Kaleidoscope

by Darryl Wimberley

  He rose stiffly from his second-class seat to find breakfast in the diner. Morning meals were most democratic, working stiffs and newlyweds sipping orange juice in the atmosphere of cigars and sophistication. Jack found a seat near the back and was on his second cup of coffee when a porter passed by with a basket of newspapers. Jack recognized the black man from his first passage, but was completely unrecognized in return.

  “Paper, suh?”

  “Not now, thanks.”

  Jack’s hands never left the well-oiled bag in his lap. It was not a Gladstone or portmanteau but a smaller satchel, freshly scrubbed with saddlesoap. Peewee had provided it for a purpose.

  “Paper for you, suh?”

  The porter now engaging some dapper seated with a gaggle of cronies just beyond Jack’s table.

  “Paper?” the porter solicited again.

  “Yes, I will.”

  A banker, Jack had gleaned that much from overheard snippets of conversation. He was a corpulent, self-satisfied tub of guts, vested, coifed and clipped. A pleasant sheen of oil in the hair. A wax of mustache. A man prone to giving orders and used to having them obeyed. He was seated with a wife half his age in a matched set of similarly attired professionals and their wives, men and women making a studied effort to exude what they took to be an air of sophistication. A breakfast of millionaires.

  Jack noticed that the banker did not thank the black man who placed the newspaper at his disposal. You could hear the snap of the rag as it opened.

  “That’s Malcolm,” the wife twittered to a younger woman. “Can’t eat his breakfast without seeing to business.”

  Her confidant nodded, a plump young thing kneading a wreath of pearls.

  “Seem silly, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s the point of making gobs if you don’t take time to—”

  “Malcolm?”

  A deeper voice interrupting the women’s chatter.

  Jack looked up from his table to see the banker rigid in his seat. His eyes bulging from their sockets, arms and legs rigid as posts.

  “MALCOLM?!!”

  The well-heeled gentleman fell face first into his grits and as his guests scrambled in horror Jack noticed the paper on the dining car floor. A bold headline bannered the latest:

  October 29th, 1929

  WALL STREET CRASHES—RUN ON THE BANKS

  The elaborately grilled gate allowing entry onto Oliver Bladehorn’s grounds was unguarded. Jack tested the barrier; it opened complaining on rusty hinges and he limped onto the grounds. There was no sign of security patrolling the arc deco mansion. No crinolines or croquet on the lawn. The long hedges of juniper and holly and azalea had not been trimmed, he could see. The flowerbeds were filled with autumn leaves, buried in leaves actually. The pleasant aroma of maple in decomposition.

  Jack followed the track of asphalt around the house proper, through the trees. The roofline of the lepidopterary was easy to see now that the elms had lost their leaves. There was not a servant or valet to be seen anywhere, but Jack could hear a gramophone inside the hothouse. The piano tugged at Jack’s memory. Where had he heard that record before?

  It was in France. Of, course, in the infirmary. He could see Gilette, now, gently padding the dust off a shining disk, carefully bringing the needle to a groove. Was it Mozart—? Mozart, yes. Or someone similar. Jack shifted the bag in his grip, turned the brass handle on the flimsy door and went inside.

  Turned out it was not a gramophone inside but a radio. Oliver Bladehorn swaying to Mozart in a million swirling motes of color. Butterflies lining his arms like scales. A beautiful insect parting wings on the crown of his bald head as the gangster pinned its cousin to a board.

  Something rotting inside. A fetid decay filling Jack’s nostrils.

  “They’re getting edgy,” Bladehorn brushed a monarch off his arm as casually as if he’d been expecting Jack all morning. “Time to migrate, I expect.”

  “Time to open the windows,” Jack agreed.

  Bladehorn’s head swiveling like a turret on his shoulders. Like a barnyard owl. Something like a smile threatening to break over the drool seeping from his mouth. The insect preening unnoticed on top.

  “Good heavens, Jack. Whatever happened to you?”

  “Played with fire.”

  “Knives, too, apparently. I hope you didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing.”

  “I found the property,” Jack assured him. “Most of it, anyway. It’s all in cash.”

  “Cash? An unexpected blessing. I don’t expect you to be astute in these matters, Mr. Romaine, but cash is something very hard to come by just now.”

  “I know what it means to break the bank,” Jack leaned onto a potting table. “Looks like you do, too.”

  “Point taken,” Bladehorn wiped his hands on his apron. “But with my property recovered I can start over.”

  Bladehorn extending his hands like a priest accepting a child for baptism.

  “Money lets you migrate, you see. Just like the butterfly. South, for me, most likely. The islands, perhaps. Someplace where I can safely cocoon. You return to me, I tell you in candor, Mr. Romaine, not a moment too soon.”

  Jack tossed the bag at Bladehorn’s feet. A moment’s irritation before he bent to retrieve it, the bald, polished head dipping as if in deference. The butterfly flitting from that gleaming skull.

  Bladehorn opened the bag with trembling hands.

  But then—

  “What? What is the meaning of this?”

  It was a doll inside the bag. Peewee’s doll. Nothing but a Raggedy Ann. A childhood gift from a mother to her child.

  “What…have…you…brought…ME?!” The Fat Lady’s father now wringing the doll’s neck.

  “It’s a birthday present.”

  “A birth—? The hell are you talking about?”

  “You really don’t know, do you? You sorry son of a bitch. You don’t even remember.”

  “Do not trifle with me, Mr. Romaine! I am not as completely without resources as you seem to suppose!”

  “I don’t suppose anything, Bladehorn. I goddamn know.”

  Jack leaned forward to bring his skewered face to Bladehorn’s. “And what I know, Oliver, is that you’ve got bigger things to worry about than me.”

  “Becker won’t quit worrying,” Bladehorn snarled. “I know Arno; he’ll find you.”

  “He already has—take a look. But guess what? During our long, long conversation Arno told me all about your problems. Bad investments. Wolves at the door. And now, jeepers creepers, the banks are busted.”

  “WHERE IS MY MONEY?!”

  The dome of his head turning scarlet.

  Jack backed off a step.

  “I took your money,” he said. “I took it, I’m keeping it, and there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it.”

  Bladehorn lurched toward the potting table but Jack snapped the brass knucks out of his pocket and across the bridge of Bladehorn’s nose and as the gangster fell back cursing, he palmed the handgun always handy in the drawer of the table.

  “You can’t do this to me!”

  Blood streaming down Bladehorn’s face, into his teeth. The son of a bitch looked like some kind of gourd, or maybe a jack-o’-lantern.

  “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” the gangster raged.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Jack pocketed the gun. “But it ain’t an insect.”

  Jack Romaine emerged from the Butterfly House to find four men with Thompsons waiting. Three of the faces were unfamiliar, but Spud Staponski’s was the fourth.

  Spud had not seen Jack since his trip south.

  “Pretty Boy. What dog got hold of you?”

  Jack pulled a thin sheaf of bills from his waistcoat.

  “Five hundred bucks I believe is what we agreed.”

  Staponski took the cash, counted it.

  “We square?”

  Spud stuffed the bills in his pocket.

  “Get outta here.”

  Jack limped on past. He could
hear the heavy bolts of the Tommy guns slide back, the shuffle of leather soles toward the hothouse door. He was barely onto the asphalt track when a quartet of weapons shattered the brisk autumn calm. Glass falling like chimes out of tune into the house of insects. Jack glanced back to see thousands of butterflies soaring into the sky. Like kites cut loose from their strings.

  Epilogue

  A Gulf breeze flutters damp and humid late one December afternoon through a ballpark cleared not too far from the Little Alafia inside a grove of cypress and pine. A radio announcer gives a play-by-play of the action, a voice hoarse with excitement and distorted with static:

  …the Reds have their pitcher at bat, Joe Dawson at the plate! We’re down one in the bottom of the ninth. We’ve got two outs with two men on base. Two strikes and two balls on the count. Wait a minute…Dawson’s backed off the plate. He’s off the plate, he’s pointing to center field! To the upper deck! The hell’s this kid think he is, Babe Ruth?…

  The radio blares from the trunk of a cabbage palm that marks the left-field foul line of this homemade ballpark. Jack Romaine laughs in shorts on a jerry-rigged mound. His son Martin, suntanned and handsome as a movie star, wields a bat over a croker sack. Mamere plays spectator from the shade of the trees. Luna lounges alongside, long and lazy, raven hair and blue skin arranged on a maroon blanket spreading on white, white sand. An infant props on Luna’s hip, Tommy Speck’s little girl. Absorbed in the mystery of oranges.

  Jack winks broadly to Luna from the mound.

  “C’mon, Dad!”

  The young man leveling his bat across the sack.

  “Gimme something I can hit.”

  “Awright, slugger.”

  The windup. The pitch. The ball snaps off Martin’s bat like a Roman candle; the radio announcer shouting on cue from the radio with the play—“It’s a home run! A home run DEEP into the center-field deck!”

  Jack’s son streaks the circuit of bags and slides to home in his father’s arms. Luna cheers from her blanket. And if you wandered just a little ways behind the ballfield you would once again see—

  “The Kaleidoscope Café.” A busy afternoon at the beddy. Gregory Lagopolus and his unfeeling twin follow Greg’s sons to a churn of ice cream. Friederich The Unparalled straddles his balls to take a turn at the crank. Pinhead brings a plate of hotdogs to Penguin and Half Track. Jo Jo and The Giant and the rest of their special family chow down with a cohort of other performers and brodies as Jacques & Marcel accompany the Hilton Sisters for a quartet of harmonized entertainment.

  Some folks throw horseshoes; some play dominoes, or checkers. Jack Earl slaps cards with a dwarf not much taller than his boots. Cassandra displays her double cleavage over Tarot cards. Offering her special dispensation. And as for Peewee—

  The Princess sips a daiquiri from her special spot on the veranda, a novel and newspaper near to hand. She can hear the latest from the ballpark:

  …The runners come in one-two and now the team’s piling out to mob Dawson at the plate. The pitcher—Joe Dawson! What are the odds? Joe Dawson hits a home run to win the game!

  The Princess turns a broad, dimpled face to find a prince perched on the lip of her nectared tumbler. Danaus Plexippus fans his wings slowly, cooling the royal blood in those marvelous veins. Those russet wings shot with black. However, a close look reveals that he is not perfectly preserved; some discoloration along a wing that bears the tears of a bad-tasting encounter with a sparrow, or owl, or some other predator. He is only weeks removed from the cocoon, this hardy traveler. He has not sired progeny, has not even finished his migration, but seeing him here in royal company there is no doubt—

  His metamorphosis is complete.

  FINIS

  Acknowledgments

  I owe interest in carnival life entirely to a talented and enthusiastic filmmaker, Robert Nowotny, who prodded me years ago to produce a feature-film script that was unabashedly in genre and set in a midway populated by carneys, cons, and exhibitionists. Many Floridians will recognize in the make-believe and nascent community of Kaleidoscope a simulacrum of the actual community of Gibsonton, a town near Tampa which still exists today. The community imagined in the novel does not chronicle the actual history of Gibsonton, nor do its characters, except in cameo. But even casual research of carnival communities, carney advertisements and playbills reveals a plethora of fascinating anecdotes and history which inform the novel and its avatar of people and place.

  I owe many thanks to Ace Atkins and Leland Hawes, author and journalist respectively, for helping me research the Tampa area of the twenties. Similarly, I am pleased to thank Dr. Nancy Humbach for helping me research the progressive city of Cincinnati during that same period.

  About the Author

  Darryl Wimberley

  Darryl Wimberley has authored two critically acclaimed literary works, A Tinker’s Damn and The King of Colored Town, along with the Gulf Coast noir series featuring Barrett Raines, Special Agent for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement: A Rock and a Hard Place, Dead Man’s Bay, Strawman’s Hammock and Pepperfish Keys. All are available from the Toby Press.

  Wimberley has also garnered three feature-film credits. The screenplay for Kaleidoscope won Grand Prize Winner in a competition sponsored some years ago by Fade In magazine.

  The author and screenwriter resides with his family in Austin.