The boy and the bear were on an Amtrak, but it derailed north of Philadelphia because somebody put something on the track. Actually it was the Amtrak in front of theirs that derailed, but theirs was supposed to be soon after, and it couldn’t go its way down the East coast corridor until they removed the remains of the train in front of them. Some Amtrak representative was telling the boy and the bear to go take the bus, or rent a car, whatever they had to do to get to Baltimore. But they really wanted to take the train, and were wondering how long it would take for the Amtrak people to remove whatever it was from the track.
I’m not sure if they ever found out what it was. There was a guy in the Philly train station who claimed it was Union Jack, a famous ghost out in the woods down that way; apparently this Jack guy had lost a brother to the Amtrak, run over by the train while he was in his car, and Jack was determined to get revenge by removing engines from cars and placing them on the tracks every once in a while. What this guy in the train station was asserting was that this was a fairly regular event, like maybe every three or four months or so.
The bear was a bit perplexed by this, because he couldn’t imagine taking an engine out of the car. He’d derailed a train or two in his time; a good tree would do the trick – but what struck the bear about the story was how somebody would get a car to the point where one could simply remove an engine and get it over to the tracks, without blocking traffic. The bear was only familiar with a certain stretch of Amtrak tracks, and there weren’t a whole lot of places, along those tracks, where this kind of thing could be done. Besides, an engine was heavy, and it was attached in all kinds of ways to the rest of the car.
The bear and the boy, as it happened, were called back, and told that they could take that last train after all, since they were now almost finished cleaning the debris off the tracks, and since they both still had valid tickets in their sweaty hands, or paws, as the case may be. One problem was the luggage. The boy was carrying only a duffel bag, but the bear had a number of things, including a cherry tree and a u-turn sign, and it really wasn’t convenient at all for him to keep getting on and off a train.
The deck of cards they were playing gin with had presidents on it, and some kibbitzer pointed out the Warren Harding was the worst president ever. The boy noticed that Harding was like the four of clubs or something, not much in the big scheme of things, but didn’t object much because he really didn’t want to argue about history. The bear, however, had strong feelings about Truman, and began to argue. It wasn’t that he thought Truman was a bad president; it was more that he thought anything that was in his family’s lifetime was probably more important than anyone born before all the wars. And he wasn’t excited about it, he just calmly asserted, repeatedly, that Truman was the worst. You’d think one of his relatives was in Hiroshima or something, but it was really more about the Zoo Act of 1959, or something, and the building of the interstates destroying habitat in southwest Montana. The problem was, a lot of people on this train were involved in the argument. One guy even snatched the deck for a full three minutes, and they could no longer play until they agreed they would take a close look at Millard Fillmore. One other guy insisted that first had stolen Buchanan, because he couldn’t find him, but the first guy insisted that you couldn’t find Buchanan even if he was right in front of your face.
This train derailed too, or at least got stuck somewhere way out in the country, and wouldn’t move for a long time. You’d think there wouldn’t be much countryside this side of Philadelphia, but in fact there’s lots of no-man’s land, and that’s where they were. There was no point in getting out and hailing a bus even though they were only an hour or two from Baltimore. The card game had now become very rowdy, but one problem was that people were gambling increasingly large sums of money, and the bear didn’t have money; he couldn’t even fake it or get credit. And when people gamble real money there’s always a chance of a fight, and that was certainly true in this case, where the one guy was still stinging about the fact that people didn’t care much about Millard Fillmore, and the other guy had some thing about Buchanan, perhaps he didn’t like how they’d spoke poorly of him. These are both kind of obscure presidents, thought the boy – why not argue about Lincoln, or Jefferson, or one I’ve heard of? But in fact the boy was still trying to figure out how to play gin. The one time he won, almost by accident, he got enough pennies to last him a while, but after that he lost steadily and was wondering if he should break the ten-dollar bill he got in the diner.
4-16, Tom Leverett
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