Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Madeleine woke her husband with a gentle hand and led him back to the spare bedroom Paulette had fixed up for them. Lying in bed, Dilby Gammond asked his wife how their daughter had taken the important news of her true parentage.

“It will take her some time to come to terms with it, I’m sure,” answered Madeleine.

“Do you think she’ll go along with MGM?”

“I don’t know. She’s very hard-headed. Very much Ellen’s little girl.” As Madeleine thought about her long-deceased friend, she ran her fingers slowly and affectionately through her husband’s thinning gray hair, his head pillowed snugly upon her large, warm, nourishing breasts.

George and his wife Dahlia Heyman couldn’t find their son Todd. They had just finished breakfast in the dining car, each ordering and very much enjoying the Santa Fe French toast which had been recommended to them by the woman in the room next to theirs. The woman was a successful Hollywood hairdresser. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Super Chief, which sped with minimal stops from Chicago to Los Angeles two days a week, was the train of choice for many of the well-to-do of Tinsel Town. Not that George and Dahlia and their missing son Todd had anything to do with Hollywood themselves. They were taking the train for two reasons: to see Dahlia’s sister in Pasadena and to celebrate Todd’s fifteenth birthday.

Todd loved trains. He was especially enamored of the ATSF, one of the country’s oldest and most beloved railroads. Todd would become slightly perturbed whenever someone asked why the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, its sleek Streamline Moderne locomotives emblazoned with the familiar, almost iconic, red-yellow-black pin-striped Indian “Warbonnet” paint scheme, did not, in fact, pass through Santa Fe, New Mexico. Without variation, Todd would explain that the civil engineers who had laid the track realized that they couldn’t surmount the mountains around Santa Fe, so they built the railway through the small nearby hamlet of Lamy instead. A smaller spur line was later constructed to take Santa Fe-bound passengers the final few miles of their journey.

Todd knew everything there was to know about the ATSF (excepting technologically abstruse engineering and design specs, and facts of a strictly proprietary nature). At the same time, Todd had been slow in certain areas of his social and psychological development. George and Dahlia had no name to give their son’s condition, unaware as they were of Hans Asperger’s groundbreaking research being conducted at the time in Vienna. Todd’s uncle Johnny merely called his nephew, with breathtaking insensitivity, “the idiot-genius.”

“I’ll search the front end of the train and you take the rear,” suggested George to his wife. The boy had excused himself to use the washroom as the three were finishing breakfast in the company of a gentleman who made his living selling microscopes for classroom application. Once Todd came to realize that their table companion knew absolutely nothing about the Super Chief beyond those items that pertained to his own traveling comfort and convenience, Todd retreated into his ATSF Railway System Time Table and only looked up to note to no one in particular that by his personal railroad chronometer (his most prized possession) the train was pulling into the La Junta, Colorado station (an operating stop only) a good one minute early.

Dahlia agreed with her husband’s plan and turned to initiate her half of the search. Both parents, though concerned, remained calm. Furthest from their minds was any possibility that Todd would have left the train even if he’d wanted to; it wasn’t due to stop again until 4:35 that afternoon (another operating stop with no discharge or receipt of passengers permitted) in Albuquerque.

As she reached the passage door, Dahlia stopped and turned back. “And we should meet back here, don’t you think?”

George nodded.

“Oh, and George?”

To which a porter, coincidentally placed between the two, replied, “Yes?”

“I beg your pardon. I was speaking to my husband,” explained Dahlia. The porter, who was trained to respond to the name “George” as tribute to the Pullman company’s founder, smiled indulgently.

Dahlia continued: “If you’re the one to find him, George, don’t scold him. I’m sure he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.”

“I don’t scold the boy. I never scold the boy.” Then, addressing the porter: “Our son Todd has wandered off. If you find a boy unattended, would you ask him to return to our room?”

“Yes, Mr. Heyman,” answered the porter. “But he isn’t a little boy, if I recall. He’s a great big boy.”

“He is,” said George, “and getting bigger every day. Todd isn’t like other children. But, of course, you’ve probably noticed that already.”

The porter nodded. “He asked me if I’d ever worked the ‘El Capitan.’ And ‘did the ATSF need Pullman porters on trains without sleeping compartments?’ That’s an ‘all chair’ car, don’t you know. ‘Why,’ I said, ‘every train needs a porter. There are lots of things that we porters got to do.’ He said if he couldn’t be an engineer, he’d be a porter. The boy loves trains.”

“That is a fact,” said George.

“And he ain’t the only different sort of boy on this train. Mr. Bergen’s riding with us on this trip. And he’s got his wooden boy Charlie with him — got the little top hat on and everything.”

Dahlia raised her eyebrows and said, “Ahh!” She and her husband loved the Chase and Sanborn Program with Edgar Bergen and his giggly sidekick Charlie McCarthy, and Todd was especially fond of Charlie after he heard him say on the radio how much he liked going places on trains. “I’d love for Todd to get the chance to meet him.”

Neither Dahlia nor her husband George was aware that their son was doing that very thing at that very moment. Both Todd and Messrs. Bergen and McCarthy were in the train’s observation car. Bergen’s impromptu performance for the occupants of that convivial car had been suddenly and effectively co-opted by Todd’s arrival, by the sudden entrance of a teenaged boy who, dead set on meeting his friend Charlie, had proceeded without attendance to proper railroad passenger etiquette, toward a bold introduction of himself.

Here is what Dahlia Heyman saw when she walked into the observation car eight minutes later:

“Aren’t you one smart cookie!” pronounced Charlie McCarthy through his ventriloquist Mr. Bergen.

“I’m not a cookie. I’m a boy.”

“Well, bright boy, let’s see if there’s anything you don’t know about this railroad.” Charlie turned to a thoroughly engaged woman wearing a blue suit with pleated skirt, her long blond hair curled into a sausage in the back. “Care to play ‘Stump the Choo-choo Genius’, my dear?”

The woman nodded enthusiastically, her morning Bloody Mary sloshing a little out of her highball glass. “I want to go from Lawrence, Kansas — I’m originally from Lawrence, Kansas — to Flagstaff, Arizona. I absolutely adore Arizona!”

Todd took hardly any time at all to deliver his response. As his mother looked on from the lounge door, he said, “You could take the Number Three — that’s the ‘California Limited.’ It makes a flag stop in Lawrence at 10:13 in the morning. But it’s a flag stop. I’d recommend the Number Nine, the ‘Navajo.’ It stops in Lawrence at 1:48 in the afternoon. It gets into Flagstaff at 9:25 the next evening. The ‘California Limited’ arrives in Flagstaff at 6:05 the next evening. But Lawrence is a flag stop. You take your chances with a flag stop.”