“What do you want?” Arlo said. He had a high voice, and sounded like he might break down crying at any moment.
“Well like I said, I need a birthday present for my brother. I mean, between you and me, he’s been kind of a shit lately, so it’s not like he actually deserves anything, but lucky for him I’m not the type to hold a grudge…Anyway, this last year he’s gotten into the whole toy-train thing, so I wanted to get him some stuff.”
“What kind of trains?”
Reverting to stupid-chick mode: “Oh, you know, the kind with wheels?”
“What scale?”
“Scale?”
“HO? O? N? Z?”
“You see, this is why I had to come to a brick-and-mortar store instead of just buying off the Internet. I have no idea what you just said.”
“The scale of the trains. HO is 1:87. O is—”
“One to eighty-seven what?”
“It’s a size ratio. HO-scale model trains are one eighty-seventh the size of real trains.”
“Oh…Well, I’m not sure. I know the trains he’s got are small, but I’ll be honest, I was never that good with fractions…What scale are those?” I raised my arm to point; Arlo ducked sideways as if my finger were the tip of a spear, which gave me an opening to move past him. I walked up to the train layout. “Yeah, these look about right…” One train was approaching a bridge near the edge of town; I plucked the locomotive from the track, sending half a dozen passenger cars plunging into a river gorge. “Is this HO size?”
Arlo’s cheeks were billowing in and out, and he’d just about bitten his lower lip off. “Sorry,” I said again. “This is the right size, though, I’m almost sure…Do you have any like this?” Unable to speak, Arlo gestured to a nearby display case—and immediately regretted it.
The display case was locked, but by jiggling the glass doors I managed to knock over a couple of the train cars inside. I turned to Arlo: “Could you open this up for—”
“No.”
“I just want to look at—”
“No.”
“OK.” I shrugged, and jabbed a finger at a random locomotive. “What’s that one called?”
“The Burlington-Northern.”
“And that one?”
“The Union Pacific.”
“And that one?”
“The Illinois Central…Listen, I don’t have time to name every—”
“Ooh! What about that one up there?”
“The Southwest Chief.”
“That one’s pretty slick. Does it come in other colors?”
“No, it doesn’t…Now I’m really kind of busy this morning, so if you aren’t sure what you want—”
“What about monkeys?” I said.
“Wh-what?”
“Monkeys.” I smiled at him. “It’s freakish, I know, but when we were kids my brother was a big-time Curious George fan, and he never totally outgrew it. Do you have any trains with monkeys on them?”
“No. I don’t have anything like that. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“What about a case?”
Arlo bit his lip again.
“You know,” I continued, “like a carrying case? Since my brother got into the hobby, he’s made some…interesting new friends. So I thought he might like a case to carry his trains in, when he goes to visit them. You got anything like that, say about this big? In a nice black, maybe?”
A phone began to ring in the store’s back room. Arlo turned his head towards the sound. “You want to get that?” I asked him. It was obvious he did—at least, he wanted to get the hell away from me—but it was just as obvious he was afraid of what might happen to his toys if he left me alone with them. “It’s OK,” I assured him. “I promise I won’t touch anything while you’re gone.”
That really made him nervous—as he headed into the back, he took a last look at the train layout, like he was sure I was going to trash it the minute he was out of sight.