The Talisman (19 page)

“Well, that ain’t too bad,” Updike said. “You ain’t big enough for the job and you’ll probably give yourself a fucking rupture, but that’s your nevermind.”

He told Jack he could start at noon and work through until one in the morning (“For as long as you can hack it, anyway”). Jack would be paid, Updike said, at closing time each night. Cash on the nail.

They went back out front and there was Lori, dressed in dark blue basketball shorts so brief that the edges of her rayon panties showed, and a sleeveless blouse that had almost surely come from Mammoth Mart in Batavia. Her thin blond hair was held back with plastic barrettes and she was smoking a Pall Mall, its end wet and heavily marked with lipstick. A large silver crucifix dangled between her breasts.

“This is Jack,” Smokey said. “You can take the Help Wanted sign out of the window.”

“Run, kid,” Lori said. “There’s still time.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Make me.”

Updike slapped her butt, not in a loving way but hard enough to send her against the padded edge of the bar. Jack blinked and thought of the sound Osmond’s whip had made.

“Big man,” Lori said. Her eyes brimmed with tears . . . and yet they also looked contented, as if this was just the way things were supposed to be.

Jack’s earlier unease was now clearer, sharper . . . now it was almost fright.

“Don’t let us get on your case, kid,” Lori said, headed past him to the sign in the window. “You’ll be okay.”

“Name’s Jack, not
kid
,” Smokey said. He had gone back to the booth where he had “interviewed” Jack and began gathering up his bills. “A kid’s a fucking baby goat. Didn’t they teach you that in school? Make the kid a couple of burgers. He’s got to go to work at noon.”

She got the
HELP WANTED
sign out of the window and put it behind the jukebox with the air of one who has done this a good many times before. Passing Jack, she winked at him.

The telephone rang.

All three of them looked toward it, startled by its abrupt shrilling. To Jack it looked for a moment like a black slug stuck to the wall. It was an odd moment, almost timeless. He had time to notice how pale Lori was—the only color in her cheeks came from the reddish pocks of her fading adolescent acne. He had time to study the cruel, rather secretive planes of Smokey Updike’s face and to see the way the veins stood out on the man’s long hands. Time to see the yellowed sign over the phone reading
PLEASE LIMIT YOUR CALLS TO THREE MINUTES
.

The phone rang and rang in the silence.

Jack thought, suddenly terrified:
It’s for me. Long distance . . . long, LONG distance
.

“Answer that, Lori,” Updike said, “what are you, simple?”

Lori went to the phone.

“Oatley Tap,” she said in a trembling, faint voice. She listened. “Hello? Hello? . . . Oh, fuck off.”

She hung up with a bang.

“No one there. Kids. Sometimes they want to know if we got Prince Albert in a can. How do you like your burgers, kid?”

“Jack!”
Updike roared.

“Jack, okay, okay,
Jack
. How do you like your burgers, Jack?”

Jack told her and they came medium, just right, hot with brown mustard and Bermuda onions. He gobbled them and drank a glass of milk. His unease abated with his hunger. Kids, as she had said. Still, his eyes drifted back to the phone every once in a while, and he wondered.

5

Four o’clock came, and as if the Tap’s total emptiness had been only a clever piece of stage setting to lure him in—like the pitcher plant with its innocent look and its tasty smell—the door opened and nearly a dozen men in work-clothes came sauntering in. Lori plugged in the juke, the pinball machine, and Space Invaders game. Several of the men bellowed greetings at Smokey, who grinned his narrow grin, exposing the big set of mail-order dentures. Most ordered beer. Two or three ordered Black Russians. One of them—a member of the Fair Weather Club, Jack was almost sure—dropped quarters into the jukebox, summoning up the voices of Mickey Gilley, Eddie Rabbit, Waylon Jennings, others. Smokey told him to get the mop-bucket and squeegee out of the storeroom and swab down the dancefloor in front of the bandstand, which waited, deserted, for Friday night and The Genny Valley Boys. He told Jack when it was dry he wanted him to put the Pledge right to it. “You’ll know it’s done when you can see your own face grinnin up at you,” Smokey said.

6

So his time of service at Updike’s Oatley Tap began.

We get pretty busy by four, five o’clock.

Well, he couldn’t very well say that Smokey had lied to him. Up until the very moment Jack pushed away his plate and began making his wage, the Tap had been deserted. But by six o’clock there were maybe fifty people in the Tap, and the brawny waitress—Gloria—came on duty to yells and hooraws from some of the patrons. Gloria joined Lori, serving a few carafes of wine, a lot of Black Russians, and oceans of beer.

Besides the kegs of Busch, Jack lugged out case after case of bottled beer—Budweiser, of course, but also such local favorites as Genesee, Utica Club, and Rolling Rock. His hands began to blister, his back to ache.

Between trips to the storeroom for cases of bottled beer and trips to the storeroom to “run me out a keg, Jack” (a phrase for which he was already coming to feel an elemental dread), he went back to the dancefloor, the mop-bucket, and the big bottle of Pledge. Once an empty beer-bottle flew past his head, missing him by inches. He ducked, heart racing, as it shattered against the wall. Smokey ran the drunken perpetrator out, his dentures bared in a great false alligator grin. Looking out the window, Jack saw the drunk hit a parking-meter hard enough to pop the red
VIOLATION
flag up.

“Come on, Jack,” Smokey called impatiently from the bar, “it missed you, didn’t it? Clean that mess up!”

Smokey sent him into the men’s can half an hour later. A middle-aged man with a Joe Pyne haircut was standing woozily at one of the two ice-choked urinals, one hand braced against the wall, the other brandishing a huge uncircumcised penis. A puddle of puke steamed between his spraddled workboots.

“Clean her up, kid,” the man said, weaving his way back toward the door and clapping Jack on the back almost hard enough to knock him over. “Man’s gotta make room any way he can, right?”

Jack was able to wait until the door closed, and then he could control his gorge no longer.

He managed to make it into the Tap’s only stall, where he was faced with the unflushed and sickeningly fragrant spoor of the last customer. Jack vomited up whatever remained of his dinner, took a couple of hitching breaths, and then vomited again. He groped for the flush with a shaking hand and pushed it. Waylon and Willie thudded dully through the walls, singing about Luckenbach, Texas.

Suddenly his mother’s face was before him, more beautiful than it had ever been on any movie screen, her eyes large and dark and sorrowing. He saw her alone in their rooms at the Alhambra, a cigarette smouldering forgotten in the ashtray beside her. She was crying. Crying for him. His heart seemed to hurt so badly that he thought he would die from love for her and want of her—for a life where there were no things in tunnels, no women who somehow wanted to be slapped and made to cry, no men who vomited between their own feet while taking a piss. He wanted to be with her and hated Speedy Parker with a black completeness for ever having set his feet on this awful road west.

In that moment whatever might have remained of his self-confidence was demolished—it was demolished utterly and forever. Conscious thought was overmastered by a deep, elemental, wailing, childish cry:
I want my mother please God I want my MOTHER
—

He trembled his way out of the stall on watery legs, thinking
Okay that’s it everybody out of the pool fuck you Speedy this kid’s going home. Or whatever you want to call it
. In that moment he didn’t care if his mother might be dying. In that moment of inarticulate pain he became totally Jack’s Jack, as unconsciously self-serving as an animal on which any carnivore may prey: deer, rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk. In that moment he would have been perfectly willing to let her die of the cancer metastasizing wildly outward from her lungs if only she would hold him and then kiss him goodnight and tell him not to play his goddam transistor in bed or read with a flashlight under the covers for half the night.

He put his hand against the wall and little by little managed to get hold of himself. This taking-hold was no conscious thing but a simple tightening of the mind, something that was very much Phil Sawyer and Lily Cavanaugh. He’d made a mistake, yeah, but he wasn’t going back. The Territories were real and so the Talisman might also be real; he was not going to murder his mother with faintheartedness.

Jack filled his mop-bucket with hot water from the spigot in the storeroom and cleaned up the mess.

When he came out again, it was half past ten and the crowd in the Tap began to thin out—Oatley was a working town, and its working drinkers went home early on weeknights.

Lori said, “You look as pale as pastry, Jack. You okay?”

“Do you think I could have a gingerale?” he asked.

She brought him one and Jack drank it while he finished waxing the dancefloor. At quarter to twelve Smokey ordered him back to the storeroom to “run out a keg.” Jack managed the keg—barely. At quarter to one Smokey started bawling for people to finish up. Lori unplugged the juke—Dick Curless died with a long, unwinding groan—to a few half-hearted cries of protest. Gloria unplugged the games, donned her sweater (it was as pink as the Canada Mints Smokey ate regularly, as pink as the false gums of his dentures), and left. Smokey began to turn out the lights and to urge the last four or five drinkers out the door.

“Okay, Jack,” he said when they were gone. “You did good. There’s room for improvement, but you got a start, anyway. You can doss down in the storeroom.”

Instead of asking for his pay (which Smokey did not offer anyway), Jack stumbled off toward the storeroom, so tired that he looked like a slightly smaller version of the drunks so lately ushered out.

In the storeroom he saw Lori squatting down in one corner—the squat caused her basketball shorts to ride up to a point that was nearly alarming—and for a moment Jack thought with dull alarm that she was going through his knapsack. Then he saw that she had spread a couple of blankets on a layer of burlap apple-sacks. Lori had also put down a small satin pillow which said
NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR
on one side.

“Thought I’d make you a little nest, kid,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said. It was a simple, almost offhand act of kindness, but Jack found himself having to struggle from bursting into tears. He managed a smile instead. “Thanks a lot, Lori.”

“No problem. You’ll be all right here, Jack. Smokey ain’t so bad. Once you get to know him, he ain’t half bad.” She said this with an unconscious wistfulness, as if wishing it were so.

“Probably not,” Jack said, and then he added impulsively, “but I’m moving on tomorrow. Oatley’s just not for me, I guess.”

She said: “Maybe you’ll go, Jack . . . and maybe you’ll decide to stay awhile. Why don’t you sleep on it?” There was something forced and unnatural about this little speech—it had none of the genuineness of her grin when she’d said
Thought I’d make you a little nest
. Jack noticed it, but was too tired to do more than that.

“Well, we’ll see,” he said.

“Sure we will,” Lori agreed, going to the door. She blew a kiss toward him from the palm of one dirty hand. “Good night, Jack.”

“Good night.”

He started to pull off his shirt . . . and then left it on, deciding he would just take off his sneakers. The storeroom was cold and chilly. He sat down on the apple-sacks, pulled the knots, pushed off first one and then the other. He was about to lie back on Lori’s New York World’s Fair souvenir—and he might well have been sound asleep before his head ever touched it—when the telephone began to ring out in the bar, shrilling into the silence,
drilling
into it, making him think of wavering, pasty-gray roots and bullwhips and two-headed ponies.

Ring, ring, ring, into the silence, into the dead silence.

Ring, ring, ring, long after the kids who call up to ask about Prince Albert in a can have gone to bed. Ring, ring, ring,
Hello, Jacky it’s Morgan and I felt you in my woods, you smart little shit I SMELLED you in my woods, and how did you ever get the idea that you were safe in your world? My woods are there, too. Last chance, Jacky. Get home or we send out the troops. You won’t have a chance. You won’t
—

Jack got up and ran across the storeroom floor in his stocking feet. A light sweat that felt freezing cold, seemed to cover his entire body.

He opened the door a crack.

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

Then finally: “Hello, Oatley Tap. And this better be good.” Smokey’s voice. A pause. “Hello?” Another pause. “Fuck
off!
” Smokey hung up with a bang, and Jack heard him re-cross the floor and then start up the stairs to the small overhead apartment he and Lori shared.

7

Jack looked unbelievingly from the green slip of paper in his left hand to the small pile of bills—all ones—and change by his right. It was eleven o’clock the next morning. Thursday morning, and he had asked for his pay.

“What
is
this?” he asked, still unable to believe it.

“You can read,” Smokey said, “and you can count. You don’t move as fast as I’d like, Jack—at least not yet—but you’re bright enough.”

Now he sat with the green slip in one hand and the money by the other. Dull anger began to pulse in the middle of his forehead like a vein.
GUEST CHECK
, the green slip was headed. It was the exact same form Mrs. Banberry had used in the Golden Spoon. It read: