Page 2 of Whistle
“Just across the border into Vermont.” He paused, lowered his voice. “Lucknow.”
“Oh God,Lucknow. He sure got out of that town just in time.”
“Yeah, moved away before it happened.”
“His wife was one of the vic—”
“No,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper so the kids wouldn’t hear. “She got electrocuted a week or two before. But he grew up around here. Got a sister in Fenelon. Decided to sell the house, move back. Hell of a thing, what happened back there.”
He gave his head a sorrowful shake. “Anyway, he brought this box in, and I thought he was selling it, but he was giving it away to the first person what wanted it, he had no need for it, said the movers packed it without him realizing. And I said, hey, I know just the boy who’d love this.” At this point, he gave Jeremy a big smile. “Give it a chance, won’t you, sport?”
He reached into the box, pulled out several sections of track, then a heavy black boxy item about half the size of a loaf of bread.
“This here’s the transformer, brand-new,” he said. “Wendell didn’t have the original one that came with the set, so I picked this one up at a hobby shop in Binghamton.” He grinned. “Train won’t run without it.”
He set down the transformer and brought out from the box a shiny red boxcar with thesantafelogo printed on the side. He held out the car, about a foot long, to his son. “Just ’cause it sayssantaonthe side doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Santa Claus. Santa Fe is a very important railway in the history of America. And check this out. The doors open and close and the couplers work and it looks like the real thing.”
With limited enthusiasm, Jeremy allowed his father to place it in his outstretched hands for a closer examination.
And something happened.
Jeremy felt a... what, exactly? A shock? No, couldn’t be a shock. The transformer wasn’t even plugged in. But there was something... like a tingle. He could feel it running all the way up his arms, if only for a millisecond.
He brought the toy boxcar close to his face, studying it. Ran his fingers along the sides, feeling the raised bumps meant to replicate rivets. Opened and closed the side doors, spun the thick metal wheels with his finger.
“Pretty neat, huh?” said his father.
Jeremy, feeling his earlier indifference shifting into something approaching enthusiasm, said, “Can we make it go?”
“Let’s make a circle of track around the bottom of the tree.”
Each track piece had a third rail that ran down the middle. “That carries the electric power and the outer rails are the ground,” his father said. “Keeps it from short-circuiting. But don’t worry, it can’t shock you.”
Once the track sections had been made into a continuous loop, Jeremy pulled out more items from the Tide box and started to carefully place them onto the track, making sure the wheels’ flanges were set within the rail edges. All that remained to make the train operational was the engine.
Jeremy picked up the weighty locomotive and the attached tender withpennsylvaniaemblazoned on the side.
“The tender’s where they kept all the coal that they had to keepfeeding into the engine to keep it going,” his father said. “You don’t see anything like that these days.”
Inside the locomotive cab, sitting at the controls, was a tiny engineer, dressed in overalls and a striped cap, his head no larger than a pea. Jeremy leaned in for a closer look.
“Pretty realistic, huh?” his father said.
“He winked at me,” Jeremy said, and his father laughed. He turned the engine around, grasping it with both hands, and looked straight into the headlight mounted on the front.
“The light’ll come on when we get it on the track and turn the throttle,” his father said, which struck Jeremy as an odd thing to say, given that he could already see a faint glimmer in the bulb.
Glynis, stroking the hair on her Bratz doll, bored and annoyed that this dumbass train set was getting so much attention, asked, “Are we gonna have breakfast or what?”
As Jeremy set the locomotive onto the track, there was that tingle again. It was hard to describe, but it felt a little like that old gag gift his friend Ricky had tried on him. A joy buzzer he’d found in his own father’s box of mementos. You slipped it into your palm and when you shook hands with someone they got a zap. But this was like a tenth of that. Subtle, pleasing almost.
Jeremy’s father ran two wires from the underside of the track to the two terminals on the transformer, screwed down the threaded connectors to ensure good electrical conduction, then plugged it into the wall. There was a handle on the top of it, which he explained was the throttle.
“Crank ’er up!”
Jeremy turned the throttle, and as if by magic the locomotive made an electrical humming sound, the headlight illuminated, and as he moved the handle farther to the right, the wheels beganto turn. Feathery wisps of smoke puffed out of the steam engine’s smokestack. And what a glorious sound it made.
Chuff. Chuff. Chuff.
