On the Blue Comet (9 page)

I sank back onto the plush blue upholstery and drew breath deeply and painfully. I tried to remember the whole sequence of events in the bank. The stockings the men were wearing over their heads and faces had pushed their features into puddings of flesh. What had happened during the robbery was fading from me like wisps of skywriting. Did they take the masks off? Did they say their names? I closed my eyes and clamped my jaw shut in concentration. Recalling it was impossible, like catching a leaping fish with my fingers.

Outside the speeding Blue Comet’s window, smut from the Gary, Indiana, smokestacks smudged out the sky. A dirty blizzard of ash fluttered by.

Deep breath, Oscar,
I told myself.
Wiggle your lucky toes and say a few Hail Marys
. I did this with profound thanks to God, wherever He might be in this weird world. Somehow I had been delivered into my father’s train; more than that I did not know. But there was no mistaking where I was. Up ahead were the lights of an enormous city. Majestically they sparkled along the curved bank of Lake Michigan. Sure enough, I was headed northwest to Chicago and beyond.

The Golden State Limited was waiting, just as the conductor had said, on track nine. Only when I had scrambled aboard did I realize that I was still in a panic and a brain freeze. Clothes and shoes still on, I fell flat across the upper bunk of the nearest empty sleeping compartment. My sinuses throbbed. I was sure my head had swollen to the size of a melon and had filled with cotton wool. I could not exactly say I was in any pain. I saw no scrapes or bruises. But my body knew it had been through something very unnatural.

Somewhere on the Dearborn Station platform, the conductor blew his whistle sharply. Six cars ahead of mine, I heard the engine grind and chug to life. The couplings clanged, one iron mass slamming against another, as we lurched forward. Although I tried mightily, I could not lift my stone-heavy head from the pillow nor open my eyes. A porter marched down the aisle, rapping smartly on each compartment door. “Dinner in two sittings, ladieez and genl’men! First seating in thirrr-ty minutes! Thirrrr-ty minutes! Cocktails in the lounge.” I was hungry. I could have eaten ten of Aunt Carmen’s baked-bean sandwiches, but it didn’t matter. In thirty seconds, sleep overpowered me.

I lay like a rag doll until the train shuddered to a stop sometime in the night. “Des Moines! Des Moines!” I heard the conductor yell. “All aboard the Golden State Limited!”

I drowsed back into a half dream. Suddenly, cold air rushed in as the door to my compartment flashed open, and somebody flung a suitcase onto the lower bunk. Whoever it was did not seem to know I was up there on bunk number two in the darkness. For one second I peered at him over the top of my railing. The man had put on blue-and-white-striped pajamas. He washed his face, brushed his teeth, and shaved, all the while singing off key, “I’m a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech, but a heck of an engineer!”

I did not wake again until the morning light was streaming through the window over my bunk. I opened my eyes fully.
Oscar, where in God’s name are you?
I asked myself.
And how did you get here?
I had no idea.

If you could pinch your mind, I pinched mine. If you could pummel your brain into attention, I pounded on mine, but very little memory surfaced. There was a troll in a picture book I had when I was little. His trick was that you could see him only out of the corner of your eye; if you turned to look right at him, he disappeared. What had happened in the First National Bank was like trying to see that troll.

Lying on my back, I checked myself for bruises. There were none. I flexed my knees and ankles. All parts seemed to work. Carefully I slung my legs over the side of the bunk.

“Merry Christmas!” said the voice of last night’s singer from beneath my feet. I withdrew my feet and curled back up into a ball on the bed. “Who are you?” I managed to ask.

“My name is Dutch. Who are you?” the voice asked. I could not continue to be alarmed. Dutch was not much of a singer, but his speaking voice was the most cheery and melodious I had ever heard.

I looked over the side of the bunk. His strong jaw managed a smile as warm as a June morning. I looked down on Dutch’s full head of brown hair, parted on one side and combed into a little stack on the other. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and a Eureka College football sweater.

“My name is Oscar,” I answered.

“Oscar, you traveling alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anyone meeting you at the other end?”

“Yes, sir, my dad,” I answered automatically. “He’s meeting me in Los Angeles, California.” I did not tell Dutch that my dad had no idea where I was or that I didn’t either.

“Good,” said Dutch. He got out of his bunk, straightened up, and offered me his right hand. “Happy to meet you, Oscar,” he said, grinning. “You’re a fine-looking young fella!” He cocked his head when he talked. It was impossible not to smile back at him. “What are you gonna do in California?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “How about you?”

“I’ve got a girl out there!” said Dutch. “I’m on Christmas break from college. My girl asked me to come and meet her family. Imagine that! She leaned on her old man. He sent me a ticket and twenty bucks for the diner tab, or I’d never have been able to spring for it.” Dutch chuckled. “Heck, I could eat all the way to California for five! With twenty bucks, I can eat like a king!”

I listened to Dutch’s wonderful voice. He was clearly a young man of character. That was a good thing, because anyone would believe anything he might say. Just having him on the same train made me feel safe all over. I realized I was hungry. Dutch crinkled a smile at me. He stood as tall and broad-shouldered as any of the stars of western movies.

“I was sure you’d say you were heading for Hollywood,” I told him. “You’d be a sure thing in the westerns, Mr. Dutch!”

He laughed. “Plain Dutch!” he answered. “You really think so, Oscar?”

“I think you’d be a big success, Dutch,” I told him. “If you took your glasses off, that is!”

Dutch took the glasses off. “Now I don’t look like a professor,” he said, “but I can’t see a thing!” He laughed and sat on his bunk to tie his shoes. “How about your dad? Is he in the movies?” he asked me.

“No,” I answered sadly. “He’s picking oranges. He lost his job selling tractors in Illinois. He used to work for John Deere, but they closed up their offices.”

Dutch tapped his newly tied brogans. “Soon the banks’ll close, and we’ll all be in the soup,” he said drily. But I guessed that Dutch was what my dad called a natural-born optimist. No dark cloud could stay in his skies for more than a minute. He grinned and said to me, “Well, Oscar, you wash up and I’ll meet you for breakfast in the diner. Is that a deal?”

“It’s a deal,” I answered, and jumped down from the bunk.

I brushed my teeth with a convenient Rock Island Line toothbrush provided for the passengers in a toiletry pack. I combed my hair with the Rock Island Line comb and washed my face with Rock Island Line linen.

The train was clipping at close to top speed, I figured. The car around me swayed and rocketed along the tracks. In the corridor, I looked out the window at the fleeing landscape. Dry and fallow winter fields sped beside us. Rows of gray earth followed perfectly parallel lines all the way to the horizon. Papery corn tassels blew in the wind. Once in a while a silo, lone and distant against the cold sky, broke the monotony. I made my way to the diner, which was two cars along toward the back of the train.

“Right here, young man,” said the porter. He guided me to a seat and a crisp table setting, right across from Dutch. The cloth was thick white linen, spotless, with heavy silver cutlery on it. The napkin was folded like a hat with the Rock Island Line initials all entwined and a sprig of holly sitting in the top fold. The porter removed the napkin, snapped it twice, and tied it gently around my neck. He handed me the menu and smiled.

The diner car was filled with people. Had they somehow jumped on this train as I apparently had? Or had they come from their homes and driven to the train station in Fords and Plymouths the way all normal travelers do? There was no way for me to know, but no one seemed as lost and puzzled as I felt.

During breakfast, Dutch slipped deep into the sports pages of last night’s late edition of the
Des Moines Register
. He sipped his coffee happily. Suddenly he held up a knife. “They make the cutlery as big and heavy as they can,” he said, “so light-fingered passengers don’t lift the silver and squirrel it away in their pockets. What are you going to have for breakfast, cowboy?”

I looked at the menu. “I guess Cream of Wheat,” I said lamely. It was the cheapest thing on the menu. I had only Dad’s dollar in my pocket. I was so hungry, I could have eaten the plate itself.

Dutch made a face. “Do you like Cream of Wheat?” he asked.

“No, I hate it, but my aunt Carmen serves it every morning. I have to eat it, like it or not.” I brought my dad’s crumpled dollar bill out of my wallet and ironed it with my hand.

Dutch ordered us waffles with bacon, a luxury that never made it into Aunt Carmen’s kitchen. “On me!” he said, eyeing my dollar bill.

“I never met anyone in my life who looked like a movie actor before,” I said to Dutch.

“I don’t know that they’d take me in Hollywood, cowboy,” Dutch answered. “They’d probably say, ‘Close but no cigar, buddy! Go back to the Middle West, where you belong!’” He shot me a big grin and handed me the comics.

The waiter brought our waffles and bacon. I gobbled them up as if I were the starving boy from Armenia on the Our Lady of Sorrows alms box back home in Cairo.

Dutch had folded the newspaper and laid it on the table front-page up. All at once I saw the headline. On the front page, my own picture stared back at me. I scanned the story quickly:

Mr. Applegate dead! It couldn’t be true
.
There must be some mistake
.

The picture was my school photograph, plaid shirt buttoned to the neck, my way-too-smiley smile, freckles clearly showing, and cowlick standing straight up on my head. Where did they get it? Guiltily I hoped Dutch wouldn’t recognize me.

Dutch looked over the top of his sports section. Had he read the story? “Are you feeling top-notch, fella? If you don’t mind my saying so, you look like a poke who’s been dropped out of a ten-story window and lived to tell the tale.”