The Talisman (21 page)

He reached out to grab Jack’s collar.

“Don’t you smart off to me, Jack,” he said, drawing Jack close. “As long as you’re in Oatley, my dog is just what you are. As long as you’re in Oatley I’ll pet you when I want and I’ll beat you when I want.”

He adminstered a single neck-snapping shake. Jack bit his tongue and cried out. Hectic spots of anger now glowed in Smokey’s pale cheeks like cheap rouge.

“You may not think that is so right now, but Jack, it is. As long as you’re in Oatley you’re my dog, and you’ll be in Oatley until I decide to let you go. And we might as well start getting that learned right now.”

He pulled his fist back. For a moment the three naked sixty-watt bulbs which hung in this narrow hallway sparkled crazily on the diamond chips of the horseshoe-shaped pinky ring he wore. Then the fist pistoned forward and slammed into the side of Jack’s face. He was driven backward into the graffiti-covered wall, the side of his face first flaring and then going numb. The taste of his own blood washed into his mouth.

Smokey looked at him—the close, judgmental stare of a man who might be thinking about buying a heifer or a lottery number. He must not have seen the expression he wanted to see in Jack’s eye, because he grabbed the dazed boy again, presumably the better to center him for a second shot.

At that moment a woman shrieked, from the Tap, “
No, Glen! No!
” There was a tangle of bellowing male voices, most of them alarmed. Another woman screamed—a high, drilling sound. Then a gunshot.

“Shit on
toast!
” Smokey cried, enunciating each word as carefully as an actor on a Broadway stage. He threw Jack back against the wall, whirled, and slammed out through the swinging door. The gun went off again and there was a scream of pain.

Jack was sure of only one thing—the time had come to get out. Not at the end of tonight’s shift, or tomorrow’s, or on Sunday morning. Right
now
.

The uproar seemed to be quieting down. There were no sirens, so maybe nobody had gotten shot . . . but, Jack remembered, cold, the millhand who looked like Randolph Scott was still down in the men’s can.

Jack went into the chilly, beer-smelling storeroom, knelt by the kegs, and felt around for his pack. Again there was that suffocating certainty, as his fingers encountered nothing but thin air and the dirty concrete floor, that one of them—Smokey or Lori—had seen him hide the pack and had taken it. All the better to keep you in Oatley, my dear. Then relief, almost as suffocating as the fear, when his fingers touched the nylon. Jack donned the pack and looked longingly toward the loading door at the back of the storeroom. He would much rather use that door—he didn’t want to go down to the fire-door at the end of the hall. That was too close to the men’s bathroom. But if he opened the loading door, a red light would go on at the bar. Even if Smokey was still sorting out the ruckus on the floor, Lori would see that light and tell him.

So . . .

He went to the door which gave on the back corridor. He eased it open a crack and applied one eye. The corridor was empty. All right, that was cool. Randolph Scott had tapped a kidney and gone back to where the action was while Jack was getting his backpack. Great.

Yeah, except maybe he’s still in there. You want to meet him in the hall, Jacky? Want to watch his eyes turn yellow again? Wait until you’re sure.

But he couldn’t do that. Because Smokey would see he wasn’t out in the Tap, helping Lori and Gloria swab tables, or behind the bar, unloading the dishwasher. He would come back here to finish teaching Jack what his place was in the great scheme of things. So—

So what? Get going!

Maybe he’s in there waiting for you, Jacky . . . maybe he’s going to jump out just like a big bad Jack-in-the-Box . . .

The lady or the tiger? Smokey or the millhand? Jack hesitated a moment longer in an agony of indecision. That the man with the yellow eyes was still in the bathroom was a possibility; that Smokey would be back was a certainty.

Jack opened the door and stepped out into the narrow hallway. The pack on his back seemed to gain weight—an eloquent accusation of his planned escape to anyone who might see it. He started down the hallway, moving grotesquely on tiptoe in spite of the thundering music and the roar of the crowd, his heart hammering in his chest.

I was six, Jacky was six.

So what? Why did that keep coming back?

Six.

The corridor seemed longer. It was like walking on a treadmill. The fire-door at the far end seemed to draw closer only by agonizing degrees. Sweat now coated his brow and his upper lip. His gaze flicked steadily toward the door to the right, with the black outline of a dog on it. Beneath this outline was the word
POINTERS
. And at the end of the corridor, a door of fading, peeling red. The sign on the door said
EMERGENCY USE ONLY
!
ALARM WILL SOUND
! In fact, the alarm bell had been broken for two years. Lori had told him so when Jack had hesitated about using the door to take out the trash.

Finally almost there. Directly opposite
POINTERS
.

He’s in there, I know he is . . . and if he jumps out I’ll scream . . . I . . . I’ll . . .

Jack put out a trembling right hand and touched the crash-bar of the emergency door. It felt blessedly cool to his touch. For one moment he really believed he would simply fly out of the pitcher plant and into the night . . . free.

Then the door
behind
him suddenly banged open, the door to
SETTERS
, and a hand grabbed his backpack. Jack uttered a high-pitched, despairing shriek of a trapped animal and lunged at the emergency door, heedless of the pack and the magic juice inside it. If the straps had broken he would have simply gone fleeing through the trashy, weedy vacant lot behind the Tap, and never mind anything else.

But the straps were tough nylon and didn’t break. The door opened a little way, revealing a brief dark wedge of the night, and then thumped shut again. Jack was pulled into the women’s room. He was whirled around and then thrown backward. If he had hit the wall dead on, the bottle of magic juice would undoubtedly have shattered in the pack, drenching his few clothes and good old Rand McNally with the odor of rotting grapes. Instead, he hit the room’s one wash-basin with the small of his back. The pain was giant, excruciating.

The millhand was walking toward him slowly, hitching up his jeans with hands that had begun to twist and thicken.

“You were supposed to be gone, kid,” he said, his voice roughening, becoming at every moment more like the snarl of an animal.

Jack began to edge to his left, his eyes never leaving the man’s face. His eyes now seemed almost transparent, not just yellow but lighted from within . . . the eyes of a hideous Halloween jack-o’-lantern.

“But you can trust old Elroy,” the cowboy-thing said, and now it grinned to reveal a mouthful of curving teeth, some of them jaggedly broken off, some black with rot. Jack screamed. “Oh, you can trust Elroy,” it said, its words now hardly discernible from a doglike growl. “He ain’t gonna hurt you
too
bad.

“You’ll be all right,” it growled, moving toward Jack, “you’ll be all right, oh yeah, you’ll . . .” It continued to talk, but Jack could no longer tell what it was saying. Now it was only snarling.

Jack’s foot hit the tall wastecan by the door. As the cowboy thing reached for him with its hooflike hands, Jack grabbed the can and threw it. The can bounced off the Elroy-thing’s chest. Jack tore open the bathroom door and lunged to the left, toward the emergency door. He slammed into the crash-bar, aware that Elroy was right behind him. He lurched into the dark behind the Oatley Tap.

There was a colony of overloaded garbage cans to the right of the door. Jack blindly swept three of them behind him, heard them clash and rattle—and then a howl of fury as Elroy stumbled into them.

He whirled in time to see the thing go down. There was even a moment to realize—
Oh dear Jesus a tail it’s got something like a tail
—that the thing was now almost entirely an animal. Golden light fell from its eyes in weird rays, like bright light falling through twin keyholes.

Jack backed away from it, pulling the pack from his back, trying to undo the catches with fingers which felt like blocks of wood, his mind a roaring confusion—

—Jacky was six God help me Speedy Jacky was SIX God please—

—of thoughts and incoherent pleas. The thing snarled and flailed at the garbage cans. Jack saw one hoof-hand go up and then come whistling down, splitting the side of one corrugated metal can in a jagged slash a yard long. It got up again, stumbled, almost fell, and then began to lurch toward Jack, its snarling, rippling face now almost at chest level. And somehow, through its barking growls, he was able to make out what it was saying. “Now I’m not just gonna ream you, little chicken. Now I’m gonna kill you . . . 
after
.”

Hearing it with his
ears?
Or in his
head?

It didn’t matter. The space between this world and that had shrunk from a universe to a mere membrane.

The Elroy-thing snarled and came toward him, now unsteady and awkward on its rear feet, its clothes bulging in all the wrong places, its tongue swinging from its fanged mouth. Here was the vacant lot behind Smokey Updike’s Oatley Tap, yes, here it was at last, choked with weeds and blown trash—a rusty bedspring here, the grille of a 1957 Ford over there, and a ghastly sickle moon like a bent bone in the sky overhead, turning every shard of broken glass into a dead and staring eye, and this hadn’t begun in New Hampshire, had it? No. It hadn’t begun when his mother got sick, or with the appearance of Lester Parker. It had begun when—

Jacky was six. When we all lived in California and no one lived anywhere else and Jacky was—

He fumbled at the straps of his pack.

It came again, seeming almost to dance, for a moment reminding him of some animated Disney cartoon-figure in the chancy moonlight. Crazily, Jack began to laugh. The thing snarled and leaped at him. The swipe of those heavy hoofclaws again missed him by barest inches as he danced back through the weeds and litter. The Elroy-thing came down on the bedspring and somehow became entangled in it. Howling, snapping white gobbets of foam into the air, it pulled and twisted and lunged, one foot buried deep in the rusty coils.

Jack groped inside his pack for the bottle. He dug past socks and dirty undershorts and a wadded, fragrant pair of jeans. He seized the neck of the bottle and yanked it out.

The Elroy-thing split the air with a howl of rage, finally pulling free of the bedspring.

Jack hit the cindery, weedy, scruffy ground and rolled over, the last two fingers of his left hand hooked around one pack-strap, his right hand holding the bottle. He worked at the cap with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, the pack dangling and swinging. The cap spun off.

Can it follow me?
he wondered incoherently, tipping the bottle to his lips.
When I go, do I punch some kind of hole through the middle of things? Can it follow me through and finish me on the other side?

Jack’s mouth filled with that rotten dead-grape taste. He gagged, his throat closing, seeming to actually reverse direction. Now that awful taste filled his sinuses and nasal passages as well and he uttered a deep, shaking groan. He could hear the Elroy-thing screaming now, but the scream seemed far away, as if it were on one end of the Oatley tunnel and he, Jack, were falling rapidly toward the other end. And this time there was a sense of falling and he thought:
Oh my God what if I just flipped my stupid self over a cliff or off a mountain over there?

He held on to the pack and the bottle, his eyes screwed desperately shut, waiting for whatever might happen next—Elroy-thing or no Elroy-thing. Territories or oblivion—and the thought which had haunted him all night came swinging back like a dancing carousel horse—Silver Lady, maybe Ella Speed. He caught it and rode it down in a cloud of the magic juice’s awful smell, holding it, waiting for whatever would happen next; feeling his clothes change on his body.

Six oh yes when we were all six and nobody was anything else and it was California who blows that sax daddy is it Dexter Gordon or is it is it what does Mom mean when she says we’re living on a fault-line and where where oh where do you go Daddy you and Uncle Morgan oh Daddy sometimes he looks at you like like oh like there is a fault-line in his head and an earthquake going on behind his eyes and you’re dying in it oh Daddy!

Falling, twisting, turning in the middle of limbo, in the middle of a smell like a purple cloud, Jack Sawyer, John Benjamin Sawyer, Jacky, Jacky

—was six when it started to happen, and who blew that sax Daddy? Who blew it when I was six, when Jacky was six, when Jacky—

11

The Death of Jerry Bledsoe

1

was six
 . . . when it really started, Daddy, when the engines that eventually pulled him to Oatley and beyond began to chug away. There had been loud saxophone music.
Six. Jacky was six
. At first his attention had been entirely on the toy his father had given him, a scale model of a London taxi—the toy car was heavy as a brick, and on the smooth wooden floors of the new office a good push sent it rumbling straight across the room. Late afternoon, first grade all the way on the other side of August, a neat new car that rolled like a tank on the strip of bare wood behind the couch, a contented, relaxed feeling in the air-conditioned office . . . no more work to do, no more phone calls that couldn’t wait until the next day. Jack pushed the heavy toy taxi down the strip of bare wood, barely able to hear the rumbling of the solid rubber tires under the soloing of a saxophone. The black car struck one of the legs of the couch, spun sideways, and stopped. Jack crawled down and Uncle Morgan had parked himself in one of the chairs on the other side of the couch. Each man nursed a drink; soon they would put down their glasses, switch off the turntable and the amplifier, and go downstairs to their cars.

when we were all six and nobody was anything else and it was California

“Who’s playing that sax?” he heard Uncle Morgan ask, and, half in a reverie, heard that familiar voice in a new way: something whispery and hidden in Morgan Sloat’s voice coiled into Jacky’s ear. He touched the top of the toy taxi and his fingers were as cold as if it were of ice, not English steel.

“That’s Dexter Gordon, is who that is,” his father answered. His voice was as lazy and friendly as it always was, and Jack slipped his hand around the heavy taxi.

“Good record.”

“
Daddy Plays the Horn
. It is a nice old record, isn’t it?”

“I’ll have to look for it.” And then Jack thought he knew what that strangeness in Uncle Morgan’s voice was all about—Uncle Morgan didn’t really like jazz at all, he just pretended to in front of Jack’s father. Jack had known this fact about Morgan Sloat for most of his childhood, and he thought it was silly that his father couldn’t see it too. Uncle Morgan was never going to look for a record called
Daddy Plays the Horn,
he was just flattering Phil Sawyer—and maybe the reason Phil Sawyer didn’t see it was that like everyone else he never paid quite enough attention to Morgan Sloat. Uncle Morgan, smart and ambitious (“smart as a wolverine, sneaky as a courthouse lawyer,” Lily said), good old Uncle Morgan deflected observation—your eye just sort of naturally slid off him. When he was a kid, Jacky would have bet, his teachers would have had trouble even remembering his name.

“Imagine what this guy would be like over there,” Uncle Morgan said, for once fully claiming Jack’s attention. That falsity still played through his voice, but it was not Sloat’s hypocrisy that jerked up Jacky’s head and tightened his fingers on his heavy toy—the words
over there
had sailed straight into his brain and now were gonging like chimes. Because
over there
was the country of Jack’s Daydreams. He had known that immediately. His father and Uncle Morgan had forgotten that he was behind the couch, and they were going to talk about the Daydreams.

His father knew about the Daydream-country. Jack could never have mentioned the Daydreams to either his father or his mother, but his father knew about the Daydreams because he had to—simple as that. And the next step, felt along Jack’s emotions more than consciously expressed, was that his dad helped keep the Daydreams safe.

But for some reason, equally difficult to translate from emotion into language, the conjunction of Morgan Sloat and the Daydreams made the boy uneasy.

“Hey?” Uncle Morgan said. “This guy would really turn em around, wouldn’t he? They’d probably make him Duke of the Blasted Lands, or something.”

“Well, probably not that,” Phil Sawyer said. “Not if they liked him as much as we do.”

But Uncle Morgan doesn’t like him, Dad
, Jacky thought, suddenly clear that this was important.
He doesn’t like him at all, not really, he thinks that music is too
loud,
he thinks it takes something from him. . . .

“Oh, you know a lot more about it than I do,” Uncle Morgan said in a voice that sounded easy and relaxed.

“Well, I’ve been there more often. But you’re doing a good job of catching up.” Jacky heard that his father was smiling.

“Oh, I’ve learned a few things, Phil. But really, you know—I’ll never get over being grateful to you for showing all that to me.” The two syllables of
grateful
filled with smoke and the sound of breaking glass.

But all of these little warnings could not do more than dent Jack’s intense, almost blissful satisfaction. They were talking about the Daydreams. It was magical, that such a thing was possible. What they said was beyond him, their terms and vocabulary were too adult, but six-year-old Jack experienced again the wonder and joy of the Daydreams, and was at least old enough to understand the direction of their conversation. The Daydreams were real, and Jacky somehow shared them with his father. That was half his joy.

2

“Let me just get some things straight,” Uncle Morgan said, and Jacky saw the word
straight
as a pair of lines knotting around each other like snakes. “They have magic like we have physics, right? We’re talking about an agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science.”

“Sure,” Phil Sawyer said.

“And presumably they’ve gone on like that for centuries. Their lives have never changed very much.”

“Except for political upheavals, that’s right.”

Then Uncle Morgan’s voice tightened, and the excitement he tried to conceal cracked little whips within his consonants. “Well, forget about the political stuff. Suppose we think about us for a change. You’ll say—and I’d agree with you, Phil—that we’ve done pretty well out of the Territories already, and that we’d have to be careful about how we introduce changes there. I have no problems at all with that position. I feel the same way myself.”

Jacky could feel his father’s silence.

“Okay,” Sloat continued. “Let’s go with the concept that, within a situation basically advantageous to ourselves, we can spread the benefits around to anybody on our side. We don’t sacrifice the advantage, but we’re not greedy about the bounty it brings. We owe these people, Phil. Look what they’ve done for us. I think we could put ourselves into a really synergistic situation over there. Our energy can feed their energy and come up with stuff we’ve never even thought of, Phil. And we end up looking generous, which we are—but which also doesn’t hurt us.” He would be frowning forward, the palms of his hands pressed together. “Of course I don’t have a total window on this situation, you know that, but I think the synergy alone is worth the price of admission, to tell you the truth. But Phil—can you imagine how much fucking clout we’d swing if we gave them electricity? If we got modern weapons to the right guys over there? Do you have any idea? I think it’d be awesome.
Awesome
.” The damp, squashy sound of his clapping hands. “I don’t want to catch you unprepared or anything, but I thought it might be time for us to think along those lines—to think, Territories-wise, about increasing our involvement.”

Phil Sawyer still said nothing. Uncle Morgan slapped his hands together again. Finally Phil Sawyer said, in a noncommittal voice, “You want to think about increasing our involvement.”

“I think it’s the way to go. And I can give you chapter and verse, Phil, but I shouldn’t have to. You can probably remember as well I can what it was like before we started going there together. Hey, maybe we could have made it all on our own, and maybe we would have, but as for me, I’m grateful not to be representing a couple of broken-down strippers and Little Timmy Tiptoe anymore.”

“Hold on,” Jack’s father said.

“Airplanes,” Uncle Morgan said. “Think airplanes.”

“Hold on, hold on there, Morgan, I have a lot of ideas that apparently have yet to occur to you.”

“I’m always ready for new ideas,” Morgan said, and his voice was smoky again.

“Okay. I think we have to be careful about what we do over there, partner. I think anything major—any real changes we bring about—just might turn around and bite our asses back here. Everything has consequences, and some of those consequences might be on the uncomfortable side.”

“Like what?” Uncle Morgan asked.

“Like war.”

“That’s nuts, Phil. We’ve never seen anything . . . unless you mean Bledsoe. . . .”

“I do mean Bledsoe. Was that a coincidence?”

Bledsoe?
Jack wondered. He had heard the name before; but it was vague.

“Well, that’s a long way from war, to put it mildly, and I don’t concede the connection anyhow.”

“All right. Do you remember hearing about how a Stranger assassinated the old King over there—a long time ago? You ever hear about that?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Uncle Morgan said, and Jack heard again the falseness in his voice.

His father’s chair squeaked—he was taking his feet off his desk, leaning forward. “The assassination touched off a minor war over there. The followers of the old King had to put down a rebellion led by a couple of disgruntled nobles. These guys saw their chance to take over and run things—seize lands, impound property, throw their enemies in jail, make themselves rich.”

“Hey, be fair,” Morgan broke in. “I heard about this stuff, too. They also wanted to bring some kind of political order to a crazy inefficient system—sometimes you have to be tough, starting out. I can see that.”

“And it’s not for us to make judgments about their politics, I agree. But here’s my point. That little war over there lasted about three weeks. When it was over, maybe a hundred people had been killed. Fewer, probably. Did anyone ever tell you when that war began? What year it was? What day?”

“No,” Uncle Morgan muttered in a sulky voice.

“It was the first of September, 1939. Over here, it was the day Germany invaded Poland.” His father stopped talking, and Jacky, clutching his black toy taxi behind the couch, yawned silently but hugely.

“That’s screwball,” Uncle Morgan finally said. “
Their
war started
ours?
Do you really believe that?”

“I do believe that,” Jack’s father said. “I believe a three-week squabble over there in some way sparked off a war here that lasted six years and killed millions of people. Yes.”

“Well . . .” Uncle Morgan said, and Jack could see him beginning to huff and blow.

“There’s more. I’ve talked to lots of people over there about this, and the feeling I get is that the stranger who assassinated the King was a
real
Stranger, if you see what I mean. Those who saw him got the feeling that he was uncomfortable with Territories clothes. He acted like he was unsure of local customs—he didn’t understand the money right away.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. If they hadn’t torn him to pieces right after he stuck a knife into the King, we could be sure about this, but I’m sure anyhow that he was—”

“Like us.”

“Like us. That’s right. A visitor. Morgan, I don’t think we can mess around too much over there. Because we simply don’t know what the effects will be. To tell you the truth, I think we’re affected all the time by things that go on in the Territories. And should I tell you another crazy thing?”

“Why not?” Sloat answered.

“That’s not the only other world out there.”

3

“Bullshit,” Sloat said.

“I mean it. I’ve had the feeling, once or twice when I was there, that I was near to somewhere
else
—the Territories’ Territories.”

Yes
, Jack thought,
that’s right, it has to be, the Daydreams’ Daydreams, someplace even more beautiful, and on the other side of that is the Daydreams’ Daydreams’ Daydreams, and on the other side of that is another place, another world nicer still
. . . . He realized for the first time that he had become very sleepy.

The Daydreams’ Daydreams

And then he was almost immediately asleep, the heavy little taxi in his lap, his whole body simultaneously weighty with sleep, anchored to the strip of wooden floor, and so blissfully light.

The conversation must have continued—there must have been much that Jacky missed. He rose and fell, heavy and light, through the second whole side of
Daddy Plays the Horn
, and during that time Morgan Sloat must at first have argued—gently, but with what squeezings of his fists, what contortions of his forehead!—for his plan; then he must have allowed himself to seem persuadable, then finally persuaded by his partner’s doubts. At the end of this conversation, which returned to the twelve-year-old Jacky Sawyer in the dangerous borderland between Oatley, New York, and a nameless Territories village, Morgan Sloat had allowed himself to seem not only
persuaded
but positively grateful for the lessons. When Jack woke up, the first thing he heard was his father asking, “Hey, did Jack disappear or something?” and the second thing was Uncle Morgan saying, “Hell, I guess you’re right, Phil. You have a way of seeing right to the heart of things, you’re great the way you do that.”

“Where the hell is Jack?” his father said, and Jack stirred behind the couch, really waking up now. The black taxi thudded to the floor.

“Aha,” Uncle Morgan said. “Little pitchers and big ears,
peut-être?
”

“You behind there, kiddo?” his father said. Noises of chairs pushing back across the wooden floor, of men standing up.

He said, “
Oooh
,” and slowly lifted the taxi back into his lap. His legs felt stiff and uncomfortable—when he stood, they would tingle.

His father laughed. Footsteps came toward him. Morgan Sloat’s red, puffy face appeared over the top of the couch. Jack yawned and pushed his knees into the back of the couch. His father’s face appeared beside Sloat’s. His father was smiling. For a moment, both of those grown-up adult male heads seemed to be floating over the top of the couch. “Let’s move on home, sleepyhead,” his father said. When the boy looked into Uncle Morgan’s face, he saw calculation sink into his skin, slide underneath his jolly-fat-man’s cheeks like a snake beneath a rock. He looked like Richard Sloat’s daddy again, like good old Uncle Morgan who always gave spectacular Christmas and birthday presents, like good old sweaty Uncle Morgan, so easy not to notice. But what had he looked like before?
Like a human earthquake, like a man crumbling apart over the fault-line behind his eyes, like something all wound up and waiting to explode
. . . .