The Last Train to Key West

by Chanel Cleeton

  Henry’s arm moves higher, jerking up, and John groans, his fist connecting with Henry’s jaw with a loud crack.

  Henry’s head snaps back, but instead of falling over, he lunges forward, the knife once again connecting with skin.

  Another groan fills the night.

  Blood drips from a slash in John’s clothing, running down his chest.

  The sight of all that red breaks me out of my stupor, and I shout at the top of my lungs—

  “Help! Help! Please!”

  For a moment, Henry’s accomplice seems frozen by indecision, weighing the odds of jumping in and joining the fray, but then he runs toward the wooded area, away from the fight.

  There must be someone still lingering around the front of the restaurant. If I go and get help—

  The men circle each other once more, and then I see it in the corner, a stray piece of wood Ruby never got around to cleaning up.

  I move quickly, grabbing the wood, swinging, swinging, until it connects with Henry’s head.

  * * *

  —

  The wood falls from my hands, and I stare down at the man slumped on the grass in front of me.

  I sag to the ground.

  “Are you all right?” John asks.

  “I—I think so.”

  “Is there any pain in your abdomen? Any pressure?”

  “No.”

  “Any bleeding?”

  “I don’t think so.” I rise slowly, accepting the hand John holds out to steady me. He releases me once I’m on my feet again. “Is he—” I take a deep breath, my heart racing. The money Henry tried to steal is spread all around his body. Blood trickles from his hairline, running down his face. “Is he—? Did I kill him?”

  John leans over the body for a moment, checking his pulse. “No. Just knocked him out.”

  He bends down, scooping up the money strewn about the ground, and gives it to me.

  I stare at it for a moment, a spot of red on the corner of one of the coins. My fingers tremble as I take the change from his outstretched hand and shove it into the pocket of my apron.

  “You shouldn’t have grabbed that post. You shouldn’t be lifting anything that heavy this late in your pregnancy,” John says.

  I gape at him. “He was stabbing you.” I take a deep breath, steadying myself. “Besides, I carry trays of food all day. I was hardly going to be brought down by a piece of wood.”

  “You shouldn’t be carrying heavy trays, either,” he retorts.

  “And you shouldn’t have fought him. You heard them—they only wanted the money.”

  “You don’t know what they wanted,” he counters. “It could have been a lot worse. Let me walk you home, at least. Do you live nearby?”

  “It’s only two miles away.”

  He shoots me an incredulous look. “You walk two miles by yourself every night after work?”

  He doesn’t tack on “in your condition,” but he might as well have.

  “Are you well enough to walk?” he asks.

  “Of course. Are you well enough to walk? You’re bleeding.”

  “I’ll be fine. Ready?”

  As much as John unsettled me before when he’d come into Ruby’s, after the attack, the company is welcome even as I put a little more distance between us than is necessary.

  “Yes. I didn’t thank you earlier for coming to my aid. Thank you.”

  My legs quiver as I walk, my steps slower than normal. I place a hand protectively over my stomach, saying a silent prayer for the baby to move.

  John matches his pace to mine, and I notice for the first time that he has a slight hitch in his stride.

  His jaw is clenched as though he’s in pain, his gaze trained to some point off in the horizon.

  I stop, and he does the same.

  There’s a flutter in my stomach, followed by a kick, strong and steady.

  I settle my hand on my belly, at the spot where the baby kicks again, relief flooding me.

  “The babe?” John asks.

  I nod, tears welling in my eyes.

  The baby shifts in my stomach, a jab here, another kick there. Never before has such motion brought such relief.

  I begin walking again, and John trails behind me. He doesn’t offer anything else to the conversation, and we drift into silence, our journey punctuated by the sounds of the night.

  The weather is pleasant enough, but there’s an undercurrent contained in the air, a taste on my tongue, a scent that suggests a storm is brewing despite Tom’s insistence it would miss us.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” I ask John. Most of the highway workers are transplants from other areas.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Do you like the Keys?”

  “I’ve been worse places,” he replies. “It’s warm, at least. Pretty enough scenery if you don’t mind things a little wild. It’s about as good as any a place to recover.”

  “Were you injured in the war?”

  He gestures to the leg he’s been favoring. “Shot. Healed fine, but it stiffens up on me in the cold or at the end of a long day. Don’t find much cold down here, so it suits me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He makes a noncommittal sound beside me.

  “Really, thank you for helping me tonight. You’re right, it could have been much worse.”

  “I didn’t do anything special. Just what anyone would have done.”

  “I don’t know about that. It wasn’t your fight.”

  “The day we stop fighting for others is the day we might as well pack it all up and go home.”

  “I’m not sure many people see it the way you do,” I reply.

  “You must see all sorts of people coming through Ruby’s. Did you recognize the men who tried to rob you tonight?”

  “They were in there earlier this evening, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before. We get a lot of men like that coming through our doors—hungry, a little mean.”

  “Did you grow up in Key West?” he asks.

  “Lived here my whole life. My daddy used to work on the railroad.”

  “It’s a hard way to make a living,” he comments.

  “Daddy was a hard man. A good one, but a hard one just the same.”

  “If it was anything like working on the highway, then there wasn’t a lot of room for softness. It’s dangerous work. It can make you hard.”

  “Is that why you come to Key West so often? To escape?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why’d they send you all down to the Keys?” I ask. “Surely, there are plenty of projects around the country for you all to work on. The weather might be good, but the elements aren’t exactly welcoming.”

  “They didn’t want us in Washington, causing trouble, reminding the American public—the voting public—that we weren’t taken care of, that the government hasn’t exactly lived up to its promises. They probably thought the Keys were far enough away to send us so everyone would forget about us.”

  A few years ago, many of the men who fought in the Great War went to Washington D.C. alongside their families to demand that the government pay the bonuses they were owed for their wartime service in an early lump-sum payout rather than making them wait years for the full payment in such desperate economic times. The papers referred to them as the “Bonus Army.”

  “Were you involved with the Bonus Army?” I ask. “The protests in Washington D.C.?”

  “I was. I marched with them. A lot of veterans are out of work. Hungry. Losing hope. The government made a promise to them, had the means to help them, to give them the money they were owed by law. Instead, they shoved them aside.”

  “The images in the papers—”

  They showed chains on the gates at the White House, men living in tents, guards patr
olling the street, tear gas bombs released on the remaining veterans, their tents burned.

  “The movement changed, of course,” he says. “People gave up hope. Went home. Others came in who had no real affiliation to the war. Near the end we had people join us who were there to cause trouble.

  “It’s a shame what’s happening to this country, the mess that’s consuming us. We fought the war to end all wars. Lived through hell. We won. Only to come home to a different sort of hell. And the people who are in a position to do something? You have congressmen making almost nine thousand dollars a year while the people they’re supposed to be serving make a fraction of that.”

  Nine thousand dollars is an unimaginable sum of money compared to the few hundred I make at Ruby’s each year.

  “Why not home? Why didn’t you go back?”

  “I tried. After the war. I’m not—” He takes a deep breath as though bracing himself for something unpleasant. “I’m not the man I was when I left. Everyone was happy to see us home, but once we were there, they didn’t know what to do with us. Wanted to pretend we were the same people who’d left, that we hadn’t seen the things we’d seen.”

  “Will you stay down here permanently?”

  “I don’t know. There are rumors they’re considering closing the camps. Not that anyone’s told us. They sent us down here like that was going to fix what’s broken in us, and now they want to get rid of us again.”

  “That’s not right.”

  “No, it isn’t, but not much is in this world.”

  I can’t disagree with him there.

  “What do you do down in Key West?” I ask.

  As soon as the question leaves my mouth, I regret it. I’m a married woman—it’s fairly easy to guess what he gets up to down here.

  “During the week, we’re working on a stretch of highway between Grassy Key and Lower Matecumbe. On the weekends? The other guys like to go out. Sloppy Joe’s and the like,” he answers evenly.

  “And you don’t like to go out?”

  He shrugs. “I went out plenty before the war. Drank myself to sleep enough nights after. Trouble’s the last thing I need.”

  “What did you come here looking for?”

  “Peace,” he answers, before turning my own question around on me. “And you? What are you searching for?”

  “I’ve never been anywhere else.”

  “Where would you go?” John asks. “If you could go anywhere?”

  Away. Far away.

  “Is it like they say?” I ask, sidestepping his question. “In the camps?”

  “What do they say?”

  “They talk of fights. Disorderly conduct. Drunkenness.”

  “Are there some men who came down to cause trouble? Sure. But there are good men, men working hard to send money back to their families. Men who simply need a break. We’ve all been through something that changes you, and most of us are trying to get by.”

  “I’ve noticed you keep to yourself. It must get lonely. Your family must miss you.”

  “I don’t know about that. I do just fine.”

  “Are you married?”

  It’s pretty much impossible to spend your day waiting on people and not form a curiosity about their lives. Sometimes I wonder about them to distract myself from the other things on my mind, and other times, I genuinely want to know.

  He’s silent for a moment that stretches on in the night. “No. I never married. How long have you been married?” he asks me.

  “Nine years.”

  “Long time.”

  Sometimes it seems like an eternity, as though my entire life has been defined by my marriage to Tom, and I suppose in a way it has. The girl I was before him belongs to someone else’s memories.

  I take a deep, shaky breath, staring up at the inky night sky. “I wonder sometimes—”

  How my life would have changed if I’d said “no” when Tom asked me to marry him . . . If things would be different if I’d never gone out to the docks that day his boat was coming in full of fish and smelling of the sea . . . if I’d gone north to my aunt Alice the first time he hit me rather than believing him when he said it would never happen again . . . if we hadn’t lost all those babies . . . if the Depression never came . . . Would our marriage be something different now if fate hadn’t crashed into us so decisively? Or were we always on this course and I couldn’t see it?

  “What do you wonder?” he asks, and I realize I’ve stopped speaking entirely.

  It’s not like me to share such intimacies with a stranger, much less a strange man, but there’s something soothing in his manner. Perhaps by offering so little of himself, he naturally invites the other person to fill the spaces where polite conversation would normally lie.

  And truthfully, my days are spent asking others what they’d like, what they need, and I can’t resist the urge to speak.

  “It seems wrong, I suppose, to bring a child into all of this.”

  “Is there no one else? Do you have family?” he asks me.

  “My parents are dead.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Do you think there’s something better out there?” I ask. “Something better than this?”

  Another pause. “I hope so,” he replies. “What does ‘something better’ look like for you?”

  I can hardly tell him the truth, about the daydreams and the rest of it. Good women don’t dream of their husband’s death.

  “Somewhere far away from here. Somewhere safe.”

  “You could leave,” he says.

  The familiar yearning fills me at those words, at the possibility of them. How many times have I considered it? Planned it?

  “How? Where would I go? With what money? A woman’s place is with her husband.”

  At least, that’s the pretty excuse that’s used to cover up all manner of sins.

  “Maybe a man loses his right to be called a husband when he raises his fists to someone he should be protecting.”

  Bitterness threads through me. “That’s a nice thought.”

  “I’ve angered you.”

  Perhaps he has a little, poking and prodding at things he has no understanding of. It’s easy to judge when you’re on the outside staring in.

  “I shouldn’t have spoken as I did earlier,” I say instead. This strange night has loosened my tongue. “What’s between a man and his wife is no one’s business.”

  “Wouldn’t your friends help you? I’ve seen how the other staff treat you, how the owner dotes on you.”

  “Ruby has enough to worry about trying to keep a business afloat. She has mouths to feed. Responsibilities. She doesn’t need to be concerned over my troubles.”

  “Maybe she’s already worried about you and she’d be happy to help.”

  “And you? You said you’d left your family. Who helps you? Every time you dine in the restaurant, you’re alone. Where are the friends you lean on? Since you’ve been coming in the restaurant, you’ve never said anything to me, never bothered to make polite conversation.”

  I hardly recognize myself, the ability to speak my mind heady indeed.

  He looks momentarily abashed, the effect unexpected, transforming his face to something younger, softer. “You’re right. I’m not good at taking my own advice.”

  “No, I shouldn’t have said anything. That was rude of me—I apologize.”

  “There’s no need to apologize. You’re right. I could do better. And I’m sorry if I came off as rude at the restaurant. It was never my intention to give offense.”

  “Not rude. Just not particularly talkative.”

  “I’ve found it difficult to be at ease with people since I came home.”

  I smile despite my earlier annoyance. “You’re doing a pretty good job of it now.”

  “You’re easy to t
alk to.”

  “I suppose that comes with the territory in my line of work.”

  “It’s more than that. There’s something calming about you.”

  “Calming?”

  He nods, tilting his head away from me.

  I think I’ve embarrassed him, even as I am left with the unmistakable sensation that I have made a friend.

  * * *

  —

  We speak less and less the nearer we get to my house, John trailing a step behind me as he follows my path. When we reach the last turnoff, I slow my pace. We’re closer to the water now, but it’s too dark and we’re too far away for me to tell if Tom’s boat is moored, if he’s back from his fishing trip. His schedule has always been unpredictable, and I’ve done the best I can to anticipate his needs, to never be home too late in case he is waiting for me; no doubt he knows exactly how long it should take me to walk home from Ruby’s, even if most nights he steps off his boat and heads to the nearest bar rather than darkening our door with his presence.

  “I’ll go the rest of the way by myself,” I say, stopping in my tracks and facing John.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am. It’s up ahead. No one’s out here anyway. Thank you for coming to my aid earlier.”

  “Thanks for coming to mine,” he replies. “I’ll be in Key West through the weekend if you need anything.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He gives me a sad look as though we both know that isn’t strictly true.

  “Are you sure you don’t need patching up?” I gesture at the general vicinity of his torso.

  “I’ll be fine,” John replies, echoing my earlier statement. He takes a cigarette and a lighter from his pocket. “I’ll wait here a time, make sure everything is all right.”

  “Good evening.”

  “Good evening,” John replies with a faint inclination of his head.

  I walk the last few yards to the cottage alone. When I round the bend to the building I call home, I spy a soft glow in one of the windows.

  I grip the doorknob, twisting the handle as a chill slides down my spine.

  With drink, there’s a line, a tipping point between being drunk and dangerous and being too drunk to be of much harm to anyone. I pray Tom is simply passed out, his limbs sprawled out on the cottage floor.