The Talisman (39 page)

But he had just finished it when Wolf pulled up his head and straightened his back and yelled, “JACK! JACK! JACK WOLF!”

“We call him Jack sometimes,” the boy put in, knowing it was already too late. “It’s because he likes me so much, sometimes I’m the only one who can do anything with him. I might even stay there in Springfield a few days after I get him home, just to make sure he settles down okay.”

“I sure am sick of the sound of your voice, Jack boy. Why don’t you and good old Phil-Jack get in the back seat here and we’ll go into town and straighten everything out?” When Jack did not move, the policeman put a hand on the butt of the enormous pistol which hung from his straining belt. “Get in the car. Him first. I want to find out why you’re a hundred miles from home on a school day. In the car. Right now.”

“Ah, officer,” Jack began, and behind him Wolf rasped, “No. Can’t.”

“My cousin has this problem,” Jack said. “He’s claustrophobic. Small spaces, especially the insides of cars, drive him crazy. We can only get rides in pick-ups, so he can be in the back.”

“Get in the car,”
the policeman said. He stepped forward and opened the back door.

“CAN’T!” Wolf wailed. “Wolf CAN’T! Stinks, Jacky, it
stinks
in there.” His nose and lip had wrinkled into corrugations.

“You get him in the car or I will,” the cop said to Jack.

“Wolf, it won’t be for long,” Jack said, reaching for Wolf’s hand. Reluctantly, Wolf allowed him to take it. Jack pulled him toward the back seat of the police car, Wolf literally dragging his feet across the surface of the road.

For a couple of seconds it looked as though it would work. Wolf got close enough to the police car to touch the doorframe. Then his entire body shook. He clamped both hands onto the top of the doorframe. It looked as though he were going to try to rip the top of the car in half, as a circus strongman tears a telephone book in two.

“Please,” Jack said quietly. “We have to.”

But Wolf was terrified, and too disgusted by whatever he had smelled. He shook his head violently. Slobber ran from his mouth and dripped onto the top of the car.

The policeman stepped around Jack and released something from a catch on his belt. Jack had time only to see that it was not his pistol before the cop expertly whapped his blackjack into the base of Wolf’s skull. Wolf’s upper body dropped onto the top of the car, and then all of Wolf slid gracefully down onto the dusty road.

“You get on his other side,” the cop said, fastening the sap to his belt. “We’re gonna finally get this big bag of shit into the vehicle.”

Two or three minutes later, after they had twice dropped Wolf’s heavy unconscious body back onto the road, they were speeding toward Cayuga. “I already know what’s gonna happen to you and your feeb cousin, if he is your cousin, which I doubt.” The cop looked up at Jack in his rear-view mirror, and his eyes were raisins dipped in fresh tar.

All the blood in Jack’s body seemed to swing down, down in his veins, and his heart jumped in his chest. He had remembered the cigarette in his shirt pocket. He clapped his hand over it, then jerked his hand away before the cop could say anything.

“I gotta put his shoes back on,” Jack said. “They sort of fell off.”

“Forget it,” the cop said, but did not object further when Jack bent over. Out of sight of the mirror, he first shoved one of the split-seamed loafers back up on Wolf’s bare heel, then quickly snatched the joint out of his pocket and popped it in his mouth. He bit into it, and dry crumbly particles with a oddly herbal taste spilled over his tongue. Jack began to grind them between his teeth. Something scratched down into his throat, and he convulsively jerked upright, put his hand in front of his mouth, and tried to cough with his lips together. When his throat was clear, he hurriedly swallowed all of the dampened, now rather sludgy marijuana. Jack ran his tongue over his teeth, collecting all the flecks and traces.

“You got a few surprises ahead of you,” the policeman said. “You’re gonna get a little sunlight in your soul.”

“Sunlight in my soul?” Jack asked, thinking that the cop had seen him stuff the joint into his mouth.

“A few blisters on your hands, too,” the cop said, and glared happily at Jack’s guilty image in the rear-view mirror.

The Cayuga Municipal Building was a shadowy maze of unlighted hallways and narrow staircases that seemed to wind unexpectedly upward alongside equally narrow rooms. Water sang and rumbled in the pipes. “Let me explain something to you kids,” the policeman said, ushering them toward the last staircase to their right. “You’re not under arrest. Got that? You are being detained for questioning. I don’t want to hear any bullshit about one phone call. You’re in limbo until you tell us who you are and what you’re up to,” the cop went on. “You hear me? Limbo. Nowhere. We’re gonna see Judge Fairchild, he’s the magistrate, and if you don’t tell us the truth, you’re gonna pay some big fuckin consequences. Upstairs. Move it!”

At the top of the stairs the policeman pushed a door open. A middle-aged woman in wire glasses and a black dress looked up from a typewriter placed sideways against the far wall. “Two more runaways,” the policeman said. “Tell him we’re here.”

She nodded, picked up her telephone, and spoke a few words. “You may go in,” the secretary said to them, her eyes wandering from Wolf to Jack and back again.

The cop pushed them across the anteroom and opened the door to a room twice as large, lined with books on one long wall, framed photographs and diplomas and certificates on another. Blinds had been lowered across the long windows opposite. A tall skinny man in a dark suit, a wrinkled white shirt, and a narrow tie of no discernible pattern stood up behind a chipped wooden desk that must have been six feet long. The man’s face was a relief map of wrinkles, and his hair was so black it must have been dyed. Stale cigarette smoke hung visibly in the air. “Well, what have we got here, Franky?” His voice was startlingly deep, almost theatrical.

“Kids I picked up on French Lick Road, over by Thompson’s place.”

Judge Fairchild’s wrinkles contorted into a smile as he looked at Jack. “You have any identification papers on you, son?”

“No sir,” Jack said.

“Have you told Officer Williams here the truth about everything? He doesn’t think you have, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes sir,” Jack said.

“Then tell me your story.” He walked around his desk, disturbing the flat layers of smoke just over his head, and half-sat, half-leaned on the front corner nearest Jack. Squinting, he lit a cigarette—Jack saw the Judge’s recessed pale eyes peering at him through the smoke and knew there was no charity in them.

It was the pitcher plant again.

Jack drew in a large breath. “My name is Jack Parker. He’s my cousin, and he’s called Jack, too. Jack Wolf. But his real name is Philip. He was staying with us in Daleville because his dad’s dead and his mother got sick. I was just taking him back to Springfield.”

“Simple-minded, is he?”

“A little slow,” Jack said, and glanced up at Wolf. His friend seemed barely conscious.

“What’s your mother’s name?” the Judge asked Wolf. Wolf did not respond in any way. His eyes were clamped shut and his hands stuffed into his pockets.

“She’s named Helen,” Jack said. “Helen Vaughan.”

The Judge eased himself off the desk and walked slowly over to Jack. “Have you been drinking, son? You’re a little unsteady.”

“No.”

Judge Fairchild came to within a foot of Jack and bent down. “Let me smell your breath.”

Jack opened his mouth and exhaled.

“Nope. No booze.” The Judge straightened up again. “But that’s the only thing you were telling the truth about, isn’t it? You’re trying to string me along, boy.”

“I’m sorry we were hitching,” Jack said, aware that he had to speak with great caution now. Not only might what he said determine whether he and Wolf were to be let free, but he was having a little trouble forming the words themselves—everything seemed to be happening with great slowness. As in the shed, the seconds had wandered off the metronome. “In fact, we hardly ever hitch because Wolf—Jack, that is—hates being in cars. We’ll never do it again. We haven’t done anything wrong, sir, and that really is the truth.”

“You don’t understand, sonny,” the Judge said, and his far-off eyes gleamed again.
He’s enjoying this,
Jack understood. Judge Fairchild moved slowly back behind his desk. “Hitching rides isn’t the issue. You two boys are out on the road by yourself, coming from nowhere, going nowhere—real targets for trouble.” His voice was like dark honey. “Now we have here in this country what we think is a most unusual facility—state-approved and state-funded, by the way—which might have been set up expressly for the benefit of boys like yourselves. It’s called the Sunlight Gardener Scripture Home for Wayward Boys. Mr. Gardener’s work with young fellows in trouble has been nothing short of miraculous. We’ve sent him some tough cases, and in no time at all he has those boys on their knees begging Jesus for forgiveness. Now I’d say that was pretty special, wouldn’t you?”

Jack swallowed. His mouth felt drier than it had been in the shed. “Ah, sir, it’s really urgent that we get to Springfield. Everybody’s going to wonder—”

“I very much doubt that,” said the Judge, smiling with all his wrinkles. “But I’ll tell you what. As soon as you two wags are on your way to the Sunlight Home, I’ll telephone Springfield and try to get the number of this Helen . . . Wolf, is it? Or is it Helen Vaughan?”

“Vaughan,” Jack said, and a red-hot blush covered his face like a fever.

“Yes,” the Judge said.

Wolf shook his head, blinking, and then put a hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“Coming around are you, son?” the Judge asked. “Could you tell me your age?”

Wolf blinked again, and looked at Jack.

“Sixteen,” Jack said.

“And you?”

“Twelve.”

“Oh. I would have taken you for several years older. All the more reason for seeing you get help now before you get in real deep trouble, wouldn’t you say, Franky?”

“Amen,” the policeman said.

“You boys come back here in a month,” said the Judge. “Then we’ll see if your memory is any better. Why are your eyes so bloodshot?”

“They feel kind of funny,” Jack said, and the policeman barked. He had laughed, Jack realized a second later.

“Take them away, Franky,” the Judge said. He was already picking up the telephone. “You’re going to be different boys thirty days from now. Depend on it.”

While they walked down the steps of the redbrick Municipal Building, Jack asked Franky Williams why the Judge had asked for their ages. The cop paused on the bottom step and half-turned to glare up at Jack out of his blazing face. “Old Sunlight generally takes em in at twelve and turns em loose at nineteen.” He grinned. “You tellin me you never heard him on the radio? He’s about the most famous thing we got around here. I’m pretty sure they heard of old Sunlight Gardener even way over in Daleville.” His teeth were small discolored pegs, irregularly spaced.

3

Twenty minutes later they were in farmland again.

Wolf had climbed into the back seat of the police car with surprisingly little fuss. Franky Williams had pulled his sap from his belt and said, “You want this again, you fuckin freak? Who knows, it might make you smart.” Wolf had trembled, Wolf’s nose had wrinkled up, but he had followed Jack into the car. He had immediately clapped his hand over his nose and begun breathing through his mouth. “We’ll get away from this place, Wolf,” Jack had whispered into his ear. “A couple of days, that’s all, and we’ll see how to do it.” “No chatter” came from the front seat.

Jack was strangely relaxed. He was certain that they would find a way to escape. He leaned back against the plastic seat, Wolf’s hand wrapped around his, and watched the fields go by.

“There she is,” Franky Williams called from the front seat. “Your future home.”

Jack saw a meeting of tall brick walls planted surrealistically amidst the fields. Too tall to see over, the walls around the Sunlight Home were topped with three strands of barbed wire and shards of broken glass set in cement. The car was now driving past exhausted fields bordered with fences in which strands of barbed and smooth wire alternated.

“Got sixty acres out here,” Williams said. “And all of it is either walled or fenced—you better believe it. Boys did it themselves.”

A wide iron gate interrupted the expanse of wall where the drive turned into the Home’s property. As soon as the police car turned into the drive the gates swung open, triggered by some electronic signal. “TV camera,” the policeman explained. “They’re a-waitin for you two fresh fish.”

Jack leaned forward and put his face to the window. Boys in denim jackets worked in the long fields to either side, hoeing and raking, pushing wheelbarrows.

“You two shitheads just earned me twenty bucks,” Williams said. “Plus another twenty for Judge Fairchild. Ain’t that great?”

21

The Sunlight Home

1

The Home looked like something made from a child’s blocks, Jack thought—it had grown randomly as more space was needed. Then he saw that the numerous windows were barred, and the sprawling building immediately seemed penal, rather than childish.

Most of the boys in the fields had put down their tools to watch the progress of the police car.

Franky Williams pulled up into the wide, rounded end of the drive. As soon as he had cut off his engine, a tall figure stepped through the front door and stood regarding them from the top of the steps, his hands knitted together before him. Beneath a full head of longish wavy white hair, the man’s face seemed unrealistically youthful—as if these chipped, vitally masculine features had been created or at least assisted by plastic surgery. It was the face of a man who could sell anything, anywhere, to anybody. His clothes were as white as his hair: white suit, white shoes, white shirt, and a trailing white silk scarf around his neck. As Jack and Wolf got out of the back seat, the man in white pulled a pair of dark green sunglasses from his suitpocket, put them on, and appeared to examine the two boys for a moment before smiling—long creases split his cheeks. Then he removed the sunglasses and put them back in his pocket.

“Well,” he said. “Well, well, well. Where would we all be without you, Officer Williams?”

“Afternoon, Reverend Gardener,” the policeman said.

“Is it the usual sort of thing, or were these two bold fellows actually engaged in criminal activity?”

“Vagrants,” said the cop. Hands on hips, he squinted up at Gardener as if all that whiteness hurt his eyes. “Refused to give Fairchild their right names. This one, the big one,” he said, pointing a thumb at Wolf, “he wouldn’t talk at all. I had to nail him in the head just to get him in the car.”

Gardener shook his head tragically. “Why don’t you bring them up here so they can introduce themselves, and then we’ll take care of the various formalities. Is there any reason why the two of them should look so, ah, shall we say, ’befuddled’?”

“Just that I cracked that big one behind the ears.”

“Ummmmm.” Gardener stepped backward, steepling his fingers before his chest.

As Williams prodded the boys up the steps to the long porch, Gardener cocked his head and regarded his new arrivals. Jack and Wolf reached the top of the steps and moved tentatively onto the surface of the porch. Franky Williams wiped his forehead and huffed himself up beside them. Gardener was smiling mistily, but his eyes switched back and forth between the boys. The second after something hard, cold, and familiar jumped out of his eyes at Jack, the Reverend again twitched the sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. The smile remained misty and delicate, but even wrapped as he was in a sense of false security, Jack felt frozen by that glance—because he had seen it before.

Reverend Gardener pulled the sunglasses below the bridge of his nose and peered playfully over the tops of the frames. “Names? Names? Might we have some names from you two gentlemen?”

“I’m Jack,” the boy said, and then stopped—he did not want to say one more word until he had to. Reality seemed to fold and buckle about Jack for a moment: he felt that he had been jerked back into the Territories, but that now the Territories were evil and threatening, and that foul smoke, jumping flames, the screams of tortured bodies filled the air.

A powerful hand closed over his elbow and held him upright. Instead of the foulness and smoke, Jack smelled some heavy sweet cologne, applied too liberally. A pair of melancholy gray eyes were looking directly into his.

“And have you been a bad boy, Jack? Have you been a very bad boy?”

“No, we were just hitching, and—”

“I think you’re a trifle stoned,” said the Reverend Gardener. “We’ll have to see that you get some special attention, won’t we?” The hand released his elbow; Gardener stepped neatly away, and pushed the sunglasses up over his eyes again. “You do possess a last name, I imagine.”

“Parker,” Jack said.

“Yesss.” Gardener whipped the glasses off his head, executed a dancing little half-turn, and was scrutinizing Wolf. He had given no indication whether he believed Jack or not.

“My,” he said. “You’re a healthy specimen, aren’t you? Positively strapping. We’ll certainly be able to find a use for a big strong boy like you around here, praise the Lord. And might I ask you to emulate Mr. Jack Parker here, and give me your name?”

Jack looked uneasily at Wolf. His head was bowed, and he was breathing heavily. A glistening line of slobber went from the corner of his mouth to his chin. A black smudge, half-dirt, half-grease, covered the front of the stolen Athletic Department sweatshirt. Wolf shook his head, but the gesture seemed to have no content—he might have been shaking away a fly.

“Name, son? Name? Name? Are you called Bill? Paul? Art? Sammy? No—something exceedingly foursquare, I’m sure. George, perhaps?”

“Wolf,” said Wolf.

“Ah, that
is
nice.” Gardener beamed at both of them. “Mr. Parker and Mr. Wolf. Perhaps you’ll escort them inside, Officer Williams? And aren’t we happy that Mr. Bast is in residence already? For the presence of Mr. Hector Bast—one of our stewards, by the way—means that we shall probably be able to outfit Mr. Wolf.” He peered at the two boys over the frames of his sunglasses. “One of our beliefs here at the Scripture Home is that the soldiers of the Lord march best when they march in uniform. And Heck Bast is nearly as large as your friend Wolf, young Jack Parker. So from the points of view of both clothing and discipline you shall be very well served indeed. A comfort, yes?”

“Jack,” Wolf said in a low voice.

“Yes.”

“My head hurts, Jack. Hurts bad.”

“Your little head pains you, Mr. Wolf?” Reverend Sunlight Gardener half-danced toward Wolf and gently patted his arm. Wolf snatched his arm away, his face working into an exaggerated reflex of disgust. The cologne, Jack knew—that heavy cloying odor would have been like ammonia in Wolf’s sensitive nostrils.

“Never mind, son,” said Gardener, seemingly unaffected by Wolf’s withdrawal from him. “Mr. Bast or Mr. Singer, our other steward, will see to that inside. Frank, I thought I told you to get them into the Home.”

Officer Williams reacted as if he had been jabbed in the back with a pin. His face grew more feverish, and he jerked his peculiar body across the porch to the front door.

Sunlight Gardener twinkled at Jack again, and the boy saw that all his dandified animation was only a kind of sterile self-amusement: the man in white was cold and crazy within. A heavy gold chain rattled out of Gardener’s sleeve and came to rest against the base of his thumb. Jack heard the whistle of a whip cutting through the air, and this time he recognized Gardener’s dark gray eyes.

Gardener was Osmond’s Twinner.

“Inside, young fellows,” Gardener said, half-bowing and indicating the open door.

2

“By the way, Mr. Parker,” Gardener said, once they had gone in, “is it possible that we’ve met before? There must be some reason you look so familiar to me, mustn’t there?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, looking carefully around the odd interior of the Scripture Home.

Long couches covered with a dark blue fabric sat against the wall on the forest-green carpet; two massive leather-topped desks had been placed against the opposite wall. At one of the desks a pimply teenager glanced at them dully, then returned to the video screen before him, where a TV preacher was inveighing against rock and roll. The teenage boy seated at the adjoining desk straightened up and fixed Jack with an aggressive stare. He was slim and black-haired and his narrow face looked clever and bad-tempered. To the pocket of his white turtleneck sweater was pinned a rectangular nameplate of the sort worn by soldiers:
SINGER
.

“But I do think we have met each other somewhere, don’t you, my lad? I assure you, we must have—I don’t forget, I am literally incapable of forgetting, the face of a boy I have encountered. Have you ever been in trouble before this, Jack?”

Jack said, “I never saw you before.”

Across the room, a massive boy had lifted himself off one of the blue couches and was now standing at attention. He too wore a white turtleneck sweater and a military nameplate. His hands wandered nervously from his sides to his belt, into the pockets of his blue jeans, back to his sides. He was at least six-three and seemed to weigh nearly three hundred pounds. Acne burned across his cheeks and forehead. This, clearly, was Bast.

“Well, perhaps it will come to me later,” Sunlight Gardener said. “Heck, come up here and help our new arrivals at the desk, will you?”

Bast lumbered forward, scowling. He made a point of coming up very close to Wolf before he sidestepped past him, scowling more fiercely all the while—if Wolf had opened his eyes, which he did not, he would have seen no more than the ravaged moonscape of Bast’s forehead and the mean small eyes, like a bear’s eyes, bulging up at him from beneath crusty brows. Bast switched his gaze to Jack, muttered, “C’mon,” and flapped a hand toward the desk.

“Registration, then take them up to the laundry for clothes,” Gardener said in a flat voice. He smiled with chromelike brilliance at Jack. “Jack Parker,” he said softly. “I wonder who you really are, Jack Parker. Bast, make sure everything is out of his pockets.”

Bast grinned.

Sunlight Gardener drifted across the room toward an obviously impatient Franky Williams and languidly withdrew a long leather wallet from his jacket’s inside pocket. Jack saw him begin to count money out into the policeman’s hands.

“Pay attention, snotface,” said the boy behind the desk, and Jack snapped around to face him. The boy was playing with a pencil, the smirk on his face an utterly inadequate disguise for what seemed to Jack’s keyed-up perceptions his characteristic anger—a rage that bubbled far down within him, eternally stoked. “Can he write?”

“Jeez, I don’t think so,” Jack said.

“Then you’ll have to sign in for him.” Singer shoved two legal-sized sheets of paper at him. “Print on the top line, write on the bottom one. Where the X’s are.” He fell back into his chair, raising the pencil to his lips, and slumped eloquently into its corner. Jack supposed that was a trick learned from the very Reverend Sunlight Gardener.

JACK PARKER
, he printed, and scrawled something like that at the bottom of the sheet.
PHILIP JACK WOLF
. Another scrawl, even less like his real handwriting.

“Now you’re wards of the State of Indiana, and that’s what you’ll be for the next thirty days, unless you decide to stay longer.” Singer twitched the papers back toward himself. “You’ll be—”

“Decide?” Jack asked. “What do you mean, decide?”

A trifle of red grew smooth beneath Singer’s cheeks. He jerked his head to one side and seemed to smile. “I guess you don’t know that over sixty percent of our kids are here voluntarily. It’s possible, yeah. You could decide to stay here.”

Jack tried to keep his face expressionless.

Singer’s mouth twitched violently, as if a fishhook had snagged it. “This is a pretty good place, and if I ever hear you ranking it I’ll pound the shit out of you—it’s the best place you’ve ever been in, I’m sure. I’ll tell you another thing: you got no choice. You have to respect the Sunlight Home. You understand?”

Jack nodded his head.

“How about him? Does he?”

Jack looked up at Wolf, who was blinking slowly and breathing through his mouth.

“I think so.”

“All right. The two of you will be bunkmates. The day starts at five in the morning, when we have chapel. Fieldwork until seven, then breakfast in the dining hall. Back to the field until noon, when we get lunch plus Bible readings—everybody gets a crack at this, so you better start thinking about what you’ll read. None of that sexy stuff from the Song of Songs, either, unless you want to find out what discipline means. More work after lunch.”

He looked sharply up at Jack. “Hey, don’t think that you work for nothing at the Sunlight Home. Part of our arrangement with the state is that everybody gets a fair hourly wage, which is set against the cost of keeping you here—clothes and food, electricity, heating, stuff like that. You are credited fifty cents an hour. That means that you earn five dollars a day for the hours you put in—thirty dollars a week. Sundays are spent in the Sunlight Chapel, except for the hour when we actually put on the
Sunlight Gardener Gospel Hour
.”

The red smoothed itself out under the surface of his skin again, and Jack nodded in recognition, being more or less obliged to.

“If you turn out right and if you can talk like a human being, which most people can’t, then you might get a shot at OS—Outside Staff. We’ve got two squads of OS, one that works the streets, selling hymn sheets and flowers and Reverend Gardener’s pamphlets, and the other one on duty at the airport. Anyhow, we got thirty days to turn you two scumbags around and make you see how dirty and filthy and diseased your crummy lives were before you came here, and this is where we start, right now exactly.”

Singer stood up, his face the color of a blazing autumn leaf, and delicately set the tips of his fingers atop his desk. “Empty your pockets. Right now.”

“Right here and now,” Wolf mumbled, as if by rote.

“TURN EM OUT!” Singer shouted. “I WANT TO SEE IT ALL!”

Bast stepped up beside Wolf. Reverend Gardener, having seen Franky Williams to his car, drifted expressively into Jack’s vicinity.

“Personal possessions tend to tie our boys too much to the past, we’ve found,” Gardener purred to Jack. “Destructive. We find this a very helpful tool.”

“EMPTY YOUR POCKETS!” Singer bawled, now nearly in a straightforward rage.

Jack pulled from his pockets the random detritus of his time on the road. A red handkerchief Elbert Palamountain’s wife had given him when she’d seen him wipe his nose on his sleeve, two matchbooks, the few dollars and scattered change that was all of his money—a total of six dollars and forty-two cents—the key to room 407 of the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. He closed his fingers over the three objects he intended to keep. “I guess you want my pack, too,” he said.