“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 121: interview with Dick and Daphne Ridpath, July 14, 1987

Larry Winchester now leaves us in suspense as to the fates of the earthbound portion of our cast, and turns the camera and microphone onto “America’s most lovable literary literary couple”,* Dick and Daphne Ridpath, last seen in a flying saucer somewhere between the Earth and the Moon...

(Go here to see our previous chapter, or here to see the first chapter of this third-place prize-winner of the Bayer Aspirin Award for Old-Fashioned Epic.)

(N.B.: This episode rated X for Excruciating Marital Dialogue.)

*John Updike, on his deathbed.

“So I take the pilot’s seat while Brad hunkers down and goes to work on Mr. MacNamara,** and I figure, Okay, let’s give this a shot.”

“You were marvelous, dear.”

“Well, so were you.”

“Oh, hush.”

“No, you were. I mean, the poor kid, her dad’s lying there all shot up and whatnot. You were quite a trouper. You really helped."

“Right, I got coffee.”

“Well, sweety, right then I needed coffee.”

“I know. I said to him, ‘Dick, what can I do?’ And Dick says, well, he could use a cup of that joe. And I say, ‘Right, joe.’ I mean, I can do that. I can at least get coffee. And Brad looks up from where he’s holding his finger in my father’s bullet wound, and he says he could go for a cup too. So I’m there, two cups. Right. But I go over to the refreshment nook and guess what? All the coffee’s spilled. It had all just floated out during free-fall. It was then I realized that it had this special screw-on lid to keep the coffee in -- plus the bottom of the pot was magnetized somehow to keep it on the warmer-thing -- but of course we hadn’t put the lid on. And now I’m just cursing a blue streak. I mean, I just got upset and started to cry. And right then poor Harvey wakes up. Poor thing, he was just like a little boy waking up from a nightmare. Although I guess it was more like waking up into a nightmare. But he’s very disoriented, going what the f-word, what the f-word, and so on. So I go to him and start babbling about how I’m trying to get it together to make some coffee, and I’m sobbing buckets, and Harvey just says, ‘Calm down, Mrs. Ridpath, we’ll make the coffee together.’”

“Harvey was good."

“Harvey was a brick. and you know, he just sort of shook the cobwebs out of his head, got right up, marched over to that refreshment nook and started to make coffee like no one’s business.

“So, while Harvey got to work on that aspect of the mission -- and because I was standing there uselessly wringing my hands -- he suggested I get the cups and saucers and things ready. So I found some clean cups and saucers and a tray and some Oreos and put them on a plate and then just sort of hovered around while we waited for the coffee to finish dripping.”

“So -- I -- uh --”

“I kept glancing anxiously over at Brad doing that mumbo-jumbo revivification finger ceremony on poor Papa, and -- even though I was nearly petrified just to look -- a couple of times I did tiptoe gently over just to say, ‘Brad, is there anything I can do? Anything at all.’ And he’d say, ‘Just waitin’ for that java, Mrs. R.’ So I’d go back and watch the coffee drip some more. Oh, the tension. I was all a wreck.”

“You did fine, Daphne.”

“Thank you, Dick. So, finally, the coffee’s ready, I get the cups and saucers and the cookies all nicely arranged on the tray, and to save time I’d already fixed it the way Dick and Brad liked it, black for Dick, four packets of Sweet ‘n’ low and lots of Cremora for Brad, and I bring it over to Brad who pops an Oreo in his mouth and takes a cup, all the while holding a finger in poor Buddy’s bullet hole -- he’d already finished with Papa, who was still lying there comatose, and I bring the tray over to Dick, Mr. Mad Driver here, when -- whoosh!”

“I know, I know --”

“Coffee, all over the place, over me, over Dick, over his little dashboard --”

“Yeah, well, we’d just entered the Earth’s atmosphere, sweety. Things got a little rocky --”

“Oh, I’ll say. I had coffee all over my -- my front.”

“She burned her boobs.”

“Well, I did, and it hurt.”

“Well! So, anyway, there we were, crashing into the earth’s atmosphere --”

“They did hurt!”

“I know, sweety.”

“Well, okay, as long as you know. Because I really was trying to help. And now I was just devastated and miserable and my boobs were burnt. I was wearing this purple satin dress and it was low-cut, and --”

There was a pause in the conversation here.

“Right, so I never got my cup of coffee, and --” Mrs. Ridpath gave him a gentle slap on the forearm, “so, there I am at the wheel, trying to bring this baby in, trying to aim it at North America at least --”

“And I’m crying again --”

“Well, you’d spilled coffee all over yourself.”

“I know, but I don’t think you needed me bawling about a damn spilt cup of coffee.”

“Well, to be honest, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to you, sweety.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Darling, I was trying to land a spaceship.”

“Oh, I know. Tell your story.”

“Well, okay, so --”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, I --”

“I did bring you another cup of coffee, didn’t I?”

“Yes you did. And I really appreciated it, too.”

“Thank you. See, I wasn’t totally useless.”

“No, not at all. So --”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. So, there I am, zooming in. And after a minute I find North America. Great. Zoom in some more. Now -- where the hell is New Mexico?”

“Not easy to tell.”

“No --”

“No state lines, no color codes, just this undifferentiated mass.”

“Yeah.”

“Not like a map or a globe at all.”

“Yeah, so --

“Plus it’s nighttime.”

“True --”

“I don’t know how you ever found the right place.”

“Well -- um, how I found it was --”

“Oh, you are explaining.”

“Trying to.”

“Sorry, darling. I’ll just sip my vin ordinaire. Don’t mind me.”

“Thanks. So, what I did was, I thought I’d try to find the Rio Grande --”

“See, I’d never have thought of that.”

“Yeah, so --”

“I’m horrible at geology.”

“Geography.”

“Whatever. All these ‘phies’. I remember one time at Bennington I tried to drive with my friend Sophie Furness to New York and we wound up in Philadelphia. I remember seeing Billy Penn’s statue up on top of City Hall and thinking, ‘Wait, this can’t be New York!’ But go on, Dick.”

“Where was I?”

“Rio something. The Road to Rio.”

“Right. So, using my vast store of recollected, uh, geology, I finally zero in on New Mexico and the general area of this town called Disdain -- and this whole time we’re watching on one screen this whole business with Enid and Hope and the motorcycle gang -- don’t even ask me about the technology of this, how they were able to keep some sort of cameras on all this --”

“The outer space people are clever.”

“Damned clever.”

“I’m half outer space person.”

“At least. So, I could tell they were near that butte or mesa we’d been on earlier that day, the one with the atomic sinkhole under it, and so I just tried to find it. There’s lots of butte-things around there, but I remembered its position roughly vis-à-vis that atomic bomb-test town, so I found the atomic town finally, and there off a ways from it I saw the butte or mesa and I saw the headlights of the motorcycle guys streaming across the desert and I could see on the other screen that they were heading for Enid and Hope who were running across the desert, and so, well, I just held my breath and started to bring that baby down.

“Of course the problem here being that Brad was still busy trying to save Buddy, and I actually hadn’t the faintest idea how to land this flying saucer.”

“You did the best you could, dear.”


**{See Episode 115. -- Editor}

(Continued here. Please go to the right hand side of this page to find a possibly complete listing of links to all other published chapters of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, soon to be a major motion picture from First National, directed by Vincente Minelli and starring Ava Gardner and James Mason.)

Zoot Money: Zoot’s Suit --

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 126: loose

“...the one single author who out-creepies Poe, who out-confesses Augustine, who out-sensitives Proust, who out-epics Homer, who out-geniuses the Bawdy Bard himself: Arnold Schnabel.” -- Harold Bloom, in conversation with Oprah Winfrey.

Previously in this Catholic Standard and Times Award-nominated memoir:

Arnold with his friend Dick Ridpath and the aged shopkeeper Mr. Arbuthnot wander (through the mysterious agency of the Book of Time) a Cape May stopped exactly at 10:08:14 PM on the 10th of August, 1963.

Unfortunately Mr. Arbuthnot’s cat has begun to attack the open book, thus endangering all of existence...

“Quick,” said Mr. Arbuthnot, knocking the contents of his Meerschaum out against the railing, “we have to run!”

And, shoving the pipe into his pocket, off he shuffled back down the pier alongside the convention hall.

Dick and I traded the briefest of glances, like “What next?” and then Dick tossed his cigarette away over the side railing, and off we went running after Mr. Arbuthnot.

In about one second we were up to him, and I think both Dick and I realized at once that Mr. Arbuthnot's version of running was roughly equal to what we ourselves might consider a slightly brisk stroll.

“Hurry!” cried Mr. Arbuthnot, already getting out of breath, and as if Dick and I were the ones who were slow. “He’ll kill us all, the little bastard!”

Indeed the wooden planks of the pier were buckling and almost rippling like stormy waves themselves and the air shrieked as if the heavens were being torn in two.

Without thinking about it I scooped up Mr. Arbuthnot in both arms and carried him along, running with Dick by my side.

“Faster, Arnold!” cried Mr. Arbuthnot. “Faster!”

We made it down the steps from the promenade and ran across Beach Drive with its immobilized stream of cars now trembling and bouncing like the cars in a toy-train village laid out on a table which was being shaken vigorously by a naughty child.

“Try to run faster, Arnold!” yelled Mr. Arbuthnot, inches from my panting face.

He probably didn’t weigh too much more than a hundred and twenty pounds or so, and I’m in pretty good shape, but, still, you try running with a hundred-and-twenty pound old guy in your arms some time and see how soon you get out of breath.

I made it down the block almost as far as the miniature golf course on the corner of Ocean Street and then I started to falter.

Dick saw my condition and opened his arms; without a word I passed Mr. Arbuthnot laterally to Dick in mid-stride, and without losing a step he swung the old fellow over his shoulders like a large doll and trotted on.

“Faster, Mr. Ridpath! Cut through the miniature golf course!”

Dick ducked through the entrance and we dashed through the links, leaping little streams and fairways and ponds and sandtraps, bounding over the roof of a Taj Mahal, trampling the stunted trees of a Japanese garden, leaping the moat and towers and battlements of a medieval castle, and finally vaulting the fence on the Ocean Street side.

A sound like God sneezing shook the earth again and suddenly everyone on the sidewalk started walking backwards while all the cars on the street went by in reverse.

“Oh no” cried Mr. Arbuthnot, upside down over Dick's shoulders, “Shnooby must be scrabbling the pages backwards! If we don’t hurry he could change the whole course of history!”

“Well, you already said he could destroy the universe,” panted Dick.

“And he might still do that! My God! Hurry!”

Suddenly the earth seemed to drop several feet in space and then the cars and people began going forward again, but now at thrice their normal speed. Dick and I now had to dodge the trampling hordes of tourists as if they were some hideously numerous and fleetfooted football team determined to trample us underfoot.

One woman whacked me with her red plastic handbag and sent me almost tumbling to the gutter, but I stumbled on, and then with a great hiccoughing sound and another titanic lurch all the people and cars froze in their tracks again.

“Christ!” muttered Dick, stumbling and losing his hold on Mr. Arbuthnot who flew backwards flailing his arms and legs, but I managed to bend down and scoop him up in my arms before he hit the pavement.

I tossed him over my right shoulder, Dick gave me a clap on the arm, and on we ran down Ocean Street and across Columbia Avenue.

Dick and I passed off Mr. Arbuthnot again as we reached Hughes Street, and as we ran on I looked up through the trees and saw those immense marbled eyes the color of warm peach Jell-O looking down at us impassively from the nighttime sky.

Mr. Arbuthnot by the way had continued to yell variations of “Faster!” through all this. As we got to Washington Street, Dick, who was again carrying Mr. Arbuthnot over his shoulders, said, “Okay, Mr. Arbuthnot, I get it! Now shut the f**k up.”

“You sailors and your language,” huffed Mr. Arbuthnot and that awful ripping noise screeched through the air again.

Looking up I saw an enormous paw descending upon us.

“That’s it, we’re all dead!” cried Mr. Arbuthnot, and indeed the earth now shook more mightily yet. Looking up and back I saw the cat’s paw tapping the square bell-tower of Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, trying to decide whether to knock the whole thing down all at once or in easy stages.

“Oh thank God!” cried Mr. Arbuthnot, because now, thank God (or thank my and especially Dick’s athletic conditioning) we had reached the entrance to the Whatnot Shoppe.

Dick heaved the old fellow off his shoulders and set him deftly in front of the glass-fronted door.

Mr. Arbuthnot had not bothered to lock up of course, and in a trice we were through the shop and following the old man up the rear stairs to his apartment.

I came up right behind Dick, and the room suddenly rocked violently, like a cabin in an old-fashioned ocean liner caught in the grip of a typhoon. Mr. Arbuthnot scurried into the dining room, screaming at his cat, who stood over the Book of Time on the table, one paw raised to strike again.

“Shnooby! Bad cat! I’ll kill you!”

The cat jumped off the table and darted across the room and under an old credenza as Mr. Arbuthnot went over to the open book.

“That damned cat! Pardon my language, gentlemen, but --”

He bent forward over the book, and Dick and I drew closer, breathing heavily and streaming with sweat.

The room had stopped shaking. All was still and silent again except for the sound of our own labored breathing.

“Okay,” said the old fellow, “here goes. I must try to find the exact moment when we stopped time. What was it again, Mr. Schnabel?”

“I believe it was 10:08,” I said, “and fourteen seconds.”

“Very well, now or never --” in the pages of the book I saw tidal waves attacking the Jersey shoreline, jagged mountains rising up from the ocean, and the burning moon descending to the earth like a cannonball, while from the great Pine Barrens all hell broke loose from fresh-torn canyons in the earth’s surface.

Mr. Arbuthnot thrust his bony finger to the page and suddenly the chaos in the book subsided, the air around us breathed and moved, we could feel the earth enter the gentle stream of time again.

Mr. Arbuthnot looked from Dick to me.

“Check your watch, please, Mr. Schnabel.”

I did.

“10:08,” I said, “fifteen seconds, and counting.”

Mr. Arbuthnot sighed.

“Saved,” he said. He took his handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his brow, and then he closed the Book of Time.

“Now I really need a drink,” he said. “Will you join me for a quick one, gentlemen?”

(Continued here. In the meantime, please feel free to go to the right hand side of this page to find a supposedly complete listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™; all contents vetted and approved by the College of Cardinals; Nihil Obstat, Msgr. Frank X. Fahey, SJ.)

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 120: shitless

Larry Winchester* now cuts to the bold sculptress/café owner Enid and the ethereal rancher’s daughter Hope, running across the desert on this fateful night in September of 1969, somewhere near a dodgy little town called Disdain...

(Go here for our previous chapter; curious newcomers may go here for the first chapter.)

*”The Sergei Eisenstein of prose.” -- Harold Bloom

As they ran Enid saw the station wagon heading towards them fast at an angle from the left. She grabbed Hope’s arm and they both stopped, sweating and panting. (They both smoked entirely too much.) They stood there and watched as the car approached. Enid saw with some alarm that Derek was driving. Then Paco brandished a rifle from the passenger window, leaned his head out, and let loose with a mediocre war cry which abruptly collapsed into a coughing fit.

Enid suddenly realized that the shooting behind them had stopped. She looked back and saw that the Motorpsychos had now remounted their bikes and were wheeling out noisily.

She heard a horrible screeching and turned to see the station wagon veering off to her left as Derek apparently floored the brake. The car skidded and swerved, then turned left full circle and headed once again full speed straight at her and Hope. She didn’t know which way to duck. Then about six feet from the women the car U-turned brutally to the left again, rising up on two wheels and blowing exhaust and dust in a great cloud, then it turned on its side and skidded for about twenty yards with a sound like an enormous jagged chalk scraping across an enormous blackboard; and then it lay there, its tires spinning and its motor groaning like a dying elephant.

Enid and Hope looked at the wreck and beyond and through its cloud of dust they saw the Motorpsychos roaring and surging towards them across the desert.

Derek was such an ass.

****

“Oh, shit, Doc,” said Jake. He stroked the barrel of his Colt. Despite that good dose of the Doc's laudanum he was scared shitless again now. “Shit, fuck and double-damn, I can’t do this!”

They were about five hundred yards from the overturned station wagon and Hope and Enid. And maybe half a mile farther beyond came the roaring swarm of Motorpsychos.

The Doc lit up a cigarette with the dashboard lighter.

“They gonna kill us, Doc!”

The Doc shoved the lighter back into the dashboard and floored the accelerator.

“Don’t worry about it, Jake.”

They could see Enid and Hope pulling someone out of the upturned passenger side of the station wagon.

“Awww, shit!” whined Big Jake, putting one hand on top of his cowboy hat.

“Just think, Jake, Hope will think you’re a hero.”

Enid and Hope had gotten the guy out and he was sitting next to the station wagon holding his head.

“For maybe two seconds she’ll think I’m a hero, ‘fore them Motorpsychos kill us all!”

“Two seconds of glory, Jake.”

Enid and Hope were now apparently trying to get someone else out of the car.

“Don’t want two glorious seconds! Want a billion glorious seconds! Wanta live!”

“We all gotta go sometime, Jake.”

“I know that! But I don’t wanta go now! Wanta go later! Lots later!”

The Doc pulled the Caddy up to the side of the station wagon.

The guy on the ground was Paco, the Indian. He had his hand on his head and blood was pouring down his face. Enid and Hope were trying to pull that English rock star kid out of the car and he was shouting and cursing. He also had blood all over his face. The station wagon’s uppermost headlight was still lit and it laid an ever-widening silvery carpet across the desert for the Mortorpsychos roaring closer and closer at top speed.

“Bloody fuckin’ Jesus fuckin’ bloody fuckin’ Jesus fuckin’ fuckin’ Christ!” yelled Derek.

“Shut the fuck up, Derek, we’re trying to get you out,” growled Enid.

“Hi, Daddy,” said Hope, over her shoulder. She was hoisting Enid on her narrow shoulders as Enid struggled with Derek.

“Get in this goddam car, girl!”

“In a minute, Daddy.”

The Doc had put his cigarette in his mouth and grabbed his black bag off the floor, and now he got out of the car, leaving the ignition on and the door open.

“Now where the fuck you goin’, Doc!”

The Doc walked around the front of the Cadillac and over to the wreck.

Jake lurched his big ass over to the driver’s seat.

“Hope Johnstone, you get in this auto-mo-bile this instant!”

“Fuck you, Daddy, you’re a coward.”

She and Enid had finally gotten the groaning Derek out of the station wagon and they were lowering him to the ground.

“Don’t you call me a coward you little wetback!”

“Fuck off.”

Jake slammed the driver’s door shut.

“All right, then,” he said. “Fuck all y’all!”

The Doc turned around and flicked away his cigarette.

“Calm the fuck down, Jake. You’re not gonna outrun those guys anyway.”

But Big Jake was thinking if he took off now maybe the Motorpsychos would concentrate on doing whatever they were going to do to Hope and Enid and the Doc and the Indian and the Limey, and while they were picking them over he would be zooming away across the flats at the highest speed this old high-powered hunk of Detroit steel could muster, yessiree Bob, and maybe he could live, live God damn it, live, and he jolted the car in gear and turned it around one-eighty, and that’s when he saw it swooping down out of the night sky, first as tiny as a little green star and then getting bigger and bigger till it was just this big fucking green glowing saucer that looked like it was going to slam right into them all and paste them right over the desert floor.

And Jake had never been much of a praying man but in that moment he addressed the Lord:

“Lord -- if You’re up there Big Buddy and I ain’t sayin’ You are and I ain’t sayin’ You ain’t but right now I sure hope to hell You are -- Lord, if You see fit in Your almighty wisdom and mercy to get me out of this here scrape with this wretched old heart of mine still tickin’, why Lord old buddy You are gonna see one brand new changed Big Jake Johnstone and that’s for sure, an’ not the mean vile selfish nasty and concupiscent asshole I been for more’n these past past fifty years but a good man, someone folks’d see drivin’ his Cadillac down the road an’ say that man there, that man is not an asshole! No sir! No sirree Bob, sir!”

But saying this heartfelt prayer as he was driving at top speed abandoning his only daughter and them other ones to their fates as that old fuckin’ flying saucer just kept on coming straight at him with that rabid pack of bloodthirsty motorcycle bandits roaring up to the back of him, Big Jake just couldn’t help but adding:

“But shit damn, good Lord, I ain’t a one to criticize your works and ways, but God damn it if this precious gift of life you have given us don’t eat shit sometimes!”

(Continued here. Kindly see the right hand side of this page to find a supposedly up-to-date listing of links to all other possible chapters of Larry Winchester’s A Town Called Disdain™, third-place prize-winner of the 20 Mule Team Borax Award for Sprawling American Epic.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 125: in amber

“On the one hand we have the usual suspects: Joyce, Proust, Mann, et alia, and on the other hand we have only one name, one man, one giant: Arnold Schnabel.” -- Harold Bloom, on The Bonnie Hunt Show.

Previously in this Parade Magazine Award-nominated memoir, our hero Arnold and his fellow adventurers Dick Ridpath and Mr. Arbuthnot (and through the mystic means of that old gentleman’s Book of Time) stepped outside the Whatnot Shoppe into a world where time has come to a halt at exactly 10:08:14 PM (EST), on the 10th of August, 1963, in the quaint and somewhat careworn seaside town of Cape May, NJ...

It was as if all the world had become a wax museum.

“Jesus Christ,” said Dick, and he flicked his cigarette into the gutter. I watched it roll into the street a few feet, the only moving thing in the universe, and when it came to a stop a thin stream of smoke rose up from it in the bright still glare of the headlights of a frozen red Corvette convertible driven by a somewhat wild-eyed man whose own cigarette trailed a tendril of unmoving smoke off to one side of his head; the woman next to him seemed to be staring at me, or through me, with indifference if not boredom.

“Why don’t we take a stroll now?” said Mr. Arbuthnot, smiling as if proudly, cradling the bowl of his little Meerschaum in his little bony fist. “We can take as long as we want.”

“I’m not quite sure I can deal with this, to be honest,” said Dick. “I feel as if I’m in a dream. And I’m not sure how pleasant a dream it is.”

“It can be quite pleasant,” said Mr. Arbuthnot. “Sometimes I wander around for a whole day. Poking about. Looking at things. Touching things. Sometimes I’ll stop time in the middle of a fair day and take a stroll along the beach in my Panama hat. I’ll find some young beauty sunbathing on a towel and sit down next to her. Touch her velvety skin --”

“Okay, I get it, Mr. Arbuthnot,” said Dick. He took his cigarette case out of his pocket.

“Sometimes I’ll even put my hand on a young lovely’s warm breast,” said Mr. Arbuthnot.

“That’s weird, Mr. Arbuthnot,” said Dick. He clicked open the cigarette case. “Not to mention presumptuous.”

“But the young lovelies are never aware of my caresses. Or my kisses. Or my -- well, let’s only say I’m sure that I leave no evidence of my pleasures. I’m sure that the young ladies are only aware of the slightest odd fleeting sensation, a sensation perhaps not completely unpleasant.”

Dick had taken out a cigarette during this last little speech, but now he put it back, shut the case and dropped it back in his trouser pocket.

“You are one disturbing old gentleman, Mr. Arbuthnot,” said Dick.

“I don’t know why you say that. No harm done.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“Someday you’ll be old and celibate.”

“If I live long enough,” said Dick. He was looking around at this paralyzed nighttime world. He sighed, and looked at me. “What do you think, Arnold?”

To tell the honest truth I was getting used to this sort of experience. Once in the hospital I remember looking at the radium dial of my watch as the second hand went round and in the space of one terrestrial minute I could have sworn I lived a century, and a very tedious century it was. And another time, again at Byberry, I remember distinctly a whole week flashed by in the time it took to watch an episode of I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster.

Yes, stepping outside of my body, flying high above myself, chatting with Jesus, visiting God’s house in Heaven or enormous flying saucers in space, it was all in a day’s work for me, but I realized that the present situation was probably very unusual to say the least for Dick. He probably didn’t even remember that we had visited 1890s France the previous evening.

“I suppose I could take a short stroll,” I said. “But only if you’re in the mood.”

“It’s creepy,” said Dick.

“Normal life is creepy,” said Mr. Arbuthnot.

“This is really creepy.”

“You’ll get used to it!” said Mr. Arbuthnot. He had become quite animated now. He turned away from Dick, facing the street, his arms outstretched. “The world! The world is ours!”

Dick looked at me. Like, “What a wacko.”

So we walked around a bit, through the frozen town.

We went down to the boardwalk. Since it was well into the evening Mr. Arbuthnot couldn’t troll the beach looking for bathing beauties to caress, but he seemed quite happy with the many trapped-in-amber girls we passed in their summer dresses and shorts. He refrained from touching them, perhaps out of deference to Dick and me.

We came to Frank’s Playland.

“Want to go in?” asked Mr. Arbuthnot. “A game of ski-ball perhaps? What I do is, I go over to Frank and just pop a handful of quarters out of his coin-change machine; one day I played ski-ball for four hours absolutely free!”

“I’ll take a pass,” said Dick.

“Yeah, me too,” I said. I found Frank’s Playland unnerving enough even under normal circumstances.

“There’s the miniature golf course up ahead. A quick round on the house?”

“Maybe some other time,” said Dick.

I concurred. Miniature golf is one of the many amusements that for some reason not only fail to amuse me but indeed tend to induce deep despair.

We strolled on up the boardwalk.

There was the movie theatre, still showing A Gathering of Eagles, with Rock Hudson.

And I wouldn’t have minded losing myself in a movie for a couple of hours, or at least until the mushrooms wore off a bit.

“Sorry, Arnold,” said Mr. Arbuthnot, reading my mind, “that’s one thing we can’t do. We could go in of course but all we’d see is one frame, frozen like a snapshot. Very dull.”

“Okay,” I said.

We walked up the boardwalk towards the new Convention Hall, which extends out over the beach and the usually crashing but now silent surf. We walked past the gift shops, the fudge store, the store that makes the salt water taffy, the hot dog place.

“Bite to eat?” asked Mr. Arbuthnot. “It’s all free.”

“No, thanks,” said Dick. He’d finally broken down and lit another cigarette.

“Arnold?” said Mr. Arbuthnot. Somehow we’d gotten to a first name basis, at least on his part.

“I don’t want to spoil my appetite,” I said. “I’m supposed to have a burger some time tonight.”

“Ah, yes. With Alexandra,” said Mr. Arbuthnot. “Let’s go look at the ocean.”

“Okey dokey,” said Dick.

So we walked around the side of Convention Hall, out to the pier that extends out over the ocean when it’s at high tide, which it now was.

Waxwork people stood there, looking out at the frozen waves, the women’s hair suspended in the air in soft strands behind their heads.

One attractive girl of twenty or so was bent forward looking into one of those coin-operated binoculars as her boyfriend looked admiringly at her. I wondered what she was looking at. Was she hoping to spy a porpoise? It seemed a waste of a dime to me. The three of us joined the living statues leaning on the rail. Unlike them though we looked at an ocean that was not moving and surging, but absolutely quiet and still, like an ocean that had given up and died.

The day’s rain had left the night sky free of clouds, and thousands of cold unblinking stars were sprinkled across the darkness above us.

Then suddenly the world trembled and an enormous cat’s paw descended from above and tapped the ocean perhaps a mile from the shore. The earth shook, and we could see a surge of large waves rushing toward us as if a herd of giant maddened whales were invading us from underwater.

“Oh no!” cried Mr. Arbuthnot, gripping the rail. “It’s Shnooby!”

“Who?” said Dick.

“My cat! Shnooby! He’s attacking the Book of Time! We must get back before he destroys the entire universe!”

And looking up I saw the titanic cat, looking down at us, raising his paw again, trying to decide where to strike next.

“F--king hell,” said Dick.

(Continued here, that is if our heroes can make it back to Mr. Arbuthnot’s in time. Please look down on the right hand side of this page to find a purportedly up-to-date listing of links to all other published chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train to Heaven™; this project made possible by a generous grant from the Uneeda Cracker Foundation on the Arts.)