On the Blue Comet

by Rosemary Wells

  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:

  MR. APPLEGATE! DON’T EVER TAKE A JOB IN A BANK. DON’T EVER WORK FOR A MAN NAMED PETTISHANKS OR YOU WILL DIE BY GUNSHOT DURING A ROBBERY!

  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 193
1, 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.

  On the streets of Cairo, jobs were as rare as hen’s teeth. There was a shabbiness to people’s clothes and fear in their eyes because of the crash. But according to my dad, a man named Frank Roosevelt was setting up to run for president and make things better for the people in the country. I wanted so much to tell my dad that Mr. Roosevelt would succeed. He’d stand up on his two feet in spite of his polio and get the country back on the tracks again.

  In the meantime, Dad and I were soon to head for Cal­i­fornia, land of surprises. “I’ve got us two sleeper seats on the Golden State for July fifth night,” Dad said and fished in his pocket to show them to me. “It leaves from Dearborn Station in Chicago at 7:09. You’ve never been on such a grand train in your life, Oscar,” he said. “Never in your life.”

  I didn’t argue. Mr. Kinoshura made us two chocolate sodas. Nobody hated the Japanese yet, or even the Germans. No one was in a soldier’s or sailor’s uniform, and nowhere could we hear the voice of the wolf.

  Rosemary Wells has written or illustrated more than sixty books for children and has received numerous awards. She is the creator of the beloved Max and Ruby stories; the co-author (with Secundino Fernandez) of My Havana: Memories of a Cuban Boyhood, illustrated by Peter Ferguson; the author of Lincoln and His Boys, illustrated by P.J. Lynch; and the illustrator of My Very First Mother Goose, edited by Iona Opie. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Bagram Ibatoulline has illustrated many acclaimed books for children, including Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina, retold by Brian Alderson; The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Great Joy, both by Kate DiCamillo; The Animal Hedge by Paul Fleischman; Hans Christian Andersen’s The Tinderbox and The Nightingale, both retold by Stephen Mitchell; The Serpent Came to Gloucester by M. T. Anderson; and Hana in the Time of the Tulips by Deborah Noyes. Bagram Ibatoulline lives in Pennsylvania.