The Talisman

Travellin Jack. Not too big, not too small, she look just like a crystal ball. Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack, you be goin to California to bring her back. But here’s your burden, here’s your cross: drop her, Jack, and all be lost.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack repeated with a scared kind of stubbornness. “You have to —”

“No,” Speedy said, not unkindly. “I got to finish with that carousel this morning, Jack, that’s what I got to do. Got no time for any more jaw-chin. I got to get back and you got to get on. Can’t tell you no more now. I guess I’ll be seein you around. Here . . . or over there.”

“But I don’t know what to do!” Jack said as Speedy swung up into the cab of the old truck.

“You know enough to get movin,” Speedy said. “You’ll go to the Talisman, Jack. She’ll draw you to her.”

“I don’t even know what a Talisman is!”

Speedy laughed and keyed the ignition. The truck started up with a big blue blast of exhaust. “Look it up in the dictionary!” he shouted, and threw the truck into reverse.

He backed up, turned around, and then the truck was rattling back toward Arcadia Funworld. Jack stood by the curb, watching it go. He had never felt so alone in his life.

5

Jack and Lily

1

When Speedy’s truck turned off the road and disappeared beneath the Funworld arch, Jack began to move toward the hotel. A Talisman. In another Alhambra. On the edge of another ocean. His heart seemed empty. Without Speedy beside him, the task was mountainous, so huge; vague, too—while Speedy had been talking, Jack had had the feeling of almost understanding that macaroni of hints and threats and instructions. Now it was close to just being macaroni. The Territories were real, though. He hugged that certainty as close as he could, and it both warmed and chilled him. They were a real place, and he was going there again. Even if he did not really understand everything yet—even if he was an ignorant pilgrim, he was going. Now all he had to do was to try to convince his mother. “Talisman,” he said to himself, using the word as the thing, and crossed empty Boardwalk Avenue and jumped up the steps onto the path between the hedges. The darkness of the Alhambra’s interior, once the great door had swung shut, startled him. The lobby was a long cave—you’d need a fire just to separate the shadows. The pale clerk flickered behind the long desk, stabbing at Jack with his white eyes. A message there: yes. Jack swallowed and turned away. The message made him stronger, it increased him, though its intention was only scornful.

He went toward the elevators with a straight back and an unhurried step. Hang around with blackies, huh? Let them put their arms around you, huh? The elevator whirred down like a great heavy bird, the doors parted, and Jack stepped inside. He turned to punch the button marked with a glowing 4. The clerk was still posed spectrally behind the desk, sending out his dumdum’s message. Niggerlover Niggerlover Niggerlover (like it that way, hey brat? Hot and black, that’s for you, hey?). The doors mercifully shut. Jack’s stomach fell toward his shoes, the elevator lurched upward.

The hatred stayed down there in the lobby: the very air in the elevator felt better once it had risen above the first floor. Now all Jack had to do was to tell his mother that he had to go to California by himself.

Just don’t let Uncle Morgan sign any papers for you. . . .

As Jack stepped out of the elevator, he wondered for the first time in his life whether Richard Sloat understood what his father was really like.

2

Down past the empty sconces and paintings of little boats riding foamy, corrugated seas, the door marked 408 slanted inward, revealing a foot of the suite’s pale carpet. Sunlight from the living-room windows made a long rectangle on the inner wall. “Hey Mom,” Jack said, entering the suite. “You didn’t close the door, what’s the big—” He was alone in the room. “Idea?” he said to the furniture. “Mom?” Disorder seemed to ooze from the tidy room— an overflowing ashtray, a half-full tumbler of water left on the coffee table.

This time, Jack promised himself, he would not panic.

He turned in a slow circle. Her bedroom door was open, the room itself as dark as the lobby because Lily had never pulled open the curtains.

“Hey, I know you’re here,” he said, and then walked through her empty bedroom to knock at her bathroom door. No reply. Jack opened this door and saw a pink toothbrush beside the sink, a forlorn hairbrush on the dressing table. Bristles snarled with light hairs. Laura DeLoessian, announced a voice in Jack’s mind, and he stepped backward out of the little bathroom—that name stung him.

“Oh, not again,” he said to himself. “Where’d she go?”

Already he was seeing it.

He saw it as he went to his own bedroom, saw it as he opened his own door and surveyed his rumpled bed, his flattened knapsack and little stack of paperback books, his socks balled up on top of the dresser. He saw it when he looked into his own bathroom, where towels lay in oriental disarray over the floor, the sides of the tub, and the Formica counters.

Morgan Sloat thrusting through the door, grabbing his mother’s arms and hauling her downstairs . . .

Jack hurried back into the living room and this time looked behind the couch.

 . . . yanking her out a side door and pushing her into a car, his eyes beginning to turn yellow. . . .

He picked up the telephone and punched 0. “This is, ah, Jack Sawyer, and I’m in, ah, room four-oh-eight. Did my mother leave any message for me? She was supposed to be here and . . . and for some reason . . . ah . . .”

“I’ll check,” said the girl, and Jack clutched the phone for a burning moment before she returned. “No message for four-oh-eight, sorry.”

“How about four-oh-seven?”

“That’s the same slot,” the girl told him.

“Ah, did she have any visitors in the last half hour or so? Anybody come this morning? To see her, I mean.”