The Talisman (23 page)

Jerry Bledsoe had come in on a Saturday to try to iron out some of the kinks in the building’s security system. If he tampered with the delicate system on a weekday, he was sure to confuse or irritate the tenants with the Klaxon alarm whenever he accidentally set it off. The security system was wired into the building’s main electrical board, set behind two large removable walnut panels on the ground floor. Jerry had set down his tools and lifted off the panels, having already seen that the lot was empty and nobody would jump out of his skin when the alarm went off. Then he went downstairs to the telephone in his basement cubicle and told the local precinct house to ignore any signals from the Sawyer & Sloat address until his next telephone call. When he went back upstairs to tackle the mare’s nest of wires coming into the board from all the contact points, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Lorette Chang was just riding her bicycle into the building’s lot—she was distributing a leaflet advertising a restaurant which was due to open down the street in fifteen days.

Miss Chang later told the police that she looked through the glass front door and saw a workman enter the hall from the basement. Just before the workman picked up his screwdriver and touched the wiring panel, she felt the parking lot wobble beneath her feet. It was, she assumed, a mini-earthquake: a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, Lorette Chang was untroubled by any seismic event that did not actually knock anything down. She saw Jerry Bledsoe set his feet (so he felt it, too, though no one else did), shake his head, then gently insert the tip of the screwdriver into a hive of wires.

And then the entry and downstairs corridor of the Sawyer & Sloat building turned into a holocaust.

The entire wiring panel turned instantly to a solid rectangular body of flame; bluish-yellow arcs of what looked like lightning shot out and encased the workman. Electronic horns bawled and bawled: KA-WHAAAAM! KA-WHAAAM! A ball of fire six feet high fell right out of the wall, slammed the already dead Jerry Bledsoe aside, and rolled down the corridor toward the lobby. The transparent front door blew into flying glass and smoking, twisted pieces of frame. Lorette Chang dropped her bike and sprinted toward the pay telephone across the street. As she told the fire department the building’s address and noticed that her bicycle had been twisted neatly in half by whatever force had burst through the door, Jerry Bledsoe’s roasted corpse still swayed upright back and forth before the devastated panel. Thousands of volts poured through his body, twitching it with regular surges, snapping it back and forth in a steady pulse. All the handyman’s body hair and most of his clothes had fried off, and his skin had become a cooked blotchy gray. His eyeglasses, a solidifying lump of brown plastic, covered his nose like a poultice.

Jerry Bledsoe.
Who plays those changes, daddy?
Jack made his feet move until he had gone half an hour without seeing another of the little thatched cottages. Unfamiliar stars in unfamiliar patterns lay all over the sky above him—messages in a language he could not read.

12

Jack Goes to the Market

1

He slept that night in a sweetly fragrant Territories haystack, first burrowing his way in and then turning around so the fresh air could reach him along the tunnel he had made. He listened apprehensively for small scuttering sounds—he had heard or read somewhere that fieldmice were great haystack fans. If they were in this one, then a great big mouse named Jack Sawyer had scared them into silence. He relaxed little by little, his left hand tracing the shape of Speedy’s bottle—he had plugged the top with a piece of springy moss from a small stream where he had stopped to drink. He supposed it was entirely possible that some of the moss would fall into the bottle, or already had. What a pity, it would spoil the piquant flavor and the delicate bouquet.

As he lay in here, warm at last, heavily sleepy, the feeling he was most aware of was relief . . . as if there had been a dozen ten-pound weights strapped to his back and some kind soul had undone the buckles and allowed them to fall to the ground. He was in the Territories again, the place which such charming folks as Morgan of Orris, Osmond the Bullwhipper, and Elroy the Amazing Goat-Man all called home, the Territories, where anything could happen.

But the Territories could be good, too. He remembered that from his earliest childhood, when everyone had lived in California and no one had lived anyplace else. The Territories could be good, and it seemed he felt that goodness around him now, as calmly, inarguably sweet as the smell of the haystack, as clear as the smell of the Territories air.

Does a fly or a ladybug feel relief if an unexpected gust of wind comes along and tilts the pitcher plant just enough to allow the drowning insect to fly out? Jack didn’t know . . . but he knew that he was out of Oatley, away from Fair Weather Clubs and old men who wept over their stolen shopping carts, away from the smell of beer and the smell of puke . . . most important of all, he was away from Smokey Updike and the Oatley Tap.

He thought he might travel in the Territories for a while, after all.

And so thinking, fell asleep.

2

He had walked two, perhaps three miles along the Western Road the following morning, enjoying the sunshine and the good, earthy smell of fields almost ready for the harvests of summer’s end, when a cart pulled over and a whiskery farmer in what looked like a toga with rough breeches under it pulled up and shouted:

“Are you for market-town, boy?”

Jack gaped at him, half in a panic, realizing that the man was not speaking English—never mind “prithee” or “Dost thou go cross-gartered, varlet,” it wasn’t English
at all
.

There was a woman in a voluminous dress sitting beside the whiskery farmer; she held a boy of perhaps three on her lap. She smiled pleasantly enough at Jack and rolled her eyes at her husband. “He’s a simpleton, Henry.”

They’re not speaking English . . . but whatever it is they’re speaking, I understand it. I’m actually thinking in that language . . . and that’s not all—I’m seeing in it, or with it, or whatever it is I mean.

Jack realized he had been doing it the last time he had been in the Territories, too—only then he had been too confused to realize it; things had moved too fast, and
everything
had seemed strange.

The farmer leaned forward. He smiled, showing teeth which were absolutely horrid. “Are you a simpleton, laddie?” he asked, not unkindly.

“No,” he said, smiling back as best he could, aware that he had not said
no
but some Territories word which meant
no
—when he had flipped, he had changed his speech and his way of thinking (his way of
imaging
, anyway—he did not have that word in his vocabulary, but understood what he meant just the same), just as he had changed his clothes. “I’m not simple. It’s just that my mother told me to be careful of people I might meet along the road.”

Now the farmer’s wife smiled. “Your mother was right,” she said. “Are you for the market?”

“Yes,” Jack said. “That is, I’m headed up the road—west.”

“Climb up in the back, then,” Henry the farmer said. “Daylight’s wasting. I want to sell what I have if I can and be home again before sunset. Corn’s poor but it’s the last of the season. Lucky to have corn in ninemonth at all. Someone may buy it.”

“Thank you,” Jack said, climbing into the back of the low wagon. Here, dozens of corn ears were bound with rough hanks of rope and stacked like cordwood. If the corn was poor, then Jack could not imagine what would constitute good corn over here—they were the biggest ears he had ever seen in his life. There were also small stacks of squashes and gourds and things that looked like pumpkins—but they were reddish instead of orange. Jack didn’t know what they were, but he suspected they would taste wonderful. His stomach rumbled busily. Since going on the road, he had discovered what hunger was—not as a passing acquaintance, something you felt dimly after school and which could be assuaged with a few cookies and a glass of milk souped up with Nestlé’s Quik, but as an intimate friend, one that sometimes moved away to a distance but who rarely left entirely.

He was sitting with his back to the front of the wagon, his sandal-clad feet dangling down, almost touching the hardpacked dirt of the Western Road. There was a lot of traffic this morning, most of it bound for the market, Jack assumed. Every now and then Henry bawled a greeting to someone he knew.

Jack was still wondering how those apple-colored pumpkins might taste—and just where his next meal was going to come from, anyway—when small hands twined in his hair and gave a brisk tug—brisk enough to make his eyes water.

He turned and saw the three-year-old standing there in his bare feet, a big grin on his face and a few strands of Jack’s hair in each of his hands.

“Jason!” his mother cried—but it was, in its way, an indulgent cry
(Did you see the way he pulled that hair? My, isn’t he strong!)
—“Jason, that’s not
nice!
”

Jason grinned, unabashed. It was a big, dopey, sunshiney grin, as sweet in its way as the smell of the haystack in which Jack had spent the night. He couldn’t help returning it . . . and while there had been no politics of calculation in his returning grin, he saw he had made a friend of Henry’s wife.

“Sit,” Jason said, swaying back and forth with the unconscious movement of a veteran sailor. He was still grinning at Jack.

“Huh?”

“Yap.”

“I’m not getting you, Jason.”

“Sit-yap.”

“I’m not—”

And then Jason, who was husky for a three-year-old, plopped into Jack’s lap, still grinning.

Sit-yap, oh yeah, I get it
, Jack thought, feeling the dull ache from his testicles spreading up into the pit of his stomach.

“Jason
bad!
” his mother called back in that same indulgent, but-isn’t-he-cute voice . . . and Jason, who knew who ruled the roost, grinned his dopey, sweetly charming grin.

Jack realized that Jason was wet. Very, extremely, indubitably wet.

Welcome back to the Territories, Jack-O.

And sitting there with the child in his arms and warm wetness slowly soaking through his clothes, Jack began to laugh, his face turned up to the blue, blue sky.

3

A few minutes later Henry’s wife worked her way to where Jack was sitting with the child on his lap and took Jason back.

“Oooh, wet, bad baby,” she said in her indulgent voice.
Doesn’t my Jason wet big!
Jack thought, and laughed again. That made Jason laugh, and Mrs. Henry laughed with them.

As she changed Jason, she asked Jack a number of questions—ones he had heard often enough in his own world. But here he would have to be careful. He was a stranger, and there might be hidden trapdoors. He heard his father telling Morgan, . . . 
a
real
Stranger, if you see what I mean
.

Jack sensed that the woman’s husband was listening closely. He answered her questions with a careful variation of the Story—not the one he told when he was applying for a job but the one he told when someone who had picked him up thumbing got curious.

He said he had come from the village of All-Hands’—Jason’s mother had a vague recollection of hearing of the place, but that was all. Had he really come so far? she wanted to know. Jack told her that he had. And where was he going? He told her (and the silently listening Henry) that he was bound for the village of California. That one she had not heard of, even vaguely, in such stories as the occasional peddler told. Jack was not exactly very surprised . . . but he was grateful that neither of them exclaimed “California? Whoever heard of a village named California? Who are you trying to shuck and jive, boy?” In the Territories there had to be lots of places—whole areas as well as villages—of which people who lived in their own little areas had never heard. No power poles. No electricity. No movies. No cable TV to tell them how wonderful things were in Malibu or Sarasota. No Territories version of Ma Bell, advertising that a three-minute call to the Outposts after five p.m. cost only $5.83, plus tax, rates may be higher on God-Pounders’ Eve and some other holidays.
They live in a mystery
, he thought.
When you live in a mystery, you don’t question a village simply because you never heard of it. California doesn’t sound any wilder than a place named All-Hands’
.

Nor did they question. He told them that his father had died the year before, and that his mother was quite ill (he thought of adding that the Queen’s repossession men had come in the middle of the night and taken away their donkey, grinned, and decided that maybe he ought to leave that part out). His mother had given him what money she could (except the word that came out in the strange language wasn’t really
money
—it was something like
sticks
) and had sent him off to the village of California, to stay with his Aunt Helen.

“These are hard times,” Mrs. Henry said, holding Jason, now changed, more closely to her.

“All-Hands’ is near the summer palace, isn’t it, boy?” It was the first time Henry had spoken since inviting Jack aboard.

“Yes,” Jack said. “That is, fairly near. I mean—”

“You never said what your father died of.”

Now he had turned his head. His gaze was narrow and assessing, the former kindness gone; it had been blown out of his eyes like candle-flames in a wind. Yes, there were trapdoors here.

“Was he ill?” Mrs. Henry asked. “So much illness these days—pox, plague—hard times . . .”

For a wild moment Jack thought of saying,
No, he wasn’t ill, Mrs. Henry. He took a lot of volts, my dad. You see he went off one Saturday to do some work, and he left Mrs. Jerry and all the little Jerrys—including me—back at home. This was when we all lived in a hole in the baseboard and nobody lived anywhere else, you see. And do you know what? He stuck his screwdriver into a bunch of wires and Mrs. Feeny, she works over at Richard Sloat’s house, she heard Uncle Morgan talking on the phone and he said the electricity came out, all of the electricity, and it cooked him, it cooked him so bad that his glasses melted all over his nose, only you don’t know about glasses because you don’t have them here. No glasses . . . no electricity . . . no
Midnight Blue . . . 
no airplanes. Don’t end up like Mrs. Jerry, Mrs. Henry. Don’t—

“Never mind was he ill,” the whiskered farmer said. “Was he
political
?”

Jack looked at him. His mouth was working but no sounds came out. He didn’t know what to say. There were too many trapdoors.

Henry nodded, as if he had answered. “Jump down, laddie. Market’s just over the next rise. I reckon you can ankle it from here, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Jack said. “I reckon I can.”

Mrs. Henry looked confused . . . but she was now holding Jason away from Jack, as if he might have some contagious disease.

The farmer, still looking back over his shoulder, smiled a bit ruefully. “I’m sorry. You seem a nice enough lad, but we’re simple people here—whatever’s going on back yonder by the sea is something for great lords to settle. Either the Queen will die or she won’t . . . and of course, someday she must. God pounds all His nails sooner or later. And what happens to little people when they meddle into the affairs of the great is that they get hurt.”

“My father—”

“I don’t want to know about your father!” Henry said sharply. His wife scrambled away from Jack, still holding Jason to her bosom. “Good man or bad, I don’t know and I don’t
want
to know—all I know is that he’s a dead man, I don’t think you lied about that, and that his son has been sleeping rough and has all the smell of being on the dodge. The son doesn’t talk as if he comes from any of these parts. So climb down. I’ve a son of my own, as you see.”

Jack got down, sorry for the fear in the young woman’s face—fear he had put there. The farmer was right—little people had no business meddling in the affairs of the great. Not if they were smart.