The Talisman (42 page)

“OH-YEAH!”

There was another caesura. Sunlight Gardener gripped the sides of the podium, head down as if in prayer, gorgeous white hair hanging in disciplined waves. When he spoke again, his voice was low and brooding. He did not look up. The boys listened breathlessly.

“But we have enemies,” Sunlight Gardener said at last. This was little more than a whisper, but the mike picked it up and transmitted it perfectly.

The boys sighed—a rustle of wind through autumn leaves.

Heck Bast was looking around truculently, eyes rolling, pimples glowing such a deep red that he looked like a boy in the grip of a tropical illness.
Show me an enemy,
Heck Bast’s face said.
Yeah, you go on, show me an enemy and just see what happens to him!

Gardener looked up. Now his mad eyes appeared filled with tears.

“Yes, we have enemies,” he repeated. “Twice now the State of Indiana has tried to shut me down. Do you know what? The radical humanists can barely stand to think of me down here at the Sunlight Home, teaching my boys to love Jesus and their country. It makes em mad, and do you want to know something, boys? Do you want to know a deep old dark secret?”

They leaned forward, eyes on Sunlight Gardener.

“We don’t just make em mad,” Gardener said in a hoarse conspirator’s whisper. “We make em
scaaaaaared
.”

“Hallelujah!”

“Oh-yeah!”

“Amen!”

In a flash, Sunlight Gardener grabbed the mike again, and he was off! Up and down! back and forth! sometimes he jigged a two-step neat as a minstrel in a 1910 cakewalk! He bopped the word to them, pumping one arm first at the boys, then up toward heaven, where God had presumably dragged up His armchair to listen.

“We scare em, oh-yeah! Scare em so bad they got to have another cocktail, or another joint, or another sniff of cocaine! We scare em, because even smart old God-denying, Jesus-hating radical humanists like them can smell righteousness and the love of God, and when they smell that they can smell the brimstone coming out of their own pores, and they don’t like that smell, oh no!

“So they send down an extra inspector or two to plant garbage under the kitchen counters, or to let loose some cock-a-roaches in the flour! They start a lot of vile rumors about how my boys are beaten.
Are you beaten?
”

“NO!”
they roared indignantly, and Jack was dumbfounded to see Morton roaring the negative out as enthusiastically as all the rest, even though a bruise was already beginning to form on Morton’s cheek.

“Why, they sent down a bunch of smart news reporters from some smart radical humanist news show!” Sunlight Gardener cried in a kind of disgusted wonder. “They came down here and they said, ’Okay, who are we supposed to do the hatchet-job on? We’ve done a hundred and fifty already, we’re experts at smearing the righteous, don’t worry about us, just give us a few joints and a few cocktails and point us in the right direction.’

“But we fooled em, didn’t we, boys?”

Rumbling, almost vicious assent.

“They didn’t find no one chained to a beam in the barn, did they? Didn’t find no boys in strait-jackets, like they heard down in town from some of these hellbound School Board jackals, did they? Didn’t find no boys getting their fingernails pulled, or all their hair shaved off, or nothing like that! Most they could find was some boys who said they got spanked, and they DID get spanked, oh-yeah, they was spanked and I’d testify on that matter myself before the Throne of Almighty God, with a lie-detector strapped to each arm, because the book says if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child, and if you believe that, boys, you gimme hallelujah!”

“HALLELUJAH!”

“Even the Indiana Board of Education, much as they’d like to get rid of me and leave a clear field for the devil, even
they
had to admit that when it comes to spanking, God’s law and the State of Indiana’s law runs just about the same: that if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child!

“They found HAPPY boys! They found HEALTHY boys! They found boys who were willing to WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord, oh can you say hallelujah?”

They could.

“Can you say oh-yeah?”

They could do that, too.

Sunlight Gardener came back to the podium.

“The Lord protects those that love Him, and the Lord is not gonna see a bunch of dope-smoking, communist-loving radical humanists take away this resting place for tired, confused boys.

“There were a few boys who told tattletale lies to those so-called news-people,” Gardener said. “I heard the lies repeated on that TV news show, and although the boys slinging that mud were too cowardly to show their own faces on the screen, I knew—oh-yeah!—I knew those voices. When you’ve fed a boy, when you’ve held his head tenderly against your breast when he cries for his momma in the night, why, I guess then you know his voice.

“Those boys are gone now. God may forgive them—I hope He does, oh-yeah—but Sunlight Gardener is just a man.”

He hung his head to show what a shameful admission this was. But when he raised it again, his eyes were still hot, sparkling with fury.

“Sunlight Gardener cannot forgive them. So Sunlight Gardener set them out on the road again. They have been sent out into the Territories, but there they shall not be fed; there even the trees may eat them up, like beasts which walk in the night.”

Terrified silence in the room. Behind the glass panel, even Casey looked pallid and strange.

“The Book says that God sent Cain out to the East of Eden, into the land of Nod. Being cast out onto the road is like that, my boys. You have a safe haven here.”

He surveyed them.

“But if you weaken . . . if you lie . . . then woe unto you! Hell awaits the backslider just as it awaits the boy or man who dives into it on purpose.

“Remember, boys.

“Remember.

“Let us pray.”

23

Ferd Janklow

1

It took Jack less than a week to decide that a detour into the Territories was the only way they could possibly escape the Sunlight Home. He was willing to try that, but he found he would do almost anything, run any risk, if only he could avoid flipping from the Sunlight Home itself.

There was no concrete reason for this, only the voice of his undermind whispering that what was bad here would be worse over there. This was, perhaps, a bad place in all worlds . . . like a bad spot in an apple which goes all the way to the core. Anyway, the Sunlight Home was bad enough; he had no urge to see what its Territories counterpart looked like unless he had to.

But there might be a way.

Wolf and Jack and the other boys not lucky enough to be on the Outside Staff—and that was most of them—spent their days in what the long-timers called Far Field. It was about a mile and half down the road, at the edge of Gardener’s property, and there the boys spent their days picking rocks. There was no other field-work to be done at this time of year. The last of the crops had been harvested in mid-October, but as Sunlight Gardener had pointed out each morning in Chapel Devotions, rocks were always in season.

Sitting in the back of one of the Home’s two dilapidated farm-trucks each morning, Jack surveyed Far Field while Wolf sat beside him, head down, like a boy with a hangover. It had been a rainy fall in the midwest, and Far Field was a gluey, sticky, muddy mess. Day before yesterday one of the boys had cursed it under his breath and called it a “real bootsucker.”

Suppose we just take off?
Jack thought for the fortieth time.
Suppose I just yell “Go for it!” at Wolf and we start busting our buns? Where? North end, where those trees are, and the rock wall. That’s where his land ends
.

There might be a fence.

We’ll climb over it. For that matter, Wolf can throw me over it, if he has to.

Might be barbed wire.

Wiggle under it. Or—

Or Wolf could tear it apart with his bare hands. Jack didn’t like to think of it, but he knew Wolf had the strength . . . and if he asked, Wolf would do it. It would rip up the big guy’s hands, but he was getting ripped up in worse ways right now.

And then what?

Flip, of course. That was what. If they could just get off the land that belonged to the Sunlight Home, that undervoice whispered, they would have a fighting chance all the way clear.

And Singer and Bast (whom Jack had come to think of as the Thuggsy Twins) would not be able to use one of the trucks to run them down; the first truck to turn wheels into Far Field before the deep frosts of December would mire itself rocker-panel deep.

It’d be a footrace, pure and simple. Got to try it. Better than trying it back there, at the Home. And—

And it wasn’t just Wolf’s growing distress that was driving him; he was now nearly frantic about Lily, who was back in New Hampshire dying by inches while Jack said hallelujah under duress.

Go for it. Magic juice or no magic juice. Got to try.

But before Jack was quite ready, Ferd Janklow tried.

Great minds run in the same channel, can you say amen.

2

When it happened, it happened fast. At one moment Jack was listening to Ferd Janklow’s usual line of cynical, amusing bullshit. At the next, Ferd was pelting north across the murky field toward the stone wall. Until Ferd went for it, the day had seemed as drearily ordinary as any other at the Sunlight Home. It was cold and overcast; there was a smell of rain, possibly even snow in the air. Jack looked up to ease his aching back, and also to see if Sonny Singer was around. Sonny enjoyed harassing Jack. Most of the harassment was of the nuisance variety. Jack had his feet stepped on, he was pushed on the stairs, his plate had been knocked out of his hands for three meals running—until he had learned to simultaneously cradle it on the inner side of his body and hold it in a death-grip.

Jack wasn’t completely sure why Sonny hadn’t organized a mass stomping. Jack thought maybe it was because Sunlight Gardener was interested in the new boy. He didn’t
want
to think that, it scared him to think that, but it made sense. Sonny Singer was holding off because Sunlight Gardener had told him to, and that was another reason to get out of here in a hurry.

He looked to his right. Wolf was about twenty yards away, grubbing rocks with his hair in his face. Closer by was a gantry-thin boy with buck teeth—Donald Keegan, his name was. Donny grinned at him worshipfully, baring those amazing buck teeth. Spit dribbled from the end of his lolling tongue. Jack looked away quickly.

Ferd Janklow was on his left—the boy with the narrow Delftware hands and the deep widow’s peak. In the week since Jack and Wolf had been incarcerated in the Sunlight Home, he and Ferd had become good friends.

Ferd was grinning cynically.

“Donny’s in love with you,” he said.

“Blow it out,” Jack said uncomfortably, feeling a flush rise in his cheeks.

“I bet
Donny’d
blow it out if you let him,” Ferd said. “Wouldn’t you, Donny?”

Donny Keegan laughed his big, rusty yuck-yuck, not having the slightest idea of what they were talking about.

“I wish you’d quit it,” Jack said. He felt more uncomfortable than ever.

Donny’s in love with you.

The bloody hell of it was, he thought that maybe poor, retarded Donny Keegan really
was
in love with him . . . and Donny was maybe not the only one. Oddly, Jack found himself thinking of the nice man who had offered to take him home and who had then settled for dropping him off at the mall exit near Zanesville.
He saw it first,
Jack thought.
Whatever’s new about me, that man saw it first
.

Ferd said, “You’ve gotten very popular around here, Jack. Why, I think even old Heck Bast would blow it out for you, if you asked him.”

“Man, that’s sick,” Jack said, flushing. “I mean—”

Abruptly, Ferd dropped the rock he had been working at and stood up. He looked swiftly around, saw none of the white turtlenecks were looking at him, and then turned back to Jack. “And now, my darling,” he said, “it’s been a
very
dull party, and I really must be going.”

Ferd made kissing noises at Jack, and then a grin of amazing radiance lit and broadened Ferd’s narrow, pale face. A moment later he was in full flight, running for the rock wall at the end of Far Field, running in big gangling storklike strides.

He did indeed catch the guards napping—at least to a degree. Pedersen was talking about girls with Warwick and a horse-faced boy named Peabody, an Outside Staffer who had been rotated back to the Home for a while. Heck Bast had been granted the supreme pleasure of accompanying Sunlight Gardener to Muncie on some errand. Ferd got a good head-start before a startled cry went up:

“Hey! Hey, someone’s takin off!”

Jack gaped after Ferd, who was already six rows over and humping like hell. In spite of seeing his own plan co-opted, Jack felt a moment of triumphant excitement, and in his heart he wished him nothing but well.
Go! Go, you sarcastic son of a bitch! Go, for Jason’s sake!

“It’s Ferd Janklow,” Donny Keegan gurgled, and then laughed his big, whooping laugh.

3

The boys gathered for confession in the common room that night as they always did, but confession was cancelled. Andy Warwick strode in, announced the cancellation with abrupt baldness, and told them they could have an hour of “fellowship” before dinner. Then he strode out.

Jack thought Warwick had looked, under his patina of goose-stepping authority, frightened.

And Ferd Janklow was not here.

Jack looked around the room and thought with glum humor that if this was “fellowship one with the other,” he would hate to see what would happen if Warwick had told them to have “a quiet hour.” They sat around the big long room, thirty-nine boys between age twelve and age seventeen, looking at their hands, picking at scabs, morosely biting their nails. They all shared a common look—junkies robbed of their fix. They wanted to hear confessions; even more, they wanted to
make
confessions.

No one mentioned Ferd Janklow. It was as though Ferd, with his grimaces at Sunlight Gardener’s sermons and his pale Delftware hands, had never existed.

Jack found himself barely able to restrain an impulse to stand and scream at them. Instead, he began to think as hard as he ever had in his life.

He’s not here because they killed him. They’re all mad. You think madness isn’t catching? Just look what happened at that nutty place down in South America—when the man in the reflector sunglasses told them to drink the purple grape drink, they said yassuh, boss, and drank it.

Jack looked around at the dreary, indrawn, tired, blank faces—and thought how they would light, how they would kindle, if Sunlight Gardener strode in here—if he strode in here right here and now.

They’d do it, too, if Sunlight Gardener asked them to. They’d drink it, and then they’d hold me and Wolf, and they’d pour it down our throats as well. Ferd was right—they see something on my face, or in it, something that came into me in the Territories, and maybe they do love me a little . . . I guess that’s what pulled Heck Bast’s bell-rope anyway. That slob isn’t used to loving anything or anyone. So, yeah, maybe they do love me a little . . . but they love him a lot more. They’d do it. They’re mad.

Ferd could have told him that, and, sitting there in the common room, Jack supposed that Ferd
had
told him.

He told Jack he had been committed to the Sunlight Home by his parents, born-again Christians who fell down on their knees in the living room whenever anyone on
The 700 Club
began to say a prayer. Neither of them had understood Ferd, who was cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth. They thought Ferd must be a child of the devil—a communistic, radical humanist changeling. When he ran away for the fourth time and was bagged by none other than Franky Williams, his parents came to the Sunlight Home—where Ferd had of course been stashed—and fell in love with Sunlight Gardener on sight. Here was the answer to all the problems their bright, troublesome, rebellious son had caused them. Sunlight Gardener would educate their son toward the Lord. Sunlight Gardener would show him the error of his ways. Sunlight Gardener would take him off their hands and get him off the streets of Anderson.

“They saw that story about the Sunlight Home on
Sunday Report
,” Ferd told Jack. “They sent me a postcard saying God would punish liars and false prophets in a lake of fire. I wrote them back—Rudolph in the kitchen smuggled the letter out for me. Dolph’s a pretty good guy.” He paused. “You know what the Ferd Janklow definition of a good guy is, Jack?”

“No.”

“One who stays bought,” Ferd said, and laughed a cynical, hurt laugh. “Two bucks buys Dolph’s mailman services. So I wrote them a letter and said that if God punished liars the way they said, then I hoped Sunlight Gardener could find a set of asbestos longjohns in the other world, because he was lying about what goes on here faster than a horse can trot. Everything they had on
Sunday Report
—the rumors about the strait-jackets and about the Box—it was all true. Oh, they couldn’t prove it. The guy’s a nut, Jack, but he’s a
smart
nut. If you ever make a mistake about that, he’ll put a real hurt on you and on Phil the Fearless Wolf-Boy for good measure.”

Jack said, “Those
Sunday Report
guys are usually pretty good at catching people with their hands in the pork barrel. At least, that’s what my mom says.”

“Oh, he was scared. He got real shrill and shrieky. Ever see Humphrey Bogart in
The Caine Mutiny?
He was like that for a week before they showed up. When they finally got here he was all sweetness and reason, but the week before was a living hell. Mr. Ice Cream was shitting in his pants. That was the week he kicked Benny Woodruff down the stairs from the third floor because he caught him with a Superman comic. Benny was out cold for three hours, and he couldn’t quite get it straight who he was or where he was until that night.”

Ferd paused.

“He knew they were coming. Same as he always knows when the state inspectors are going to pull a surprise inspection. He hid the strait-jackets in the attic and made believe the Box was a hay-drying shed.”

Ferd’s cynical, hurt laugh again.

“Know what my folks did, Jack? They sent Sunny Gardener a Xerox of my letter to them. ’For my own good,’ my pop says in his next letter to me. And guess what? It’s Ferd’s turn in the Box, courtesy of my own folks!”

The hurt laugh again.

“Tell you one other thing. He wasn’t kidding at night-chapel. The kids that talked to the
Sunday Report
people all disappeared—the ones he could get hold of, anyway.”

The way Ferd himself has disappeared now,
Jack thought, watching Wolf brood across the room. He shivered. His hands felt very, very cold.

Your friend Phil the Fearless Wolf-Boy.

Was Wolf starting to look hairier again? So soon? Surely not. But that was coming of course—it was as relentless as the tides.

And by the way, Jack, while we’re just sitting around here worrying about the dangers of just sitting around here, how’s your mother? How’s Darling Lil, Queen of the Bs? Losing weight? Having pain? Is she finally starting to feel it eat into her with its sharp, ratty little teeth as you sit here growing roots in this weird prison? Is Morgan maybe getting ready to wind up the lightning and give the cancer a hand?

He had been shocked at the idea of strait-jackets, and although he had seen the Box—a big ugly iron thing which sat in the Home’s back yard like a weird abandoned refrigerator—he couldn’t believe that Gardener actually put boys in it. Ferd had slowly convinced him, talking in a low voice as they harvested rocks in Far Field.

“He’s got a great setup here,” Ferd had said. “It’s a license to coin money. His religious shows play all over the midwest on the radio and over most of the country on cable TV and the indy stations. We’re his captive audience. We sound great on the radio and we look great on the tube—when Roy Owdersfelt isn’t milking that fucking pimple on the end of his nose, that is. He’s got Casey, his pet radio and TV producer—Casey videotapes every morning-chapel and audiotapes every night-chapel. He cuts all the sound and picture together and hypes everything until Gardener looks like Billy Graham and us guys sound like the crowd in Yankee Stadium during the seventh game of the World Series. That isn’t all Casey does, either. He’s the house genius. You see the bug in your room? Casey set up the bugs. Everything feeds into his control room, and the only way into that control room is through Gardener’s private office. The bugs are voice-actuated, so he doesn’t waste any tape. Anything juicy he saves for Sunlight Gardener. I’ve heard Casey put a blue box on Gardener’s phone so he can make long-distance phone calls free, and I know damned well he’s spliced a line into the pay-TV cable that goes by out front. You like the idea of Mr. Ice Cream settling back and watching a big double feature on Cinemax after a hard day of selling Jesus to the masses? I like it. This guy is as American as spinner hubcaps, Jack, and here in Indiana they love him almost as much as they love high-school basketball.”