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Richard Stevenson

Tongue tied

Chapter 1

The 24-across clue was " 'The Oblong Box' writer," and the answer was looming just over the hazy horizon of my Friday-morning mind when the man in the Amtrak seat next to me whipped out his cellphone, punched in some numbers, and announced,

"Ed, it's Al. "

I looked up from the folded-in-quarters arts section of the Times and said to the back of the seat ahead of me, "Ed, it's Al. "

Missing just a fraction of a beat, Al said, "I'm on the train. I'll see Quinn when I get there, and I'm having lunch with Margaret Wills. "

While Al listened to Ed's reply, I said, "I'm on the train. I'll see Quinn when I get there, and I'm having lunch with Margaret Wills. "

Al peered over at me, and I peered back. Then he told Ed, "Listen, there's a guy in the seat next to me who…"

Like a simultaneous-translation whiz at the UN, I was right behind him. "Listen, there's a guy in the seat next to me who…"

I grinned as I said it, and Al's look of annoyance was turning to apprehension. This would make a good story when he met Quinn and then when he dined with Margaret Wills-"Would you believe, I was sitting next to this prick on the train who…"-but for now it must have been starting to seem to Al that I could be dangerous.

"Hang on a second," Al told Ed. He gathered up his laptop, flipped up and secured his tray table, stood, retrieved his nicely folded suit jacket from the overhead rack, and looked my way but avoided eye contact. He muttered, "Asshole," and strode up the aisle with his belongings.

Al found an aisle seat near the front of the car, where he disappeared from view if not entirely from earshot. Over the next few minutes, I still caught a word from time to time over the train's low whoosh and steady clickety-clack, although now Al was another unlucky passenger's voluble neighbor.

I went back to the crossword puzzle, but the "Oblong Box" writer's name was still beyond my reach. It was just three letters and should have been obvious.

Carolyn See? It didn't sound like either one. Myrna Loy? Eddie Foy? Not writers.

I jumped down to 26-across: "spawn. " Again, three letters. Kid? Doubtful. The Times puzzle makers could be slangy, but never imprecise.

I gazed out the window at the broad Hudson flying by, the blue Catskills hazy beyond the far shore. We sped south past a tanker pushing upstream to Albany, fuel for the state office workers' Subarus and minivans and the Pataki administration limos. A shirtless man and a woman wearing a green halter and red headband paddled downriver in a yellow canoe closer in to the near shore. The mountains across the water lolled like hippos in the July sun.

Another couple of words flew back from noisy Al, and I wondered how long it would take before Amtrak felt enough customer pressure and segregated cellphone yakkers the way it once had smokers. Would mounting numbers of letters and phone calls do it, or would a media-worthy "incident" trigger the regulations? Poughkeepsie -

A Schenectady man was roughed up by three Amtrak passengers, and his cellular telephone flushed down the lavatory toilet by a fourth. . . .