Last Train Home

Robert Earl Deemer recounts the last moments of his life to John, a kind, understanding and whimsical being who is somehow inside the convict's head, encouraging Robert as he takes his final steps toward the "death chamber." Strapped in, Robert offers his last words, “If I could change things, I probably would.” Somewhere between life and death, Robert sits in an abandoned railroad depot with John who offers him a chance to fix things. But that's impossible now, isn't it? John reveals a way to make it happen and warns Robert to avoid pitfalls along the way. He simply needs to board the next train and think of a time. Bewildered, unsure, but out of options, Robert boards the next train. Robert arrives at the old train depot in Bethel County, near his hometown of Bethbary. The year is 1971. Back in the "death chamber" a prison doc attends to the executed convict, who still shows a faint pulse. Robert runs toward an abandoned barn. But he's too late and misses a chance to stop his father’s suicide. Under John's guidance, he shifts forward two years, and is picked up along the road by the mother of his old girlfriend, Sue Kaneeley, who invites Robert to stay in the spare room which was once her husband’s “getaway... until he just got away”. If re-meeting Sue and Sarah was difficult for Robert, it would pale in comparison to the knee-buckling moment when he first encounters himself as the 18 year-old angry Bobby, who hasn’t been the same since his father “blew his brains out.” Already on course to take all the wrong turns in life, Bobby wants nothing to do with this guy who claims to have known his father back in Vietnam... even after he confides that his own father “checked out the same way." With John’s unique “help” along the way, Robert must face his own past and stick it out, even when the going gets tough -- when he races in Bobby’s Dodge Dart toward an oncoming train, or is beaten to a pulp by Bobby and his friends Luke and Jason, or, worst of all, watching his deceased mother, Lillian, live with scars left by her husband's suicide, an addiction to codeine. Bobby, Luke and Jason have conspired to blow up the Bethbary water tower on July 4 as a diversion to cover knocking off the town bank. This would be the crisis moment in Bobby’s life, the moment Robert has returned to possibly prevent... unless another one comes first -- a moment in which Bobby must decide if he’s a killer and ready to take the path that comes with that territory. But that moment never happened in Robert’s past, only during this return trip, and Robert must intervene if any of this is to work. Bobby makes the right choice. Or, so it seems. With the clock ticking closer to the time when the water tower’s set to blow, Robert spots Bobby heading for the bank. Was it all for naught? Has he failed? Robert takes off for the bank, and his last chance to stop Bobby. But Bobby’s not there, and Robert takes the fall and is arrested by Officer Dilly inside the bank and led off to jail... a jail which will not hold him once he follows John's directive to invoke his name when his mission is finished. John does bring Robert across time to the abandoned train station and praises him for a job well done, right before telling him that he's being sent back. Robert doesn't understand but complies and steps toward a bright wall of light. In Bethbary, 1973, Bobby seems infused with new life; he's a different person, ready to make things right. While in the death chamber, 1999, an executed man's body is being wheeled out... also a different person.