By Morning, Gone

Chapter 1: Last Run

The locomotive sat in Los Angeles Union Station like a sleeping beast, its steel hide ticking in the July heat. Clyde Sheridan stood on the platform with his uniform pressed sharp enough to cut glass, his porter's cap set at the regulation angle, and a feeling in his chest he hadn't carried in seven years of riding the rails: the lightness of a man about to be free.

He checked his watch. Four-seventeen in the afternoon. The Southwest Chief would begin boarding in thirteen minutes, and by tomorrow evening, it would deliver him to Chicago. From there, a bus to Washington, D.C. From there, Howard University. From there, the rest of his life.

The acceptance letter was folded inside his breast pocket, next to his heart, where he'd kept it for three months. He'd read it so many times the creases had gone soft as cloth. Dear Mr. Sheridan, we are pleased to inform you... He didn't need to read it again. He had every word committed to memory the way a prisoner memorizes the date of his release.

Seven years. That's how long it had taken. Seven years of twelve-hour shifts, of yes sir and right away sir and let me get that for you sir. Seven years of shining shoes and making beds and carrying bags that weighed more than his dignity was supposed to. Seven years of tips slid across his palm like charity, or withheld entirely when a passenger decided that a Black man's service was simply owed. Seven years of sleeping in a narrow berth at the back of the train while white conductors got proper bunks, of eating in the kitchen after the dining car closed, of being invisible when convenient and suspect when not.

But Clyde had done something with those seven years that the railroad hadn't counted on. He'd saved. Dollar by dollar, tip by tip, he'd built a wall of money between himself and this life. Forty-two hundred dollars in a savings account at the Broadway Federal on Central Avenue. Enough for tuition, books, and a modest room near campus for the first year. After that, he'd figure it out the way he'd figured out everything else—by being smarter and more disciplined than the world expected him to be.

He set his bag down and watched the other porters gathering along the platform. Most of them were older, men who'd been doing this since before the war, men who'd made their peace with the job or been broken by it. Clyde respected them. He just couldn't become them.

"Last run, college boy?" That was Roosevelt Timms, a barrel-chested man of fifty-five who'd been a porter since 1936. Roosevelt had given Clyde his nickname on his first day and never let it go.

"Last run," Clyde confirmed.

Roosevelt studied him with eyes that had seen more of America from the inside of a train than most people saw in a lifetime. "You know what I'm gonna say."

"That I'll be back."

"Every young man who leaves says he won't. Half of them come back inside a year." Roosevelt wasn't being cruel. He was being honest. Clyde had seen it happen—porters who saved up, quit, tried something else, and came crawling back when the money ran out or the world reminded them that a Black man's ambitions had a ceiling.

"I won't be back, Roosevelt."

The older man smiled, and for just a moment, something like hope flickered behind the weariness. "Then don't you dare come back, you hear me? You go be a lawyer. You go sit in a courtroom and make them call you sir for a change."

Clyde felt the words settle into him like a benediction. He picked up his bag and walked toward the train.

The Southwest Chief was one of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway's premier runs—a silver streak that connected Los Angeles to Chicago in roughly thirty-nine hours, cutting through the desert Southwest, climbing over Raton Pass, sweeping across the Kansas plains, and threading through Missouri before arriving at Chicago's Dearborn Station. It was a beautiful train, and Clyde had ridden it more times than he could count. He knew every sway of the tracks, every whistle stop, every stretch of landscape that blurred past the windows like a moving painting.

He'd been assigned to the Pullman sleeper car designated "Cimarron Valley," one of three sleeper cars on this run. His responsibilities were straightforward: attend to the passengers in the car's twelve sections and four private compartments, make up berths at night, answer calls, carry luggage, and perform it all with the kind of quiet efficiency that made white passengers feel comfortable and cared for without ever having to think too hard about the man providing the service.

Clyde moved through the car, checking each compartment. Linens fresh. Pillows plumped. Water carafes filled. The small rituals of servitude that he could perform in his sleep. He'd done them so many times that his hands moved independently of his mind, leaving his thoughts free to roam toward the future.

Constitutional law. Torts. Civil procedure. He'd been reading textbooks he borrowed from the public library for two years, preparing himself. He knew he'd be behind the other students—most of them would be coming straight from undergraduate programs, their minds still limber from study. Clyde would be coming from a train, his hands calloused from luggage and his back stiff from berths too short for his six-foot-one frame. But he also knew something those students didn't: he knew what injustice felt like in the body. Not as an abstraction discussed in a seminar room, but as a daily weight carried in the shoulders and swallowed in the throat.

That knowledge, he believed, would make him a better lawyer than any of them.

The boarding call sounded at four-thirty. Clyde took his position at the vestibule steps, white-gloved hands clasped behind his back, smile fixed in place. The passengers began to file aboard.

First came a family of four—husband, wife, two boys under ten, all of them sunburned and carrying the scattered energy of a vacation ending. Clyde helped them with their bags, directed them to their section, answered the wife's question about dinner service times, and fielded the older boy's request to see the locomotive. "Maybe tomorrow morning," he said with practiced warmth. "The engineer sometimes allows visitors before breakfast."

Then a pair of elderly women traveling together, sisters by the look of them, with matching hats and a shared irritability about the heat. Clyde carried their four bags—two each, both heavier than they looked—and settled them into their compartment with a minimum of fuss.

Then a businessman in a gray suit who barely glanced at Clyde, who dropped his bag at Clyde's feet without a word and walked to his section reading a newspaper. Clyde picked up the bag. He didn't react. He never reacted. Reaction was a luxury a Black porter couldn't afford.

And then came Gilbert Doyle.

Clyde noticed him immediately, not because there was anything remarkable about the man's appearance—he was rumpled, overweight, and sweating through a brown suit that had seen better days—but because of the way he moved. Gilbert Doyle walked like a man who was scanning a room even when there was no room to scan. His eyes swept the platform, the train, the other passengers, and finally Clyde, in a single practiced arc that took no more than two seconds but cataloged everything.

Military, Clyde thought. Or police. Something that trained a man to observe.

"Compartment B," Doyle said, handing over his ticket. His voice was flat, midwestern, the kind of voice that came from small towns and long winters.

"Yes, sir. May I take your bag?"

Doyle handed over a battered leather suitcase. It was heavy but not unusually so. "What time's dinner?"

"First seating at six o'clock, sir. Second at seven-thirty."

"First." Doyle mopped his forehead with a handkerchief that was already damp. "And I'll need extra pillows. Bad back."

"I'll have them for you right away, sir."

Doyle nodded and disappeared into his compartment without another word. Clyde filed him away in the mental catalog he kept of every passenger: Doyle, Gilbert. Compartment B. Traveling alone. Observant. Possibly unwell—the sweating was excessive even for July, and there was a grayish cast to his skin that spoke of something more than heat.

The boarding continued. By five o'clock, the Cimarron Valley was nearly full. Clyde had greeted nineteen passengers, carried twenty-six bags, answered forty-odd questions, and maintained his smile without interruption. The train gave its final whistle. The platform began to slide backward. Los Angeles fell away in a wash of afternoon light, and the Southwest Chief pointed its nose toward the desert.

Clyde allowed himself one moment. Standing in the vestibule as the city receded, he closed his eyes and felt the familiar rhythm of the rails beneath his feet—the heartbeat of a life he was about to leave behind. When he opened his eyes, the sprawl of the city was already giving way to the dry, brown hills east of town.

One more run. Forty-eight hours. Then he was done.

He went to work.

The first hours of any run were the busiest. Passengers needed to be settled, questions answered, small complaints addressed before they became large ones. Clyde moved through his car with the efficiency of long practice, a choreography of service so smooth it appeared effortless. He made up berths for the passengers who wanted to rest before dinner. He brought water, adjusted ventilation, located a missing hat that had slid under a seat. He did all of this while remaining, in the peculiar way the job demanded, both present and invisible.

At five forty-five, he changed into his dining car jacket and made his way forward to help with the first seating. The dining car was the social heart of the train, a long, gleaming space of white tablecloths and heavy silver where passengers who might never speak to each other in ordinary life found themselves sharing meals across narrow tables. The steward, a white man named Vic Pulaski, ran the dining car with the brisk authority of a man who believed that punctuality was next to godliness and that both were slightly less important than keeping the coffee hot.

"Sheridan, you're on the left side tonight," Pulaski said without looking up from his seating chart.

"Yes, sir."

Clyde took his station. The passengers began filing in, and for the next hour, he poured water, took orders, ferried plates from the kitchen, and performed the small theater of attentive service that the railroad demanded. He was good at it. He'd always been good at it. The bitter irony was that the same skills that made him an excellent porter—observation, memory, the ability to read people and anticipate their needs—were the skills that would make him an excellent lawyer. The railroad had been his law school in everything but name.

Gilbert Doyle came in for the first seating and was seated across from the businessman in the gray suit, a man who introduced himself as Lyle Cranshaw, something in insurance. Clyde served them both, noting that Doyle ordered the steak but ate only half of it, that he drank water instead of the bourbon that Cranshaw was putting away with enthusiasm, and that his color had not improved since boarding.

At six-forty, it happened.

Doyle was reaching for his water glass when his hand stopped in midair, trembling. His face went from gray to white. He made a sound—not quite a gasp, not quite a groan—and his left hand went to his chest. Then he pitched forward, his forehead striking the table with a sound that silenced the entire dining car.

Clyde was at his side in three seconds. He'd seen this before—a passenger two years ago, a retired judge from San Francisco, same sudden collapse, same gray pallor. That man had died before the train reached the next station.

"Mr. Doyle. Mr. Doyle, can you hear me?" Clyde eased him back in his seat. Doyle's eyes were open but unfocused, his breathing shallow and rapid. His skin was clammy to the touch.

"Get him on the floor," said a voice behind Clyde. It was one of the elderly sisters—the taller one, who turned out to be a retired nurse from Pasadena. Between them, they got Doyle onto the floor of the dining car, loosened his tie, and elevated his feet on a folded tablecloth.

"Is there a doctor on the train?" Pulaski called out, but no one answered. The retired nurse—her name was Dottie Cranston—checked Doyle's pulse and declared it rapid but present.

"It could be his heart," she said to Clyde, speaking to him as a colleague rather than a servant, which surprised him. "Or it could be exhaustion and heat. Has he been drinking?"

"Water only, ma'am. He ate half a steak."

"Good. Keep him flat. Someone should bring aspirin and cool cloths."

Clyde dispatched another porter for the supplies and stayed with Doyle until the man's color began to return. Within ten minutes, Doyle was conscious and irritable, which Clyde took as a good sign.

"I'm fine," Doyle muttered, trying to sit up.

"You're not fine, sir. You collapsed."

"I know what happened. I was there." Doyle's eyes focused on Clyde for the first time with real attention. "Help me back to my compartment. I don't need a crowd."

Clyde helped him up and walked him back through the train, one car at a time, moving slowly. Doyle leaned on him more heavily than either of them acknowledged. When they reached Compartment B, Clyde got him settled on the bed, brought water and aspirin, and pulled the shade against the last of the desert sun.

"The next station with medical facilities is Albuquerque," Clyde said. "We arrive at approximately eleven-fifteen tonight. I can arrange for a doctor to meet the train."

"No doctors. No stops. I have business in Chicago that won't wait."

"Sir—"

"I said no." Doyle's voice carried the finality of a man accustomed to ending conversations. Then, unexpectedly, it softened. "What's your name?"

"Clyde, sir. Clyde Sheridan."

"Clyde." Doyle studied him. "You handled that well. Most people panic."

"It's not my first emergency on a train, sir."

"No, I don't suppose it is." Doyle closed his eyes. "I'll ring if I need anything."

Clyde left the compartment and closed the door softly behind him. In the corridor, he allowed himself a single deep breath. Then he straightened his jacket, adjusted his cap, and went back to work.

The train pushed east through the Mojave as the sun dropped behind them, painting the desert in shades of copper and rust. Clyde finished the dinner service, made up the remaining berths, answered the last round of evening requests, and completed his duties for the night shift. He was due for four hours of rest before the Albuquerque stop, and he intended to use every minute.

But sleep, when it came in his narrow berth at the back of the car, was thin and restless. He dreamed of courtrooms and trains, of judges who looked like passengers and passengers who looked like judges, of a future that shimmered just beyond the next station, always the next station, never quite arriving.