The Last Train to Key West

by Chanel Cleeton

  “I’m trying to find my brother. Half brother, actually. His mother was my father’s first wife.”

  She died of cancer; my father married my mother a scandalous eight months later.

  “We lost touch with him a few years ago,” I add. “The war—he wasn’t the same when he came back from the war. He sent letters occasionally, but he disappeared from our lives.”

  “You couldn’t have been more than a little girl when he left.”

  “I was. I remember what he was like before, though. Flashes of memories, at least. He was my hero. He had the best laugh. He was always bringing me treats, sneaking me sweets my mother didn’t want me to have.”

  “What did he do over there?” Sam asks.

  “He was a doctor when he volunteered. He went into medical service.”

  “He must have seen a great deal of death.”

  Almost forty million people died during the course of the Great War, and I’ve often wondered how many saw my brother in their final hours.

  “He must have. He never spoke of it to anyone, though. When the war was over, we waited and waited for him to come home, and he never did. We received a letter postmarked from London that arrived much later saying he was alive. A few years passed and he showed up on our doorstep. I barely recognized him. He stayed for a night or two and he was gone again. Over the years, he would show up unexpectedly and disappear again. Finally, he stopped coming around.”

  “Do you know where he was living during that time?”

  “No.”

  “And then you got a letter from him with a Key West postmark.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought the prudent thing was to board a train and drag him home yourself?”

  “There were exigent circumstances.”

  “Such as?”

  “That’s enough of my secrets,” I answer instead.

  “Why is it so important you find your brother?”

  “He’s all I have left.”

  “You have no one else?”

  “My mother isn’t well,” I say in a tone that makes it clear I’m done sharing.

  “When did you last hear from your brother?” Sam asks.

  “A month ago.”

  I don’t add how the letter appeared on the same afternoon Frank proposed, or tell him how I felt when I opened it and saw my brother’s familiar handwriting, how it seemed like the answer to all of my prayers, as though my big brother could sense my distress and was rescuing me like he did all those times when we were younger.

  I don’t tell him my brother is the only thing standing between me and a marriage I’m desperately trying to escape.

  “There’s the camp up ahead,” Sam says.

  * * *

  —

  At first glance, the camp on Windley Key—Camp One—is a soulless place devoid of color, everything arranged in cold, austere angles with military precision. Upon deeper examination, it’s a soulless place devoid of color that stinks to high heaven.

  “I heard the conditions were rough,” Sam admits. “But I wasn’t expecting this.”

  I don’t speak as he parks the car, my gaze on the camp, my heart sinking at the sight before me. A few tents dot the landscape in rows, meager-looking shacks with canvas-covered roofs beside them doing little to improve the conditions.

  Men walk around, their shirts grimy and soaked with sweat, the cheap fabric sticking to their bodies. A faint buzzing fills the air, and a man slaps at his skin, killing a mosquito with the flat of his hand.

  What kind of disease breeds in a place like this with all manner of vermin crawling about, men crammed in such tight and unsanitary quarters?

  There’s a uniformity to the men—they all appear tired and worn down, as though they are one tragedy away from losing everything.

  I wait while Sam turns off the car, comes around the side, and opens the door for me. The heel of my sandal sinks into the ground as I get out of the car, and Sam supports me, his palm warm against my skin.

  I lean into him, taking a deep breath, the air in the camp heavy and cloying.

  Curious glances are cast our way, and Sam steps closer to me, settling his hand at the small of my back, hovering there reassuringly.

  I search for my brother’s face among these men, for a glimmer of recognition on their faces, but none stares back at me.

  “How many men are down here working?” I murmur to Sam.

  “Several hundred.”

  It’s a small enough island that it seems like everyone knows everyone around here, even if there’s a tension between the veterans and locals. And still—it’s been years since my brother and I last saw each other, the picture I carry with me hopelessly outdated, the face of a boy before he went to war.

  “Stay close,” Sam urges. “I’m going to see if I can find someone who’s in charge.”

  I wrap my arm around his, bringing my body against his side. Sam stiffens against me in surprise, and for an awkward moment, I think he’s going to pull away, but he doesn’t.

  The camp is far rougher than I ever imagined; men loll about intoxicated, their sly glances and nudges making it clear that they are unused to many women in their presence. The stench in the air I can’t quite place—and surely, don’t wish to: fish, sea, sweat, and rot, and the sweet sickness that so frequently accompanies any number of maladies. I surreptitiously press my nose to my fist. I search for my brother, try to envision how his features might have changed, how the passage of time would have altered him.

  Sam tenses beside me. “This was a bad idea.”

  We walk around the camp for a couple of minutes before Sam locates a man who appears to be in charge. Along the way I show the old photo to a few people, but no one recognizes him, or is even sober enough to notice.

  “We’re trying to find this man,” Sam says, showing the photo to the man in charge.

  He barely glances at the picture. “There’s a storm coming. This isn’t a real good time for a social visit. I gotta get these men taken care of.”

  “I’m searching for my brother,” I interject.

  “You see him here? There are other camps, though. Maybe he’s on one of them. A lot of guys are gone for the holiday weekend. Down in Key West getting drunk or up in Miami doing the same. Besides, plenty of people come down here and then they stop showing up.”

  “My brother’s not like that.”

  The look the man gives me is almost pitying. “They’re all like that, darling.”

  “They were heroes once,” I retort. “It seems like the least you could do is show them some respect.”

  “Sure. They’ll tell you the same if you get enough drink in them. That was a long time ago. Those men who went to war—you wouldn’t recognize them in the men who work here.”

  “How could I?” I snap as I gesture around the camp, my arm arcing out farther than I intended and nearly hitting Sam in the process. “Who would thrive in an environment like this?”

  “Now, you listen here. We run a fine camp up here.”

  “A clean, orderly one,” I say sarcastically.

  “You want clean? Orderly? We do the best we can with what we’ve got here. We’ve got storms and mosquitoes, men getting up to all sorts of trouble, and right now, my hands are full. I shouldn’t be a glorified governess to grown men, but I might as well be. Your brother isn’t here, and unless I miss my guess, the fact that you’re searching for him means he doesn’t want to be found.”

  He leaves me and Sam standing in the middle of the camp without so much as a good-bye.

  “Should we talk to more workers?” I ask Sam.

  “It’s a small enough camp that if someone had seen him, we would have heard about it.”

  “It’s an outdated photo. Maybe his appearance has changed.”

  “Still. No one here
recognized him.”

  “That man said a lot of people are out of town for the weekend.” Should I have stayed in Key West? It seemed more likely for me to find him here, but at the moment, he’s so far away.

  He could be dead.

  I try to dismiss the thought, but now that I’ve seen the conditions down here, I can’t ignore that it’s a distinct possibility. The living is hard, and I’m not sure he would have been equipped for something like this.

  “We can come back another day,” Sam says, the sympathy in his voice unmistakable.

  “You think this is a fool’s errand, don’t you?”

  “It could be, yes. I didn’t like that man more than you did, but he wasn’t lying to you. Some people come down here and disappear. Either by choice or not. I’m not saying your brother is one of those people, but you have to be prepared for that possibility.”

  “How do you know so much about life down here, anyway?”

  “Work, mostly.”

  “What about your work? The man you’re chasing?”

  “I’ve put some feelers out at the inn. He’ll turn up. They always do. Right now, let’s focus on your brother.”

  We drive down to Camp Five on Matecumbe Key. It’s smaller than Camp One, but still filthy, the same mosquitoes swarming around, the same indistinguishable stench in the air.

  Bile rises in my throat. “How can they treat people like this? We wouldn’t even treat our animals like this.”

  “This is what happens when you have a problem you don’t want to deal with. You put it out of people’s sight, out of their minds, get them out of Washington with the hope that they won’t cause trouble anymore.”

  I was too young to care when the Bonus Army marched on Washington D.C., too full of my own drama and life to consider people so far removed from my own reality. It wasn’t my problem, and even though my brother fought in the war, it was easy to view him as separate from all of this. Seeing what has become of so many of the soldiers now, I cannot help but wonder how many people made the same mistake I did, how many turned their backs on the veterans once the war drifted from their minds and they had their own problems to worry about.

  We walk through the camp silently, eyes on us once more—mostly me, rather. Not that Sam doesn’t attract his share of gazes, though, too. I get the impression that many of the men view anyone connected with the government with mistrust—not that I can blame them considering their experiences—and Sam in his somber suit and hat looks like the quintessential government man.

  We meet another man similar to the official we spoke to at Camp One—impatient and brusque, his mind on the coming storm. He doesn’t recognize my brother’s photograph; nor do the dozen or so other men we ask. With each person we approach, I sink lower and lower, tears threatening, my voice wavering until Sam wraps an arm around my waist and takes over, directing his questions toward the men in a manner that makes me think he must be quite a good investigator indeed. I wouldn’t say he has a way of putting people at ease, but he naturally commands respect seemingly without making an effort to do so. The men I’m used to throw their wealth around as though by virtue of it they are entitled to having the world spread before them. Sam is simply direct, lacking in pretense or artifice, and I watch, fascinated by the skill.

  I admire the power in his job, the ability to command respect, to ask questions people answer. It gives him a quiet confidence I can’t help but envy.

  It’s late in the afternoon when we finish up at Camp Five, and suddenly, the storm everyone has spoken of seems to make an appearance, the sky darkening, a raindrop falling on my dress. Then another. And another.

  “Come on.” Sam tugs on my hand, pulling me away from the camp and the men with ruined dreams in their eyes.

  Water falls from the sky in heavy waves, and we run toward Sam’s car parked in the distance.

  Thirteen

  It doesn’t rain for long, but it seems like an eternity. I desperately need to stretch my legs, to get fresh air in my lungs after the misery of the camps we visited today. Beside me in the car, Sam seems restless, too, tapping a silent melody on his thigh with his fingers, a cigarette in his free hand. I shake my head when he offers me a smoke, my gaze trained out the window.

  We wait outside the Sunrise Inn, and when the rain finally breaks, we walk to the little beach I explored earlier. I edge toward the shore, away from Sam, the water covering my feet as I struggle to steady my breathing, to replace the stagnant, sticky heat that has taken residence there since we visited the camps.

  Even if I do find him, the truth is inescapable now—the brother I once knew and loved is lost to me forever.

  No one is coming to save me from this mess.

  Sam hangs back, but his gaze weighs on me between drags of his cigarette, his attention unraveling me more and more. What does he see when he stares at me? What did all of those men see?

  A spoiled girl with no sense of the real world?

  I have never felt less sure of myself than I do at this moment. All of the things that made me me—my family, my friendships, our wealth, my plans for the future—have been taken away.

  I was so eager to leave New York, to escape the prying eyes and whispers, that it never occurred to me I’d miss it. At least you can get lost in the commotion of the city. I’ve never felt more invisible than in a crowd of people, but out here surrounded by this stark beauty, just me and Sam, I am stripped bare.

  Now that the rain has ended, the weather has changed, and it’s practically peaceful. The clouds appear as though they’re tinged in a coppery glow. For all they worried about an impending storm at the camp, now that the rain has passed, the weather couldn’t be calmer or more beautiful.

  “Have you ever seen clouds that color?” I ask. “It’s almost pretty here.”

  Sam shrugs. “You see beaches, I see smugglers in the mangroves.”

  “I doubt I’ve ever met anyone less whimsical than you in my life.”

  “I could say the opposite of you, I suppose,” he counters.

  “Life’s hard enough as it is,” I reply. “It’s easier to go through it with a smile.”

  “It’s not just the smiles, though, is it?” he asks. “You live on the edge and you like it.”

  I laugh because when he says it, it seems terribly glamorous, but the reality is that being a woman—even a reckless one—is fairly mundane. Something I’ve learned quickly since my family’s fall from grace. The heroics are often saved for men who wager big and risk it all, rather than the women left to care for them and pick up the pieces when they’ve returned.

  “And what do you call chasing criminals all day, if not taking risks? I’m not the only one who enjoys life on the edge.”

  He inclines his head as though subtly acknowledging the truth behind my statement. “No, I suppose not. Although, to put a finer point on it, you could say I’m more inclined to stop trouble than cause it.”

  “That sounds dreadfully boring.”

  “You’d be surprised.” He steps closer, as though he’s sharing a secret with me. “It starts with a target. Someone whose criminal behavior tests the bounds of lawful society. It can be wantonness, or recklessness, or general wickedness.”

  “General wickedness doesn’t sound boring at all,” I tease, batting my eyelashes at him, sinking into this moment, this delicious moment, when I can cast my troubles away for the space of a heartbeat.

  He eyes me speculatively. “I can’t tell if you flirt because you’re too smart for the world you’re stuck in and you’re bored as hell, or if you have a mischievous streak you can’t resist indulging.”

  “Maybe it’s both those things. You’d be frustrated if your hands were tied. The running of this world is left to men, and quite frankly, I’m not impressed with what they’ve done with it.”

  He’s silent for a beat, his tone gentler than any I’m u
sed to hearing from him. “What happened to your father?”

  I take a deep breath, releasing the words in a whoosh as though the effort could push them as far away from myself as possible. “He killed himself after the crash in ’29. He had an investment firm on Wall Street. He didn’t lose everything all at once, but it was a slow leak. A few weeks later, things were bad enough that he stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger in his office at home.” The familiar tightness fills my chest. “I found him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My brother George killed himself a few months later.”

  An oath falls from Sam’s lips.

  “There were debts, and after the crash, there were more,” I add. “None of us knew. My father maintained the facade that everything was fine, until there was no use pretending anymore.” I can’t quite keep the anger from my voice. Maybe some cleave to the Almighty in times like these, but I’ve found more fury beneath my smiles than anything else.

  “Some people say the Depression is our punishment for our wickedness,” I continue.

  Sam’s voice is almost unbearably gentle. “In my experience, lots of people say lots of stupid things. Fear and panic make them search for scapegoats.”

  “True.”

  “You must miss your family a great deal.”

  “I do miss them. It’s strange—we weren’t even that close, really. They were both so busy with work and I was so young. But still—it’s not the same with them gone. My mother—she’s not well. Her nerves, they say. She hasn’t been well for a long time—since she lost my father and brother.”

  “You’re responsible for her?”

  “I am. I left her with our housekeeper while I came down here. She’s been with the family forever, and stayed on when the money ran out. These days, there aren’t a lot of options out there. For a while, we sold what we could to try to manage things. Cut back. We were shuttled from family member to family member like a set of poor relations. But not many people want to take on extra mouths to feed right now, and even less so when they come with such a stigma attached to them. We were running out of options, drowning under the weight of my father’s debts. So I did what needed to be done.”