Like Light for Flies

by Lee Thomas

  I sat with Graham for a time and even dozed, dreaming about my sister and trenches filling with blood like gutters during a rain storm, eventually waking to find the light coming through the small windows had not changed, and the rap of the rain had taken on an insistence far surpassing the usual afternoon downpour. Once again, I checked Graham’s temperature and found him cool to the touch, with no sign of fever. He stirred in his sleep again, and I pulled my hand away. Having no idea how long I’d napped, and uncertain if I should wait in my cabin for the captain to summon me or simply be on hand for his queries at the infirmary, I left my friend and made a stop at my cabin to retrieve a slicker before setting off once again to see the doctor. Along the way, a man named Horrocks, shouted my name, which I barely heard over the rain. I found him standing in the open doorway of his cabin, and I slogged through the muddy sand to greet him.

  Horrock’s wasn’t an easy man to like, and I can’t say we were exactly friends. He was a foul looking man with pendulous jowls and a perpetual stubble on his cheeks that looked as if his face had been smeared with coffee grounds, and though I didn’t keep track of his visits to the showers, they had to be infrequent due to the often overpowering reek that rolled from him. Further he was crude in ways that seemed to go beyond a poor upbringing, as he often grinned at the shock his words could bring to the eyes of those with whom he spoke.

  “You see that cocksucker Reynolds out there?” Horrocks asked.

  I told him I hadn’t. The only other men I’d seen in the storm were those my uncertain mind had placed there.

  “Damndest thing,” he said, drawing the last bit of life from a cigarette, the paper burned down right to his lips. “We were walking back from the mess tent, talking about this bastard storm, and the son of a bitch just disappeared. I figured he made a dash for the latrine because the food is always giving him the shits, or maybe forgot that he’d left something burning in his cabin, but one second he was there trying to tell me the storm would blow over soon enough, even though he knew full well what the report out of Miami said, and then poof…gone. Damnedest thing.”

  “Did you check his cabin?”

  “Nah,” said Horrocks, “didn’t want my supper getting any wetter. Just thought I’d ask if you seen him. Trying to scrape together a few bastards for a card game tonight. Reynolds can’t play worth a shit and I could use the scratch.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  This seemed good enough for Horrocks, and he nodded his head before lighting up another smoke.

  “What did Miami say?” I asked.

  “Come again?”

  “You said you were talking to Reynolds about a weather report out of Miami.”

  “Oh sure, right,” Horrocks said as if having to search many months or years through his memory before landing on the bit of information.

  “Well?”

  “Just a storm,” he said. “gonna be with us for a while. Maybe through tomorrow or more. Nothing to worry about they said. If it gets bad the hurricane flags will go up and they’ll blow the horn. Looks like you’ll get a day off the road.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “If you see Reynolds, you send him on over. I’d like to take a bit of his money home with me tonight.”

  “Will do,” I replied.

  Then I left Horrocks in his cabin. At the infirmary, I found the doctor sliding a notebook into his breast pocket. He’d folded the thick canvas over the dead man on the table. It looked like a giant cocoon from which some hideous creature might emerge.

  “Ah Lon,” Mathias said, “I’m sorry you came all the way back in this squall.”

  “You said the captain would want a report.”

  “Indeed, but he sent word that he wouldn’t be leaving the hotel tonight, so I’ll be meeting with him there. You are welcome to come, but it’s probably a waste of your time. I have your statement, and I’ve made a good number of notes about our unfortunate friend there. Nothing seems to be amiss—no weapon wounds or broken bones. His skull was perfectly intact. So we’ll have this one put down to an accident, likely not dissimilar to the explanation Bainbridge had for it. If you’d like to accompany me, please do, but you’d probably be better served returning to your cabin and drying off. We don’t need you coming down with a cold or some other crud.”

  I agreed with the doctor and waited for him to finish gathering his things—his bag, the brass lantern—and led him into the storm.

  “Nasty one,” he said, indicating the weather with a wave of his lantern.

  “Yes, it is,” I replied.

  We wished each other a good night and the doctor hurried off toward the road, rounding the motor pool tent, his lamplight guiding him through the scratchy murk. Once he disappeared into the storm, I set off for my cabin, but a shrill squeal stopped me. It sounded like tin being torn, but the shriek lasted only a second and then faded away like the echo of a coin dropping on a church floor. I turned toward the motor pool, where I believed the sound had come from and saw a dot of light drop from the sky, like a falling star. The scene confused me because no flame could burn in this weather, certainly not the entire distance I had seen it drop.

  Quickly, I jogged toward the motor pool and ran around it, chasing the fire I believed I’d seen falling from the storm battered sky. The canvas tent, covering the automobiles and trucks, whipped angrily in the wind, popping and cracking like the offspring of the thunder above. I searched the gloom for the strange light but saw nothing save the pale strip of highway ahead. Throwing my gaze up and down the road, there was no sign of a light. I walked forward and after a dozen steps the toe of my boot rattled a metal casing. At first I thought I’d kicked an old can or perhaps one of the tin bowls we took our grub on, but the clanging complaint came from a brass lantern lying on the sand. Though there was no way to be certain, it looked like the lamp Doctor Mathias had been carrying. I bent down and picked it up. The glass was smashed and the scent of kerosene wafted from the dripping wick. And I looked upward, judging the distance I’d seen the light falling from and quickly determined it had originated too high to have been merely tossed, and even if it had been thrown into the air, why in the world would anyone discard the thing in that way?

  I called for Doctor Mathias, but received no reply.

  Then I thought about bonfires, hovering above the ground, shattering the men they touched into ragged, fragmented pieces. Lightning crashed, sending blue-white light across the camp and down the unfinished highway. No one. Empty. Deserted.

  The lamp had probably been there all day. It couldn’t have been the source of the falling light I’d witnessed, unless a biplane had soared through the tortured air and dropped it.

  That night the dreams were particularly awful, and I’m certain I didn’t sleep for more than twenty minutes at any given time. Too many explosions. Too many pops of rifle fire. Too many screams and all of these underscored by the marching beat of the falling rain.

  Four men were reported missing the next morning, including Vic Reynolds and Doctor Irvin Mathias. The news spread through the camp like the plague. I was incredibly troubled by these disappearances, but it wasn’t the worst news I got on the morning of the storm. Not nearly the worst.

  A fist pounded on my door drawing me from my bed. Outside, amid the continued downpour Arthur Horrocks stood holding a sheet of tin over his head to deflect the worst of the rain.

  “Fucking camp is on alert,” he said. “We got four sons of bitches missing and the storm flags are going up all along the coast. Might have us a hurricane blowing in.”

  The news unsettled me greatly. I’d heard about hurricanes before, heard they made a good gulley washer look like mist, heard the wind came on so strong it could launch a piece of wood with enough force to pierce a tree trunk like an arrow. Bad things, hurricanes. I didn’t want to meet one. But I was equally concerned about the other bit of news Horrrocks had passed on.

  “Who’s gone?”

  “The doc never made it
back to the hotel last night. His wife and the captain are pitching fits. I went in to cover the radio this morning, and they sent me away, telling me to get some men together to search the camp for him. Along the way, we found out Oliver Wertz went out to use the latrine last night and never came back, and I still ain’t seen hide nor hair of Reynolds.”

  “That’s three,” I said. “Who’s the fourth?”

  “We checked in on Graham Rowe just after sun up, or what would be sun up if the cocksucking sun ever showed itself, and he didn’t answer his door. We checked inside but didn’t see him, so we waited a bit, but he didn’t come back.”

  I took the news about Graham like a punch to the breadbasket, even felt a bit of tears in my eyes over it. The men who’d disappeared from the other camps had never showed up—except for the man we’d found in the mangrove roots—and the idea that Graham might have met a similar fate made me ill. I felt bad about the doctor as well, and I considered the fire that had rained down the night before, leading me to discover a broken lantern in the sand. Maybe god himself was reaching down and snatching these men into the sky, lifting them high, only to drop them as an omen of his displeasure—but displeasure for what? We’d all carried our suffering to the lowest place imaginable; how much punishment did any one man deserve?

  Horrocks finished by saying that the captain wanted all of the men to round up the women and children and get them situated in the schoolhouse. Then he wanted the men to grab rations from the mess and settle in for the storm. Coffee would be available at the post office all day. If the siren blew that meant the storm was bad and the camp would be evacuated and all the men were to gather at the depot. Safety lines had been run from the post office to the camp. The captain suggested men buddy up so they could keep track of each other in the storm.

  Horrocks said all of this as if reading from a notepad. I told him I understood and let him move on to the next cabin.

  I decided to visit Graham’s cabin myself. Maybe he had been out, feeling better and testing his legs, eager to be moving in the air despite the hellacious weather. I grabbed my slicker and pulled it on and walked across the camp to Graham’s shack, and I opened the door to find his bed remained empty. The hole in my chest, one I’d been aware of since Horrocks had suggested Graham was among the missing, flooded with acid and my temper flared.

  It wasn’t fair. Graham was a good man. He didn’t waste his wages on whores or gamble them in an attempt to prove that luck hadn’t deserted him completely. He helped the folks in the camp out and despite his bum leg, he more than pulled his weight on the highway crew. What kind of hateful thing would just carry him away? What kind of god would allow it?

  Furious, I pounded my fist against the door, relieving only a fraction of my rage. I cursed and shouted and kept hitting the door until the imprint of my fist had been cracked into the thin wood. This proved insufficient to vent my anger, so I stomped across the room and kicked the chair by Graham’s cot, and then I kicked the cot itself, sending it hard to the wall.

  Graham’s hand dropped into view then like a pale dead spider. Something in the night had driven him to the shadows beneath his cot, and his bedclothes had been drawn down like a curtain obscuring him from view. I knelt and pulled the cloth aside and my good friend’s empty eyes cut through the gloom to cool the acid in my chest with absolute sorrow. His mouth was frozen in a shallow frown, lips tensed and drawn away from his teeth. His arms curled at the elbows as if Graham had succumbed to a convulsion and death had frozen him in an unnatural and horrific position.

  Oddly though, he had gathered a selection of his belongings with him beneath the cot: an old pair of boxing gloves; a photograph of Graham in the ring, arms held high, the referee scowling at his back. My chest tightened upon noticing the cheap straw hat I’d bought him as a joke the last time we’d visited Key West. The items rested against his side as if he’d been clutching them tight before the final spasm of death had overcome him.

  I let the bedclothes fall to cover the dreadful scene and my throat constricted around a sob. Pulling the chair I’d so recently kicked to the side of the bed, I sat down and waited for the sadness to pass, but a cheerless souvenir fell loose in my head, adding to my grief.

  The telegram from the Orchard Sanitarium, telling me of my sister’s suicide, arrived on a Monday afternoon in January as snow fell like confetti outside my apartment’s window. I don’t remember destroying my furniture or ripping the cabinet doors from their hinges. I remember reading the telegram and the world skipped, and I regained my composure to find myself sitting amid the shards of broken dishes on the floor of my kitchen, my hand broken, two knuckles shattered, blood forming a web on my palm. It was then that I began to believe that neither my sister nor myself had been blessed, but rather, we were cursed, forced to endure life while our siblings escaped the trial completely by dying before the world put them to any real test. I couldn’t help but wonder how much a man had to lose before he accepted the fact there was nothing left to fight for.

  After a time of pronounced self-pity I brought Graham’s body out from under the cot. I took one of his old shirts and held it outside under the rain until it was soaked through and then I wiped his body down, cleaning away the waste that had followed his soul out of his body, and I tossed the shirt back out to the beach before lifting Graham onto the cot. I placed the items he’d selected to carry with him under the bed next to him on the mattress, holding the straw hat for several seconds before adding it to the collection. Then I covered him and his keepsakes with a blanket—it was as close to dignity as I could offer him.

  The door blew out of my grasp when I opened it and slammed against the cabin’s wall. Rain pelted the grim room, riding gusts of wind. I struggled outside and managed to get the door closed before another gale sent me into the side of the cabin. The ocean rose and fell in great steely swells, capped in a sickly pale foam that crashed to the muddy beach like a great limbless beast struggling to wriggle its way closer to the camp. Again I saw the grim sailors, but this time I knew it was a projection of my mind, a simple memory cast against a gray screen. I made it behind Graham’s shack before the next great blast of wind hit, and the shirt I’d discarded to the beach flew past me like a stained spirit.

  Unsure of whom to inform about Graham’s death, I worked my way from cabin to cabin, clutching close to the thin wooden walls, which offered some minor protection from the storm, and made my way back to the infirmary. From there, I’d radio the hotel to inform the captain that Graham Rowe was not among the missing, but he was with his Lord.

  A number of men had gathered in the infirmary: Chester McMahon, a strapping Irishman in his mid-forties and the father of Robby McMahon who had kept me company on the beach the evening before; stout and solemn Dee Dee Macaby, a man who craved military order; the always-thinking Michael Bainbridge; and the foul-mouthed Arthur Horrocks. A dozen other men—some of whom I knew by name and others I’d seen in the camp—huddled around a small wooden table and the radio sitting there. A thin voice—belonging most likely to Ricky James who acted as first shift communications officer—trickled and squeaked over the tiny speaker as he updated the weather situation. The rickety building creaked around us, battered by the increasing wind. The gusts moaned and howled. Nails squealed as distressed boards took the full brunt of the gale.

  Just to my side lay the body of the dead Lieutenant, still wearing his canvas shroud atop Doctor Mathias’s desk. Beyond the gathered men were the ten cots, five to a side, where our injured and ill had spent their days.

  “Cocksucker says we’re to stay put,” Horrocks said. He laid his hand on the table beside the radio, tensed as if ready to beat the machine for having given him unwelcome news. “Got red flags flying from Key West to Camp Number 5, and the mule fucking, shit-stained Captain says we’re supposed to hunker down and ride it out.”

  “That’s disappointing,” Bainbridge said, scratching his eyebrow.

  “I’m about a minute from grabbing
Robby and Louise May and taking one of them trucks outside. Get our asses up to Homestead or Miami,” said Chester McMahon.

  “That’s theft of military property,” Dee Dee said. “Court martial.”

  “This ain’t the fucking army,” Horrocks said with a laugh. “It’s a government sponsored chain gang. We pretend it’s an infantry unit because it’s the only fucking way we can deal with the hard cots, the shit grub, and the lack of pussy.”

  “Either way, it’s theft,” Bainbridge noted. He turned to Chester. “You want this to blow through and lose what little you’ve already got? Are you going to stand with Robby and Louise May on a bread line every day?”

  Chester thought this over, and I watched Bainbridge’s sharp wisdom deflate his rebelliousness. The man looked around the room, perhaps seeking support from one of the other men, but none of them would meet his gaze. I wouldn’t meet it either. The rope the government had given me was thin and burned my hands, but it kept me from falling, and I wasn’t about to encourage anyone to take it from me.

  “The Captain’s never steered us wrong,” Dee Dee said. “He says it’s gonna pass. It’s gonna pass.”

  “Any word on the missing men?” I asked.

  Horrocks twisted his face toward me and shook his head. “We found Wertz’s dopp kit wedged in a mound of sand by the latrine. Reynolds, the Doc, and Rowe just plain vanished.”

  I didn’t bother mentioning the lantern I’d found the night before, which might have belonged to the doctor, but I did say, “Graham isn’t missing. He’s dead.”

  A hush ran through the infirmary and though a few men dropped their chins as if in prayer, the others turned to me questioningly.

  “I went to his cabin after I spoke to Horrocks this morning. He was under his cot.”

  “Why the good Goddam was he under his cot?” Horrocks asked.

  “Must have fallen out of bed,” I said. “The fever could have come back, muddled his thoughts. I don’t know.”