On the Blue Comet

by Rosemary Wells

  “He better be registered somewhere!” said Mr. Tip-Top, and he strolled out to view his orchards.

  Two soldiers in smartly pressed army khakis banged through the screen door, saluted, and walked confidently into the office. “We’re looking for your orange pickers who’ve got their American citizenship, Mac!” they yelled at my dad. But the first thing they noticed was me. The sergeant couldn’t take his eyes off me. He looked and looked as if he’d just spotted a chocolate malted with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

  “I’m only eleven years old — don’t look at me,” I said.

  “He really is only eleven,” said my father. “He doesn’t look it, but he is only in the fifth grade.”

  The soldiers winked at each other. “Trying to play cuckoo,” said the one with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves. “That’s one way to get out of the army! Some of ’em are putting blotting paper in their shoes. Gives ’em a fever.” He rolled his eyes. “Where ya from, fella?” he asked.

  “Cairo, Illinois,” I answered.

  “Yeah? You register with your draft board back East?”

  “Draft board? Heck no!” I said. “I’m in the fifth grade! I’m a junior altar boy at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Cairo, Illinois.”

  “It’s a long story,” said my dad.

  “I’ll bet it is,” said the sergeant. His companion, a corporal, took notes. The corporal grabbed me by the hand and pressed my fingers into a pad of stamp ink. Then he smacked them on a piece of paper. “We got ’em, Sarge,” he said, and put my fingerprints in a file. “Go get drunk and kiss your girlfriend good-bye,” he ordered. “We’re comin’ back Monday, noon sharp. Be ready. We’re sending you out to kill a few Krauts, boy.”

  They trooped out as quickly as they had come.

  “What are Krauts?” I asked my father.

  “Germans,” he answered. “We’re at war with them, too, on the other side of the world.”

  “Germans! I thought we finished them off in the Great War!”

  “They came back,” said Dad. “They have a crazy leader called Hitler who started it all. Hitler and his Italian buddy, Mussolini. The Italians are in it, too! People are calling this the second of the world wars. Oscar, we’ve got to get you out of here!”

  “Dad, I am eleven years old. Everything I told you is true.”

  “Oscar, we have to move fast, but I don’t know where or how,” said my dad. “I’ve half a mind to just skip town and disappear in the mountains of Montana till the war’s over.”

  “Dad, I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s sit in the truck and I’ll tell you.”

  Unhappily my dad stumped back to the truck, frowning and staring into the middle distance as if somehow an answer lay there for him to see. He swung himself into the creaky leather front seat and shoved the gears into neutral, neither backing up nor going forward.

  “Dad, I know you don’t believe me about the train. About getting onto a Lionel train and coming out here,” I began.

  Something between a small chuckle and a sigh came out of his mouth, and he shook his head. “They’re going to suck you into that horrible war, Oscar,” he said. “Unless we get out of here quick and disappear so they can’t find us.”

  “Dad, would you hear me out? Please?”

  “Shoot, Oscar.” Dad worked his palm back and forth over the knob on the gear shift.

  I tried to use my most sensible, logical voice. “We’ve got to find a train layout, Dad. If I did it once, maybe I can do it again.”

  “Do what again?” he asked.

  “Get on it. Go through time. Go back to where I left off, in 1931. If I can do that . . . if I can finger those crooks, we’ll be rich! This war will be ten years off in the future. You can come home to Cairo, and we’ll get our old house and even our trains back. All I need is a Lionel layout, a good layout.”

  “But it’s 1941, Oscar; 1931 is gone.”

  “No, it isn’t, Dad. It’s all right there on the river. All times are present at once. That’s what Professor Einstein says.”

  “Professor who?”

  “Dad, will you trust me? Will you help me find a layout and let me try? Because if I can go back to 1931 and you can come home to Cairo, none of this stuff will ever have happened. Not the Tip-Top Ranch or living here alone in a rented room for ten years and worrying about me.”

  My dad shook his head. “You can’t get onto a Lionel train, Oscar,” he said. “Be reasonable, son!”

  “Dad, I did it before. I can do it again. I’ll just put my head on the layout and convince myself that I’m as small as the little tin people on the platform. If I can make the trains look real size, I think I can do it. First thing when I get off, I’ll go back into the bank. Somehow I’ll remember the names and faces of those goons. They’ll be arrested and Mr. Pettishanks’ll give me ten thousand dollars. You can come back to stay. You’ll even get all your hair back, Dad! At least for a while.”

  “Oscar . . .” said Dad.

  “And you’ll never have to leave me again.”

  Dad rubbed his eyes. “We’re between a rock and a hard place, Oscar,” he said sadly. “One way or t’other, I’m going to lose sight of you just when you came back to the land of the living. My boy has been returned to me in some kind of miracle, praise God, but Oscar,” he went on in the same voice he used when he had to tell me he’d sold our trains, “I hear the voice of the wolf howling in those hills out there.”

  “Dad, we have to find a train,” I prompted him. “I have to at least try! If it doesn’t work, we’ll go disappear in Montana.”

  Dad brushed off his pants. He threw the truck into reverse.

  “Trains,” muttered Dad. “Expensive layouts. I don’t know a living soul who could afford a layout these days.”

  “Let’s go to a toy store,” I said. “We don’t have to buy a train. I just have to figure out how to jump onto one. But first I better get some little boy clothes. I can’t go back in a man’s work clothes.”

  We got in the truck and drove on old dirt roads through Santa Monica, alongside of the Pacific Ocean, then turned onto Wilshire Boulevard. We stopped at Bullock’s boys’ shop. Dad and I bought boy-size underwear, trousers, shirt, shoes, socks, and lined jacket and a zip bag to put them in. I threw in my Hershey bar for emergencies and my return Lionel ticket stub. Then we went on to Minshman’s Toy Emporium, the biggest in the city.

  As of December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day itself, Minshman’s had discontinued their train layout. Everything in the window and upstairs, where the trains had run before, was inspired by the war — tanks, guns, and submarines. But they were all made of wood and cardboard. No metal. PLAY WITH OUR TANKS AND HELP WIN THE WAR! said a big sign. TEN PERCENT OF ALL MINSHMAN’S PROFITS GOES TO OUR BOYS IN UNIFORM!

  We tried another toy store, and another. All were filled with miniature bombers and machine guns and junior-size army uniforms. There were destroyers, aircraft carriers, Jeeps, fighter planes, and antiaircraft guns. But no trains chugged around even a single loop of track. In the last toy store, the very helpful salesman told us that Lionel had suspended production for the duration of the fighting to save metal for the war effort. Dejectedly we sat in Dad’s truck, the bag of boys’ clothes between us on the seat.

  “It’s a dead end,” said Dad. “Better to hightail you to a mountain hideaway until the war is over and the draft is done.”

  “Wait a minute!” I said. I took my rubber wallet out of my pocket and thumbed through it. Out of it I fished a worn piece of Rock Island Line stationery. In faded, scrawled writing were the words, If you ever need help, call me anytime, Oscar. Good luck!

  Under it was a Pasadena telephone number. My father looked at the signature. “Holy Mother of God!” he said. “Your Dutch fellow is a famous movie star. He’s in a lot of westerns. You’ll never get someone like that on the phone. He’s too famous.”

  A pleasant woman’s voice answered the telephone. When I asked for Dutch by his real name, she beg
an to laugh. “Oh, my goodness!” she said. “He’s a movie star now. Ages ago he went to college with my daughter, Audrey. He came out from Des Moines at Christmas I think in ’31, when they were sweethearts. We never saw him again. Audrey’s married to a lawyer now. She lives in New York!”

  “Do you know where to reach Dutch?” I asked, hope dropping into my shoes.

  I could hear fingernails tapping the phone in concentration. “He’ll never be listed in the telephone book. He’s too famous,” said the lady. “But just a minute. I think Audrey ran into him once in the Biltmore. He bought her a lemonade in the lounge. The studio keeps a room for him there when he’s in town. If he’s not on location, you may find him there. Good luck!”

  At first the Biltmore Hotel operator did not want to put me through to Dutch. She took my name and left me hanging for five minutes. Suddenly a foreign man got on the line. “Biltmore lounge, may I help you?” he said. I asked for Dutch by his real name. Then I held my breath and prayed to every forgotten saint whose statue lined both walls of our church, not to mention Our Lady of Sorrows herself. Within a minute that wonderful voice was on the line.

  “He’ll never remember you,” whispered my dad.

  But he did.

  “Remember you!” Dutch whooped into the line. “Oscar,” he said, “you’re the one who got me my first break in pictures. I auditioned till I was blue in the face and then bingo! I took off my glasses just like you said, and I got my first part. Oscar, are you hungry?”

  “I’m always hungry, Dutch,” I answered.

  “Meet me in the Brown Derby restaurant for dinner in half an hour.”

  “Do you know where the Brown Derby is, Dad?” I asked when I hung up the phone.

  “We can’t go into the Brown Derby like this,” said my dad. He had on his work clothes: a plaid shirt with a John Deere emblem on the pocket, stained workpants, and heavy boots.

  We scrubbed up as best we could, but we still weren’t very clean.

  Nonetheless we rattled down to the Brown Derby in our fruit picker’s truck and parked outside where fancy cars were all lined up as if for an auto show. Dad was too shy, so I gave Dutch’s name to the head waiter, who sneered at us until suddenly a larger, even sunnier Dutch than I remembered strode in through the door. He wore a ten-gallon hat and sported a really good suntan. In order to see, he took his glasses out of a pocket and scanned the room. Then he smiled, spotting the cowlick on the top of my head, and put his glasses away. He had filled out and looked like the Prince of Hollywood. From his walk you could just tell that he knew it.

  “How did you ever meet him?” asked my dad in a whisper.

  “I told you, Dad. On the train!”

  “Son of a gun! Still got that cowlick and freckles, pal!” Dutch said, and stuck his hand out to my dad and to me. “What a fine young man you’ve grown into, Oscar! I want to know . . . didja ever collect that reward?”

  “You remember!” I blurted out.

  “I felt like a heel leaving you at that station,” said Dutch. “I got in that cab, and I said to myself, Dutch, you’ve done the lad a bum turn. You should go back and wait’ll he finds his old man.” Dutch’s face had saddened at this memory, but he began to beam again and crowed, “But it looks like you were okay, cowboy!”

  Dutch didn’t turn a hair at how we were dressed, although the waiter gave us a once-over. We sat at a window table. Through it I could view Los Angeles, 1941, walking by. Women sauntered along in shorts and in trousers. You just didn’t see that in Cairo, Illinois.

  Dad was tongue-tied. He could hardly speak to anyone as famous as Dutch, but to me it didn’t matter if Dutch were the president of the United States. He was still just Dutch. He ordered steaks all around.

  “Did you ever remember what happened in the bank?” Dutch asked. “Did you ever get the names and faces of those robbers?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s all just in the corner of my eye, but if I try to look at it, it goes up in smoke.”

  “Too bad,” said Dutch, and he cocked his head with a grin on his face that I remembered from before.

  “But only a few days have gone by,” I said.

  “Come again?” Dutch looked up.

  Dad and Dutch exchanged glances.

  “Dutch, I need your help,” I said.

  “If I can do it, Oscar, I will,” said Dutch. The waiter whizzed the steaks out of the kitchen on sizzling pewter platters with baked potatoes and salads on the side. I hadn’t had a meal like this since . . . since the train from Chicago. Since 1931. A couple of days ago.

  “I need to find a train set, Dutch. A layout. A big wonderful layout with lots of trains. Is there such a thing in Los Angeles?”

  “Why, Oscar? If I may ask,” asked Dutch.

  My dad looked embarrassed and folded and refolded his napkin.

  “Because I have to go back,” I answered.

  Dutch speared and swallowed several pieces of his steak before he answered. “Have you tried the toy stores? You could call ’em up. Somebody’s gotta have a Lionel layout.”

  “On our way over here in Dad’s truck,” I said, “we stopped at the biggest toy stores in town. No train layouts. Everything’s army tanks and fighter planes and submarines on display.”

  “It’s the war,” said my dad.

  Dutch agreed. “The world’s gone crazy since Pearl Harbor. Next thing you know, they’ll round up every Japanese mother and child off the streets and drop ’em in a bob-wire paddock in the middle of Iowa.” He signaled for the waiter and asked for drinks. “Every gimp-legged son of a gun in the state of Cal­i­fornia is going into the service. The army’ll be after you soon, son,” said Dutch. “They won’t touch me because I’m so darn nearsighted, but you haven’t got a leg to stand on with the draft board.”

  “Except that I’m eleven years old, and I came out here on a Lionel train,” I said.

  Dutch’s eyebrows shot up, but he kept eating.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said, hanging my head and looking at my plate. I shifted a piece of steak around in its sauce.

  “I believe this, son,” said Dutch, wiping his mouth on his napkin. “You had such a heck of a shock ten years back in that bank that you haven’t come up for air. Where’ve you been all these years?” Dutch chopped his fork around inside his baked potato.

  I studied the tablecloth. “This is everything I remember,” I told him, looking him hard in the eye and not wavering. “Christmas Eve I was standing right at the west side of the bank’s layout. The church bells rang five o’clock from up the street. I counted them. Five o’clock. Then everything’s a blank until I saw someone’s dirty finger pull the trigger of a gun aimed right at my head. I closed my eyes and jumped as hard and far as I could. I swear to God, Dutch. It felt like being shot out of a cannon. I landed in a bunch of seafoam shrubbery painted to look like juniper. I was at Dune Park Station on the South Shore Line. The Blue Comet stopped at 5:04 and I got on.”

  Dutch frowned and swallowed some water. He ran his tongue over the back of his teeth, but he didn’t say anything.

  I reached in my pocket for my wallet suddenly. “Look,” I said. “Here’s the ticket I used to get to Chicago. It’s got the conductor’s punch mark right on the time, 5:04. It’s not a fake, Dutch.”

  Dutch took the ticket and examined it. He passed it to my dad.

  “These tickets, Oscar,” said Dad, “they used to come in the Lionel boxes when I bought you a whole set.”

  “I know,” I said. “I kept them all in my wallet after you sold the trains, Dad.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Dutch. He turned to my father and stared at the ticket again, fingering the punch mark. “Oscar Senior,” he asked, “you’re an Illinois man, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said my dad. “Born and raised.”

  “Well then, how long would you say it takes to get onto a train in Dune Park and make a connection in Chicago for the Golden State Limited to Cal­i­fornia?”

&nb
sp; My dad frowned. “Dune Park is give or take ninety minutes by rail from Chicago. So maybe an hour and forty minutes if you ran like a fool.”

  “Oscar,” said Dutch. “You were on the Golden State. That train runs on the minute every night of the year, like clockwork. I know you were on the train ’cause so was I. As I remember, the newspapers confirm the robbery happened about five. You could have flown on wings, but you’d never have made the 7:09 Golden State at Dearborn Station unless you connected on the South Shore local. It leaves Dune Park at 5:04. That leaves four minutes for the whole robbery. No time to be bound and gagged. No time for you to be thrown in the trunk of a car. There’s only one train a night to Cal­i­fornia, and I know you were on it ’cause I got on at Des Moines at midnight.”

  “But it was a real train,” said my dad, puzzled.

  “Indeed it was,” Dutch agreed.

  “Dutch,” I said, “do you remember that phone call you made? Do you remember that electric shock . . .”

  “I’ll never forget it!” said Dutch. “I couldn’t hear out of that ear for a week afterward!”

  “I think I know what that noise was,” I said.

  “What?” asked both Dad and Dutch, this time together.

  “I think only the train and the station were in the year 1931. Whoever answered at Indian Grove Ranch was ten years down the line in the future. That’s why there was that screaming noise.”

  “I’ve got it!” said Dutch suddenly. “I’ve got it!”

  “What?” Dad and I asked together.

  “I’ve got an idea.” Dutch ordered ice cream sundaes all around. Then he excused himself to go to the lobby and make a telephone call.

  The sun had set by the time we finished our ice cream and the men had drunk their coffee. “Joan’s away, so Alma will let us in,” Dutch had said mischievously when he returned to the table. “We can get in to see the Crawford layout. It’s famous all over Hollywood. I should have thought of it before!”

  “The Crawford layout?” my dad asked.

  Dutch grinned with the pleasure of his discovery. “It’s a model train layout as big as a small town, built right into the rock of the house’s foundation. It even runs through a little tunnel into the garden outside. The layout belongs to Joan Crawford’s little boy. He’s only a baby, of course, so it’s just for show. Joan’s one of Hollywood’s most glamorous dragon ladies. She has a temper like a faulty blast furnace. Lucky for us, she’s away, and the house is rented to a nice director and his wife. We wouldn’t want Joan to give us a guided tour!”