In the end he’d signed on in Alabama as what they called a local experienced man. It was CCC labor, same as any else, but he didn’t have to join up with one of the veteran companies. Instead, he was tasked with providing instruction to a bunch of boys from New York and Jersey, city kids who’d never swung an ax or handled a saw. Was the sort of thing that could try some men’s patience, but Arlen didn’t mind teaching, and just about anyone could be shown how to drive a nail or square an edge.
Paul Brickhill, though… he was something special. The closest thing to a mechanical genius Arlen had ever seen. A tall, dark-haired boy with serious eyes and an underfed frame, same as almost all the rest of them, he had not the first bit of experience with carpentry, but what he did have was the mind. The first thing that caught Arlen’s attention was how quickly the boy learned. In all those early days of instruction, Arlen never repeated himself to Brickhill. Not once. You said it, he absorbed it and applied it. Still, he’d appeared little more than a reliable boy and a quick study until they got to work building a shelter house. They’d laid masonry from foundation to windowsill and Arlen was checking over the rounded logs they’d set above the stone when he caught Brickhill changing his measurements for the framing of the roof.
He’d been ready to light the boy up-took some first-class ignorance to dare pick up a pencil and fool with Arlen’s numbers, make a change that could set them back days-when he looked down and studied the sketch and saw that the boy was right. Arlen had the angle off on the beams. He would’ve discovered it himself once they got to laying boards, but he hadn’t seen it in his measurements.
“How’d you know that?” he asked.
Brickhill opened his mouth and closed it, frowned, then steepled his hands in the shape of a roof and then flattened them out and said, “I just… saw it, that’s all.”
It wasn’t the sort of thing a boy who’d never built a roof should see. Not a fifteen-degree difference without a single board set.
They got to talking a bit after that. Arlen had been in the habit of telling the juniors only what was needed-cut here, nail there-but Brickhill wanted to know more, and Arlen told him what he could. Didn’t take long to see that the boy’s innate understanding of building was such that Arlen’s experience didn’t seem all that impressive. A few months later it was at Brickhill’s suggestion that Arlen approached the camp foreman with the idea of constructing a three-hundred-foot-long chute to get concrete down to a dam they were building. The chute worked, and saved them who knew how many days.
It was getting on toward the end of summer and things were winding down at Flagg Mountain when Brickhill’s six-month hitch finished up. He intended to reenlist-expected he’d continue to for some time, long as they’d let him, he told Arlen-but he didn’t want to stay with his company, which was set for a transfer from Alabama to Nevada.
“I got something else in mind,” Brickhill said. “But I figure it’s going to take your help to get me there.”
The boy proceeded to inform him, in exorbitant detail, of a new CCC project in the Florida Keys. They were building a highway bridge that would conquer the ocean, same grand thing that Henry Flagler had done with the railroad. Labor for the project was being provided by the Veterans Work Program, but the CCC had just taken over the management. As they didn’t have a junior camp down there, it was going to take a bit of work for Paul to join up. Considering how Arlen was an ex-Marine, same as the local officer in charge of enlistment, and might have some pull, Paul was looking for help.
Arlen agreed to it, and what he told the enlistment officer had been true enough-the boy needed to be working on such an endeavor, not planting trees and clearing drainage ditches in Nevada.
“What you have here,” he’d said, “is the next great engineer this country will see.”
It didn’t fly. Seems they’d had trouble in the camps down there, and the old Veterans Work Program was becoming something of a black eye thanks to circulating national news reports about the violent and troubled men who populated the camps in the Keys.
“You want to go down there, we could use you, Arlen,” the enlistment officer had said. “Matter of fact, I’d appreciate it were you willing. We need some steady men in those camps. But we won’t be sending juniors.”
Arlen figured that verdict would close the discussion with Brickhill. It didn’t. The boy simply said that if Arlen accepted the transfer and went south, he’d tag along and talk his way onto the project. It was, Arlen had discovered, a situation typical of the boy. He had a sort of focused determination you just didn’t come across much, and when you did, it tended to be held by men who got things done. Paul Brickhill would surely be such a man.
“Once I’m down there, I bet the tune changes,” Paul promised. “They need workers. And if it doesn’t sort out, I’ll go on to one of the other Florida camps and reenlist.”
“Might be so,” Arlen said, “but that requires me going as well, and I ain’t looking to transfer, son. This is my camp.”
“Why?”
Well, because he’d happened to be in the area when he hired on. It was that simple. A local experienced man, that was what they called him, but truth was he was hardly more local than the boys he supervised. Experienced, yes. Local, no. Wasn’t any place where Arlen could be considered a local.
“You don’t have any reason not to head down there,” Paul said. “You’re not one with family around here, or…”
He stopped as if fearing he’d said something offensive, but Arlen just shook his head.
“No, I don’t have any family here.”
Here, or anywhere. The work at Flagg Mountain was nearing a close-there was a reason these boys were about to be transferred west-and it might be interesting, as Brickhill suggested, to work on an ocean bridge…
That was how Arlen Wagner came to be sitting beside a boy from New Jersey in a muggy train car on the last day of August 1935.
For a time after the train had left, they just stood there in the glow of the station platform and stared off down the dark rails. The flat air billowed up one long gust and pushed the trapped wet heat out of the woods and into their faces, and Arlen dropped his hand for his flask and then stopped when Paul’s eyes followed the motion. He didn’t want the kid to think this was all due to liquor. Wasn’t drinking that caused it, was drinking that could ease it.
“All right,” Paul said at length, “we aren’t going to die on that train tonight. We also aren’t going to get anywhere on it. So unless you intend to spend the night right here…”
“Hold on. We’ll find someone to ask.”
There was a station attendant, a stooped man with a squint that seemed permanent, who met all of Arlen’s questions with the same statement: I don’t understand-why didn’t you get back on your train?
At last he was made to accept the idea, if not understand it, and informed them that there was a boardinghouse five miles up the highway.
“Look here,” he said, “why go five miles away to spend the night if you’re not looking to stay around here anyhow? Now that you got off your train, where is it you’re bound?”
That was a hell of a question. Paul looked at Arlen, a challenging look.
“Next train to the Keys?” he said.
“If’n you still want to go to the Keys,” the attendant said, “why in the hell didn’t you stay on your damn train?”
Arlen ran a hand over his face. The next train for the Keys might well be safe, but it might well not. How could he explain that to the boy? All he knew for certain was that those men they’d just left were heading toward death. And if somehow he’d been wrong, then he wasn’t real eager to chase after them, set up in a camp down where every man looked at Arlen and chuckled and whispered.