Like Light for Flies

by Lee Thomas

  As children my sister and I had tied the tops of wheat stalks together, creating thatch tunnels and shelters in the pasture behind our parents’ home. Fragile Marjorie, always nervous, would have worried herself sick over the angry clouds and the coming storm.

  I paused and pulled a cigarette from the tin in my breast pocket and a box of matches from my trousers. Marjorie remained in my thoughts as I drew deeply and felt the smoke grate the tissue of my throat before becoming smooth and calming in my lungs as if its edges were worn away on its journey through my chest. My mother had given birth to six children. Marjorie was the oldest and I the youngest. The four in between—all girls—had each succumbed to illness and been buried before their first birthdays, and as a boy, I’d thought Marjorie and I were somehow blessed, chosen among the six to live and thrive and build important lives. Foolish I know, but children look for reason in everything. It’s only through enduring the passing of years that we discover the truth: Fate is a blind giant stumbling through the world indifferent to the misery staining the soles of its feet.

  At the edge of the mangrove thicket, I put down my pole and opened up the canvas sack I carried to store my day’s catch. There was no art or skill to snatching critters from beneath the arched fingers of the mangrove roots, at least none I’d ever reasoned out. Either the fish and crabs were there for the grabbing or they weren’t. Still I usually managed to haul something up from the salty water, even if I didn’t recognize the fish I’d caught.

  I walked into the thicket to a place where the grassy land reached into the ocean a bit, which gave me access to the caged waters on either side. Kneeling down, I immediately saw a shape in the shadowed surf, and I crawled forward, applauding my good luck, but as I drew closer, it became apparent that I had not stumbled on a convenient delicacy.

  The man’s face was bloated and torn with strips of skin waving in the tide like a paper mask, white and shredded. Black holes had replaced his eyes and the surrounding lids had been gnawed into frayed flaps. An open mouth showed me rotted teeth and diseased gums, but his tongue had been stripped by bottom feeders or plucked out by a tenacious gull. Half a dozen tiny crabs—no longer an appetizing prospect—worked over the man’s throat and chest.

  I’d seen more horrible things in war, but the sight of the drowned man, so viciously consumed, worked into my skin and clamped around the nape of my neck. I backed away on hands and knees, and then found my feet. Leaving the canvas sack and my fishing rod where they lay, I raced back to the camp to share my discovery.

  On the edge of the camp I caught up with the search party. They’d stopped to gab before joining the other men on the grub line. With great care, I explained what I had found, and the sixman party followed me back to the mangrove thicket.

  Pulling the dead man free proved difficult as none of us wanted to hold him too tightly. Michael Bainbridge leaned between two thick roots and with his knife, flicked the crabs away from their supper, and then he and two other men reached in and took the collar of the man’s jacket. They hauled him upward, but his swollen bulk proved too great to fit between the roots. Eventually, I and another man waded out and around the tree and found a wider opening on the other side.

  The dead man’s cheek rested on the back of my hand, feeling like cold dough against my skin. I fought an overwhelming disgust to keep hold of him.

  We put the body on a tarp and hauled it over the darkening beach. Mercer had been sent to alert the Captain, and Steve ran ahead to find Dr. Mathias, not that the man swinging in the canvas cradle could benefit from a doctor’s help. He was beyond pills and draughts and bandages. Well beyond. But the doctor was the only medical authority in the camp, and his official duties had just been expanded to include those of coroner.

  “Looks like he got himself tore up under a boat,” Gunnar Blake noted.

  “No,” Michael Bainbridge said. Bainbridge was one of the few men I’d met in the camp that relied on books for entertainment, forsaking card games and trips into Miami for quiet afternoons with a novel. “He hasn’t been broken, just ripped up a bit where his clothes weren’t covering. The ocean did that to him. Fish and crabs can take a good amount of meat off a man if he isn’t fighting back.”

  “They got his eyes,” Dee Dee Macaby said at my back.

  “First thing to go,” Bainbridge said knowingly. “Fish have a taste for a man’s eyes.”

  We carried the body down the beach, struggling with the shifting weight and the unpredictable sand, sinking to erratic depths with each step. We waited for Dr. Mathias on the north side of camp at the entrance of the infirmary. The doctor and his nurse, who was also his wife, locked the place up tight unless they had a patient inside. If the infirmary was empty they stayed out to the hotel with the Captain and the other swells, but if even a single man lay on a cot, the doctor and his wife moved house to the small room behind the hospital to keep an eye on their patient. Of course calling the wooden shack a hospital was a bit grand, but it’s where we put our sick and injured, and it’s where we came for sodium bicarbonate when our bellies went sour.

  The doctor, a wiry little guy with black hair and small ears, strolled around the motor pool tent, his lantern swinging before him like a teasing faerie. He made no concession to speed, which made perfect sense. A corpse could be patient.

  “Steve said you found him under a mangrove down the beach,” Dr. Mathias commented, producing a key and opening the door of the infirmary.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “I was crabbing or about to start anyway, and I saw this here fella.”

  The doctor made a sound deep in his throat and bobbed his head once. We crowded into the infirmary, the four of us jostling back and forth and sideways to get through the door, carrying our morbid load. “Put him on the desk,” Dr. Mathias instructed. “No point in fouling bed clothes. I’m sure he’s as comfortable as he’s going to get.”

  “Yes, sir,” the four of us said in unison.

  The doctor pulled a few books off the wooden tabletop and then stepped back, allowing us to position ourselves at the corners of the desk and gently lower the body. We released the canvas tarp and stepped back as the fabric fell like a drape to cover the table’s wooden legs. The doctor lifted his lantern to get a better look at the corpse and winced.

  “One of the men from the other camps?” Dr. Mathias asked.

  “He’s wearing a uniform, looks to be a Lieutenant,” Dee Dee said. “So I reckon he is.”

  “Well, the tide wouldn’t bring him down the coast like that,” Bainbridge said—always so sure of his thoughts. “He must have worked his way down the keys from Camp One or Camp Five and took shelter ‘neath them Mang-gers. Maybe he got himself drunk and fell in and drowned.”

  “That’s a fine theory,” Dr. Mathias said, making Bainbridge smile and shrug as if it were all very obvious. “I’ll keep it in mind while I do my examination, which I should be getting to, so if you gentleman would excuse us.”

  The word us stuck with me for a second. Who else did he mean? He hadn’t brought his wife to the infirmary with him—no need to expose the woman to such a sight, though as a nurse she’d likely seen worse—and I soon realized the plurality he implied consisted of himself and a dead man. It was an act of compassion, I thought. The doctor refused to deny the Lieutenant’s humanity and presence though his soul had moved on. He was a good man, our doctor.

  As the four of us retreated, Dr. Mathias called me back.

  “Lonnie, if you have a second.”

  “Sure,” I told him.

  I joined the doctor on the far side of the table, my back to its terrible setting.

  “Have you checked in on Graham Rowe today?” he asked, placing a hand on my shoulder.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “After the shift ended and before I set out to the beach. I was hoping to find him some fresh fish to eat instead of the camp rations. Thought it might sit better with him.”

  “It might have done at that,” the doctor said. “How did he look?�
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  “Better. He still has the rash and his eyes are cloudy, but his fever’s broke and he’s got a grip like a vice. He’ll likely be up and around in no time.”

  “Well that’s fine,” Dr. Mathias said. “I’m pleased to hear it. Never seen anything like it before.”

  “Me neither.”

  “That noted, I wish he’d have kept himself here to the infirmary for a spell longer. Never seen a sick man want to be alone so much.”

  “That’s just Graham’s way.”

  “I’ll swing by in the morning and pay a visit.”

  “Much appreciated,” I said.

  “You’re a good friend to him. A lot of folks would have kept their distance what with us not knowing the cause of his ailment. Might have been contagious.”

  “You help your pals,” I said.

  “Indeed,” Dr. Mathias agreed. He clapped my shoulder and gave me a bit of a shove, turning me toward the door. “You head on back to your room and get some rest. I’m sure the Captain will want a word once I get him my report.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  But I didn’t go back to my shack. Instead, I followed an alley between the shacks to the center of the camp and turned to the left, heading toward the ocean. It was still early and if it weren’t for the scab of clouds covering the sky, the beach and camp would have been bathed in sunlight. Wind gusted between the buildings, moaning horribly like a legion of lost souls, and it carried the tangy scent of electricity on its currents. A drop of rain plopped onto my brow and slid down the side of my nose, running like a tear across my cheek. Our crew leader had complained about his knees and had assured us it meant a storm was on the way, and I’d taken him at his word.

  At Graham’s shack, I stopped and lifted myself to toe tips to peer through the window. Gray on gray shapes filled the gloom, and when I finally took in Graham’s form, my heart skipped mightily in my chest.

  He lay naked across his bed, facing me. He appeared as dead as the Lieutenant on the doctor’s table. Graham’s strong round face now seemed flat like a mask carved of stone. It was the color of bread dough, eyes wide and lips parted. Motionless. A knot of sorrow lodged in my throat and two more drops of rain rapped on my head. I let myself into the shack and crossed to the cot and took up one of his cold hands in mine, and I placed my other palm against his cheek. I was startled to see him blink.

  “Lon?” he asked.

  Relief came over me and I squeezed his hand gently. “I’m here, Pal,” I said.

  “It’s so dark. Did I sleep all day?”

  “Nah. It’s just overcast. Storm is coming, Graham. Should be a real corker.”

  Rain began to rap heavily on the roof to confirm what I’d said. Graham looked toward the ceiling and blinked several times as if uncertain what the sounds might mean. He rolled his head on the pillow and gazed beyond me to the window.

  “I guess the storm’s here,” he said. Then he tried to clear his throat and reached up with his free hand to rub his neck. “Thirsty,” he said.

  I released his hand, and it fell to his side. From the table by the window I lifted the lantern and a moment later had it lit, along with a cigarette, which I clamped firmly between my lips. I poured water from a canteen into a cup. I put the cup to Graham’s lips and he gulped the water down.

  “That’s good,” he whispered.

  His voice hissed through the air like a static charge and then vanished. So weak. I couldn’t help but note the contradiction of his physical appearance and his state. The sickness that had so affected him had no visible effect on his musculature. His chest and shoulders, covered in a fine spray of black hairs, were immense and intimidating, seeming even more pronounced than before the illness had subdued him, and his arms, seemed particularly swollen, though I attributed this to a play of light and shadow on his skin. The red welts, some kind of pox, still covered him head to toe, but their intensity had diminished. They no longer looked inflamed, and I took this as a good sign for my good friend’s recovery.

  We shared similar histories, Graham Rowe and I. I’d played baseball—third base for the Yankees—prior to the war and for a brief time after the armistice, before the fury at the back of my head broke free. Graham had been a boxer, a heavyweight. He could have been one of the greats, right up there with Dempsey, Louis, Carnera, or Sharkey. But he’d brought integrity into a business that found any such characteristic an obstacle to profit. He’d fought fair and had refused any suggestion to the contrary, and for his ethical stand, a thug with the Irish mob had shot a .38 slug into Graham’s right kneecap, sufficiently ending his pugilistic pursuits. He’d been lucky to keep the leg. Maybe the only luck he’d had in the last ten years.

  I guess a lot of us at the camp had a good starving for luck.

  As for me, my troubles started long before the market crashed; they began in a trench gouged through the French countryside. It was there, amid blossoms of fire and mustard gas and hails of German bullets that my brain went bad. The quick-fire rages and blackouts came later, after I’d returned home, but they had originated there. I know it. My instability was born from the sight of an unclean woman—a woman who could not die—who walked the battlefields clutching some foul offspring to her breast.

  Back home after the war, my career went fast, teammates turning their backs on the man who’d returned from Europe with all of his skills intact, but something living in the back of his brain like a coiled snake. I argued with an umpire. I blacked out. I woke up in restraints. In my absent state, I’d broken the umpire’s jaw and blinded him in one eye. Marjorie, my sister and only living family, went into an asylum and then into death, having opened her wrists with a bit of broken glass much to the amusement of the two dozen shaved-headed women sharing her ward and much to the disinterest of the matrons who’d left her to bleed out on the wooden floor. My money vanished in twenty-nine, as insubstantial and irretrievable as the souls of Wall Street suicides. I ended up at the veteran’s camp on Lower Matecumbe Key as part of the New Deal, and I thought my luck might turn, but that was simply a delusion of hope—being so far down the only place left to look was up.

  Something happened to me in the trenches, happened to a lot of men, I imagine. But they died in the mud with it. I carried it home.

  “When are you going to quit faking and get out of that bed?” I asked Graham.

  He tried to smile. “It’s crazy,” he said. “Come here.”

  I did as he asked, and when he lifted his hand toward me, I took it. His wide palm wrapped around mind, and he tightened his grip. In seconds it felt like my hand was trapped in an apple press. I could feel the bones grinding. Finally, I asked him to stop and his hand dropped away again.

  “I can barely keep my eyes open,” he said. “Can barely breathe. But I bet I could still crush a walnut without half trying. How can that be? How can I be weak as a baby and strong as an ox at the same time?”

  “You’re getting better,” I told him. “Some parts get better faster than others is all. The rest will catch up soon enough.”

  This seemed to satisfy him and Graham closed his eyes, took a ragged breath, and fell asleep. I pulled up a chair and then remembered the captain would expect a report once he heard from the doctor, so I left Graham to sleep and stepped into the rain, and in the dimming light, through the pelting downpour, I thought I saw movement on the beach.

  I stood there for some time, squinting to bring the shapes on the sand into focus, but it wasn’t until a bolt of lightning broke the blackness above the ocean that the scene became clear. Five men stood in the surf, a great wave rising at their backs. Three of the men wore the black coats and caps I associated with a ship’s crew or longshoremen. The other two wore strips of torn fabric, merely remnants of garments no longer sufficient to protect their wearers from the elements or provide suitably modest coverings. The lightning flash bleached their faces and bodies white. One of the five stared directly at me and in the heartbeat’s time of illumination managed to sink to a cro
uch as if preparing to spring. Then darkness returned.

  The sight of the men so startled me that I hurried back into Graham’s shack and threw my shoulder to the door. A great weight hit the other side of the plank and the shack rattled as if it might collapse around us. A second collision coaxed a curse from my lips, and from his bed Graham groaned in his sleep. Then the thunder rolled overhead. I braced myself more securely against the door, but no further assault occurred. I thought I heard a shout from farther down the camp, but it could have been nothing more than the wind screaming at the rain.

  Another flash of lightning. Thunder exploded over the shack, and I heard screams, and I was back in a trench, an open tunnel of glistening mud. Guns fired all around me. Explosions lit the night like transient bonfires hovering in the dismal air, and I felt their heat. Men screamed. The torrential downpour couldn’t wash away the scent of blood and shit and rot.

  The fugue played for only a moment, but the agitation it brought stayed with me. Staring at the dark window from my place at Graham’s door, my vision grew red at the edges and my heartbeat sounded in my ears like a marching battalion. The anger came over me in a spasm. So quick. So familiar.

  I shouldn’t have to be afraid, not again, not ever again. What right did the grim sailors have to attack me?

  I threw open the door and clenched my fists and stomped into the wet sucking sand, looking for the strange men. But the next flash of lightning, and the next, showed me I was alone on the beach. Monstrous waves rose in the sparking light. The rain doused me. I breathed in great panting bellows as if I’d just run a tremendous distance, and before long the fury passed, leaving me certain that the sailors had not been there at all. They’d been in my mind, like so many other nightmares.

  Like the woman I’d seen on a French battlefield: a dead woman who walked across a plain of brilliant explosions, carrying the body of a newborn baby. And like my sister, drawn through the night by long crimson reins emanating from the gashes in her arms to hover over my bed like a portent of bleak tomorrows.