The Talisman (28 page)

In the cool sunlight of an early autumn afternoon, Jack sprinted across the street toward the mall’s parking lot.

If it had not been for his conversation with Buddy Parkins, Jack would very likely have stayed on U.S. 40 and tried to cover another fifty miles—he wanted to get to Illinois, where Richard Sloat was, in the next two or three days. The thought of seeing his friend Richard again had kept him going during the weary days of nonstop work on Elbert Palamountain’s farm: the image of spectacled, serious-faced Richard Sloat in his room at Thayer School, in Springfield, Illinois, had fueled him as much as Mrs. Palamountain’s generous meals. Jack still wanted to see Richard, and as soon as he could: but Buddy Parkins’s inviting him home had somehow unstrung him. He could not just climb into another car and begin all over again on the Story. (In any case, Jack reminded himself, the Story seemed to be losing its potency.) The shopping mall gave him a perfect chance to drop out for an hour or two, especially if there was a movie theater somewhere in there—right now, Jack could have watched the dullest, soppiest
Love Story
of a movie.

And before the movie, were he lucky enough to find a theater, he would be able to take care of two things he had been putting off for at least a week. Jack had seen Buddy Parkins looking at his disintegrating Nikes. Not only were the running shoes falling apart, the soles, once spongy and elastic, had mysteriously become hard as asphalt. On days when he had to walk great distances—or when he had to work standing up all day—his feet stung as if they’d been burned.

The second task, calling his mother, was so loaded with guilt and other fearful emotions that Jack could not quite allow it to become conscious. He did not know if he could keep from weeping, once he’d heard his mother’s voice. What if she sounded weak—what if she sounded really sick? Could he really keep going west if Lily hoarsely begged him to come back to New Hampshire? So he could not admit to himself that he was probably going to call his mother. His mind gave him the suddenly very clear image of a bank of pay telephones beneath their hairdryer plastic bubbles, and almost immediately bucked away from it—as if Elroy or some other Territories creature could reach right out of the receiver and clamp a hand around his throat.

Just then three girls a year or two older than Jack bounced out of the back of a Subaru Brat which had swung recklessly into a parking spot near the mall’s main entrance. For a second they had the look of models contorted into awkwardly elegant poses of delight and astonishment. When they had adjusted into more conventional postures the girls glanced incuriously at Jack and began to flip their hair expertly back into place. They were leggy in their tight jeans, these confident little princesses of the tenth grade, and when they laughed they put their hands over their mouths in a fashion which suggested that laughter itself was laughable. Jack slowed his walk into a kind of sleepwalker’s stroll. One of the princesses glanced at him and muttered something to the brown-haired girl beside her.

I’m different now
, Jack thought:
I’m not like them anymore
. The recognition pierced him with loneliness.

A thickset blond boy in a blue sleeveless down vest climbed out of the driver’s seat and gathered the girls around him by the simple expedient of pretending to ignore them. The boy, who must have been a senior and at the very least in the varsity backfield, glanced once at Jack and then looked appraisingly at the facade of the mall. “Timmy?” said the tall brown-haired girl. “Yeah, yeah,” the boy said. “I was just wondering what smells like shit out here.” He rewarded the girls with a superior little smile. The brown-haired girl looked smirkingly toward Jack, then swung herself across the asphalt with her friends. The three girls followed Timmy’s arrogant body through the glass doors into the mall.

Jack waited until the figures of Timmy and his court, visible through the glass, had shrunk to the size of puppies far down the long mall before he stepped on the plate which opened the doors.

Cold predigested air embraced him.

Water trickled down over a fountain two stories high set in a wide pool surrounded by benches. Open-fronted shops on both levels faced the fountain. Bland Muzak drifted down from the ochre ceiling, as did the peculiar bronzy light; the smell of popcorn, which had struck Jack the moment the glass doors had whooshed shut behind him, emanated from an antique popcorn wagon, painted fire-engine red and stationed outside a Waldenbooks to the left of the fountain on the ground level. Jack had seen immediately that there was no movie theater in the Buckeye Mall. Timmy and his leggy princesses were floating up the escalator at the mall’s other end, making, Jack thought, for a fast-food restaurant called The Captain’s Table right at the top of the escalator. Jack put his hand in his pants pocket again and touched his roll of bills. Speedy’s guitar-pick and Captain Farren’s coin nested at the bottom of the pocket, along with a handful of dimes and quarters.

On Jack’s level, sandwiched between a Mr. Chips cookie shop and a liquor store advertising
NEW LOW PRICES
for Hiram Walker bourbon and Inglenook Chablis, a Fayva shoe store drew him toward its long table of running shoes. The clerk at the cash register leaned forward and watched Jack pick over the shoes, clearly suspicious that he might try to steal something. Jack recognized none of the brands on the table. There were no Nikes or Pumas here—they were called Speedster or Bullseye or Zooms, and the laces of each pair were tied together. These were sneakers, not true running shoes. They were good enough, Jack supposed.

He bought the cheapest pair the store had in his size, blue canvas with red zigzag stripes down the sides. No brand name was visible anywhere on the shoes. They seemed indistinguishable from most of the other shoes on the table. At the register he counted out six limp one-dollar bills and told the clerk that he did not need a bag.

Jack sat on one of the benches before the tall fountain and toed off the battered Nikes without bothering to unlace them. When he slipped on the new sneakers, his feet fairly sighed with gratitude. Jack left the bench and dropped his old shoes in a tall black wastebasket with
DON’T BE A LITTERBUG
stencilled on it in white. Beneath that, in smaller letters, the wastebasket read
The earth is our only home
.

Jack began to move aimlessly through the long lower arcade of the mall, searching for the telephones. At the popcorn wagon he parted with fifty cents and was handed a quart-size tub of fresh popcorn glistening with grease. The middle-aged man in a bowler hat, a walrus moustache, and sleeve garters who sold him the popcorn told him that the pay phones were around a corner next to 31 Flavors, upstairs. The man gestured vaguely toward the nearest escalator.

Scooping the popcorn into his mouth, Jack rode up behind a woman in her twenties and an older woman with hips so wide they nearly covered the entire width of the escalator, both of them in pants suits.

If Jack were to flip inside the Buckeye Mall—or even a mile or two from it—would the walls shake and the ceiling crumble down, dropping bricks and beams and Muzak speakers and light fixtures down on everybody unlucky enough to be inside? And would the tenth-grade princesses, and even arrogant Timmy, and most of the others, too, wind up with skull fractures and severed limbs and mangled chests and . . . for a second just before he reached the top of the escalator Jack saw giant chunks of plaster and metal girders showering down, heard the terrible cracking of the mezzanine floor, the screams, too—inaudible, they were still printed in the air.

Angola. The Rainbird Towers.

Jack felt his palms begin to itch and sweat, and he wiped them on his jeans.

THIRTY-ONE FLAVORS
, gleamed out a chilly incandescent white light to his left, and when he turned that way he saw a curving hallway on its other side. Shiny brown tiles on the walls and floor; as soon as the curve of the hallway took him out of sight of anyone on the mezzanine level, Jack saw three telephones, which were indeed under transparent plastic bubbles. Across the hall from the telephones were doors to
MEN
and
LADIES
.

Beneath the middle bubble, Jack dialed 0, followed by the area code and the number for the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. “Billing?” asked the operator, and Jack said, “This is a collect call for Mrs. Sawyer in four-oh-seven and four-oh-eight. From Jack.”

The hotel operator answered, and Jack’s chest tightened. She transferred the call to the suite. The telephone rang once, twice, three times.

Then his mother said “Jesus, kid, I’m glad to hear from you! This absentee-mother business is hard on an old girl like me. I kind of miss you when you’re not moping around and telling me how to act with waiters.”

“You’re just too classy for most waiters, that’s all,” Jack said, and thought that he might begin to cry with relief.

“Are you all right, Jack? Tell me the truth.”

“I’m fine, sure,” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just had to make sure that you . . . you know.”

The phone whispered electronically, a skirl of static that sounded like sand blowing across a beach.

“I’m okay,” Lily said. “I’m great. I’m not any worse, anyhow, if that’s what you’re worried about. I suppose I’d like to know where you are.”

Jack paused, and the static whispered and hissed for a moment. “I’m in Ohio now. Pretty soon I’m going to be able to see Richard.”

“When are you coming home, Jack-O?”

“I can’t say. I wish I could.”

“You can’t say. I swear, kid, if your father hadn’t called you that silly name—and if you’d asked me about this ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later . . .”

A rising tide of static took her voice, and Jack remembered how she’d looked in the tea shop, haggard and feeble, an old woman. When the static receded he asked, “Are you having any trouble with Uncle Morgan? Is he bothering you?”

“I sent your Uncle Morgan away from here with a flea in his ear,” she said.

“He was there? He did come? Is he still bothering you?”

“I got rid of the Stoat about two days after you left, baby. Don’t waste time worrying about him.”

“Did he say where he was going?” Jack asked her, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth the telephone uttered a tortured electronic squeal that seemed to bore right into his head. Jack grimaced and jerked the receiver away from his ear. The awful whining noise of static was so loud that anyone stepping into the corridor would have heard it. “MOM!” Jack shouted, putting the phone as close to his head as he dared. The squeal of static increased, as if a radio between stations had been turned up to full volume.

The line abruptly fell silent. Jack clamped the receiver to his ear and heard only the flat black silence of dead air. “Hey,” he said, and jiggled the hook. The flat silence in the phone seemed to press up against his ear.

Just as abruptly, and as if his jiggling the hook had caused it, the dial tone—an oasis of sanity, of regularity, now—resumed. Jack jammed his right hand in his pocket, looking for another coin.

He was holding the receiver, awkwardly, in his left hand as he dug in his pocket; he froze when he heard the dial tone suddenly slot off into outer space.

Morgan Sloat’s voice spoke to him as clearly as if good old Uncle Morgan were standing at the next telephone. “Get your ass back home, Jack.” Sloat’s voice carved the air like a scalpel. “You just get your ass back home before we have to take you back ourselves.”

“Wait,” Jack said, as if he were begging for time: in fact, he was too terrified to know quite what he was saying.

“Can’t wait any longer, little pal. You’re a murderer now. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a murderer. So we’re not able to give you any more chances. You just get your can back to that resort in New Hampshire. Now. Or maybe you’ll go home in a bag.”

Jack heard the click of the receiver. He dropped it. The telephone Jack had used shuddered forward, then sagged off the wall. For a second it drooped on a network of wires; then crashed heavily to the floor.

The door to the men’s room banged open behind Jack, and a voice yelled, “Holy SHIT!”

Jack turned to see a thin crewcut boy of about twenty staring at the telephones. He was wearing a white apron and a bow tie: a clerk at one of the shops.

“I didn’t do it,” Jack said. “It just happened.”

“Holy shit.” The crewcut clerk goggled at Jack for a split-second, jerked as if to run, and then ran his hands over the crown of his head.

Jack backed away down the hall. When he was halfway down the escalator he finally heard the clerk yelling, “Mr. Olafson! The phone, Mr. Olafson!” Jack fled.

Outside, the air was bright, surprisingly humid. Dazed, Jack wandered across the sidewalk. A half-mile away across the parking lot, a black-and-white police car swung in toward the mall. Jack turned sideways and began to walk down the pavement. Some way ahead, a family of six struggled to get a lawn chair in through the next entrance to the mall. Jack slowed down and watched the husband and wife tilt the long chair diagonally, hindered by the attempts of the smaller children to either sit on the chair or to assist them. At last, nearly in the posture of the flag-raisers in the famous photograph of Iwo Jima, the family staggered through the door. The police car lazily circled through the big parking lot.

Just past the door where the disorderly family had succeeded in planting their chair, an old black man sat on a wooden crate, cradling a guitar in his lap. As Jack slowly drew nearer, he saw the metal cup beside the man’s feet. The man’s face was hidden behind big dirty sunglasses and beneath the brim of a stained felt hat. The sleeves of his denim jacket were as wrinkled as an elephant’s hide.

Jack swerved out to the edge of the pavement to give the man all the room he seemed to warrant, and noticed that around the man’s neck hung a sign handwritten in big shaky capital letters on discolored white cardboard. A few steps later he could read the letters.

BLIND SINCE BIRTH

WILL PLAY ANY SONG