The Talisman (17 page)

As soon as Jack was out of the tunnel, he turned around to face it. No sounds emerged, no weird creatures slunk toward him. He took three steps forward, peered in. And then his heart nearly stopped, because coming toward him were two huge orange eyes. They halved the distance between themselves and Jack in seconds. He could not move—his feet were past the ankles in asphalt. Finally he managed to extend his hands, palm-out, in the instinctive gesture of warding-off. The eyes continued toward him, and a horn blasted. Seconds before the car burst out of the tunnel, revealing a red-faced man waving a fist, Jack threw himself out of the way.

“SHIIITHEEAAA . . .” came from the contorted mouth.

Still dazed, Jack turned and watched the car speed downhill toward a village that had to be Oatley.

4

Situated in a long depression in the land, Oatley spread itself out meagerly from two principal streets. One, the continuation of Mill Road, dipped past an immense and shabby building set in the midst of a vast parking lot—a factory, Jack thought—to become a strip of used-car lots (sagging pennants), fast-food franchises (The Great Tits of America), a bowling alley with a huge neon sign (
BOWL
-
A
-
RAMA
!), grocery stores, gas stations. Past all this, Mill Road became Oatley’s five or six blocks of downtown, a strip of old two-story buildings before which cars were parked nose-in. The other street was obviously the location of Oatley’s most important houses—large frame buildings with porches and long slanting lawns. Where these streets intersected stood a traffic light winking its red eye in the late afternoon. Another light perhaps eight blocks down changed to green before a high dingy many-windowed building that looked like a mental hospital, and so was probably the high school. Fanning out from the two streets was a jumble of little houses interspersed with anonymous buildings fenced in behind tall wire mesh.

Many of the windows in the factory were broken, and some of the windows in the strip of downtown had been boarded over. Heaps of garbage and fluttering papers littered the fenced-in concrete yards. Even the important houses seemed neglected, with their sagging porches and bleached-out paint jobs. These people would own the used-car lots filled with unsaleable automobiles.

For a moment Jack considered turning his back on Oatley and making the hike to Dogtown, wherever that was. But that would mean walking through the Mill Road tunnel again. From down in the middle of the shopping district a car horn blatted, and the sound unfurled toward Jack full of an inexpressible loneliness and nostalgia.

He could not relax until he was all the way to the gates of the factory, the Mill Road tunnel far up behind him. Nearly a third of the windows along the dirty-brick facade had been broken in, and many of the others showed blank brown squares of cardboard. Even out on the road, Jack could smell machine oil, grease, smouldering fanbelts, and clashing gears. He put his hands in his pockets and walked downhill as quickly as he could.

5

Seen close up, the town was even more depressed than it had looked from the hill. The salesmen at the car lots leaned against the windows in their offices, too bored to come outside. Their pennants hung tattered and joyless, the once-optimistic signs propped along the cracked sidewalk fronting the rows of cars—
ONE OWNER
!
FANTASTIC BUY
!
CAR OF THE WEEK
!—had yellowed. The ink had feathered and run on some of the signs, as if they had been left out in the rain. Very few people moved along the streets. As Jack went toward the center of town, he saw an old man with sunken cheeks and gray skin trying to wrestle an empty shopping cart up onto a curb. When he approached, the old man screeched something hostile and frightened and bared gums as black as a badger’s. He thought Jack was going to steal his cart! “Sorry,” Jack said, his heart pounding again. The old man was trying to hug the whole cumbersome body of the cart, protecting it, all the while showing those blackened gums to his enemy. “Sorry,” Jack repeated. “I was just going to . . .”

“Fusshhingfeef! FusshhingFEEEFF!” the old man screeched, and tears crawled into the wrinkles on his cheeks.

Jack hurried off.

Twenty years before, during the sixties, Oatley must have prospered. The relative brightness of the strip of Mill Road leading out of town was the product of that era when stocks went go-go and gas was still cheap and nobody had heard the term “discretionary income” because they had plenty of it. People had sunk their money into franchise operations and little shops and for a time had, if not actually flourished, held their heads above the waves. This short series of blocks still had that superficial hopefulness—but only a few bored teenagers sat in the franchise restaurants, nursing medium Cokes, and in the plate-glass windows of too many of the little shops placards as faded as those in the used-car lots announced
EVERYTHING MUST GO
!
CLOSING SALE
. Jack saw no signs advertising for help, and kept on walking.

Downtown Oatley showed the reality beneath the happy clown’s colors left behind by the sixties. As Jack trudged along these blocks of baked-looking brick buildings, his pack grew heavier, his feet more tender. He would have walked to Dogtown after all, if it were not for his feet and the necessity of going through the Mill Road tunnel again. Of course there was no snarling man-wolf lurking in the dark there—he’d worked that out by now. No one could have spoken to him in the tunnel. The Territories had shaken him. First the sight of the Queen, then that dead boy beneath the cart with half his face gone. Then Morgan; the trees. But that was
there
, where such things could be—were, perhaps, even normal.
Here
, normality did not admit such gaudiness.

He was before a long, dirty window above which the flaking slogan
FURNITURE DEPOSITORY
was barely legible on the brickwork. He put his hands to his eyes and stared in. A couch and a chair, each covered by a white sheet, sat fifteen feet apart on a wide wooden floor. Jack moved farther down the block, wondering if he was going to have to beg for food.

Four men sat in a car before a boarded-up shop a little way down the block. It took Jack a moment to see that the car, an ancient black DeSoto that looked as though Broderick Crawford should come bustling out of it, had no tires. Taped to the windshield was a yellow five-by-eight card which read
FAIR WEATHER CLUB
. The men inside, two in front and two in back, were playing cards. Jack stepped up to the front passenger window.

“Excuse me,” he said, and the cardplayer closest to him rolled a fishy gray eye toward him. “Do you know where—”

“Get lost,” the man said. His voice sounded squashed and phlegmy, unfamiliar with speech. The face half-turned to Jack was deeply pitted with acne scars and oddly flattened out, as if someone had stepped on it when the man was an infant.

“I just wondered if you knew somewhere I could get a couple days’ work.”

“Try Texas,” said the man in the driver’s seat, and the pair in the back seat cracked up, spitting beer out over their hands of cards.

“I told you, kid, get lost,” said the flat-faced gray-eyed man closest to Jack. “Or I’ll personally pound the shit out of you.”

It was just the truth, Jack understood—if he stayed there a moment longer, this man’s rage would boil over and he would get out of the car and beat him senseless. Then the man would get back in the car and open another beer. Cans of Rolling Rock covered the floor, the opened ones tipped every which way, the fresh ones linked by white plastic nooses. Jack stepped backward, and the fish-eye rolled away from him. “Guess I’ll try Texas after all,” he said. He listened for the sound of the DeSoto’s door creaking open as he walked away, but all he heard being opened was another Rolling Rock.

Crack! Hiss!

He kept moving.

He got to the end of the block and found himself looking across the town’s other main street at a dying lawn filled with yellow weeds from which peeked fiberglass statues of Disney-like fawns. A shapeless old woman gripping a flyswatter stared at him from a porch swing.

Jack turned away from her suspicious gaze and saw before him the last of the lifeless brick buildings on Mill Road. Three concrete steps led up to a propped-open screen door. A long, dark window contained a glowing
BUDWEISER
sign and, a foot to the right of that, the painted legend
UPDIKE’S OATLEY TAP
. And several inches beneath that, handwritten on a yellow five-by-eight card like the one on the DeSoto, were the miraculous words
HELP WANTED
. Jack pulled the knapsack off his back, bunched it under one arm, and went up the steps. For no more than an instant, moving from the tired sunlight into the darkness of the bar, he was reminded of stepping past the thick fringe of ivy into the Mill Road tunnel.

9

Jack in the Pitcher Plant

1

Not quite sixty hours later a Jack Sawyer who was in a very different frame of mind from that of the Jack Sawyer who had ventured into the Oatley tunnel on Wednesday was in the chilly storeroom of the Oatley Tap, hiding his pack behind the kegs of Busch which sat in the room’s far corner like aluminum bowling pins in a giant’s alley. In less than two hours, when the Tap finally shut down for the night, Jack meant to run away. That he should even think of it in such a fashion—not
leaving
, not moving on, but
running away
—showed how desperate he now believed his situation to be.

I was six, six, John B. Sawyer was six, Jacky was six. Six.

This thought, apparently nonsensical, had fallen into his mind this evening and had begun to repeat there. He supposed it went a long way toward showing just how scared he was now, how certain he was that things were beginning to close in on him. He had no idea what the thought meant; it just circled and circled, like a wooden horse bolted to a carousel.

Six. I was six. Jacky Sawyer was six.

Over and over, round and round she goes.

The storeroom shared a wall in common with the taproom itself, and tonight that wall was actually vibrating with noise; it throbbed like a drumhead. Until twenty minutes before, it had been Friday night, and both Oatley Textiles and Weaving and Dogtown Custom Rubber paid on Friday. Now the Oatley Tap was full to the overflow point . . . and past. A big poster to the left of the bar read
OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 220 PERSONS IS IN VIOLATION OF GENESEE COUNTY FIRE CODE 331
. Apparently fire code 331 was suspended on the weekends, because Jack guessed there were more than three hundred people out there now, boogying away to a country-western band which called itself The Genny Valley Boys. It was a terrible band, but they had a pedal-steel guitar. “There’s guys around here that’d fuck a pedal-steel, Jack,” Smokey had said.

“Jack!”
Lori yelled over the wall of sound.

Lori was Smokey’s woman. Jack still didn’t know what her last name was. He could barely hear her over the juke, which was playing at full volume while the band was on break. All five of them were standing at the far end of the bar, Jack knew, tanking up on half-price Black Russians. She stuck her head through the storeroom door. Tired blond hair, held back with childish white plastic barrettes, glittered in the overhead fluorescent.

“Jack, if you don’t run that keg out real quick, I guess he’ll give your arm a try.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Tell him I’ll be right there.”

He felt gooseflesh on his arms, and it didn’t come entirely from the storeroom’s damp chill. Smokey Updike was no one to fool with—Smokey who wore a succession of paper fry-cook’s hats on his narrow head, Smokey with his large plastic mail-order dentures, grisly and somehow funereal in their perfect evenness, Smokey with his violent brown eyes, the scleras an ancient, dirty yellow. Smokey Updike who in some way still unknown to Jack—and who was all the more frightening for that—had somehow managed to take him prisoner.

The jukebox fell temporarily silent, but the steady roar of the crowd actually seemed to go up a notch to make up for it. Some Lake Ontario cowboy raised his voice in a big, drunken
“Yeeeee-HAW!”
A woman screamed. A glass broke. Then the jukebox took off again, sounding a little like a Saturn rocket achieving escape velocity.

Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road.

Raw.

Jack bent over one of the aluminum kegs and dragged it out about three feet, his mouth screwed down in a painful wince, sweat standing out on his forehead in spite of the air-conditioned chill, his back protesting. The keg gritted and squealed on the unadorned cement. He stopped, breathing hard, his ears ringing.

He wheeled the hand-truck over to the keg of Busch, stood it up, then went around to the keg again. He managed to rock it up on its rim and walk it forward, toward where the hand-truck stood. As he was setting it down he lost control of it—the big bar-keg weighed only a few pounds less than Jack did himself. It landed hard on the foot of the hand-truck, which had been padded with a remnant of carpet so as to soften just such landings. Jack tried to both steer it and get his hands out of the way in time. He was slow. The keg mashed his fingers against the back of the hand-truck. There was an agonizing thud, and he somehow managed to get his throbbing, pulsing fingers out of there. Jack stuck all the fingers of his left hand in his mouth and sucked on them, tears standing in his eyes.

Worse than jamming his fingers, he could hear the slow sigh of gases escaping through the breather-cap on top of the keg. If Smokey hooked up the keg and it came out foamy . . . or, worse yet, if he popped the cap and the beer went a gusher in his face . . .

Best not to think of those things.

Last night, Thursday night, when he’d tried to “run Smokey out a keg,” the keg had gone right over on its side. The breather-cap had shot clear across the room. Beer foamed white-gold across the storeroom floor and ran down the drain. Jack had stood there, sick and frozen, oblivious to Smokey’s shouts. It wasn’t Busch, it was Kingsland. Not beer but ale—the Queen’s Own.

That was when Smokey hit him for the first time—a quick looping blow that drove Jack into one of the storeroom’s splintery walls.

“There goes your pay for today,” Smokey had said. “And you never want to do that again, Jack.”

What chilled Jack most about that phrase
you never want to do that again
was what it assumed: that there would be lots of opportunities for him to do that again; as if Smokey Updike expected him to be here a long, long time.

“Jack, hurry it up!”

“Coming.”
Jack puffed. He pulled the hand-truck across the room to the door, felt behind himself for the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. He hit something large and soft and yielding.

“Christ, watch it!”

“Whoops, sorry,” Jack said.

“I’ll whoops you, asshole,” the voice replied.

Jack waited until he heard heavy steps moving on down the hall outside the storeroom and then tried the door again.

The hall was narrow and painted a bilious green. It stank of shit and piss and TidyBowl. Holes had been punched through both plaster and lath here and there; graffiti lurched and staggered everywhere, written by bored drunks waiting to use either
POINTERS
or
SETTERS
. The largest of them all had been slashed across the green paint with a black Magic Marker, and it seemed to scream out all of Oatley’s dull and objectless fury.
SEND ALL AMERICAN NIGGERS AND JEWS TO IRAN
, it read.

The noise from the taproom was loud in the storeroom; out here it was a great wave of sound which never seemed to break. Jack took one glance back into the storeroom over the top of the keg tilted on the hand-truck, trying to make sure his pack wasn’t visible.

He had to get out.
Had
to. The dead phone that had finally spoken, seeming to encase him in a capsule of dark ice . . . that had been bad. Randolph Scott was worse. The guy wasn’t
really
Randolph Scott; he only looked the way Scott had looked in his fifties films. Smokey Updike was perhaps worse still . . . although Jack was no longer sure of that. Not since he had seen (or thought he had seen) the eyes of the man who looked like Randolph Scott change color.

But that Oatley itself was worst of all . . . he was sure of that.

Oatley, New York, deep in the heart of Genny County, seemed now to be a horrible trap that had been laid for him . . . a kind of municipal pitcher plant. One of nature’s real marvels, the pitcher plant. Easy to get in. Almost impossible to get out.

2

A tall man with a great swinging gut porched in front of him stood waiting to use the men’s room. He was rolling a plastic toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and glaring at Jack. Jack supposed that it was the big man’s gut that he had hit with the door.

“Asshole,” the fat man repeated, and then the men’s-room door jerked open. A man strode out. For a heart-stopping moment his eyes and Jack’s eyes met. It was the man who looked like Randolph Scott. But this was no movie-star; this was just an Oatley millhand drinking up his week’s pay. Later on he would leave in a half-paid-for doorsucker Mustang or maybe on a three-quarters-paid-for motorcycle—a big old Harley with a
BUY AMERICAN
sticker plastered on the nacelle, probably.

His eyes turned yellow.

No, your imagination, Jack, just your imagination. He’s just—

—just a millhand who was giving him the eye because he was new. He had probably gone to high school here in town, played football, knocked up a Catholic cheerleader and married her, and the cheerleader had gotten fat on chocolates and Stouffer’s frozen dinners; just another Oatley oaf, just—

But his eyes turned yellow.

Stop it! They did not!

Yet there was something about him that made Jack think of what had happened when he was coming into town . . . what had happened in the dark.

The fat man who had called Jack an asshole shrank back from the rangy man in the Levi’s and the clean white T-shirt. Randolph Scott started toward Jack. His big, veined hands swung at his sides.

His eyes sparkled an icy blue . . . and then began to change, to moil and lighten.

“Kid,” he said, and Jack fled with clumsy haste, butting the swinging door open with his fanny, not caring who he hit.

Noise pounced on him. Kenny Rogers was bellowing an enthusiastic redneck paean to someone named Reuben James. “
You allus turned your other CHEEK
,” Kenny testified to this room of shuffling, sullen-faced drunks, “
and said there’s a better world waitin for the MEEK!
” Jack saw no one here who looked particularly meek. The Genny Valley Boys were trooping back onto the bandstand and picking up their instruments. All of them but the pedal steel player looked drunk and confused . . . perhaps not really sure of where they were. The pedal steel player only looked bored.

To Jack’s left, a woman was talking earnestly on the Tap’s pay phone—a phone Jack would never touch again if he had his way about it, not for a thousand dollars. As she talked, her drunken companion probed and felt inside her half-open cow-boy shirt. On the big dancefloor, perhaps seventy couples groped and shuffled, oblivious of the current song’s bright up-tempo, simply squeezing and grinding, hands gripping buttocks, lips spit-sealed together, sweat running down cheeks and making large circles under the armpits.

“Well thank
Gawd
,” Lori said, and flipped up the hinged partition at the side of the bar for him. Smokey was halfway down the bar, filling up Gloria’s tray with gin-and-tonics, vodka sours, and what seemed to be beer’s only competition for the Oatley Town Drink: Black Russians.

Jack saw Randolph Scott come out through the swinging door. He glanced toward Jack, his blue eyes catching Jack’s again at once. He nodded slightly, as if to say:
We’ll talk. Yessirree. Maybe we’ll talk about what might or might not be in the Oatley tunnel. Or about bullwhips. Or sick mothers. Maybe we’ll talk about how you’re gonna be in Genny County for a long, long time . . . maybe until you’re an old man crying over a shopping cart. What do you think, Jacky?

Jack shuddered.

Randolph Scott smiled, as if he had seen the shudder . . . or felt it. Then he moved off into the crowd and the thick air.

A moment later Smokey’s thin, powerful fingers bit into Jack’s shoulder—hunting for the most painful place and, as always, finding it. They were educated, nerve-seeking fingers.

“Jack, you just got to move faster,” Smokey said. His voice sounded almost sympathetic, but his fingers dug and moved and probed. His breath smelled of the pink Canada Mints he sucked almost constantly. His mail-order false teeth clicked and clacked. Sometimes there was an obscene slurping as they slipped a little and he sucked them back into place. “You got to move faster or I’m going to have to light a fire under your ass. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Y-yeah,” Jack said. Trying not to moan.

“All right. That’s good then.” For an excruciating second Smokey’s fingers dug even deeper, grinding with a bitter enthusiasm at the neat little nest of nerves there. Jack
did
moan. That was good enough for Smokey. He let up.

“Help me hook this keg up, Jack. And let’s make it fast. Friday night, people got to drink.”

“Saturday morning,” Jack said stupidly.

“Then, too. Come on.”

Jack somehow managed to help Smokey lift the keg into the square compartment under the bar. Smokey’s thin, ropey muscles bulged and writhed under his Oatley Tap T-shirt. The paper fry-cook’s hat on his narrow weasel’s head stayed in place, its leading edge almost touching his left eyebrow, in apparent defiance of gravity. Jack watched, holding his breath, as Smokey flicked off the red plastic breather-cap on the keg. The keg breathed more gustily than it should have done . . . but it didn’t foam. Jack let his breath out in a silent gust.

Smokey spun the empty toward him. “Get that back in the storeroom. And then swamp out the bathroom. Remember what I told you this afternoon.”

Jack remembered. At three o’clock a whistle like an air-raid siren had gone off, almost making him jump out of his skin. Lori had laughed, had said:
Check out Jack, Smokey—I think he just went wee-wee in his Tuffskins
. Smokey had given her a narrow, unsmiling look and motioned Jack over. Told Jack that was the payday whistle at the Oatley T & W. Told Jack that a whistle very much like it was going off at Dogtown Rubber, a company that made beach-toys, inflatable rubber dolls, and condoms with names like Ribs of Delight. Soon, he said, the Oatley Tap would begin filling up.

“And you and me and Lori and Gloria are going to move just as fast as lightning,” Smokey said, “because when the eagle screams on Friday, we got to make up for what this place don’t make every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. When I tell you to run me out a keg, you want to have it out to me before I finish yelling. And you’re in the men’s room every half an hour with your mop. On Friday nights, a guy blows his groceries every fifteen minutes or so.”