The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

The engineer raised himself heavily, turned around, and gaped in surprise.

  He must have been expecting somebody else, an assistant or a mechanic or someone, and he demanded to know who we were and why we had barged into the locomotive. He had to shout to make himself heard over the din, and Felix smiled at him so bewilderedly, it was enough to break your heart. Leaning toward the engineer, he shouted in his ear that he was truly sorry, he knew he had broken the rules, but what could he do when little Eliezer here begged to see just once, for the first and last time in his life, what a locomotive looks like.

  Those were his very words. And as he gently smoothed my hair, I saw him give the engineer a significant look, with a nod in my direction.

  At first I didn’t understand what he was saying. He seemed to be lying to the engineer, lying through his teeth, pretending I was, say, a kid he was taking on a farewell trip around the world, to grant my last wishes before I died, God forbid, of some dread disease.

  Impossible, I told myself: the noise in there must have made me hear wrong. I smiled at my own stupidity, a nervous little quarter-smile, because how could such a distinguished gentleman concoct a ridiculous lie like that. I mean, as far as I knew, I was a healthy devil with only the mildest of allergies to grass. But when I looked into the engineer’s eyes and saw the dismay there, I began to think perhaps I had been right in the first place, perhaps Felix really had said those terrible things in his amiably gentle, sincerely plaintive way.

  As for me, I was gone, glued to the side of the locomotive, with the engine roaring up from my heels into my brain. The heat had melted what remained of my wits. It didn’t occur to me that my father would never have allowed Felix to involve me in something like this. I trusted him implicitly. Nor did I shout at him to stop, or tell the engineer he was lying. I merely stood there, gazing at him as though I were in a dream.

  How did he make up an excuse so quickly and tell such a bold-faced lie?

  It would take me years to learn how to control my face the way he did: people can always tell straight off when I’m lying, except Micah, maybe, who for some reason finds my lies extremely fascinating.

  But Felix was an adult—and he had told a lie! And a whopper at that, big enough to stun the engineer. Definitely the wrong kind of lie to tell, if only for superstitious reasons!

  I stood there, frozen.

  But I had to admire him.

  Against my will, albeit aghast at his chutzpah, I admired him.

  That is the bitter truth.

  I was outraged at what he was doing, yes, but also humbly resigned to it. It was as if I had been obliterated, completely wiped out, together with all I’d ever learned and every single finger that had ever wagged “No, no, no!” in front of my nose, and the ghastly furrow between Dad’s eyes that grew ominously deeper whenever he was angry, and loomed over me like a permanent exclamation mark. At the last moment, a faint cry seemed to escape my lips, “No! It isn’t so! This is all wrong!” But just then a joyful squeal went through me, to the accompaniment of the roaring engine and the rattling locomotive, as if I had been whisked off to another world where such things were permitted, where everything was permitted, where there were no stern-faced teachers or forlorn-looking fathers, and you didn’t have to make such an effort to remember what you were and were not allowed to do all the time.

  In fact, no effort of any kind was required of you. As soon as you said a thing, it came to be.

  Like when God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

  Yes, I admired Felix for tying those people in there, behind the door, just like that, and wasting an expensive silver watch, and for daring to go through a door marked ENTRANCE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, and for telling the engineer such a horrible lie, the kind of lie it’s wrong to tell. As if it was all a game to him and the only law was his law.

  But I didn’t know the half of what he was capable of yet.

  He was deep into his lie by then and believed in it completely, which is the way to lie if you want others to believe you, like a detective working undercover, and as I watched him, I could feel the heat of the buzzing between his eyes. For the first time in my life I sensed that itch in somebody else, and Felix was lying with so much conviction now, looking at me so pityingly, that I, healthy if mildly allergic imp that I was, began to go into a decline; the morbid gray veil in Felix’s eyes floated around over me, cloaking me in blissful languor.

  That was how it started, the new sensation, the pleasant lightheadedness that nearly made me faint. I wish I could say I fought it off for a while, that I displayed more strength of character. But I didn’t fight off or display a darn thing. In a matter of minutes, Felix had made me his accomplice. He didn’t even have to train me for the role; it was as if he knew me so well, all he had to do was blow the dust off the real Nonny. The false one, that is … Who am I?

  I leaned back against the wall. Felix was staring at me, and so was the engineer. I grimaced with pain and shrank into myself. Life, my own precious life, was ebbing away. I felt cold all over. It was sweltering hot inside the locomotive, yet I was shivering. I had converted the shiver caused by Felix’s astounding lie into a shiver of sickliness, of melancholy and gloom. I was heartbroken over this terrible disease which even now was consuming my body, and by the velvety black curtain closing on the stage of my young life. My right hand began to tremble like a little animal in the throes of death, a symptom of my illness, no doubt, and totally spontaneous, while my arm flapped at my side, what a trouper, who would have believed it, too bad Gabi wasn’t there to see, not that I was thinking about her just then, I put that in just to cover my embarrassment, though I was not in the least embarrassed at the time; in fact, I was proud of myself for having put on such a wonderful act. Felix’s eyes grew wide with wonder as I writhed and grimaced and gasped for breath. I was proud that Felix was so pleased with me, as though I were his prize pupil. At long last I was somebody’s prize pupil; I mean, acting is an art, isn’t it, and writers make up stories, don’t they? And isn’t a story a kind of lie? I felt the blood throbbing in my temples as the train chugged on, and I gazed feebly at the engineer, pardoning him in advance for thwarting me, with a look that said, “Yes, I know there are rules and regulations, Mr. Engineer, and I don’t blame you, friend, for not wishing to bend the rules and bring a little happiness to a child like me. I mean, what is one child’s suffering compared to rules and regulations, rules and regulations make the world go round and the sun shine and trains depart on schedule, and there are so many kids like me at death’s door, but only this one, very special locomotive.” “Oh, thank you, thank you, kind sir,” whispered my parched lips when the engineer reached out in the nick of time to stop me from collapsing and offered me a bench, because a lie doesn’t have a leg to stand on …

  It worked. The engineer believed me. I was filled with exhilaration: he believed me! He believed me, Nonny—though hardly anyone ever did, even when I was telling the truth!

  Yempa and hi-deh!

  The engineer mopped his bald head and face with a sooty blue rag, leaned back in his seat, which was bolted to the floor, and shook his head, not daring to meet my eyes. Instead, he stared at Felix, unaware that in so doing he had sealed his fate. In a low, gruff voice he began to explain how the engine worked, how much power it had: “1,650 horsepower,” he declared with a pout and a sideways glance in my direction. He was a clumsy, heavyset man with curly hair growing on his back and arms and even out of his ears. Though no great talker, he tried his best on account of my condition. He even offered me his seat, and leaned over me cautiously, pointing out every switch and lever and gauge, with occasional glances at the door, lest the conductor walk in and discover that he had allowed strangers into the locomotive.

  Felix asked him questions, too. Like where the brakes were, and how do you pick up speed, and blow the whistle? The engineer, delighted, even flattered by Felix’s interest in the train, forgot his worries for the moment and told us more and more. He
showed us the main brake that stops the whole train, and the smaller brake that stops only the locomotive; he let me pull the whistle switch, and a mournful wail resounded, as though the train were bemoaning the deception, but I was sad about something else—nobody in my class would ever believe that I got to blow the whistle—and I knew I had no choice but to leave the whistle part out if I wanted to convince them that the story was true.

  Then the engineer showed us how to speed up to 120 kilometers per hour, and Felix recalled how as a boy in Romania he loved to lie on a clifftop and watch the trains go by below, and hold his breath when the steam blew up around him, and the engineer reminisced about the old-fashioned steam locomotives back in Russia, not like these modern babies, with their twelve-cylinder diesel engines made by General Motors, no sir, and in Russia once, in the middle of our regular run, wouldn’t you know it, the engineer got drunk, so I, though still a fireman, had to come to the rescue, tfoo! (He spat out the window for luck.)

  Under Felix’s caressing gaze, the engineer became loquacious, describing the wonders of his locomotive, which weighed a hundred tons, while all the other cars, including passengers, came out to another hundred. A heavy responsibility, he said, showing us the soiled and crumpled letter of commendation he kept in the pocket of his overalls. At this point, I started worrying that the trip would be over before I could get on with the adventure Dad and Gabi had planned for me.

  But then:

  “What say, Mr. Engineer?” Felix beamed his enchanting smile at him. “You like to let this boy here drive train now?”

  7

  Some Personal Reflections on Driving Locomotives; and the Difficulty of Breaking the Habit Thereof

  No, I thought, he doesn’t really mean it, and I put on the old quarter-smile, knowing that if the engineer consented (oh, if only—God forbid—if only and God forbid), then I would have to drive the locomotive. Felix repeated his question. The floor groaned beneath my feet. The locomotive raced guilelessly on. Disjointed thoughts clattered through my brain: there are cars attached to the locomotive. There are people in the cars. These people have done me no wrong. Felix may not realize how inexperienced I am at driving on rails. No child should be allowed to drive a locomotive … I sank down on the side bench, at the mercy of sickly Eliezer.

  “God forbid!” The engineer was frightened, too, and firmly shook his head. “Something the matter with you, mister? You must be crazy! Are you an adult, or what? I could lose my job!”

  I sent a faint smile of encouragement his way, but Felix was smiling at him just then, too, and the way Felix smiled, you had to smile back, even if you did not feel particularly cheerful. The engineer was anything but cheerful, and yet, when Felix flashed his smile at him, a smile that expanded slowly from his lips to his eyes, and the three creases around his eyes smiled, too, making him look like a movie star who had alighted from the screen to visit mortal kind, and his smile grew even brighter, with the radiance of a sunrise, suffusing everything in its light, then slowly, and unaware, the lips of the engineer formed an answering smile.

  Luckily for me there was more to the engineer than his wimpy lips. In one angry motion, he wrenched his gaze away from the blue glow of Felix’s eyes, shouting, “Look, mister, no offense—but that’s all! You take the kid out of here right now or else!” But Felix was no quitter. He beckoned him closer, and when the engineer shrank back, as though in response to an indecent proposal, he beckoned again, this time with his long, slender forefinger, and the engineer stared as it drew him closer, till before he knew it, he was huddling with Felix, his bullneck, dirty undershirt, and fiery bald dome against the leonine head with the wavy white mane.

  They were whispering together. The engineer kept shaking his head. A muscle bulged out on his arm. Felix tapped the rebellious biceps, soothing it with a barely perceptible touch. The engineer was listening now, his bullneck calm, his shoulders drooping. I knew that something had been settled between them, though Felix continued to whisper sweetly into the big, hairy ear that was more accustomed to the din of screeching brakes.

  The engineer observed me sideways through his little left eye with its network of veins, looking so weary that he seemed to be on the verge of surrendering to some mysterious force.

  It was there, inside the racing locomotive, that I first saw Felix use this dark magnetic power. In the days that followed I was to have several more occasions to witness the phenomenon, and years later, when I conducted research on the subject, I heard many more such stories about Felix and his power to overwhelm people—there’s no other word for it—and bend them to his will.

  The amazing thing is that he rarely used violence—quite the contrary, in fact: it was almost as if he were able to create a chasm between himself and others, cushioned with kindness and the caring smiles people need so much that they let themselves float off in a fairy-tale trance. And that’s when Felix would zip the chasm over their heads, leaving them to wake up at the bottom of what was now a trickster’s suitcase.

  And me? Why did I go on believing his story? And what did I feel? I felt as if I’d been split down the middle: One part of me tried to cry out to the engineer and deny all the lies Felix had been telling him. And as I’ve already admitted, there was another part of me completely under the spell of Felix’s flashing blue daredevil eyes. Still a third part of me (I guess I was split in three) kept thinking, What an idiot you are, Nonny; has any other kid in your class ever driven a locomotive? Who else do you know who’ll get a chance like this! What would Dad say if he found out you wasted it after all the trouble he went to for you?!

  “Okay,” grumbled the engineer, straightening himself up with difficulty, “but only for a little while, for half a minute, no longer, it’s against the rules …”

  He was still leaning heavily against the wall in front of me, shaking his big bald head, but his arms hung limply at his sides and his eyes were in a fog. “But only for a little while. This isn’t right …” he mumbled, nodding vigorously, as though to cancel any memory of the deed.

  “Now, Eliezer”—Felix smiled happily—“please to drive engine.”

  I sat down on the driver’s swivel chair with my right hand on the throttle. I kept my left hand on the emergency brake, as I’d seen him do. He stood over me, tightening my grip around the brake, but I didn’t need his advice. It seems I had memorized his movements, as though guessing in advance that Felix would offer me this chance to drive. I picked up a little speed, and the engine obeyed with a roar. It was too abrupt, for a beginner, at least. I pulled down the brake that stops the engine, let some air out through the one above it, and suddenly I knew how to drive. Dad’s like that, too: get him into any vehicle and he’ll drive away in it, though I doubt that he’s ever driven a locomotive.

  But I wasn’t thinking about Dad just then. If I had been, I might have realized that there was something really weird going on. All I could think about was having to skip this part when I told my adventure to the kids at school. They would never believe it. But at least the story about blowing the train whistle could go back in, now that it seemed like a relatively easy thing to do.

  I remember this little window where the grime and dust had been wiped away, and through it I could see the tracks rushing at me before they disappeared below. The engineer leaned on me with the full weight of his lifeless body. His hand grasped mine around the brake, as if all his vitality were concentrated in this crucial limb. Felix, though, was positively glowing. His eyes shone like sapphires. He was so happy to be giving me this incredible gift. We were passing through the coastal plain. Banana plantations whizzed by us, fields of loamy soil, cypress trees, and furrowed sand … and on our right, a road, where I remember a red car moving slower than I was.

  And then it happened: There was an explosion inside me; the power of the locomotive, the roaring, the grandeur, the speed that made my hands tremble and sent the trembling up my arms and into my chest; I couldn’t contain it all, and I started screaming; here was
this hundred-ton locomotive, like a great drum pounding in my chest, what a heart had been given to me, and I pulled the throttle till the needle jumped on the dial and “hi-deh!” A hundred-ton locomotive, plus a hundred tons worth of railway cars, not to mention the poor passengers who knew from nothing! If I felt like it, I could leave the rails and go racing through the fields where no one would be able to stop this chariot of mine, drawn by 1,650 horses, and I, who until a moment ago had been an ordinary passenger on this train, not even bar mitzvahed yet, was suddenly summoned from among the multitude and chosen to sit in the driver’s seat, where I was doing a pretty good job, Dad would be proud of me, me, Nonny, driving a train, and all because I didn’t chicken out this time, there was nothing I couldn’t do, there were no limits, no laws …

  With all their might Felix and the engineer tried to pull me away from the control board. I don’t remember what happened exactly. I only know I struggled as hard as I could to keep driving. I was like a wild animal: stronger than the two of them put together, because I was getting power directly from the locomotive with its 1,650 horses.

  They won, of course. But it took their combined strength to drag me away. Felix held me so tight that it hurt. He was very strong for his age. He threw me down on the bench, and they both stood panting at my side. Sweat trickled down the engineer’s forehead and onto his cheeks and neck. He stared at me with revulsion, as if he’d just noticed something disgusting about me. “Go,” he said, his barrel chest rising and falling. “Please, I’m asking you, get out of here,” he said again, his voice breaking into a scream.

  “Oh yes, yes, of course,” said Felix absentmindedly. He looked at the clock on the panel, mumbling calculations. “It is exactly time. Thank you very much for everything, Mr. Engineer, and please forgive us if we cause some harm.”

  “It’s pure luck nothing terrible happened,” howled the engineer. He grasped his head with his hands. “What have I done? Oh no! … Enough … just get out of here. Enough.”