The Talisman

alertness. The man was thin, but ropes of muscles moved under his white undershirt and along the sides of his neck. He wore baggy white cook’s pants. A paper cap was cocked forward over his left eyebrow. His head was narrow, weasellike. His hair was cut short, graying at the edges. Between his big hands were a stack of invoices and a Texas Instruments calculator.

“I saw your Help Wanted sign,” Jack said, but now without much hope. This man was not going to hire him, and Jack was not sure he would want to work for him anyway. This guy looked mean.

“You did, huh?” the man in the booth said. “You must have learned to read on one of the days you weren’t playing hooky.” There was a package of Phillies Cheroots on the table. He shook one out.

“Well, I didn’t know it was a bar,” Jack said, taking a step back toward the door. The sunlight seemed to come through the dirty glass and then just fall dead on the floor, as if the Oatley Tap were located in a slightly different dimension. “I guess I thought it was . . . you know, a bar and grill. Something like that. I’ll just be going.”

“Come here.” The man’s brown eyes were looking at him steadily now.

“No, hey, that’s all right,” Jack said nervously. “I’ll just—”

“Come here. Sit down.” The man popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail and lit the cigar. A fly which had been preening on his paper hat buzzed away into the darkness. His eyes remained on Jack. “I ain’t gonna bite you.”

Jack came slowly over to the booth, and after a moment he slipped in on the other side and folded his hands in front of him neatly. Some sixty hours later, swamping out the men’s toilet at twelve-thirty in the morning with his sweaty hair hanging in his eyes, Jack thought—no, he knew—that it was his own stupid confidence that had allowed the trap to spring shut (and it had shut the moment he sat down opposite Smokey Updike, although he had not known it then). The Venus flytrap is able to close on its hapless, insectile victims; the pitcher plant, with its delicious smell and its deadly, glassy-smooth sides, only waits for some flying asshole of a bug to buzz on down and inside . . . where it finally drowns in the rainwater the pitcher collects. In Oatley the pitcher was full of beer instead of rainwater—that was the only difference.

If he had run—

But he hadn’t run. And maybe, Jack thought, doing his best to meet that cold brown stare, there would be a job here after all. Minette Banberry, the woman who owned and operated the Golden Spoon in Auburn, had been pleasant enough to Jack, had even given him a little hug and a peck of a kiss as well as three thick sandwiches when he left, but he had not been fooled. Pleasantness and even a remote sort of kindness did not preclude a cold interest in profits, or even something very close to outright greed.

The minimum wage in New York was three dollars and forty cents an hour—that information had been posted in the Golden Spoon’s kitchen by law, on a bright pink piece of paper almost the size of a movie poster. But the short-order cook was a Haitian who spoke little English and was almost surely in the country illegally, Jack thought. The guy cooked like a whiz, though, never allowing the spuds or the fried clams to spend a moment too long in the Fryolaters. The girl who helped Mrs. Banberry with the waitressing was pretty but vacant and on a work-release program for the retarded in Rome. In such cases, the minimum wage did not apply, and the lisping, retarded girl told Jack with unfeigned awe that she was getting a dollar and twenty-five cents each hour, and all for her.

Jack himself was getting a dollar-fifty. He had bargained for that, and he knew that if Mrs. Banberry hadn’t been strapped—her old dishwasher had quit just that morning, had gone on his coffee-break and just never come back— she would not have bargained at all; would have simply told him take the buck and a quarter, kid, or see what’s down the road. It’s a free country.

Now, he thought, with the unknowing cynicism that was also a part of his new self-confidence, here was another Mrs. Banberry. Male instead of female, rope-skinny instead of fat and grandmotherly, sour instead of smiling, but almost surely a Mrs. Banberry for a’ that and a’ that.

“Looking for a job, huh?” The man in the white pants and the paper hat put his cigar down in an old tin ashtray with the word CAMELS embossed on the bottom. The fly stopped washing its legs and took off.

“Yes, sir, but like you say, this is a bar and all—”

The unease stirred in him again. Those brown eyes and yellowed scleras troubled him—they were the eyes of some old hunting cat that had seen plenty of errant mice like him before.

“Yeah, it’s my place,” the man said. “Smokey Updike.” He held his hand out. Surprised, Jack shook it. It squeezed Jack’s hand once, hard, almost to the point of pain. Then it relaxed . . . but Smokey didn’t let go. “Well?” he said.

“Huh?” Jack said, aware he sounded stupid and a little afraid—he felt stupid and a little afraid. And he wanted Updike to let go of his hand.

“Didn’t your folks ever teach you to innerduce yourself?”

This was so unexpected that Jack came close to gabbling out his real name instead of the one he had used at the Golden Spoon, the name he also used if the people who picked him up asked for his handle. That name—what he was coming to think of as his “road-name”—was Lewis Farren.

“Jack Saw—ah—Sawtelle,” he said.

Updike held his hand yet a moment longer, those brown eyes never moving. Then he let it go. “Jack Saw-ah- Sawtelle,” he said. “Must be the longest fucking name in the phonebook, huh, kid?”

Jack flushed but said nothing.

“You ain’t very big,” Updike said. “You think you could manage to rock a ninety-pound keg of beer up on its side and walk it onto a hand-dolly?”

“I think so,” Jack said, not knowing if he could or not. It didn’t look as if it would be much of a problem, anyway—in a place as dead as this, the guy probably only had to change kegs when the one hooked up to the taps went flat.

As if reading his mind, Updike said, “Yeah, nobody here now. But we get pretty busy by four, five o’clock. And on weekends the place really fills up. That’s when you’d earn your keep, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Jack said. “How much would the job pay?”

“Dollar an hour,” Updike said. “Wish I could pay you more, but—” He shrugged and tapped the stack of bills. He