The Talisman

bucks in your poke that you didn’t have coming in. You’ll go out thinking that Oatley’s not such a bad place after all. So what do you say?”

Jack looked into those brown eyes, noted the yellow scleras and the small flecks of red; he noted Smokey’s big, sincere smile lined with false teeth; he even saw with a weird and terrifying sense of deja vu that the fly was back on the paper fry-cook’s hat, preening and washing its hair-thin forelegs.

He suspected Smokey knew that he knew that everything Updike had said was a lie, and didn’t even care. After working into the early hours of Saturday morning and then Sunday morning, Jack would sleep until maybe two Sunday afternoon. Smokey would tell him he couldn’t give him that ride because Jack had woken up too late; now he, Smokey, was too busy watching the Colts and the Patriots. And Jack would not only be too tired to walk, he would be too afraid that Smokey might lose interest in the Colts and Patriots just long enough to call his good friend Digger Atwell and say, “He’s walking down Mill Road right now, Digger old boy, why don’t you pick him up? Then get over here for the second half. Free beer, but don’t you go puking in my urinal until I get the kid back here.”

That was one scenario. There were others that he could think of, each a little different, each really the same at bottom.

Smokey Updike’s smile widened a little.

10

Elroy

1

When I was six . . .

The Tap, which had begun to wind down by this time on his previous two nights, was roaring along as if the patrons expected to greet the dawn. He saw two tables had vanished—victims of the fistfight that had broken out just before his last expedition into the john. Now people were dancing where the tables had been.

“About time,” Smokey said as Jack staggered the length of the bar on the inside and put the case down by the refrigerator compartments. “You get those in there and go back for the fucking Bud. You should have brought that first, anyway.”

“Lori didn’t say—”

Hot, incredible pain exploded in his foot as Smokey drove one heavy shoe down on Jack’s sneaker. Jack uttered a muffled scream and felt tears sting his eyes.

“Shut up,” Smokey said. “Lori don’t know shit from Shinola, and you are smart enough to know it. Get back in there and run me out a case of Bud.”

He went back to the storeroom, limping on the foot Smokey had stomped, wondering if the bones in some of his toes might be broken. It seemed all too possible. His head roared with smoke and noise and the jagged ripsaw rhythm of The Genny Valley Boys, two of them now noticeably weaving on the bandstand. One thought stood out clearly: it might not be possible to wait until closing. He really might not be able to last that long. If Oatley was a prison and the Oatley Tap was his cell, then surely exhaustion was as much his warder as Smokey Updike—maybe even more so.

In spite of his worries about what the Territories might be like at this place, the magic juice seemed more and more to promise him his only sure way out. He could drink some and flip over . . . and if he could manage to walk a mile west over there, two at the most, he could drink a bit more and flip back into the U.S.A. well over the town line of this horrible little place, perhaps as far west as Bushville or even Pembroke.

When I was six, when Jack-O was six, when—

He got the Bud and stumble-staggered out through the door again . . . and the tall, rangy cowboy with the big hands, the one who looked like Randolph Scott, was standing there, looking at him.

“Hello, Jack,” he said, and Jack saw with rising terror that the irises of the man’s eyes were as yellow as chicken-claws. “Didn’t somebody tell you to get gone? You don’t listen very good, do you?”

Jack stood with the case of Bud dragging at the ends of his arms, staring into those yellow eyes, and suddenly a horrid idea hammered into his mind: that this had been the lurker in the tunnel—this man-thing with its dead yellow eyes.

“Leave me alone,” he said—the words came out in a wintery little whisper.

He crowded closer. “You were supposed to get gone.”

Jack tried to back up . . . but now he was against the wall, and as the cowboy who looked like Randolph Scott leaned toward him, Jack could smell dead meat on its breath.

2

Between the time Jack started work on Thursday at noon and four o’clock, when the Tap’s usual after-work crowd started to come in, the pay phone with the PLEASE LIMIT YOUR CALLS TO THREE MINUTES sign over it rang twice.

The first time it rang, Jack felt no fear at all—and it turned out to be only a solicitor for the United Fund.

Two hours later, as Jack was bagging up the last of the previous night’s bottles, the telephone began to shrill again. This time his head snapped up like an animal which scents fire in a dry forest . . . except it wasn’t fire he sensed, but ice. He turned toward the telephone, which was only four feet from where he was working, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He thought he must see the pay phone caked with ice, ice that was sweating through the phone’s black plastic case, extruding from the holes in the earpiece and the mouthpiece in lines of blue ice as thin as pencil-leads, hanging from the rotary dial and the coin return in icicle beards.

But it was just the phone, and all the coldness and death was on the inside.

He stared at it, hypnotized.

“Jack!” Smokey yelled. “Answer the goddam phone! What the fuck am I paying you for?”

Jack looked toward Smokey, as desperate as a cornered animal . . . but Smokey was staring back with the thin-lipped, out-of-patience expression that he got on his face just before he popped Lori one. He started toward the phone, barely aware that his feet were moving; he stepped deeper and deeper into that capsule of coldness, feeling the gooseflesh run up his arms, feeling the moisture crackle in his nose.

He reached out and grasped the phone. His hand went numb.