On the Blue Comet (25 page)

“What happened then, Willa Sue?” I asked.

“Well,” she answered primly, “you almost died, but you didn’t.”

I couldn’t tell whether Willa Sue was happy or sad about that. “Mama’s down in the cafeteria getting a cup of tea, so you just have me,” she said, and kicked her legs, which did not yet reach the floor from the visitor’s chair. On either side of Willa Sue were her favorite dolls. She patted them and adjusted them as if they were in our conversation.

“How did I almost die?” I asked Willa Sue.

“You’ve got four broken ribs. One! Two! Three! Four! Plus you have a punctured lung, just like a popped balloon,” said Willa Sue. “It gave you new-monia, and you had a fever of one hundred and four degrees for all this time since they found you lying on the sidewalk outside the Chicago Station in a pair of Brooks Brothers Boys’ Shop pajamas. Aunt Carmen said the pajamas must have cost a small fortune.”

I was as weak as a bunny. That was true. “What’s the
Mr
.
Moneybags
all about?” I asked Willa Sue drowsily.

“Well,” she said, “I’m not supposed to know, but I was hiding in that little coat closet and I heard everything! You were at death’s door. They said you were in a croma —”

“Coma,” I corrected her.

“The FBI detective was here,” said Willa Sue. “The one with the glass eye.”

“Pearly Gates!” I said.

“So that’s why he’s called Pearly,” said Willa Sue.

“Never mind that, Willa Sue. What happened?”

“Well, Detective Pearly took one look at you and he said, ‘What happened to the kid? Did he jump out of a ten-story window?’ and right on the word
jump,
you opened your eyes and started talking a mile a minute. Even though you had a fever of one hundred and four degrees, you told him all about the bank robbery.

“‘We’re gonna nab those goons!’ That’s the way Detective Pearly said it, and
Boom
! They did nab ’em, right on the Mexican border with only minutes to spare, and now, of course, Mr. Pettishanks is going to give you a big reward. Ten million dollars!”

“Thousand,” I corrected.

“Ten something,” said Willa Sue. “Monday morning, Mr. Pettishanks’ll give you the check. It’s a lot of money. You don’t have to live with us anymore. I hope you buy me a present, Oscar.”

“I’ll get you a new doll, Willa Sue,” I promised.

Willa Sue smiled her cutie-pie smile. “Oscar,” she asked, “what’s so special about the word
jump
?”

I did not answer Willa Sue. I had slid back toward the warm hands of sleep. But on cue my memory of the last two days kicked in and began trickling back to me. I could remember the fever, the pneumonia, and the steam tent.

I could see Detective Gates writing furiously in his notepad. “Stackpole!” I wailed to him through my illness. “Stackpole and McGee! Stackpole was bent over like a monkey; mustache and bad complexion. McGee was a little runt with red hair. They were going to head to El Paso and then to Mexico. I tried to help Mr. Applegate!” Here my recollection was gauzy. Detective Gates wanted to know who Mr. Applegate was.

“He was the night watchman,” I’d insisted.

“There weren’t no night watchmen,” said Detective Pearly Gates.

This puzzled me, but I didn’t want to ask Willa Sue or Aunt Carmen anything about it. Willa Sue left my hospital room holding Aunt Carmen’s hand. They promised to be back with my dad as soon as he came in on the train.

The nurse brought lunch. Crumbed fish loaf. I left the meal untouched under its metal lid, congealing on a tray beside my bed, until midafternoon when I woke.

On my tray I saw there was today’s paper, neatly folded. I opened the paper to the front page. It was January 3, 1932. I had been gone only ten days. Dad was still at Indian Grove. The Tip-Top Ranch was years in the future, and there was no war being fought. Everything was normal, and best of all, my dad was on his way. The front headline read:

Double?
I said to myself.
Double?
I read on with curiosity.

I asked the empty air, “But what about Mr. Applegate? Did he disappear from the face of the earth? He was certainly not in the bank that night, not anymore. He wasn’t murdered, either. Where was he?”

The nurse peeked her head around the doorway.

“You have a visitor!” she chirped. “Are you strong enough to eat a little chocolate?”

Chocolate? Who would send me chocolate? I waited for the visitor to appear. He shambled into the room, ruddy-cheeked, shirt rumpled, and looking embarrassed. He carried a Whitman’s sampler box, which he had clearly broken into somewhere along the line. It was Cyril. It being just New Year’s 1932, he was, of course, just his fifth-grade self. He had not yet set foot in Missouri Military Prep. Cyril was exactly ten years short of being a vengeful meany in a lieutenant’s uniform.

“My father made me come,” said Cyril, “seeing you won the reward and all.” He looked at my intravenous tubing, and the color drained out of his cheeks. He handed me the dented box of chocolates. “He sent you these as a get-well thing. Sorry, I opened the box and had a couple in the elevator.”

“I’m sorry I made you look bad, Cyril,” I said. “That day with Kipling’s ‘If.’ I didn’t mean to make it go rough for you.”

“That’s okay,” said Cyril, looking at the floor and putting his hands in his pockets. “Is that a needle going into your hand?”

“Yup,” I answered.

“Wow!” he said, and sat on the floor instead of the chair.

In my bed, knowing what I knew would happen someday, I wondered if Cyril could possibly ever grow up into a nice man if his father didn’t send him off to military school in the fifth grade. “Cyril,” I said, “I have something you might want to see.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“See my blue coat hanging on the hook behind the door? Go in the pocket. Take a look.”

Cyril got up. “It’s the fricking poem,” he said. “But it’s . . . it’s all written funny.”

“It’s the code to memorizing,” I told him. “You set up anchor words. You memorize them. Then the rest of it comes easy as ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’”

Cyril tried it. “This works!” Cyril said. “My God, Ogilvie! This works!”

We finished the whole box of chocolates and the whole poem. Cyril smiled and shook my un-needled hand.

“Good job, Ogilvie,” he said. “It’s enough to keep me out of Missouri Military Prep, anyway!”

My dad rolled home on a night train. He took a cab to the hospital in spite of Aunt Carmen’s telling him to wait for the bus. He had a California suntan, fruit pickers’ blistered hands, and a grin like a Christmas tree on his face.

“Dad!” I shouted. “I wish I could touch you!” I couldn’t because of my ribs and my needle. Was he real?

“Oscar!” said Dad. “You’re okay! I thought you were dead!”

“Dad.” I marveled at him. He was the dad I knew again, not old and tired-looking. I sputtered out, “Your hair! It’s back!”

Dad ran his fingers through his thick hair, puzzled. “Oscar?” he picked up my pain medication and examined it. “What’s in those pills?”

Dad stayed with me, sleeping in a hospital chair next to my bed until I was released. We went to the bank Monday morning and retrieved the check from Mr. Pettishanks himself.

“Gonna buy the old house back, Ogilvie?” Mr. Pettishanks wanted to know.

“Don’t think so,” said my dad. “Think Oscar and I’ll buy an orange ranch in the valley of L.A. county, California.”

“Sir,” I piped up, “may I ask you something?”

Mr. Pettishanks smiled his dry smile. “Fire away, boy.”

“Was there . . . wasn’t there a night watchman called Applegate in the bank the night of the robbery?”

Mr. Pettishanks frowned. “Applegate? Never heard of him. The watchman’s name was George Perkins, and he was hiding in the basement washroom the whole time. I fired him! Good luck to you, fella,” said Mr. Pettishanks, and he handed my dad a big Macanudo.

We put the check for ten thousand dollars in Dad’s bank account. Then first thing, we went to the car dealer and bought Aunt Carmen a new Buick so she could drive to her clients’ houses. Then we called the phone company and ordered a telephone for her front hallway.

“You are wasting money again, Oscar!” Aunt Carmen scolded him, but she scolded him with some June in those January blue eyes.

“A car is peanuts compared to an orange ranch in El Segundo, California,” said Dad. “As for the phone, me and Oscar’ll call you every Sunday night and chat from California!”

We moved in with Aunt Carmen and Willa Sue until a bungalow was built for us on the Red Star Ranch in El Segundo, California.

On the afternoon that the telephone was installed at Aunt Carmen’s, I waited until I was alone. I looked in the brand-new telephone book that came with the phone and found the number for the Cairo YMCA, and made a phone call.

“YMCA,” answered a bored voice.

“Could you tell me if you have a Harold Applegate staying at the Y?” I asked.

“Ah . . . let’s see,” said the voice. It trailed off. “Nah . . . Armon, Angleweiss, but no Applegates.”

“Could you possibly tell me when he moved out?” I asked.

“Ah c’mon, kid. I gotta lot of men come and go. I don’t keep track of ’em. That stuff’s in the old records in the main office.”

“Maybe he left a forwarding address,” I said. “I’m his nephew and I’ve been looking for him a long while. Is there any way you could check?”

The telephone seemed to go dead. Had the man hung up on me? Five minutes passed, and then the voice came back through the receiver. “Yup. He paid his room through November twenty-first last year. No forwarding address. But he ain’t had no mail. That’s all I got, kid. Bye.”

Dad and I ordered all the Lionel trains we had owned before. We set up a temporary layout in Aunt Carmen’s basement.

“We’ll have ’em all shipped out to El Segundo soon, Oscar,” Dad promised. “We’re going to have the best darn layout you’ve ever seen out there. I told the builder we wanted a big basement in that bungalow of ours!”

“It’ll be better than the Crawford layout!” I said. “Bigger and better.” But since it was only 1932, Dad had no memory of the Crawford layout, or of Dutch, Mr. H., or anything else that was to happen in the next ten years. He just looked at me funny, just as he would when I slipped and mentioned something that had not yet happened and maybe never would.

We stayed on in Cairo until I could keep my promise to Aunt Carmen to memorize and perform a recitation on the Fourth of July. Then everyone in town would know what a terrific declamation tutor she was.

I didn’t like the Gettysburg Address, or anything in
Famous Speeches of Famous Men
. It was all much too long and boring. I was determined to find a poem and recite it in Mr. Applegate’s honor, wherever he might be.

One day in the Cairo Library, on the highest shelf in the poetry stacks, I spotted the shabby spine of
The Fireside Book of Poetry
. I wheeled over a stepladder and took the book down. Leafing through, to my surprise I found that someone had written in the book. There were words in red pen over the top of Kipling’s poem. I knew that page. Last time I saw it, the book had been left in Aunt Carmen’s kitchen by Mr. Applegate. There had certainly been nothing scrawled on the “If” page when Mr. Applegate showed it to me in the glider on Aunt Carmen’s front porch.

Suddenly my breath quickened. I recognized the handwriting, the crisp block letters written perfectly as if with a ruler. The message said:

My pulse hammered so that I could feel it in my ears. I flipped to the back of the book cover. I opened the card sleeve and ran my finger down the checkout dates. As before, all the dates were stamped in order. September 1931, October 1931, November 1931. Then, completely out of order, came the last checkout date, January 3, 1926. How could that be?

“Claire!” I shouted into the dusty stillness of the library. “
Claire
. You were here! You saved Mr. Applegate!”

Before the librarian could stride back into the stacks and find out what was wrong with me, I scrawled at the bottom of the same page,
Gone to Red Star Ranch, El Segundo, California
.
Come on out!

Someday I knew Claire would start up the Twentieth Century and fill its smokestack with pellets. She’d come to Cairo and know just where to find
The Fireside Book of Poetry
.

I crept past the librarian at her desk on my way out, nodding politely, which she did back to me. I was such a good boy, using the library to prepare for that Fourth of July recitation. I would never yell in the stacks or write in a library book.

Dad was waiting for me under one of the big library elms. He hadn’t let me too far out of his sight since the hospital. He got to his feet and broke into a whistle. He was still a bushy-haired man, my dad, with an easy walk and a strong hand on my shoulder. I grinned back up at him and we went downtown to Mr. Kinoshura’s drugstore to have a soda.