On the Blue Comet Read online

  ANGRY BANKER DOUBLES REWARD FOR MASSACRE INFO! BOY STILL MISSING!

  “Wow!” said Dutch. “Look at that! You’ve got ten thousand simoleons coming, cowboy, if you can remember who did the deed!”

  This time I hugged Dutch in joy, not tears. “If you run into trouble,” he told me, “just give me a buzz! My girl’s old man owns a twenty-room house in Pasadena. That’s where you’ll find me!”

  Swinging his suitcase in one hand, he waved. With an athlete’s gait, he swept through a high archway. I waved back for as long as I could see him. He waded through the crowds of people heading for trains, flagging down porters, and looking for those they loved. I followed Dutch out to the entrance of the station and watched him step off the yellow-brick sidewalk into the world beyond. One minute his foot was on the sidewalk; the next he had disappeared and there was no trace of him to be seen. I felt unbearably alone.

  I sat on the steps outside the station and concentrated, hawklike, looking for my dad, not knowing what color truck he had or the direction he might come from. I hoped no one would recognize me from the picture on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

  The station had yellow stucco walls and towers five stories high. They gleamed splendidly in the brilliant sunshine. Palm trees clicked their fronds in the breeze along the street outside. I ate my hot dog, saving my Hershey bar for later, and watched traffic passing by. The heat spiraled in waves off the sidewalks, although it was the day after Christmas. There were an unusual number of soldiers and sailors passing along the streets across from the station. I wondered why. You never saw soldiers in Cairo.

  An hour passed. I read and reread the story in the paper about Mr. Pettishanks doubling the reward to $10,000, and the police being totally befuddled. I tried not to think about Mr. Applegate lying dead on the floor of the First National Bank of Cairo. Try to remember, Oscar! I told myself. Try to remember the robbers’ faces, their names. You know you know them.

  But nothing of the crooks’ identity would come back to me.

  Across the street, a newsboy was hawking the afternoon paper. I tried not looking every two minutes at the clock tower. I reminded myself that hot as it was in Cal­i­fornia, it was wintertime and dusk would come early.

  The newsboy across the street was waving folded papers at passersby. “War fever! Read all about it! War fever!”

  War fever? Some stupid war must have suddenly started that afternoon and knocked my story off the front pages. I wanted to know the latest scoop from Cairo. Had the thieves been caught? Had someone else collected the reward?

  At that moment, a rust bucket of a truck drove up with John Deere written in script on the door.

  “Dad!” I shouted. “Dad, over here! I’m here!”

  My dad jumped out of the pickup. He hadn’t heard me. He began searching, looking up and down the street. He focused on the station steps. He looked right at me, but he didn’t seem to see me.

  “Dad! I’m here! Right here!” I shouted. Again he didn’t hear.

  He took his cap off for a minute to scratch his head, and it was then I noticed that he was entirely bald. Bald! My dad always had a thick head of hair. Where did it go? He was wearing eyeglasses too. Where did they come from?

  I ran down the steps to cross the street, but I could not step off the yellow-brick sidewalk that surrounded the station. I tried jumping and punching and turning myself sideways, but an invis­ible wall separated the crisscross brick pavement from the black asphalt. I tried another section farther down the sidewalk. I ran up and down trying to hurl myself into the street, but between me and the asphalt street was a barrier, see-through as a window but tough as steel. I was trapped.

  Dad’s eyes raked the area one more time, with his glasses and then without his glasses. I saw dis­appointment cloud his face. He raised both hands to his mouth and called, “Oscar? Oscar?” He saw no one he knew.

  Disappointment overcame him, and he put his hand back on the door handle of the truck and began to open it. Panic quaked through me. My dad was going to leave. I would never see him again because I was pinned where he would never see or hear me.

  “Dad!” I screamed. Could I turn my body into an arrow and burst through?

  Dad lay the side of his head on the top of the steering wheel for just a moment. His shoulders hunched up, and he closed his eyes. Then he cleaned off his glasses and started the motor of the truck.

  Then my eye caught a little red light flashing on the telephone pole above me. TAXI it said in white letters, exactly as in Mr. Pettishanks’s station layout. Waiting at the curb, on the yellow-brick pavement, its ON DUTY top light illuminated, was a taxicab. I jumped inside it.

  “Where to?” asked the driver. “Just across the street, please!” I said, and threw my only dollar bill onto the front seat. The driver shrugged. He rolled his eyes, as if to say, “Crazy!” but turned the ignition key and grabbed the wheel to back the cab up.

  I fell back against the seat just as a hurricane wind pinned me into the upholstery and darkness descended. Thick-as-Jell-O air clogged my lungs. If there was any oxygen to be had, it was rubbery and as im­possible to breathe as gas. The driver shifted the gears into reverse and turned the cab around. As the cabbie jerked forward, the blackness around me dawned to a milky light. I gulped for air. For a moment the whole world roared and clattered like a thousand marbles hitting a tin roof. I thought my eardrums would burst. It was the same noise, a hundred times louder, as had come through the telephone when Dutch dropped it.

  “We’re here, kid!” said the driver, and he stopped his meter at twenty-five cents. “Pay up — two bits!” he said lazily. Then suddenly he looked at me, and his eyes popped. “Get outta my cab, fella!” he said, and threw the cab into reverse.

  I was already out in the sunlit street. I banged on the rear bed of the truck that my dad was just about to drive away. For some reason, my shoes had burst open, laces ripping. Aunt Carmen’s careful stitching on the waistband of my pants had split. Miraculously I now filled the trousers out. A minute before, Cyril Pettishanks’s shirt had hung on me like a pajama top. Now the buttons were tight. I grabbed the pant legs, tore through Aunt Carmen’s hem stitching, and kicked them down. “Dad!” I shouted, tears of happiness choking my voice.

  Dad braked. “Who in God’s name are you, and what do you want banging on my truck like that?”

  “Dad! It’s me, Oscar!”

  He only sort of recognized me. Suddenly a grin ringed his face so hard I thought his cheeks would give way. “Oscar!” he yelled. “Is that you? Is it you?”

  “It’s me!”

  “Oscar! You’re safe!” Dad jumped out of the cab. “You’re not kidnapped anymore!” Then he just grabbed me. He gazed at me up and down, down and up, tears running down his face. He said not a word until he heaved a big sigh and mumbled, “God forgive me, son. I didn’t know you. It’s been ten years and, of course, you’re a grown man now. Ten years, Oscar! Ten long years!” He was looking straight out and up at me, not downward as he always had.

  “Ten years?” I asked.

  “Almost to the day!” said my dad. “You’ve grown two feet! Where have you been? What did they do to you? Get in the truck and tell me!”

  Dizzily I pulled myself onto the front seat of the pickup truck. Dad gunned the engine. He stole sideways glances at me as if he thought I might just disappear in a puff of smoke. I felt my head loll on my shoulders and fall.

  It was morning before I opened my eyes. The air wafting through the open window was as sweet as any summer day in Illinois. The world smelled of citrus fruit. Birds sang in the trees outside the window. Dad was sitting on the foot of my bed. When I opened my eyes, he was staring into them.

  “Is it really, really you, Oscar?” Dad asked.

  “Of course it’s me! What happened to your hair, Dad? Why are you wearing those glasses?”

  “Hair? I lost it long ago. I’ve worn glasses eight years now.”

  “I’ve only been gone three
days, Dad! Three days!”

  “Oscar,” said Dad. He frowned and offered me a cup of coffee. “You disappeared ten years ago, after the kidnapping at the bank. They never caught them, those men. You were given up for dead! I was so miserable, I almost joined the navy and sailed away, but they wouldn’t have me.”

  I wrinkled my nose at the coffee. “I’m not allowed to drink coffee, Dad,” I said. “I’m just a kid!”

  My father strained to understand me. There was no arguing with it. Dad was now a balding, middle-aged man. What was left of his hair was speckled with gray. I, on the other hand, filled the whole bed. I was bigger than he was. I was six feet tall instead of four feet, five inches. What happened?

  A copy of Life magazine lay on the bedside table. I snatched it up. The date was December 1941. On the cover was a grinning, saluting new president of the United States, a man called Franklin Delano Roosevelt, standing on an aircraft carrier. I had never heard of him. America was apparently in the middle of a war.

  I flexed my hand several times and studied the fingernails. They were mine, all right. I knew them well, and yet they were no longer the hands of a boy.

  “You have grown into such a splendid young man!” Dad whispered. “Handsome and strong and well spoken. I am so proud of you, Oscar!” Here he looked down and pounded his fist into his open hand like a ballplayer. “I promise never to leave you again, son.”

  “Dad,” I answered, “you’re stuck with me. I’m not going anywhere either.”

  I finally took the coffee, the first cup of my life, and eyes steadily on his, sipped at it. It was sweet, full of milk and sugar, and it did the trick. I got up and walked around as if this walking were new, like the coffee. Dad watched me with a hand ready in case I tipped over suddenly.

  Gently, as if I were an injured kitten, he whispered to me, “What happened, Oscar? What did those goons do to you for these ten years? Where have you been?”

  I couldn’t answer his question. I kicked my big, new legs out. They seemed to work fine. There were no bruises on me, although I could swear I had been hit by a heavyweight boxer.

  “Where are we, Dad?” I asked.

  “We’re in my rented room in Burbank, Oscar,” he answered, his eyes following every move I made. “Not much of a town. Just a little wink and blink on the map.”

  “I smell chop suey, Dad!”

  Dad looked embarrassed. “I don’t make much money yet, son. The room’s over a Chinese restaurant.”

  I sat down and ate the eggs and biscuits that Dad served to me. “Oscar, tell me,” he said. “No matter how bad they treated you, say it out. Tell me all ten years’ worth.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, Oscar.”

  “There is no they. I haven’t been away ten years. It was three days, maybe, at the most. Three days ago, I got your Christmas card on Aunt Carmen’s front porch. I opened it up and there was that dollar and the clipping about John Deere closing down all its Cal­i­fornia branch offices.”

  Dad wouldn’t swallow this. He said, “Oscar, that was 1931, ten years back. Look at the magazine. Look at the paper. Look at you! You’re twenty-one years old and six feet tall.” Here he thrust a news­paper, the Voice of the Valley, onto my placemat. December 27, 1941, it read.

  “Dad, I can’t explain any of this.”

  “Well, start with the day I left Cairo,” said my dad. He took out a cigar and offered one to me.

  “Dad, I’m eleven years old and I don’t smoke,” I said, but I thanked him and put the cigar in my shirt pocket. I started at the beginning with Mrs. Olderby’s fractions and Mr. Applegate appearing out of nowhere and helping me. I told him about the disastrous night of the forgotten wet library book and how that meant I had to go on rounds with Aunt Carmen. I told him about “If” and Cyril and my trains being in the bank and my reciting the poem to Mr. Pettishanks.

  Then I got to Christmas Eve. “Dad,” I said, “I loved that man, Mr. Applegate. You being gone, Dad, he was all I had. He was sort of like a substitute you for me. He loved the trains. He helped me get by. And now he’s dead and it was my fault. The whole thing was my fault for not locking the door and putting on the alarm.” I began to cry into my hands.

  “Not your fault, Oscar,” said my dad. “Their fault.” He called the thieves a name I didn’t know he could say. “I know, son, that when terrible things get done to a person, sometimes they just blot the whole thing out. You must have grown up in some kind of prison those goons kept you in.”

  “I was on a train, Dad. Forty hours or so from Chicago to Los Angeles. I’m eleven years old. You’ve got to believe me.”

  My dad’s face clouded in puzzlement. He said in his levelest Sunday voice, “Oscar, it’s ten real years. This is 1941, not 1931. You were kidnapped and never found again. I counted every day of every month of every one of those years, and I cried into my pillow every night thinking of you being dead, being tied hand and foot in the trunk of someone’s car!”

  I was beginning to panic. Dad had to believe me — otherwise he’d think I’d lost my mind.

  My dad finished his cigar and stubbed out the butt. I pulled out the one he’d given me and handed it back over to him to light for himself.

  “What’s this?” he said, spitting. “What’s this green stuff on the end of this cigar?”

  “Wait!” I shouted. “Dad, this proves it!” I turned out my shirt pocket, emptying it of a handful of bright-green grit, first into my hand and then into his. “Look!” I said. “You tell me what this is, Dad!”

  He ran it through his fingers and smelled it. He made a face. “It’s . . . it’s that instant meadow grass!” he said. “Permagrass! We used to use it on our layout.”

  “Dad, before I jumped onto the layout, just before the crooks came into the bank, I had my face pressed down on Mr. Pettishanks’s Great Plains. You know how I used to do that all the time at home. I got the grass all over the side of my face. Some old lady on the train made me clean it off! I put it in my pocket so as not to make a mess.”

  For the first time, my dad hesitated, and he narrowed his eyes, thinking. “I know this much,” he said. “You’re not in 1931 anymore, son. I sure as shootin’ voted for Mr. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936. President Roosevelt single-handedly pulled us through that ter­rible depression and set America on its feet again. These days movies are in color, Oscar! Sulfa drugs cure infections! And the best player in the American League is Joe DiMaggio! He hit forty-five home runs and stole seventy bases this season for the Yankees. Have you never heard of these things?”

  “Never!” I answered. “But it doesn’t matter now! Dad, we’re rich,” I said, rapping the table happily with the end of my spoon.

  “Rich?”

  “Yup. You can buy an orange ranch. We’ve got ten thousand dollars.”

  “What do you mean, Oscar? I’ve been working back up to mechanic all these ten years. I still only make fifty bucks a week,” said Dad.

  “Dad, Mr. Pettishanks offered a reward for anyone giving information leading to the arrest of the bank robbers. At first it was five thousand dollars, and now it’s doubled to ten thousand! All I have to do is remember what the crooks looked like and what their names were. We’ll be sitting pretty, Dad. We’ll be thousandaires, if not millionaires! The reward was published in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  My dad shook his head. “Oscar. The reward has long expired. The cops won’t catch ’em now. Everyone has forgotten the crime. We’re in the middle of a war!”

  “A war?”

  “The Japanese attacked our navy at Pearl Harbor.”

  “Pearl Harbor? Where’s that? The Japanese?” Back home in Cairo, Mr. Kinoshura was Japanese. Mr. Kinoshura ran the drugstore soda fountain. “But the Japanese are nice people. What did they do that for?” I asked.

  “The whole state of Cal­i­fornia is paralyzed with fear that the Japanese are coming our way and going to bomb us next. Everybody’s in a panic. All the boys a
re joining up with the army and navy.” Dad’s face changed expression. “Oh, no!” he said darkly.

  “What, oh, no?” I asked.

  “Oscar, we’ll have to be very careful. The army is drafting every young man in the country. Just last week the recruiters came out to the ranches looking for Tip-Top Ranch’s fruit pickers. The long arm of Uncle Sam’ll nab you for the army if we’re not careful!”

  “But Dad, I’m eleven years old.”

  “Well,” he said, “I believe in serving your country, but not if you’re in the fifth grade.” He looked at me quizzically. He was considering the impossible. I knew that much about my dad. He didn’t want to believe my story, but he knew that something about me wasn’t quite squared up.

  Dad gave me an old shirt, a John Deere cap, and a pair of his overalls to wear. They were still a little small, but way better than Cyril’s old castoffs. Then he zipped up his jacket and took me to work with him. We drove from Burbank to Tarzana. There on the Tip-Top Citrus Ranch, we checked the engines of the machinery Dad had sold to them and to every farmer in the county. We changed the plugs on an old row picker and rotated its tires. Dad stood no more than five feet away from me as if someone might come and snatch me away from him. He introduced me to a passel of different workers coming on and off shift. They were from south of the border, but Dad seemed to speak a little of their lingo. None of them greeted me as if I were a kid, the way I was used to being talked to. I looked like a young man, as big as Dutch. I didn’t want to be. I just wanted to be eleven.

  “Blend in, Oscar,” my dad warned me that afternoon when Mr. Tip-Top himself came to inspect the orange groves. “Blend in with the Mexican men. Pretend you can’t speak English. Old Tip-Top won’t notice you.”

  But Mr. Tip-Top did notice me. “Hey, freckles!” he said. “Come into my office. Take that hat off. You ain’t no crop picker. I’m bound to report every able-bodied male on the prem­ises who ain’t got his army papers to the local draft board. Here they come! I hear their Jeep!”

  “He’s my son. He’s just visiting!” said my dad.