The Cat's Pajamas

I leaped to the back car door and flung it open wide.

“Bastards!”

Three dozen lawyers jumped at my steam-whistle shriek.

“Fire!” I screamed. “Ford’s Theatre is on fire! Fire!” I shrieked.

And everyone on the damned and terrible train heard.

Old-fashioned doors were flung wide. Old-fashioned windows flew up, jam-packed with yells.

“Hold on!” cried Green.

“No!” I shouted. “Fire, fire!”

I ran, yelling, through car after car and spread the blaze.

“Fire!”

And panic suctioned all and everyone off the train.

The platform swarmed with victims and crazed lawyers, scribbling names and babbling.

“Fire,” I whispered a final time, and the train was as empty as a dentist’s office on a bad noon.

Green staggered up to me, and this time his feet looked sunk in concrete. His face was ashen and he seemed unable to breathe.

“Turn the tra

in around,” I said.

“What?”

Marty led me through a litter of unlit Cuban cigars and playing cards.

“Around,” I wept. “Take the train back to Washington Station, 1865, April.”

“We can’t.”

“You just came from there. Back, oh dear God, back.”

“No return tickets. We can only go ahead.”

“Ahead? Does MGM still have a track switch not covered up by asphalt? Pull in there, like in 1932, drop Louis B. Mayer, tell him Thalberg’s alive on the fourth car back, Mayer will have a heart attack.”

“Louie B.?”

“Harry Cohn too,” I said.

“MGM’s not his studio.”

“He can call a cab or hitch a ride, but no one gets back on this stupid idiot bastard train.”

“No one?”

“Unless they want to be buried in Ford’s Theatre when I really strike a match and light the fire.”

The lawyer mob on the platform surged and bleated.