Kaleidoscope (8 page)

Every window in the car was wide open and every female present had a fan in her hand. Jack abjured coffee entirely, giving in to the foreign taste of iced tea sweetened with molasses and served by a Negro steward who, to Jack’s irritation, never seemed to break a sweat. A
Tampa Tribune
offered some diversion. Two columns in that rag were spent extolling the marvels of the Southern Star, the nation’s largest airliner. A marvelous flying machine, the paper declared. Could carry twenty passengers in comfort from Tampa to Chile.

Jack shook his head. Who in their right mind would trust his life to an aeroplane over water?

Other stories related to local concerns. The effects of the Mediterranean fruit fly continued to merit attention and comment. Thousands of acres of orchards destroyed, Jack read. Fortunes lost overnight. But of course the rich always imagined themselves to be immune; two full columns were devoted to slavish praise of Tampa’s Mirasol Hotel. “A revival of Mediterranean and Moorish architecture,” the piece declared with authority, “with Venetian Gothic influence.” A big draw for royalty and rich people, apparently, but the rest of Tampa’s real estate was feeling the effects of speculation.

And it wasn’t just real estate that had investors nervous in the sunny city. According to the paper, the city was reeling, financially. The Citizens Bank & Trust had closed its doors the previous July; depositors were clogging the courts to regain their life’s savings. Jack snorted derision. Everyplace else in the country was rich. What was wrong with
these
clowns?

But in other respects Tampa looked a lot like cities anywhere. The Volstead Act was no better enforced in the southland than in the Midwest. The same busts, the same bosses. Gambling was big, which was interesting. ‘
Bolita’
, a game unknown to Jack, apparently paid big odds. One of the kings of the little ball, Charlie Wall, was set free after a jury could not find evidence or stomach to convict him for the wholesale dealing of narcotics.

Booze, gambling, drugs. Same as anyplace.

There were the usual gossip columns keeping their readers abreast of the sportsmen and celebrities vacationing or occasionally working in the city. But not all visitors were equally welcome. There had been an uproar over a screening of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, local members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy objecting to that depiction of the Ku Klux Klan. D.W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation
was accordingly substituted as a more palatable alternative.

So much for local news.

Jack arrived at Tampa’s Union Station just in time to experience a cloudburst. Jack had never seen a sky so gravid with precipitation. The train had to be backed into the Tampa station, creating a delay which grated on already frayed nerves. A geyser of steam sent a brakeman cursing as the engineer cleared the train’s valves of mud. Beyond the brakeman’s retreat Jack could see a long concourse scrolling into view, a weaving line of passengers and hangers-on and, unexpected, cordons of men in uniform. Campaign boots and khakis. Springfield rifles sprouting bayonets.

“Nash’nul God,” the porter answered his question.

And what did they need the Guard for?

“De fruit fly.”

“Be one hell of a fly.”

A magnificent ironwork of sliding gates came into view. The train hissed and hooted and slowed to a stop in a thunderstorm. The porter swung off easily. Jack followed behind the cover of tourists and bankers scrambling uselessly to avoid the driving rain, a tie draped around his neck like a hangman’s noose. Something like a warm, wet blanket settled beneath the brim of his fedora only to be stirred by a sudden gust of unseasonably frigid air. Lightning
craaaaacked
and thunder boomed and Jack jumped with other travelers for the cover of the concourse.

He scanned the dock. A virtual sea of expectant eyes straining to find friends and family among the debarking passengers. A confusion of greetings, whistles and shouts of recognition adding to the confusion of wind and rain and thunder. Somewhere among these milling folks was somebody sent to meet Sally Price. Be too rich to spot some lackey hefting a jerry-rigged salutation—
For Miss Price.
Jack never had that kind of luck. He was beginning to feel a rise of panic. The crowd was thinning, family, friends and business associates pairing off and dispersing. Jack looked in vain for a craning neck, any sign of some hanger-on who might be the man sent to pick up Sally Price. Some expression of anxiety or disappointment other than his own, when Goodman’s proxy realized that the woman he was sent to meet had not arrived.

But the only face still turned to the train was Jack’s own. And with the storm driving everyone else for cover he was beginning to look awfully conspicuous, a newcomer soaked and solitary amidst a residue of baggage boys and porters.

“Hep you with sumpin’, suh?”

The Negro again. The porter.

“No, thanks, Uncle,” Jack replied and tipped the man two bits.

Whoever was sent to meet Sally was gone by now, but Goodman had assured Sally he’d see her at ‘The Kaleidoscope ’. There couldn’t be that many joints by that name. Maybe the porter could steer him. Jack was about to re-engage the Negro when an upbeat voice called out—

“Help with the bag, bright boy?”

Jack glanced about. Not a soul in sight.

“Hey, pinhead,” the voice chirped, practically from his pocket, “You wanta hand with yer satch or what?”

The smallest man Jack had ever seen spit the biggest plug of tobacco he’d ever seen into a spittoon ten feet distant. Pealed that brass like a gong.

“What about it?” the spitter pulled his sleeve across the stain at his mouth. “Two bits, I’ll tote yer bag.”

“For two bits you can live in it,” Jack replied.

“Oh, that’s rich,” the dwarf did not smile. “I never heard that one before.”

He was not a smidgeon over three feet tall. Bright red hair, a real carrot top. Overalls made him look even shorter than he was and his shoes must have been made for a child. He was oddly constructed, thick-framed, but with limbs stiffly bent, like the trolls of fairy tales. Jack noted the wrists. Swollen. Truncated.

“What’s your name, little man?”

“Tom Thumb, why should you care?”

“I make it a habit never to piss off anybody half my size.”

The little man grabbed his crotch.

“And how would
you
know?”

That got a chuckle, even from a traveler bone-tired and anxious.

“Tell you what, I got the grip, but I could use a ride.”

“Where to?”

“…The Kaleidoscope.”

The troll rolled his shoulders slowly. “Kaleidoscope, uh huh. And what brings ya?”

Jack shrugged.

“Friend said I should come down.”

“Say, you’re not in the pictures, are ya?”

“Hell, no. You?”

“Sure, spent the night humping Mary Pickford. That’s why I’m hustlin’ bags at a train station.”

“You got a name?”

“Call me Tommy. Tommy Speck.”

“Jack Romaine.”

A bolt of lightning broke over the tracks like a rifle shot.

“The hell?” Jack ducked.

“Keep yer britches.” The dwarf jerked a thumb over a knot of shoulder. “I got a truck.”

The second the little shit got his two bits he lost interest in conversation. Jack was following Speck down the tracks in silence when he saw a freight car getting more than the expected attention. A squad of hefty men in souwesters converged on the dock, hustling to rig what looked like a heavily timbered drawbridge from the dock to the door of a just-opened freight car. A solitary woman directed that bustling gang. A tall woman, very tall. She wore no headgear. In fact, she wore nothing in deference to the downpour. A cotton shift was soaked with rain, the fabric clinging like a second skin to her flesh. A long, firm frame. Her hair could have belonged to an Indian, raven and straight and down past her waist.

“The hell is that?” Jack blinked water from his eyes.

“Are you comin’?”

“Just a sec.”

Jack formed a visor against the rain with the brim of his hat. A bolt of lightning briefly spotlighted the long-haired attendant. She was waving to someone inside the railroad car. A greeting? A command? Lightning cracked again, and thunder, and then a four-wheeled wagon creaked out of the car and onto the drawbridge. Bales of hay piled above the wagon’s sideboards to stack along something inside—some
one
inside, Jack corrected himself—some human figure propped on hay bales as though they were pillows.

“Holy Mack.”

She filled the wagon, an enormous, folded aggregate of flesh. The rain plastered dishwater blond curls to a forehead as broad as the belly of a tub. You could put a row of silver dollars in the creases of her arms, her neck. She turned imperiously in the downpour to gaze down the tracks. It seemed, distant as she was, that she looked straight into Jack’s eyes.

“Princess Peewee,” Tommy anticipated his question.

“‘Princess Peewee’? ‘Tommy Speck’? Christ, does anybody have a real name down here?”

Speck snorted disdain for that convention.

Seven men with ropes strained to retard the wagon’s descent down its rain-slick incline. Once that oversized cart was safely onto the loading dock, a heavy truck pulled up, its sideboards clapping inside their vertical restraints. A giant stepped out of the passenger side of the Ford, a no-shit Negro giant. Jack could not guess his size except to realize that the giant’s head and shoulders towered over the far side of the truck’s battered cab.

The giant strolled to the rear of the truck’s bed, a massive length of chain draped over his shoulder. In a matter of seconds the links were secured from the wagon’s yoke to an anchor jerry-rigged in the Ford’s bed. Then the giant spread a tarpaulin as gently as a blanket over the reclining royal. A tender, almost reverent ministration.

Jack spilled water in a silver spout from the lid of his hat.

“You know these people?”

“That’s a question either dumb or dangerous.”

Dangerous?

And then the lady-in-waiting leapt light as a doe from the dock into the truck bed. She leaned over the reclining Princess, restraining a fall of long, raven hair to leave a kiss on that wide forehead.

“She a switch hitter? The looker?”

“None of my business.”

“She got a handle?” Jack tried another tack.

“Luna. Luna Chevreaux.”

“
Mon chere la lune
.”

“She’ll be your boss,” Speck said.

“Boss? How you know I’m looking for work?”

“Everybody comes to Kaleidoscope works, Jack. Or whatever
your
name is. And we all work for Luna. If you ain’t willing to do that—train pulls out in six minutes.”

Jack scanned the track. Except for these freaks the concourse was deserted.

“Fine, then,” Romaine spilled water from his hat. “But I’m driving.”

Tommy’s Model-T was rigged with a hand-operated clutch and brake whose function the dwarf left Jack to divine on his own. They drove due east from Tampa before turning south. The lightning and thunder had abated, but not the downpour, water falling in buckets to inundate two wide lanes of a modern asphalt highway.

“Just finished last year,” Tommy was once more chatting away as if he’d known Jack all his life. “Before the highway—? Rain like this—? You’d be up to your axles.”

The car swayed on narrow tires in a brutal crosswind. Jack struggling to keep the vehicle centered on what looked to be the silver belly of a snake.

“Goes all the way to Miami,” Tommy informed him. “That’s why they call it the Tammy Ammy. Tampa-Miami. Get it?”

“Got it,” Jack replied shortly and the dwarf howled laughter as if some hugely ingenious joke had just been passed between them.

“How long are we gonna be on this thing?” Jack asked when his passenger settled down.

“All the way,” Speck replied brightly. “I coulda taken a shortcut over McKay Bay, but with this rain—”

“Gotcha,” Jack replied. “And ’bout how far’s the Kaleidoscope?”

Tommy regarded him with some humor.

“You don’t know nuthin’, do ya?”

“Just took a gamble,” Jack replied coolly.

“Well, we’ve only got ten, maybe twelve miles to go.” Tommy propped a child-sized shoe on the dashboard.

“And exactly who are ‘we’?”

“Oh, that’s sharp,” Tommy chortled evilly, and something about his thwarted torso sent a crawl up the back of Jack’s neck. “Very sharp.”

Twenty minutes later Tommy directed Jack off the hard pavement to a series of ruts gleaming silver with water. A river coursed along one side.

“The Alafia,” Tommy informed him. “The Little Alafia, actually.”

“Where’s the Big Alafia?”

“Other side of the Little Alafia. Dumbass.”

A soft sand road carried them through a sprawl of trailers and trucks occupying spits of sand that spidered at random on lots spiked with pine trees and puddles of rain. Every manner of portable transportation littered those small squares of loam: trucks, caravans, wagons.

The hell was this place? A camp for gypsies?

“Turn here.”

Jack turned onto a sandy boulevard leading to more permanent structures. A few cottages on one side of the flooded ruts, shacks actually. And then Jack saw a tin roof rising beyond. And then he saw something else.

“God Almighty.”

A tiger pacing a cage not ten feet off the road. Jack jerked the wheel on instinct. Tommy grabbed his arm. A surprising grip. Like a goddamn vice.

“’S’matter, Jack?” the little man regarded him coolly. “Ain’t you been around animals?”

Speck released his arm and Jack geared down, centering the truck on its sandy boulevard. There were more animals to be seen on either side of the loam. Horses and llamas corralled behind a fence. A cage of monkeys, their simian stares impenetrable. A flamboyance of flamingoes. A single lion, indifferent to his captured kingdom, the rain, or anything else.