On the Blue Comet (15 page)

When I came to
, the light fixture above me was inscribed
MERCY HOSPITAL, LOS ANGELES COUNTY.
The emergency room smelled of disinfectant and canned soup. Sympathetic eyes and expert fingers examined my cut-up face.

“Hello,” said a capable voice, “I’m Nurse Washington.” It was nine o’clock at night, and she was tired; I could see that by her red-rimmed eyes. She peered at my eyes critically, under the blinding examination light.

“No concussion,” she announced. Then she shook her curls and shifted her chair back to her desk with a waxy squeak on the linoleum floor.

This time I had no loss of memory. I could picture every awful detail. My bag had flown out of my hand and landed heavily in front of L.A.’s new Union Station, just missing the beautiful stucco towers. I’d cracked my skull on the crest of Christopher Crawford’s bona-fide granite Pikes Peak, which was sculpted into a Matterhorn of a point. Bouncing off it, I smashed into Denver’s Union Station with its tiny panes of real glass, all of which splintered into a thousand shards, spearing my face. My right foot had hooked the girders of the Hell Gate Bridge, over the Colorado River, smashing the bridge and my knee beyond where I wanted to look at either. But why? Why had it gone so terribly wrong? What was different?

I tried to stop sniffling and shaking like an eleven-year-old. “It will take a month of Sundays to get the glass shards out of your cheeks, young man,” Nurse Washington said.

“Are you going to have to use a lance or anything?” I asked.

“Tweezers will do,” she answered. “You are very sensitive for a young man of twenty-one,” she said, picking the word
sensitive
instead of calling me an outright chicken. “What do you do for a living?”

Before I could answer, “Fifth-grader, altar boy in Our Lady of Sorrows, Cairo, Illinois,” my dad said, “I’m afraid he’s a private in the United States Army as of this coming Monday.”

“I hope they send you somewhere safe,” said the nurse, grim-voiced. “Not that there’s anywhere safe in a war.” She made me lie down on a gurney under an even brighter light and wheeled up next to me with her tweezers at the ready. “How exactly did this happen?” she asked.

“I fell,” I said. “I fell right into an electric train layout. Pikes Peak was real rock. The Denver station model had real glass in the windows.”

“My stars!” said Nurse Washington. “If you were breathing beer fumes at me like so many of them do, I wouldn’t believe you, but there is something so innocent about you.”

I had to act grown-up, whatever that might mean. I had to be brave and not flinch no matter what she did to me.

Dutch stood against the doorway, puffing on his pipe and wincing at every move of the tweezers. My father did not take his eyes off my bleeding face. He leaned forward, arms resting on his thighs. His face was five inches from mine. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. How long was it since I had seen my father’s eyes dreamy and at peace? Was it ten months or ten years? I breathed deeply as Nurse Washington turned to set a sliver of glass in a metal tray.

I had ruined everything for Dutch. I had wrecked Christopher Crawford’s trains, and that would get everyone into big trouble. Worst of all, I had no chance now of getting the reward from Mr. Pettishanks and buying an orange ranch for my hardworking dad.

What had been the key the night of the robbery that allowed me to shoot through time and space itself? Why could I not do it again? I could not answer because I could not remember.

Nurse Washington picked out all the glass at last and then went to work on my hands. My hands were scraped strawberry raw on the palms. Fake grass had embedded itself in the skin. She washed out the worst of it, put on antiseptic, and gauze-bandaged them. She taped my knee and put a dressing on the wound on my head.

Then she listened carefully with a stethoscope to my breathing and heart. She concentrated with her eyes closed and for quite some time pressed me in various places on my chest and back.

“Does this hurt?” she kept asking.

“A little,” I answered. “I can’t breathe as deeply as I’d like, but it’s okay.”

“You don’t have pneumonia,” she said. “You don’t have pleurisy rales. There is no apparent internal bleeding.” She tapped her stethoscope against her chin. “Other than this fall, has he . . . has he been in any serious accident?” she asked my dad. “Within the last two weeks?”

“No,” Dad said.

“Any kind of shock recently?”

“No,” said Dad.

I did not want to tell her about being shot out of a cannon and landing on a Lionel layout from a bank lobby in Cairo, Illinois, a few days ago, not to mention the same thing happening all over again as the taxicab backed away from the curb outside the station in L.A.

“Funny,” she said. “I was a war nurse in 1918. Believe me, I saw everything there was to see. This young man has definitely suffered some sort of recent trauma. There’s puffiness in the chest and small breaks of capillaries all over the trunk. The internal organs have been given a ramming of what we call g-forces. High-speed shock. I’ve seen it in pilots whose planes threw them around at great velocity. I’ve seen it in shell shock. Usually there are terrible injuries, for instance in a car accident. This is most peculiar. I can’t put my finger on it, but I have seen this condition in wartime. And yet . . .”

“Are you sure?” asked my dad.

“As sure as God made little green apples,” she answered.

Nurse Washington ended my treatment with a hefty injection. “It’s just a little sulfa drug and a smidge of morphine for the pain,” she said. “It’s the latest and the greatest, and it will prevent infection.”

I nearly passed out at the sight of the needle just as I did when Dr. Peasley back in Cairo gave me my annual tuberculosis and diphtheria shots. She quickly gave me smelling salts to bring me out of my daze.

My dad paid her five dollars cash from his worn-out, paper-filled wallet. Dutch made him take it back. “The whole thing’s my fault,” said Dutch, and he stayed my father’s hand, dropping his own five spot on the nurse’s desk. “I made him do it.”

Somewhere outside an ambulance wailed. The siren light, red and rotating, cast its reflection through the window onto Nurse Washington’s spotless white uniform. The doors of the Mercy Hospital flew open with her next emergency.

“So sorry,” I said, sitting up and wiping my nose. “I’m scared of needles!”

“You’re going to have trouble in the army, Oscar,” Nurse Washington said sadly.

I lay crumpled in the cushiony rear seat of Dutch’s car as he drove us back to the Brown Derby and Dad’s truck. Dutch eased through the night and the streets of the big city.

“Trouble is not the word for it,” I heard Dutch say to Dad. “The army’ll make short work of our boy.” Dutch went quiet for a few moments. Then he spoke, dreamily: “Something has happened to Oscar,” he said. “The psychoanalyzers would explain it by amnesia or some other fancy word. But something much stranger than that has happened to Oscar, because he
is
eleven years old! Look in his eyes. That’s no man! He’s still a boy or I’m a whirling dervish. Hell or high water, Pop, we’d better get him back to 1931 or he’s a goner.”

“But how?” asked my dad.

“Why didn’t it work today?” asked Dutch almost to himself. “What went wrong? Was it the wrong train? The wrong atmosphere?”

I did not wake until Sunday morning when the telephone in Dad’s apartment rang.

“I collect perfect crimes!”
said Mr. H. He was a perfectly pear-shaped man, with a pear-shaped head. His face was as pink as a baby’s. He spoke in a cut-glass English accent. I had only heard a fake Englishman speak once, on “Our Gal Sunday,” a drama that Aunt Carmen never missed on the radio.

“Your father is an honorable chap,” Mr. H. said, pulling the tops of his knife-creased trousers ever so neatly upward to sit without wrinkling them. “He came all this way back to fix the layout. I suppose Alma terrified him about Miss Crawford’s temper. We all shake in our shoes when we think of Miss Crawford and her famous temper.”

Mr. H. also did not mention my bandages and crutch, which made me very grateful because I felt like a complete fool for diving into an electric train layout like someone from the loony bin. We sat alone in his study, he and I, while Dad was downstairs working on the layout. Dad had been able to assemble all the materials he needed to repair the layout from one of the movie studio’s scenery departments. Thanks to Dutch, we got porch screening, plaster of paris, and enamel paint of the right colors on a Sunday, when the hardware stores were all closed.

Miss Chow appeared with pictures for Mr. H. to autograph, which he did in a looping swoop of the pen. She also brought him a cone-shaped glass filled with a brilliantly clear, gassy-looking drink. Mr. H. put one index finger into the drink and swirled the lemon rind around. Then he picked it out and nibbled the end of it. “Dutch told my wife, Alma, all about you and the bank robbers,” he said. “It was a perfect crime!” He smiled. “I make mystery movies, I suppose you’d say,” said Mr. H. “Suspense dramas.”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, sitting on the edge of my chair.

He went on, pulling a small notebook from his jacket and wetting the tip of his pencil with his tongue. “I recall the Christmas Eve Massacre well from the newspapers. First came the brutal murder of the guard, the stolen unmarked money, the apparent kidnapping of the boy, the reward — a handsome one, if I may say so. Then the manhunt with the bloodhounds. The aunt gave the police an article of the boy’s clothing. The police let the dogs smell it and turned the dogs loose everywhere around Cairo. In the woods, down the dirt roads. Nothing. Nothing was ever found. Tell me something, Oscar,” said Mr. H.

“Yes, sir?”

“Last night when I came home, Alma told me the story. I telephoned the head man at the FBI here in Los Angeles, Detective Hissbaum, an old friend. He remembers the crime well. He knew the detective who was in charge of the case back then. He provided me with a detail or two not written up in the newspapers. Do you mind if I ask you about it?”

“No, sir!”

Mr. H. sipped his drink and took another small nip of the lemon slice. “In the pocket of the missing boy’s winter coat, the FBI found a paper. On it, in a boy’s handwriting, was a two-hundred-eighty-eight-word poem. Can you tell me what that might have been?”

I frowned. “Of course,” I said. “It was Kipling’s poem ‘If.’ My aunt Carmen made me write it out ten times every night. That was my master copy. It was written in a code I used for memorizing.”

I imagined which clothes the police had been given by Aunt Carmen. Did they give my worn socks or my pajamas to the police? Were my old corduroys slobbered over by a bunch of huge dogs?

“And can you recite that poem?” Mr. H. asked me.

“Easy!” I took a deep breath, “‘If you can keep your head while all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .’”

When I finished, he said, “No one could fake that.” He swallowed the rest of his drink. “My dear boy,” he went on with a smile, “we are in Hollywood, not the Midwest, with all its glories. So you needn’t call me sir. Mr. H. will do nicely.”

“Yes, sir,” I agreed.

“Please tell me everything you remember about the evening of December 24, 1931.”

I launched into it, sitting deeply back in my chair, which was as comfortable as a bed and upholstered in a slick silvery leather.

I described catching the number 17 bus to the bank the night before Christmas. “It was snowing. I rang the bell on the side of the bank’s front doors as I always did. Mr. Applegate, the night watchman, came up and unlocked the doors. I threw my coat on a chair. I think he said, ‘Look at that darn snow! It’s coming down like the blizzard of ’88. We might never get home.’ But right off, I spotted this heavy engine dangling over the beautiful blue glass river. I ran over to catch it so it wouldn’t fall and shatter the glass.”

“Did Mr. Applegate lock the bank after you came in?”

“No, sir. I usually did that, and I forgot, and I forgot to turn the alarm switch back on.” I grimaced with the memory of my carelessness. “Dad and Dutch say it’s not my fault the thieves got in and killed Mr. Applegate, but I know it was.”

Mr. H. laughed explosively. “My dear boy,” he said, “these psychos would have shot out the door lock and turned off the alarm themselves in two seconds. They had the joint cased. You are certainly not at fault. It was their guns that killed Mr. Applegate.”

“I’m not even a little bit at fault?” I asked Mr. H.

“Not one tenth of a percent out of a hundred,” said Mr. H. “What happened next, Oscar?”

I finished my story. In my heart was a tiny window of lightness that had not been there a moment before. One little shard of memory jumped out of the blue and in front of me. I suddenly remembered one of the thugs’ voices shouting a name.

I told Mr. H., and he wrote it down. “It was Mackey or McKey. Something like that. Someone pulled a gun on me. I heard the shot fired, but I had already jumped.”

“Jumped?”

“Yes. With my eyes closed and holding my breath as if I were jumping into the wild blue yonder. I landed on the layout, but they couldn’t see me because I was already as small as the make-believe tin people on the layout. I got on the next train and then changed in Chicago. When I woke up on the Golden State Limited, I felt all banged up, as if I’d fallen out of a skyscraper window. But nothing was actually broken or bruised. That’s when I met Dutch. He was in the bunk below me.”