It

he promised himself. Like one of those or even better. Maybe even a Cadillac!
There were six tracks in all, swooping into the station like strands of cobweb tending toward the center: Bangor and Great Northern Lines from the north, the Great Southern and Western Maine from the west, the Boston and Maine from the south, and Southern Seacoast from the east.
One day two years before, when Eddie had been standing near the latter line and watching a train go through, a drunken trainman had thrown a crate out of a slow-moving boxcar at
Mm. Eddie ducked and flinched backward, although the crate landed in the cinders ten feet away. There were things inside it, live things that clicked and moved. ‘Last ran, boy!’ the drunken trainman had shouted. He pulled a flat brown bottle from one of the pockets of his denim jacket, tipped it up, drank, then flipped it into the cinders, where it smashed. The trainman pointed at the crate. ‘Take em home to yer mum! Compliments of the Southern-Fucking-Seacoast-Bound-for –Welfare Line!’ He had reeled forward to shout these last words as the train pulled away, gathering speed now, and for one alarming moment Eddie thought he was going to tumble right out.
When the train was gone, Eddie went to the box and bent cautiously over it. He was afraid to get too close. The things inside were slithery and crawly. If the rtainman had yelled that they were for him, Eddie would have left them right there. But he had said take em home to your Mom, and, like Ben, when someone said Mom, Eddie jumped.
He scrounged a hank of rope from one of the empty quonset warehouses and tied the crate onto the package carrier of his bike. His mother had peered inside the crate even more warily than Eddie himself, and then she screamed — but with delight rather than terror. There were four lobsters in the crate, big two-pounders with their claws pegged. She cooked them for supper and had been extremely grumpy with Eddie when he wouldn’t eat any.
‘What do you think the Rockefellers are eating this evening at their place in Bar Harbor?’ she asked indignantly. ‘What do you think the swells ar e eating at Twenty-one and Sardi’s in New York City? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? They’re eating lobster, Eddie, same as we are! Now come on — give it a try.’
But Eddie wouldn’t — at least that was what his mother said. Maybe it was true, but inside it felt more to Eddie like couldn’t than wouldn’t. He kept thinking of the way they had slithered inside the crate, and the clicking sounds their claws had made. She kept telling him how delicious they were and what a treat he was missing until he started to gasp for breath and had to use his aspirator. Then she left him alone.
Eddie retreated to his bedroom and read. His mother called up her friend Eleanor Dunton. Eleanor came over and the two of them read old copies of Photoplay and Screen Secrets and giggled over the gossip columns and gorged themselves on cold lobster salad. When Eddie got up for school the next morning, his mother was still in bed, snoring away and letting frequent farts that sounded like long, mellow cornet notes (she was Getting Off Some Good Ones, Richie would have said). There was nothing left in the bowl where the lobster salad had been except a few tiny blots of mayonnaise.
That was the last Southern Seacoast train Eddie ever saw, and when he later saw Mr Braddock, the Derry trainmaster, he asked him hesitantly what had happened. ‘Cump’ny went broke,’ Mr Braddock said. ‘That’s all there was to it. Don’t you read the papers? It’s hap’nin ail over the damn country. Now get out of here. This ain’t no place for a kid.’
After that Eddie would sometimes walk along track 4, which had been the Southern Seacoast track, and listen as a mental conductor chanted names inside his head, reeling them off in a lovely Downcast monotone, those names, those magic names: Camden, Rockland, Bar Harbor (pronounced Baa Haabaa), Wiscasset, Bath, Portland, Ogunquit, the Berwicks; he would walk down track 4 heading east until he got tired, and the weeds growing up between the crossties made him feel sad. Once he had looked up and seen seagulls (probably just fat old dump-gulls who didn’t give a shit if they ever saw the ocean, but that had not occurred to him then) wheeling and crying overhead, and the sound of their voices had made him cry a little, too.
There had once been a gate at the entrance to the trainyards, but it had blown over in a windstorm and no one had bothered to replace it. Eddie came and went pretty much as he liked, although Mr Braddock would kick him out if he saw him (or any other kid, for that matter). There were truck-drivers who would chase