On the Blue Comet (19 page)

I closed the door over myself and held my breath as the footsteps returned. Three sets of feet, I guessed. There was no comment at first, only the slap of shoe leather back and forth on the floor of the dining car and the slamming of various doors and cabinets.

Finally one man’s deep baritone muttered unintelligible words. Then it declared, “Harry, you’re seeing things. Maybe it’s time to retire.”

“I swear to God and everything that’s holy, Captain, there was two of them. I seed ’em clear as day, a shifty-looking little squirt and that girl sitting at the table large as life. Pigtails and Mary Jane shoes!” the conductor answered.

“They ain’t here, Harry. No one ain’t here! No one couldn’t have got on the train nohow anyhow. Them doors was sealed until the last minute.”

“It’s a delusion,” said another voice. “You been up too late, Harry. How many corn dogs you eat last night?”

“It ain’t the corn dogs,” Harry complained. But the argument died out and I could hear them retreating as Harry announced his intention to check every bunk and every compartment in the blasted train.

We lay hidden for what seemed like an eternity. After a while the thought occurred to me that Harry would be back alone, and this time he might do a more careful excavation of the dining car’s cupboards. I squirmed out of my locker and tapped on the locker door opposite.

My voice was urgent. “Harry will come back here to the galley,” I said. “After he’s checked the other compartments. The others think he’s been into the giggle water, but believe me he’ll come back here and root through these cars like a hound dog. I’m going to the Abraham Lincoln, Pullman four. There’s a tiny storage locker room behind the lavatory. We can wait there until he passes on to the next compartment.”

There was a hesitation from the other side. Finally the girl asked, “How
did
you get on this train, and how do you know so much about it?”

“Come on out,”
I said when finally I was convinced Harry would not return. “I’ll show you where the sleeper car is.” I still had managed not to answer her question.

The girl’s name was Claire Bister. She had told me she was ten and a half years old and lived at the corner of Park Avenue and Seventieth Street, New York City. She had two light-brown pigtails with blue ribbon bows at the ends. Claire was skinny like me, with intelligent green eyes and a determined look on her face.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Oscar Ogilvie,” I answered. “I’m eleven years old and I come from Cairo, Illinois.”

“You saved my life, Oscar Ogilvie,” she said. “If we’d have been caught, they would have stopped the train and called my father, and Daddy would have called the police and would have been so mad it wouldn’t even be funny. If there is anything I can ever do to repay you, I will!”

Right off the bat, Claire confided that she had run away from home.

“What did they do to you?” I asked.

“It got to be too much,” said Claire. “They enrolled me in ballroom dancing lessons. I hate ballroom dancing. They bought me dolls and frilly dresses, and Mummy keeps talking about someday when I have a coming-out party. I don’t ever want a coming-out party, and I refuse to have one!”

“What is that?” I asked. “Coming out of where?”

Claire sized me up and down for a couple of seconds.

“It’s a stupid society thing,” she said. “It’s for girls at eighteen to dress in long white dresses with kid gloves and meet all the right boys and none of the wrong boys. That way all the rich boys marry rich girls and have rich babies and it just goes forward in a big horrible line. I won’t do it. I won’t go to boarding school, either. I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“Boarding school.” I stumbled on the words a little. “Is that like a military academy?”

“Almost as bad,” said Claire. “They make you wear an ugly old plaid uniform and force you to go to study halls and field hockey every waking minute of the day. I like to play baseball and football too. They won’t let me.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why do your folks want to send you away?”

“Mummy and Daddy have no time,” answered Claire, “because of their parties and dinners and business and all that. Daddy’s a busy lawyer. Mummy’s a social butterfly. They think I’d be happier at Miss Pryor’s Girls’ Academy in the sticks of New Jersey. Fat chance!”

“I guess they’d think I was one of the wrong boys,” I said.

“That’s what I like about you, Oscar,” Claire answered, and she fixed me with a dead-certain look.

I hung on to the railing of her bunk. Claire’s world might as well be life on the moon or in Hollywood to a poor boy from Cairo like me.

“How did you get on this train, Claire?” I asked after a minute of silence.

“You won’t believe me,” said Claire.

“I will believe anything,” I said. “I mean I’m on it, too! You won’t believe me either. No one does.”

Claire blew out a mouthful of what-do-I-care air. “It was at Christmas,” explained Claire. She kicked the blanket that lay folded at her feet. “It all started on Christmas vacation. During Christmas holidays, my parents always feel guilty. So they took me and my brother to FAO Schwarz.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a big, big toy store on Fifth Avenue. Biggest in the world. Six floors of toys. I wanted a train set just like my brother Maxwell’s. Well, Daddy and Mummy said no. No, no, no. Trains are for boys, not for girls. So I couldn’t have it. I had to have a doll. I told them I hated dolls, especially dolls in mink-trimmed coats. I threatened to toss any doll they gave me out my window into the middle of Park Avenue.

“Christmas morning I went downstairs early, way before anyone else was up. Sure enough, under the tree, there’s Maxwell’s train. A beauty. Daddy knows Mr. Cowen, who owns Lionel. Maxwell gets all the prototypes years before they get into the stores. So there’s Maxwell’s train, all silver and rocketlike. And there’s my fancy lace and satin doll. Yick!”

“So what happened next?” I asked.

“I began to cry,” said Claire. “I knew no matter what I ever said, they would never hear me, Claire. They would just hear a pretend Claire who liked dolls and was going to grow up and get married to the son of one of Daddy’s friends at the club. So I lay down on the carpet under the Christmas tree and pushed the switch to start up Max’s new train. It ran beautifully, quieter than his other trains. I began to picture myself with no dolls and no ballroom dancing. I pictured myself on the train, actually getting on the train.

“Then Mummy came downstairs and she said, ‘Claire, dear, that’s your brother’s train. Look at your beautiful doll, darling!’

“And so, I just . . . I just jumped on the train, and now I’m here.”

“Were you scared?” I asked. “Is that how you jumped on?”

Claire frowned for a moment. “No,” she said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in my apartment. Mummy and Daddy certainly aren’t scary, and my brother is just a chucklehead. It was . . . it was longing. Just longing that made it happen, Oscar.”

“I sure know about that,” I said. “I spent a whole three months longing when my dad left home for California.”

“Do you believe me, Oscar?” Abruptly Claire rolled her head toward me on her pillow and looked directly into my eyes.

I didn’t blink. Why shouldn’t I believe her? Claire’s story was a lot easier to swallow than mine. “Yes,” I answered. “It seems perfectly logical.”

“Your turn to tell, Oscar,” said Claire.

I began with the layout in the basement of our house on Lucifer Street. I got to the Wall Street crash before Claire said a word. “That old crash is what started all our problems,” I told her. “Right in the paper it said millionaires who lost all their dough in one day started jumping out skyscraper windows. The ones who didn’t jump out windows wound up selling apples on the street for a nickel an apple.”

Claire frowned. “Everyone lost their money?” she asked. “Everyone?”

“Not everyone,” I said. “Mr. Pettishanks and all the people at the River Heights Country Club still got by, but the poor farmers couldn’t buy any more tractors. John Deere laid off all its salesmen. My dad lost his job. Ordinary people like us, we went broke. We had to sell our house back to the bank; even our trains were sold to Mr. Pettishanks’s bank.”

“When was this crash?” asked Claire.

“October 29, 1929,” I answered.

Claire frowned at this. “We haven’t gotten to 1929, yet, Oscar. I left New York on December 25, 1926.”

“You did?”

“Yes, and the train hasn’t made a single stop longer than that little pause where you hopped on in Los Angeles. We went all the way west, and now we’re going east again, and I’m starving. . . . I’ve had nothing but Wheaties and Carnation milk since I’ve been on the train. I found them in the galley.”

I rooted in the pocket of my Bullock’s boys’ shop duffle and extracted the Hershey bar that Dutch had bought me before he left the L.A. station a week ago. Was it? Or was it ten years ago? Or had it not happened yet? But here was the Hershey bar, solid squares of chocolate with almonds. Claire ate it in four bites.

“I’m getting out at Chicago,” I said. “The President train stops there. I’m sure of it. My dad put it on the Crawford layout tracks last night. He ran it through Christopher Crawford’s Dearborn Station. The signal turned red, and the train stopped for a few minutes there.”

“What?”

I sighed. I knew she wouldn’t believe me. “Claire, when I got on this train, it was 1941. When I left Cairo for Los Angeles, it was 1931. I was in a time pocket. I traveled west for two thousand miles and got out in California. I gained ten years’ time.”

“Impossible!” said Claire.

“I think I’d better tell you about negative velocity and Professor Einstein’s theory of relativity and time.” I hesitated. “Time is like a river and —”

“Professor who?” asked Claire.

“It’s higher math —”

“I can’t even do lower math,” Claire interrupted. “Let’s skip that. Tell me about this crash instead.”

The crash. I was shaky on the crash. I hadn’t paid much attention to the newspapers. “You know where Wall Street is, Claire?”

“Yes, of course! My father works on Wall Street! He’s a lawyer for a Wall Street bank.”

“Well, Wall Street is where the crash happened. It was all over the
Cairo Herald
. Your dad better watch out in three years’ time is all I can say!” I told her.

Dreamily, Claire traced a design in the windowpane fog beside her bunk. What was she thinking?

“Do you want me to go on with how I got on the train?” I asked her.

“Of course, Oscar. What happened next?”

As my words and memories spun out, I touched on Aunt Carmen’s kidney-bean casseroles, on Mr. Applegate saving my neck, on how he left the soaking wet
Fireside Book of Poetry
on the kitchen table and how it had been spotted by Willa Sue. I described Cyril and his hopeless rendition of the poem “If.” Claire stopped me right there.

“That’s my favorite poem!” she said. “Can you recite it?”

“Can I recite it!” I answered. “I could recite every blessed word of that thing with a bucket over my head and one foot in an anthill:

I finished it, as always, not missing a single word. Then Claire recited it with more gusto than I had. Then we said the whole of “If” together in unison, complete with the gestures and dramatic flourishes that Mr. Kipling himself no doubt used when he wrote the poem in 1891.

Our train raced through small towns somewhere in one of the square states. Street lamps winked by us in half seconds. The taillights of a truck vanished over the horizon on an empty road, and a firehouse whistle blew somewhere on a deserted street. I could just hear it through the heavy windows. Our train thundered past sidings, junctions, and the checkered gates of crossings, red flares flashing at our passing. Small stationmasters’ houses whizzed by, all built alike of red brick by the railroad companies along the tracks. Outside each one, green glass signals of the all-clear lanterns swung on iron hooks and glowed like cat’s-eyes in the coming evening. To the southwest, the sky darkened, a purplish black curtain sinking over the fiery leavings of the day’s sun.