On the Blue Comet (12 page)

“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 are 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.

“He better be registered somewhere!” said Mr. Tip-Top, and he strolled out to view his orchards.

Two soldiers in smartly pressed army khakis banged through the screen door, saluted, and walked confidently into the office. “We’re looking for your orange pickers who’ve got their American citizenship, Mac!” they yelled at my dad. But the first thing they noticed was me. The sergeant couldn’t take his eyes off me. He looked and looked as if he’d just spotted a chocolate malted with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

“I’m only eleven years old — don’t look at me,” I said.

“He really is only eleven,” said my father. “He doesn’t look it, but he is only in the fifth grade.”

The soldiers winked at each other. “Trying to play cuckoo,” said the one with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves. “That’s one way to get out of the army! Some of ’em are putting blotting paper in their shoes. Gives ’em a fever.” He rolled his eyes. “Where ya from, fella?” he asked.

“Cairo, Illinois,” I answered.

“Yeah? You register with your draft board back East?”

“Draft board? Heck no!” I said. “I’m in the fifth grade! I’m a junior altar boy at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Cairo, Illinois.”

“It’s a long story,” said my dad.

“I’ll bet it is,” said the sergeant. His companion, a corporal, took notes. The corporal grabbed me by the hand and pressed my fingers into a pad of stamp ink. Then he smacked them on a piece of paper. “We got ’em, Sarge,” he said, and put my fingerprints in a file. “Go get drunk and kiss your girlfriend good-bye,” he ordered. “We’re comin’ back Monday, noon sharp. Be ready. We’re sending you out to kill a few Krauts, boy.”

They trooped out as quickly as they had come.

“What are Krauts?” I asked my father.

“Germans,” he answered. “We’re at war with them, too, on the other side of the world.”

“Germans! I thought we finished them off in the Great War!”

“They came back,” said Dad. “They have a crazy leader called Hitler who started it all. Hitler and his Italian buddy, Mussolini. The Italians are in it, too! People are calling this the second of the world wars. Oscar, we’ve got to get you out of here!”

“Dad, I am eleven years old. Everything I told you is true.”

“Oscar, we have to move fast, but I don’t know where or how,” said my dad. “I’ve half a mind to just skip town and disappear in the mountains of Montana till the war’s over.”

“Dad, I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s sit in the truck and I’ll tell you.”

Unhappily my dad stumped back to the truck, frowning and staring into the middle distance as if somehow an answer lay there for him to see. He swung himself into the creaky leather front seat and shoved the gears into neutral, neither backing up nor going forward.

“Dad, I know you don’t believe me about the train. About getting onto a Lionel train and coming out here,” I began.

Something between a small chuckle and a sigh came out of his mouth, and he shook his head. “They’re going to suck you into that horrible war, Oscar,” he said. “Unless we get out of here quick and disappear so they can’t find us.”

“Dad, would you hear me out? Please?”

“Shoot, Oscar.” Dad worked his palm back and forth over the knob on the gear shift.

I tried to use my most sensible, logical voice. “We’ve got to find a train layout, Dad. If I did it once, maybe I can do it again.”

“Do what again?” he asked.

“Get on it. Go through time. Go back to where I left off, in 1931. If I can do that . . . if I can finger those crooks, we’ll be rich! This war will be ten years off in the future. You can come home to Cairo, and we’ll get our old house and even our trains back. All I need is a Lionel layout, a good layout.”

“But it’s 1941, Oscar; 1931 is gone.”

“No, it isn’t, Dad. It’s all right there on the river. All times are present at once. That’s what Professor Einstein says.”