Author's Note: Updated.
"Hey kid," he said, in a voice more gravel than human. "You're in my seat."
Jack Kelly looked up. The man was a real louse; the kind who wore an undersized suit for his expansive waist and the tired sneer of a weasel. He had clearly made a herculean effort to board the train, as evidenced by the dewy beads of sweat anchoring themselves to his graying mustache. The man was a bastard— that much Jack knew without a doubt. He was a bastard of the caliber Jack had quickly learned to spot from a mile away.
"What, you got wax in your ears?" the man said, now turning an unbecoming shade of salmon in his agitation. "I said get outta my seat."
Jack looked at the people in the car. The man's raised voice had caught their attention and they had discreetly turned around to see what had caused the commotion. He searched for their eyes, for their sympathy, but every pair he came across deflected his gaze. It was an experience not unfamiliar to someone like Jack who grew up on the streets of New York. But he wasn't on the train to stick around. Finding only evasive eyes he stood up—not from embarrassment or an impulse to fight, but rather from an instinctive need to be in motion. The man pushed past, and the grassy, sour odor that radiated from his clammy neck was so pungent that Jack could feel its stickiness hover as he stood. The man sat down in his seat with a huff, moving his weighty flesh back and forth until he found the seat's sweet spot, without bothering a glance at Jack, who was standing there like a real dope, fighting his natural indignation, now with no place to sit.
Jack choked back a sigh. He wasn't even out of New York yet.
As he reached the car door to move down the line, the momentum of the fact that he hadn't read the crumb the riot act when he had the chance hit him like a horse's kick to the head. He was Jack Kelly, soon to be Kiss of Death Kelly, or, even better, Kill 'Em Dead Kelly, if he had his way about it. He was the goddamn King of New York, and he had just let a fat bastard snake him out of his seat without even a whimper, though Jack Kelly would never whimper. Not even for a one-way ticket to Santa Fe.
But hell, he thought in a grinding voice, I'm still Jack Kelly, even if I'm leaving New York. The train's still in the yard. I still don't have to listen to no schmuck.
He turned from the door to look back. It was far too late. The fat man was already settled nicely into his seat, and the moment for harsh words and knee-jerk reactions had long passed. He would be a fool to start something now, just as the train was about to leave. He hoisted his suitcase, which leaned heavily against his leg, with unnecessary, theatrical violence and bore the back of the man's head down with a wrathful glare. Jack didn't bother to check his ticket, even though he would have found himself in the correct seat. He simply moved on. As far as Jack was concerned, it didn't matter. He didn't want the damn seat anymore.
He stopped at the dining car. Two older women sat at a table and frowned as he passed, but he paid them no mind and tucked the small suitcase—the only piece of luggage to his name, which contained only a few tattered articles of clothing and a half-smoked cigar generously gifted by Racetrack—safely under his arm. These few belongings were meant only to get him to Santa Fe. Once there, Jack knew, it would all have to go.
He sat down at a table on the far end of the car. A few moments later he heard the women stand and move out of the car, fussing as they walked. Jack breathed deeply as the door closed behind them. He threw his suitcase on the table and leaned over to look out the window. He rubbed the fabric of the tablecloth between his fingers, concentrating on the feel of each thread and the silkiness of the whole. Jack frowned. Sure, he thought bitterly, I'll bet Pulitzer's got closets of skivvies made out of this stuff, and here I am with near nothing to my name.
Jack leaned back in the chair. He folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes. He had left for the station in the early morning hours while the birds quietly convened in their concrete castles and the streets still smelled of drunken whispers. He thought about the fact that he hadn't told Davey he was leaving. Davey was his best friend, sure, but Jack had learned that friends often hold a guy back from what he really ought to be doing. Friends are what kept him working as a newsie for far too long. Jack didn't want to disappoint Davey, that was the damn truth, but it was high time for him to start making his own way. A man didn't just wake up wrangling cows beneath a dusky Western sky. He had to get there first.
Yes, Jack had thought long and hard about how he was going to leave Davey and in the end it hadn't mattered at all. He had left and that was it.
He didn't regret what he'd done. It was just the way it had to be.
Dealing with Sarah, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter. He still wasn't sure that telling her about his plans wasn't a mistake, but there was no going back now, not after everything he'd done. After her expected rage had passed, she had asked him, in a funereal tone that made his skin crawl, why he hadn't left with Roosevelt when he had the chance.
Even if he'd had an answer to her looming question—which he'd mulled over more times than he could count—he wouldn't have given it. It just wasn't his way.
After their austere goodbye Jack had left. He worried for a moment that Sarah would give Davey the head's up on what he'd done, but he didn't dwell on it for very long. He had decided, in the end, that Sarah would never tell Davey, not a million years. She was a girl who had as pretty a face as any and manners to charm a thief, but she was just as proud as the best of them, old man Pulitzer included; though she hid her hubris with impressive skill. Jack knew she would make it so everyone, especially Davey, thought that Jack Kelly, the scumbag that he was, had just up and left everything he had spent all the years of his life building, as if it were nothing but trash.
Why? Jack knew all too well why. Sarah was pretty and proud, but she wasn't simple. She knew Jack had wanted her to hurt; why else would he have told her he was leaving for good? She also knew he hadn't told Davey, and that simple fact had wounded her more than she expected―Jack had seen it in her eyes. It was all so ironic, Jack thought, sitting at that table with no one around. At the precise moment when Sarah's tears turned into bitterness, he had loved her more than ever; for her pride, for her hurt, for her anger, because it was all so human.
He asked himself why he had wanted to hurt her, but he foundered for an explanation. He chalked it up to wanting someone to know where he was going and left it at that.
As for the rest of his friends, well, they had their own selves to be worried about. They all knew the game; they would be fools if they didn't. He never worried about the boys because it was only a matter of time before they all tramped off, too.
Jack was sitting there, looking at the New York train yards, imagining the deep New Mexico sky, and wishing the damn train would get a move on already, when the conductor walked into the dining car. As the conductor neared where Jack was sitting, his eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"Young man, what are you doing here?"
Jack did not turn to face him. "I'm sittin', what does it look like?"
Expectedly, the conductor changed his tone.
"Well, you ought to know that passengers are not allowed in the dining car until the train has moved out of the station and the journey is underway. Now, if you will—"
"I ain't movin'."
The only thing the conductor—a well-seasoned bitter man— hated more than being interrupted while he was speaking were the greasy-haired kids who stole their way onto his trains, only to cost him precious time and little patience as he disposed of them, kicking them right into the gutter where they would wait for the next train to hop. The conductor straightened and pulled at his lapels. "Young man, there are rules when one is on a train; rules that must be followed. If you refuse to comply with these rules, I would be more than pleased to have the authorities throw you off this train." His ire increased as Jack kept silent. "I assure you that you are not the only rat to board this train without a ticket. I can't tell you how many—"
Jack pushed himself up too quickly and the chair fell behind him. He straightened and found himself to be the same height as the conductor. He moved his face close enough to the conductor's to see a thin film of white powder across his nose. Jack breathed deeply.
"I got myself a ticket, fair and square. So go ahead, call the bulls. I ain't breakin' the law."
The conductor inhaled affectingly, preparing himself for the ensuing verbal battle. "Well," he said, adjusting his cap and gathering his bearings. "What do you think, young man, that I'm just off the boat? I've seen my fair share of kids like you." He paused. "Show me the ticket."
Jack growled and pulled the ticket, now creased and sweaty, out of his pocket before holding it up to the conductor's face. "See here? I got myself a real live ticket. Now will ya get off my back?"
The conductor frowned and adjusted his glasses while he read the ticket. He squinted until his eyes began to water. He removed his glasses and wiped them. "Very well. But this still does not explain why you are not in your seat. Or perhaps," the conductor said slowly and with a vague smile, "you stole this ticket and have chosen to hide here?"
The insinuation stranded Jack in a corner. He was incensed, as any sap would be at being called a thief, but he also knew that he was one smart remark away from getting thrown onto the tracks. Men like this, he knew, had psyches as sensitive as an autumn wind, and at the slightest funny business they would toss and turn and roll with mad anger.
Jack exhaled and relaxed his shoulders. "I didn't steal it. Some dandy took my seat."
The conductor frowned. "And why did he take your seat?"
"You'll have to ask him, won't ya?"
The conductor seized the ticket from Jack's manifestly dirty fingers and squinted at it once more. "Regardless, young man, you simply cannot stay here."
Jack stared plainly at the conductor's face. In that second, never before and never after, he felt a desert dust storm rip through his ribs, a bull's tail whip across his shoulder, a pretty Mexican girl kiss his cheek. A moment later it was all gone. He took a breath that reached down to his toes, and savored, as he would the finest cigar ever made, the way it hissed through his nostrils as it came back up. "Pray tell, then, Your Highness," he said, opening his eyes just enough to catch a glimpse of the conductor's balding head, "where am I supposed to sit?"
Jack relished, with a grotesque fervor, the carmine flush that rose in the conductor's neck.
Jack tried to recover the foreign sensations he'd had a minute ago, but there was nothing left. This was one of those moments, Jack thought, he both loved and hated with an intense, personal passion. This was one of those moments when he'd had the power to ruin his own dreams, and, drunk on such consuming power, he'd done so. He'd had the power to make the conductor so angry, so unnecessarily overwrought, that in the next minute he would throw Jack on the tracks and urge the train on, full speed ahead. He'd had the power to look Santa Fe in the face and say, not for this. I won't, not yet, not for this.
Jack was not surprised when the conductor drew his meaty hand around his ticket and tore it twice. He didn't bother to look where the bitter pieces landed.
With a force Jack had not expected, the conductor grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him toward the car door. Jack didn't bother to make a scene about his suitcase, which was still sitting on the table as if it waiting patiently for the scene to blow over. A curious, satisfied smile spread across Jack's face as the conductor thrust the car door open and jostled him onto the platform, growling in some self-righteous dialect Jack couldn't, nor cared to, decipher.
When the train departed a few minutes later, Jack felt a wave of intense melancholy sweep over him as he stood on the platform. He wished the conductor had been a more dramatic man. He ought to have thrown Jack onto the tracks, face first into a pile of gravel. Perhaps a slap across the face and a heaving kick to the rear would have been in order. The absolute least he could have done would have been to throw Jack out the window of the moving train.
But the conductor did none of those things, and Jack was humiliated. He had been shouldered out of the door of a train as stationary as a hundred-year-old house. There was nothing more to it.
So he stood, watching the train as it vanished into the New York horizon, because there was nothing left.
And so it was that Jack Kelly was left alone, standing in the midst of an empty train station, with just his hat to his name and a couple pennies in his pocket; his only spare clothes and a half-smoked cigar tucked away in a suitcase bound, with no uncertain irony, for Santa Fe.