The Cypress House

The Cypress House

The Cypress House wasn’t one of those novels that had been kicking around in my mind for awhile, slowing taking shape, as some do. Rather, it was a story that simply jumped in and demanded to be written right now! I’d been planning a very different novel when two things merged in my mind and called me elsewhere. One was a slice of tragic history – a devastating Category 5 hurricane that tore through the Florida Keys on Labor Day of 1935, where World War I veterans hired to build a bridge waited in tents and shacks, where hundreds perished and a rescue train was torn from the tracks and bodies were washed high into the mangroves. The other was an image of unusual power that compelled me to sit down and write the first pages, and I was swiftly swept into the world of the novel in the way that you always want to be as a writer. My hope is that the story takes hold of you in a similar fashion. That image: a train rattles through backwoods Florida on a sultry late summer night, carrying workers bound for the Keys, and in the dimly lit interior a battle-scarred soldier opens his eyes sleepily and is horrified by a stark, unrelenting premonition of death. It was a scene that came of its own volition, the most powerful and fully realized I’ve ever had before starting a novel, and by the time I got it on paper I had a sense of pure exhilaration, the sure knowledge that I was going to enjoy writing this one tremendously. As my protagonist, Arlen Wagner, and his young friend, Paul Brickhill, disembarked the train and set off down an empty highway and into the humid darkness, I had not the faintest idea where they were bound. That deserted inn on the Gulf, The Cypress House, hadn’t suggested itself to me yet. I knew only that they were on the road, and in trouble, and that there was a storm blowing in. The rest lay ahead in the shadows, and in that is the wonderful fun of storytelling, the reason I love writing. I hope you’ll give The Cypress House a chance. Board that train with Arlen and Paul, hear the whistle call out shrill in the night air, watch the shadowed palms pushed by ominous Gulf breezes, and see if the journey appeals. I’d love to think it that it will!
All best and many thanks,
Michael Koryta

The Cypress House

They’d been on the train for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men.
To that point it had been a hell of a nice ride. Hot, sure, and progressively more humid as they passed out of Alabama and through southern Georgia and into Florida, but nice enough all the same. There were thirty- four on board the train who were bound for the camps in the Keys, all of them veterans with the
exception of the nineteen-year-old who rode at Arlen’s side, a boy from Jersey by the name of Paul Brickhill.

They’d all made a bit of conversation at the outset, exchanges of names and casual barbs and jabs thrown around in that way men have when they are getting used to one another, all of them figuring they’d be together for several months to come, and then things quieted down. Some slept, a few started card games, others just sat and watched the countryside roll by, fields going misty with late-summer twilight and then shapeless and dark as the moon rose like a watchful specter. Arlen, though, Arlen just listened. Wasn’t anything else to do, because Paul Brickhill had an
outboard motor where his mouth belonged.

As the miles and minutes passed, Brickhill alternated between explaining things to Arlen and asking him questions. Nine times out of ten, the boy answered his own questions before Arlen could so much as part his lips with a response. Brickhill had been a quiet kid when the two of them first met months earlier in Alabama, and back then Arlen believed him to be shy.
What he hadn’t counted on was the way the boy took to talk once he felt comfortable with someone. Evidently, he’d grown damn comfortable with Arlen.

As the wheels hammered along the rails of northern Florida, Paul Brickhill was busy telling Arlen all of the reasons this was going to be a hell of a good hitch. Not only was there the bridge waiting to be built, but all that sunshine and blue water and
boats that cost more than most homes. They could do some fishing, maybe catch a tarpon. Paul’d seen pictures of tarpon that were near as long as the boats that landed them. And there were famous people in the Keys, celebrities of every sort, and who was to say they wouldn’t run into a few, and . . .

Around them the men talked and laughed, some scratching out letters to loved ones back home. Wasn’t anyone waiting on a letter from Arlen, so he just settled for a few nips on his fl ask and tried to fi nd some sleep despite the cloaking warmth and the stink of sweating men. It was too damn hot.

Brickhill finally fell silent, as if he’d just noticed that Arlen was sitting with his eyes closed and had stopped responding to the conversation. Arlen let out a sigh, grateful for the respite. Paul was a nice enough kid, but Arlen had never been one for a lot of words where a few would do.

Excerpted from the book The Cypress House by Michael Koryta. Copyright © 2011 by Michael Koryta. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved.