The Talisman (18 page)

“I got the women’s,” Lori said, coming over. Her hair was thin, wavy gold, her complexion as white as a comic-book vampire’s. She either had a cold or a bad coke habit; she kept sniffing. Jack guessed it was a cold. He doubted if anyone in Oatley could afford a bad coke habit. “Women ain’t as bad as men, though. Almost, but not quite.”

“Shut up, Lori.”

“Up yours,” she said, and Smokey’s hand flickered out like lightning. There was a crack and suddenly the imprint of Smokey’s palm was printed red on one of Lori’s pallid cheeks like a child’s Tattoodle. She began to snivel . . . but Jack was sickened and bewildered to see an expression in her eyes that was almost happy. It was the look of a woman who believed such treatment was a sign of caring.

“You just keep hustling and we’ll have no problem,” Smokey said. “Remember to move fast when I yell for you to run me out a keg. And remember to get in the men’s can with your mop every half an hour and clean up the puke.”

And then he had told Smokey again that he wanted to leave and Smokey had reiterated his false promise about Sunday afternoon . . . but what good did it do to think of that?

There were louder screams now, and harsh caws of laughter. The crunch of a breaking chair and a wavering yell of pain. A fistfight—the third of the night—had broken out on the dance floor. Smokey uttered a curse and shoved past Jack. “Get rid of that keg,” he said.

Jack got the empty onto the dolly and trundled it back toward the swinging door, looking around uneasily for Randolph Scott as he went. He saw the man standing in the crowd that was watching the fight, and relaxed a little.

In the storeroom he put the empty keg with the others by the loading-bay—Updike’s Oatley Tap had already gone through six kegs tonight. That done, he checked his pack again. For one panicky moment he thought it was gone, and his heart began to hammer in his chest—the magic juice was in there, and so was the Territories coin that had become a silver dollar in this world. He moved to the right, sweat now standing out on his forehead, and felt between two more kegs. There it was—he could trace the curve of Speedy’s bottle through the green nylon of the pack. His heartbeat began to slow down, but he felt shaky and rubber-legged—the way you feel after a narrow escape.

The men’s toilet was a horror. Earlier in the evening Jack might have vomited in sympathy, but now he actually seemed to be getting used to the stench . . . and that was somehow the worst thing of all. He drew hot water, dumped in Comet, and began to run his soapy mop back and forth through the unspeakable mess on the floor. His mind began to go back over the last couple of days, worrying at them the way an animal in a trap will worry at a limb that has been caught.

3

The Oatley Tap had been dark, and dingy, and apparently dead empty when Jack first walked into it. The plugs on the juke, the pinball machine, and the Space Invaders game were all pulled. The only light in the place came from the Busch display over the bar—a digital clock caught between the peaks of two mountains, looking like the weirdest UFO ever imagined.

Smiling a little, Jack walked toward the bar. He was almost there when a flat voice said from behind him, “This is a bar. No minors. What are you, stupid? Get out.”

Jack almost jumped out of his skin. He had been touching the money in his pocket, thinking it would go just as it had at the Golden Spoon: he would sit on a stool, order something, and then ask for the job. It was of course illegal to hire a kid like him—at least without a work permit signed by his parents or a guardian—and that meant they could get him for under the minimum wage. Way under. So the negotiations would start, usually beginning with Story #2—Jack and the Evil Stepfather.

He whirled around and saw a man sitting alone in one of the booths, looking at him with chilly, contemptuous alertness. The man was thin, but ropes of muscles moved under his white undershirt and along the sides of his neck. He wore baggy white cook’s pants. A paper cap was cocked forward over his left eyebrow. His head was narrow, weasellike. His hair was cut short, graying at the edges. Between his big hands were a stack of invoices and a Texas Instruments calculator.

“I saw your Help Wanted sign,” Jack said, but now without much hope. This man was not going to hire him, and Jack was not sure he would want to work for him anyway. This guy looked mean.

“You did, huh?” the man in the booth said. “You must have learned to read on one of the days you weren’t playing hooky.” There was a package of Phillies Cheroots on the table. He shook one out.

“Well, I didn’t know it was a bar,” Jack said, taking a step back toward the door. The sunlight seemed to come through the dirty glass and then just fall dead on the floor, as if the Oatley Tap were located in a slightly different dimension. “I guess I thought it was . . . you know, a bar and grill. Something like that. I’ll just be going.”

“Come here.” The man’s brown eyes were looking at him steadily now.

“No, hey, that’s all right,” Jack said nervously. “I’ll just—”

“Come here. Sit down.” The man popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail and lit the cigar. A fly which had been preening on his paper hat buzzed away into the darkness. His eyes remained on Jack. “I ain’t gonna bite you.”

Jack came slowly over to the booth, and after a moment he slipped in on the other side and folded his hands in front of him neatly. Some sixty hours later, swamping out the men’s toilet at twelve-thirty in the morning with his sweaty hair hanging in his eyes, Jack thought—no, he
knew
—that it was his own stupid confidence that had allowed the trap to spring shut (and it had shut the moment he sat down opposite Smokey Updike, although he had not known it then). The Venus flytrap is able to close on its hapless, insectile victims; the pitcher plant, with its delicious smell and its deadly, glassy-smooth sides, only waits for some flying asshole of a bug to buzz on down and inside . . . where it finally drowns in the rainwater the pitcher collects. In Oatley the pitcher was full of beer instead of rainwater—that was the only difference.

If he had run—

But he hadn’t run. And maybe, Jack thought, doing his best to meet that cold brown stare, there would be a job here after all. Minette Banberry, the woman who owned and operated the Golden Spoon in Auburn, had been pleasant enough to Jack, had even given him a little hug and a peck of a kiss as well as three thick sandwiches when he left, but he had not been fooled. Pleasantness and even a remote sort of kindness did not preclude a cold interest in profits, or even something very close to outright greed.

The minimum wage in New York was three dollars and forty cents an hour—that information had been posted in the Golden Spoon’s kitchen by law, on a bright pink piece of paper almost the size of a movie poster. But the short-order cook was a Haitian who spoke little English and was almost surely in the country illegally, Jack thought. The guy cooked like a whiz, though, never allowing the spuds or the fried clams to spend a moment too long in the Fryolaters. The girl who helped Mrs. Banberry with the waitressing was pretty but vacant and on a work-release program for the retarded in Rome. In such cases, the minimum wage did not apply, and the lisping, retarded girl told Jack with unfeigned awe that she was getting a dollar and twenty-five cents
each hour
, and
all for her
.

Jack himself was getting a dollar-fifty. He had bargained for that, and he knew that if Mrs. Banberry hadn’t been strapped—her old dishwasher had quit just that morning, had gone on his coffee-break and just never come back—she would not have bargained at all; would have simply told him take the buck and a quarter, kid, or see what’s down the road. It’s a free country.

Now, he thought, with the unknowing cynicism that was also a part of his new self-confidence, here was another Mrs. Banberry. Male instead of female, rope-skinny instead of fat and grandmotherly, sour instead of smiling, but almost surely a Mrs. Banberry for a’ that and a’ that.

“Looking for a job, huh?” The man in the white pants and the paper hat put his cigar down in an old tin ashtray with the word
CAMELS
embossed on the bottom. The fly stopped washing its legs and took off.

“Yes, sir, but like you say, this is a bar and all—”

The unease stirred in him again. Those brown eyes and yellowed scleras troubled him—they were the eyes of some old hunting cat that had seen plenty of errant mice like him before.

“Yeah, it’s my place,” the man said. “Smokey Updike.” He held his hand out. Surprised, Jack shook it. It squeezed Jack’s hand once, hard, almost to the point of pain. Then it relaxed . . . but Smokey didn’t let go. “Well?” he said.

“Huh?” Jack said, aware he sounded stupid and a little afraid—he
felt
stupid and a little afraid. And he wanted Updike to let go of his hand.

“Didn’t your folks ever teach you to innerduce yourself?”

This was so unexpected that Jack came close to gabbling out his real name instead of the one he had used at the Golden Spoon, the name he also used if the people who picked him up asked for his handle. That name—what he was coming to think of as his “road-name”—was Lewis Farren.

“Jack Saw—ah—Sawtelle,” he said.

Updike held his hand yet a moment longer, those brown eyes never moving. Then he let it go. “Jack Saw-ah-Sawtelle,” he said. “Must be the longest fucking name in the phonebook, huh, kid?”

Jack flushed but said nothing.

“You ain’t very big,” Updike said. “You think you could manage to rock a ninety-pound keg of beer up on its side and walk it onto a hand-dolly?”

“I think so,” Jack said, not knowing if he could or not. It didn’t look as if it would be much of a problem, anyway—in a place as dead as this, the guy probably only had to change kegs when the one hooked up to the taps went flat.

As if reading his mind, Updike said, “Yeah, nobody here now. But we get pretty busy by four, five o’clock. And on weekends the place really fills up. That’s when you’d earn your keep, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Jack said. “How much would the job pay?”

“Dollar an hour,” Updike said. “Wish I could pay you more, but—” He shrugged and tapped the stack of bills. He even smiled a little, as if to say
You see how it is, kid, everything in Oatley is running down like a cheap pocket-watch someone forgot to wind—ever since about 1971 it’s been running down
. But his eyes did not smile. His eyes were watching Jack’s face with still, catlike concentration.

“Gee, that’s not very much,” Jack said. He spoke slowly but he was thinking as fast as he could.

The Oatley Tap was a tomb—there wasn’t even a single bombed-out old alky at the bar nursing a beer and watching General Hospital on the tube. In Oatley you apparently drank in your car and called it a club. A dollar-fifty an hour was a hard wage when you were busting your buns; in a place like this, a buck an hour might be an easy one.

“Nope,” Updike agreed, going back to his calculator, “it ain’t.” His voice said Jack could take it or leave it; there would be no negotiations.

“Might be all right,” Jack said.

“Well, that’s good,” Updike said. “We ought to get one other thing straight, though. Who you running from and who’s looking for you?” The brown eyes were on him again, and they drilled hard. “If you got someone on your backtrail, I don’t want him fucking up my life.”

This did not shake Jack’s confidence much. He wasn’t the world’s brightest kid, maybe, but bright enough to know he wouldn’t last long on the road without a second cover story for prospective employers. This was a Story #2—The Wicked Stepfather.

“I’m from a little town in Vermont,” he said. “Fenderville. My mom and dad got divorced two years ago. My dad tried to get custody of me, but the judge gave me to my mom. That’s what they do most of the time.”

“Fucking-A they do.” He had gone back to his bills and was bent so far over the pocket calculator that his nose was almost touching the keys. But Jack thought he was listening all the same.

“Well, my dad went out to Chicago and he got a job in a plant out there,” Jack said. “He writes to me just about every week, I guess, but he quit coming back last year, when Aubrey beat him up. Aubrey’s—”

“Your stepfather,” Updike said, and for just a moment Jack’s eyes narrowed and his original distrust came back. There was no sympathy in Updike’s voice. Instead, Updike seemed almost to be laughing at him, as if he knew the whole tale was nothing but a great big swatch of whole cloth.

“Yeah,” he said. “My mom married him a year and a half ago. He beats on me a lot.”

“Sad, Jack. Very sad.” Now Updike did look up, his eyes sardonic and unbelieving. “So now you’re off to Shytown, where you and Dads will live happily ever after.”

“Well, I hope so,” Jack said, and he had a sudden inspiration. “All I know is that my
real
dad never hung me up by the neck in my closet.” He pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, baring the mark there. It was fading now; during his stint at the Golden Spoon it had still been a vivid, ugly red-purple—like a brand. But at the Golden Spoon he’d never had occasion to uncover it. It was, of course, the mark left by the root that had nearly choked the life from him in that other world.

He was gratified to see Smokey Updike’s eyes widen in surprise and what might almost have been shock. He leaned forward, scattering some of his pink and yellow pages. “Holy
Jesus
, kid,” he said. “Your stepfather did that?”

“That’s when I decided I had to split.”

“Is he going to show up here, looking for his car or his motorcycle or his wallet or his fucking dope-stash?”

Jack shook his head.

Smokey looked at Jack for a moment longer, and then pushed the
OFF
button on the calculator. “Come on back to the storeroom with me, kid,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to see if you can really rock one of those kegs up on its side. If you can run me out a keg when I need one, you can have the job.”

4

Jack demonstrated to Smokey Updike’s satisfaction that he could get one of the big aluminum kegs up on its rim and walk it forward just enough to get it on the foot of the dolly. He even made it look fairly easy—dropping a keg and getting punched in the nose was still a day away.