On the Blue Comet (2 page)

Then Dad ordered signals and an electrically operated gate out of the Lionel catalog to go with our first train, a standard work train. Dad took a sable brush that had maybe six hairs to it. He painted
SOO LINE HAPPY WARRIOR
on the side of the engine in red paint, exactly like on the real Soo Line. Our Happy Warrior had a lumber car with logs as long as cigarillos, two cattle cars, a coaler, a caboose, and a refrigerator car that had small cubes of glass ice inside, each no bigger than one of my Parcheesi dice.

The Warrior was followed by a commuter train, which we called the South Shore Special. We ran it from Chicago to the dunes of Indiana and back. The passenger cars were rigged with real electric lights inside. We put together three stop stations on that commuter express. They came from the Ives Company, which made the most detailed stations.

Then Dad bought us the biggest steam engine in the catalog. It was a 260 series with marker lights on each side, one red, one green. There was a red light underneath the boiler that made the coals glow. The trim was copper and brass, the wheels had spoked drivers with nickel rims. It carried freight cars and three passenger Pullmans. We named it the Choctaw Rocket of the Rock Island Line. Our first tabletop layout was now too small. We began constructing the mountains of the west, lumping up their foothills out of stiff window screening. We layered plaster of paris on top of that, and then we painted it granite gray. This was sprinkled with sand, glue, and a green mystery powder provided by the Cairo druggist, Hop Shumway.

“You’re not going to swallow this stuff, are you, Oscar?” Hop Shumway asked my dad, pushing a box of the green powder across the drugstore counter.

“On the contrary, Hop,” Dad answered. “We’re going to make the Transcontinental Railroad,” and we did.

The benchwork for the mountains, canyons, and bridges that ran between was constructed of wooden crossbeams, like the criss-cross supports of a roller coaster. A tunnel ran through the mountains. The river that coursed under the trestle bridge was painted blue over silvery tinfoil. The ripples were transparent lines of model airplane glue. The tracks shot down the length and a whole side of our basement. Soon we had two tables and three tunnels.

“You are stark raving crazy, Oscar,” Aunt Carmen said when she came to Thanksgiving dinner and asked what was in the basement that smelled of shellac. My cousin, Willa Sue, donkey’s years younger than me, gazed at the layout in bewilderment.

“Don’t touch anything. You might get electrocuted, Willa Sue,” said Aunt Carmen.

“I can show you how the trains run,” I said to Willa Sue encouragingly, even though I didn’t like her much. Willa Sue had come to Aunt Carmen from a sister who was almost never mentioned. Once I overheard that Willa Sue’s real mother might pull herself together one day and reappear, but this had never happened, and Willa Sue called Aunt Carmen
Mama
from day one. She was a cherub-mouthed girl and always had ahold of Aunt Carmen’s skirt with one hand. The thumb of her other hand hovered, nearing her mouth, just as Aunt Carmen, quick as a mousing cat, pounced on the thumb and pushed it back down.

“Keep your hands at home, Willa Sue, dear,” said Aunt Carmen.

“Girls don’t like trains,” whined Willa Sue. The thumb darted into the red bow mouth and stayed there a full thirty seconds while Aunt Carmen gave my dad a piece of her mind about his paycheck going down the drain on electric trains and throwing good money after bad on more and more electric trains.

“That’s the Transcontinental Railroad you’re talking about, Carmen,” said my dad with a chuckle in his voice and a hand steady and warm on the back of my shirt collar. Then Dad lit a Muriel panatela so that Carmen and Willa Sue would go upstairs again.

I, myself, could not decide if the summer or the winter evenings were my favorites. I was grateful to have both.

From April through September, we got the Cubs and Cardinals games on the radio. We caught the play-by-play down in the basement, while the trains ran their routes in the cool shadows.

If you looked up through the two high-up-the-wall windows, you could watch the long summer evenings fade slowly. When we needed air, we opened the windows and the hot wind of the central plains rushed in.

“You can smell the alfalfa all the way from Kansas on that wind,” Dad claimed, while he and I worked on switches, track repair, and new equipment installation.

In 1928, Dad sold a passel of tractors. And seldom did a week go by without a red box, or even two, arriving from the Lionel Company in Rochester, New York. Inside the train-set boxes was always a paper engineer’s cap with blue and white stripes and a set of printed Lionel tickets for the route of the train inside. I never wore the hats because I thought they were for babies, but the tickets were printed in color and looked like the real thing. I collected them and kept at least a dozen wadded in an elastic band in my wallet.

On winter evenings, the sun set before I came home from school and before Dad came home from John Deere. We had our supper and talked about the work lying ahead that evening. Then we turned out all the lights in the house and went downstairs. On moonless nights, you might not have known from standing on Lucifer Street that our house was there at all. The wind soughed through the lonely spruces, much as I reckoned an Alaska wind might blow. Deep in our basement Dad and I stood together, wrapped on all sides by trains racing this way and that way, their smoke pellets pouring smoke, headlights shining down their tracks.

“Listen to that whistle,” Dad told me many a time. “I hear that same whistle out in the farmland. The farmers hear it when they’re taking in their hay. It goes right straight across the prairie all the way to Lincoln and beyond. Good people and bad hear it from inside the churches and prisons alike just as if it were the voice of the wolf.”

“What is the voice of the wolf?” I asked.

Dad did not say.

Our Lionel trains corresponded exactly to the real trains in the big world. They were all modeled exactly on the genuine locomotive, freight cars, and Pullmans. Each was set up to stop at their stations, then to pull out and make their way up the Rocky Mountain ridges, over the Colorado River, and back through the tunnels to the South Side of Chicago. In the windless basement night, our transcontinental Golden State Limited crossed the plains from Los Angeles to Chicago and back. The station lights winked as each train came through and the striped gate slammed down at the crossings.

By 1929 we owned ten complete trains. My favorite of all was the Blue Comet. Dad also judged it to be the finest of all the great Lionel trains. Her engine was sapphire blue, with a blue tender behind. Her passenger cars bore brass plates with the names of famous astronomers Westphal, Faye, and Barnard. The roofs came off if you wanted. Inside there were hinged doors, interior illumination, swiveling seats, and lavatories with cathedral ceilings.

Dad and I added an observation car to the back of the train. Dad took tweezers and turned two little blue seats right under the arc of the Plexiglas dome so that they were in perfect viewing position. “Someday, Oscar,” my dad said, “we’ll go to New York City and board the big Blue Comet, and these are the seats we’ll reserve. The whole Atlantic shore will be spread before us, start to finish. We’ll get out at Atlantic City. Then we can have our portraits painted on the boardwalk, and we can eat Turkish Taffy by the sea. Maybe for your next birthday!”

My next birthday came and went, and Dad and I never did leave Cairo, but our imaginations took us up and down the continent and that was plenty enough for me. Sometimes I would place my head sideways, ear down, on the grass of the layout. “Are you sleepy, Oscar?” my dad always asked.

“No, just looking,” I always answered. “Just looking.”

What I was really doing was closing my bottom eye and staring with my top eye into the carriages of the passenger cars. The cars came complete with little cutout people, sitting in silhouette in each window. Here were two tiny tin women in hats, hands uplifted, chitchatting, both bent face to face. There a tin man read the newspaper. A tin boy ignored the porter, who stood above him with a tray, and gazed, two tiny pinholes for eyes, back out toward me. In this way, everything on the layout came to life, and I was no bigger than the people and the trains and buildings that stood in miniature before me. I truly believed that if I wanted to, I could have just walked right into the permagrass and onto a train. I could have dashed right up the steps of the Blue Comet and sped off into the wheaty night prairies with the Rocky Mountains looming just beyond.

Knowing I might be able to do this made me the happiest boy in the city of Cairo, even the state of Illinois. Me, Oscar Ogilvie Jr., in the dark safety of circling trains. Me, with my dad standing large beside me, working the central switches and the throttle, big as a car battery, that caused the trains to roar past, the signal lights to blink red and green, and made all things possible in the world.

The voice of the wolf
howled a thousand miles to the east in the fall of 1929. Something had happened in the city of New York. People called it the Crash. I did not know what had fallen or crashed, since I was only nine years old at the time.

Dad read the
Cairo Herald
aloud to me. “Millionaires are jumping out of skyscraper windows in despair,” he reported. “Some of Wall Street’s biggest tycoons have sold off their diamond shirt studs. Now they’re peddling apples on the street corners.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They lost all their money,” said Dad.

The radio would not shut up about the crash. When it was explained to me, the words fell about my ears like raindrops but did not bother to go in.

“Gambling like card sharks on the stock market!” Aunt Carmen was heard to say. “It’s the work of the devil. Credit. Margin calls. Credit’s what ruins lives! They’re like fortune-tellers at the horse races, every last Wall Street tycoon!”

I did not ask what a card shark was, or margin calls for that matter. I had enough trouble on my hands. My problem was math. For me 1929 was the year of blinding math problems. When the teacher wrote the problems on the blackboard, my mind drifted everywhere, to the bugs on the window and the ticking of the wall clock. Our teacher never smacked us, but she did smack our desks plenty with her ruler. Each wrong answer got a
wham!
on the offending student’s desk. I got a lot of whacks and whams that year and an F in arithmetic.

Dad tried to teach me a quick way to solve the problems. He had a secret shortcut for fractions, but I could not bring Dad’s methods to class because the teacher did not approve of shortcuts.

In the year that followed the crash, my dad’s tractor orders began to fall short of what they had been. There was talk about layoffs at John Deere. Dad was worried about being laid off his job if he didn’t sell ten tractors a month.

Nineteen-thirty passed and things got worse. In the summer of 1931, Dad explained that all the money in the country had been sucked down the drain like soapsuds. President Hoover was no better than the Roman emperor Nero, violining away while Rome burned to a crisp. Money was no longer to be found in the pockets of the working people and farmers. Their savings were worthless.

Farm prices fell, and farmers stopped ordering tractors.

By August our menu changed. We dropped from beef to canned yams. From lamb chops we sank to Ham Stix. There were no more Muriel panetelas and no boxes from Rochester, New York. The catalog from Lionel still came in the mail, but now it tortured us with its pictures of the newest, sleekest trains.

One late-summer night, Dad found me deep in the pages of the catalog. I was looking at the “Brand-New Models for Christmas Giving!” page. There was a picture of a boy and his dad, pipe in mouth, glowing over their new trains on Christmas morning. Put a cigar where the pipe was, and it looked just like Dad and me.

Dad read the catalog advertisement over my shoulder. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she!” he whispered with a sigh. “The President.” It was a new silver model, streamlined like a rocket ship with every car named after a different president. It cost three times more than any other train.

“Boy, it would be perfect on our layout, Dad! And look. They put a girl in the window of the observation car.”

That was unusual. Lionel almost always featured boys, in, out, and on top of the model trains with their pipe-smoking dads. Never a girl.

“It’s an expensive train. Maybe next year,” said Dad.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I tried to assure him. “We’ve got plenty of trains!”

But even in our basement world, apart from the world above, Dad cracked his knuckles and frowned. He could not concentrate on the trains.

“Oscar,” he said one evening, “they are going to take the house.”

“House?” I asked. “What house?”

“Our house,” said Dad, looking at the wall behind my head.

“But it’s our house,” I argued. “It’s a free country. No one can take our house away.”

“The house is mortgaged, Oscar,” he answered. His eyes were open wide like the eyes of a sick man.