The Talisman (41 page)

Halfway to the stairs, he turned and looked back.

“I never forget a place or a face, Jack. I’ll remember.”

Coldly, Jack thought,
God, I hope not. Not until I’m about two thousand miles away from this fucking pris—

Something slammed into him hard. Jack flew out into the hall, pinwheeling his arms madly for balance. He hit his head on the bare concrete floor and saw a tangled shower of stars.

When he was able to sit up, he saw Singer and Bast standing together, grinning. Behind them was Casey, his gut pouching out his white turtleneck. Wolf was looking at Singer and Bast, and something in his tensed-down posture alarmed Jack.

“No, Wolf!” he said sharply.

Wolf slumped.

“No, go ahead, dummy,” Heck Bast said, laughing a little. “Don’t listen to him. Go on and try me, if you want. I always liked a little warmup before dinner.”

Singer glanced at Wolf and said, “Leave the dummy alone, Heck. He’s just the body.” He nodded at Jack. “There’s the
head
. There’s the
head
we got to change.” He looked down at Jack, hands on his knees, like an adult bending to pass a pleasant word or two with a very small child. “And we will change it, Mr. Jack Parker. You can believe it.”

Deliberately, Jack said, “Piss off, you bullying asshole.”

Singer recoiled as if slapped, a flush rising out of his collar, up his neck, and into his face. With a growl, Heck Bast stepped forward.

Singer grabbed Bast’s arm. Still looking at Jack, he said, “Not now. Later.”

Jack got to his feet. “You want to watch out for me,” he said quietly to them both, and although Hector Bast only glowered, Sonny Singer looked almost scared. For a moment he seemed to see something in Jack Sawyer’s face that was both strong and forbidding—something that had not been there almost two months ago, when a much younger boy had set the small seafront town of Arcadia Beach to his back and had begun walking west.

4

Jack thought that Uncle Tommy might have described dinner—not unkindly—as consisting of American Grange Hall Cuisine. The boys sat at long tables and were served by four of their number, who had changed into clean mess-whites following the confession period.

Following another prayer, chow was duly brought on. Big glass bowls full of home-baked beans were passed up and down the four tables, steaming platters of cheap red hotdogs, tureens of canned pineapple chunks, lots of milk in plain cartons marked
DONATED COMMODITIES
and
INDIANA STATE DAIRY COMMISSION
.

Wolf ate with grim concentration, his head down, a piece of bread always in one hand to serve as a combination pusher and mopper. As Jack watched, he gobbled five hotdogs and three helpings of the bullet-hard beans. Thinking of the small room with its closed window, Jack wondered if he were going to need a gas-mask tonight. He supposed so—not that he was likely to be issued one. He watched dismally as Wolf slopped a fourth helping of beans onto his plate.

Following dinner, all the boys rose, formed lines, and cleared the tables. As Jack took his dishes, a Wolf-decimated loaf of bread, and two milk-pitchers out into the kitchen, he kept his eyes wide open. The stark labels on the milk cartons had given him an idea.

This place wasn’t a prison, and it wasn’t a workhouse. It was probably classed as a boarding school or something, and the law would demand that some sort of state inspectors must keep an eye on it. The kitchen would be a place where the State of Indiana’s eye would fall most often. Bars on the windows upstairs, okay. Bars on the kitchen windows? Jack didn’t think so. They would raise too many questions.

The kitchen might make a good jumping-off point for an escape attempt, so Jack studied it carefully.

It looked a lot like the cafeteria kitchen at his school in California. The floor and walls were tiled, the big sinks and counters stainless steel. The cupboards were nearly the size of vegetable bins. An old conveyor-belt dishwasher stood against one wall. Three boys were already operating this hoary antique under the supervision of a man in cook’s whites. The man was narrow, pallid, and possessed of a ratlike little face. An unfiltered cigarette was pasted to his upper lip, and that identified him in Jack’s mind as a possible ally. He doubted if Sunlight Gardener would let any of his own people smoke cigarettes.

On the wall, he saw a framed certificate which announced that this public kitchen had been rated acceptable under standards set by the State of Indiana and the U.S. Government.

And no, there were no bars on the frosted-glass windows.

The ratlike man looked over at Jack, peeled his cigarette off his lower lip, and tossed it into one of the sinks.

“New fish, you and your buddy, huh?” he asked. “Well, you’ll be old fish soon enough. The fish get old real quick here in the Sunlight Home, don’t they, Sonny?”

He grinned insolently at Sonny Singer. It was quite obvious that Singer did not know how to cope with such a smile; he looked confused and unsure, just a kid again.

“You know you’re not supposed to talk to the boys, Rudolph,” he said.

“You can just cram it up your ass anytime you can’t roll it down the alley or kick it in the air, buddy-roo,” Rudolph said, flicking his eyes lazily over Singer. “You know that, don’t you?”

Singer looked at him, lips first trembling, then writhing, then pushing together hard.

He suddenly turned around. “Night-chapel!” he shouted furiously. “Night-chapel, come on, let’s go, get those tables cleared and let’s get up the hall, we’re late! Night-chapel!”

5

The boys trooped down a narrow staircase lit by naked bulbs enclosed in wire mesh. The walls were dank plaster, and Jack didn’t like the way Wolf’s eyeballs were rolling.

After that, the cellar chapel was a surprise. Most of the downstairs area—which was considerable—had been converted into a spare, modern chapel. The air down here was good—not too warm, not too cold. And fresh. Jack could hear the whispering of convection units somewhere near. There were five pews split by a central aisle, leading up to a dais with a lectern and a simple wooden cross hung on a purple velvet backdrop.

Somewhere, an organ was playing.

The boys filed quietly into the pews. The microphone on the lectern had a large, professional-looking baffle on the end of it. Jack had been in plenty of studio sound-rooms with his mother, often sitting patiently by and reading a book or doing his homework assignments while she did TV overdubs or looped unclear dialogue, and he knew that sort of baffle was meant to keep the speaker from “popping” the mike. He thought it a strange thing to see in the chapel of a religious boarding home for wayward boys. Two video cameras stood at either side of the lectern, one to catch Sunlight Gardener’s right profile, the other to catch his left. Neither was turned on this evening. There were heavy purple drapes on the walls. On the right, they were unbroken. Set into the left wall, however, was a glass rectangle. Jack could see Casey crouched over an extremely professional-looking sound-board, reel-to-reel tape recorder close to his right hand. As Jack watched, Casey grabbed a pair of cans from the board and slipped them over his ears.

Jack looked up and saw hardwood beams rising in a series of six modest arches. Between them was drilled white composition board . . . soundproofing. The place looked like a chapel, but it was a very efficient combination TV-and-radio studio. Jack suddenly thought of Jimmy Swaggart, Rex Humbard, Jack Van Impe.

Folks, just lay yo hand on yo television set, and you gone be HEALED!!!

He suddenly felt like screaming with laughter.

A small door to the left of the podium opened, and Sunlight Gardener stepped out. He was dressed in white from head to toe, and Jack saw expressions varying from exaltation to outright adoration on the faces of many of the boys, but Jack again had to restrain himself from a wild laughing-spree. The vision in white approaching the lectern reminded him of a series of commercials he had seen as a very young child.

He thought Sunlight Gardener looked like the Man from Glad.

Wolf turned toward him and whispered hoarsely, “What’s the matter, Jack? You smell like something’s really funny.”

Jack snorted so hard into the hand cupped over his mouth that he blew colorless snot all over his fingers.

Sunlight Gardener, his face glowing with ruddy good health, turned the pages of the great Bible on the lectern, apparently lost in deepest meditation. Jack saw the glowering scorched-earth landscape of Heck Bast’s face, the narrow, suspicious face of Sonny Singer. He sobered up in a hurry.

In the glass booth, Casey was sitting up, watching Gardener alertly. And as Gardener raised his handsome face from his Bible and fastened his cloudy, dreaming, and utterly insane eyes upon his congregation, Casey flipped a switch. The reels of the big tape recorder began to turn.

6

“Fret not thyself because of evildoers,”

said Sunlight Gardener. His voice was low, musical, thoughtful.

“Neither be thou envious against

the workers of iniquity.

For they shall soon be cut down like the grass,

and wither as the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;

so shalt thou dwell in the Territories—”

(Jack Sawyer felt his heart take a nasty, leaping turn in his chest)

“—and verily thou shalt be fed.

Delight thyself also in the Lord;

and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.

Commit thy way unto the Lord;

trust also in him;

and he shall bring it to pass. . . .

Cease from anger, and forsake wrath;

fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.

For evildoers shall be cut off:

but those that wait upon the Lord,

they shall inherit his Territory.”

Sunlight Gardener closed the Book.

“May God,” he said, “add His Blessing to the reading of His Holy Word.”

He looked down at his hands for a long, long time. In Casey’s glass booth, the wheels of the tape recorder turned. Then he looked up again, and in his mind Jack suddenly heard this man scream:
Not the Kingsland? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve overturned a full wagonload of Kingsland Ale, you stupid goat’s penis? You don’t mean to tell me that, do yoooooouuuuuuu?

Sunlight Gardener studied his young male congregation closely and earnestly. Their faces looked back at him—round faces, lean faces, bruised faces, faces flaring with acne, faces that were sly, and faces that were open and youthful and lovely.

“What does it
mean
, boys? Do you understand Psalm Thirty-seven? Do you understand this lovely, lovely song?”

No
, their faces said—sly and open, clear and sweet, pitted and poxed.
Not too much, only got as far as the fifth grade, been on the road, been on the bum, been in trouble . . . tell me . . . tell me. . . .

Suddenly, shockingly, Gardener shrieked into the mike, “It means
DON’T SWEAT IT!
”

Wolf recoiled, moaning a little.

“Now you know what that means, don’t you? You boys have heard that one, haven’t you?”

“Yeah!”
someone shouted from behind Jack.

“
OH-YEAH!
” Sunlight Gardener echoed, beaming. “DON’T SWEAT IT! NEGATIVE PERSPIRATION! They are good words, aren’t they, boys? Those are some kind of
gooooood
words,
OH-YEAH!
”

“Yeah! . . . YEAH!”

“This Psalm says you don’t have to WORRY about the evildoers!
NO SWEAT! OH-YEAH!
It says you don’t have to WORRY about the workers of sin and iniquity!
NEGATIVE PERSPIRATION!
This Psalm here says that if you WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord,
EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE SO COOL!
Do you understand that, boys? Do you have an understanding ear for that?”

“Yeah!”

“Hallelujah!”
Heck Bast cried, grinning divinely.

“Amen!”
a boy with a great lazy eye behind his magnifying spectacles returned.

Sunlight Gardener took the mike with practiced ease, and Jack was again reminded of a Las Vegas lounge performer. Gardener began to walk back and forth with nervous, mincing rapidity. He sometimes did a jigging little half-step in his clean white leather shoes; now he was Dizzy Gillespie, now Jerry Lee Lewis, now Stan Kenton, now Gene Vincent; he was in a fever of jive Godhead testimony.

“Naw, you don’t have to fear! Ah, naw! You don’t have to fear that kid who wants to show you dirty-book pictures! You don’t have to fear that boy who says just one toke on just one joint won’t hurt you and you’ll be a sissy if you don’t take it! Ah, naw! ’CAUSE WHEN YOU GOT THE LORD YOU GONNA WALK WITH THE LORD, AM I RIGHT?”

“YEAH!!!”

“OH-YEAH! AND WHEN YOU GOT THE LORD YOU GONNA TALK WITH THE LORD, AM I RIGHT?”

“YEAH!”

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU, AM I RIGHT?”

“YEAH!!!”
They screamed it out, many of them rocking back and forth in a frenzy now.

“IF I’M RIGHT SAY HALLELUJAH!”

“HALLELUJAH!”

“IF I’M RIGHT SAY OH-YEAH!”

“OH-YEAH!”

They rocked back and forth; Jack and Wolf were rocked with them, helplessly. Jack saw that some of the boys were actually weeping.

“Now tell me this,” Gardener said, looking toward them warmly and confidentially. “Is there any place for the evildoer here in the Sunlight Home? Huh? What do you think?”

“No
sir!
” cried out the thin boy with the buck teeth.

“That’s right,” Sunlight Gardener said, approaching the podium again. He gave the mike a quick, professional flick to clear the cord out from under his feet and then he slipped it back into the clamp again. “That’s the ticket. No room here for tattletale liars and workers of iniquity, say hallelujah.”

“Hallelujah,” the boys replied.

“Amen,” Sunlight Gardener agreed. “The Lord says—in the Book of Isaiah he says it—that if you lean on the Lord, you’re gonna mount up—oh-yeah!—with wings as eagles, and your strength shall be the strength of ten and I say to you, boys,
THAT THE SUNLIGHT HOME IS A NEST FOR EAGLES, CAN YOU SAY OH-YEAH!”