The Talisman (27 page)

Got to try and remember how that felt
, he thought.
I may need it . . . and I may not get back here for a long time.

He looked out at the grasslands, darkening now as night stole over them from the east. The wind gusted, chilly now but still fragrant, tossing his hair—it was getting shaggy now—as it tossed the grass.

You ready, Jack-O?

Jack closed his eyes and steeled himself against the awful taste and the vomiting that was apt to follow.

“Banzai,” he whispered, and drank.

14

Buddy Parkins

1

He vomited up a thin purple drool, his face only inches from the grass covering the long slope down to a four-lane highway; shook his head and rocked backward onto his knees, so that only his back was exposed to the heavy gray sky. The world, this world, stank. Jack pushed himself backward, away from the threads of puke settling over the blades of grass, and the stench altered but did not diminish. Gasoline, other nameless poisons floated in the air; and the air itself stank of exhaustion, fatigue—even the noises roaring up from the highway punished this dying air. The back end of a roadsign reared like a gigantic television screen over his head. Jack wobbled to his feet. Far down the other side of the highway glinted an endless body of water only slightly less gray than the sky. A sort of malignant luminescence darted across the surface. From here, too, rose an odor of metal filings and tired breath. Lake Ontario: and the snug little city down there might be Olcott or Kendall. He’d gone miles out of his way—lost a hundred miles or more and just about four and a half days. Jack stepped under the sign, hoping it was no worse than that. He looked up at the black letters. Wiped his mouth.
ANGOLA
. Angola? Where was that? He peered down at the smoky little city through the already nearly tolerable air.

And Rand McNally, that invaluable companion, told him that the acres of water way down there were Lake Erie—instead of losing days of travel time, he had gained them.

But before the boy could decide that he’d be smarter after all if he jumped back into the Territories as soon as he thought it might be safe—which is to say, as soon as Morgan’s diligence had roared long past the place he had been—before he could do that, before he could even begin to think about doing that, he had to go down into the smokey little city of Angola and see if this time Jack Sawyer, Jack-O, had played any of those changes, Daddy. He began to make his way down the slope, a twelve-year-old boy in jeans and a plaid shirt, tall for his age, already beginning to look uncared-for, with suddenly too much worry in his face.

Halfway down the long slope, he realized that he was thinking in English again.

2

Many days later, and a long way west: the man, Buddy Parkins by name, who, just out of Cambridge, Ohio, on U.S. 40, had picked up a tall boy calling himself Lewis Farren, would have recognized that look of worry—this kid Lewis looked like worry was about to sink into his face for good.
Lighten up, son, for your own sake if no one else’s
; Buddy wanted to tell the boy. But the boy had troubles enough for ten, according to his story. Mother sick, father dead, sent off to some schoolteacher aunt in Buckeye Lake . . . Lewis Farren had plenty to trouble him. He looked as though he had not seen as much as five dollars all together since the previous Christmas. Still . . . Buddy thought that somewhere along the line this Farren kid was jiving him.

For one thing, he smelled like farm, not town. Buddy Parkins and his brothers ran three hundred acres not far from Amanda, about thirty miles southeast of Columbus, and Buddy knew that he could not be wrong about this. This boy smelled like Cambridge, and Cambridge was country. Buddy had grown up with the smell of farmland and barnyard, of manure and growing corn and pea vineries, and the unwashed clothes of this boy beside him had absorbed all these familiar odors.

And there were the clothes themselves. Mrs. Farren must have been awful sick, Buddy thought, if she sent her boy off down the road in ripped jeans so stiff with dirt the wrinkles seemed bronzed. And the shoes! Lewis Farren’s sneakers were about to fall off his feet, the laces all spliced together and the fabric split or worn through in a couple of places on each shoe.

“So they got yore daddy’s car, did they, Lewis?” Buddy asked.

“Just like I said, that’s right—the lousy cowards came out after midnight and just stole it right out of the garage. I don’t think they should be allowed to do that. Not from people who work hard and really are going to start making their payments as soon as they can. I mean, do you? You don’t, do you?”

The boy’s honest, sunburned face was turned toward him as if this were the most serious question since the Nixon Pardon or maybe the Bay of Pigs, and all Buddy’s instincts were to agree—he would be inclined to agree with any generally good-hearted opinion uttered by a boy so redolent of farm work. “I guess there’s two sides to everything when you come down to it,” Buddy Parkins said, not very happily. The boy blinked, and then turned away to face forward again. Again Buddy felt his anxiety, the cloud of worry that seemed to hang over the boy, and was almost sorry he had not given Lewis Farren the agreement he seemed to need.

“I suppose yore aunt’s in the grade school there in Buckeye Lake,” Buddy said, at least in part hoping to lighten the boy’s misery. Point to the future, not the past.

“Yes, sir, that’s right. She teaches in the grade school. Helen Vaughan.” His expression did not change.

But Buddy had heard it again—he didn’t consider himself any Henry Higgins, the professor guy in that musical, but he knew for certain sure that young Lewis Farren didn’t talk like anyone who had been raised in Ohio. The kid’s voice was all wrong, too pushed-together and full of the wrong ups and downs. It wasn’t an Ohio voice at all. It especially was not a rural Ohioan’s voice. It was an
accent
.

Or was it possible that some boy from Cambridge, Ohio, could learn to talk like that? Whatever his crazy reason might be? Buddy supposed it was.

On the other hand, the newspaper this Lewis Farren had never once unclamped from beneath his left elbow seemed to validate Buddy Parkins’s deepest and worst suspicion, that his fragrant young companion was a runaway and his every word a lie. The name of the paper, visible to Buddy with only the slightest tilt of his head, was
The Angola Herald
. There was that Angola in Africa that a lot of Englishmen had rushed off to as mercenaries, and there was Angola, New York—right up there on Lake Erie. He’d seen pictures of it on the news not long ago, but could not quite remember why.

“I’d like to ask you a question, Lewis,” he said, and cleared his throat.

“Yes?” the boy said.

“How come a boy from a nice little burg on U.S. Forty is carrying around a paper from Angola, New York? Which is one hell of a long way away. I’m just curious, son.”

The boy looked down at the paper flattened under his arm and hugged it even closer to him, as if he were afraid it might squirm away. “Oh,” he said. “I found it.”

“Oh, hell,” Buddy said.

“Yes, sir. It was on a bench at the bus station back home.”

“You went to the bus station this morning?”

“Right before I decided to save the money and hitch. Mr. Parkins, if you can get me to the turnoff at Zanesville, I’ll only have a short ride left. Could probably get to my aunt’s house before dinner.”

“Could be,” Buddy said, and drove in an uncomfortable silence for several miles. Finally he could bear it no longer, and he said, very quietly and while looking straight ahead, “Son, are you running away from home?”

Lewis Farren astonished him by smiling—not grinning and not faking it, but actually smiling. He thought the whole notion of running away from home was funny. It tickled him. The boy glanced at him a fraction of a second after Buddy had looked sideways, and their eyes met.

For a second, for two seconds, three . . . for however long that moment lasted, Buddy Parkins saw that this unwashed boy sitting beside him was beautiful. He would have thought himself incapable of using that word to describe any male human being above the age of nine months, but underneath the road-grime this Lewis Farren was beautiful. His sense of humor had momentarily murdered his worries, and what shone out of him at Buddy—who was fifty-two years old and had three teenage sons—was a kind of straightforward goodness that had only been dented by a host of unusual experiences. This Lewis Farren, twelve years old by his own account, had somehow gone farther and seen more than Buddy Parkins, and what he had seen and done had made him beautiful.

“No, I’m not a runaway, Mr. Parkins,” the boy said.

Then he blinked, and his eyes went inward again and lost their brightness, their light, and the boy slumped back again against his seat. He pulled up a knee, rested it on the dashboard, and snugged the newspaper up under his bicep.

“No, I guess not,” Buddy Parkins said, snapping his eyes back to the highway. He felt relieved, though he was not quite sure why. “I guess yore not a runaway, Lewis. Yore something, though.”

The boy did not respond.

“Been workin on a farm, haven’t you?”

Lewis looked up at him, surprised. “I did, yeah. The past three days. Two dollars an hour.”

And yore mommy didn’t even take the time out from bein sick to wash yore clothes before she sent you to her sister, is that right?
Buddy thought. But what he said was “Lewis, I’d like you to think about coming home with me. I’m not saying yore on the run or anything, but if yore from anywhere around Cambridge I’ll eat this beat-up old car, tires and all, and I got three boys myself and the youngest one, Billy, he’s only about three years older’n you, and we know how to feed
boys
around my house. You can stay about as long as you like, depending on how many questions you want to answer. ’Cuz I’ll be asking em, at least after the first time we break bread together.”

He rubbed one palm over his gray crewcut and glanced across the seat. Lewis Farren was looking more like a boy and less like a revelation. “You’ll be welcome, son.”

Smiling, the boy said, “That’s really nice of you, Mr. Parkins, but I can’t. I have to go see my, ah, aunt in . . .”

“Buckeye Lake,” Buddy supplied.

The boy swallowed and looked forward again.

“I’ll give you help, if you want help,” Buddy repeated.

Lewis patted his forearm, sunburned and thick. “This ride is a big help, honest.”

Ten nearly silent minutes later he was watching the boy’s forlorn figure trudge down the exit ramp outside Zanesville. Emmie would probably have brained him if he’d come home with a strange dirty boy to feed, but once she’d seen him and talked to him, Emmie would have brought out the good glasses and the plates her mother had given her. Buddy Parkins didn’t believe that there was any woman named Helen Vaughan in Buckeye Lake, and he wasn’t so sure this mysterious Lewis Farren even had a mother—the boy seemed such an orphan, off on a vast errand. Buddy watched until the boy was taken by the curve of the off-ramp, and he was staring out at space and the enormous yellow-and-purple sign of a shopping mall.

For a second he thought of jumping out of the car and running after the kid, trying to get him back . . . and then he had a moment of recall of a crowded, smokey scene on the six-o’clock news. Angola, New York. Some disaster too small to be reported more than once, that was what had happened in Angola; one of those little tragedies the world shovels under a mountain of newsprint. All Buddy could catch, in this short, probably flawed moment of memory, was a picture of girders strewn like giant straws over battered cars, jutting up out of a fuming hole in the ground—a hole that might lead down into hell. Buddy Parkins looked once more at the empty place on the road where the boy had been, and then stamped on his clutch and dropped the old car into low.

3

Buddy Parkins’s memory was more accurate than he imagined. If he could have seen the first page of the month-old
Angola Herald
“Lewis Farren,” that enigmatic boy, had been holding so protectively yet fearfully beneath his arm, these are the words he would have read:

FREAK EARTHQUAKE KILLS 5
by Herald staff reporter Joseph Gargan

Work on the Rainbird Towers, intended to be Angola’s tallest and most luxurious condominium development and still six months from completion, was tragically halted yesterday as an unprecedented earth tremor collapsed the structure of the building, burying many construction workers beneath the rubble. Five bodies have been retrieved from the ruins of the proposed condominium, and two other workers have not yet been found but are presumed dead. All seven workers were welders and fitters in the employ of Speiser Construction, and all were on the girders of the building’s top two floors at the time of the incident.

  Yesterday’s tremor was the first earthquake in Angola’s recorded history. Armin Van Pelt of New York University’s Geology Department, contacted today by telephone, described the fatal quake as a “seismic bubble.” Representatives of the State Safety Commission are continuing their examinations of the site, as is a team of . . .

The dead men were Robert Heidel, twenty-three; Thomas Thielke, thirty-four; Jerome Wild, forty-eight; Michael Hagen, twenty-nine; and Bruce Davey, thirty-nine. The two men still missing were Arnold Schulkamp, fifty-four, and Theodore Rasmussen, forty-three. Jack no longer had to look at the newspaper’s front page to remember their names. The first earthquake in the history of Angola, New York, had occurred on the day he had flipped away from the Western Road and landed on the town’s border. Part of Jack Sawyer wished that he could have gone home with big kindly Buddy Parkins, eaten dinner around the table in the kitchen with the Parkins family—boiled beef and deep-dish apple pie—and then snuggled into the Parkinses’ guest bed and pulled the homemade quilt up over his head. And not moved, except toward the table, for four or five days. But part of the trouble was that he saw that knotty-pine kitchen table heaped with crumbly cheese, and on the other side of the table a mouse-hole was cut into a giant baseboard; and from holes in the jeans of the three Parkins boys protruded thin long tails. Who plays these Jerry Bledsoe changes, Daddy?
Heidel, Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey; Schulkamp and Rasmussen
. Those Jerry changes? He knew who played them.

4

The huge yellow-and-purple sign reading
BUCKEYE MALL
floated ahead of Jack as he came around the final curve of the off-ramp, drifted past his shoulder and reappeared on his other side, at which point he could finally see that it was erected on a tripod of tall yellow poles in the shopping-center parking lot. The mall itself was a futuristic assemblage of ochre-colored buildings that seemed to be windowless—a second later, Jack realized that the mall was covered, and what he was seeing was only the illusion of separate buildings. He put his hand in his pocket and fingered the tight roll of twenty-three single dollar bills which was his earthly fortune.