Free Kaleidoscope by Darryl Wimberley

family.”
    A sudden constriction in his throat. Jack swallowed.
    “I’ll wire if I have any news. Don’t try to reach me. Don’t write anything down.”
    Jack shifted his duffel onto his shoulder. Established his fedora on his head.
    “When Martin gets back from school tell him…tell him…”
    “I tell him,” the old woman said, and turned away.

Chapter six
     
    Rube— a mark, a chump, a loser.
     
    S eventy-three dollars got you a sleeper from Cincinnati to Tampa. A first-class ride. Jack boarded the seven o’clock L&N which gave him more time than he wanted on the haul to Atlanta. Too much to think about. Too much time on hands used to handling cards or whiskey. Jack tried to keep awake, tried to keep that photograph before him, of Martin, of Gilette.
    The terrain rolling by outside his Pullman coach became more and more unfamiliar. He felt himself drifting on iron wheels further and further from steady bearings, the gentle vistas above the Ohio River giving way to blue mountains which had by sunset transformed into a flat and ochre pan of clay.
    There was no discernible industry on the approach to the city of Atlanta. The urban landscape of the Midwest had long given way to wheat fields, small towns, and, now, to pockets of agriculture hemmed in at intervals with small, dirty towns peopled at their fringes with Negroes. Negroes everywhere. At the stations. By water-filled ditches. Jack’s odyssey south seemed to him lined with colored men and cane poles, their catches of fish got with a snatch of line and a can of worms.
    He had thought no region could be more humid than Cincinnati, but the further he locomoted into the Deep South, the wetter and warmer it got. The laced curtains in his compartment hung like rags on a clothesline. Moss sagged on the live oaks outside like the beard of a drowned man.
    Jack took off his collar. He wanted a drink. He wanted to gamble. He began to wish for any variety of companionship, some intercourse with his fellow-travelers, some conversation to pass the time. But those imperatives warred with a sterner dictum, which was to remain sober, alert, and inconspicuous, which compelled a distance from his fellow passengers.
    There was plenty of temptation. Someone had brought a gramophone into the dining car. It didn’t work well, a worn spinner of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” jumping grooves with the train over iron tracks. But a swell of young people kept on without regard, the women shedding their Berlutis and stockings to dance the Charleston and sipping from their sheiks’ silver-tipped walking sticks. Ignoring entirely the admonitions of stone-faced conductors. Those determined to revel ignored the porters and searched for more recruits to their own inebriated cause.
    “Come on, fella,” a redhead with an Eaton crop plopped into his lap. “Don’t be a flat tire.”
    Parties didn’t stop, after all, just because you were in sweaty transit. The lost generation were determined to have a good time, even if they made themselves miserable doing it. But Jack declined their invitation. He could not afford the seduction of some flapper out for a good time. The last thing in the world he could afford was to cross some jealous boyfriend or husband. Harder to ignore were the card games played as casually as checkers all over the car. That, and the booze. An atmosphere of temptation, cigar smoke redolent in the heavy air, the seductive movement of makeshift chips among snifters of brandy or collins of bourbon.
    There was another reason to say alert, of course, and his name was Becker. Jack found himself looking over his shoulder for Sally’s killer. He would not have been surprised waking in his sleeper to find that blond, evil face sharing his pillow. The man was preternatural, immune to normal attacks.
    Death’s happy whore.
    Every blond-haired passenger gave Jack the sheebies, which he kept telling himself was not rational. How, after all, could Becker know Jack was on this train?