From Norvelt to Nowhere (Norvelt Series)

by Jack Gantos

  When the train slowed even more, there was a sudden eruption of action as porters hustled luggage through the corridors and rapped on doors while announcing our arrival at “Uoon-yun Staa-tion!”

  Some swarthy guy in striped pajamas opened his door and stuck his head out. “Finally!” he groused. “I’m late for last night’s dinner with my congressman.”

  I kept pace with the porters and ducked and dodged their coming and going until I made it to the next sleeper car.

  When I opened Miss Volker’s roomette door, I half expected the mysterious second detective to grab me from behind, but it was only my nervous imagination hiding behind the door. I kept thinking about the detective’s muffled voice in the toilet stall. When he dropped his handkerchief I was certain I’d heard that voice before. Or was my dad right in telling me that my imagination was a servant to my fears? He could be right. In my daydreams I always seemed to be the victim and not the conqueror.

  Miss Volker’s suitcase was on her bunk. I threw the corked bottle of wine on top of her lady things, closed and snapped the clasps, then slung her coat over my shoulder and dashed back up the hallway. When I elbowed open my door she had vanished and the train was shuddering to a stop as the brakes were slowly applied.

  “Cheeze-us-crust,” I muttered. “Where’d Mrs. Captain Ahab sail off to?”

  I stuck my head out the doorway and took a quick glance up and down the sleeper car. I didn’t see her, so I grabbed my bag as well and followed the porters down the hall until I jumped out the first door that slid open.

  I ran down the platform and joined up with the gathering passengers that attempted to enter the wide portals of Union Station.

  I pressed myself into the crowd and leaned forward. All around me the shoulders of passengers trying to enter the station jammed up against the shoulders of people equally driven to make their trains. It was as if we were all trapped inside one revolving door. A man shoved me from behind and in turn I shoved the man in front of me until finally, step by step, we stumbled into the station.

  Instantly, everyone had a determined expression of knowing where they were going, except for me. My eyes circled wildly once I entered the vast white concourse, but I didn’t dare stop.

  I followed the people dashing ahead of me. Along the wide corridor, café waiters held out trays of toasted bacon and egg sandwiches and called out for customers. There were baskets of sweet rolls and fritters. Hawkers handed off paper cups of steaming coffee to racing commuters who in turn paid the hawkers as if passing a baton. Newspaper venders announced the headlines.

  RUSSIA REMOVES BOMBERS FROM CUBA! U.S. NAVY BACKS AWAY! WAR UNLIKELY!

  All that good news was lost on me because I was trying to spot Miss Volker. I picked up my speed again as my eyes scanned left and right.

  Maybe I passed her already, I thought, and spun around. People lurched past me. I didn’t spy the creepy little detective or Spizz. If I really was a Seeing Eye dog, I would have spotted them all in a glance.

  And then I saw a line of red-capped porters pushing carts of luggage and dollies stacked with wooden crates and other freight. On the very top of one crate was balanced a casket. It gleamed like one of Huffer’s special bombproof models—the kind with the glass window on the top that Bunny liked because when the lid was closed you could look in and see if the person was dead or alive. I hoped this one was empty.

  On the far side of the casket, I could just see a dark hat bobbing up and down and a thick hand gripping the top edge of the crate underneath to keep it steady.

  Suddenly I was knocked off my feet by a commuter rushing for the train platforms. I jumped up and darted sideways between people, slipping like a fish behind and in front of them.

  I was closing in on the casket and that’s when a pistol fired off somewhere ahead of me. People screamed and ducked down. Someone pointed toward an upper balcony. Others turned abruptly and pointed in the opposite direction. Everyone froze for a moment and began to swivel their necks around to find where the shot had come from as the crack! of it echoed sharply back and forth along the massive barrel vault of the station.

  I could guess exactly where the bullet came from and it was easy for me to imagine the target! At any moment I expected the crowd to gasp and part and there would be Spizz, dying belly-up like a beached white whale while Mrs. Captain Ahab stood over him with the smoking pistol in one hand and her peg leg jammed into his quivering navel.

  And then I heard someone shout, “Oh my God, she’s shot!”

  A little crowd of people gathered in a horseshoe around a fallen woman and I ran toward them.

  I saw the scuffed bottoms of her shoes first. She was stretched out like a swimming-pool diver, with her arms and face flat down on the Union Station floor. When I reached her I dropped to my knees and tucked in next to her shoulder.

  “Miss Volker,” I cried in a panic as I leaned over her face. “Can you hear me?”

  Then I gasped because blood was running out of her hair and across her forehead. “You’ve been hit!” I exclaimed in horror.

  She rolled her face over and glared up at me as if I was some sort of useless idiot. “Get me up off this filthy floor before the police arrive,” she hissed.

  “But you shouldn’t move,” I begged, as she gritted her teeth and struggled up onto one knee. I stood and braced my arm across her thin back to steady her. Blood dribbled out of her ear and seeped into the white lace collar of her sweater.

  She clutched my shoulder and raised herself onto her other knee. “Get me on my feet,” she panted hastily. “We have to skedaddle out of here.”

  I turned to a gawking luggage porter and nodded toward our suitcases and her overcoat. “Grab those and lead us to a taxi—we need to get to a hospital now!”

  “That’s a lot of blood,” a man said dramatically, as I lowered my arm around Miss Volker’s waist and hoisted her onto her feet.

  Once she was upright, we marched behind the porter, who cut a path through the crowd while Miss Volker and I left a trail of bloody footprints behind us.

  When we reached the taxi, the porter set our suitcases in the trunk and snappily opened the back door. I spun Miss Volker onto the vinyl seat and jostled her legs into the cab before slamming the door. I turned and for an instant looked back to where I had last seen the casket, but it was gone.

  Quickly I ran around to the far side and opened my door.

  “Tip the porter!” Miss Volker hollered out before I could dive inside. “Never stiff a working man.”

  “Cheeze!” I cried out. I dug into my pocket and yanked out a bill. It was a ten. In the distance I spotted a blue-uniformed cop talking intently to a knot of people just outside the station. A lady turned and jabbed at the air in our direction. The cop nodded.

  I shoved the ten at the porter and saw drops of blood on his white-gloved hand. “When that cop arrives,” I said breathlessly, “tell him to meet us at the nearest emergency room.”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. I threw myself into the taxi and slammed the door just as Miss Volker hollered to the driver, “The Lincoln Memorial! And step on it.”

  “You mean drive to the hospital,” I cut in. “You’ve been shot in the face.”

  “No, you’ve been shot in the face,” she replied, correcting me. “Right in the nose, to be exact.”

  I pulled a handkerchief out of my coat pocket and mopped the blood off my nose and mouth and chin. Then I looked down at my coat: it was bloody, as were my shirt and hands. My face must have been twisted up into an expression of absolute terror. I began to wildly pat myself all over in an effort to search for my bullet wound.

  “Calm down, Chicken Little. You aren’t shot. But,” she asked, raising a schoolmarm’s eyebrow, “which president was shot in the Baltimore and Potomac train station in Washington?”

  The question seemed crazy to me at that moment but I knew the answer from one of her This Day In History columns in Mr. Greene’s newspaper.

  “Garfield,”
I answered with confidence. “President Garfield. He was shot in 1881 on my birthday, July second.”

  She smiled. “A-plus,” she said approvingly, and patted me on the shoulder with her firm hand. “Your mother would be proud. Remember, no matter how bad things become, history always gives you the gift of perspective—basically, make sure the gun is in your hand.”

  And that’s when I smelled the gunpowder coming from her cloth purse. I opened my mouth and Mr. Hyde spoke. He was not in a good mood.

  “You told me you’d only fire the gun if you were alone with Spizz!” I said, hardly trying to keep my voice down.

  She frowned. “When I’m truly aiming for him I will be alone,” she replied. “But in this case I wasn’t aiming for him.”

  “Then who?” I asked, still steaming.

  “I was creating a distraction. They almost nabbed Spizz,” she explained. “I saw that little ferret-faced detective sneaking up on him in the station with the butt end of a gun in his coat pocket. I reached into my purse. I clutched the pistol grip and raised the purse straight up into the air but I was having trouble curling my finger around the trigger. I swear my hands are getting worse. My finger had frozen up, and just then someone bumped into me and I tripped and when I hit the deck the gun went off. The bullet must have shot across the floor.”

  “What you did was totally criminal,” I shouted, scolding her as if I were my mother. “You could have killed someone.”

  She dismissed my concern with a wave of her hand. “Calm down. By accident, I probably shot the heel off some lady’s shoe,” she said without concern. “But by design, I sidetracked the detective, and during the confusion I figure Spizz got away.”

  “If he did escape, how will you ever find him?” I asked.

  “The best way to catch a killer is to think like one,” she replied. “In Spizz’s case I don’t have to think too hard. I know where he’ll end up.”

  “So he’s going to the Lincoln Memorial?”

  “No,” she scoffed. “History is lost on him. Like a little baby whale, he’ll return to his mama’s home. But he’s so slow we have time to visit the Lincoln Memorial. Since we are in Washington, I can show you something that’s not in any of your comic books. It’s something about Eleanor, and we can add it to her obituary.”

  “Aren’t we running from the police?” I reminded her, turning around to look out the back window for squad cars.

  “Use your head,” she advised. “Only the guilty run. If you stand still, the police zip right by you like the Keystone Cops.”

  It wasn’t long before the cab driver pulled into the parking lot at the Lincoln Memorial. As he shifted around in his seat to collect the fare he gave me a bug-eyed look of surprise when he saw the blood.

  “Don’t worry about the boy,” Miss Volker said. “He’s tougher than he looks.”

  I stepped out of the cab and went around to the trunk. The cab driver followed. “Looks like that old lady knocked you out in the first round,” he remarked, snickering as he opened the trunk.

  “Don’t turn your back on her,” I advised, and felt some humor water down my anger. “She sucker punched me.” I grabbed our bags and her coat. He closed the trunk and Miss Volker and I hiked up to the front of the monument, which was like climbing to the top of a Greek temple.

  Once we reached the portico we stared way off to the left but couldn’t see the White House because of the trees. I couldn’t see the Jefferson Memorial either, but I knew it was not far across the Tidal Basin. Right ahead of me there was no missing the reflecting pool and Washington Monument that stood up ramrod straight like the spine of the nation.

  “From this very spot,” Miss Volker said, raising her arms to form a circle, “American history forms an unbreakable chain, with each link telling one nation-building story after another.”

  I turned and looked up at Lincoln.

  She followed my gaze. “What do you see when you look up at that man?” she asked with reverence.

  “I’m not sure,” I said shakily, knowing that she expected me to say something more momentous than “a man sitting in a chair.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what Lincoln sees when he looks down at you,” she replied since she had no patience for ignorance. “He sees a twelve-year-old boy with his mouth hanging open who only knows that Lincoln was born in a log cabin, read books by firelight, became a lawyer, then president, defeated the Confederates, freed the slaves, and was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre.”

  I lowered my head because she was right. I had only read the fifteen-cent Classics Illustrated version of Lincoln’s life.

  But suddenly I remembered something else that was hugely historic. “You know the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still?” I asked excitedly.

  She frowned.

  “Well, Klaatu, the visitor from outer space, lands around here, and he comes up to the Lincoln Memorial and reads the Gettysburg Address on the wall and says, ‘Those are great words, he must have been a great man.’”

  “You are a hopeless pupil,” Miss Volker said, gawking at me as if I had dropped down from outer space.

  “Well, what do you see?” I asked testily.

  “A lot. One reason we came here is because we can really talk about how Jekyll and Hyde are like the North and the South. ‘A house divided cannot stand,’ Lincoln said. And he meant more than just the Union and the Confederacy,” she added. “He meant blacks and whites too. The nation had become a Jekyll and Hyde with the South rising up as an evil twin inside the nation to kill off America’s highest belief that all men are created equal.”

  She stamped her foot down on the granite floor.

  “The earth has its own axis but the heart and humanity of America pivots at the feet of Lincoln. We are not so much defined by the wars we fight across the globe, but by the wars we have fought within ourselves as a nation. It is here where the people forced democracy to turn the gears of justice. I love Lincoln. He was one of the greatest presidents of this conflicted nation. Look up at him. Look at the statue with his haggard face, slumped shoulders, and tired legs. He’s exhausted from carrying on a war in which six hundred thousand Americans died and hundreds of thousands were wounded and maimed. He looks like he already knows John Wilkes Booth is going to end his life.”

  He did look tired. He was the president, but his stony hands looked like the hard hands of a grave digger.

  “You could also say,” she continued, “that he looks like a man exhausted by an inner conflict because he is tired from wrestling with his own Jekyll and Hyde. Lincoln did not start out in favor of freeing the slaves. In fact, he spoke against mixing blacks and whites in society, and instead he supported a movement to ship all the slaves back home to Africa. But deeper still, he wrestled with his moral belief that no man should be enslaved by another. And when the abolitionists gathered together and agitated and protested in one voice against slavery, Lincoln changed his mind. His greatness was in listening to the will of the people, and as president he gave all people what they asked for—freedom and equality. Now that is true democracy!”

  “It is,” I remarked. “If you don’t question yourself, you can never change your mind.”

  “Listen to me,” she said, “so I can also improve your mind. Sadly, what you don’t see on Lincoln’s face are the four million slaves that gained their freedom and ended up working for slave wages paid out by the same rich men who had owned them in the first place. Not enough had changed in America after all the war’s carnage and suffering. And to their unforeseen surprise, the South came to realize they had actually won the war because they were never defeated in their ugly belief that white people were superior to blacks. Sadly the Civil War went from something that was honorable and full of humanity to something shameful.”

  She looked up at Lincoln and took a deep breath. “I hate war as much as he did,” she said. “So many do.”

  “Even my dad doesn’t like war,” I added. “And he fought in one.”r />
  “You’ll learn from history,” she said firmly, underlining her words with wisdom, “that it’s mostly the people who haven’t been to war that start them.”

  Then she cocked her head at me, and her face seemed to freeze up like a cat seeing itself in a mirror. Maybe she was thinking of Lincoln and Garfield and McKinley and wondering what president might be shot next. Maybe she was regretting her vow to shoot Spizz. Maybe Jekyll and Hyde were arm wrestling inside her for the pistol at that moment and they were locked up in a tie.

  I took a chance. “Please give the gun to me,” I encouraged, “and we can throw it into the Potomac River. It will be better that way.”

  She gave her head a shake and it seemed the conflict inside her was over. “I’m not quite ready to give you the pistol,” she slowly replied, backing away from her better half. “Not yet. I’m getting there—maybe later, but not now. Eleanor had a permit to keep a little protection in her purse when she traveled, and I think I will too.”

  “Well, you give it some serious thought,” I said, trying not to sound as disappointed as I felt. “Just remember that my mother said we make our best choices about how we live and not about how we die.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she remarked, and reached into her purse. “Now turn your back to me,” she ordered, “and take a long look at the reflecting pond and beyond.”

  I did, and as I stood there I thought of that pistol in her purse. I knew she wouldn’t shoot me. Not intentionally, but she might fall down again with her hand on the pistol trigger and I’d be bleeding from somewhere other than my nose.

  “Now what do you see?” she asked.

  I figured it would be best to die while telling the truth. “I cannot tell a lie,” I declared, “I see the Washington Monument, and I figure it looks to be the right size harpoon for Mrs. Captain Ahab to defeat the white whale.”

  She laughed and I turned around to see that her hands were empty. “That’s more like the harpoon Washington used on the British,” she said, and with a flourish pretended to heave the huge Washington Monument right through the puffed-up belly of mad King George. I bet she could do it too.