On the Blue Comet Read online

  My knee brace fell away, and I ran like a greyhound down the arched, tiled passageways to the platform. If I made it onto the train, Cyril would soon fade, and I would pull out of Los Angeles, homeward bound.

  The Golden State Limited waited, steaming and purring its engine on platform two. I ran for the steps of one of its Pullman sleeper cars. Then something made me stop. It was the shadow of an enormous hand. I shrank behind a signal box that stood on the platform and watched as a brown khaki cuff, neatly bound with gold braid stripes, hovered over the tracks. Glinting on the third finger was a Missouri Military Prep class ring. The fingers twitched as if they were about to select and tweak up a piece of candy. Then the hand came down toward the engine of the Golden State.

  Clear as a bell in my mind’s ear rang the voice of Mr. Applegate: “Cyril!” he trumpeted. “Cyril isn’t even allowed near the trains. He likes to have accidents! The old man won’t let him in the room with the layout!”

  I knew, of course, that Lieutenant Cyril Petti­shanks, U.S. Army Recruiting Office, had heard Miss Chow yell “Jump!” as clearly as I had. The Crawford basement had no other exit but the stairway and elevator. There wasn’t a nook or cranny in the room to hide in. I peered out an inch from my hiding place. Sure enough, I saw Cyril’s huge face above me. He blinked a couple of times and then fastened on the layout in front of him. I could see every fiber in the weave of his army shirt, every pore and whisker on his jaw, magnified. In proportion, Cyril was so big, I could have fit into his front pocket.

  I slithered back behind a hot-dog stand and held my breath. The big hairy hand from the big sleeve reached out for my train. Cyril lifted the engine of the Golden State, then he yanked the entire ten-car train from its track — Pullmans, tender, and caboose. Cyril shook each car like a jar full of candy, as if he thought I was in one of them. Each time, he cursed in disgust while I watched, hardly breathing, hiding in the hot-dog stand. Cyril slammed each car of the Golden State down on the cement floor of the basement. The train and its engine, dining car, and sleepers broke into twisted pieces at his feet. “Get out of that damn train, Ogilvie!” Cyril yelled as he smashed each car. Through the intensifying fog of the fading room, I could just make out the voice of Corporal Handcuffs. He must have plodded down the stairs after Cyril. I could not see him, but I heard his voice whining loud and clear. “Jeez Louise, Lieutenant! You crazy? The boy ain’t on no electric train. He’s ex-caped onto the elevator. Let’s go!”

  Cyril swore, but he turned around to his corporal. With a squeal of brakes, another train had rounded the bend and pulled up into the slot where the Golden State had been. It did not stop. Whatever it was, wherever it was headed, I didn’t care. I aimed for the moving steps and leaped into the safe depths of the interior.

  “Go away!” I said between my teeth to the outside world of 1941. I didn’t care if the train were heading for Timbuktu. I found a bunk in one of the smartly made sleeper cars just as the train left the station.

  I didn’t dare move for the longest time. When I finally looked out of my bunk window, the landscape that whizzed by could have been anywhere. What train was I on? Union Pacific? Where was it going? Texas? Louisiana?

  No breezy college man slammed into the compartment in the middle of the night and started singing “Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech.” As the hours passed, I missed Dutch more. I wished he were there to have steak and ice cream with. And I missed my dad. Would he know I’d made it this time? Would he cheer and know that I would try to get him back to Cairo and he’d be young again?

  The train whistled its high shriek over what seemed to be desert, and we began our slow ascent into the mountains. East! I told myself. At least we’re going east.

  The train was unusually quiet. No conductor had called out the next stop or the dining car seatings. What railroad company ran this line? Atchison-Topeka? Canadian Pacific? My head ached and throbbed so much that I could only close my eyes and sleep.

  In my dreams Miss Joan Crawford appeared, raven hair bobbing in rage, lips open in a full shout, grabbing Lieutenant Cyril Pettishanks by the collar of his shirt and smashing one of her cut-glass decanters over his head for messing up her son’s trains.

  In the middle of the night, I awoke, feeling grimy. I reached for the toiletry kit provided by the railway, and that’s when I saw it. On the kit bag was the seal of the President. I was on the prototype! I wanted to cry out for my dad, but of course he was hundreds of miles away by this time.

  Brushing my teeth, I suddenly looked in the mirror. I stared at my skinny, undeveloped ribs. My arms were twiggy. My cheeks were smooth, and there were no scars from glass on my face. My chest was purple as a bruised plum, but I didn’t care. I was eleven again.

  I opened my zip bag and pulled on my new Bullock’s boys’ shop clothes. In them I fell back on the bunk and slept the sleep of an Egyp­tian mummy.

  I didn’t wake until the late morning. The train was as quiet as a church. It raced over silent trackbeds in an uninteresting landscape of winter desert. Since I was hungry, I made my way to the dining car, but the car was empty. No crisp white linen or silver had been laid on its tables. No waiter smiled and snapped my napkin onto my lap for me. Outside the windows, a red-rock landscape peeled away at enormous speed. Stations rushed by so fast I could not read the nameplates that hung over their platforms.

  Suddenly I saw her. She was about my age, about eleven. She sat primly on a blue plush seat, pigtails framing her face.

  “Hello!” she said.

  I did not have time to say another word. We were not alone. The train’s conductor suddenly swayed in the door of the dining car, giving us the once-over.

  “How did you get on this train, girlie?” the conductor asked in a none-too-friendly voice. “And you, punk? Howja get on this train?”

  “None of your business!” replied the girl in pigtails. “I’m on it and that’s that.”

  “What train is this, sir?” I asked.

  The conductor growled, “It’s a prototype on a test loop. Not in service yet. She don’t take no passengers, she don’t make no stops, and she don’t serve no meals.”

  “Where is it going?” I asked. I already knew. I tried to remember if my dad had made a permanent track switch for the President to run nonstop to New York. Or would we stop in Chicago? I couldn’t remember exactly what Dad had done the night before with the Crawford layout’s tracks.

  “This here train was sealed,” the conductor grunted. “Ain’t nobody allowed on or off. How’d you get on, kids? Say, wait a minute. Don’t move!”

  The conductor’s voice shifted suddenly as if he might be sweet-talking a cornered dog. Keeping his eyes on us, he backed all the way down the aisle until he came to the door that connected with the next car. I did not have to be told that he was going to fetch someone, a security officer, someone to confine or arrest us. I remembered that the George Washington diner was the last car of the train. The President was rushing through what looked like New Mexico at more than eighty miles an hour. There was no escape. What would they do to this girl in the pigtails? Or to me?

  I waited until the conductor had been out of the car a few seconds. “Get down!” I said. She hit the floor immediately. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Never mind that now. He’s coming back!” I said.

  “If they find me, I’m finished,” said the girl. “I’ll be in so much trouble it won’t be funny!”

  I grabbed her hand. It was cold and trembling. “See that locker under the booth? Right where your feet go? Slide the door with that push-button release! Get in there! Quick,” I whispered. “He may not be familiar with this train yet.”

  The hidden locker was exactly the one my dad had shown me with his optometrist’s screw­driver. It was a supply closet for the diner car’s galley, but there was no chef and no kitchen prep and so it was quite empty. So was its mate, an opposite floor-level locker on the other side of the dining booth. I climbed into that one.

 
The girl slid open a vent to whisper through. “If they find me, they’ll stop the train and take us off into the middle of nowhere. They’ll hold me in some jail in the back of beyond and call my parents. Who knows?” she half shouted and half whispered over the sound of the train’s wheels.

  I closed the door over myself and held my breath as the footsteps returned. Three sets of feet, I guessed. There was no comment at first, only the slap of shoe leather back and forth on the floor of the dining car and the slamming of various doors and cabinets.

  Finally one man’s deep baritone muttered unintelligible words. Then it declared, “Harry, you’re seeing things. Maybe it’s time to retire.”

  “I swear to God and everything that’s holy, Captain, there was two of them. I seed ’em clear as day, a shifty-looking little squirt and that girl sitting at the table large as life. Pigtails and Mary Jane shoes!” the conductor answered.

  “They ain’t here, Harry. No one ain’t here! No one couldn’t have got on the train nohow anyhow. Them doors was sealed until the last minute.”

  “It’s a delusion,” said another voice. “You been up too late, Harry. How many corn dogs you eat last night?”

  “It ain’t the corn dogs,” Harry complained. But the argument died out and I could hear them retreating as Harry announced his intention to check every bunk and every compartment in the blasted train.

  We lay hidden for what seemed like an eternity. After a while the thought occurred to me that Harry would be back alone, and this time he might do a more careful excavation of the dining car’s cupboards. I squirmed out of my locker and tapped on the locker door opposite.

  My voice was urgent. “Harry will come back here to the galley,” I said. “After he’s checked the other compartments. The others think he’s been into the giggle water, but believe me he’ll come back here and root through these cars like a hound dog. I’m going to the Abraham Lincoln, Pullman four. There’s a tiny storage locker room behind the lavatory. We can wait there until he passes on to the next compartment.”

  There was a hesitation from the other side. Finally the girl asked, “How did you get on this train, and how do you know so much about it?”

  “Come on out,” I said when finally I was convinced Harry would not return. “I’ll show you where the sleeper car is.” I still had managed not to answer her question.

  The girl’s name was Claire Bister. She had told me she was ten and a half years old and lived at the corner of Park Avenue and Seventieth Street, New York City. She had two light-brown pigtails with blue ribbon bows at the ends. Claire was skinny like me, with intelligent green eyes and a determined look on her face.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Oscar Ogilvie,” I answered. “I’m eleven years old and I come from Cairo, Illinois.”

  “You saved my life, Oscar Ogilvie,” she said. “If we’d have been caught, they would have stopped the train and called my father, and Daddy would have called the police and would have been so mad it wouldn’t even be funny. If there is anything I can ever do to repay you, I will!”

  Right off the bat, Claire confided that she had run away from home.

  “What did they do to you?” I asked.

  “It got to be too much,” said Claire. “They enrolled me in ballroom dancing lessons. I hate ballroom dancing. They bought me dolls and frilly dresses, and Mummy keeps talking about someday when I have a coming-out party. I don’t ever want a coming-out party, and I refuse to have one!”

  “What is that?” I asked. “Coming out of where?”

  Claire sized me up and down for a couple of seconds.

  “It’s a stupid society thing,” she said. “It’s for girls at eighteen to dress in long white dresses with kid gloves and meet all the right boys and none of the wrong boys. That way all the rich boys marry rich girls and have rich babies and it just goes forward in a big horrible line. I won’t do it. I won’t go to boarding school, either. I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “Boarding school.” I stumbled on the words a little. “Is that like a military academy?”

  “Almost as bad,” said Claire. “They make you wear an ugly old plaid uniform and force you to go to study halls and field hockey every waking minute of the day. I like to play baseball and football too. They won’t let me.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do your folks want to send you away?”

  “Mummy and Daddy have no time,” answered Claire, “because of their parties and dinners and business and all that. Daddy’s a busy lawyer. Mummy’s a social butterfly. They think I’d be happier at Miss Pryor’s Girls’ Academy in the sticks of New Jersey. Fat chance!”

  “I guess they’d think I was one of the wrong boys,” I said.

  “That’s what I like about you, Oscar,” Claire answered, and she fixed me with a dead-certain look.

  I hung on to the railing of her bunk. Claire’s world might as well be life on the moon or in Holly­wood to a poor boy from Cairo like me.

  “How did you get on this train, Claire?” I asked after a minute of silence.

  “You won’t believe me,” said Claire.

  “I will believe anything,” I said. “I mean I’m on it, too! You won’t believe me either. No one does.”

  Claire blew out a mouthful of what-do-I-care air. “It was at Christmas,” explained Claire. She kicked the blanket that lay folded at her feet. “It all started on Christmas vacation. During Christmas holidays, my parents always feel guilty. So they took me and my brother to FAO Schwarz.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a big, big toy store on Fifth Avenue. Biggest in the world. Six floors of toys. I wanted a train set just like my brother Maxwell’s. Well, Daddy and Mummy said no. No, no, no. Trains are for boys, not for girls. So I couldn’t have it. I had to have a doll. I told them I hated dolls, espe­cially dolls in mink-trimmed coats. I threatened to toss any doll they gave me out my window into the middle of Park Avenue.

  “Christmas morning I went downstairs early, way before anyone else was up. Sure enough, under the tree, there’s Maxwell’s train. A beauty. Daddy knows Mr. Cowen, who owns Lionel. Maxwell gets all the prototypes years before they get into the stores. So there’s Maxwell’s train, all silver and rocketlike. And there’s my fancy lace and satin doll. Yick!”

  “So what happened next?” I asked.

  “I began to cry,” said Claire. “I knew no matter what I ever said, they would never hear me, Claire. They would just hear a pretend Claire who liked dolls and was going to grow up and get married to the son of one of Daddy’s friends at the club. So I lay down on the carpet under the Christmas tree and pushed the switch to start up Max’s new train. It ran beautifully, quieter than his other trains. I began to picture myself with no dolls and no ballroom dancing. I pictured myself on the train, actually getting on the train.

  “Then Mummy came downstairs and she said, ‘Claire, dear, that’s your brother’s train. Look at your beautiful doll, darling!’

  “And so, I just . . . I just jumped on the train, and now I’m here.”

  “Were you scared?” I asked. “Is that how you jumped on?”

  Claire frowned for a moment. “No,” she said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in my apartment. Mummy and Daddy certainly aren’t scary, and my brother is just a chucklehead. It was . . . it was longing. Just longing that made it happen, Oscar.”

  “I sure know about that,” I said. “I spent a whole three months longing when my dad left home for Cal­i­fornia.”

  “Do you believe me, Oscar?” Abruptly Claire rolled her head toward me on her pillow and looked directly into my eyes.

  I didn’t blink. Why shouldn’t I believe her? Claire’s story was a lot easier to swallow than mine. “Yes,” I answered. “It seems perfectly logical.”

  “Your turn to tell, Oscar,” said Claire.

  I began with the layout in the basement of our house on Lucifer Street. I got to the Wall Street crash before Claire said a word
. “That old crash is what started all our problems,” I told her. “Right in the paper it said millionaires who lost all their dough in one day started jumping out skyscraper windows. The ones who didn’t jump out windows wound up selling apples on the street for a nickel an apple.”

  Claire frowned. “Everyone lost their money?” she asked. “Everyone?”

  “Not everyone,” I said. “Mr. Pettishanks and all the people at the River Heights Country Club still got by, but the poor farmers couldn’t buy any more tractors. John Deere laid off all its salesmen. My dad lost his job. Ordinary people like us, we went broke. We had to sell our house back to the bank; even our trains were sold to Mr. Pettishanks’s bank.”

  “When was this crash?” asked Claire.

  “October 29, 1929,” I answered.

  Claire frowned at this. “We haven’t gotten to 1929, yet, Oscar. I left New York on December 25, 1926.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, and the train hasn’t made a single stop longer than that little pause where you hopped on in Los Angeles. We went all the way west, and now we’re going east again, and I’m starving. . . . I’ve had nothing but Wheaties and Carnation milk since I’ve been on the train. I found them in the galley.”

  I rooted in the pocket of my Bullock’s boys’ shop duffle and extracted the Hershey bar that Dutch had bought me before he left the L.A. station a week ago. Was it? Or was it ten years ago? Or had it not happened yet? But here was the Hershey bar, solid squares of chocolate with almonds. Claire ate it in four bites.

  “I’m getting out at Chicago,” I said. “The President train stops there. I’m sure of it. My dad put it on the Crawford layout tracks last night. He ran it through Christopher Crawford’s Dearborn Station. The signal turned red, and the train stopped for a few minutes there.”