The waste lands - Stephen King [83]
He was given a job cleaning the engines in the St. Louis yards, and Engineer Bob became Wiper Bob. Sometimes the other engineers who drove the fine new diesels would laugh at him. “Look at that old fool!” they said. “He cannot understand that the world has moved on!”
Sometimes, late at night, Engineer Bob would go to the far side of the rail yard, where Charlie the Choo-Choo stood on the rusty rails of the lonely siding which had become his home. Weeds had twined in his wheels; his headlight was rusty and dark. Engineer Bob always talked to Charlie, but Charlie replied less and less. Many nights he would not talk at all.
One night, a terrible idea came into Engineer Bob’s head. “Charlie, are you dying?” he asked, and in his smallest, gruffest voice, Charlie replied:
Don’t ask me silly questions,
I won’t play silly games,
I’m just a simple choo-choo train
And I’ll always be the same.
Now that I can’t race along
Beneath the bright blue sky
I guess that I’ll just sit right here
Until I finally die.
Jake looked at the picture accompanying this not-exactly-unexpected turn of events for a long time. Rough drawing it might be, but it was still definitely a three-handkerchief job. Charlie looked old, beaten, and forgotten. Engineer Bob looked like he had lost his last friend . . . which, according to the story, he had. Jake could imagine children all over America blatting their heads off at this point, and it occurred to him that there were a lot of stories for kids with stuff like this in them, stuff that threw acid all over your emotions. Hansel and Gretel being turned out into the forest, Bambi’s mother getting scragged by a hunter, the death of Old Yeller. It was easy to hurt little kids, easy to make them cry, and this seemed to bring out a strangely sadistic streak in many story-tellers . . . including, it seemed, Beryl Evans.
But, Jake found, he was not saddened by Charlie’s relegation to the weedy wastelands at the outer edge of the Mid-World trainyards in St. Louis. Quite the opposite. Good, he thought. That’s the place for him. That’s the place, because he’s dangerous. Let him rot there, and don’t trust that tear in his eye—they say crocodiles cry, too.
He read the rest rapidly. It had a happy ending, of course, although it was undoubtedly that moment of despair on the edge of the trainyards which children remembered long after the happy ending had slipped their minds.
Mr. Martin, the President of The Mid-World Railway Company, came to St. Louis to check on the operation. His plan was to ride the Burlington Zephyr to Topeka, where his daughter was giving her first piano recital, that very afternoon. Only the Zephyr wouldn’t start. There was water in the diesel fuel, it seemed.
(Were you the one who watered the diesel, Engineer Bob? Jake wondered. I bet it was, you sly dog, you!)
All the other trains were out on their runs! What to do?
Someone tugged Mr. Martin’s arm. It was Wiper Bob, only he no longer looked like an engine-wiper. He had taken off his oil-stained dungarees and put on a clean pair of overalls. On his head was his old pillowtick engineer’s cap.
“Charlie’s is right over there, on that siding,” he said. “Charlie will make the run to Topeka, Mr. Martin. Charlie will get you there in time for your daughter’s piano recital.”
“That old steamer?” scoffed Mr. Briggs. “Charlie would still be fifty miles out of Topeka at sundown!”
“Charlie can do it,” Engineer Bob insisted. “Without a train to pull, I know he can! I have been cleaning his engine and his boiler in my spare time, you see.”
“We’ll give it a try,” said Mr. Martin. “I would be sorry to miss Susannah’s first recital!”
Charlie was all ready to go; Engineer Bob had filled his tender with fresh coal, and the firebox was so hot its sides were red. He helped Mr. Martin up into the cab and backed Charlie off the rusty, forgotten siding and onto the main track for the first time in years. Then, as he engaged Forward First, he pulled on