Running that almighty steam tractor meant that I was up from sunup literally to sundown, with only brief breaks to eat at the house or to stop for water or coal, but I'd take a day like that over a school day at any opportunity.

It wasn't anything against the school itself, which my father had attended some thirty years before and he'd often talk about what a great thing it was that both his children were attending exactly the same school. In giving these speeches he'd occasionally pause and look at me in a way that made it clear a response was expected, and I'd give a nod, which was usually enough to start him talking again and get me off the hook.

I knew that even when my father had been attending that school they'd been building bigger schools than this. I knew because I'd read about them in the newspapers the schoolteacher would leave out next to the door. Sometimes there was a picture of a sprawling brick building with the slightly grainy text nearby telling that the (any famous person) Secondary School was unveiled this week in Pomona, California, or Portland, Oregon, or some other place I'd never been to. The only one that stuck in my memory was the school in San Francisco, because I knew the Daylight stopped at that city. I wondered if there were kids who took the Daylight to school.

These schools were a world away from my own, which was one room in a wooden building about the size of our church. The desks were made out of frilly black cast iron (they reminded me of park benches) and the seats and desk tops were wood, unfinished but sanded absolutely smooth by hundreds of arms. Sometime when I was in the seventh grade, someone attempted to "brighten things up" by painting all the carved woodwork along the walls and corners white; it had begun to crack and peel before the year was over and now it looked even dingier than before. At least it didn't have that musty "old house" smell to it, the smell that reeked of dust, mothballs and neglect. Maybe it was because the teacher insisted on keeping the windows open all the time, even in the fall.

It was about two years after the woodwork got painted that Lionel showed up. We knew instantly he was a city kid, the rest of us having real names like Bob and Jim and Charlie. We couldn't even get him to shorten it to Ly or anything like that - no, he insisted, it's not Ly, it's not Lenny, it's not Lonny, it's Lionel! Not that this stopped them from ribbing the heck out of him. Maybe "ribbing" is too weak a word to use in this case; to adults, it was mere ribbing. To an adolescent, it was cruelty.

There was an inexhaustible supply of things to make fun of Lionel for. The rest of us had to wear nice clothes to school; this didn't quite mean the full Sunday get-up, but it did mean the newest pair of jeans (without holes), a shirt with a collar and cuffs, and our hair got combed. It also meant that if you had got yourself hurt recently, you wore something to cover up both the wound and the bandage lest you disturb the teacher or the other girls. Lionel, being a city kid, wore some kind of nice pants and a tie every day. It didn't help that he carried his books in a leather pouch with a strap that went around his neck that he called a "valise." He never could convince them that it wasn't a woman's purse, had nothing to do with a woman's purse, will you please stop calling it that! Needless to say, it was a hopeless cause. He even took put-downs from a couple of girls, something almost unheard of. Girls were creatures you had nothing to do with unless she was your sister, and you didn't talk about them until age sixteen or seventeen, when they became objects of mystery and fascination.

I never lifted a finger to stop the abuse hurled in Lionel's direction, but at least I never hurled any myself. Part of it was because I'd taken some of that in my earlier years at the school and my only solace was the teacher assuring me the other boys were the ones in the wrong, so for me to join them now would have taken a double-standard, something I wasn't quite capable of yet. More importantly, Lionel's name was the one always on the side of the expensive toy trains buzzing around the toy shops in town, and the advertisements for model trains in the newspaper always bore the name Lionel. Maybe the connection was a shaky one at best, but that didn't matter; this was one kid instantly worthy of respect!

During class, Lionel always sat in my row. The rows were set up according to grades, so the first-graders were in the front row, the second-graders right behind them, and so on back a full thirteen rows (well, twelve and a half, actually; one-half of the last row was taken out to make room for an indoor outhouse). The teacher was always chiding the first-graders for swinging their legs beneath their desks, and then she'd point to the rest of us as a non-swinging example (of course we didn't swing our legs; our feet could reach the floor by our age). In the course of a typical day, Lionel could generally expect to have at least one of his pencils stolen; he told the teacher the first few times this happened, but stopped after he found out doing so made them go after him even more during lunch.

When out for lunch, Lionel always sat by himself, usually out in the blazing sun because everyone else would gravitate toward the shade of either the schoolhouse or the only tree in the yard. The sun formed a good insulation, since the other boys generally wouldn't leave the shade to torment him; if they shouted at him, he could ignore them. Sometimes, though, it was cool enough that they'd go surround him, demand to know what he'd brought for lunch, take his lunchpail and force him to chase them to get it back. I wondered when they'd come up with something new; they'd done all that stuff to me. That was also part of the reason I kept out of it: I'd taken it, no reason Lionel couldn't.

The war, as we knew it, had been going on for three or four years when Lionel and I entered our last year at the school. I'd never spoken to him, though we'd glanced at each other a few times. Maybe I stood out a little to him, simply because I wasn't one of his tormentors. Lionel always had this look about him I couldn't quite place. His eyes were vaguely almond-shaped, his skin less ruddy than the rest of us. He couldn't be Japanese, though. Out in the sun I could see his hair was more of a dark brown than a black. There had been one or two Japanese-looking farmers in the valley before the war, but I hadn't seen any of them since I began the eighth grade.

Something changed in that last year. The other boys started leaving Lionel alone. It wasn't that they were paying less attention to him. I knew they were staring at him more. Lionel didn't seem to mind. He only got worked up at all when one of them started talking to him. We're gonna beat you, they'd tell him. Our boys have beaten you. You can't beat me, he'd sometimes answer, I'm with you fellas. They didn't answer that. I'd been thinking about talking to Lionel a little, see if he really did know anything about Lionel trains, but now I was even less willing to go near him than I'd been before.

The sun was out that late spring day as I was walking the two miles home from school. The road I took was of blazing, tan-colored dirt, and the fields around me were a pale gold. Far off in the distance stood the Sierras, white and light blue, and I wondered what those snow-capped mountains must feel like on a day like this. Coming up close to an irrigation ditch running alongside the road, I dropped down into the ditch and walked there underneath young trees that could get along here by the meager, muddy water it offered. It was like walking home in a swamp cooler, balancing myself along the narrow shelf carved by innumerable young feet on innumerable hot days before me.

I hadn't gotten much closer to home when I heard shouting above me, somewhere in the fields. Men shouted at each other in the fields all the time when it was spring - they had to get it plowed and planted quick, unless you happened to get that job done early, as my father always did. But these were boys shouting at each other, boys from school. I recognized some of their voices and peered up over the edge of the ditch.

Lionel was at the center of it all, clinging to his valise with both hands, his almond-shaped eyes wide and flickering in all directions. I'd seen rabbits do that when they're caught in a trap; they'd sit down and tuck their front paws beneath them like a cat, and they'd look calm and composed, but I could see their eyes darting every which way, as if there were only one chance to run and he wasn't going to waste it.

Yes, that was how Lionel looked now, surrounded by boys seventeen and eighteen years old, some a head taller, most with shoulders broader. A few had their younger brothers with them, and they stood off to the side, gripping the child's shoulders, both their faces expectant. They weren't so much shouting at him as speaking loudly, in stage voices to make sure their audience caught every word. A lot of high-end terms were thrown at him - traitor, spy, and the like - but one seemed to recur a lot: Jap. It seemed that whenever their collective vocabulary failed them, they fell back on that one word, "Jap."

Finally, one of them approached Lionel, someone I knew called Randy. The approacher's back was straight, his arms at his sides, feet apart. Lionel instantly bolted like a rabbit - that is, with the same bullet-fast response and grace in running. He might have gotten away if the other boy hadn't had a longer stride and tackled him.

I could see right off it wasn't a fair fight, what with Randy being so much larger. What made it even more so was the fact that Lionel wasn't even trying to fight back. I felt my hand spring free of the weight of the books I was carrying, felt my back arch and my feet scramble for traction in the loose dirt, then I shot up the side of the ditch and out into the open

It was dusty up there, and I felt the dry weeds crackle as they were crushed beneath my footsteps. Lionel had been forced to the dirt, and dry brown dust drifted around them as Randy started throwing punches. I got my arms around his chest and literally lifted him up and away. We staggered back. "Get off me! Get off!"

I answered with the one retort I could think of: "You'll kill him! You're killing him!"

"He deserved it! Now get off! Get off!"

"You'll kill him! You'll kill him . . ."

He struggled like the devil to get out of my grip, but I had my hands locked together. The other boys watched silently, not moving, the young ones awestruck. Once or twice I caught a glimpse of Lionel in the dirt, unmoving, something glimmering around him.

Randy eventually stopped. I let go. He gave me a shove in the chest, which I'd been expecting, but I'd also expected he wouldn't try to hit me. He didn't. Instead, he talked. "Look at him. He's a Jap. We're at war with 'em."

"Wasn't a fair fight, Randy."

"It's war."

"Still wasn't a fair fight."

He looked like he was going to say something else. Then he looked around. The circle around us was dissipating, boys turning to go down the road or down the ditch, the older ones leading the younger ones away. I felt my face heat up as though embarrassed, self-conscious about how skinny me had somehow cowed the enormous Randy into submission. Maybe it was just a matter of hanging 130 pounds of dead weight around his neck until all the fight was out of him.

Randy looked like a steam engine that had lost all its power in one single 'chuff.' "Come on," he said.

By this time, Lionel was sitting up. Blood had been running out of his nose like a faucet and turned purplish-black on his shirt. I took a rag out of my pocket and tossed it to him. "Later," I said. "I've got to wait till he's done with that."

"It's a rag. Come on."

"I'll need it later. I only got one."

That seemed to pacify him. "See you tomorrow."

"Yeah." Randy left along the road, back still straight but looking strangely collapsed. I stood there, looking around like there was something to look at, trying to look at everything except the wreck of Lionel, mopping the blood from his shirt and tie as best he could. I had a feeling he'd catch some flak for it at home. I stirred around him for a few more minutes, then asked point-blank "Are you a Jap?"

His reply was equally point-blank, but more desperate: "No! I was born in America. In Yakima Valley, up in Washington."

He paused. I wanted him to go on, and he somehow knew. "My grandmother was an Indian. Some people think they look Japanese." He stopped again, wiping the last remnants of blood from his face. It still left a faint, rusty smear.

I didn't really want to talk about that. I finally blurted out what I'd been meaning to ask him for three years. "Do you know the Lionel people?" A puzzled look seized his blood-smeared features. "Lionel trains?" I continued.

"Oh, yeah." He was fastidiously folding the rag like a handkerchief, and he let something like a smile dance around his face. "It's just the name, actually. But I do have one of their trains. Jaunty little 'Atlantic Flyer' set. I'll be working for the trains as soon as school's over."

My ears pricked up. "For Lionel?"

"No, for the real thing. The Southern Pacific."

"You're not too young?"

"Not really. I learned to type at school back in Oregon. My father has a cousin in San Francisco who thinks he can get me a job typing up train orders or something. It's the war. The railroads are all shorthanded."

He stood up and instantly started leaning to the side as if to fall. I froze, not sure what to do. By the time I moved, he'd found his balance and was extending the rag back to me. "Thank you." I nodded and took it back. It had been carefully and evenly folded up so most of the blood was on the inside. A few seconds later, Lionel turned back down the road, unfazed by the near-summer sun.

Even though I knew the Daylight wasn't due for a few more hours, I could hear its whistle echoing dimly within my own ears. So, the S.P. was looking for workers my age. I scurried back to the ditch, grabbed my books and ran home along that narrow path while in my mind an image played of the Daylight riding the track at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.