The Talisman (20 page)

At the bottom the figure $4.10 was written in large numbers and circled. Jack had made nine dollars for his four-to-one stint. Smokey had charged off nearly half of it; what he had left by his right hand was four dollars and ninety cents.

He looked up, furious—first at Lori, who looked away as if vaguely embarrassed, and then at Smokey, who simply looked back.

“This is a cheat,” he said thinly.

“Jack, that’s not true. Look at the menu prices—”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it!”

Lori flinched a little, as if expecting Smokey to clout him one . . . but Smokey only looked at Jack with a kind of terrible patience.

“I didn’t charge you for your bed, did I?”

“Bed!” Jack shouted, feeling the hot blood boil up into his cheeks. “Some
bed!
Cut-open burlap bags on a concrete floor! Some
bed!
I’d like to see you try to charge me for it, you dirty
cheat!
”

Lori made a scared sound and shot a look at Smokey . . . but Smokey only sat across from Jack in the booth, the thick blue smoke of a Cheroot curling up between them. A fresh paper fry-cook’s hat was cocked forward on Smokey’s narrow head.

“We talked about you dossing down back there,” Smokey said. “You asked if it came with the job. I said it did. No mention was made of your meals. If it had been brought up, maybe something could have been done. Maybe not. Point is, you never brought it up, so now you got to deal with that.”

Jack sat shaking, tears of anger standing in his eyes. He tried to talk and nothing came out but a small strangled groan. He was literally too furious to speak.

“Of course, if you wanted to discuss an employees’ discount on your meals now—”

“Go to
hell!
” Jack managed finally, snatching up the four singles and the little strew of change. “Teach the next kid who comes in here how to look out for number one! I’m
going!
”

He crossed the floor toward the door, and in spite of his anger he knew—did not just think but flat-out
knew
—that he wasn’t going to make the sidewalk.

“Jack.”

He touched the doorknob, thought of grasping it and turning it—but that voice was undeniable and full of a certain threat. He dropped his hand and turned around, his anger leaving him. He suddenly felt shrunken and old. Lori had gone behind the bar, where she was sweeping and humming. She had apparently decided that Smokey wasn’t going to work Jack over with his fists, and since nothing else really mattered, everything was all right.

“You don’t want to leave me in the lurch with my weekend crowd coming up.”

“I want to get out of here. You cheated me.”

“No sir,” Smokey said, “I explained that. If anyone blotted your copybook, Jack, it was you. Now we could discuss your meals—fifty percent off the food, maybe, and even free sodas. I never went that far before with the younger help I hire from time to time, but this weekened’s going to be especially hairy, what with all the migrant labor in the county for the apple-picking. And I
like
you, Jack. That’s why I didn’t clout you one when you raised your voice to me, although maybe I should have. But I need you over the weekend.”

Jack felt his rage return briefly, and then die away again.

“What if I go anyhow?” he asked. “I’m five dollars to the good, anyway, and being out of this shitty little town might be just as good as a bonus.”

Looking at Jack, still smiling his narrow smile, Smokey said, “You remember going into the men’s last night to clean after some guy who whoopsed his cookies?”

Jack nodded.

“You remember what he looked like?”

“Crewcut. Khakis. So what?”

“That’s Digger Atwell. His real name’s Carlton, but he spent ten years taking care of the town cemeteries, so everyone got calling him Digger. That was—oh, twenty or thirty years ago. He went on the town cops back around the time Nixon got elected President. Now he’s Chief of Police.”

Smokey picked up his Cheroot, puffed at it, and looked at Jack.

“Digger and me go back,” Smokey said. “And if you was to just walk out of here now, Jack, I couldn’t guarantee that you wouldn’t have some trouble with Digger. Might end up getting sent home. Might end up picking the apples on the town’s land—Oatley Township’s got . . . oh, I guess forty acres of good trees. Might end up getting beat up. Or . . . I’ve heard that ole Digger’s got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly.”

Jack thought of that clublike penis. He felt both sick and cold.

“In here, you’re under my wing, so to speak,” Smokey said. “Once you hit the street, who can say? Digger’s apt to be cruising anyplace. You might get over the town line with no sweat. On the other hand, you might just see him pulling up beside you in that big Plymouth he drives. Digger ain’t totally bright, but he does have a nose, sometimes, Or . . . someone might give him a call.”

Behind the bar, Lori was doing dishes. She dried her hands, turned on the radio, and began to sing along with an old Steppenwolf song.

“Tell you what,” Smokey said. “Hang in there, Jack. Work the weekend. Then I’ll pack you into my pick-up and drive you over the town line myself. How would that be? You’ll go out of here Sunday noon with damn near thirty bucks in your poke that you didn’t have coming in. You’ll go out thinking that Oatley’s not such a bad place after all. So what do you say?”

Jack looked into those brown eyes, noted the yellow scleras and the small flecks of red; he noted Smokey’s big, sincere smile lined with false teeth; he even saw with a weird and terrifying sense of
déjà vu
that the fly was back on the paper fry-cook’s hat, preening and washing its hair-thin forelegs.

He suspected Smokey
knew
that
he
knew that everything Updike had said was a lie, and didn’t even care. After working into the early hours of Saturday morning and then Sunday morning, Jack would sleep until maybe two Sunday afternoon. Smokey would tell him he couldn’t give him that ride because Jack had woken up too late; now he, Smokey, was too busy watching the Colts and the Patriots. And Jack would not only be too tired to walk, he would be too afraid that Smokey might lose interest in the Colts and Patriots just long enough to call his good friend Digger Atwell and say, “He’s walking down Mill Road right now, Digger old boy, why don’t you pick him up? Then get over here for the second half. Free beer, but don’t you go puking in my urinal until I get the kid back here.”

That was one scenario. There were others that he could think of, each a little different, each really the same at bottom.

Smokey Updike’s smile widened a little.

10

Elroy

1

When I was six . . .

The Tap, which had begun to wind down by this time on his previous two nights, was roaring along as if the patrons expected to greet the dawn. He saw two tables had vanished—victims of the fistfight that had broken out just before his last expedition into the john. Now people were dancing where the tables had been.

“About time,” Smokey said as Jack staggered the length of the bar on the inside and put the case down by the refrigerator compartments. “You get those in there and go back for the fucking Bud. You should have brought that first, anyway.”

“Lori didn’t say—”

Hot, incredible pain exploded in his foot as Smokey drove one heavy shoe down on Jack’s sneaker. Jack uttered a muffled scream and felt tears sting his eyes.

“Shut up,” Smokey said. “Lori don’t know shit from Shinola, and you are smart enough to know it. Get back in there and run me out a case of Bud.”

He went back to the storeroom, limping on the foot Smokey had stomped, wondering if the bones in some of his toes might be broken. It seemed all too possible. His head roared with smoke and noise and the jagged ripsaw rhythm of The Genny Valley Boys, two of them now noticeably weaving on the bandstand. One thought stood out clearly: it might not be possible to wait until closing. He really might not be able to last that long. If Oatley was a prison and the Oatley Tap was his cell, then surely exhaustion was as much his warder as Smokey Updike—maybe even more so.

In spite of his worries about what the Territories might be like at this place, the magic juice seemed more and more to promise him his only sure way out. He could drink some and flip over . . . and if he could manage to walk a mile west over there, two at the most, he could drink a bit more and flip back into the U.S.A. well over the town line of this horrible little place, perhaps as far west as Bushville or even Pembroke.

When I was six, when Jack-O was six, when—

He got the Bud and stumble-staggered out through the door again . . . and the tall, rangy cowboy with the big hands, the one who looked like Randolph Scott, was standing there, looking at him.

“Hello, Jack,” he said, and Jack saw with rising terror that the irises of the man’s eyes were as yellow as chicken-claws. “Didn’t somebody tell you to get gone? You don’t listen very good, do you?”

Jack stood with the case of Bud dragging at the ends of his arms, staring into those yellow eyes, and suddenly a horrid idea hammered into his mind: that
this
had been the lurker in the tunnel—this man-thing with its dead yellow eyes.

“Leave me alone,” he said—the words came out in a wintery little whisper.

He crowded closer. “You were supposed to get
gone
.”

Jack tried to back up . . . but now he was against the wall, and as the cowboy who looked like Randolph Scott leaned toward him, Jack could smell dead meat on its breath.

2

Between the time Jack started work on Thursday at noon and four o’clock, when the Tap’s usual after-work crowd started to come in, the pay phone with the
PLEASE LIMIT YOUR CALLS TO THREE MINUTES
sign over it rang twice.

The first time it rang, Jack felt no fear at all—and it turned out to be only a solicitor for the United Fund.

Two hours later, as Jack was bagging up the last of the previous night’s bottles, the telephone began to shrill again. This time his head snapped up like an animal which scents fire in a dry forest . . . except it wasn’t fire he sensed, but ice. He turned toward the telephone, which was only four feet from where he was working, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He thought he must see the pay phone caked with ice, ice that was sweating through the phone’s black plastic case, extruding from the holes in the earpiece and the mouthpiece in lines of blue ice as thin as pencil-leads, hanging from the rotary dial and the coin return in icicle beards.

But it was just the phone, and all the coldness and death was on the inside.

He stared at it, hypnotized.

“Jack!” Smokey yelled. “Answer the goddam phone! What the fuck am I paying you for?”

Jack looked toward Smokey, as desperate as a cornered animal . . . but Smokey was staring back with the thin-lipped, out-of-patience expression that he got on his face just before he popped Lori one. He started toward the phone, barely aware that his feet were moving; he stepped deeper and deeper into that capsule of coldness, feeling the gooseflesh run up his arms, feeling the moisture crackle in his nose.

He reached out and grasped the phone. His hand went numb.

He put it to his ear. His ear went numb.

“Oatley Tap,” he said into that deadly blackness, and his mouth went numb.

The voice that came out of the phone was the cracked, rasping croak of something long dead, some creature which could never be seen by the living: the sight of it would drive a living person insane, or strike him dead with frost-etchings on his lips and staring eyes blinded by cataracts of ice. “
Jack
,” this scabrous, rattling voice whispered up out of the earpiece, and his face went numb, the way it did when you needed to spend a heavy day in the dentist’s chair and the guy needled you up with a little too much Novocain.
“You get your ass back home, Jack.”

From far away, a distance of light-years, it seemed, he could hear his voice repeating: “Oatley Tap, is anyone there? Hello? . . . Hello? . . .”

Cold, so cold.

His throat was numb. He drew breath and his lungs seemed to freeze. Soon the chambers of his heart would ice up and he would simply drop dead.

That chilly voice whispered,
“Bad things can happen to a boy alone on the road, Jack. Ask anybody.”

He hung the phone up with a quick, clumsy reaching gesture. He pulled his hand back and then stood looking at the phone.

“Was it the asshole, Jack?” Lori asked, and her voice was distant . . . but a little closer than his own voice had seemed a few moments ago. The world was coming back. On the handset of the pay phone he could see the shape of his hand, outlined in a glittering rime of frost. As he looked, the frost began to melt and run down the black plastic.

3

That was the night—Thursday night—that Jack first saw Genny County’s answer to Randolph Scott. The crowd was a little smaller than it had been Wednesday night—very much a day-before-payday crowd—but there were still enough men present to fill the bar and spill over into the tables and booths.

They were town men from a rural area where the plows were now probably rusting forgotten in back sheds, men who perhaps wanted to be farmers but had forgotten how. There were a lot of John Deere caps in evidence, but to Jack, very few of these men looked as if they would be at home riding a tractor. These were men in gray chinos and brown chinos and green chinos; men with their names stitched on blue shirts in gold thread; men in square-toed Dingo Boots and men in great big clumping Survivors. These men carried their keys on their belts. These men had wrinkles but no laugh-lines; their mouths were dour. These men wore cowboy hats and when Jack looked at the bar from in back of the stools, there were as many as eight who looked like Charlie Daniels in the chewing-tobacco ads. But these men didn’t chew; these men smoked cigarettes, and a lot of them.

Jack was cleaning the bubble front of the jukebox when Digger Atwell came in. The juke was turned off; the Yankees were on the cable, and the men at the bar were watching intently. The night before, Atwell had been in the Oatley male’s version of sports clothes (chinos, khaki shirt with a lot of pens in one of the two big pockets, steel-toed workboots). Tonight he was wearing a blue cop’s uniform. A large gun with wood grips hung in a holster on his creaking leather belt.

He glanced at Jack, who thought of Smokey saying
I’ve heard that ole Digger’s got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly
, and flinched back as if guilty of something. Digger Atwell grinned a wide, slow grin. “Decided to stick around for a while, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” Jack muttered, and squirted more Windex onto the juke’s bubble front, although it was already as clean as it was going to get. He was only waiting for Atwell to go away. After a while, Atwell did. Jack turned to watch the beefy cop cross to the bar . . . and that was when the man at the far left end of the bar turned around and looked at him.

Randolph Scott
, Jack thought at once,
that’s just who he looks like.

But in spite of the rangy and uncompromising lines of his face, the real Randolph Scott had had an undeniable look of heroism; if his good looks had been harsh, they had also been part of a face that could smile. This man looked both bored and somehow crazy.

And with real fright, Jack realized the man was looking at him, at
Jack
. Nor had he simply turned around during the commercial to see who might be in the bar; he had turned around to look at Jack. Jack knew this was so.

The phone. The ringing phone.

With a tremendous effort, Jack pulled his gaze away. He looked back into the bubble front of the juke and saw his own frightened face hovering, ghostlike, over the records inside.

The telephone began to shriek on the wall.

The man at the left end of the bar looked at it . . . and then looked back at Jack, who stood frozen by the jukebox with his bottle of Windex in one hand and a rag in the other, his hair stiffening, his skin freezing.

“If it’s that asshole again, I’m gonna get me a whistle to start blowing down the phone when he calls, Smokey,” Lori was saying as she walked toward it. “I swear to God I am.”

She might have been an actress in a play, and all the customers extras paid the standard SAG rate of thirty-five dollars a day. The only two real people in the world were him and this dreadful cowboy with the big hands and the eyes Jack could not . . . quite . . . see.

Suddenly, shockingly, the cowboy mouthed these words:
Get your ass home
. And winked.

The phone stopped ringing even as Lori stretched out her hand to it.

Randolph Scott turned around, drained his glass, and yelled, “Bring me another tapper, okay?”

“I’ll be damned,” Lori said. “That phone’s got the ghosts.”

4

Later on, in the storeroom, Jack asked Lori who the guy was who looked like Randolph Scott.

“Who looks like
who?
” she asked.

“An old cowboy actor. He was sitting down at the end of the bar.”

She shrugged. “They all look the same to me, Jack. Just a bunch of swinging dicks out for a good time. On Thursday nights they usually pay for it with the little woman’s Beano money.”

“He calls beers ’tappers.’ ”

Her eyes lit. “Oh yeah! Him. He looks mean.” She said this last with actual appreciation . . . as if admiring the straightness of his nose or the whiteness of his smile.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name,” Lori said. “He’s only been around the last week or two. I guess the mill must be hiring again. It—”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack, did I tell you to run me out a keg or not?”

Jack had been in the process of walking one of the big kegs of Busch onto the foot of the hand-dolly. Because his weight and the keg’s weight were so close, it was an act requiring a good deal of careful balancing. When Smokey shouted from the doorway, Lori screamed and Jack jumped. He lost control of the keg and it went over on its side, the cap shooting out like a champagne cork, beer following in a white-gold jet. Smokey was still shouting at him but Jack could only stare at the beer, frozen . . . until Smokey popped him one.

When he got back out to the taproom perhaps twenty minutes later, holding a Kleenex against his swelling nose, Randolph Scott had been gone.

5

I’m six.

John Benjamin Sawyer is six.

Six—

Jack shook his head, trying to clear this steady, repeating thought out as the rangy millhand who was not a millhand leaned closer and closer. His eyes . . . yellow and somehow scaly. He—
it
—blinked, a rapid, milky, swimming blink, and Jack realized it had nictitating membranes over its eyeballs.

“You were supposed to get
gone
,” it whispered again, and reached toward Jack with hands that were beginning to twist and plate and harden.

The door banged open, letting in a raucous flood of the Oak Ridge Boys.

“Jack, if you don’t quit lollygagging, I’m going to have to make you sorry,” Smokey said from behind Randolph Scott. Scott stepped backward. No melting, hardening hooves here; his hands were just hands again—big and powerful, their backs crisscrossed with prominent ridged veins. There was another milky, swirling sort of blink that didn’t involve the eyelids at all . . . and then the man’s eyes were not yellow but a simple faded blue. He gave Jack a final glance and then headed toward the men’s room.

Smokey came toward Jack now, his paper cap tipped forward, his narrow weasel’s head slightly inclined, his lips parted to show his alligator teeth.

“Don’t make me speak to you again,” Smokey said. “This is your last warning, and don’t you think I don’t mean it.”

As it had against Osmond, Jack’s fury suddenly rose up—that sort of fury, closely linked as it is to a sense of hopeless injustice, is perhaps never as strong as it is at twelve—college students sometimes think they feel it, but it is usually little more than an intellectual echo.

This time it boiled over.

“I’m not your dog, so don’t you treat me like I am,” Jack said, and took a step toward Smokey Updike on legs that were still rubbery with fear.

Surprised—possibly even flabbergasted—by Jack’s totally unexpected anger, Smokey backed up a step.

“Jack, I’m warning you—”

“No, man, I’m warning
you
,” Jack heard himself say. “I’m not Lori. I don’t want to be hit. And if you hit me, I’m going to hit you back, or something.”

Smokey Updike’s discomposure was only momentary. He had most assuredly not seen everything—not living in Oatley, he hadn’t—but he
thought
he had, and even for a minor leaguer, sometimes assurance can be enough.