On the Blue Comet (4 page)

I was as lost as a child in the forest. Each problem was like trying to find the Northwest Passage, a route that did not exist. Dreaming out the window, I pictured butcher Smith and butcher Jones in their bloody aprons weighing meat. Who would want to eat that disgusting liver, anyway? Maybe Mrs. Brown liked one of the butchers better. Maybe butcher Smith winked at her across the hamburger meat. Who cared where she shopped, anyway? Not me!

I doubled my pancake recipe and worked on my homework from the glider on the front porch, using the daylight so as not to waste electric lights.

It was in the porch glider, on a brilliant October afternoon, that I sprawled with ten homework problems spread out on the seat around me.

The nine problems that followed were much worse. My mind wandered to my trains. Where were they now? I closed my eyes and thought of my Blue Comet. Would I ever see it again? I knew I had as much chance of laying hands on my trains as flying to Mars.

“I can help you with that problem!” said a voice.

I looked up.
A man stood at the edge of the porch, looking in on my spread-out papers. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a snap-brim cap. He did not appear to be in filthy clothes or in danger of arrest. He had a pleasant smile, and he smelled of Barbasol shaving cream, like my dad. The grandfather clock had dinged four o’clock. There was still an hour and a half of afternoon before Aunt Carmen and Willa Sue alighted from the bus.

“My name’s Henry Applegate,” the man said, taking off his cap politely. “I was a math teacher once.” He replaced the cap and removed his glasses. “Raised three boys of my own! All grown,” he added as he polished the lenses on a tattered but clean handkerchief. He was well spoken. That was a good sign. He was carrying a fat book. Another good sign. I didn’t think tramps and hobos went around with heavy books under their arms.

He continued to introduce himself. “I taught algebra and geometry in the town high school of Searchlight, Texas. A year ago, Mr. Hoover’s recession hit Texas badly. Everybody upped and went away. They closed the school. I lost my job, so I came up here to see if there was any work.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Got a room at the Y for twenty-five cents a day,” was his answer.

“My dad lost his job, too,” I said. “He went to California. He’s going to work for John Deere out there. Soon as he gets his job, he’s going to send me a ticket to go. He’s going to meet me at the station in Los Angeles.”

Mr. Applegate pointed to my paper with his pinky finger. He said, “The answer to the first question is five hundred sixty-eight thousand, six hundred sixty point oh five five, three times an hour. The answer to the second question is twenty million, four hundred ninety-six thousand, forty-one point oh nine, and the answer to the third question is six hundred million, nine hundred fifty thousand, four hundred seventy-eight point ten.”

“Come again?” I said, pencil stub furiously writing.

Without effort he reeled off the answers a second time. “Once upon a time, I was even a mathematics tutor at the University of Texas,” Mr. Applegate added by way of further explanation. I noticed him breathing in deeply and grinning. “Is that pancakes I smell?” he asked.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“I haven’t eaten but a box of raisins in two days,” said Mr. Applegate.

I retreated from the porch to the kitchen and made him a plate of pancakes all his own and covered them with molasses. I added to his lunch an apple, which was all I dared do for fear Aunt Carmen would notice something missing. I passed the plate out the window to him. When I turned away for a second, everything on Mr. Applegate’s plate was gone, and he thanked me. In another five minutes, my homework was completely done.

“I am going to explain how to do it,” said Mr. Applegate. “It’s no good you just having the right answers. You have to know how to get them. Then we’ll read a poem together.”

A little comprehension flickered in my mind as Mr. Applegate showed me how to do the work. He was certainly a better teacher than Mrs. Olderby. It had never occurred to me that one teacher might be better than another. Teachers just were. You got them, one after another, the way you got shoes.

After math, Mr. Applegate opened
The Fireside Book of Poetry
. We read, “The boy stood on the burning deck . . .” Tears sprang into my eyes when the father and then the noble son die on a fiery ship in the midst of battle. Mr. Applegate passed me his handkerchief.

Mr. Applegate stayed outside the kitchen window for the first week. He did all the problems from afar. But when it rained, I could not bear to see him all wet and dripping. I asked him to come under the eaves and sit in the glider on the porch. I showed him my postcards from Dad. He showed me how he did math in his head.

“You can train yourself, Oscar,” he assured me. “Just use the palm of your hand instead of paper. That way you feel the numbers as you write them with your fingernail, but you can’t see them. Makes you concentrate. You do that for a few weeks, and you’ll start doing math in your head just like me!”

Each afternoon we lightened
Arithmetic for the Modern Child
with
The Fireside Book of Poetry
. One afternoon Mr. Applegate recited a poem called “O Captain! My Captain!”

“It has another dead father in it!” I complained, my lip trembling. “This time he’s lying cold and dead on the deck!”

“Next time we will do a more uplifting poem,” said Mr. Applegate.

“I don’t
want
an uplifting poem!” I pleaded, serving him his plate of pancakes. “I want to turn myself into an arrow and fly to when I see my dad again.”

Mr. Applegate’s jaw dropped. “Now that is
very
interesting, Oscar,” he said, actually suspending his forkful of pancakes, midair over his plate, on the way to his mouth.

“What is interesting?” I asked.

“Well most people would say I want to fly to
where,
not I want to fly to
when
. Flying to
when
is a very complicated mathematical concept. Perhaps only a handful of people on earth really understand it. It is the theory that time and place are one thing, not different things, discovered by Professor Einstein. He believes that time is like a river. All times are present at once along its banks. Everything future and everything past is happening right now at some point in that river. If we were strong enough and fast enough to get across the current, we could reverse course and go back around the last bend in the stream. We might see the Battle of Gettysburg and find Mr. Lincoln in the White House.”

“We could?” I asked. “Then we could warn President Lincoln not to go out to the theater ever again!”

“Yes, we could, but if we did, every event ever after that would change, too. Who knows, Oscar? A new chain of history would fall into place like cogs turning on a billion sprockets. Herbert Hoover might not be our president today if Lincoln had not been assassinated. On the other hand, you and I might never have been born. It would be a foolish thing to go back in time and make changes. Not to mention, Oscar, that it would take a very fast rocket ship to go into the past. It would have to go so fast that it would disintegrate, and all its passengers would disintegrate with it.”

“But how about forward? Could somebody like me go forward from now, just a little bit?” I asked. “Maybe just enough to find my dad?”

“Oh, forward is part of the concept, too, according to Professor Einstein,” answered Mr. Applegate.

I answered Mr. Applegate with a puzzled look.

He explained more, if
explain
is the right word — I couldn’t make sense of a single particle of his thinking. “Oscar, if you wanted to go into the future, you would have to travel more slowly than time itself. You would have to use the principle of negative velocity. Time would simply pass you by.”

“Did Professor Einstein invent a way of doing it?” I asked.

“Alas, Oscar,” answered Mr. Applegate, eating his pancakes now, “Professor Einstein is just a mathematician, not an inventor.”

“There’s always a catch,” I said, and looked down at my first problem of the day.

“Who cares?” I moaned. “Who cares about the stupid train, the butchers, or liver prices?”

Every day Mr. Applegate ate with the speed of a hungry German shepherd. Every day he told me of his job-hunting progress. One week he raked leaves for the city park for twenty-five cents an hour. Another day he changed oil, lying on the floor under the cars in the Mobilgas garage. There was no regular work to be had.

The no-work stories frightened me. I was afraid the same thing was happening to my dad way out in California. Were Dad’s cheerful postcards from this town and that just a mask over hopelessness? Were my dad’s handkerchiefs tattered? Were there worry pouches sunk below his eyes, like Mr. Applegate’s?

“Poetry gets you through the hardest times, Oscar. It’s like a tonic,” Mr. Applegate told me. “The world has forgotten poetry and how it heals the soul and body, too.”

Mr. Applegate finished his pancakes, sat back in his chair, and out of his mouth came a stream of verses. It was a righteous theme, a moral Sunday-school kind of poem, but it had a kick to it and it made little goose bumps go down my back and lift the tiny hairs along my spine.

“I liked that one, Mr. Applegate!” I told him.

“It’s a very famous one called ‘If,’ Oscar, and it was written by Rudyard Kipling. Come June, some unlucky kid in every school in America has to recite that chestnut on graduation day. Preachers love it; teachers love it! Weepy old army officers love it! But, darn it, when the blues come over me, I set myself right by reciting ‘If.’”

“How can you remember so many lines of it?” I asked.

“There’s a trick to learning things by heart. A secret code.”

“Wow!” I said. “Could you teach me how to do it?”

“Nothing easier,” said Mr. Applegate. He flipped open
The Fireside Book of Poetry
to
K
for
Kipling
. I scanned the poem “If.” With a pencil, Mr. Applegate made tiny red underlines on certain words in the first verse.

“Now try to remember those key words in order,” said Mr. Applegate.

“I can’t possibly,” I answered.

“The code works just the way ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’ lets you remember the notes E, G, B, D, F in music,” Mr. Applegate explained. “
Keep blaming yourself
.
Your allowance
can
wait
.
Lies
and
hating don’t look too good
! Repeat it a couple of times, Oscar. Now can you recall your anchor words?”

The first verse of “If” flowed into my mind as easily as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Each afternoon Mr. Applegate and I got more of the poem down to memory.

One day we had run out of milk and eggs. I did not dare open a can of substitute turkey hash or even tinned cod cheeks in case Aunt Carmen found it missing. Then the idea came to me.

“You know what!” I said to Mr. Applegate. “There’s a whole carton of Ham Stix hidden in the basement. My dad brought ’em from our house. I reckon those Ham Stix are legally mine.” I made Mr. Applegate a nice hot Ham Stix sandwich on toast. He loved it. He said it gave him energy.