The Talisman (22 page)

“How about a little ice cream on the way home, Jack?” Uncle Morgan said to him. “That sound good to you?”

“Uh,” Jack said.

“Yeah, we can stop off at that place in the lobby,” his father said.

“Yummy-yummy-yum,” Uncle Morgan said. “Now we’re really talking about synergy,” and smiled at Jack once more.

This happened when he was six, and in the midst of his weightless tumble through limbo, it happened again—the horrible purple taste of Speedy’s juice backed up into his mouth, into the passages behind his nose, and all of that languid afternoon of six years before replayed itself out in his mind. He saw it just as if the magic juice brought total recall, and so speedily that he lived through that afternoon in the same few seconds which told him that this time the magic juice really was going to make him vomit.

Uncle Morgan’s eyes smoking, and inside Jack, a question smoking too, demanding to finally come out . . .

Who played

What changes what changes

Who plays those changes, daddy?

Who

killed Jerry Bledsoe? The magic juice forced itself into the boy’s mouth, stinging threads of it nauseatingly trickled into his nose, and just as Jack felt loose earth beneath his hands he gave up and vomited rather than drown.
What
killed Jerry Bledsoe? Foul purple stuff shot from Jack’s mouth, choking him, and he blindly pushed himself backward—his feet and legs snagged in tall stiff weeds. Jack pushed himself up on his hands and knees and waited, patient as a mule, his mouth drooping open, for the second attack. His stomach clenched, and he did not have time to groan before more of the stinking juice burned up through his chest and throat and spattered out of his mouth. Ropey pink strings of saliva hung from his lips, and Jack feebly brushed them away. He wiped his hand on his pants. Jerry Bledsoe, yes.
Jerry
—who’d always had his name spelled out on his shirt, like a gas-station attendant. Jerry, who had died when— The boy shook his head and wiped his hands across his mouth again. He spat into a nest of saw-toothed wild grass sprouting like a giant’s corsage out of the gray-brown earth. Some dim animal instinct he did not understand made him push loose earth over the pinkish pool of vomit. Another reflex made him brush the palms of his hands against his trousers. Finally he looked up.

He was kneeling, in the last of the evening light, on the edge of a dirt lane. No horrible Elroy-thing pursued him—he had known that immediately. Dogs penned in a wooden, cage-like enclosure barked and snarled at him, thrusting their snouts through the cracks of their jail. On the other side of the fenced-in dogs was a rambling wooden structure and from here too doggy noises rose up into the immense sky. These were unmistakably similar to the noises Jack had just been hearing from the other side of a wall in the Oatley Tap: the sounds of drunken men bellowing at each other. A bar—here it would be an inn or a public house, Jack imagined. Now that he was no longer sickened by Speedy’s juice, he could smell the pervasive, yeasty odors of malt and hops. He could not let the men from the inn discover him.

For a moment he imagined himself running from all those dogs yipping and growling through the cracks in their enclosure, and then he stood up. The sky seemed to tilt over his head, to darken. And back home, in
his
world, what was happening? A nice little disaster in the middle of Oatley? Maybe a nice little flood, a sweet little fire? Jack slipped quietly backward away from the inn, then began to move sideways through the tall grass. Perhaps sixty yards away, thick candles burned in the windows of the only other building he could see. From somewhere not far off to his right drifted the odor of pigs. When Jack had gone half the distance between the inn and the house, the dogs ceased growling and snapping, and he slowly began walking forward toward the Western Road. The night was dark and moonless.

Jerry Bledsoe.

4

There were other houses, though Jack did not see them until he was nearly before them. Except for the noisy drinkers behind him at the inn, here in the country Territories people went to bed when the sun did. No candles burned in these small square windows. Themselves squarish and dark, the houses on either side of the Western Road sat in a puzzling isolation—something was wrong, as in a visual game from a child’s magazine, but Jack could not identify it. Nothing hung upside-down, nothing burned, nothing seemed extravagantly out of place. Most of the houses had thick fuzzy roofs which resembled haystacks with crewcuts, but Jack assumed that these were thatch—he had heard of it, but never seen it before.
Morgan
, he thought with a sudden thrill of panic,
Morgan of Orris
, and saw the two of them, the man with long hair and a built-up boot and his father’s sweaty workaholic partner, for a moment jumbled up together—Morgan Sloat with pirate’s hair and a hitch in his walk. But Morgan—this world’s Morgan—was not what was Wrong with This Picture.

Jack was just now passing a short squat one-story building like an inflated rabbit hutch, crazily half-timbered with wide black wooden X’s. A fuzzy crewcut thatch capped this building too. If he were walking out of Oatley—or even running out of Oatley, to be closer to the truth—what would he expect to see in the single dark window of this hutch for giant rabbits? He knew: the dancing glimmer of a television screen. But of course Territories houses did not have television sets inside them, and the absence of that colorful glimmer was not what had puzzled him. It was something else, something so much an aspect of any grouping of houses along a road that its absence left a hole in the landscape. You noticed the hole even if you could not quite identify what was absent.

Television, television sets . . . Jack continued past the half-timbered little building and saw ahead of him, its front door set only inches back from the verge of the road, another gnomishly small dwelling. This one seemed to have a sod, not a thatched, roof, and Jack smiled to himself—this tiny village had reminded him of Hobbiton. Would a Hobbit cable-stringer pull up here and say to the lady of the . . . shack? doghouse? . . . anyhow, would he say, “Ma’am, we’re installing cable in your area, and for a small monthly fee—hitch you up right now—you get fifteen new channels, you get
Midnight Blue
, you get the all-sports and all-weather channels, you get . . .”?

And that, he suddenly realized, was it. In front of these houses were no poles. No wiring! No TV antennas complicated the sky, no tall wooden poles marched the length of the Western Road, because in the Territories there was no electricity. Which was why he had not permitted himself to identify the absent element. Jerry Bledsoe had been, at least part of the time, Sawyer & Sloat’s electrician and handyman.

5

When his father and Morgan Sloat used that name,
Bledsoe
, he thought he had never heard it before—though, having remembered it, he must have heard the handyman’s last name once or twice. But Jerry Bledsoe was almost always just
Jerry
, as it said above the pocket on his workshirt. “Can’t Jerry do something about the air-conditioning?” “Get Jerry to oil the hinges on that door, will you? The squeaks are driving me batshit.” And Jerry would appear, his work-clothes clean and pressed, his thinning rust-red hair combed flat, his glasses round and earnest, and quietly fix whatever was wrong. There was a Mrs. Jerry, who kept the creases sharp and clean in the tan workpants, and several small Jerrys, whom Sawyer & Sloat invariably remembered at Christmas. Jack had been small enough to associate the name
Jerry
with Tom Cat’s eternal adversary, and so imagined that the handyman and Mrs. Jerry and the little Jerrys lived in a giant mouse-hole, accessible by a curved arch cut into a baseboard.

But who had killed Jerry Bledsoe? His father and Morgan Sloat, always so sweet to the Bledsoe children at Christmas-time?

Jack stepped forward into the darkness of the Western Road, wishing that he had forgotten completely about Sawyer & Sloat’s handyman, that he had fallen asleep as soon as he had crawled behind the couch. Sleep was what he wanted now—wanted it far more than the uncomfortable thoughts which that six-years-dead conversation had aroused in him. Jack promised himself that as soon as he was sure he was at least a couple of miles past the last house, he would find someplace to sleep. A field would do, even a ditch. His legs did not want to move anymore; all his muscles, even his bones, seemed twice their weight.

It had been just after one of those times when Jack had wandered into some enclosed place after his father and found that Phil Sawyer had somehow contrived a disappearance. Later, his father would manage to vanish from his bedroom, from the dining room, from the conference room at Sawyer & Sloat. On this occasion he executed his mystifying trick in the garage beside the house on Rodeo Drive.

Jack, sitting unobserved on the little knob of raised land which was the closest thing to a hill offered by this section of Beverly Hills, saw his father leave their house by the front door, cross the lawn while digging in his pockets for money or keys, and let himself into the garage by the side door. The white door on the right side should have swung up seconds later; but it remained stubbornly closed. Then Jack realized that his father’s car was where it had been all this Saturday morning, parked at the curb directly in front of the house. Lily’s car was gone—she’d plugged a cigarette into her mouth and announced that she was taking herself off to a screening of
Dirt Track
, the latest film by the director of
Death’s Darling
, and nobody by God had better try to stop her—and so the garage was empty. For minutes, Jack waited for something to happen. Neither the side door nor the big front doors opened. Eventually Jack slid down off the grassy elevation, went to the garage, and let himself in. The wide familiar space was entirely empty. Dark oil stains patterned the gray cement floor. Tools hung from silver hooks set into the walls. Jack grunted in astonishment, called out, “Dad?” and looked at everything again, just to make sure. This time he saw a cricket hop toward the shadowy protection of a wall, and for a second
almost
could have believed that magic was real and some malign wizard had happened along and . . . the cricket reached the wall and slipped into an invisible crack. No, his father had not been turned into a cricket. Of course he had not. “Hey,” the boy said—to himself it seemed. He walked backward to the side door and left the garage. Sunlight fell on the lush, springy lawns of Rodeo Drive. He would have called someone, but whom? The police?
My daddy walked into the garage and I couldn’t find him in there and now I’m scared
. . . .

Two hours later Phil Sawyer came walking up from the Beverly Wilshire end of the street. He carried his jacket over his shoulder, had pulled down the knot of his tie—to Jack, he looked like a man returning from a journey around the world.

Jack jumped down from his anxious elevation and tore toward his father. “You sure cover the ground,” his father said, smiling, and Jack flattened himself against his legs. “I thought you were taking a nap, Travelling Jack.”

They heard the telephone ringing as they came up the walk, and some instinct—perhaps the instinct to keep his father close—made Jacky pray that it had already rung a dozen times, that whoever was calling would hang up before they reached the front door. His father ruffled the hair on his crown, put his big warm hand on the back of his neck, then pulled open the door and made it to the phone in five long strides. “Yes, Morgan,” Jacky heard his father say. “Oh? Bad news? You’d better tell me, yes.” After a long moment of silence in which the boy could hear the tinny, rasping sound of Morgan Sloat’s voice stealing through the telephone wires: “Oh, Jerry. My God. Poor Jerry. I’ll be right over.” Then his father looked straight at him, not smiling, not winking, not doing anything but taking him in. “I’ll come over, Morgan. I’ll have to bring Jack, but he can wait in the car.” Jack felt his muscles relax, and was so relieved that he did not ask why he had to wait in the car, as he would have at any other time.

Phil drove up Rodeo Drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel, turned left onto Sunset, and pointed the car toward the office building. He said nothing.

His father zipped through the oncoming traffic and swung the car into the parking lot beside the office building. Already in the lot were two police cars, a fire truck, Uncle Morgan’s pocket-size white Mercedes convertible, the rusted old Plymouth two-door that had been the handyman’s car. Just inside the entrance Uncle Morgan was talking to a policeman, who shook his head slowly, slowly, in evident sympathy. Morgan Sloat’s right arm squeezed the shoulders of a slim young woman in a dress too large for her who had twisted her face into his chest. Mrs. Jerry, Jack knew, seeing that most of her face was obscured by a white handkerchief she had pressed to her eyes. A behatted, raincoated fireman pushed a mess of twisted metal and plastic, ashes and broken glass into a disorderly heap far past them down the hall. Phil said, “Just sit here for a minute or two, okay, Jacky?” and sprinted toward the entrance. A young Chinese woman sat talking to a policeman on a concrete abutment at the end of the parking lot. Before her lay a crumpled object it took Jack a moment to recognize as a bike. When Jack inhaled, he smelled bitter smoke.

Twenty minutes later, both his father and Uncle Morgan left the building. Still gripping Mrs. Jerry, Uncle Morgan waved goodbye to the Sawyers. He led the woman around to the passenger door of his tiny car. Jack’s father twirled his own car out of the lot and back into the traffic on Sunset.

“Is Jerry hurt?” Jack asked.

“Some kind of freak accident,” his father said. “Electricity—the whole building could’ve gone up in smoke.”

“Is Jerry hurt?” Jack repeated.

“Poor son of a bitch got hurt so bad he’s dead,” said his father.

Jack and Richard Sloat needed two months to really put the story together out of the conversations they overheard. Jack’s mother and Richard’s housekeeper supplied other details—the housekeeper, the goriest.