On the Blue Comet Read online

  The bus took twenty minutes to reach downtown Cairo and the intersection of Center Street and Washington Avenue. I alighted at the corner and went to the bronze filigreed doors of the bank. The First National was a heroic granite building. Ten fluted Greek columns held up the capital out in front. The bank’s name was chiseled in the marble for all Cairo and the surrounding world to read.

  Bankers’ hours ended at three, but there was a bell on the side of the double doors, and I rang it. Waiting in the cold afternoon for the night watchman, I turned to the right to one of the darkened display windows. Suddenly spotlights flared on. All that was in the Christmas display window came to life. There was a layout of twenty different trains in a Christmas landscape. The Blue Comet whizzed by. It was my Blue Comet. Mr. Pettishanks had it running lakeside on the South Shore Line.

  Before I could even take it in, the night watchman opened the bank door and saluted me with a smile.

  “Mr. Applegate!” I shouted.

  “Oscar,” said Aunt Carmen after grace and before supper that evening, “you are excused from writing any further copies of Mr. Kipling’s poem.” She gave me a frosty smile.

  “Oh, thank you, ma’am,” I said. “That’s a relief !” A grin, exactly like my dad’s very own, widened across my face.

  “You saved our bacon, Oscar,” piped up Willie Sue.

  Aunt Carmen frowned at Willa Sue and put her finger to her lips.

  “Mama, that’s what you said on the bus ’fore Oscar came home: ‘Oscar Ogilvie Jr. certainly saved our bacon today.’ I heard it with my own ears.”

  “Oscar,” said Aunt Carmen, “you did remarkably well today.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I sure know that poem by heart.”

  She asked me, “Did you know, Oscar, that the town of Cairo celebrates the Fourth of July with a fifth-grader reciting a speech from history? Each year one boy or girl is chosen from the schools. You might be the one selected if you practice. Perhaps we should prepare you for a few more recitations.”

  “It would certainly make Mama look good,” said Willa Sue. “If you got to give the Fourth of July speech in front of the whole town, why, everybody’d know you were Mama’s nephew! We’d get lots more jobs and a pay raise. ’Course you’d have to do it without messing up!”

  “Hush, Willa Sue,” said Aunt Carmen, but the cat was out of the bag.

  “More speeches?” I asked. I stopped midspoon in my attack on the navy-bean-and-cod-cheek casserole. I knew all about the Fourth of July. Dad and I never missed the town picnic. We loved the band concerts. We marched in the parade. But when the hour came and some pasty-faced kid with glasses got up to deliver Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Dad said, “Let’s get out while the getting’s good!”

  Aunt Carmen did not read the thoughts in my head. She plowed on informatively as she ate. “There’s Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena, of course. Then there’s George Washington’s Farewell. How about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? That’s a good one!” she said.

  I felt the color drain from my cheeks and the sense from my mind. “Why don’t I . . . look some of them over,” I finally managed to suggest.

  Famous Speeches of Famous Men was on my bedside table that night.

  Aunt Carmen and I arrived at a bargain, without ever discussing a single detail of it out loud. She would allow me to visit my trains in the First National Bank in the afternoons after lessons. I would have Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address committed to memory by the next July Fourth.

  “Well, howdy!” said Mr. Applegate when I pounded on the doors of the bank. He flipped the alarm switch off and swung open the fifteen-foot-high bronze doors to let me in. He showed me how to slip the dead bolt bar that relocked the doors and flip the alarm back on again.

  “All we need, Oscar,” said Mr. Applegate, “is a false alarm. The cops’ll come swarming down here, sirens blazing, and we’ll be in trouble up to our keisters with old Pettishanks!”

  Mr. Applegate made enough money from his new job as night watchman to buy a thermos bottle and hot chocolate to fill it. This we shared every afternoon before tackling the trains. In front of the massive lobby-wide layout was a small coin-operated box decorated with holly and red Christmas bows. The sign said

  YOUNG SAVERS — JOIN THE FIRST NATIONAL’S CHRISTMAS CLUB!

  EARN A DIME FOR EVERY DOLLAR SAVED.

  ONE DIME RUNS THE TRAINS FOR FIVE MINUTES!

  I did not have to join the Christmas Club. Mr. Applegate knew how to run the trains for free by using a dime glued to a string over and over again. I kept the dime hung around my neck along with my Holy Name medal.

  Mr. Pettishanks had placed my Blue Comet train on the South Shore Commuter Line. It ran the round-trip from South Bend to Chicago. I watched it run several loops before taking my eyes off it. No question it was my own train. On the side of the engine was a small scrape that my dad had carefully sanded and afterward repainted with cobalt-blue enamel. In its observation car were the two seats Dad and I had adjusted just so for perfect viewing when we would go down the Jersey Shore and see the great Atlantic Ocean for the first time. The windows had always been kept polished by my dad with a chamois cloth, and the nickel-plated side rods along the engine gleamed like silver.

  Of course Mr. Pettishanks had replaced Dad’s handmade layout with the official, expensive tunnels, mountains, and stations provided by Lionel trains and other makers. In the east stood Grand Central Terminal, New York. If you looked in the arched Plexiglas windows, you could see the tiny lights of the zodiac illuminating the vaulted ceilings. Dozens of tin people headed this way and that. Ten tracks went into Grand Central. Ten more led into and out of Dearborn Station, Chicago. Near it ran a Mississippi River of dimpled sapphire-blue glass with winking lights that rippled on a circuit beneath. To the west, the Rocky Mountains rose above everything, peaks covered with sparkling mica-flake snow. Nested in the mountains, Denver’s Union Station shone like a treetop star above the rest of the country. The Rockies loomed a good five feet high above the base layout.

  Beyond all the mountains and plains lay the country of my heart, Cal­i­fornia. Mr. Pettishanks’s Cal­i­fornia layout contained tiny orange orchards made of seafoam dipped in flocking powder and expertly sculpted into trees. They were set on hills and in valleys surrounding the final terminus of the whole layout, the Los Angeles station, reproduced in tiny detail. I had never seen the terminal at Los Angeles in the Lionel Catalog. This one must have been invented by some expert in miniature buildings, prob­ably costing an arm and a leg.

  The sidewalk surrounding the station was crisscross yellow bricks, scored perfectly and scuffed to a real bricky surface. On the sidewalk near the front steps blinked a tiny red sign saying TAXIS. Three miniature checker cabs were gathered there. Each cab sported a Chiclet-size ON-OFF DUTY top light wired to its roof. When Mr. Applegate illuminated the station lights, the cabs waited for passengers with headlights and ON DUTY lights ablaze.

  “Old man Pettishanks owns just about the entire stock of the Lionel catalog now,” said Mr. Applegate. “He loves ’em. He comes in here every morning before the bank opens and runs ’em for an hour while he drinks his coffee and smokes his cigars. I don’t know what he’ll do when the Christmas season is over and the display has to come down.”

  “But I thought the trains were for his son, Cyril,” I said in astonishment.

  “Cyril!” said Mr. Applegate. He laughed heartily. “The old man swears he wouldn’t let Cyril in the same room with these trains! Not on a bet! Cyril would try to have a train crash in five minutes. Cyril’s a big galoot. He’d break the signals and put his foot through the windows in the stations.”

  There was snow coming on Christmas Eve afternoon. I took the mail out of the mailbox before I boarded the number 17 bus to the bank. Among the bills was a Christmas card addressed to me. In the corner Dad had put a real return address this time: O. Ogilvie, Indian Grove Ranch, Reseda, Cal­i­fornia. I ripped open the envelope.
Good news! Dad had a job at last, even if it was picking oranges. Without comment, he had enclosed a dollar bill. Bad news, too. He had cut out a newspaper column from the Farmers’ Gazette: “Deere Shuts Select Offices Nationwide.”

  I read on, heart sinking. John Deere had closed all of its Cal­i­fornia offices due to the recession in farming. Nonetheless, I put the dollar bill to my lips and kissed it because my dad’s hand had earned and touched that dollar, two thousand miles away. I was not about to spend it anytime soon.

  I shivered. The lowering gray sky darkened, and I ran out to catch the bus. At the bank, I banged on the door over the howl of the wind.

  Mr. Applegate opened up. “Look at that darn snow!” he said. “It’s coming down like the blizzard of ’88. We might never get home, Oscar!”

  Then there was a screeching sound. Behind Mr. Applegate, a Pennsylvania engine hung over a trestle bridge, its wheels spinning. The heavy engine dangled by a single coupling completely off a bridge over the blue-glass Mississippi River.

  “It’s going to crash!” I yelled. I threw my coat on a huge leather banker’s chair and raced to rescue it before all five pounds of steel engine smashed the delicate river underneath.

  “Wow, you’re quick!” said Mr. Applegate. “Musta cost Old Man Pettishanks a small fortune to have that river custom-made. Imagine if we broke it! I’d owe him for five years’ indentured servitude!”

  Mr. Applegate and I fixed the broken track bed under the engine just as Dad and I had done. Then we charged the engine stacks of all the rolling stock with smoke pellets.

  “Everything set?” he asked with a grin.

  “All aboard. Let ’em roll!” I answered. He pulled the throttle on the main controls, and all twenty-one trains raced around their tracks at daredevil speed. The lobby lights had been turned off, leaving two small all-night luminators, low glimmers behind the barred tellers’ windows. Only the glowing lamps from the train stations and the small-town crossings glittered in the darkness of the bank’s huge interior. Outside, Christmas Eve snow hurled itself against the thirty-foot bank windows. Drifts and eddies whirled under the street lights of Washington Avenue.

  The lobby of the First National Bank of Cairo wasn’t exactly as cozy as our basement in the old house on Lucifer Street, but it would have to do. For the next couple of weeks, whenever I visited my Blue Comet, for a few minutes now and then I felt as if I were home again, running our trains in our world below the world.

  Tonight, when I rested my head sideways against the table near a bend in the tracks, the Golden State Limited on its way to Cal­i­fornia tootled past. From the club car, the tin man with the spectacles read his tin newspaper and the tin boy stared out at me. I wished a tiny Oscar could hop right onto the layout board and run into another world.

  “Are you sleepy, Oscar?” Mr. Applegate asked.

  “Not sleepy,” I answered. “Just pretending.”

  “Pretending?” asked Mr. Applegate.

  I was embarrassed to tell Mr. Applegate that when I laid my head down on the layout there were moments when I truly believed I could be an inch tall and race up the verge of the station. In my dream, the papier-mâché rocks would suddenly be fieldstone. “My dad always used to ask me that same question,” I said.

  “You miss him,” said Mr. Applegate.

  A wave of sorrow swept over me, and I could not speak. I concentrated on the Happy Warrior as it emerged from a mountain tunnel, whistling and spewing out a delicate trail of white smoke.

  “Mr. Applegate,” I asked, “how long do you suppose it would take for one of these Lionel trains to run all the way from here in Cairo to Los Angeles, Cal­i­fornia?”

  “Well, let’s do the numbers, Oscar,” said Mr. Applegate.

  “If a train leaves Station A in the east vestibule and travels in about sixty seconds to Station B in the west lobby and the stations are, say, two hundred and twenty feet apart, how fast is the train going?”

  I multiplied the distance times the speed. “About two point five miles an hour, give or take,” I answered. “To go eighteen hundred miles at two and a half miles an hour would take seven hundred and twenty hours. Seven hundred and twenty hours is thirty days or one month. One month, give or take!”

  “Very good,” said Mr. Applegate. “But you are forgetting something!”

  “What am I forgetting?” I asked.

  “Professor Einstein’s theory of relativity,” said Mr. Applegate. “Now try it this way: If a train leaves Station A and travels in sixty seconds to Station B, and the stations are in actuality two thousand miles apart, roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles, how fast will that train be going?”

  I did the math in the palm of my hand. “Two thousand miles a minute and sixty minutes in an hour,” I calculated. “That means the train is traveling a hundred and twenty thousand miles an hour!”

  Mr. Applegate smiled. “As we know, any rocket ship going a hundred and twenty thousand miles an hour would just disintegrate from the heat. Even if the rocket ship was made of some amazing substance not yet invented, a passenger would die instantly from the g-forces,” said Mr. Applegate.

  “But how could it actually happen?” I asked.

  Mr. Applegate sighed before he answered. “Einstein went just so far in his math, Oscar. But he didn’t go far enough. He never considered negative velocity or time pockets.”

  “Time pockets?”

  “Long story short, Oscar, if you were to sit in our make-believe rocket ship and it went east to west, you’d fly into tomorrow.”

  “I would?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Applegate. “East to west, you would go into tomorrow, and if you kept going, you’d fly through a hundred tomorrows if you wanted.”

  “But Cal­i­fornia’s west of here, and it’s Pacific time, two hours behind us,” I argued.

  Mr. Applegate smiled. “You’re forgetting the international date line, Oscar,” he said. “No one knew how to contain the endlessness of time, so they made a seam around the surface of the world. But it isn’t real. If your rocket ship flew over that date line three hundred sixty-five times, you’d be a year ahead. In no time at all, you could go ten years, even a hundred years into the future. Of course if you went west to east, you’d fly into yesterday and then a thousand yesterdays. To go forward into time that hasn’t yet happened, you would have to slow down enough to plunge into a time pocket in Einstein’s frozen river. You’d have to use negative velocity. Then you might do it.”

  Mr. Applegate’s voice turned dreamy. “Scientific American claims that German scientists have been beavering away on all this in secret laboratories,” he said. “They are working on time pockets. They call them Zeithülsen. They’ve built a primitive p­article accelerator hidden underneath some mountain in the Black Forest. They’re experimenting with snails and other mollusks, sending them backward and forward in time. Then they’ll try it with mice and then chimpanzees. Eventually they will try to send a person back to 1914 and reverse the outcome of the Great War.”

  “Reverse the outcome of the war?” I asked. “The Germans lost the war. We beat the pants off them!”

  “Yes, they did,” said Mr. Applegate. “That’s why they want to monkey with history. They want to change it so that they beat the pants off us. Who knows? They have very clever scientists in Germany.”

  Mr. Applegate smiled again, this time sadly. “I could have been one of those scientists, Oscar. I could have run the American Negative Velocity Lab. There is none now, of course. American science doesn’t believe in negative velocity.”

  “You could be head of the lab, Mr. Applegate?”

  “I am an old man now, Oscar,” said Mr. Applegate. “But when I was young and my mind was agile, I was the most promising graduate student at the University of Texas Department of Mathematics. I wrote my thesis on negative velocity theory, starting with Einstein’s equation E=MC2 and then improving on it and finishing it to its logical conclusion. I wanted to get a scholarship
to Princeton to get my doctorate, Oscar! I wanted to change the world!”

  Mr. Applegate swallowed very hard. He lifted both his empty hands as if something precious had dropped from them.

  “Unfortunately,” he went on, “no one in the Mathematics Department at Princeton could understand my paper. I didn’t get my scholarship. I was a poor boy, so instead of becoming a world-famous professor like Mr. Einstein, I had to settle for being a high-school math teacher.”

  Mr. Applegate picked up a disabled freight engine from one of the sidings, turned it over, and spun its wheels in the air.

  I wandered to the other end of the bank lobby. I liked to watch the trains from different angles. The Blue Comet followed the curve of the lake along the Indiana dunes.

  My favorite train, my dad’s last birthday present to me, was leaving Beverly Shores Station heading east to Dune Park. Its whistle hailed me as if to say, “Hello, Oscar! I know you’re there!” I pressed my face down on the bright green permagrass that sheathed the Nebraska plains to the west of Chicago and idly pretended that the oncoming express was absolutely real. The bells from Saint Savior’s, down the street, chimed five o’clock. The Blue Comet looked huge, life-size, from my eye at track level. Suddenly, I saw movement at the far corner of the bank lobby.

  I froze where I crouched, my head on the grassy layout, gazing down the tracks. Two men with silk stockings over their faces had come through the door without a sound. I hadn’t locked the doors! I had forgotten to pull the bank’s alarm switch back to the on position.