“Um-huh. You must of seen him from the back,” I said. “Otherwise, it’s obvious. At least, that’s what the ladies say.”
Arlis groaned and shook himself. “God Aw’mighty, I’ve just about had it with this getting old shit. One minute, I’m damn happy my body’s showin’ it’s still got some perk. Next minute, I got the heebie-jeebies ’cause these worthless eyes a’ mine got me lusting after some dope-smoking hippie, thinking he’s got a good ass.”
The old man hacked as if to spit. “You got anything to drink around here, Doc?”
“Beer,” I said. “All I’ve got’s beer.”
Arlis said beer would do.
T wenty minutes later, keeping some distance between himself and Tomlinson, who was toweling his hair, Arlis said, “It’s some kinda Kraut badge. A fancy one. That eagle, too, with the square head. They both come from WW II. When we whupped the Nazis.”
In his nasal, Cracker accent, he said the letters—double-u double-u two—and pronounced Nazis Knot-says.
Arlis was leaning over the tray of sodium hydroxide, inspecting the medals, telling us what we might not know because his generation had done it, not ours. He looked like he wanted to reach and touch the things. The space of all those years now separated only by a few inches of clear water.
“They operated around Florida, you know. Nazi subs—U-boats, we called ’em. They sunk a lot of our freighters.” He looked to confirm that we were interested. “Sanibel, Captiva, and the barrier islands off Sarasota. We had coastal patrols, by boat and on foot. Coast Watchers, they called themselves, all volunteers. I did a few of them beach walks myself before the Army finally let me enlist at sixteen.
“People who lived near the Gulf couldn’t burn lights at night for fear they’d silhouette merchant vessels, and U-boats would sink ’em. So we had to black out our windows or the Coast Guard would come along and shoot the damn things out.”
It was a relief for him to be talking history now, something he was strong and sure about because, only a few minutes before, he’d nearly broken down when he told us how ashamed he was to have ever worked for a snake like Bern Heller, and he was glad they’d fired him yesterday after what happened to Javier.
“Getting old and dumber is about the most surprising thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “I was a strong man for so long, it takes some getting used to, being weak.”
This was the way Arlis was dealing with it: getting in his boat, burning energy by taking his apology from island to island, meeting friends.
Being on the water would help.
A rlis said he’d been in my house once before, long ago, just after the war, when it was still being used to store ice and fish, and to house fishermen.
“It smells the same, a good smell,” he said. “Pine lumber and creosote. I can smell the bay coming through the floor. Same as I remember when I come back from the Army.”
The war—that was something the old man was comfortable talking about. The war, and how it had changed Florida. Arlis had lived it, and he’d done some reading. The subject served to reestablish him as the man he once was. It also distanced him from the breakdown we’d witnessed.
I’d asked him to take a look at the Nazi medals lying in the sodium solution and tell me what he thought. Any ideas about how they’d ended up in forty feet of water, twelve miles off Sanibel Lighthouse?
That got him started; gave him a reason to stick around and finish the second beer Tomlinson poured. Also, the medals were right there to be seen, artifacts from another era. Like him.
Arlis’s gray eyes were huge through his glasses when he leaned to study detail. Hypnotic, that was the effect.
Tomlinson and I left him alone for a while so he could get himself under control. We retreated to the lower deck, where I chipped away four dollar-sized objects from the cable. I selected them randomly—there was no telling what lay beneath the armor work of calcium carbonate and barnacle scars.
As I worked, Tomlinson had glanced at the upper deck—empty—before he said, “It still bothers you, doesn’t it? I immediately picked up on the vibe. Because Arlis and Hannah were once lovers.”
I’d made the mistake of admitting my uneasiness about their relationship years before, and I was still paying the price. “Doesn’t bother me a bit. Besides, they weren’t lovers. Hannah was just…extrafriendly to the guy because he’s old. It was more like a therapeutic sort of deal.”
Among Tomlinson’s catalog of facial expressions is a superior all-knowing smile that, more than once, I’ve been tempted to slap off his face. I was tempted now. “Oh, great. Sure, that explains it, then. Therapy. So there’s no reason for you to make silly judgments about Hannah being with a man his age. Seems like I remember you saying it was…disgusting?”
Before he could find the right word—I’d said distasteful—I held up a warning finger. No lectures! Then handed him the four barnacle-coated objects, sharing their black sulfide stain now that he was freshly showered.
A few minutes later, the objects were soaking in sodium hydroxide as I prepared a third electrolytic reduction system. Hannah was a valued memory. I wouldn’t allow my own petty feelings about her relationship with Arlis Futch to impose on that memory.
Well, I’d try, anyway…
I readied copper wire, and another steel plate, as we listened to Arlis tell us how World War II had transformed Florida. Changed it more than any state in the union, he’d bet money. Florida had so much coastline, lots of deepwater ports, and we’re so close to Cuba, the Panama Canal—“Strategic location, understand?”—it made sense for the military to build a hundred new bases between Key West and Jacksonville, and order tens of thousands of personnel south.
Florida’s population nearly doubled in six years, he told us.
“South Florida used to be Southern. The war brought in Yankees from New York to Colorado. That’s why it’s Northern-like today.”
And the weather? There was another attraction. Troops could train here all year. Mess halls had fresh produce, even in January. And, in an era when coal and oil were rationed, buildings didn’t need to be heated. Which is why, Arlis told us, the government also built POW camps in Florida.
Arlis had a know-it-all manner that was irritating, but I paused when he mentioned prisoner of war camps.
“POWs in Florida? I never heard that before.”
Arlis said, “Hell, ’most no one knows it, ’cause no one really gives a tinker’s damn, these days. There was twenty or thirty POW camps in Florida; nearly a hundred thousand German prisoners. I should know, I worked at the camp in Fort Myers. You didn’t know about that? It was at Page Field, one of the smallish ones. Two hundred and seventy-one POWs, we had—I did the head count lots of nights.”
I listened to him tell us that his brother, Lexter, had served in Europe two years before the Army finally took Arlis, so Arlis did what he could for the war effort as a civilian.
“Some of them prisoners were pretty decent guys. They were off U-boats, the African Tank Corps, pilots in the Luftwaffe. Some of them, though, were bastard Kraut Nazis. Superior acting, like their shit wouldn’t draw a fly. So I wish’t they’d given me something other than a club to carry, but I was civilian staff.”
Page Field was on the mainland, fifteen miles from Sanibel. The county’s population has exploding southward, so the little transit airport was now a snag of open space in a flood of shopping malls and traffic.
“The camp was active all four years of the war?”
“Longer. All the camps stayed active. The earliest POWs came off U-boats that the Brits killed before Pearl Harbor got us into it. I didn’t leave for Army boot camp ’til late in the war, and when I come home on leave in ’46 we still had the POW camps.
“Some people said it was because the Krauts didn’t want to leave Florida. But I also heard we kept ’em around for cheap labor. We used them in the fields, picking citrus and such stuff, for eighty cents a day plus meals. Everyone needed workers because our me
n were away at war. Like the mess left by the hurricane of ’44—who else was gonna deal with it? The POWs were a hell of a big help, cleaning up the mess.”
Tomlinson said, “The hurricane of ’44? I’ve never heard of that one.”
“That’s because the war was still going on, so it didn’t make much news. Not like the hurricanes of ’28 and 1931—they’re the ones you read about. But bad? You want to talk about a bad hurricane? The ’44 hurricane was a hell of a lot worse than what just hit us. Worse than the storm that hit the Keys awhile back. It flooded Sanibel, a direct hit. Almost washed the lighthouse away. Three hundred and some people were killed. Check the history books. It came late—October 19th—ask anyone who lived through it. We didn’t get no early warnings then.
“Boys,” Arlis continued, “you have never seen a hurricane if you didn’t live through the storm of ’44. It reminds me of some of the stuff that went on in them war years…”
I turned away.
Jesus, the old know-it-all was feeling his beer already. Chattering along, no longer bothering to confirm we were listening. He was in the early stages of a talking jag, and it wasn’t going to be easy to get him out the door if we kept feeding him beer.
Next, he’d be talking about the good old days if we didn’t find a way to stop him. What it meant to be a native Floridian, fifth or sixth generation. How good the fishing used to be before everything went to hell.
I heard Arlis saying, “…we’d catch so many mullet in a single strike, you couldn’t even pull the damn net in…”
Here we go.
The man was already into it, talking nonstop, and now also looking at his empty glass so that Tomlinson would notice.
I interrupted, “Tomlinson, what time is that party supposed to start? Shouldn’t we be…”
Too late. Tomlinson was already crossing to the galley. Came back with a quart bottle, saying, “Our pal here’s getting thirsty.”
He filled Arlis’s glass with beer, and kept the rest for himself.
17
Still irritated, I listened to Arlis awhile longer, exaggerating my attentiveness, hoping Tomlinson would get the hint and realize it was time for the old man to move along.
No luck. Tomlinson, who was perceptive in elevated ways, could also be obtuse. Now, for instance. Sitting there guzzling my beer, straddling a lab stool as if he were in some Key Largo bar instead of a working laboratory. Goading Arlis to drone on and on via the intensity of his interest. Mr. Sensitive showing respect for oral history.
Or maybe he was encouraging the old man to talk because he knew it aggravated me.
Um-huh, Mr. Sensitive. Sensitive as a damn anvil.
“Well,” I said finally, “some of us have to work.” And moved away.
My headache had returned. Arlis’s nasal twang had found the rhythm of blood throbbing in my temples and every word had a serrated edge. I made an effort to tune him out. Fragments of sentences registered, though. They caught my attention on a level of consciousness that stays alert for useful information.
I checked the transformer’s voltage meter, adjusted the rheostat, then retrieved several more encrusted objects. His voice wasn’t as penetrating from the other side of the room, where I began chipping away at barnacle growth with a stainless pick.
“Bunch of Cuban fishermen washed up afterward, and we buried them right there on the beach, close to the lighthouse. Bloated, but no vultures around ’cause even the birds had been killed…
“…we didn’t get no warning, so people rode out the hurricane of ’44. Some famous people, too—or just missed being here. This was a sleepy part of Florida, but some of the world’s biggest names, they knew about these islands…
“…beautiful women? We had film actresses. I saw a woman on the beach, she’d make you ache. Still can see her face, if I close my eyes…
“The night the storm hit, one of our Coast Watch cruisers was out. Got a report someone saw lights. Maybe a U-boat, they said, but it was probably them Cubans. The Coast Watch boat—I can’t remember her name. Anyway, she never came back…
“Thomas Edison lived here, but was dead by then. Charles Lindbergh, though, I saw him many a time. And his wife, Anne…? I think she was here. Staying at her cottage on Captiva, where she wrote books.
“…John L. Lewis, too. He was almost as powerful as FDR in them war years. The great labor man; the coal miners’ union. Mr. Lewis, he loved to fish. He had a place at Pineland, up on the Indian mounds. You could see it from Captiva…
“Henry Ford, his house was on the river, and his family used it. You know the place, the mansion next to Edison’s where they have tourist trolleys now…”
I paused, as my attention vectored, drawn by the association of names. It was an eclectic list. Worth remembering, I decided.
Consciously, I summarized details: In the fall of 1944, four of America’s most famous and influential people, and/or their family members, had ties to the Sanibel area: The inventor of the automobile, the president of the United Mine Workers, the first man to fly the Atlantic solo, and his literary wife.
Yes, impressive.
Arlis was now saying, “I think there was a famous poem writer here, too. She had a hard name to remember. Saint-something. Edna…Saint-something, that’s close. She came almost every year.”
The name came into my mind as Tomlinson said it. “Edna St. Vincent Millay? She was an amazing poet; one of our first great feminists.”
“That’s the one,” Arlis said. “When the Sanibel Palms Hotel burned, the book she was writing got burned up with it. It made the newspapers, how sad she was about losing all those pages. But that was a few years before the storm, as I remember…”
Five powerful people, not four. Both women Pulitzer Prize winners.
Somewhere in the past, I’d heard that Millay had stayed on Sanibel. She’d written one of my favorite stanzas: “Whether or not we find what we are seeking/Is idle, biologically speaking.”
I was also aware that Ford, Edison, and the Lindberghs had lived in the area, and were friends, but I’d never heard their names connected in this way.
I listened to Arlis tell us, “I met Mrs. Millay. She was nice. Smart, too, and she knew it, which wasn’t considered polite for women in those days. That’s probably why some folks gossiped about her. Not the locals—it was always outsiders. She liked her whiskey, that’s what I heard.” Arlis lowered his voice. “She liked men, too. Young ones. And girls. What they mostly talked about, though, was her being a Commie.”
I glanced at Tomlinson to see his reaction. “She was a socialist, that was no secret. Most intellectuals of that period were. Still are, as far as I’m concerned. She wrote some very heavy stuff about the movement.”
“Well,” Arlis said, “in the war years, because of all the censorship, the only way to get news was to talk to outsiders. That’s what we did, so you never knew what to believe. People said Mr. Lewis was a Commie, too. And you shoulda heard some of the stories that went around about Henry Ford.
“They said that Mr. Ford went to Germany and built a car factory for Hitler. That Ford and Colonel Lindbergh was both secret supporters of Hitler. They were all close friends, you know, Mr. Ford, Colonel Lindbergh, and Thomas Edison.”
Tomlinson was nodding, aware.
“At Mr. Ford’s house, there was a German employee or two—that kept the rumors going. He had a bunch of them working for him in Detroit. Germans, I’m saying.
“People worried they was spies. Who knows? The first time we marched our POWs to Mr. Ford’s mansion to work, those Germans pretended like they weren’t happy to see more Krauts. But they were, I could tell.”
I was listening again, interested. “You took POWs to Ford’s home more than once?”
“Not me. The captain in charge of the Page Field camp. In ’44, there was a big storm in August, too. Not a hurricane, but enough to knock down trees. We liked to keep them Krauts busy.
“One thing I do know for certain,” Arlis
added, “is that Hitler gave Mr. Ford a medal. Check the history books, there’s photos of Ford wearing it on his chest. A cross of some kind, a famous award, but the name of it’s gone from my memory now.”
I watched Arlis turn to lean toward the reduction tray. The sodium hydroxide was bubbling as the old man’s reflection colored the surface. “Mr. Ford’s medal wasn’t as fancy as this one, though. Bigger, maybe, but not as fancy.” He meant the silver death’s-head.
The lenses of his glasses caught the light. “You figure those are real diamonds?”
I’d looked at the stones under a microscope. No visible scratches. I said, “I think they are,” then asked for his opinion again: How did Nazi medals end up on a wreck off Sanibel?
Arlis shrugged, and used the back of his hand to wipe his face. “Hard to say. There’s a story about a sunken U-boat, but it’s bullshit—us old-timers would’ve known. They can’t be off a German warship or freighter, neither. We’d a blowed the bastards out of the water before they made the Florida Straits.”
He thought about it for a while, then impressed me, saying, “A plane, maybe? I’ve read that some of the Nazi big shots, the really bad ones—the ones who did experiments on people? I read some of them escaped before the war ended. They had new identities, the routes all planned. They left Europe on a U-boat headed for South America, or even the U.S. Once they got ashore, they could’ve switched to a plane. In those days, planes crashed a lot more often than they do now.”
He was silent for a few moments more, then impressed me again. “Know what, Doc? A medal as fancy as this, it’s the sort of thing generals wear. Except for all those diamonds. The diamonds, they just don’t fit. Think about it. Who would you give a medal that’s covered with diamonds?”
I was still processing the question when Arlis and Tomlinson both spoke at the same time. They said: “A woman.”
18
After sunset, east of Dinkin’s Bay, the peaks of storm clouds were neon pink but water swollen at their anvil bases.
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