Raising Cubby (15 page)

But no matter what his mother said about me as a dog, the stone kid remained. You could say what you wanted about me, but the stone kid stood there, mute testament to the power of sorcery. Cubby believed in the stone kid because he was tangible and real, and he had to have come from somewhere. An older kid might have assumed that an object like the stone kid had emerged from a concrete mold, but to a five-year-old, sorcery is an easier explanation to grasp than the operation of a factory.

“It’s a shame we live in a different school district. If that kid had been in your school, we’d probably know who he was. I wonder why his parents don’t try and change him back. Maybe he’s a stray, without any parents. Or maybe the wizard made them into frogs.”

“Yeah,” Cubby said slowly. He always watched that house closely whenever we passed by. I could see he was thinking about the Stone Kid and what he might have been and done.

A few months later, Cubby changed schools and we didn’t pass the stone kid too often anymore. With time, he faded from both of our memories, but the idea never really left us. After all, the world was a big place. There must have been other sorcerers out there, turning kids into rock. And what about pets? Dogs and cats could be even more annoying than children. Surely there were fields full of solidified animals out there somewhere. Cubby and I talked about the possibility whenever we saw evidence of sorcery in someone else’s yard. We decided it was one of those mysteries best left unsolved.

I found some of the stone kid’s cousins when Cubby was eight. They were just two hours from our home, in Rhode Island.

Every Father’s Day, I go to the Newport Car Show. It’s a very pretty event, set on the grounds of Portsmouth Abbey, with a few hundred classic cars parked on the grass overlooking Narragansett Bay. Most years, Cubby went with me. But every now and then, he was disagreeable and objected, and I ended up in Newport without him, free to graze and explore. It was one of those years.

The car show had ended, so I headed for the waterfront. There were always interesting things to see down there, especially at the ship chandler’s and the nautical bookstore. I was walking the alleys off Thames Street when I turned a corner and stopped short. There in front of me, behind a low iron fence, stood a herd of alligators, bears, and other fierce creatures. Stone children stood among them, little herdsmen frozen in time.

I approached slowly and encountered a sign. Aardvark Art, it said. I looked down, and as far as I could see, I was surrounded by reptiles and beasts with mouths agape, ready to devour me or at least tear off large chunks of me for their eating pleasure. I reached down to pet the nearest beast. Its skin was cool and a bit rough. Some were metal, others were stone. I looked for the wizard; I had to have one for Cubby and me.

After a brief negotiation and a small scuffle with a merchant who was busy turning a large pot of frogs into bronze paperweights, a four-foot alligator was purchased and loaded into the back of my Range Rover. The snout was concealed beneath the load space cover, but the tail curled upward and was plainly visible just inside the rear window. I headed home, beast in back, to pick up Cubby. When I arrived, Cubby climbed into the Rover without noticing the tail sticking up in back.

I quickly apprised him of the new situation. “Cubby, I got us a pet alligator. I found a wizard in Rhode Island who turns animals to metal. They said he will stay metalized, but you never know with
these wizards and demons. He might come back to life, so don’t go grabbing him. And let me know if you see the tail moving, because that means he’s waking up.” Cubby turned around and caught sight of the tail. His eyes got a bit wider, but I was quick to reassure him. “As long as he’s metal, he’s no more likely to bite than any of your other metal toys.” That must not have been reassuring enough, because his gaze remained locked on the tail all the way to our house.

When we got home, I opened the tailgate and prepared to lift out the alligator. Even in its metallic state, it was heavy. “He probably ate something big just before the wizards caught him.” Cubby seemed to accept my explanation, but he remained wary.

“Dad! Watch the teeth!” Cubby warned me whenever I got close to the snout, which was frozen into what alligators probably think of as a welcoming toothy smile, ready to snap my arm off if he should wake unexpectedly. We got the gator settled in alongside the house. Cubby would not tolerate having it inside, but he gradually came to accept it among the rocks and bushes outdoors. The longer it stayed in one place, the more confident Cubby became about the metalization spell.

Within a few months, he began taking friends out back to see the alligator. They developed a ritual. He called it Pet the Teeth. He was very proud of himself for being brave enough to stick his little paws right up by the metal beast’s mouth without getting them snapped off. Other children weren’t so sure, but he reassured them, just as I had.

“It’s usually okay,” he told them. “He hardly ever eats kids.”

I was glad to have taught Cubby a healthy respect for wizards, but it was equally important that he learn to respect heavy machinery. Either one had the power to squash him like a bug if he made a wrong move. One way to teach him that lesson was by going railroading. There is no mistaking the power and grandeur of a string of heavy diesel freight engines as they thunder ahead of a hundred loaded freight cars.

My relationship with railroads began when I was four. That’s when my dad took me to see the giant Baldwin locomotive in the basement of the Franklin Museum. The sight of that huge black engine would have terrified many kids, but I was entranced. There it sat, dominating everything else in the room. Seven hundred thousand pounds of steel. Thirteen feet high and eighty-eight feet long. It was the most impressive sight I had ever seen.

My dad lifted me up into the cab, where I grabbed hold of the controls and imagined the big steam engine moving under my command. I worked the levers and watched the boiler gauge as I rolled the engine out of the station, huffing and puffing and blowing the whistle at every crossing. It’s been fifty years, but I can still remember
the feel of the big throttles and the sound of the engineer—really a museum worker—as he told me, “Watch the water gauge! If it drops too low, you’ll have a boiler explosion!” That was the beginning of a lifelong love of trains, and a wariness of high-pressure boilers and indeed anything under pressure in a big steel vessel.

Could I find some trains for Cubby? I wondered …

Steam locomotives were long gone by the time he was born, but Conrail ran its big GE diesels right through Springfield every day. In fact, they had a terminal less than twenty miles from our house.

“Cubby,” I said one day, “would you like to go see some trains?” “Yeah,” he said, bouncing a good six inches off the floor with excitement. So we climbed into the car and headed south for Springfield. All the way, Cubby asked me about trains. What did they do? What did they look like? Could he drive one? Could he take one home to keep? I realized Cubby did not have a good grasp of what we were about to see. Some things are just beyond imagining, especially for a toddler.

Rolling down Memorial Avenue, we could see the train yard to our right, running for half a mile alongside the road, filled with hundreds of boxcars, tank cars, gondolas, and even rail cars loaded with new automobiles. They call those auto-racks.

Unfortunately, seeing was not the same as entering. Try as we might, I could not find an entrance to drive an automobile into the yard. Yet I knew there must be a way in, because I could see workmen walking around, working on the trains. We finally spotted the entrance, across from the Big E Fairgrounds. We drove into the yard, bounced over some unused tracks, and parked next to a dirty gray shed.

We had found our train yard. Right in front of us, two engines rumbled at idle. “Those are smaller switchers they use to move cars here in the yard,” I explained. Beyond them, on the long track out of the yard, five enormous GE mainline locomotives sat waiting. “Those engines have over three thousand horsepower apiece.
They’ll need five of them to get a heavy westbound train over the Berkshire Mountains.” Cubby was impressed.

Over the next few years, we visited the West Springfield yard more times than I can remember. We made friends with the train boss, who presided over the yard from his perch in the shed. Engineers and workmen would come and go as Cubby watched close and said little. In time, he became something of a mascot to the guys in the yard, and they let him have the run of the place. Cubby was very safety conscious, never once losing a leg or even the tip of a finger. He knew trains could flatten quarters like pieces of paper. That was enough to keep him well clear of the wheels and tracks and do his watching from a safe distance.

One day we were watching the men move cars around the yard when the engineer stopped his big diesel right next to Cubby and climbed down. “Would you like to drive the engine?” he asked. Cubby grinned and leaped straight up the ladder and into the cab. The engineer explained the engine’s controls. Cubby listened closely, and in a moment he was ready. Cubby and the engineer moved the reverser lever forward, released the air brake with a hiss, and pushed the throttle forward a step. With a rumble and a clank, the locomotive began to move. Cubby wiggled his ears and looked out the window. He was driving a train!

With me as a passenger, Cubby and the engineer moved freight cars between the main yard and a siding in East Springfield. Our trip took us back and forth across the Connecticut River and through the Amtrak commuter terminal. We waved at the passengers and Cubby blew the horn. It was quite an adventure.

Now our appetites were stoked for even grander adventures in locomotion. We began to wonder: Were there more train yards out there that we could see? Maybe bigger or better ones? We had driven past some huge rail terminals during our journeys to Boston and New York, but they were surrounded by fences and guarded by police. They weren’t open, like West Springfield yard. We needed a way in.

In fact, we needed a way into more than just train yards. We needed an entrée into all the facilities where good things happened: quarries, nuclear power plants, and even the Boston seaport. All those places were full of machinery and fascinating things happened inside, but ordinary people could not get in to watch. Somehow we had to become something other than ordinary.

The answer hit me out of the blue one day: We would become owners. Owners cannot be refused admission or thrown out. Owners are not trespassers and they are certainly not ordinary. They are a class unto themselves. I explained it all to Cubby. “You have the general public,” I said, “and then you have the owners. Owners get to go inside and see all the neat stuff, because they own it.”

Cubby understood my solution immediately, and together we conceived a plan. We would buy stock, beginning with railroads. People who own stock are called stockholders, and
stockholder
is just another word for … owner. I had a few stockbrokers as customers at work, so I called one and asked what shares of our local railroad might cost. The answer shocked me. I could buy a piece of Conrail for less than one hundred dollars! Being a big spender, I immediately bought ten shares in Cubby’s name. The certificates arrived a few weeks later, along with a whole bunch of printed material expostulating on the performance of the railroad. Our railroad. Cubby couldn’t read any of it, but he certainly admired the pictures. He immediately spotted some key differences between the images in the brochure and observed reality in the West Springfield yard.

“Those trains are cleaner than ours!” Even at that age, he recognized advertising spin.

“Yes,” I explained, “they photographed specially cleaned and detailed engines for the reports. Our West Springfield yard is filled with dirty workingmen’s engines.”

Cubby thought about that a minute, and said, “I’ll bet they have cleaner engines in the big-city yards. Let’s go see them!”

That Sunday, we set out to test our new status. Armed with our investor package, we headed for Boston. Our destination was Conrail’s Allston container yard, a location we had previously been turned away from by gruff railroad policemen. “Things will be different this time,” I told Cubby. “Now we’re owners. Watch what happens.” Cubby studied the annual report as we rolled down the turnpike toward Boston.

Having previously been refused admission in an ordinary car, we were returning in style, in our white Rolls-Royce. I was very proud of that car, and it showed. The dash was done in fine burl walnut and the upholstery was soft black leather. No mere carpets for our car—the woolen carpets were covered in fine sheepskin overlays, softer than any blanket. The engine was smooth and silent, moving the car with unmistakable grandeur. My Silver Shadow was thirty years old; a grand dame of automobiles. I was especially proud that I’d gotten her at auction for less than most people spend on a Kia.

You get a lot more respect in a Rolls-Royce than you do in a regular car, no matter who you are. You may look the same, but when you step into that car, the world sees you differently. The car says you belong, that you’re not a trespasser. I was counting on that to get us by the guards at the gate.