and Paul hid, but he did not see them. At length he followed the others into the Cypress House, and then they were gone from view, hidden behind the closed door.

  “I don’t like this,” Paul whispered. “We ought not leave her—”

  “Shut up,” Arlen said, his own nerves making his voice harsh. “We’ll do as she asked. She knows what to expect; we don’t. You in a hurry to chat with the sheriff again?”

  That quieted him, and they slipped out of the trees and back down to the dock. Paul settled on one of the floor planks, with his feet dangling in the gap where others were missing.

  “We could fix this dock easy enough, if she had the lumber,” he said.

  “I expect we could.”

  “And isn’t anything to that boathouse but basic carpentry—roof repairs, wall reinforcements, that sort of thing.”

  “Sure isn’t.”

  “So we could do it.”

  “Sure could.” Arlen was distracted, thinking of that group up at the inn.

  He lit a cigarette and looked at the boy’s slumped shoulders and then out at the wooded inlet. The sun had disappeared, vanished beneath the waves of the Gulf, but a faint pink smudge along the horizon remained, fading fast to shadow. The air was the sort of warm that made you comfortable, ready to stretch out and watch the stars rise as your eyelids became heavy.

  A heron slid in, sleek and swift as a bullet, then hit the shore across from them and stood on spindly legs, studying the water. If you looked away from it and then back, the bird was tough to find, a pencil-thin shadow amid the backdrop of plants. Deeper in the woods, insects trilled and creatures rustled.

  “She’s ready to pay us,” Arlen said. “And it won’t be much, but it’ll put us on a train and send us back to Flagg Mountain.”

  “Arlen,” Paul said as the last glowing remnants of the sun slid beneath black water, “I can’t leave her.”

  “Can’t leave her?”

  Paul nodded, still with his back to Arlen. “Rebecca. I can’t leave her.”

  Arlen closed his eyes and sucked deep at the cigarette, too deep, enough so the smoke that touched his throat was hot and harsh. He swallowed down the cough that wanted to rise, kept his eyes squeezed shut.

  “Tell me why.”

  “You know why.”

  “Paul… that’s a mighty beautiful woman. One could have a son near as old as you. And I understand what you see in her. She’s the kind that would weaken the knees of most men. But she’s also in a situation that you can’t be a part of.”

  “What do you mean? What do you know about it?”

  “Those men up there, son, they aren’t good men. And Wade? You think he’s running a legitimate business through here? Hell, the man we rode in with was a damned bootlegger. What do I know about the details of her situation? Nary a thing. But I know the gist, and that’s enough.”

  “Even so, I’m not leaving her. I feel like I’ve been traveling through time to get here, Arlen, just to find her. And now that I have… I can’t leave.”

  Paul’s voice was thick, and the sound of it made Arlen open his eyes and look at the boy and then away, out across the dark waters and into the breeze that fanned toward them from the west.

  “Son, she’s more than ten years older than you. Fifteen, maybe. She’s a grown woman.”

  “That doesn’t mean a thing. She’s alone out here, Arlen, and I can tell she’s awful tired of being alone. I can see that clear as anything.”

  “She made the choice to stay out here.”

  “I don’t know that she did. Lots of people in this country are doing things they didn’t choose to do, things they have to do. And I’ll tell you something else: she doesn’t show it, but she’s scared. I saw that the day before the hurricane came in, when I helped her board up the windows.”

  “Lots of people are scared of hurricanes.”

  “She’s scared,” Paul repeated, “but it’s not of a hurricane.”

  Arlen didn’t say anything. Paul turned and faced him, his jaw set.

  “She’s lonely, and she likes me.” As if that ended the discussion.

  “She does like you. I can see that. But it’s in a different way than—”

  “How do you know?” Paul snapped. “How do you know what she feels? You married? You ever been married?”

  There was a long silence, and then Arlen said gently, “You’re fixing to marry her?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Don’t twist my words on me like that. I’ll make that easy on you, and we both know it. What I’m saying is that I like her. I like her in a way… Arlen, I can’t even tell you the way.”

  Arlen understood, though. Had seen it rising since they’d landed at the Cypress House, but now that Paul was trying to put it into words it set off a warning in his head, a sense of a new trouble joining those he already had.

  “I get it,” he said. “But you’re asking for trouble. You won’t take anything from this but—”

  “I can’t leave her, Arlen.”

  The thick, choked sound was gone from his voice now, and there was the ring of finality to the words. He looked Arlen in the eye when he said them, held the look, and then turned and stared back across the inlet. The heron had moved on a fish in the shallows, moved with a splash and flourish, then stepped back. Its beak was empty. Swing and a miss.

  “I thought we’d agreed on returning to Flagg,” Arlen said.

  “I know it, and there isn’t anything makes me feel worse than arguing with you. But, Arlen?” He turned and looked at him again, and in the shadows he seemed more man than boy, had the weariness of an adult in his countenance. “I cannot leave her. Okay? I’m going to stay.”

  “What if she won’t have you?”

  “She’ll have me. She needs this dock fixed, and then the boathouse, and I’ll be damned what anybody says, I can make that generator run. I can do it. There are things for me to do, and they’ll let me show her… show her…”

  “That she needs you,” Arlen said softly.

  “Yeah.”

  Arlen’s chest filled and he blew out air, but this time the cigarette was still held down against his side. Darkness had shrouded them, and the cacophony of buzzing insects from the woods had increased as the daylight faded. Out in the inlet, the heron was marking new territory, ready for another strike.

  “I brought you down here,” Arlen said. “It was me who brought you south, and it was me who took you off the train. Was also me who put you in Sorenson’s fancy car and dragged you this way, and I’m not going to leave you here now.”

  He felt, as he often had since the start of this journey, like a man pushed by unseen but powerful currents.

  “You don’t need to stay,” Paul said.

  “I’m not leaving you here alone. You’re no fool, boy; there’s trouble up there and you know it. I won’t leave you alone in such a place.”

  Paul said, “Thank you.”

  “Shit,” Arlen
said, and fumbled in the dark for another cigarette.

  It was quiet for a moment, nothing but the night sounds around them, and then Paul said, “You don’t think she can ever love me.”

  Arlen said nothing.

  “I think she can,” Paul said. “But it’ll take some time. It’ll take a chance for me to show her who I really am. Who I can be. But I think…”

  His words trailed off, and Arlen didn’t spur them back into life or add to them. He just leaned against the mangled side of the boathouse and smoked his cigarette, and the boy looked out across the inlet as the heron struck and missed once, and then again, and then it was too dark to see all the way over to him.

  17

  THEY SPENT AN HOUR OR TWO sitting and talking about insignificant things but both of them jerking at every sound, their minds back at the Cypress House. Once, Paul started to mosey that way, said he had to relieve himself. Arlen pointed into the trees.

  “All the privacy you need right there. Don’t you even think about going back up into the view of that tavern unless you want to cause trouble for her.”

  That seemed to convince him. He went off into the bushes and pissed.

  “Think she’s okay?” he said when he returned.

  “I know she is,” Arlen said. “She’s run this place on her own for a time, Paul. She’s had men like that visit more than once, and she’s handled herself fine. Don’t trouble yourself over it. It’s a normal night for her.”

  He wasn’t sure of that, but he needed the boy to be. He took his flask from his pocket and uncapped it and offered it to Paul.

  “Sip a little.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Go on,” he said. “You’ve earned it tonight, Paul. It’ll ease your worry.”

  After a hesitation, Paul accepted the flask and drank. They passed it back and forth as they sat on the floor of the boathouse, which was now like a lean-to shelter, open to the night sky on one side. Just to Paul’s left, the water from the inlet lapped gently inside the boathouse.

  “This isn’t such a bad spot to spend a night,” he said at length, his voice beginning to show the booze. “Hear that ocean, see those stars?”

  Arlen didn’t say anything. After a while the boy slumped down against the pile of blankets. Arlen lit a cigarette and let the sound of wind and water fill the silence. By the time the cigarette had burned down to his fingertips, he could tell the kid was already asleep. He always went down hard and fast, the way the boys in the CCC had—you worked them enough during the day, and they forgot their homesickness and orneriness as soon as their heads touched the pillows—but he was also unfamiliar with drink, and it would help to keep him down. Arlen had been counting on this.

  He got quietly to his feet and left the dock and started up the sandy path to the tavern. By the time he reached the end of the trail, he could see the flickering light of oil lamps from the main barroom. All of the cars were still parked out in the yard.

  He hesitated and looked up at the cars and wondered what the best approach was. If he really worked at being unseen, crept around staying low and in the shadows, he suspected he could do it. The problem then was with the off chance that they came bumbling out of the bar at just the wrong time and caught him. No, better to just walk up to the cars as casually as he could, and if someone came out and saw him, he’d feign ignorance, explain that they were staying at the boathouse and that he couldn’t sleep. Be easy to present as the truth, because mostly it was.

  He circled around to the Plymouth and had just removed a matchbook so he could put some light on the license plate when something moved in the corner of his eye. He spun back with his fists raised and heart thundering.

  There was a woman inside the sheriff’s car. Sitting in the passenger seat, staring through the shadowed glass at Arlen without expression.

  For a moment he stayed there with his hands clenched into fists, and then he dropped them, looked once at the tavern, and approached the car, making a rolling gesture with his hand, indicating that she should lower the window. She did so, and he could hear a strange tinkling noise. It wasn’t until he stepped closer and knelt beside the door that he understood—she was wearing handcuffs.

  “What are you doing out here?” he whispered.

  “I’m waiting,” she said, “for them to finish bargaining.”

  “Over what?”

  “My life.”

  He ran a hand over his jaw and stared at her, looking from the handcuffs back to her face. She was a beautiful woman, with full lips and hair so dark it looked like oil spilled across the front of her dress, which was a pale yellow. Beneath the clasps of steel, her arms were slender and elegant.

  “What are you talking about?” Arlen said. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Gwen.”

  “I don’t mean your name, I mean what in the hell you’re doing here, with men like that. Why does that son of a bitch have you in chains?”

  “I’m leverage,” she said, and for the first time he heard clear emotion in her words. Not fear but sorrow. The sort that rose up from the core.

  “How?”

  “There’s a man inside who loves me,” she said. “And they know that. They intend… I believe they intend to test the strength of his love.”

  “The fellow who drove the Plymouth?”

  “Yes. David.”

  “Why do they have you out here, instead of in with them?”

  “I was inside, once. So he could see me. Then Tate asked the sheriff to take me back out. I believe I unsettle him.”

  Her voice was eerie, faint but firm and entirely matter-of-fact.

  “Who is Tate? He the older guy? Long gray hair?”

  “Yes. The three with him are his sons. A family of vipers. You and the boy will need to be careful with them, Mr. Wagner.”

  When she said his name he tightened his hand around the door frame.

  “You know me, eh? Tolliver’s been telling his tales.”

  “These men aren’t concerned with you,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken, “yet. But they will be the longer you linger.”

  “I don’t intend to linger. I’ve been trying to get—”

  “Give me your hand,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” Her whisper now held urgency.

  The wind picked up, blowing cool off the water, and Arlen’s flesh prickled. He was looking into her eyes, and while he meant to object he could not. He released the door frame and extended his right hand, and she lifted both of hers, the cuffs rattling, and grasped it. His breath caught at the touch, her slim hands cool against his, her fingers gliding over his palm.

  “You’re the girl from Cassadaga,” he said. “Sorenson’s girl.”

  The fortune-teller, the palm reader. The one who’d told Sorenson to watch for travelers in need.

  “I’m a girl from Cassadaga,” she said. “But not Sorenson’s. I already told you—I love the man in that house. David. And he loves me, and that will be our downfall, Mr. Wagner. Love is a powerful thing, and like all powerful things, it can be used to harm.”

  She was rubbing his palm lightly with her fingertips.

  “You fell in love with the wrong sort of boy,” Arlen said.

  “Shh. I’m trying to see whether you’re—”

  “Stop it,” he said suddenly, his voice rough, and he jerked his hand free. “I won’t have that bullshit. You can’t tell a damn thing from that.”

  She frowned but didn’t respond to his harshness.

  “You’re the boy’s guardian,” she said. “And you know that he won’t fare well in this place. I can tell that. You understand the danger and—”

  “I told you to stop it,” he said. “You want to talk truth, lady, I’ll talk it with you, but I’m not inclined to sit here and listen to foolishness.”

  “Of course not. You’ve tried long and hard to block the things you need to hear. At some point you’re going to have to listen.”

  “What I
will listen to is you explaining what happened to Walter Sorenson and what’s going on inside that…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t even get his mouth closed, just knelt there slack-jawed, staring into the dark of the sheriff’s car.

  The glittering silver handcuffs were now resting on thin shafts of bone.

  “What?” she said, and he raised his eyes, hoping to see those sculpted, full lips. A skull stared back at him.

  No words came. The skull tilted and studied him, then said, in a soft and sad voice, “It’s happened now, hasn’t it? He’s told them. It’s done.”

  Arlen couldn’t answer.

  She said, “You can see it in me. You truly have gifts beyond measure.”

  Finally, he spoke. Said, “Lady, you’ve got to get out of that car.”

  The skull shook slowly back and forth. “No.”

  “Yes. You have got to get out of that car and—”

  “They’ll find me,” she said. “And it will end the same for me, only it will also be bad for you and the boy. And for Rebecca. I won’t initiate such things.”

  “Lady,” he said, “Gwen, you’ve got to understand something. They’re going to kill you.”

  “They always were,” she said. “It just took some time to confirm it.”

  He couldn’t bear to look at the skull anymore. He pulled out his matchbook and struck a match and leaned into the car, held it close to her. In the flickering light, flesh spread like butter over the bones and she was whole again. Whole except for the whirling pools of gray smoke where her eyes belonged.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re leaving. We’re going to run. All three of us. I’ll get the boy up here and we’ll run.”

  “You can’t run from them,” she said. “I hope you understand that. You’re going to need to. There will be no running from what lies ahead.”

  “Quiet,” he said. “We’re going now.” The match had burned down to his fingers, and he shook it out and reached for the door handle.

  “No!” she said, and she took the handle in her bone fingers and pulled back against his efforts.