On the Blue Comet Read online

  “What?”

  I sighed. I knew she wouldn’t believe me. “Claire, when I got on this train, it was 1941. When I left Cairo for Los Angeles, it was 1931. I was in a time pocket. I traveled west for two thousand miles and got out in Cal­i­fornia. I gained ten years’ time.”

  “Im­possible!” said Claire.

  “I think I’d better tell you about negative velocity and Professor Einstein’s theory of relativity and time.” I hesitated. “Time is like a river and —”

  “Professor who?” asked Claire.

  “It’s higher math —”

  “I can’t even do lower math,” Claire interrupted. “Let’s skip that. Tell me about this crash instead.”

  The crash. I was shaky on the crash. I hadn’t paid much attention to the newspapers. “You know where Wall Street is, Claire?”

  “Yes, of course! My father works on Wall Street! He’s a lawyer for a Wall Street bank.”

  “Well, Wall Street is where the crash happened. It was all over the Cairo Herald. Your dad better watch out in three years’ time is all I can say!” I told her.

  Dreamily, Claire traced a design in the windowpane fog beside her bunk. What was she thinking?

  “Do you want me to go on with how I got on the train?” I asked her.

  “Of course, Oscar. What happened next?”

  As my words and memories spun out, I touched on Aunt Carmen’s kidney-bean casseroles, on Mr. Applegate saving my neck, on how he left the soaking wet Fireside Book of Poetry on the kitchen table and how it had been spotted by Willa Sue. I described Cyril and his hopeless rendition of the poem “If.” Claire stopped me right there.

  “That’s my favorite poem!” she said. “Can you recite it?”

  “Can I recite it!” I answered. “I could recite every blessed word of that thing with a bucket over my head and one foot in an anthill:

  “If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .”

  I finished it, as always, not missing a single word. Then Claire recited it with more gusto than I had. Then we said the whole of “If” together in unison, complete with the gestures and dramatic flourishes that Mr. Kipling himself no doubt used when he wrote the poem in 1891.

  Our train raced through small towns somewhere in one of the square states. Street lamps winked by us in half seconds. The taillights of a truck vanished over the horizon on an empty road, and a firehouse whistle blew somewhere on a deserted street. I could just hear it through the heavy windows. Our train thundered past sidings, junctions, and the checkered gates of crossings, red flares flashing at our passing. Small stationmasters’ houses whizzed by, all built alike of red brick by the railroad companies along the tracks. Outside each one, green glass signals of the all-clear lanterns swung on iron hooks and glowed like cat’s-eyes in the coming evening. To the southwest, the sky darkened, a purplish black curtain sinking over the fiery leavings of the day’s sun.

  “Can you read the station names?” I asked Claire as they flickered past us in the darkness, the sleepy towns of the west.

  “I can’t. The train’s going too fast to read them,” said Claire, “but go back to your story, Oscar. What happened next?”

  I got to the part about Stackpole and McGee slipping into the bank on Christmas Eve, whacking Mr. Applegate on the head, and pulling the gun directly on me. The memory was still fresh, and my voice was a little shaky in the telling of it.

  “You jumped?” asked Claire.

  “I had no choice. It was jump or die.”

  Claire listened to the rest of my story, through Dutch and Mr. H., Miss Chow and the breakfast appearance of Cyril Pettishanks in his army recruiter’s uniform.

  “And you did it again?” said Claire. “You got on another train? This one that we’re on now?”

  “Miss Chow yelled ‘Jump!’” I said. “It was jump then or jump out of an airplane over Siberia to help the Russkies fight the Krauts.”

  “Who are the Russkies and who are the Krauts?”

  My head was beginning to ache from Claire’s questions. “I don’t know why it’s important,” I said. “The war won’t even start until 1941.”

  Claire went back to her window tracing. “You know something, Oscar?” she said. “Daddy would give his eyeteeth to know what’s going to happen in the future, and so would all his friends. The future is his business. That’s what the stock market is. Every morning over his oatmeal, Daddy says anyone who can read tomorrow’s tea leaves gets rich.”

  “I thought your father was already rich,” I said.

  Claire snorted. “Oh, he’s rich, all right. But you have to understand about really wealthy people, Oscar. Most of ’em just try to double their money, then triple it. That’s how they spend their days. Daddy’d give his right arm to know what you know, Oscar.”

  “Well,” I said, “you can tell him someday, Claire.”

  “He would laugh,” said Claire. “He’d never believe a single word. If he ever forgives me for running away from home, that is. They’ve prob­ably got a thirteen-state alarm out for me. When I go home, they’ll keep me in the apartment for a month. Then it’ll be dolls and dancing lessons and white cotton gloves all over again.”

  Somewhere around a bend in the tracks, another train whistled. Where was it heading? Where might we be in the universe? The prairie states encircled us, farmhouses all asleep in the embrace of the night.

  Together we clicked out our tiny bunk lamps. In the rolling darkness, I told Claire everything in my life, even the most private feelings that ever seemed important. She told me the same from the bunk underneath. We talked until neither of us could form words with our sleepy tongues.

  Before dawn, the sound changed and the train slowed. I woke. I could read the station names now. Naperville sailed by. I knew Naperville lay just to the west of Chicago. I woke Claire, tapping on the metal bedpost that ran up the side of the bunks. “We’re coming into Chicago!” I whispered. “We’re slowing down! I’m going to make a run for it!”

  “Oh, Oscar!” said Claire. “I’ll never see you again!”

  “I have to go, Claire!” I said, bumping out of my bed. “But I’ll find a way!”

  We waited together at the door of the train. “Good-bye!” I said as the Dearborn Station platform appeared by our side.

  Suddenly the train jerked away from it and veered left onto another track. Then it sped up, and my heart sank. We hadn’t stopped at all. We raced on by Dearborn Station; the Twentieth Century waited on a layby on our left side. We were heading south of the Great Lakes and east to New York.

  I sat on my bunk and watched suburban Chicago pass without interest. “Oh, no, no, no!” I moaned. “I’ll never see my dad again. I want to go home and now I can’t!”

  “I did something terrible, Oscar,” whispered Claire.

  “What did you do?” I asked, without much interest.

  “Last night after we stopped talking, I said my prayers. And I wished as hard as I could that you would somehow stay on the train. I promised to be good for the rest of my life. And that’s what happened. God heard me,” said Claire. “And now I have to make it up to you.”

  “No, Claire,” I replied. “I’m afraid it’s my dad’s doing.”

  “Your dad?”

  I sighed heavily at the prospect of explaining again. “Two nights ago,” I said, “Dad and I were running the trains on the Crawford layout. Dad messed around with the track configuration. Dad wanted to send this President prototype across the whole country on a direct run. He must have sidelined the regular Chicago–New York trains, put a Y joint in the tracks at Chicago, and sent this train north, nonstop all the way to Grand Central Terminal.”

  Claire made a face.

  “Are you a Catholic, Claire?” I asked.

  “No. I’m an Episcopalian,” said Claire.

  I pictured Episcopal prayers as a lot lighter and bouncier than Catholic ones, but I didn’t say so.

&
nbsp; “Don’t worry,” I said. “I never heard of Episcopalian prayers getting people into trouble.”

  “I’ll make it up to you, Oscar,” said Claire. “I’ll get Daddy to send you home on the real train to Chicago.”

  That was going to have to be the way it was. If I was lucky, I’d get back home all right, but it would be 1926 in Chicago, too. I’d be in kinder­garten again. Eventually I’d have to live through the selling of our trains, Aunt Carmen’s casseroles, and the robbers in the bank. Only after a while, I’d be none the wiser because I probably would forget the future the moment I began to live it over.

  As the sun came up, Claire pointed out the window. A pleasant hill rose beside the train, its naked trees covered in dawn frost. “I think we are in western Pennsylvania,” she said.

  I had no idea, but within an hour, the train slowed again and the woodsy landscape around us thickened with villages and small cities.

  “Claire, I have to prepare you for what is going to happen in New York. I’m going to be six years old again.”

  “C’mon, Oscar,” she said.

  “Claire, try to understand this. If you went in a rocket ship to the west and you flew over the international date line, you’d fly right into tomorrow. If you went east, you’d go into yesterday.”

  “I can’t understand that stupid date line,” said Claire. “It just zigs and zags right down the globe.”

  “Take it on faith, then,” I said. “They just made up that line, anyway. Listen, Lionel trains look like they’re just running around a layout track. But they aren’t. The minute you get on one, you run back and forth through time. Cal­i­fornia is two thousand miles to the west of where I got on, in Cairo. It gained me ten years. Chicago to New York is a thousand miles in the other direction. It’ll lose me five years, and I’ll be six years old.”

  “What are we going to do?” said Claire, after thinking this over.

  “Be prepared,” I said. “When we get to the edge of where the Lionel layout station ends, I’m going to hit a time pocket. There’s no oxygen in a time pocket, just screaming noise and jelly air. It nearly choked me to death in Los Angeles. Just push me through it. Drag me through it.”

  “Will it happen to me, too?” asked Claire.

  “Probably not. You never got off the train. You’ll just be back in 1926, where you left, so there’s no time pocket for you. Just me.” I breathed in deeply. “I don’t know how many of these I can do,” I said.

  “I’ll get you through it, Oscar,” said Claire. “I’m strong! When we get uptown, I’ll have to sneak you into the apartment up the servants’ stairs. We’ll have to figure out a plan for after that, Oscar.”

  I whistled. “I’ll be a first-grader without a penny to my name, separated from my dad by a thousand miles,” I said. “And you, Claire! You’re going to get holy heck in a handcar from your folks for running away. We’re up a creek without a paddle!”

  Claire sat very still on her bunk. Clickety, clickety, clickety, like an overworked metronome the train’s wheels hummed on the track below us. She squinted thoughtfully. “We’d better stick together, Oscar,” she said. “We are the only ones in the world who have ever done this train jumping.”

  Pennsylvania was as endless as Russia, but at last we hit New Jersey. The engine paused ever so slightly in a dirty yellow station called Newark. Then it sped on and entered a long tunnel. Within two minutes, it pulled into Grand Central Terminal, New York City, and it finally stopped, wheezing like a marathon runner.

  The next thing I knew, Claire had me by the hand. “Come on, Oscar,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before they seal the doors.”

  Harry, the conductor, stood on the platform, hands on hips and feet planted wide. He opened his mouth in astonishment as we ran by. “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey! Youse! Come back here!” But Claire knew exactly where she was going. We melted away into the crowd of Grand Central.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Claire.

  “To the Lexington Avenue subway,” she shouted. “Tell me when you hit that invisible wall, Oscar,” said Claire, dodging right and left through the bustling crowd of commuters and travelers. Suddenly I couldn’t move.

  “Now!” I yelled. “I can’t go any farther. I can’t see it, Claire, but I can feel it! Can you?”

  She could not. Claire was in her own time. Claire dashed back up behind me. She grabbed my hand in a vise grip and sidestepped a fat woman with two big shopping bags who was racing past. Claire shoved me in front of the woman. Behind her the woman’s weight tumbled into us.

  “My stars!” said the chubby woman. “Somebody needs to teach you some manners! Say excuse me!”

  How Claire answered this, I did not know. The air around me had again turned thick and unbreathable. I heard only the clattering of a million marbles on a tin roof and then a popping sound from my own chest.

  But I was through. Claire half dragged me into a ceramic-tiled entranceway. The sign read 42ND ST. GR. CENTRAL in red mosaic just as it did on the Lionel layout stations. Claire tripped down the steps as if she owned them. I fell down the rest of the steps after her and crumpled into a heap on the dirty stone floor. I lay in front of a newsstand underneath both Claire and the shopping lady.

  “Is that you, Oscar?” Claire asked nervously, bending over to brush me off.

  I could inhale only shallow gasps. Going through the barrier had cracked my ribs. I could no more run than someone in a head-to-toe plaster cast.

  “Oscar?” asked Claire. “Is that you? I only see a little boy!”

  “I’m in here,” I managed to say. “I can’t stand up.”

  Near my head was the spinner rack of the day’s newspapers. I glanced at the World-Telegram and looked at the date. “Christmas sales!” it read. “December 31, 1926.”

  “Where are all of these people running to?” I panted. Old and young, tall and short, everyone galloped, up, down, and crosswise, in the echoing subway platforms. Briefcases banged against us. There were few excuse me’s from New Yorkers.

  “It’s the New York City subway at Grand Central. It’s always like this,” said Claire. “Even at midnight!”

  Claire half carried me onto the IRT subway, which ran uptown to her home. I stumbled along beside her. The subway car lurched and heaved back and forth. “I’ll just die,” I whispered to Claire. “I’ll just die right here. And now.”

  I opened one eye and tried to figure out where I was. In a bed, that was for sure. I had only the va­gu­est memory of being put to bed. The Lexington Avenue subway had given my ribs such a pummeling, and the walk up ten flights of stairs was so painful that I had blubbered like a baby, stumbling from step to agonizing step. That much I recalled with vivid embarrassment.

  But in bed I was quite comfortable. In Claire’s apartment, the smell in the atmosphere was distinct and familiar. Through the air wafted the special scent of thick oriental carpets and lemon-oil furniture polish. Mixed in on top was the aroma of vanilla and butter cooking somewhere in a kitchen.

  I ran my hand up and down my body gingerly to see how much it had been hurt. I discovered that my ribs were wrapped in tape. They felt better, snugger.

  “Hello,” said Claire. “Are you hungry, Oscar?”

  I nodded and pulled myself carefully upright to lie back on two pillows. The pillows were as soft as two clouds.

  Claire spooned me some very warm beef soup. Eating it brought strength back to me. She gave me two aspirin with a glass of milk. I could see almost nothing in the dark room. “Where are we, Claire?” I asked her when the soup was done, fingering the tape up and down my small rib cage.

  “We’re in a maid’s room in our apartment house. We’re on the third floor. Mummy and Daddy have a triplex. Nobody knows we’re here, except Lisl, the maid. She won’t talk because I gave her the Bonwit Teller gift certificate my granny gave me for Christmas. She’s got New Year’s Eve off. All the servants do. So no one’s up here.”

  I did not ask Claire what a
Bonwit Teller gift certificate was. “Your mother and father don’t know you’re home yet?” I asked. “Is the thirteen-state alarm still on for you?”

  “Lisl told me it’s still on,” said Claire. “But we’re safe. The cops have searched the whole apartment three times. They’re standing downstairs in the lobby bored stiff. Mummy and Daddy are in the living room listening for the telephone to ring. We came up the servants’ stairway. It’s separate from the main lobby, so Bruno, the doorman, didn’t see us.” Claire took my soup bowl and spoon and set them on the floor.

  “Who . . . who did this rib taping?” I asked.

  “Oh,” said Claire airily, “I did. I got out the Boy Scout Handbook. I figured you might have cracked ribs, and so I got the tape from my brother’s Boy Scout kit and taped you up just the way the handbook says to do. Oscar,” she said suddenly. Something was glinting in her hand. “What’s this? I found it on a string around your neck with your religious medal when I taped you up.” Claire held out my dime on a string.

  “It’s my dime on a string,” I said. “Mr. Applegate glued it on for me. We dropped it into the slot and ran the trains in the bank as much as we wanted.”

  “Oscar,” she said cautiously as she handed the dime back to me, “this dime’s from 1931. It’s a genuine U.S. mint silver dime from five years into the future.”

  I was not surprised. I looked at Claire quizzically.

  “Oscar. Can you get up out of bed?”

  “I think so.” Slowly I eased my aching body out from between the comfortable covers and pillows. The aspirin was helping. “What now?” I asked.

  “Can you take this letter?” asked Claire. “Could you make it down the back stairway? It leads out the side door of the building. Then slip into the main lobby. Can you do that?”

  “I think so, Claire. I’ll try.”

  “Good! The cops are prob­ably watching, but they won’t be looking for a six-year-old boy. They won’t even see you. Take this letter and put it in the mail-room basket at the back of the lobby.” Claire looked at her watch. “The building superintendent brings up the mail three times a day. His next run’s about ten minutes from now. Once you drop the letter off, disappear quickly, Oscar. Whatever you do, don’t call attention to yourself. Here’s twenty cents. Outside the building, go left. On the avenue is a Schrafft’s. Go in there.”