by Lee Thomas
“A few men should go over and retrieve his body, bring it here to be loaded on the train once the storm passes.” Bainbridge said this, still gazing at the floor.
“Best leave him be,” I said. He was tucked in with the memories he’d considered fond, and that struck me as an okay way to be for a while, better than lying on a desk like the dead lieutenant. Wind slammed into the side of the infirmary, making it groan as if in pain. I waited for one of the men to argue my suggestion, but none of them did. “He’s fine enough where he is. The Captain have any orders about how to secure the camp? Sand bags? Buttresses? Anything?”
“No,” Chester said through a scowl. “Not a peep. He’s all safe and secure in that hotel so it don’t make him no never mind.”
This complaint brought up a wave of agreement from the room. Men nodded and offered their own words of dissatisfaction. The same men who had refused to support Chester in his plan to steal a truck only minutes before proved more than happy to join in his vitriol. Soon enough, hushed grumblings rose to all out shouts: What are they doing for us? Where’s the evacuation train? I have a family to think about. It ain’t right! Before long angry voices rose so high, I could no longer hear the rain beating the roof or the wind attacking the infirmary walls.
“Enough,” Dee Dee shouted, bringing a sudden silence to the room. He began to pace like a colonel before morning roll, throwing hard glances at the men gathered in the shack. A few of the men—whether from reflex or genuine respect—threw their shoulders back and stood at attention. “This may not be a military operation, but the Captain has been appointed by our government, and such a trust is no different than that bestowed upon any military officer. Our government put him in charge because he knows what is best for this project and best for his men, and we have no right to question him as long as there is food in our bellies and roofs over our heads. We could be living under bridges instead of building them. We could waste our days waiting for handouts instead of earning our way and keeping our self-respect. We may not all be soldiers but we are all Americans, and our country needs us. Our government needs us, and it will protect us as it always has.”
His impassioned speech, dripping with assurance and patriotism, seemed to inflate several of the men in the infirmary, though McMahon, Horrocks and a handful of others remained stooped and unaffected. I felt similarly unmoved. Dee Dee was trying to rally the troops around the Captain, perhaps sincere in the belief that the man’s military rank made him infallible, but I knew that war didn’t always bring out the best qualities in a man. In my experience officers were more often than not born into rank—from wealthy, influential fathers who owned banks and corporations—and of the possibly inherited traits, I’d seen far more arrogance than intelligence or bravery. I kept my mouth shut because the Captain seemed to be a good man, one who took his position and its responsibilities seriously, but I did not imbue him with the same infallibility Dee Dee Macaby suggested.
“On a different note, but to the same point,” said Bainbridge, “all of our available sandbags are being used to bolster the trestle beams, and the cabins would not benefit from buttressing. The Captain has clearly drawn out a sufficient plan of action. Should we reach hurricane status, we will gather at the sturdier structures away from the beach: the post office and the train depot. The women and children are already safe in the school and will remain there until the storm passes or the hurricane siren is sounded. By that time the evacuation train will have been dispatched from Miami. Right now, since there doesn’t seem to be much we can do for our lost companions, except pray, I suggest we take supplies to the three shelters the captain has indicated.”
Bainbridge’s logic focused the men, gave them something they could unanimously agree upon as a course of action. Horrocks sat back down in front of the radio and twisted a knob, sending a screeching blast of static through the room, and then Ricky James’s voice parted the noise.
“Go ahead, Arthur.”
“I got a question,” a man shouted from the back of the infirmary, interrupting Horrocks’ transmission.
I leaned to the side, peering through the crowd to see an unshaven man at least ten years my senior, wearing a tattered gray jacket and matching woolen cap. He sat on one of the infirmary cots, back propped against the wall, arms folded in his lap.
“Hold on a second, Ricky,” Horrocks said.
“What’s your question?” Bainbridge asked.
“Anybody else gonna talk about those sumsabitches been sneaking around our camp at night?”
The comment startled me, and I took a step back. My hand grazed the canvas tarp enveloping the dead Lieutenant, and I jerked it away as if from a flame. I’d convinced myself that the grim sailors I’d encountered on the beach were no more substantial than dark daydreams, but this man had seen them as well, or at least, he’d seen someone.
“We don’t need to hear about your fucking hants, Leonard,” Horrocks said. The other men in the infirmary laughed mockingly, and I sensed there was a reason the old man’s credibility had come under fire. So, I remained silent, waiting to see how the conversation progressed.
“I know what I know,” Leonard replied.
“And last spring you saw mermaids by the train trestle.”
“We got men missing and the other camps has got men missing,” Leonard continued. He pointed at the body on the desk next to me. “And I seen men that don’t belong here. Saw one last week, clear as day, talking to Graham Rowe before he took sick and I saw more of ’em last night. Ignore it if you want. I know what I know.”
“Bah,” said Horrocks waving his hand in the air as if to pat an idiot’s head.
“Regardless,” Bainbridge said, “I would think the storm is the more pressing issue just now. If you did see interlopers, we can address that situation when the immediate danger has passed, but for now our concern should be for the storm. I would think that even miscreants would have returned to their shelters in this weather.”
I should have spoken up, if only to give Leonard piece of mind in his last hours of life, but knowing the truth about those men wouldn’t save anyone.
After lugging supplies to the school, the post office and the depot, I returned to the infirmary where I waited by the radio with Horrocks and Bainbridge, both of whom had lost all humor as we overheard the anxious call from Ricky James. At the captain’s request, he was sending an emergency message to Miami, demanding a train be sent to evacuate the workmen on Lower Matecumbe Key.
“They’ll be too late,” Horrocks said. He spoke loudly, nearly a shout to be heard over the storm. “In clear weather the train takes two hours to get here, and if they intend to stop at the northern camps… Too fucking late.”
Instead of contradicting him as would have been typical of Bainbridge, the man remained silent. The infirmary walls let out great tortured whines against a particularly vicious blast of wind. A piece of driftwood, the length of my arm, sailed through a window, shattering glass and rocketing to the far wall, where it hit with a thud before dropping to a cot. Rain followed, a steady stream running parallel to the plank flooring and the bellowing wind cried in triumph. “Are they ever going to sound the siren?” Bainbridge asked. “There are still dozens of men in their cabins.”
His concern was understandable. The cabins had been built with an eye on efficiency and functionality; they hadn’t been constructed for durability, certainly not against weather this serious. A couple of good men could tip one of them over and hardly break a sweat. I had no doubt the shacks would be coming down soon, the whole lot of them, and the planks that had proved ineffective as shelter against the weather’s attack would snap and splinter, making more than adequate spears when carried on the vicious wind.
“Maybe we should get our asses up to the post office,” Horrocks said. “I don’t think this place is going to hold.”
Behind his words, the long-awaited siren began to wail. At first it was slow as the operator cranked the handle to build the klaxon’s mome
ntum, and then the horn’s voice grew steady and insistent.
“Well, there it is,” Bainbridge called. “Lon, take up that lantern. Arthur, send a message to the hotel and let them know we’re out.”
Once the call was made, the three of us walked to the door. I led the way with the lantern, its yellow cast falling on the dead Lieutenant’s wrapped form and then leaving it for the shadows. Bainbridge stepped forward and opened the infirmary door and the raging storm blew across the opening like a runaway locomotive. Debris filled the screaming wind. Bits of wood, scraps of paper, entire books, and articles of clothing soared by, momentarily captured in the lantern’s cast. My fear notched up as I imagined the damage such garbage could cause when traveling at locomotive speed.
“Stay close,” I called. “The guide ropes are on the far side of the motor pool.”
Walking into the storm, an immediate disorientation fell over me. It seemed as if the world was indeed flat and God had seen fit to tip it on end. Gravity no longer pulled us earthward but rather pushed us from the east. The force at my back was unassailable. If we’d had to move against it, I imagine we would have failed, but our destination was to the west and the wind proved eager to get us there. Arthur Horrocks went tumbling and for a moment he lifted off the sand, and fell away as if dropping from the side of a building. He remained in the lantern light only a moment and then glided beyond its reach. We found him at the motor pool, dragging himself to his feet, using the side panel of a truck for leverage. He squinted into the lantern, clutching madly for the door handle to get a secure grip. Bainbridge and I joined him and received his bellowed assurance that he was uninjured.
Peering through the chaos, I saw lights on the slight rise above the camp, near the highway where the school and post office and depot waited. The lights were weak and seemed very far away, match flames in a maelstrom. All else was roiling darkness a turbulent sea of air, rain, sand and trash. I clutched the fender of a Buick and waved the lantern to get Bainbridge and Horrock’s attention.
“Turn on the headlights,” I yelled. “All of them. Start the engines and turn them on.”
We wouldn’t be the only men needing light. Those who emerged too late from their cabins would be fumbling around in the dark, trying to find the guide ropes, and every additional moment they spent in the storm had the potential to prove fatal.
Noting the confusion on Horrock’s face, I handed him the lantern, struggled to open the truck door and climbed inside. The door slammed shut the moment after I’d pulled my leg clear. In seconds I had the engine running and headlights burning. They cut some ways into the storm, far enough to illuminate the first of the guide ropes.
Men in glistening black slickers pulled themselves across the sand, beetles ascending a spider’s thread. The air about them was yellow and foul like gauze ripped from an infected wound.
I slid across the seat and climbed out of the truck, went to the next one, set its lights to blazing. Behind me, another pair of beams ignited and then another. More of the camp was revealed in the growing bath of light. My hands clutched the steering wheel and I looked out at the men struggling along the ropes, making their way up the incline toward the white box of a post office. I felt a moment of pride when a man emerged from the shadows by the back row of shacks and grabbed hold of the rope, knowing my ingenuity had played some small part in his salvation.
Then he was gone.
A dark form, which I first mistook for another worker in his rain gear, flew from the shadows, striking the man I had been watching. But instead of falling to the ground, the two men rose into the air, sailing over the heads of the others struggling along the guide ropes and vanishing into the gloom above. My heart skipped into my throat, and I questioned what I had seen.
And then I saw it again.
One of the grim sailors wearing strips of pale frayed fabric dashed into the light and leapt at another of the workmen. He knocked the man from the rope and carried him through the air, straight at the truck in which I sat. As they grew larger in the windshield, the sailor used one hand to furiously rip away the black slicker while holding tight to his victim with an embracing arm. The two bodies collided with the front of the truck, sending it rocking on its wheels. The workman tried to scramble away, climbing the hood of the truck toward me, and I recognized the man’s round, neatly shaven face.
Dee Dee Macaby, eyes wide and mouth open, faced me. He might have been screaming but I couldn’t say. The roar of the storm and the blood in my ears were too loud. He reached a hand toward me, his fingertips just grazing the glass. Then the grim sailor, who clutched at Dee Dee from behind, scrabbled forward like a starving insect and buried his face in the crook of Dee Dee’s neck. The workman’s mouth opened further, showing the holes where molars had been lost to battle and bar fights.
Then the men were gone. They rolled off the truck hood and across the motor pool as if no more substantial than sheets of newspaper.
In horrible awe, I saw another man plucked from the guide rope and another. It felt as if the hurricane had found a way into my head. It battered my thoughts and dislodged memories of trenches and explosive bon fires and men screaming through the blood filling their throats, and I sat there, paralyzed by what I was witnessing, past and present playing like two different motion pictures projected on the same screen—the sound so loud it blasted incomprehensible noise.
Another of the sailors emerged at the far reach of the headlights. Beneath his black wool cap, his face appeared as nothing more than a white smear. He observed the row of men, now scrabbling desperately up the hill toward the post office. The body of a workman rolled across the sand at his feet, pushed along the wet beach like a child’s ball discarded in the sand. The sailor watched the body roll by, his head following the corpse’s progression like a disinterested turtle. He lifted into the air, rising higher while the wind and rain pressed him as if trying to surface in a raging river, and he hung suspended over the row of men below.
A broad sheet of wood, either the roof or the side of a cabin spun into the flood of headlights and struck the sailor before whipping into the darkness. The sailor came apart from shoulder to hip, a ragged diagonal wound bisected him, sending blood and organs into the wind to be cleansed by the downpour and carried away. The segments of his body followed his fluid and tissue like two unmanageable kites lost to the gale.
And I was in a trench and men screamed and rifles cracked and a fire erupted over the ground, tearing two men into ribbons of flesh and viscera, and the man next to me doubled over to vomit, and the man ahead of me lost the back of his head to a German’s bullet, and I shouted and aimed my gun into the night firing wildly, aimlessly, targeting any disturbance in the darkness, and that’s when she appeared. A woman crossed the field, appearing in silhouette against the flame of a mortar detonation behind her one second and then being bathed in light front another explosion in the dirt to her side. She carried a baby in her arms, held the infant to her breast in feeding, and bullets peppered them both, but the woman didn’t fall. She never fell. Pain startled me from my fugue. A sharp tingling rose on my cheek and I looked around in a panic, thinking one of the sailors had come for me, and I struggled irrationally, slapping at the air in the truck’s cab, shouting incoherently. The pain came again and I found myself facing Horrocks, who was already cocking his palm back for a third blow.
“We have to go,” he screamed. “Lon, the whole camp is coming apart. We have to get inside.”
Bainbridge appeared at the front of the vehicle, holding tight to the fender, yelling at the top of his lungs. The wreckage of cabins, bits of wall and window and furniture flew behind him in a barrage of dangerous debris. He jabbed his finger at the post office and then secured his grip on the side of the truck.
“We have to go,” Horrocks bellowed in my ear.
Holding the guide rope, moving hand over hand toward the post office, the wind shoving me along as the rough hemp tore at my palms. I saw souvenirs of the men who ha
d gone before us, smears of blood and bits of skin left behind on the bristling line. The lights from the carpool provided sufficient illumination, but I refused to observe my surroundings. I focused on the rope—hand over hand. I didn’t want to know what was coming, because I would be helpless against it, whether it came in the form of a substantial piece of structure, a lethal shard of glass, or the quickly moving and unnatural sailors who had arrived with the storm. Even if I had wanted to look, I couldn’t. Fear had stooped me over and fused my spine in a coward’s crouch. A shirt struck my back and wrapped around my torso. I imagined myself in the clutches of the sailor who had murdered Dee Dee Macaby, but the fabric ripped away and sailed on to strike Bainbridge and climb over his back before continuing to the west where it was pasted against the side of the post office. The slack came out of the rope and it jerked downward violently and then returned.
Finally we made it to the front of the post office and Bainbridge threw open the door. The tight grip on my spine released and I could look up and around. I felt as if a brace had dropped from my neck and back.
Forty men crowded into a space that would have been uncomfortable for half as many. Some squatted against the walls and others stood. They all looked shell shocked, an expression my mirror had tutored me in for years. A counter split the room on my right. Five men used it as a perch, dangling their legs over the edge. The windows on the east and north sides of the building had been boarded over, and the south side had no windows at all, but the western wall, the front of the post office, still wore a broad pane of glass. The odors of wet hair, sour sweat, motor oil, and damp clothing pushed into my nose like mud. There seemed to be no oxygen in the room, nothing left for me to breathe with so many other hungry lungs devouring the atmosphere, but it was dry and though the building creaked, the complaints were hardly noticeable, unlike those of the infirmary when every squealing nail seemed to announce the building’s collapse. And even with the continued intensity of the storm, it was somehow quiet inside the room—almost peaceful in comparison with the pandemonium outside.