The Talisman (4 page)

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

Jack could almost hear his father’s voice, and the peculiar and unsettling realm of the Daydreams seemed to stir in the shadowy wasteland beneath the roller coaster. He began again to trot after Speedy, who had opened the door of the little red shack and was leaning against it, smiling without smiling.

“You got something on your mind, Travellin Jack. Something that’s buzzin in there like a bee. Get on inside the executive suite and tell me about it.”

If the smile had been broader, more obvious, Jack might have turned and run: the spectre of mockery still hung humiliatingly near. But Speedy’s whole being seemed to express a welcoming concern—the message of all those deepened lines in his face—and Jack went past him through the door.

Speedy’s “office” was a small board rectangle—the same red as its exterior—without a desk or a telephone. Two upended orange crates leaned against one of the side walls, flanking an unplugged electrical heater that resembled the grille of a mid-fifties Pontiac. In the middle of the room a wooden round-back school chair kept company with an overstuffed chair of faded gray material.

The arms of the overstuffed chair seemed to have been clawed open by several generations of cats: dingy wisps of stuffing lay across the arms like hair; on the back of the school chair was a complex graffito of scratched-in initials. Junkyard furniture. In one of the corners stood two neat foot-high piles of paperback books, in another the square fake-alligator cover of a cheap record player. Speedy nodded at the heater and said, “You come round here in January, February, boy, you see why I got that. Cold? Shoo.” But Jack was now looking at the pictures taped to the wall over the heater and orange crates.

All but one of the pictures were nudes cut from men’s magazines. Women with breasts as large as their heads lolled back against uncomfortable trees and splayed columnar, hardworked legs. To Jack, their faces looked both fascinating and rapacious—as if these women would take bites out of his skin after they kissed him. Some of the women were no younger than his mother; others seemed only a few years older than himself. Jack’s eyes grazed over this needful flesh—all of it, young and unyoung, pink or chocolate-brown or honey-yellow, seemed to press toward his touch, and he was too conscious of Speedy Parker standing beside him, watching. Then he saw the landscape in the midst of the nude photographs, and for a second he probably forgot to breathe.

It too was a photograph; and it too seemed to reach out for him, as if it were three-dimensional. A long grassy plain of a particular, aching green unfurled toward a low, ground-down range of mountains. Above the plain and the mountains ranged a deeply transparent sky. Jack could very nearly smell the freshness of this landscape. He knew that place. He had never been there, not really, but he knew it. That was one of the places of the Daydreams.

“Kind of catch the eye, don’t it?” Speedy said, and Jack remembered where he was. A Eurasian woman with her back to the camera tilted a heart-shaped rear and smiled at him over her shoulder. Yes, Jack thought. “Real pretty place,” Speedy said. “I put that one up myself. All these here girls met me when I moved in. Didn’t have the heart to rip em off the wall. They sort of do remind me of way back when, times I was on the road.”

Jack looked up at Speedy, startled, and the old man winked at him.

“Do you know that place, Speedy?” Jack asked. “I mean, do you know where it is?”

“Maybe so, maybe not. It might be Africa—someplace in Kenya. Or that might be just my memory. Sit down, Travellin Jack. Take the comf’able chair.”

Jack twisted the chair so that he could still see the picture of the Daydream place. “That’s
Africa?
”

“Might be somewhere a lot closer. Might be somewhere a fellow could get to—get to anytime he liked, that is, if he wanted to see it bad enough.”

Jack suddenly realized that he was trembling, and had been for some time. He balled his hands into fists, and felt the trembling displace itself into his stomach.

He was not sure that he wanted ever to see the Daydream place, but he looked questioningly over at Speedy, who had perched himself on the school chair. “It isn’t anyplace in Africa, is it?”

“Well, I don’t know. Could be. I got my own name for it, son. I just call it the Territories.”

Jack looked back up at the photograph—the long, dimpled plain, the low brown mountains. The Territories. That was right; that was its name.

They have magic like we have physics, right? An agrarian monarchy . . . modern weapons to the right guys over there
 . . . Uncle Morgan plotting. His father answering, putting on the brakes:
We have to be careful about the way we go in there, partner . . . remember, we owe them, by which I mean we really owe them . . .

“The Territories,” he said to Speedy, tasting the name in his mouth as much as asking a question.

“Air like the best wine in a rich man’s cellar. Soft rain. That’s the place, son.”

“You’ve been there, Speedy?” Jack asked, fervently hoping for a straightforward answer.

But Speedy frustrated him, as Jack had almost known he would. The custodian smiled at him, and this time it was a real smile, not just a subliminal flare of warmth.

After a moment Speedy said, “Hell, I never been outside these United States, Travellin Jack. Not even in the war. Never got any farther than Texas and Alabama.”

“How do you know about the . . . the Territories?” The name was just beginning to fit his mouth.

“Man like me, he hear all kinds of stories. Stories about two-headed parrots, men that fly with their own wings, men who turn into wolves, stories about queens. Sick queens.”

 . . . magic like we have physics, right?

Angels and werewolves. “I’ve heard stories about werewolves,” Jack said. “They’re even in cartoons. That doesn’t mean anything, Speedy.”

“Probably it don’t. But I heard that if a man pulls a radish out of the ground, another man half a mile away will be able to smell that radish—the air so sweet and clear.”

“But angels . . .”

“Men with wings.”

“And sick queens,” Jack said, meaning it as a joke—
man, this is some dumb place you make up, broom jockey
. But the instant he spoke the words, he felt sick himself. He had remembered the black eye of a gull fixing him with his own mortality as it yanked a clam from its shell: and he could hear hustlin, bustlin Uncle Morgan asking if Jack could put Queen Lily on the line.

Queen of the Bs. Queen Lily Cavanaugh.

“Yeah,” Speedy said softly. “Troubles everywhere, son. Sick Queen . . . maybe dyin.
Dyin
, son. And a world or two waitin out there, just waitin to see if anyone can save her.”

Jack stared at him open-mouthed, feeling more or less as if the custodian had just kicked him in the stomach. Save her? Save his mother? The panic started to flood toward him once again—how could
he
save her? And did all this crazy talk mean that she really was dying, back there in that room?

“You got a job, Travellin Jack,” Speedy told him. “A job that ain’t gonna let you go, and that’s the Lord’s truth. I wish it was different.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said. His breath seemed to be trapped in a hot little pocket situated at the base of his neck. He looked into another corner of the small red room and in the shadow saw a battered guitar propped against the wall. Beside it lay the neat tube of a thin rolled-up mattress. Speedy slept next to his guitar.

“I wonder,” Speedy said. “There comes times, you know what I mean, you know more than you think you know. One hell of a lot more.”

“But I don’t—” Jack began, and then pulled himself up short. He had just remembered something. Now he was even more frightened—another chunk of the past had rushed out at him, demanding his attention. Instantly he was filmed with perspiration, and his skin felt very cold—as if he had been misted by a fine spray from a hose. This memory was what he had fought to repress yesterday morning, standing before the elevators, pretending that his bladder was not about to burst.

“Didn’t I say it was time for a little refreshment?” Speedy asked, reaching down to push aside a loose floorboard.

Jack again saw two ordinary-looking men trying to push his mother into a car. Above them a huge tree dipped scalloped fronds over the automobile’s roof.

Speedy gently extracted a pint bottle from the gap between the floorboards. The glass was dark green, and the fluid inside looked black. “This gonna help you, son. Just a little taste all you need—send you some new places, help you get started findin that job I told you bout.”

“I can’t stay, Speedy,” Jack blurted out, now in a desperate hurry to get back to the Alhambra. The old man visibly checked the surprise in his face, then slid the bottle back under the loose floorboard. Jack was already on his feet. “I’m worried,” he said.

“Bout your mom?”

Jack nodded, moving backward toward the open door.

“Then you better settle your mind and go see she’s all right. You can come back here anytime, Travellin Jack.”

“Okay,” the boy said, and then hesitated before running outside. “I think . . . I think I remember when we met before.”

“Nah, nah, my brains got twisted,” Speedy said, shaking his head and waving his hands back and forth before him. “You had it right. We never met before last week. Get on back to your mom and set your mind at ease.”

Jack sprinted out the door and ran through the dimensionless sunlight to the wide arch leading to the street. Above it he could see the letters
DLROWNUF AIDACRA
outlined against the sky: at night, colored bulbs would spell out the park’s name in both directions. Dust puffed up beneath his Nikes. Jack pushed himself against his own muscles, making them move faster and harder, so that by the time he burst out through the arch, he felt almost as though he were flying.

Nineteen seventy-six. Jack had been puttering his way up Rodeo Drive on an afternoon in June? July? . . . some afternoon in the drought season, but before that time of the year when everybody started worrying about brushfires in the hills. Now he could not even remember where he had been going. A friend’s house? It had not been an errand of any urgency. He had, Jack remembered, just reached the point where he no longer thought of his father in every unoccupied second—for many months after Philip Sawyer’s death in a hunting accident, his shade, his loss had sped toward Jack at a bruising speed whenever the boy was least prepared to meet it. Jack was only seven, but he knew that part of his childhood had been stolen from him—his six-year-old self now seemed impossibly naive and thoughtless—but he had learned to trust his mother’s strength. Formless and savage threats no longer seemed to conceal themselves in dark corners, closets with half-open doors, shadowy streets, empty rooms.

The events of that aimless summer afternoon in 1976 had murdered this temporary peace. After it, Jack slept with his light on for six months; nightmares roiled his sleep.

The car pulled across the street just a few houses up from the Sawyers’ white three-story Colonial. It had been a green car, and that was all that Jack had known about it except that it was not a Mercedes—Mercedes was the only kind of automobile he knew by sight. The man at the wheel had rolled down his window and smiled at Jack. The boy’s first thought had been that he knew this man—the man had known Phil Sawyer, and wanted just to say hello to his son. Somehow that was conveyed by the man’s smile, which was easy and unforced and familiar. Another man leaned forward in the passenger seat and peered toward Jack through blind-man glasses—round and so dark they were nearly black. This second man was wearing a pure white suit. The driver let his smile speak for him a moment longer.

Then he said, “Sonny, do you know how we get to the Beverly Hills Hotel?” So he was a stranger after all. Jack experienced an odd little flicker of disappointment.

He pointed straight up the street. The hotel was right up there, close enough so that his father had been able to walk to breakfast meetings in the Loggia.

“Straight ahead?” the driver asked, still smiling.

Jack nodded.

“You’re a pretty smart little fellow,” the man told him, and the other man chuckled. “Any idea of how far up it is?” Jack shook his head. “Couple of blocks, maybe?”

“Yeah.” He had begun to get uncomfortable. The driver was still smiling, but now the smile looked bright and hard and empty. And the passenger’s chuckle had been wheezy and damp, as if he were sucking on something wet.

“Five, maybe? Six? What do you say?”

“About five or six, I guess,” Jack said, stepping backward.

“Well, I sure do want to thank you, little fellow,” the driver said. “You don’t happen to like candy, do you?” He extended a closed fist through the window, turned it palm-up, and opened his fingers: a Tootsie Roll. “It’s yours. Take it.”

Jack tentatively stepped forward, hearing in his mind the words of a thousand warnings involving strange men and candy. But this man was still in his car; if he tried anything, Jack could be half a block away before the man got his door open. And to not take it somehow seemed a breach of civility. Jack took another step nearer. He looked at the man’s eyes, which were blue and as bright and hard as his smile. Jack’s instincts told him to lower his hand and walk away. He let his hand drift an inch or two nearer the Tootsie Roll. Then he made a little stabbing peck at it with his fingers.

The driver’s hand clamped around Jack’s, and the passenger in blind-man glasses laughed out loud. Astonished, Jack stared into the eyes of the man gripping his hand and saw them start to change—
thought
he saw them start to change—from blue to yellow.

But later they were yellow.

The man in the other seat pushed his door open and trotted around the back of the car. He was wearing a small gold cross in the lapel of his silk suit coat. Jack pulled frantically away, but the driver smiled brightly, emptily, and held him fast. “NO!” Jack yelled. “HELP!”