Standing on the ladder, his face exposed to the cool morning air, Emmett was no longer stirred by thoughts of the past. What stirred him now was hunger. All he had eaten since leaving Morgen was the sandwich his brother had given him in the station. Billy, at least, had had the good sense to eat breakfast at the orphanage when it was offered to him. By Emmett’s estimation, they still had another thirty hours before reaching New York, and all they had in Billy’s backpack was a canteen of water and the last of Sally’s cookies.
But when the panhandler had told Emmett that they would stop for a few hours on a private siding outside of Cedar Rapids, he’d said it was so that General Mills could hitch some of their cars to the back of the train—cars stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes of cereal.
Emmett went down the ladder and gently woke his brother.
—The train’s going to be stopped here for a bit, Billy. I’m going to see if I can find us something to eat.
—Okay, Emmett.
As Billy went back to sleep, Emmett climbed up the ladder and out the hatch. Seeing no signs of life up or down the line, he began working his way to the rear of the train. As the General Mills cars were laden, Emmett knew that they were likely to be locked. He simply had to hope that one of the hatches had been left unsecured inadvertently. Figuring he had less than an hour before they were under way, he moved as quickly as he could, leaping from the top of one boxcar to the next.
But when he reached the last of the empty Nabisco cars, he came to a stop. While he could see the flat rectangular tops of the General Mills cars stretching into the distance, the two that were immediately in front of him had the curved rooftops of passenger cars.
After a moment’s hesitation, Emmett climbed down onto the narrow platform and peered through the small window in the door. Most of the interior was obscured by the curtains that bordered the inside of the window, but what little Emmett could see was promising. It appeared to be the sitting room of a well-appointed private car after a night of festivities. Beyond a pair of high-back chairs with their backs to him, Emmett could see a coffee table covered with empty glasses, a champagne bottle upside down in an ice bucket, and a small buffet on which were the remnants of a meal. The passengers were presumably in the sleeping compartments of the adjacent car.
Opening the door, Emmett quietly stepped inside. As he took his bearings, he could see that what festivities there had been had left the room in disarray. Strewn across the floor were feathers from a busted pillow along with bread rolls and grapes, as if they’d been used as ammunition in a fight. The glass front of a grandfather clock was open, the hands missing from its face. And sound asleep on a couch by the buffet was a man in his midtwenties wearing a soiled tuxedo and the bright red stripes of an Apache on his cheeks.
Emmett considered backing out of the car and continuing over the roof, but he wasn’t going to get a better chance than this. Keeping his eyes on the sleeping figure, Emmett passed between the high-back chairs and advanced cautiously. On the buffet were a bowl of fruit, loaves of bread, hunks of cheese, and a half-eaten ham. There was also an overturned jar of ketchup, no doubt the source of the war paint. At his feet, Emmett found the case of the busted pillow. Loading it quickly with enough food for two days, he spun it around by the neck to cinch it. Then he took one last look at the sleeper and turned toward the door.
—Oh, steward . . .
Slumped in one of the high-back chairs was a second man in a tuxedo.
With his attention trained on the sleeper, Emmett had walked right by this one without noticing him—which was all the more surprising given his size. He must have been nearly six feet tall and two hundred pounds. He wasn’t wearing war paint, but he had a slice of ham sticking neatly out of his breast pocket, as if it were a handkerchief.
With his eyes half open, the reveler raised a hand and slowly unfolded a finger in order to point at something on the floor.
—If you would be so kind. . . .
Looking in the indicated direction, Emmett saw a half-empty bottle of gin lying on its side. Setting down the pillowcase, Emmett retrieved the gin and handed it to the reveler, who received it with a sigh.
—For the better part of an hour, I have had my eye on this bottle, sorting through the various stratagems by which it might be delivered into my possession. One by one, I had to discard them as ill conceived, ill advised, or defying the laws of gravity. Eventually, I turned to the last recourse of a man who wants something done and who has exhausted every option short of doing it himself—which is to say, I prayed. I prayed to Ferdinand and Bartholomew, the patron saints of Pullman cars and toppled bottles. And an angel of mercy hath descended upon me.