On the Blue Comet (18 page)

“Don’t interfere with the army, sir!” snapped the lieutenant, and he turned to me again. “You’ll cool your heels in an army brig for a month for draft evasion, Private. Then I’ll recommend you for the combat parachute troops in Siberia. You get to jump right out of a plane and help the Russkies fight the Krauts in the Arctic Circle!” The officer smirked. “You may not remember me, but I sure remember you. You’re fresh meat, Private Ogilvie!”

I had never made the acquaintance of an army officer in my short life. How could this lieutenant possibly know me?

“You’re wrong!” I pleaded. “I’m only eleven years old. I’m in the fifth grade. You can’t draft me!” my voice cracked.

Dad stepped around the table. Dutch got to his feet and said, “You’re on private property, Lieutenant. You need a search warrant to come in here!”

Detective Hissbaum shook his head sadly. “It’s the long arm of Uncle Sam, Dutch. No warrants, no questions, no civil laws apply to the army.”

“That’s right, sir!” the soldier said smartly.

The voice. Suddenly I knew that voice!

The lieutenant lowered the paper and tossed the
Los Angeles Times
onto the table. Sure enough, on his uniform breast pocket was his name in gold stitching,
LT. CYRIL PETTISHANKS
.

As it happened, Miss Chow began to clear the breakfast table just as the corporal lunged forward at me with his handcuffs open like crab claws. For a single awkward moment, she stepped in the corporal’s way, her silver tray stacked full of syrupy, buttery plates. “Excuse me!” she said, smiling as the corporal stumbled into the stack of plates, allowing precious seconds for me to get to my feet and slip away.

“Oscar,” she said under her breath, “go downstairs through the kitchen! Get on the train! Get on the same train you came here on, the Golden State, Oscar!”

There was no time for the elevator. I raced into the kitchen and down the back stairway, ignoring my gauze-bound hands and taped, swollen knee. Cyril charged after me, one flight of stairs behind. I had felt sorry for Cyril. How had he turned from a Saint Bernard into a pit bull terrier? How would I escape and get to Montana with my dad?

I dived into the train room and threw all the switches on the wall. The trains roared to life. The signals blinked, the gates went up and down, and the whistles blew like the howling prairie wind.

“You little worm!” shouted Cyril. “If it wasn’t for you, my old man wouldn’t have shunted me off to military school for seven godforsaken years. . . . No girls, up at five in the morning, food worse than the dog pound! You’re going to pay for that, you little poetry-spouting twerp!”

From the kitchen stairwell I heard Miss Chow. She gave a happy yell, as if she were calling a baby to her arms. “Jump, Oscar!” she called. “Jump!”

And, of course, I was scared spitless of Cyril and his handcuff-wielding sidekick. I grabbed my duffle bag of little boys’ clothes, which had fallen on the floor, and I jumped. Like an Olympic high diver, I jumped!

I landed on the yellow-brick pavement
that ringed the station just beyond the taxi rank with its available top-lit cabs. Feverishly I prayed again, to every single one of the saints, that Cyril would not look at the Crawford layout too closely.

“Fade!” I wanted to yell to Cyril and the room and everything in the year 1941. “Fade away!” It did not fade fast enough. I looked up and tried to see Cyril’s face. Had he noticed me? Was I just another one of the little tin toy people from up there? I heard kicking and banging under the table. He was looking for me underneath the layout. I took a chance and dashed up the station steps and into the station lobby. Leather easy chairs sprawled on the tiles. I ran past a hot-dog vendor and a newsstand, but I didn’t have time to look at the newspapers. A loudspeaker blared, “All aboard for Chicago on the Golden State Limited, 9:17, departing in one minute from platform two. All aboard!”

My knee brace fell away, and I ran like a greyhound down the arched, tiled passageways to the platform. If I made it onto the train, Cyril would soon fade, and I would pull out of Los Angeles, homeward bound.

The Golden State Limited waited, steaming and purring its engine on platform two. I ran for the steps of one of its Pullman sleeper cars. Then something made me stop. It was the shadow of an enormous hand. I shrank behind a signal box that stood on the platform and watched as a brown khaki cuff, neatly bound with gold braid stripes, hovered over the tracks. Glinting on the third finger was a Missouri Military Prep class ring. The fingers twitched as if they were about to select and tweak up a piece of candy. Then the hand came down toward the engine of the Golden State.

Clear as a bell in my mind’s ear rang the voice of Mr. Applegate:
“Cyril!”
he trumpeted.
“Cyril isn’t even allowed near the trains
.
He likes to have accidents! The old man won’t let him in the room with the layout!”

I knew, of course, that Lieutenant Cyril Pettishanks, U.S. Army Recruiting Office, had heard Miss Chow yell “Jump!” as clearly as I had. The Crawford basement had no other exit but the stairway and elevator. There wasn’t a nook or cranny in the room to hide in. I peered out an inch from my hiding place. Sure enough, I saw Cyril’s huge face above me. He blinked a couple of times and then fastened on the layout in front of him. I could see every fiber in the weave of his army shirt, every pore and whisker on his jaw, magnified. In proportion, Cyril was so big, I could have fit into his front pocket.

I slithered back behind a hot-dog stand and held my breath. The big hairy hand from the big sleeve reached out for my train. Cyril lifted the engine of the Golden State, then he yanked the entire ten-car train from its track — Pullmans, tender, and caboose. Cyril shook each car like a jar full of candy, as if he thought I was in one of them. Each time, he cursed in disgust while I watched, hardly breathing, hiding in the hot-dog stand. Cyril slammed each car of the Golden State down on the cement floor of the basement. The train and its engine, dining car, and sleepers broke into twisted pieces at his feet. “Get out of that damn train, Ogilvie!” Cyril yelled as he smashed each car. Through the intensifying fog of the fading room, I could just make out the voice of Corporal Handcuffs. He must have plodded down the stairs after Cyril. I could not see him, but I heard his voice whining loud and clear. “Jeez Louise, Lieutenant! You crazy? The boy ain’t on no electric train. He’s ex-caped onto the elevator. Let’s go!”

Cyril swore, but he turned around to his corporal. With a squeal of brakes, another train had rounded the bend and pulled up into the slot where the Golden State had been. It did not stop. Whatever it was, wherever it was headed, I didn’t care. I aimed for the moving steps and leaped into the safe depths of the interior.

“Go away!” I said between my teeth to the outside world of 1941. I didn’t care if the train were heading for Timbuktu. I found a bunk in one of the smartly made sleeper cars just as the train left the station.

I didn’t dare move for the longest time. When I finally looked out of my bunk window, the landscape that whizzed by could have been anywhere. What train was I on? Union Pacific? Where was it going? Texas? Louisiana?

No breezy college man slammed into the compartment in the middle of the night and started singing “Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech.” As the hours passed, I missed Dutch more. I wished he were there to have steak and ice cream with. And I missed my dad. Would he know I’d made it this time? Would he cheer and know that I would try to get him back to Cairo and he’d be young again?

The train whistled its high shriek over what seemed to be desert, and we began our slow ascent into the mountains.
East!
I told myself.
At least we’re going east
.

The train was unusually quiet. No conductor had called out the next stop or the dining car seatings. What railroad company ran this line? Atchison-Topeka? Canadian Pacific? My head ached and throbbed so much that I could only close my eyes and sleep.

In my dreams Miss Joan Crawford appeared, raven hair bobbing in rage, lips open in a full shout, grabbing Lieutenant Cyril Pettishanks by the collar of his shirt and smashing one of her cut-glass decanters over his head for messing up her son’s trains.

In the middle of the night, I awoke, feeling grimy. I reached for the toiletry kit provided by the railway, and that’s when I saw it. On the kit bag was the seal of the President. I was on the prototype! I wanted to cry out for my dad, but of course he was hundreds of miles away by this time.

Brushing my teeth, I suddenly looked in the mirror. I stared at my skinny, undeveloped ribs. My arms were twiggy. My cheeks were smooth, and there were no scars from glass on my face. My chest was purple as a bruised plum, but I didn’t care. I was eleven again.

I opened my zip bag and pulled on my new Bullock’s boys’ shop clothes. In them I fell back on the bunk and slept the sleep of an Egyptian mummy.

I didn’t wake until the late morning. The train was as quiet as a church. It raced over silent trackbeds in an uninteresting landscape of winter desert. Since I was hungry, I made my way to the dining car, but the car was empty. No crisp white linen or silver had been laid on its tables. No waiter smiled and snapped my napkin onto my lap for me. Outside the windows, a red-rock landscape peeled away at enormous speed. Stations rushed by so fast I could not read the nameplates that hung over their platforms.

Suddenly I saw her. She was about my age, about eleven. She sat primly on a blue plush seat, pigtails framing her face.

“Hello!” she said.

I did not have time to say another word. We were not alone. The train’s conductor suddenly swayed in the door of the dining car, giving us the once-over.

“How did you get on this train, girlie?” the conductor asked in a none-too-friendly voice. “And you, punk? Howja get on this train?”

“None of your business!” replied the girl in pigtails. “I’m on it and that’s that.”

“What train is this, sir?” I asked.

The conductor growled, “It’s a prototype on a test loop. Not in service yet. She don’t take no passengers, she don’t make no stops, and she don’t serve no meals.”

“Where is it going?” I asked. I already knew. I tried to remember if my dad had made a permanent track switch for the President to run nonstop to New York. Or would we stop in Chicago? I couldn’t remember exactly what Dad had done the night before with the Crawford layout’s tracks.

“This here train was sealed,” the conductor grunted. “Ain’t nobody allowed on or off. How’d you get on, kids? Say, wait a minute. Don’t move!”

The conductor’s voice shifted suddenly as if he might be sweet-talking a cornered dog. Keeping his eyes on us, he backed all the way down the aisle until he came to the door that connected with the next car. I did not have to be told that he was going to fetch someone, a security officer, someone to confine or arrest us. I remembered that the George Washington diner was the last car of the train. The President was rushing through what looked like New Mexico at more than eighty miles an hour. There was no escape. What would they do to this girl in the pigtails? Or to me?

I waited until the conductor had been out of the car a few seconds. “Get down!” I said. She hit the floor immediately. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Never mind that now. He’s coming back!” I said.

“If they find me, I’m finished,” said the girl. “I’ll be in so much trouble it won’t be funny!”

I grabbed her hand. It was cold and trembling. “See that locker under the booth? Right where your feet go? Slide the door with that push-button release! Get in there! Quick,” I whispered. “He may not be familiar with this train yet.”

The hidden locker was exactly the one my dad had shown me with his optometrist’s screwdriver. It was a supply closet for the diner car’s galley, but there was no chef and no kitchen prep and so it was quite empty. So was its mate, an opposite floor-level locker on the other side of the dining booth. I climbed into that one.

The girl slid open a vent to whisper through. “If they find me, they’ll stop the train and take us off into the middle of nowhere. They’ll hold me in some jail in the back of beyond and call my parents. Who knows?” she half shouted and half whispered over the sound of the train’s wheels.