On the Blue Comet Read online

  I did not want to ask who Joan Crawford was. My dad seemed to know. I knew no one in this ten-year-later world, not even the president or the biggest hitter in baseball.

  Dutch’s car, a brand-new Chrysler Thunderbolt, moved almost silently through the middle of town, its motor purring softly. We drove up into the hills northeast of Los Angeles, above the curve of the Pacific Ocean, sparkling in the night. Dad sat behind me in the backseat and hunched forward. His hand never strayed from my shoulder, as if he could physically hold me back from the army, back from an unknown where he might never hear from me again.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Leaving Santa Monica. Heading for Beverly Hills!” said Dutch. Beside us, front windows flashed by too quickly to take in very much. Each house contained a family that I glimpsed for a few seconds. In some windows I could see people having cocktails in their living rooms or dressing in their bedrooms. The lives inside the huge houses zipped by like pages of books I had not yet read.

  Beverly Hills mansions came in every fancy building style a person could ever imagine. Dutch pointed out which house belonged to which famous actor. “Judy Garland lives there!” he said. “And Clark Gable over in that one.”

  Whoever they were, they all seemed to live in palm-ringed mansions with circular drives that looked as though they were groomed with a toothbrush every morning.

  “Who are these people?” I asked, but Dad told me to shush. He knew who they were, every single one of them. “I live a lonely life, Oscar,” he said. “So I go to the movies all the time.”

  Dutch spun the wheel, and we turned up another amazing street lined with even bigger mansions. I peeked around the backs of them as we whizzed and zoomed past, catching glimpses of a jewel-like swimming pool, an arbor, a guesthouse. Many were set way back behind an alley of trees the way the houses of River Heights, Illinois, were hidden. Apparently, regular people were meant to know that the houses were there but not what the owners really had behind the trees.

  Dutch’s Thunderbolt churned up the streets of Beverly Hills. “Roy Rogers lives in that house right there!” he said. “Every boy in the world knows Roy Rogers!”

  I had no idea whether Roy Rogers was a deep-sea diver or a banjo player.

  I did know that there were certainly no cars like the Thunderbolt back in Cairo. Even Mr. Petti­shanks’s Bentley saloon looked old and stuffy compared to Dutch’s racer. Ten years had passed since I had seen the world of cars and streets and people’s clothes. Everything in 1941 looked so airplane-like, so modern. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut, and at the same time I could not get enough of seeing how things were going to be one day.

  We pulled into a driveway marked 426 North Bristol Avenue. “An Italian palace!” said Dad. Tiles covered everything, and vines grew up the side. Dutch turned to me. “Joan Crawford’s away on location. She’s lent her house to Hollywood’s hottest ticket, Oscar,” he said. “But he’s no movie star. He’s a little fat man, an English director. I’d give my right arm to be in his next picture, but he’ll pick Cary Grant, sure as shootin’.”

  “Who is Cary Grant?” I asked, picturing old bearded President Grant, whose picture hung over Mrs. Olderby’s desk.

  Dutch didn’t answer but got out and rang the doorbell. A lady came to the door. Dutch took off his hat and twirled it over his chest as he spoke. His strong features, the nearly center-parted hair, and the swimmer’s chest had not changed, even if ten years had indeed passed without my knowing it. In the lamplight of the front door, he bobbed his head in the familiar “good evening, ma’am” gesture. Whoever the lady was, she was all smiles. For a moment she looked anxiously out at us in the car, and then Dutch beckoned us to come up the steps and into the house.

  We sat down awkwardly in our workmen’s clothes. The room was much too elegant for the likes of Dad and me. Along the walls were painted gold-leaf cabinets with copper fan-knobs. Many photographs of the famous Joan, autographed in big loopy writing, sat in fancy frames on the end tables and hung on the walls. Joan was a looker, no doubt about it. Raven waves of hair framed her perfect face. Lush-lashed, doelike eyes and full red lips smiled at me. I examined the many poses of Joan. She kneeled, hugging her two children. She sat, caressing a dog, or she rested her head against some handsome man’s shirtfront. Joan Crawford of the Crawford layout was every bit a Hollywood star.

  On the enormous glass table in front of me sat a ruby-glass ashtray as big as a hubcap. The objects and colors in this house were much too daring to make it through the Pettishankses’ front door; nonetheless both houses had that mysterious smell of thick carpets, lemon-oil furniture polish, and butter piecrust from the kitchen. You never smelled those things in the houses of regular people.

  The lady shook our hands and introduced herself. I was glad we just had friendly Alma instead of dragon-lady Joan. “You’re here to see the Crawford layout?” she asked. Her voice was light and delicate, exactly like the upper-class ladies on the radio.

  My father looked as if he had just met the angel Gabriel. “Who is she?” I whispered, as she led us into the bar.

  “Darn it, Oscar, she’s the wife of Hollywood’s most successful director. He does suspense movies, like Rebecca — it won the Academy Award this year.”

  I shook my head. Alma offered us anything we wanted from the enormous chrome bar. I had to remind myself that I was grown-up now, voting age. I was old enough to ask for at least a beer. I had never drunk anything stronger than a sip of Communion wine in my life, and so I asked for a ginger soda.

  “Miss Chow?” said Alma. Another person was sitting at the side of the room. She was a slim Asian woman in a red tunic and black trousers. “Miss Chow has come from China as my husband’s personal assistant,” said Alma. “Her homeland, as I’m sure you know, has been bombed and invaded by the Japanese.” Alma prepared our drinks with a magician’s swift touch, then served them with a worldly smile.

  “My husband, Mr. H., will be home shortly,” Alma explained to us. “But, Oscar, you will be quite the celebrity!”

  “Who, me?” I asked.

  “On the phone, Dutch told me about the bank robbers and the dead night watchman and the ten-thousand-dollar reward!”

  I answered, “I can’t remember any of it. The crooks are prob­ably living it up in Mexico by this time.”

  “Mexico?” asked Dutch sharply. “Why Mexico, Oscar?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, frowning and looking up from the floor. “I can’t remember.” At that moment I noticed that Miss Chow’s eyes were riveted on me. Her gaze was as piercing as high-beam headlights on a moonless night. The sealed door in my mind had stood ajar for just a second and then closed again.

  “Well, the Crawford layout is one of the big attractions of Hollywood,” said Alma. “There’s a bus for tourists who want to come and see the homes of the stars. Sometimes the bus stops outside and Miss Crawford lets people in to see the gardens. That is, if she’s in a good mood.” Alma looked over at Dutch. “I don’t know how to run the trains. Do you?”

  My father nodded. “Do we ever!” he said.

  “Well, I’m glad,” answered Alma, standing and straightening her skirt. “The train is officially her son Christopher’s. I wouldn’t want anything to go wrong. Joan has such a terrible temper, you know! She’d prob­ably break one of her cut-glass decanters over my head if anything happened to her son’s trains.”

  Dad assured Alma that he had all the experience any miniature railroader could ever want and that the trains were perfectly safe in his hands. “I trust you!” said Alma to my dad. “You have such an honest face!”

  She walked us to an elevator. I had never imagined that a private house could contain an elevator. It let us out two floors below. Alma flicked on the light switch. “Would you mind terribly, Oscar,” Alma asked me, “if I tell my husband your peculiar story when he comes home? The one about the bank robbery?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t mind at all.”

  S
he gave a sweet smile to me and my dad. “My husband collects crime stories. He just loves the true ones, and I know he’ll want to hear yours!”

  The ceiling light revealed a layout far superior even to Mr. Pettishanks’s and certainly to our old one in the basement on Lucifer Street. There were forklifts and coal ramps and barrel loaders. There was an entire Union Pacific freight with sixty cars. I stared openmouthed. Gone were the simple work trains and steam engines. The new additions to the Lionel line of the past ten years were like dream trains. Along with old favorites were new torpedo-shaped streamliner engines of great power. The Commodore Vanderbilt, the Hudson, and the Hiawatha, with a brilliant gold eagle on its engine, roared through the tunnels. The Flying Yankee flashed around its tracks. Floodlights and gondolas abounded. My dad was not prepared for the Crawford layout. When he saw the trains, tears brimmed in his eyes and broke his voice. “I haven’t looked at a train set in ten years,” he said shakily.

  Dutch gave him a friendly swat between the shoulder blades. “Your son is alive and well, Oscar Senior,” he said. “Thank your lucky stars and be glad!”

  My dad smiled and wiped his eyes. “The sight of the trains knocks years off me!” he agreed.

  Unlike my dad, I was all business. I noticed that Grand Central Terminal, New York City, was a slightly bigger model than Mr. Pettishanks’s Grand Central. It connected with the Southern Railway and the route up to Buffalo as well.

  No papier-mâché mountains for Christopher Crawford. His Rocky Mountains were solid granite. They had been chiseled and created out of the natural stone formations that lay under the foundation of the house. Pikes Peak rose to enormous heights. The mountain passes and cliffs were all artificially carved but appeared real as real could be. Dad explained that Christopher’s Los Angeles station was the new one I had seen myself, Union Station. It was amazing. Outside it, ruby-red outdoor lamps were held aloft by goddesses. Ten trains ran in and out of its mammoth roundhouse.

  The jewel of the layout, however, was a Hell Gate Bridge. This had always been the most elaborate structure that Lionel carried and the most expensive. Even Mr. Pettishanks had not owned a Hell Gate Bridge. It was a magnificent work of engineering, a suspension bridge every bit as impressive as a real bridge a hundred times its size.

  I found a spot where the Union Pacific sped out of a tunnel, crossing the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. The smaller train had stopped at a signal for the bigger train to pass. Holding my bag of new boys’ clothes tightly in my hand, I lay my cheek on the scratchy fake grass of the layout board. Hard as I could, I let my eye imagine me right up to the cowcatcher on the giant life-size engine. I pictured the coals in between the tracks as big as baseballs in my hands. I could almost hear the patter of my feet on the yellow tile floor of the fancy new L.A. station. Dutch followed me with his eyes.

  Could I do it? Everything seemed right. Everything but one part. Could I leave my dad?

  My dad whispered, “Do you think you can do it, Oscar? Do you think you can?”

  I answered, “You’ll know right away, Dad. If I can do it, I’ll just be gone, like that.”

  My dad held me in his arms for a long minute. Then he swung me away and looked into my face. He ran his hand anxiously over where his hair had once grown thick and black. He said nothing for a moment, but then nodded. “Good-bye, Oscar,” he whispered.

  “Good-bye, Dad!” I said in my deep man’s voice, which nonetheless cracked as I said it.

  My dad couldn’t watch. He turned his back. Dutch thumped me between the shoulders. I felt the pull of my dad like a lifeline to a ship. But I was going to make us rich. I smiled through the tears that had filled my eyes.

  Suddenly in his biggest football-field voice, Dutch yelled, “Go, Oscar! Go!” and I did, leaping into the layout with all my might, leaving my heart behind.

  When I came to, the light fixture above me was inscribed MERCY HOSPITAL, LOS ANGELES COUNTY. The emergency room smelled of disinfectant and canned soup. Sympathetic eyes and expert fingers examined my cut-up face.

  “Hello,” said a capable voice, “I’m Nurse Washington.” It was nine o’clock at night, and she was tired; I could see that by her red-rimmed eyes. She peered at my eyes critically, under the blinding examination light.

  “No concussion,” she announced. Then she shook her curls and shifted her chair back to her desk with a waxy squeak on the linoleum floor.

  This time I had no loss of memory. I could picture every awful detail. My bag had flown out of my hand and landed heavily in front of L.A.’s new Union Station, just missing the beautiful stucco towers. I’d cracked my skull on the crest of Chris­topher Crawford’s bona-fide granite Pikes Peak, which was sculpted into a Matterhorn of a point. Bouncing off it, I smashed into Denver’s Union Station with its tiny panes of real glass, all of which splintered into a thousand shards, spearing my face. My right foot had hooked the girders of the Hell Gate Bridge, over the Colorado River, smashing the bridge and my knee beyond where I wanted to look at either. But why? Why had it gone so terribly wrong? What was different?

  I tried to stop sniffling and shaking like an eleven-year-old. “It will take a month of Sundays to get the glass shards out of your cheeks, young man,” Nurse Washington said.

  “Are you going to have to use a lance or anything?” I asked.

  “Tweezers will do,” she answered. “You are very sensitive for a young man of twenty-one,” she said, picking the word sensitive instead of calling me an outright chicken. “What do you do for a living?”

  Before I could answer, “Fifth-grader, altar boy in Our Lady of Sorrows, Cairo, Illinois,” my dad said, “I’m afraid he’s a private in the United States Army as of this coming Monday.”

  “I hope they send you somewhere safe,” said the nurse, grim-voiced. “Not that there’s anywhere safe in a war.” She made me lie down on a gurney under an even brighter light and wheeled up next to me with her tweezers at the ready. “How exactly did this happen?” she asked.

  “I fell,” I said. “I fell right into an electric train layout. Pikes Peak was real rock. The Denver station model had real glass in the windows.”

  “My stars!” said Nurse Washington. “If you were breathing beer fumes at me like so many of them do, I wouldn’t believe you, but there is something so innocent about you.”

  I had to act grown-up, whatever that might mean. I had to be brave and not flinch no matter what she did to me.

  Dutch stood against the doorway, puffing on his pipe and wincing at every move of the tweezers. My father did not take his eyes off my bleeding face. He leaned forward, arms resting on his thighs. His face was five inches from mine. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. How long was it since I had seen my father’s eyes dreamy and at peace? Was it ten months or ten years? I breathed deeply as Nurse Washington turned to set a sliver of glass in a metal tray.

  I had ruined everything for Dutch. I had wrecked Christopher Crawford’s trains, and that would get everyone into big trouble. Worst of all, I had no chance now of getting the reward from Mr. Pettishanks and buying an orange ranch for my hardworking dad.

  What had been the key the night of the robbery that allowed me to shoot through time and space itself? Why could I not do it again? I could not answer because I could not remember.

  Nurse Washington picked out all the glass at last and then went to work on my hands. My hands were scraped strawberry raw on the palms. Fake grass had embedded itself in the skin. She washed out the worst of it, put on antiseptic, and gauze-bandaged them. She taped my knee and put a dressing on the wound on my head.

  Then she listened carefully with a stethoscope to my breathing and heart. She concentrated with her eyes closed and for quite some time pressed me in various places on my chest and back.

  “Does this hurt?” she kept asking.

  “A little,” I answered. “I can’t breathe as deeply as I’d like, but it’s okay.”

  “You don’t have pneumonia,” she said
. “You don’t have pleurisy rales. There is no apparent internal bleeding.” She tapped her stethoscope against her chin. “Other than this fall, has he . . . has he been in any serious accident?” she asked my dad. “Within the last two weeks?”

  “No,” Dad said.

  “Any kind of shock recently?”

  “No,” said Dad.

  I did not want to tell her about being shot out of a cannon and landing on a Lionel layout from a bank lobby in Cairo, Illinois, a few days ago, not to mention the same thing happening all over again as the taxicab backed away from the curb outside the station in L.A.

  “Funny,” she said. “I was a war nurse in 1918. Believe me, I saw everything there was to see. This young man has definitely suffered some sort of recent trauma. There’s puffiness in the chest and small breaks of capillaries all over the trunk. The internal organs have been given a ramming of what we call g-forces. High-speed shock. I’ve seen it in pilots whose planes threw them around at great velocity. I’ve seen it in shell shock. Usually there are terrible injuries, for instance in a car accident. This is most peculiar. I can’t put my finger on it, but I have seen this condition in wartime. And yet . . .”

  “Are you sure?” asked my dad.

  “As sure as God made little green apples,” she answered.

  Nurse Washington ended my treatment with a hefty injection. “It’s just a little sulfa drug and a smidge of morphine for the pain,” she said. “It’s the latest and the greatest, and it will prevent infection.”

  I nearly passed out at the sight of the needle just as I did when Dr. Peasley back in Cairo gave me my annual tuberculosis and diphtheria shots. She quickly gave me smelling salts to bring me out of my daze.