On the Blue Comet Read online

  My dad paid her five dollars cash from his worn-out, paper-filled wallet. Dutch made him take it back. “The whole thing’s my fault,” said Dutch, and he stayed my father’s hand, dropping his own five spot on the nurse’s desk. “I made him do it.”

  Somewhere outside an ambulance wailed. The siren light, red and rotating, cast its reflection through the window onto Nurse Washington’s spotless white uniform. The doors of the Mercy Hospital flew open with her next emergency.

  “So sorry,” I said, sitting up and wiping my nose. “I’m scared of needles!”

  “You’re going to have trouble in the army, Oscar,” Nurse Washington said sadly.

  I lay crumpled in the cushiony rear seat of Dutch’s car as he drove us back to the Brown Derby and Dad’s truck. Dutch eased through the night and the streets of the big city.

  “Trouble is not the word for it,” I heard Dutch say to Dad. “The army’ll make short work of our boy.” Dutch went quiet for a few moments. Then he spoke, dreamily: “Something has happened to Oscar,” he said. “The psychoanalyzers would explain it by amnesia or some other fancy word. But something much stranger than that has happened to Oscar, because he is eleven years old! Look in his eyes. That’s no man! He’s still a boy or I’m a whirling dervish. Hell or high water, Pop, we’d better get him back to 1931 or he’s a goner.”

  “But how?” asked my dad.

  “Why didn’t it work today?” asked Dutch almost to himself. “What went wrong? Was it the wrong train? The wrong atmosphere?”

  I did not wake until Sunday morning when the telephone in Dad’s apartment rang.

  “I collect perfect crimes!” said Mr. H. He was a perfectly pear-shaped man, with a pear-shaped head. His face was as pink as a baby’s. He spoke in a cut-glass English accent. I had only heard a fake En­­glishman speak once, on “Our Gal Sunday,” a drama that Aunt Carmen never missed on the radio.

  “Your father is an honorable chap,” Mr. H. said, pulling the tops of his knife-creased trousers ever so neatly upward to sit without wrinkling them. “He came all this way back to fix the layout. I suppose Alma terrified him about Miss Crawford’s temper. We all shake in our shoes when we think of Miss Crawford and her famous temper.”

  Mr. H. also did not mention my bandages and crutch, which made me very grateful because I felt like a complete fool for diving into an electric train layout like someone from the loony bin. We sat alone in his study, he and I, while Dad was downstairs working on the layout. Dad had been able to assemble all the materials he needed to repair the layout from one of the movie studio’s scenery departments. Thanks to Dutch, we got porch screening, plaster of paris, and enamel paint of the right colors on a Sunday, when the hardware stores were all closed.

  Miss Chow appeared with pictures for Mr. H. to autograph, which he did in a looping swoop of the pen. She also brought him a cone-shaped glass filled with a brilliantly clear, gassy-looking drink. Mr. H. put one index finger into the drink and swirled the lemon rind around. Then he picked it out and nibbled the end of it. “Dutch told my wife, Alma, all about you and the bank robbers,” he said. “It was a perfect crime!” He smiled. “I make mystery movies, I suppose you’d say,” said Mr. H. “Suspense dramas.”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, sitting on the edge of my chair.

  He went on, pulling a small notebook from his jacket and wetting the tip of his pencil with his tongue. “I recall the Christmas Eve Massacre well from the newspapers. First came the brutal murder of the guard, the stolen unmarked money, the apparent kidnapping of the boy, the reward — a handsome one, if I may say so. Then the manhunt with the bloodhounds. The aunt gave the police an article of the boy’s clothing. The police let the dogs smell it and turned the dogs loose everywhere around Cairo. In the woods, down the dirt roads. Nothing. Nothing was ever found. Tell me something, Oscar,” said Mr. H.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Last night when I came home, Alma told me the story. I telephoned the head man at the FBI here in Los Angeles, Detective Hissbaum, an old friend. He remembers the crime well. He knew the detective who was in charge of the case back then. He provided me with a detail or two not written up in the news­papers. Do you mind if I ask you about it?”

  “No, sir!”

  Mr. H. sipped his drink and took another small nip of the lemon slice. “In the pocket of the missing boy’s winter coat, the FBI found a paper. On it, in a boy’s handwriting, was a two-hundred-eighty-eight-word poem. Can you tell me what that might have been?”

  I frowned. “Of course,” I said. “It was Kipling’s poem ‘If.’ My aunt Carmen made me write it out ten times every night. That was my master copy. It was written in a code I used for memorizing.”

  I imagined which clothes the police had been given by Aunt Carmen. Did they give my worn socks or my pajamas to the police? Were my old corduroys slobbered over by a bunch of huge dogs?

  “And can you recite that poem?” Mr. H. asked me.

  “Easy!” I took a deep breath, “‘If you can keep your head while all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .’”

  When I finished, he said, “No one could fake that.” He swallowed the rest of his drink. “My dear boy,” he went on with a smile, “we are in Hollywood, not the Midwest, with all its glories. So you needn’t call me sir. Mr. H. will do nicely.”

  “Yes, sir,” I agreed.

  “Please tell me everything you remember about the evening of December 24, 1931.”

  I launched into it, sitting deeply back in my chair, which was as comfortable as a bed and upholstered in a slick silvery leather.

  I described catching the number 17 bus to the bank the night before Christmas. “It was snowing. I rang the bell on the side of the bank’s front doors as I always did. Mr. Applegate, the night watchman, came up and unlocked the doors. I threw my coat on a chair. I think he said, ‘Look at that darn snow! It’s coming down like the blizzard of ’88. We might never get home.’ But right off, I spotted this heavy engine dangling over the beautiful blue glass river. I ran over to catch it so it wouldn’t fall and shatter the glass.”

  “Did Mr. Applegate lock the bank after you came in?”

  “No, sir. I usually did that, and I forgot, and I forgot to turn the alarm switch back on.” I grimaced with the memory of my carelessness. “Dad and Dutch say it’s not my fault the thieves got in and killed Mr. Applegate, but I know it was.”

  Mr. H. laughed explosively. “My dear boy,” he said, “these psychos would have shot out the door lock and turned off the alarm themselves in two seconds. They had the joint cased. You are certainly not at fault. It was their guns that killed Mr. Applegate.”

  “I’m not even a little bit at fault?” I asked Mr. H.

  “Not one tenth of a percent out of a hundred,” said Mr. H. “What happened next, Oscar?”

  I finished my story. In my heart was a tiny window of lightness that had not been there a moment before. One little shard of memory jumped out of the blue and in front of me. I suddenly remembered one of the thugs’ voices shouting a name.

  I told Mr. H., and he wrote it down. “It was Mackey or McKey. Something like that. Someone pulled a gun on me. I heard the shot fired, but I had already jumped.”

  “Jumped?”

  “Yes. With my eyes closed and holding my breath as if I were jumping into the wild blue yonder. I landed on the layout, but they couldn’t see me because I was already as small as the make-believe tin people on the layout. I got on the next train and then changed in Chicago. When I woke up on the Golden State Limited, I felt all banged up, as if I’d fallen out of a skyscraper window. But nothing was actually broken or bruised. That’s when I met Dutch. He was in the bunk below me.”

  Three times Mr. H. walked me through the story. Each time I remembered a little more about the robbery, but the memory as a whole stood just to the side of my vision.

  “Your story would make a good movie,” said Mr. H. with an unhappy sigh, “but, alas, we don’t have th
e special effects yet to make it believable. It would be like filming the Titanic using a ten-foot model in a studio tank. It would be a terrible movie.”

  He stood and picked up his glass. “I must go, Oscar. Alma and I are invited to a very boring cocktail party. I would rather listen to you. However, your father wishes to finish his work on the layout downstairs.” He held out his hand to shake mine while bending and whispering in my ear. “I, alone,” he said, “actually believe that you are still eleven years old, Oscar. And that you evidently managed to get onto a Lionel train.”

  “You believe me?” I asked.

  “Of course! Look at your haircut. No man of twenty has a boy’s haircut with a cowlick sticking up like a tent pole! Cowlicks calm down in late puberty.”

  “Dearest!” called Alma from upstairs. “We’re late!” Mr. H. bolted up the stairs much more quickly than I thought a pear-shaped man could ever run.

  Down in the Crawford basement, my dad was at work restoring Christopher Crawford’s Hell Gate Bridge. “Gonna take hours to fix her, Oscar,” Dad said. He handed me a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  I examined the damage I’d caused jumping into the layout the night before. “I feel like a fool for wrecking everything, Dad,” I said.

  Dad grinned with a piece of copper wire in his mouth. He looked me up and down. I was bandaged up, with my knee taped and my hand in gauze. “Looks like you did more wreckage on yourself,” he said. He had a full array of tools on the table. Little screwdriv­ers, special pliers, and glue. He picked up a small clamp and held one of the pylons in place while he glued it back together.

  “This is like the old days, son,” he muttered happily.

  We worked side by side in the basement until the ruined layout began to take better shape. Dollops of plaster of paris had to dry over the screens in the precise Colorado River banks where my foot had wrecked the original ones. Like a jeweler, I fit a score of tiny glass panes to restore Denver’s Union Station. My big fingers got in my way.

  Suddenly Dad winked at me. “Let that plaster dry, Oscar,” he said. He pulled out a cigar and brought fifteen red-and-white Lionel boxes up from under the layout table. They were stamped PROTOTYPE and unopened. Out of the boxes came a silver train, twelve cars long.

  “What is it?” I asked. I had only once seen such a wonderful train, and that was in a picture. It gleamed like sterling silver. On the nose of the streamlined engine was an enameled red eagle emblem.

  “Remember, Oscar? It’s the President,” said my dad.

  “Of course I remember!” I said. “That train was in the catalog that came in the mail the night you told me we had to sell the trains.”

  Dad puffed a few smoke rings of delight. “Lionel never actually sold many of these. Too expensive! But look at this, Oscar! The whole thing’s made of pure polished nickel! And see! Every car has a different president on the seal. . . . Right here’s the Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, Taft, TR, McKinley . . . it goes right through back to Lincoln.”

  I could see why the President was so expensive. It had a circling searchlight on its observation car. It worked, of course. Sure enough, on a plush seat, which changed into a bed at the push of a lever, sat the little tin girl with pigtails.

  Dad opened the tiny door of the dining car. With an eyeglass screw­driver, he showed me the galley’s cupboards. Two of the cabinets lay cunningly hidden beneath the seats of the diner’s booths. The doors slid back and forth as if someone might just come along and fill them up with cans of soup and frozen steaks. “Keen little hidden closets!” Dad remarked. “No wonder this baby cost an arm and a leg.”

  “Even George Washington’s got his name on the diner!” I said. “I wonder how he’d like that if he knew!”

  “Let’s let her rip!” said my dad. “It’s prob­ably the only one still in exis­tence. I wonder where Mrs. Crawford ever got this prototype.”

  I nodded to the upstairs. “Dad, I bet movie stars are so rich they get everything they want over­night.”

  Dad put the train together, carefully joining the couplings. “We’ve got a better life, Oscar,” he declared, very seriously. “So long as we keep ahold of it. You’ve got me, and I’ve got you, and from what I hear, that’s a heck of a lot more than poor little adopted boy Christopher Crawford or his divorce-happy mama will ever have in this world!”

  He tilted back in his seat and pulled the throttle. The President streaked over the tracks, through the tunnels like an arrow, faster and quieter than any other train we’d ever run. Dad switched the Golden Gate to a siding and sent the President from L.A. over the foothills of the Rockies, over the plains, and into Chicago on the regular L.A.–Chicago run.

  “How about running her all the way to Grand Central?” said my dad, drawing fully on his cigar. He sidelined the Twentieth Century express train in Dearborn Station and sent the President flying past the Great Lakes loop over the heartland of America to New York City’s Grand Central Terminal.

  The late-day sun played in through the basement windows of the Crawford mansion, casting deep, soft shadows on the layout’s mountains. Upstairs in this house were famous people, their expensive furniture polish, and their oriental carpets. But down here things weren’t too different from our basement in Cairo, where we had not a care in the world.

  But we were not in Cairo, and the United States Army was coming to get me in less than twenty-four hours.

  “Oscar,” Dad said after a few coast-to-coast traversings of the President, “we’re still in the soup. An eleven-year-old boy in the army’s gonna spend most of his time throwing up in the brig.”

  “What’s the brig, Dad?” I asked.

  “It’s the cooler, son. The slammer. It’s where they put the recruits who won’t march in a straight line.”

  “Are we going to Montana, Dad?” I asked.

  He answered, “Oscar, as soon as the banks open after breakfast tomorrow, we’re on our way. Got three hundred and fifty dollars saved up. We’ll go to Montana.” He waved in the general direction of the north. “We’ll find a little cabin in the mountains someone’s forgotten about. I’ll get a job as a park ranger. You can catch fish, shoot game, and do the cooking, just like home. We’ll get you all the schoolbooks you need to keep up. And we’ll wait for you to grow up and really be twenty-one. Then we’ll come back and no one will be the wiser. If the army still wants you when you’re really twenty-one, then you’ll serve your country like every other red-blooded American. Okay, Oscar?”

  “Okay, Dad!” I said. Fish, I thought. I’d never cooked fish before. But we would be together, Dad and I, and that was not going to change if a team of wild horses tried pulling us apart.

  Mr. H. sauntered downstairs in his dinner jacket and gazed in admiration at Dad’s work.

  “I won’t be able to paint any more until morning,” said Dad. “Plaster’s got to dry.”

  “In that case, you are welcome to spend the night in the guest suite,” said Mr. H.

  Around eight o’clock, Dad and I took a break for sandwiches brought in by the lovely Miss Chow, who said not one word.

  Dad and I worked until ten on the broken windows in the Denver station. Then we stumbled upstairs. “Oscar,” said my dad, “I didn’t tell Dutch or Mr. H. or anybody about this plan of mine. Just between you and me. Okay?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “We’ll go tomorrow morning, Oscar,” he con­tinued. “If we hurry, we’ll make the 11:22 local for Seattle, then change to the 7:41 to Billings, Montana.”

  On the pillow of my bed were silk guest pajamas, neatly folded. I put them on. I had never worn silk in my life.

  There was a modest tap on my door.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Excuse me! Miss Chow here!”

  “Yes, Miss Chow?” I opened the door.

  “Toothbrush and soap,” said Miss Chow. She had all the amenities neatly assembled on one of her silver trays. I took them and thanked her.

  “And something else,” said Miss
Chow.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Miss Chow hears everything! I will let you open your locked door of memory in the Oscar mind! Easily. Easily!” she said. “Chinese method going back two thousand years!”

  Miss Chow sat down right next to me on my bed. From a velvet-lined box she produced a black rock shaped roughly like a ball. It was glass and semi-see-through. Somewhere inside darted a little luminescent fish, or what seemed to be a fish. But it wasn’t a fish. It couldn’t be.

  “What is this?” I asked Miss Chow.

  “Translate to Star Stone,” she answered. “Very rare. We find these in north China near Harbin. Sometimes the Star Stone appears in the river. Sometimes under the ginkgo tree. Very valuable. People pay a lot of money for Star Stone on the black market. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of China, has the Star Stone to help her husband fight the war against the Japanese. Miss Chow asks you just relax, please. Just look at little star inside stone. Just relax in that bed. Don’t take your eye off little star. Okay?”

  I did as she told me.

  “That’s it, Oscar. Now you rub the Star Stone. Heat from your body will make the star jump around. You concentrate on that star until Miss Chow comes back in the room, please.”

  Again I did as I was told. The heat of my hands and my stomach where the stone rested made the little internal star swim around like crazy in its round black home. Something warm as a summer night settled over and into me. All anxieties dwindled out of my mind. Nothing seemed to matter but the tiny moving light in my hands. My eyes darted in unison with it as I lay in a state of alert quiet. The bedroom door opened without a sound. Miss Chow tiptoed back in so silently I would not have known she was there but for the light in the hallway spilling through the door.

  I heard a tiny chuckle in her whisper. “Your father fast asleep under his blanket. He did not wait for Miss Chow’s toothbrush and silk pajamas.”