by Jack Gantos
“Would you agree to let me hold the gun for you?” I offered, and extended my hand as if I were a doctor and she was a mental patient.
She thought about it for a minute. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a good idea. Your hands are more steady than mine so I expect you’ll be a better shot.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I want to keep the gun so we don’t shoot it.”
“Your mother said you had to do anything I asked of you,” she reminded me. “Don’t let your mother down.”
“She didn’t mean I had to murder someone for you,” I replied.
“Then forget it,” she said stiffly. “I’ll use the gun myself. There are six bullets in it and I’m bound to plug him with one of them even if I have to pull the trigger with my toe.”
“What if you shoot me by mistake? Or some other person?” I asked.
She cocked her head to one side and smiled coyly. “I’ll just make sure I’m alone with him,” she said. “In fact, it would be perfect if you would pry open one of the outside doors between the sleeper cars and then he and I could take a romantic stroll and I could pretend to kiss him between the cars but instead when he closed his eyes I could shoot him in the gut and he could fall out the door and roll down the track bed and into the bushes and the rodents would eat his carcass and that would be that!”
“Are you joking?” I asked, thinking that Mom was right. Miss Volker was talking crazy talk.
“I don’t joke about murder,” Miss Volker said, “but for the moment I can see that you are not in the right mood to be cooperative. And in the meantime let’s go to the observation car and enjoy the scenery.”
I shifted my hands to just under her stiff shoulders and pushed her straight above me so I could look at her face-to-face. “Can’t I just stay in my room and read?” I asked.
She glanced over my shoulder at the comic book on my bed. The garish cover showed the civilized Dr. Jekyll in a tuxedo while the evil Mr. Hyde hovered menacingly over his shoulder like a rancid shrunken head. He was so moldy-looking that I could feel my nose itch.
“That’s junk!” she declared, and snapped at it with her square old teeth. “I bet that’s how you read Moby-Dick!”
“Illustrated Classics comics aren’t junk,” I countered, feeling a little embarrassed. “And Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde really makes you think about what kind of person you are. It’s about a doctor with a split personality—one is good and one is evil and they both live inside a single man. I think I’m like that too.”
She raised her skeletal hand up over her head and turned the thin edge of it toward me as if it were a meat cleaver. “I’ll give you a split personality,” she threatened. “Only they’ll both be bad. Now push me up onto my feet.”
I waited a moment until I caught my breath, and when the train tilted back in the other direction I shoved her away from me with all my might. But it wasn’t enough. She elevated about a foot above me and hovered wild-eyed and defiantly against gravity before she came crashing back down with her whale-sized forehead slamming flat against my nose.
The pain brought tears to my eyes. “That really hurt,” I sniveled.
“Suck it up and be a man for a change,” she ordered, exhaling up my nose as if she were trying to resuscitate me. The stinky fumes from her breath nearly knocked me out.
“Have you been drinking?” I asked in return.
“Only one glass of red wine,” she replied. “I had to order something while I waited for you.”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t drink wine,” I suggested, “because now you can’t stand up.”
Just then the train snapped back the other way and I gave her a push, and at the same time she jerked her head and shoulders back and just barely staggered up and off of me.
“I’m perfectly sober,” she replied in a dignified tone while adjusting her black dress, which had climbed up her thighs so I could see where she had rolled her old-lady support stockings down like two tan doughnuts above her knees. “Now show some manners and stop staring at a single woman’s chicken legs and meet me in the lounge,” she ordered. “Pronto! I have something juicy to say.”
“About what?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said mysteriously.
“Be right there,” I fired back, and sat up.
As Miss Volker leaned on the doorjamb to steady herself the train swayed wildly back and forth along a stretch of uneven tracks. Then, in an abrupt roller-coaster spasm, we snapped around another tight curve and she swung out of the doorway like an unhinged clock pendulum and I heard her irritated cries and clomping old-lady heels as she caromed off the compartment doors and down the hallway like a scuttling lobster.
I stood and rubbed my sore ear long enough to get some blood back into it, then carefully shuffled across the linoleum floor in my slippery socks. I grabbed onto the towel rack to secure myself and stood in front of my miniature sink, which was the size of an old porcelain soup bowl. I looked up into my book-sized mirror. My ear was bright red and still creased over like a paper flower, but it was my throbbing nose that really worried me.
Oh cheeze, I thought. Not another bloody nose! I carefully twisted my little finger halfway up my right nostril as if it were a blood dipstick. But before I could pull it out and check for a leak I heard Miss Volker’s grating, Klaxon voice growl out above the clacking wheels, “Jack-ie! I’m wait-ing!”
I pulled my unbloody finger out of my nose. “Be right there!” I hollered, then ran my hand over my prickly hair. I pulled in my stomach and more or less tucked my white shirt down into the scratchy winter-wool trousers Mom had picked out for me at the Norvelt tag sale.
As I stepped into the corridor I looked to the left, and then to the right. She was gone. I kept my door key on a string around my neck because there were moth holes in the old pants pockets. The string was pretty short, so I dropped to my knees and pulled the key out from around the neck of my shirt and locked the door. I hopped up before someone, maybe the secret detective, saw me and thought I was a criminal trying to jimmy the lock. Then I went skittering down the corridor while yelping, “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” There were a lot of nasty splinters on the oak floors.
7
I really did need my shoes back but I still couldn’t find the old steward who had taken them. Maybe he had returned them to the wrong person. I do have big feet for my size, so he could have given them to a small adult by mistake.
I pranced on my tiptoes down the sleeper-car hallways. The roughed-up wooden floor was like walking on a bed of toothpicks. I entered the observation car. It was like a glassy white cocoon. The wet snow had stuck to all the wraparound windows on the sides and roof, and the light inside the car was soft and pearly. I couldn’t see anything outside. I had a Classics Illustrated version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and I felt like I was standing in the submarine cockpit of the Nautilus, which Captain Nemo had disguised as a gigantic white narwhal that he used to attack and destroy the battleships of warring nations. Like Miss Volker, he hated war too. The rocking movement of the train made me think we were surging through rough water looking for ships to sink.
It was all so magical until I spotted Miss Volker. She was sitting at a small round table that was still cluttered with the remains of the previous diner’s supper. I took a seat across from her. She was hunched toward me and I was startled to see her sobbing into what I thought was a wadded-up napkin, but when I looked closely it was really a crumpled slice of white bread she had lifted from the top of a partly gnawed sandwich.
“I should tell you something important,” she said between her halting breaths, which rose and fell like waves on the ocean.
“Are you ill?” I asked. She was old. Old enough to go insane or drop dead at any moment—or even to shoot someone with that big silver pistol in her purse.
She sniffed in my direction and shook her head. “No,” she whispered, and dabbed at her eyes with the sandwich bread.
�
��Are we on the wrong train or something?” I asked. I couldn’t see out the snow-packed windows but could feel us slowing down. “Like, are we headed to Canada instead of Florida?” I pressed my face against an open spot on the window where the snow had slipped off. At any moment I thought I might catch sight of either a polar bear or an alligator, but we were just moving through a woodsy patch.
“No,” she said quietly, and pulled herself upright as she had slid downward on the red vinyl seat. “We’re headed south.”
“Then tell me what is on your mind,” I said with concern. “Because one minute you are angry with me, and the next minute I find you crying into a slice of used bread.”
“It was that silly comic of yours,” she sniffed.
“If it bothers you that much, I can throw it away,” I offered. “Really, I’m sorry. I’m not supposed to read them anyway.”
“Keep the comic. It’s the story that upset me, because I am like Jekyll and Hyde,” she admitted. “On one hand I feel like saving all of mankind and spreading peace around the globe like Mrs. Roosevelt, and on the other hand I have Captain Ahab’s obsessive desire to murder that big white Spizz of a whale. But I can’t share my inner conflict with you because it might put your life in danger—so forget I mentioned anything.”
“My life won’t be in danger,” I said, thinking she was just being her overly dramatic self. “We’re just sitting on a train. It’s not as if we’re lying across the tracks.”
“Trains can be dangerous,” she said gravely, and with her curled fingers she pressed the clammy bread against the contours of her face as if she were casting a plaster death mask. “Our fourteenth president,” she sputtered as she began to clumsily paw the pasty bread from her face, “lost his third son, cute little Benny, on a train that crashed and killed him instantly. The boy’s grieving mother was never the same and hid herself on the upper floors of the White House while writing guilt-ridden letters to dead little Benny, begging for his forgiveness. Nobody could tell her that trains weren’t dangerous.”
“Well, I don’t want to end up like Benny, so if what you have to say is so dangerous then you don’t have to tell me,” I said calmly, and then I smiled like a sympathetic guard in a mental institution.
I slowly reached forward with one hand and plucked a row of dangling, drippy bread beads off her quivering chin, then with my other hand I scampered blindly under the table in a luckless effort to locate a dropped napkin.
Suddenly Miss Volker stomped her hard shoe down onto my knuckles as she dabbed at her eyes with the wad of soggy bread.
“Steward!” she suddenly bawled out so sharply that everyone spun their heads in our direction as if she had been stabbed.
I hunched down into my seat and exhaled like a wounded accordion as I rubbed my throbbing hand with my good one. I turned my face toward the window, which was now like a snow-backed mirror, and spied on the reflected faces of the people behind me. As I slowly looked from face to face I realized that I was the only kid in the car and that all the other passengers were older, probably retired people who were escaping the miserable northern winter for the southern sun. They were leaning forward and staring at us with that puzzled, slightly squinty look on their owlish faces because they couldn’t see or hear very well.
At that moment the ferret-faced man I was trying to avoid rushed into the car and dashed toward our section. “Excuse me,” he mumbled after a glancing blow from his hip knocked a woman’s glasses off one ear. “Pardon me,” he said hastily a moment before he flopped down across from us and wedged himself roughly between the hips of two fusty old men on a bench seat.
In an instant he had a little notebook pressed open against his knee and a mechanical pencil poised above it. He took a deep breath but didn’t write anything. Maybe he really was eavesdropping on us and was now wide-eyed and ready to overhear and record our conversation. If Miss Volker was right, he was a lousy detective.
Miss Volker sneaked a look at him across the aisle. From my position I could see a sly, mischievous smile cut across her lips. It looked as if nice Dr. Jekyll had faded away and wicked Mr. Hyde had bubbled up and was getting the best of her.
“Steward!” Miss Volker called out again in her demanding voice.
The steward was busy delivering a steaming pot of tea and a tiered silver tray of lady fingers and macaroons to another table. He walked smartly over to our table once he’d poured a round of tea for his other guests.
“Yes, ma’am?” the steward asked politely as he flipped his serving tray under his arm and dried his hands on a bar towel that hung neatly tucked into the waist of his starched white trousers. He was a handsome black man with a pencil-line mustache and a heavy accent, and he was the first Southerner I had ever heard address a woman as “ma’am.”
When I read that word in the Classics Illustrated Tom Sawyer, I pronounced it to myself like a sheep bleating, “Maaaaam!” Now it sounded so charming and polite I had to remember to use it to address my mother if she ever found my BB gun. Saying something to her like “I’m sorry I’ve been a naughty boy, ma’am” sounded like I would get in a lot less trouble than saying “I’ve been a rotten kid, Mother.”
“Steward,” Miss Volker ordered in her trumpeting voice though he was only two feet away, “may I please have another glass of your excellent red wine!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, and reached forward with his tray to first clear the dishes from our table.
“Forget the dishes,” Miss Volker sharply insisted, and banged her wrist on the edge of the table. “Just get the wine!”
He stepped back a pace and raised an eyebrow at her as he took a deep breath.
“And don’t forget the bendy straw,” she reminded him. “I can’t trust my hands well enough to hold a glass, and I don’t want this young man next to me to drink it because he can’t hold his liquor and he tries to kiss me when he’s drunk.”
I snapped my head around and glared at her. “I am not a kissing drunk!” I blurted out.
“So you say,” Miss Volker retorted, and batted her eyelashes at me as if she were a cartoon of a crazy old lady.
If people weren’t staring at us before, they were now gawking at us as they watched a flirting old lady with clumpy bits of sandwich bread stuck to her face throw a tantrum while waving her arthritic claw-shaped hands in the air like lobster hand puppets. And next to her, with his mouth dropped open, sat a flustered red-faced boy who looked like he wanted to throw himself onto the tracks and join little Benny in the hereafter. And across the aisle from that boy was a possible detective furiously writing in his notebook.
The steward glanced contemptuously at Miss Volker, then his gaze shifted and he stared beyond her and into my wide eyes. He lowered his chin and shrugged as if to ask, “Well?” and I knew he was waiting for me to approve or disapprove her drink order because he had seen plenty of irritable old people who had gone around the bend and were screeching like mad crows for more wine.
Just behind the waiter, the detective nervously flipped through the pages of his notebook. Occasionally he paused to read or correct something he’d written, and then he sped on until he came to a clean page where he jotted down a few more words.
I stared at his pointy face. It was twitchy, and he had wiry, bottlebrush hairs bristling out of his ears and even more hairs poking sharply down from his nose, and covering the dark cleft of his chin was a thatch of crisscrossed hairs as if they were hiding the secret entry to an insect lair.
I leaned across the table and under my breath I asked, “Miss Volker, are you sure you need another glass?”
She rolled her shoulders forward and stuck out her lower lip and made a pouty face. Mom warned me that old people can become difficult. But she didn’t warn me that when they get really old they revert back to behaving like bratty children.
“Yes,” she replied loudly. “In order to kiss you again I’ll definitely need another glass of wine.”
The ball of soggy white bread slipp
ed out of her cramped hand as if it were a scoop of ice cream that had tipped out of a lowered cone. It rolled slowly across the table and hit the floor with an unpleasant splat.
As I bent over and reached for the wet glob of bread I peeked up at the steward whose composed face had tightened into a politely tense mask. He had other old, fidgety passengers calling for him like a pack of mewing cats wanting to be fed.
“She’s the boss,” I said as plainly as possible. “And please, whatever you do, don’t forget the bendy straw.” I smiled in an effort to let him know I was on his side.
He exactly matched the width of my smile with his own, but I could see in his eyes that he didn’t require my sympathy. I figured the only side he wished we were on was the outside of the train.
He turned on one foot and dutifully sped off toward the rear end of the car, where the clinking wine bottles were secured behind a special stainless steel rack so they wouldn’t tip over. I sat up and carefully placed the watery bread ball onto the open face of the abandoned ham sandwich it had come from.
In a moment I heard the sudden pop of a cork pulled from the mouth of a wine bottle.
The strange man across the aisle flinched as if Miss Volker had fired a poorly aimed shot over his head. If he was a detective, his nerves didn’t seem steady enough for the unforeseen dangers that came with his job.
It had been a pretty rough time for Miss Volker, so maybe she needed the second glass of wine. Maybe a third. But how could I know for sure? I was a kid, so I didn’t know exactly what wine did to old ladies. I always thought it made them extra happy and want to hug babies and pinch their cheeks and talk in cutesy baby talk, but I was wrong. Miss Volker was not the happy-granny type.
“I’ll tell you why I need a second glass,” she hissed, pressing her hand into her chest and throwing her head back in a tortured pose of grief. “Because I need a second chance at life. Because I haven’t been a good person.”
