Kaleidoscope Read online

  The photograph had been taken in France, in Tannerie, at a field hospital. Jack had mustered from Camp Upton in New York with forty thousand other patriots or draftees or those wanting to prove something to themselves. The 77t? Division deployed from ships and rail-lines and even horseback to fill the trenches criss-crossing countryside once travelled by Napoleon. The division had engaged heavily fortified Boche for nearly a month in the Oise-Aisne region. Tens of thousands of men were shredded in that encounter. Gilette had been assigned to a French first-aid post behind the lines in Tannerie. A church had been converted for the purpose. The walls were peppered with German artillery, part of the roof was blown away, but the Virgin inside, serene in marble tranquility, was untouched. You heard stories like that all over France, that the statues of saints and virgins were impervious to German guns. It had been beneath Mary’s open hands that Jack entered the infirmary.

  You smelled the wounded long before you saw them. The ripe stench of pus mingling with the astringency of alcohol. Woefully few doctors in attendance, fluttering by intermittently in their long white coats. It was the nurses who were ubiquitous, working virtually as surgeons themselves in the daily, sometimes hourly, dressing of wounds. Nurses, mostly women, prying shards of metal or bullet from suppurating injuries. Nurses treating tetanus and gangrene and peritonitis. Everything from cracked kneecaps to trepanned skulls. Jack was not himself wounded. He had been commandeered with a half-dozen other men to secure a truck of supplies being sent to the hospital. The trucks were always clearly marked with the universal cross but supplies were short on both sides of the line and were subject to ambush, even by French civilians.

  The efficiency of trench warfare could be measured in the tons of material needed to treat casualties. Gauze was delivered over sea and land in lots of a thousand yards, along with cuvettes and gloves and platinum needles. And morphine, of course. Lots of morphine. Enough alcohol to float a city of gangsters. Supply lines were subject to any number of ruptures, however; even hospital ships were subject to attack and so Jack found the nurses at Tannerie attempting to sterilize bandages corrupt with pus or excrement in vats of boiling water. Constant streams of wounded were unloaded as so many cords of wood from trucks and cots, doctors making instant judgments as to the likelihood of survival—this man too far along to help, this man rushed for immediate amputation. The rest waiting in pain, sometimes agony, comforted only by memory or religion or most reliably the human contact of the mostly-female and mostly French nurses who lived on soup and bread and sixteen hour shifts.

  Rows and rows of American and French and sometimes even German soldiers languished in cots littered row upon row beneath a cathedral ceiling festooned with the limp standards of the Allies. The place was eerily quiet. No complaints from those martial beds. The muffled coughs of those able to clear their throats and chests, the sputum of those sequestered with tuberculosis. Murmurs in varying tongues of men dictating letters, or dying. Those soon to be discharged reading letters or playing cards. Sometimes you’d see a man sipping a malted milk or peeling a rare orange. Mulling over a copy of some hoarded magazine or newspaper or, of course, letters from home.

  “Over here.”

  Jack actually heard his wife-to-be before he saw her. She was petite, even for a French woman. Built like a pear. Hair tangled as a ball of yarn trapped beneath the peaked, starched hat. But the eyes were the thing. Green, like the kind of green reflected in a still stream banked by some brilliant forest. An emerald green.

  Her patient was muttering some gibberish in a language Jack could not identify. He was a soldier, that was clear enough, shrouded in sheets and bandages with tubes like tapeworms draining a lung. A leg had been amputated and was seeping. He clutched a medal like a rosary. A scrap of ribbon embossed with a star over a scrap of brass.

  “You can help me.” She spoke to Jack in passable English. It was not a request.

  “Is he a prisoner?” Jack had asked.

  “No. Arab. They left him here to die, but I’ve brought him back I think.”

  She made Jack wash his hands. “Hand me the instruments when I tell you,” and before you knew it she was in the guy’s guts, pulling out scraps of cloth and integument.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jack tried to hold his gorge.

  “It was worse before. Wasn’t it, my Muslim friend?”

  The man growled something.

  “Cheerful, isn’t he?”

  “He wouldn’t speak to me at all in the beginning,” she replied. “They don’t trust the French.”

  “And yet they fight for them?”

  “They fight for any reason at all.”

  “You need anything else before I go?”

  “We need everything. All the time.”

  The Arab died not long after that first encounter. Gilette was not sure what to do with his things. Usually there was a forwarding address, some next of kin. But for the Arab, nothing but a box in a hole in the ground.

  “He was awfully attached to that decoration,” Jack remarked. “Maybe you should bury the medal with him.”

  “No,” she shook her head sadly. “He thought it would keep him alive. Toward the end, when he knew better, he made me take it.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Men who are wounded, they get one.”

  He saw Gilette perhaps half a dozen times in her hospital ward, always with supplies. She was a native of the area, turned out. Lived only a bicycle’s ride from the hospital. “‘Who would you choose for a husband’,” he read the question from a worn edition of The Spiker, “‘a Frenchman or an American?’”

  “A Frenchman,” she replied without hesitation. “He eats less.”

  Just before the 77t? moved on he managed one last trip to the hospital for the allowed excuse of visiting a wounded buddy. He brought chocolate instead of linens or morphine. Then he made Gilette promise that he might see her when, as he put it, the job was done. She seemed surprised, even a little amused, when a month after Versailles he arrived at her shepherd home. A cottage of wood and shingle. A small vineyard. Goats and sheep. She was much changed in her new setting, reduced from a position of competence and command to a peasant. He offered her New York and after only a moment’s hesitation she said he should speak to her parents.

  They married in the same sanctuary where she had labored during the war and honeymooned on the boat to America. They were pregnant less than a year later and then had come the terrible epidemic. Gilette directing her own care until the very end.

  “You are a terrible nurse, mon cher.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You care too much.”

  She reached over to a bed stand and produced the Arab’s ribboned medal.

  “The ‘Insigne du Blesse Militaire’,” she pressed it into his hand. “To remind us of our wounds.”

  The photograph slipped from his fingers to the dining car’s hardwood table. Jack’s hand wandered to the brass pinned, still, on his lapel. He glanced about. Car was nearly empty; Jesus, was it that late? Jack checked his watch before he slipped Gilette’s photo beneath his son’s. Then he dropped a buck from his wallet for the steward and left the diner.

  Jack Romaine collapsed fully clothed into his sleeper’s narrow berth. The gay voices of floozies and their gents smothered in the deep rumble of iron wheels on iron rails. The sway of the car. Rock along, rock along. All he needed was a little rest, he told himself. Just a little…

  An emerald green outfield frames an immaculately groomed baseball diamond. Jack sees his son heft a bat over homeplate. A boy of summer in a uniform trimmed in scarlet. Soft hair spills from beneath a woolen cap; Martin waves to his dad. Jack smiles back proudly. The catcher dons his mask; Jack cannot see the barred face. But he recognizes the hands that give the pitcher his signal. They are huge hands. Misshapen. And as Jack stands paralyzed in the stands at left field he sees the pitcher begin his windup. An athlete, for sure. Big man. Hair and skin pale as bleached bone.

&nbs
p; Arno Becker hurls a fastball straight at the batter’s head.

  “Martin! MARTIN!”

  Jack tries to warn his son. But there is no sound, no rush of air, nothing to strum his vocal cords to life as the ball sails in slow motion toward the unblemished boy at home plate—

  “TAMPA in one hour. Passengers for TAMPA.”

  A porter rousting travelers from their dreams.

  Jack stumbled from his rack, splashed water on his face from the valet’s basin. A change of shirt and then he was back to the dining car. The windows set at intervals along the car’s length divided the passing scenery into separate frames like splices from an ongoing film, a series of pictures flashing inside motionless panes depending entirely on the train’s six driving wheels to impute activity and life. In the course of Jack’s restless slumber oak trees and Spanish moss had been replaced by palmetto and pine. A land still owned by Seminoles flashed by now—

  Clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

  He reached for a cigarette then decided against it. He already felt like he was breathing syrup. The heat was stifling inside the car. He wanted to get out. To climb atop his Pullman, rip open his coat and collar and bring a gale of stream-driven air bursting into his lungs. To see something beyond a virid blur of vegetation.

  They had to be near the coast, but it was impossible to tell. A wasteland sentineled with conifers crowded right up to the rail-bed leaving only a ribbon of sky turning amethystine overhead. Not a living thing moved, not even a buzzard, the climate torrid under plum-colored ribs of cloud.

  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.