On the Blue Comet (8 page)

“But how could it actually happen?” I asked.

Mr. Applegate sighed before he answered. “Einstein went just so far in his math, Oscar. But he didn’t go far enough. He never considered negative velocity or time pockets.”

“Time pockets?”

“Long story short, Oscar, if you were to sit in our make-believe rocket ship and it went east to west, you’d fly into tomorrow.”

“I would?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Applegate. “East to west, you would go into tomorrow, and if you kept going, you’d fly through a hundred tomorrows if you wanted.”

“But California’s west of here, and it’s Pacific time, two hours behind us,” I argued.

Mr. Applegate smiled. “You’re forgetting the international date line, Oscar,” he said. “No one knew how to contain the endlessness of time, so they made a seam around the surface of the world. But it isn’t real. If your rocket ship flew over that date line three hundred sixty-five times, you’d be a year ahead. In no time at all, you could go ten years, even a hundred years into the future. Of course if you went west to east, you’d fly into yesterday and then a thousand yesterdays. To go forward into time that hasn’t yet happened, you would have to slow down enough to plunge into a time pocket in Einstein’s frozen river. You’d have to use negative velocity. Then you might do it.”

Mr. Applegate’s voice turned dreamy. “
Scientific American
claims that German scientists have been beavering away on all this in secret laboratories,” he said. “They are working on time pockets. They call them
Zeithülsen
. They’ve built a primitive particle accelerator hidden underneath some mountain in the Black Forest. They’re experimenting with snails and other mollusks, sending them backward and forward in time. Then they’ll try it with mice and then chimpanzees. Eventually they will try to send a person back to 1914 and reverse the outcome of the Great War.”

“Reverse the outcome of the war?” I asked. “The Germans lost the war. We beat the pants off them!”

“Yes, they did,” said Mr. Applegate. “That’s why they want to monkey with history. They want to change it so that they beat the pants off us. Who knows? They have very clever scientists in Germany.”

Mr. Applegate smiled again, this time sadly. “I could have been one of those scientists, Oscar. I could have run the American Negative Velocity Lab. There is none now, of course. American science doesn’t believe in negative velocity.”

“You could be head of the lab, Mr. Applegate?”

“I am an old man now, Oscar,” said Mr. Applegate. “But when I was young and my mind was agile, I was the most promising graduate student at the University of Texas Department of Mathematics. I wrote my thesis on negative velocity theory, starting with Einstein’s equation E=MC
²
and then improving on it and finishing it to its logical conclusion. I wanted to get a scholarship to Princeton to get my doctorate, Oscar! I wanted to change the world!”

Mr. Applegate swallowed very hard. He lifted both his empty hands as if something precious had dropped from them.

“Unfortunately,” he went on, “no one in the Mathematics Department at Princeton could understand my paper. I didn’t get my scholarship. I was a poor boy, so instead of becoming a world-famous professor like Mr. Einstein, I had to settle for being a high-school math teacher.”

Mr. Applegate picked up a disabled freight engine from one of the sidings, turned it over, and spun its wheels in the air.

I wandered to the other end of the bank lobby. I liked to watch the trains from different angles. The Blue Comet followed the curve of the lake along the Indiana dunes.

My favorite train, my dad’s last birthday present to me, was leaving Beverly Shores Station heading east to Dune Park. Its whistle hailed me as if to say, “Hello, Oscar! I know you’re there!” I pressed my face down on the bright green permagrass that sheathed the Nebraska plains to the west of Chicago and idly pretended that the oncoming express was absolutely real. The bells from Saint Savior’s, down the street, chimed five o’clock. The Blue Comet looked huge, life-size, from my eye at track level. Suddenly, I saw movement at the far corner of the bank lobby.

I froze where I crouched, my head on the grassy layout, gazing down the tracks. Two men with silk stockings over their faces had come through the door without a sound. I hadn’t locked the doors! I had forgotten to pull the bank’s alarm switch back to the
on
position.

Snow swirled in after the men, bringing a jolt of cold air into the warm room. They crept up behind Mr. Applegate. I tried to shout, but before I could even open my mouth, one of the men whacked Mr. Applegate over the head with a club. All that followed happened in a kind of blur. I reckon the whole thing took only a minute or maybe two, but time itself slowed to a snail’s crawl and I watched everything happen in the slowest of slow-motion pictures. I stood like a boy carved in stone until a shattering bang, much louder than any gunshot, made me leap out of my skin.

That’s when one of the men saw me. He held the muzzle of a pistol straight out from his body. It was aimed directly between my eyes. In that exact moment, Mr. Applegate pulled off his blindfold. He rasped from the floor, “Jump, Oscar! Jump!”

Not five feet away, I saw a nail-bitten index finger settle over the gun’s trigger. I smelled the oil from inside its barrel and panicked.

Facing the train layout at eye level, I tucked my chin, squeezed my eyes shut, and dived forward. Behind me somewhere, the gun went off like a firecracker.

I rocketed upward like a circus acrobat shot out of an air cannon and came down with a thump on my elbows and knees. I was a sitting duck and I knew it. The man with the gun would see me and shoot me in the tail. But I lay perfectly still on something horribly prickly and didn’t move an eyelash. Somewhere nearby, a string of swear words echoed. Then clearly came the words, “Where the h—’s the d— kid? He musta jumped into thin air!”

I closed my eyes tight as if doing that and holding my breath would make the men go away. Around me and over me rang a voice demanding, “Where’s the kid? Where’d he go?” Furious, steaming words followed. “He was just here! Where the h— did he go?”

“There’s no kid. We’re seeing things! Let’s get out of here before the cops come.”

Another shot rang out.

In front of me, a train rattled by, undisturbed, as if the shooting and yelling were part of another world. I had to breathe. My nostrils filled with a nauseating stink. The stink brought me back to our basement on Lucifer Street. I knew perfectly well what it was. . . . Kwik-Dri. Dad and I had made dozens of bushes and trees out of a cheap dried sponge called seafoam. This delicate foliage stank of the Kwik-Dri paint it had been dipped in. I was sunk in a row of toothpick-sharp Kwik-Dri seafoam shrubberies. Mr. Pettishanks had them too.

I lifted my head above the bushes just a hair, in order to see. The snow beneath my knees was not cold, as it was only mica-flake powder, which gave a nice sparkle. All I could see from my position was the underside of the tin bench next to me. On the slats was stamped
L
IONEL
C
OMPANY
.
There was no mistaking where I was.

I waited in silence
for what seemed an eternity until I could stand the prickling seafoam no more. I rolled myself out, staggered to my feet, and thought about finding a telephone. The police had to be called, and an ambulance for Mr. Applegate, but where
was
Mr. Applegate? I frowned, trying to remember what had happened to him. Then I teetered and sank heavily down onto the bench. I was as exhausted as if I’d run ten miles. When I could get up, I stood and carefully walked a few steps. Beyond the very edges of the layout table, the lobby of the bank had vanished. In its place were the dunes of Indiana and beyond them Lake Michigan. The lake wind blew fiercely off the waves. It knifed through my sweater and whirled sand into my hair.

I snatched a handful of the snow that lay on a pine branch. It was cold. The pine branch was sticky with sap. My fingertips reddened. The flakes melted to cold water in my hand. The snow wasn’t mica flakes at all. The bench on which I’d sat was not tin but stone and iron. Again I listened for pistols, thieves, bank noises. I heard nothing of the kind. Off the lake and into my lungs came the wind, salty and damp, a wind that could never happen inside the marble lobby of the First National Bank of Cairo.

A railroad depot loomed two stories above my head. The neat green trim around the station’s main door was familiar. So was the white-and-emerald pattern of the tiles on the belvedere, yet I was sure I had never been here in my life, since I had never once in my eleven years left Cairo.

But this much was certain, I told myself. I was standing outside the Dune Park Station on the South Shore Line. How would I ever get home? Where was my world? I began to sweat into the cold wind and the fabric of my shirt. The station clock read 5:04.

A whistle shrilled suddenly and up roared the unmistakable grinding of iron couplings slamming to a stop. Puffing away on the tracks was the Blue Comet.

“The 5:04 local to Chicago!” said a voice on a loudspeaker.

I ran forward toward the steps of the train. I knew every side rail and nameplate. But this was no toy. It was a huge steel Blue Comet, the real train, but now on the Chicago track. No play smoke pellets poppled out of its stack. Instead, thick clouds of steam roiled into the sky. Black oil, gritty and hot, lined the crankpins and piston rods of the enormous iron wheels. The engineer’s window was spangled with frost, and the whistle shrilled a deafening shriek.

“All aboard that’s going aboard!” sang the conductor. The brass buttons on his uniform coat gleamed smartly in the doorway light. His red conductor’s hat was beautiful to behold. I ran up the steps and found a seat in the first car, the Westphal.

“Tickets, please!” said the conductor.

Desperately I grabbed my wallet. It was a thin rubber one with gimp cowboy-style stitching, given out on saints’ days by Our Lady of Sorrows Sunday School. The conductor did not take his eyes off it. No mistaking the Sacred Heart of Jesus embossed on one side. I riffled through the tickets bunched in their elastic band and pulled out the one that had come in the box with the Blue Comet set. In cobalt and silver letters was printed
BLUE COMET-JUNIOR PASS
.

I held my breath, waiting for the conductor to laugh and throw me off the train, but he placed the ticket into his time punch and slipped a receipt into the slot at the back of my seat.

“Chicago your final destination, son?” he asked.

Would my sudden plan work? I hardly dared to hope. Would I have to stay on this South Shore route only to loop back into the First Bank of Cairo and Aunt Carmen’s cod-cheek casseroles? Or maybe . . . maybe this train would connect with other trains. I hardly dared to hope, but the answer fell out of me. “I’m going to California,” I drawled easily. “My dad’s going to meet my train at the station in Los Angeles.”

The conductor nodded as if this were the most normal thing in the world. “Now you’re gonna wanna change trains at Dearborn Station, Chicago, son,” he said. “You’ll have fourteen minutes. You’re gonna wanna board the Golden State Limited. Go to track nine. There’s a big sign, can’t miss it, says Rock Island Line. She leaves at 7:09 on the dot.”

The conductor went along to the next passenger. Outside, the engine whistle screamed and we pulled away. For a few minutes I rested my eyes on the rolling Indiana dunes on the right side of the car. Speeding right along, we passed between smut-belching factories.

A woman got on the train at the next station, Gary. She sat down next to me and smiled a little greeting. She reminded me of Mrs. Olderby.

“Young man?” she said after a few moments.

“Yes, ma’am?” I answered.

“I don’t mean to pry, but you have some green substance all over your left cheek!”

I reached up to my face and brushed off a palmful of permagrass from where I’d pressed my cheek deep into the Nebraska plains on the bank’s layout.

I didn’t dare throw the grass leavings on the floor in case the woman disapproved and got me into trouble, so I squirreled it away in my shirt pocket. She got her hankie out of her handbag and dusted the rest off my face. “Now you look fine, dear heart,” she said, and brought out some knitting.