On the Blue Comet (10 page)

“I do?”

Dutch told me, “Oscar, I’ve been a lifeguard for many years. I worked my way through college. Saved a ton of people from drowning. Your face is the color of a Sunday swimmer who swallowed half the pool.”

“If I told you, you would never believe me,” I said.

Dutch smiled. “Anybody headed for Hollywood better believe a heck of a lot more than your average John Doe. Try me,” he said, and slurped his coffee.

The waiter came back with more coffee. Dutch tucked his napkin around his neck, just like mine. I wavered. I didn’t really know anything about Dutch. After all, he was just a stranger on a train. “If you meet a man with a firm handshake and a steady eye, you can usually trust him,” my dad had told me, “unless he’s a politician. Then watch out.” Dutch had looked me right in the eye, and his handshake had been as firm as a rock.

“You’re not a politician, are you?” I asked Dutch.

“Not in a pig’s ear!” said Dutch. “Now, tell me, Oscar. Where did you come from, and how did you get on this train?”

What did I have to lose? “I am afraid I’ve died and am somewhere in heaven,” I answered. The train whizzed around a curve, and I had to hold my plate steady. I had finished my waffles, but when I thought about it, I had never heard of dead people eating waffles. Plus, I was still hungry.

Dutch poured more syrup over his plate from a miniature syrup bottle labeled
Rock Island Line
. “Dead at eleven years old?” he said, without sounding as if he thought I was crazy. “Oscar, I can guarantee you that nothing of the kind has happened to you, unless we are both on an express train to heaven.” He pointed out the window with his fork.

I looked out the diner car window. We were just careening past a station called East Libby. A farmer stood on the platform, hands in overall pockets, eyes dreaming down the track from a sun-wrinkled face. Next to him on the platform was a dusty old saddle. Then he was gone, spilled into the past.
Time and place,
I thought.
One and the same, according to Professor What’s-his-name
. Another line of tracks split off and disappeared to the north through more miles of wintery cornfield, stalks bent and dry. The lonely silos on the horizon did not fit my idea of anything that might be heaven either.

“I can tell you one thing,” said Dutch, tucking into his bacon. “East Libby, Kansas, is a mighty fine town, but East Libby sure isn’t heaven.” He wiped his mouth, signaled to the waiter, and ordered a second plate of waffles and more bacon for each of us. “I bet your story’s a good one, Oscar,” said Dutch. “You might as well tell me. We’ve got nearly two days to pass the time.”

I pointed to the newspaper. He picked it up and read the lead article. Then he whistled loud as a hog caller. Dutch looked at the picture and then at me, and then at the picture and then at me again. “Is this true?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s true.”

“Holy mackerel, Oscar!” said Dutch. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” I answered. “I can’t remember much. I know two men came into the bank all of a sudden. They whapped the night watchman, Mr. Applegate, over the head. Mr. Applegate was my best friend in the world. He’s dead, and it’s my fault for not locking the door and remembering to switch the alarm back on.” Tears ran suddenly into my voice. “I loved Mr. Applegate, and it’s all my fault!”

“Did you shoot Mr. Applegate?” Dutch asked.

“No.”

“Those thugs would have come into the bank and robbed it, anyway, scout. You’re not to blame.”

I wasn’t so sure. But I stopped sniffling.

“How did you get on this train, Oscar?” Dutch asked.

I could not tell Dutch I had jumped onto a model train layout. “I don’t know, Dutch. I just know I dived forward, and next thing I knew I was in the station at Dune Park, Illinois. I jumped on the first train that came by and switched in Chicago at Dearborn Station to this train. Then I passed out.”

Dutch took a pipe out of his pocket. He filled it, tamped it down, and lit it up. “Oscar,” he said, “you’re still gray as a mackerel. Whatever the heck happened to you, you’re suffering from shock, same as a swimmer who nearly drowns. You need to sleep. Go back to the bunk and sleep it off.”

I woke again in the evening as the train pulled into Denver and the conductor yelled, “All aboard!” Dutch was not in the compartment. I lifted myself out of my bunk and stared for long, soothing minutes into the blackness of the passing land. We sped through a little town, its name on the station plate lost in darkness. I could see the closed-up storefronts reflected in a damp brick Main Street, lit only by one streetlamp as our train raced and rattled by. With my final wisps of memory of the bank robbery, the little town receded into the past, invisible and forgotten.

I found Dutch in the diner. “You look better, cowboy,” he said. He had another newspaper folded beside him. “Sit yourself down. I’ve got news.”

I brought out my same dollar and frowned again at the menu. I could perhaps afford a cheese sandwich, eating half now and saving half for breakfast.

“How about a steak, son?” asked Dutch.

“Oh, I couldn’t pay for it, Dutch,” I said.

“On me,” said Dutch.

“Oh, boy!” I answered. “I haven’t had a steak in two years.”

The waiter brought me an orange Moxie. I hadn’t drunk a Moxie since I could remember either. Aunt Carmen didn’t believe in soda pop.

Dutch swirled the cherry in his old-fashioned in a counterclockwise motion. He took a swallow and showed me the evening paper.

“We stopped in Denver for five minutes,” he said. “There was a newsboy hawking papers on the platform.”

In Dutch’s hands was the evening-edition
Rocky Mountain News
. The paper was still cold to the touch. I could smell the ink.

“That’s the real stuff,” said Dutch. “The FBI!”

“Wow!” I said. “Five thousand dollars!”

“It looks like payday for you, Oscar,” said Dutch. “You’ll be famous faster than me, that’s for sure! Your dad will be able to buy the whole darn orange ranch.”

I took a deep breath. “But, Dutch,” I said, “I can’t remember anything. I won’t do any good to the police if I can’t remember who did it! I think they said their names out loud. I think I saw their faces, too, but it’s all like a dream I can’t bring back.” My voice squeaked.

“We’ll work on it,” said Dutch. “Let’s go to the club car. First thing is, how about your pop? He’s gonna be mighty worried about you when he sees in the papers that you’ve been kidnapped.”

“I have no way to reach him,” I said.

We sat across from each other in the club car in big easy chairs. Two ladies occupied the seats across from us, chattering away like magpies. The skylight windows of the Golden State streamliner opened above us to the stars and night sky.

“Oscar,” said Dutch, “try to remember: How and where did you get on this train? Start at the beginning.”

“It was Christmas Eve afternoon. Mr. Applegate let me into the bank to run the trains, same as always. Outside on Washington Avenue, it was snowing hard, blowing around like a blizzard. When I came into the bank, I saw an engine come off its track bed. It was a big one — those weigh almost five pounds! It was going to smash into this beautiful glass lake that Mr. Pettishanks had custom-made for the layout, see? We could have been in a peck of trouble if that lake had gotten smashed. That’s why I got distracted and forgot the alarm system. . . .” I stopped. “That’s no excuse . . . I know. . . .”

“Go on, Oscar,” said Dutch. “Try to remember.”

“I remember the bells of Saint Savior’s Church down the street chiming out five o’clock ’cause I counted the five chimes. I put my head down right at track level and watched the Blue Comet pull out of Beverly Station on the South Shore Line. I like to do that . . . put my eye down at track level. It makes the trains look almost real!”

Dutch smiled at me encouragingly. “And then?” he said.

“Then it all goes blurry, Dutch. I saw ’em come into the bank, all right. They wore ladies’ stockings on their faces. There was a huge bang, and the next thing I knew I was jumping on the local at Dune Park.”

“Did you see the men enter the bank?”

“I must have.”

“Would you know their faces again?”

“I don’t know. I just remember one thing.”

“And what was that, Oscar?” Dutch asked.

“Somebody yelled, ‘Jump!’”

“Who, Oscar? Who?”

“It must have been Mr. Applegate. I can’t remember anything else.”

“Oscar,” said Dutch, “I’d bet my bottom dollar those goons tied you up, stuffed you in a gunnysack, and dumped you in the trunk of their car. They must have scared the living pants off you. Somehow, Oscar, you gave ’em the slip in Dune Park. Somehow you got out of their getaway car and boarded a train. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“No, Dutch.” I shook my head. “I jumped on this train,” I said, “from another, bigger world. Maybe it’s like something Mr. Applegate was trying to explain. I think it’s called a time pocket. The Germans have a whole laboratory working on it.”

“What?” Dutch asked.

“It’s a very advanced scientific thing,” I said. “I can’t even do long division right, Dutch, so don’t ask me!”

Dutch pulled on his pipe and blew out three perfect smoke rings. “I think you saw what a loaded gun can do, cowboy. You’ve got shell shock, sure as shootin’. Didja know, Oscar, what happened in the Great War? Our brave boys who fought the Huns in the trenches of France — know what happened to most of them? Well, sir, when they came home, half of ’em went down with shell shock. Oscar, dollars to doughnuts you saw point-blank that Applegate fella get clocked. According to the paper, it wasn’t pretty.”

“When my dad wasn’t there, Mr. Applegate near about saved my neck,” I said sadly. “I guess I don’t want to remember it or I might have nightmares for the rest of my life!”

“Oscar,” said Dutch, “if you’re going to get that five-thousand-dollar reward, you’re gonna have to finger those goons.”

“Don’t I know it!” I answered. “Five thousand dollars would buy back our house, and my dad could come home from California.”

“We’ll take a break,” said Dutch, and he took out his pipe and refilled it with Prince Albert special cut. “It’ll come, Oscar. Like a deep-set splinter, it’ll come out one way or another.”

The train had begun an upward grade. I felt it in the slight slowing of our speed. We were in the mountain foothills on the eastern slope of the Rockies. It was too dark to see anything but the lights of a farmhouse here and there. Still, I could feel the earth lift beneath the train, and the
chicketa
-
chicketa
sound of the wheels on the tracks slowed its rhythm.
Dutch must be right,
I told myself.
Nobody can just jump onto a layout
.
There must be a sensible explanation for all this
. This was a real train with real waffles and real prairies outside.

I fell asleep and woke to find the starry lights of Albuquerque through my window. During my sleep I had dreamed of the Dune Park depot, where I had dashed onto the Blue Comet. Maybe I had been knocked unconscious by the thugs and thrown into the trunk of their car, only to escape at Dune Park. It made sense. But then suddenly I remembered, clear as day, that I had heard in the bank the Saint Savior’s chimes at five o’clock and the Dune Park Station clock. The local to Chicago had been at 5:04 sharp. So the robbery had taken exactly four minutes start to finish from the time of the five-o’clock chimes of Saint Savior’s. Four minutes exactly wasn’t enough time for a robbery and a kidnapping. It was only enough time for something else, something physically impossible. I had jumped onto a toy train and escaped into some kind of time and space neverland.

Across from me in his comfortable seat, Dutch was scanning the paper again. He had it open to the Christmas Eve massacre story. Then it came to me. I glanced leftward to the two ladies in the seats beside us. They were deep in face-to-face conversation. The last time I saw them, they had been thumb-size and made of tin. So had Dutch. He was the metal man with the tin glasses reading his tin newspaper in my own train in my own basement. And I was the tin boy on the opposite seat, riding around and around forever through dark tunnels, over rivers, looping over the Rocky Mountains and back through Salt Lake City, staring out the window of the Golden State streamliner at another great big Oscar who might, this very minute, be peering in at me.