On the Blue Comet

by Rosemary Wells

  I smiled a response but kept my eyes on the stone.

  “How you feel, Oscar?” she asked, again in a whisper.

  “Ahhhhhh!” was all I could answer.

  She took the stone from me and crossed my hands on my belly.

  “Now you close the eyes. Look up inside the eyes without moving the head, okay? Okay? Roll the eyes back in the head. Good! Good! Good!” said Miss Chow softly. She waited a minute and listened to my breathing.

  “Tell Miss Chow your name. Speak slowly, please.”

  “Oscar Ogilvie Junior.”

  “How old you, Oscar?”

  “Eleven years old.”

  “Now you tell Miss Chow what happened inside that bank, please.”

  The stubborn troll in the corner of my mind’s eye began to move to the center of my vision. I spoke without hesitation. “I am pressing my face to the fake grass on the bank’s western slope layout. The church bells ring five times out in the street. Suddenly there is a funny noise. Two men are rushing in! They have stockings over their faces, which they rip off. One of them hits Mr. Applegate on the head. Snow flies off his shoulders. Mr. Applegate goes down. Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”

  Miss Chow’s hand immediately soothed mine. She asked, “He has a name, this man?”

  “Yes, Stackpole!” I said immediately. The memory was clear as day. “This man is big. He’s stooped over with long arms like a monkey. He grabs Mr. Applegate and blindfolds him with a stocking mask in half a second. Then both men look around the bank. The monkey man’s all pitted with acne. He has one thick eyebrow going right across his face and a mustache like . . . it looks like a black cater­pillar. The other man is a little runt. His hair is tufty and kind of reddish-yellow-colored. He has a broken nose and a big jagged scar on his forehead.

  “At first they don’t see me. They’re too busy blindfolding and beating Mr. Applegate.”

  I began to actually use the voices of Stackpole and McGee — I remembered his name clearly now. Their voices rang freshly in my mind, as if they were there in the bedroom at that moment.

  “‘Put your mitts up and throw the keys to the teller’s drawer over to me! Right now, right now! Do it!’ yells Stackpole. ‘McGee, grab them keys and get the cash fast!’

  “Mr. Applegate empties his pocket of his keys before they bind his hands behind him. I duck and then stand as low and still as I can against the side of the layout.

  “McGee grabs the keys and rushes over to the teller’s window. I hear him yank open the drawer. He throws it on the tiles below. It crashes. He yells, ‘There’s no money! Where’s the cash, you dumb sap?’

  “Mr. Applegate is gasping for breath. ‘Every night it gets put in the vault,’ he explains. ‘It’s locked away! I don’t have the keys. It’s a combination lock, and there’s an alarm. Just leave now, please! You can’t get the money!’ Mr. Applegate pleads with them. ‘And I can’t get it for you!’ The words come out of him fast and terrified. I remain absolutely quiet like a boy of stone. All around the huge layout, the trains are circling and whistling as if nothing is happening.

  “‘Shoot the vault open, cheese-face!’ McGee growls to his partner.

  “Mr. Applegate is lying far out of reach from me across the room. I can’t help him! I can’t help him or they’ll see me. I can hear my heart bam-bam-bamming away. Go! I pray. Just take the money and go!

  “The two men shoot their way through a pair of iron gates and then shoot three times into the lock on the main vault.

  “It takes them only a few seconds. They grab two carryalls of cash, then they come crashing out again. McGee gives the bank a last look over and then he sees me.

  “‘Who the hell is that?’ he says.

  “‘It’s a kid. Some stupid kid!’ says Stackpole.

  “‘He seen us! He seen us! No witnesses, Stackpole,’ yells McGee.

  “‘We can’t shoot a kid. Let’s snatch him. We’ll let him go when we get to El Paso. Then we’ll cross the border and let him find his way in the desert.’

  “‘I’m gonna rub him out now,’ says McGee. ‘We don’t need no flat tires with us.’

  “‘We can’t kill a kid,’ Stackpole argues. ‘This is already a box job! They’ll have the whole FBI after us by morning. C’mon, we’ll blindfold him and take him to Blue Island until things go quiet.’

  “‘That’s kidnapping, you dumb mug!’ says McGee. ‘The kid is a goner. I’m gonna blow his little head off!’

  “McGee raises his gun. He squints one eye along the sight, and Mr. Applegate yells, ‘Jump, Oscar! Jump!’ and McGee whips around and shoots Mr. Applegate. Once in the head, once in the heart. Blood every­where. Oh, Mother of God!” I put my hands over my eyes and felt my whole body shake.

  Gently Miss Chow touched my arm. “Then what, Oscar? Then what?” she asked.

  “It’s ridiculous,” I answered. “I jump like I’ve never jumped in my life. McGee pulls the trigger on me. Bang! I hear him shoot me. But it’s too late. He can’t see me anymore because he doesn’t know where to look. I’m in a seafoam juniper bush next to the Dune Park Station on the layout. And I’m small. I’m so small that when the train comes around the bend and stops, I just get right on it and sit right down and nobody thinks anything is strange at all.”

  I must have been anxious because Miss Chow had a handkerchief out and was clearing my brow with it. “They shoot you?” she asked.

  “McGee is five feet away. He aims the gun directly at my forehead. I see him pull the trigger.”

  “And you just jumped?” asked Miss Chow calmly, as if perhaps I had hopped over a skip rope.

  “Yes. That part was actually easy. It was like being shot out of a cannon. I was terrified they’d see me. I heard them chasing around, looking for me every­where. Everywhere in the bank but not on the layout. That’s all. Then the bank just faded. I wanted to help Mr. Applegate, but there wasn’t any Mr. Applegate. I could feel the wind off the lake. I was at a train station on the South Shore Line, and I got on the first train that came along.”

  Miss Chow put the Star Stone back into my hands. Its blue-green eye calmed me, and she let me sit with it for many minutes.

  “You feel better now?” she asked at last.

  “Yes.”

  “The story is a miracle,” said Miss Chow.

  “I don’t expect you to believe it,” I said.

  “Star Stone cannot produce the lie,” said Miss Chow. She put her hand on the stone. “Now, Oscar, this is what Miss Chow thinks!”

  “Yes?” I ask. “Am I dead or alive, Miss Chow?”

  “You are alive, Oscar. By the skin of the teeth! Chinese people know there is a small space between life and death, okay? Oscar got in that space one second before that bullet hit you. Oscar jumped into a parallel universe.”

  “Alongside.”

  “Yes, exactly. Both worlds are real thing. But this 1941 is not your world yet. You are still eleven-year-old boy in your big man’s body. You need to go home.”

  “Home?”

  “So, Oscar, you cannot get on the train again unless you are very, very scared. You understand? That is why yesterday you banged up the Oscar head and the Oscar knee, because you tried without being scared. The word jump is the secret key!” She tapped one long fingernail on my knuckle. “You hear Miss Chow?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”

  “You not guilty of the night watchman’s death. You not guilty! So you will remember everything now!” she repeated.

  Miss Chow slipped the Star Stone into its sack. On red silk slippers she left my room as silently as she had come.

  Mr. H. woke me when the sky outside my window showed its first streaks of morning light. “I understand that Miss Chow and her mysterious stone worked wonders on you, Oscar,” he said. He handed me a glass of fresh orange juice.

  “I remember everything now,” I answered. Miss Chow and her Star Stone were clearly part of Mr. H.’s plan. What was next?

  “Good,” said Mr.
H. “Now, Oscar. Last night at the cocktail party, Dutch and I had a word with Detective Hissbaum. You remember he happens to be the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation here in L.A. I chatted him up. You understand, Oscar, ten years ago you were a material witness to a felony and your account of it must be reported to the police. Otherwise we are concealing evidence to a crime.”

  In my bed, I nodded and pulled the blanket up to my chin.

  “And so,” Mr. H. concluded, “Detective Hissbaum is going to pay us a visit. Hizzy’s a good egg. A diamond in the rough, but a good egg nonetheless. He’s coming here for breakfast.”

  Dutch was not going to miss a minute of breakfast with the head of the FBI West. He showed up carrying with him a square tin of Vermont maple syrup.

  Alma cooked us all French toast. Miss Chow winked at me and fanned out the morning newspapers on the dining-room table. There was the Los Angeles Times, the Press-Telegram, the Van Nuys News, and the Star-News. My fifth-grade class photo­graph was plastered all over the front pages of four newspapers.

  “Who leaked this to the papers?” asked Mr. H. icily. I couldn’t have imagined Mr. H.’s pleasant voice with such cold, hard anger in it. “I don’t want anyone to know Oscar is here.” he said. “Publicity brings trouble!”

  When Detective “Hizzy” Hissbaum arrived, he had a fairground voice and face to go with it. “It seems a reporter overheard our conversation at the party last night, chum,” explained Detective Hissbaum to Mr. H. “Pal, if the boy’s the genuine article,” he continued, “the story’ll be headlined in every paper in the country tomorrow morning.”

  Hissbaum never took his hawk gaze off me. In his hand was a stack of old snapshots of me, my fourth- and fifth-grade pictures, which had been enlarged to big glossies. One had me grinning in my choirboy robes. Detective Hissbaum shot glances from the photos to me and back again, eating his French toast without even looking down at his plate. “Kid,” he said when he’d finished his coffee, “December 1931, there was a forty-eight-state alert out for you. All these pictures have been in our files ever since the Christmas Eve Massacre. Head of Chicago FBI was a top man. Best in the business. Name of Pearly Gates. It was a prime case, Pearly’s baby. He never cracked it. We had ten teams of bloodhounds looking for you, Oscar, a hundred agents. Where the devil have you been?”

  Squirming, I looked at Dutch and my dad for help.

  “I’ve heard everything there is to hear, kid,” Mr. Hissbaum assured me. “You can’t surprise me. What’d they do? Keep you in a cage full of monkeys? Put you in a closet? Tie you to a tree?”

  Fresh with the details from the night before, I began.

  Detective Hissbaum popped a cigar from his shirt pocket when I finished. It was a Macanudo. He lit it up. “I’m going to test you, Oscar,” he said, blowing out a blue lungful of smoke. “Take your time, boy, but get the right answer. You got one chance with me. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir!” I answered.

  “How many shots did the thieves use to crack the door to the vault?” he asked.

  I thought and pictured it. “Three,” I answered.

  “How many shots killed the guard?”

  “One in the heart. One in the head.”

  Detective Hissbaum nodded. “Close your eyes, boy. Think hard. One of ’em dropped something during the robbery. What was that thing that he dropped, and what was in it?”

  I went over the entire crime again in my mind. Dropped? What dropped? I started at the beginning. Yes, of course! “The head teller’s cash drawer,” I answered. “And nothing was in it.”

  Detective Hissbaum expelled a mouthful of smoke and glared at me. “You’re the real McCoy, kid. No one else in the world could possibly know these details.” A big inhale and exhale of cigar smoke. “But son of a gun, we’re ten years too late! If those goons were headed El Paso way, they’d have flipped across the border into Mexico in no time.” Hissbaum used an awful word to describe the two. Alma drew in breath, and Hissbaum said, “Excuse my French. Sorry, Mrs. H., I got carried away. But I know who these crumbs are. Mickey ‘Hands-off’ Stackpole was a two-bit punk on parole for battery in a diner robbery. Buck ‘Gaspipe’ McGee did ten years in Folsom for sticking up a jewelry store in Kansas City. Christmas Day, 1931, they went into the unknown without a trace. Both of ’em. No doubt about it, they’re living the life of Riley someplace warm. Paraguay, maybe. They could be anywhere. Siam! Persia! French West Africa!”

  Dutch put in, “They’d have the money to alter their appearances with plastic surgery!”

  “You were on ice for ten years, kid!” said Detective Hissbaum. “Where?”

  “I was . . . on my way out here,” I answered shakily.

  “Whadja do? Walk on your hands?”

  “I was on a train.”

  “What kind of train?”

  I shook my head and looked to Dutch, who was, for once, tongue-tied.

  “Look, kid,” said the detective, “I got two of my best agents coming up here in a squad car as we speak. So far your story checks out. But we can’t find these crumbs unless you tell us where ya been for the last ten years. Where did they keep you? Did they beat you up? Threaten you?”

  At that moment there was a sharp rap on the door.

  “My guys!” said Detective Hissbaum. Dutch left the room and strode down the hall to open the front door. But instead of two detectives, there were two soldiers in khaki uniforms and puttees standing on the doorstep. With no invitation whatever, they stepped past him into the hallway. They spotted me immediately, sitting at the dining-room table one room down.

  The officer was a ruddy-faced lieutenant with curly black hair. He held a copy of the Los Angeles Times to his chest. Under my eleven-year-old photo was the screaming headline:

  KIDNAPPED OGILVIE BOY FOUND IN HOLLYWOOD!

  The officer grinned broadly. He saluted Detective Hissbaum smartly and strutted into the dining room. Following him marched a beefy corporal with a pair of handcuffs at the ready.

  “You’re under military arrest, Ogilvie,” snapped the officer. “I’m the deputy draft officer for Los Angeles County. The minute I saw the morning paper with your face all over the front page, I called your draft board officer back in Cairo, Illinois. Seems you didn’t register for the U.S. Army!”

  “But —” I began.

  “Hold your horses, Lieutenant!” my dad broke in. He stood up and tried to look reasonable and not-to-be-fooled-with all at once. Dad would be no match for this burly draft officer — I knew that much.

  “Don’t interfere with the army, sir!” snapped the lieutenant, and he turned to me again. “You’ll cool your heels in an army brig for a month for draft evasion, Private. Then I’ll recommend you for the combat parachute troops in Siberia. You get to jump right out of a plane and help the Russkies fight the Krauts in the Arctic Circle!” The officer smirked. “You may not remember me, but I sure remember you. You’re fresh meat, Private Ogilvie!”

  I had never made the acquaintance of an army officer in my short life. How could this lieutenant possibly know me?

  “You’re wrong!” I pleaded. “I’m only eleven years old. I’m in the fifth grade. You can’t draft me!” my voice cracked.

  Dad stepped around the table. Dutch got to his feet and said, “You’re on private property, Lieutenant. You need a search warrant to come in here!”

  Detective Hissbaum shook his head sadly. “It’s the long arm of Uncle Sam, Dutch. No warrants, no questions, no civil laws apply to the army.”

  “That’s right, sir!” the soldier said smartly.

  The voice. Suddenly I knew that voice!

  The lieutenant lowered the paper and tossed the Los Angeles Times onto the table. Sure enough, on his uniform breast pocket was his name in gold stitching, LT. CYRIL PETTISHANKS.

  As it happened, Miss Chow began to clear the breakfast table just as the corporal lunged forward at me with his handcuffs open like crab claws. For a single awkward moment, she stepped in the corporal’s
way, her silver tray stacked full of syrupy, buttery plates. “Excuse me!” she said, smiling as the corporal stumbled into the stack of plates, allowing precious seconds for me to get to my feet and slip away.

  “Oscar,” she said under her breath, “go downstairs through the kitchen! Get on the train! Get on the same train you came here on, the Golden State, Oscar!”

  There was no time for the elevator. I raced into the kitchen and down the back stairway, ignoring my gauze-bound hands and taped, swollen knee. Cyril charged after me, one flight of stairs behind. I had felt sorry for Cyril. How had he turned from a Saint Bernard into a pit bull terrier? How would I escape and get to Montana with my dad?

  I dived into the train room and threw all the switches on the wall. The trains roared to life. The signals blinked, the gates went up and down, and the whistles blew like the howling prairie wind.

  “You little worm!” shouted Cyril. “If it wasn’t for you, my old man wouldn’t have shunted me off to military school for seven godforsaken years. . . . No girls, up at five in the morning, food worse than the dog pound! You’re going to pay for that, you little poetry-spouting twerp!”

  From the kitchen stairwell I heard Miss Chow. She gave a happy yell, as if she were calling a baby to her arms. “Jump, Oscar!” she called. “Jump!”

  And, of course, I was scared spitless of Cyril and his handcuff-wielding sidekick. I grabbed my duffle bag of little boys’ clothes, which had fallen on the floor, and I jumped. Like an Olympic high diver, I jumped!

  I landed on the yellow-brick pavement that ringed the station just beyond the taxi rank with its available top-lit cabs. Feverishly I prayed again, to every single one of the saints, that Cyril would not look at the Crawford layout too closely.

  “Fade!” I wanted to yell to Cyril and the room and everything in the year 1941. “Fade away!” It did not fade fast enough. I looked up and tried to see Cyril’s face. Had he noticed me? Was I just another one of the little tin toy people from up there? I heard kicking and banging under the table. He was looking for me underneath the layout. I took a chance and dashed up the station steps and into the station lobby. Leather easy chairs sprawled on the tiles. I ran past a hot-dog vendor and a newsstand, but I didn’t have time to look at the newspapers. A loudspeaker blared, “All aboard for Chicago on the Golden State Limited, 9:17, departing in one minute from platform two. All aboard!”