Quartet for the End of Time (36 page)

I
T WAS GOOD TO
be drunk. It was good to be drunk and alive for a while. Whenever he felt that way, anyway, Douglas wouldn't have traded it in for anything in the world, not even getting painted up on a wall or written
into a book. And indeed there was always the chance of that at Josie's, because every day the writer Ernest Hemingway, who had a house down on that key, would be in the bar, and when they'd had enough to drink some of the men would call out to him: Are you going to write me into one of your books? And sometimes he promised he would.

He sat at the back, a little crowd always around him, but sometimes he didn't speak to them, or to anyone at all, but instead would only scribble away in the notebook he carried, and when he finally looked up again, he would say that, sure, he was going to write all of them up in a book one day.

You better play it straight, the bandit said to him once. Write it down like it is—don't make any of us ugly or dumb, except for the ones that is, and the writer said that he always played it straight, and the men nodded.

On the day the Patman Bill passed, the writer was at the bar when Douglas and the bandit arrived, and by the time Douglas could edge his way to the counter to order a drink, he found the writer had already paid. He was so surprised he accepted the drink and didn't even say thanks.

What's your name, son? the writer asked, and when Douglas told him, he said he had seen him before and often wondered to himself why a young man like him had come down to work on a job with a bunch of old men. So Douglas told him how he had signed up with the bandit and how even though he hadn't been to France, he had been a proud member of the Bonus Army since 1932 on account of his father, who had fought in the war. He felt in his shirt pocket for the bonus ticket and it pleased him to feel it there, and to tell someone, especially the writer, who he knew had driven an ambulance during the war, and won several medals—and especially on that day, when the Patman Bill had just passed through the House—about his father, and what he was doing there, at that very moment, in Josie Russell's Bar. He felt proud to be among those men, some of whom were twice his age. To have remained with them, tramping back and forth to Washington, first with the Cadons and then with the bandit, when he might have gone his own way just as easily, and perhaps squared for himself a better deal out of it somehow. He knew that if he had done that, that when he
went to cash in his father's bonus for him, though he might still have the ticket that said exactly what they were owed, he would have cheated both of them somehow. Plus, at the beginning, the Keys jobs had been coveted—and not just by veterans. They promised work and plenty of it; who wasn't in the market for that?

Julius Stone, who managed the project, swore it was only a matter of time once the highways got built before the money started pouring in. There would be no end to the work then, he said.

Key West was the example he used when anyone doubted him. It was—he reminded them—hardly recognizable to anyone who'd known it before he and his troops had arrived! And sure enough, the tourists flooded in. This was a thorn in the side of the writer, as he himself had, in the process, turned into one of Stone's tourist attractions. After he had caught all the stray dogs and cats and run them out of town, whitewashed the buildings, and burned all the trash and litter on the beaches and streets, Stone had drawn up a map of the island that marked—among other points of interest—the precise location of the writer's house. Then he issued it to the tourist board. Soon the writer could expect on any given day a stream of curious passersby looking in at him from the street. Sometimes they would come right up on his front lawn and peer in through the windows of his house while he was trying to work, or sleep, or any other number of things that a man tries to do in the privacy of his home. He'd built a wall around the yard almost at once, but the people disregarded the wall, because (the writer explained) once a thing is written in a book, and the book is sold, the people who buy the book think that everything the book contains, including its author, belongs to them. To get away from all that, the writer would come regularly, every day at three, to Josie Russell's Bar and bring his notebook and tell his stories and listen to the veterans', and complain about the government and reminisce about the days before anyone dreamt of intervening with the “natural order of things”—not caring, or at least not blaming the veterans particularly, for the fact that they were employed to alter that very thing. It was well known among them, however, that he hated the President and the New
Deal and everything that had come from it with a passion, and from time to time he would let loose about it, so that everyone would know what exactly he thought of the President of the United States. That paralytic demagogue, he would say—which was something Douglas never understood until the bandit explained to him that it was sort of like a Fascist with no legs.

The bandit was often educating Douglas like that, which was something he appreciated, though sometimes the explanations he gave did not make things any clearer than they had been before. Like the time when, after they first signed up for the job in the Keys, they learned that a man they knew from the government camp had been turned down for the same job and sent to work in another camp instead. He was mad about it, and said, They save all the best jobs for the white boys. This had surprised Douglas, because he hadn't known until then that the man, Ben Stokes was his name, wasn't a white boy himself. They were keeping all the work camps segregated, even though everyone got along just fine, and so that was how Douglas found out Ben Stokes was a Negro, because he went to a Negro camp, and because he was bitter about all the choice jobs going to white folks.

When Douglas asked the bandit if Ben was a Negro, the bandit laughed and said, Sure!

Douglas said, What? And the bandit said again, Sure, you ain't never seen a nigger don't look like a nigger before?

When Douglas said he had not, the bandit said, Well, how do you know you haven't if you already said you wouldn't know if you saw him? and Douglas said that was precisely the point. But by that time the bandit was no longer interested and Douglas did not get any more information out of him, and often afterward he would look at a white man and wonder if he was really a white man, or look at a black man and wonder if there was any possibility he was actually white. It was more difficult to imagine that a black man could be a white man than the other way around, he found, because it did always seem conceivable that with a white man he had failed to detect some element of blackness in his skin, which had such gradations to it, and less likely that he might mistake
blackness for white, and so, though he decided that this was unlikely, he was not prepared to rule the possibility out entirely. And sometimes he thought of Ben Stokes afterward and wondered how he was faring in the Negro camp and if there were really less opportunities for Negroes than for white folks, because it was just as hard to imagine how there could be less opportunities for any man than there were in the Upper Keys as it was to imagine a black man that was white. But it was clear that nothing was as it appeared to be and that his estimation of anything and understanding of it were almost certain to be false, and that there existed a great deal more complexity and contradiction to any thing than ever met the eye.

I
T WAS NOT LONG
after the news of the Patman Bill that the men on Windley Key began to talk of a strike. In February, a small battle raged between the veterans and the camp officials, and even though most of the organizers of the strike were soon driven out of the camp—they headed back to Washington to continue their protest there—and there was a growing concern among the men that the whole project (which ran at the best of times only in fits and starts) would be abandoned, and the labor they had done before the strike would remain unpaid, not one of them lifted a finger to lengthen the highway and the tourists got no nearer for the entire month of February.

One of the veterans, a real southern gentleman (or so, at least, he would have you believe)—name of Spencer Ford—was one of the organizers who stayed on. At the end of February he even managed to get a sit-down with the camp commanders, and the night before it was to take place he called a general meeting to compose a list of grievances he planned to bring to the management's attention the very next day. Number one was sanitation, of course—but then once they got going nearly everything needed improving, and the men started shouting all at once until Spencer Ford held his hand up, like he was accustomed to being listened to, and sure enough the men quieted down, and Ford said, I am drawing up a list of only our most pressing concerns, gentlemen.

So they decided on three main points for Ford to discuss with the camp commanders the next day, but neither Ford nor the three men who accompanied him to represent the veterans' affairs ever returned to report on how their demands were received, so they never did know. It was rumored the four had been shipped off to Fort Jefferson, though some said they had only been sent back to Miami, from which point they were encouraged to “make their own way”—anywhere but back to Windley Key—and still others said they knew for certain they had been taken into international waters and drowned.

Whatever the case, neither Ford nor any of his men were heard from again, and the veterans' situation did not improve. There was continued talk, after that, of heading back to Washington—of remaining there, this time, and no mistake, until the bonus was paid—but everyone, including Douglas and the bandit, when they talked of leaving, talked of leaving “after the next paycheck,” in order to ensure they had something with which to start the journey. But that day was always, at any given point, at least two weeks away, because as soon as any paycheck arrived it would be the next paycheck that would decide them and the paycheck that came was spent, at least in significant part, drinking at Josie Russell's Bar.

—

B
EFORE THEY KNEW IT
,
IT WAS
J
ULY
,
AND
R
OYAL
R
OBERTSON
—
THAT
charismatic veteran from California (who, it was rumored, had once been a star on the silver screen—though no one could ever actually claim to having seen him in the pictures)—had moved his troops into Washington, establishing himself and his followers in a vacant lot off Pennsylvania Avenue. It was like 1932 all over again! With this encouragement, half a dozen men did go—taking whatever was left of their last paycheck, if there was any left over at all. But most of them—Douglas and the bandit among them—stayed on through the brutal heat of that summer, and so were still there on the first of September, 1935, when the hurricane hit.

T
HE NEXT DAY BEING
Labor Day, most everyone was drunk the night before the storm. They sat together in the small tavern on Windley Key, drinking what was left to drink and leaning from their chairs as though they hadn't a care in the world.

Many of them, like Douglas and the bandit, were still there at six o'clock in the morning, when the roof blew off.

A general confusion erupted then. Men rounded up vehicles in order to head to Key West—but there weren't many. Word came that a train was on its way—but hours passed and the train never arrived. Soon they had no choice but to give up on the train; to turn their attention instead— too late—to whatever they had on hand. As the winds picked up to a frightening speed in the early afternoon, some of the men began to dig trenches in the dirt just like the ones that had saved them on so many occasions before, back in France.

Like all terrible things, it arrived, when it did, all of a sudden—as though without warning. There was nothing to do but brace themselves against it. But even that was not a thing they
did
, it was just a thing that happened. It seemed to Douglas as if the whole world had suddenly been swept out from under him. At first he could see nothing at all, so it was a relief when he managed to catch sight of the bandit. He could make out only a dim shadow on account of the direction and force of the storm, but he knew it was the bandit. Leaning there, into the wind—his body turned toward Douglas, though he did not seem to see him. It took another several seconds before Douglas understood why. The bandit's face, left exposed, had (Douglas realized only now, with horror) been completely torn off by the wind, which was by then whipping the sand from the beach with the force of a thousand tiny grenades. Douglas may have screamed at the sight, but he could not be certain. It is possible it was only the wind that he heard, which he mistook as his voice—or equally that it was his voice that he mistook for the wind. He looked around for shelter, his hands shielding his face and his eyes. The mess house did not exist any longer. Nothing existed.
Once, he looked back, toward where the bandit remained, and though he could still make out the outline of his shadow, he no longer recognized him. It was a great mystery what kept him riveted there.

He ran, and did not stop until he reached the last stretch of road, built just before the storm. It ran adjacent to the railroad and a small trestle bridge, which spanned a small estuary emptying off into marshland. Somehow Douglas managed to wedge himself underneath the bridge, and only then—protected by the overhang—was he able to remove his hands from his eyes. What he saw, he did not immediately comprehend: it was the ocean. Raised on its back, like a great horse on hind legs, and moving steadily toward him.

How it was that he managed to brace himself against the wooden ties of the railway bridge; how it was that he remained there, as the ocean crashed over him—crushing his bones with its weight—he would never know. At the time, indeed, he couldn't be certain if he was alive or dead, and even after the wave passed he remained braced against a force that no longer existed except in his memory of its having been.