The Talisman

He put it to his ear. His ear went numb.

“Oatley Tap,” he said into that deadly blackness, and his mouth went numb.

The voice that came out of the phone was the cracked, rasping croak of something long dead, some creature which could never be seen by the living: the sight of it would drive a living person insane, or strike him dead with frost-etchings on his lips and staring eyes blinded by cataracts of ice. “Jack,” this scabrous, rattling voice whispered up out of the earpiece, and his face went numb, the way it did when you needed to spend a heavy day in the dentist’s chair and the guy needled you up with a little too much Novocain. “You get your ass back home, Jack.”

From far away, a distance of light-years, it seemed, he could hear his voice repeating: “Oatley Tap, is anyone there? Hello? . . . Hello? . . .”

Cold, so cold.

His throat was numb. He drew breath and his lungs seemed to freeze. Soon the chambers of his heart would ice up and he would simply drop dead.

That chilly voice whispered, “Bad things can happen to a boy alone on the road, Jack. Ask anybody.”

He hung the phone up with a quick, clumsy reaching gesture. He pulled his hand back and then stood looking at the phone.

“Was it the asshole, Jack?” Lori asked, and her voice was distant . . . but a little closer than his own voice had seemed a few moments ago. The world was coming back. On the handset of the pay phone he could see the shape of his hand, outlined in a glittering rime of frost. As he looked, the frost began to melt and run down the black plastic.

3

That was the night—Thursday night—that Jack first saw Genny County’s answer to Randolph Scott. The crowd was a little smaller than it had been Wednesday night—very much a day-before-payday crowd—but there were still enough men present to fill the bar and spill over into the tables and booths.

They were town men from a rural area where the plows were now probably rusting forgotten in back sheds, men who perhaps wanted to be farmers but had forgotten how. There were a lot of John Deere caps in evidence, but to Jack, very few of these men looked as if they would be at home riding a tractor. These were men in gray chinos and brown chinos and green chinos; men with their names stitched on blue shirts in gold thread; men in square-toed Dingo Boots and men in great big clumping Survivors. These men carried their keys on their belts. These men had wrinkles but no laugh-lines; their mouths were dour. These men wore cowboy hats and when Jack looked at the bar from in back of the stools, there were as many as eight who looked like Charlie Daniels in the chewing-tobacco ads. But these men didn’t chew; these men smoked cigarettes, and a lot of them.

Jack was cleaning the bubble front of the jukebox when Digger Atwell came in. The juke was turned off; the Yankees were on the cable, and the men at the bar were watching intently. The night before, Atwell had been in the Oatley male’s version of sports clothes (chinos, khaki shirt with a lot of pens in one of the two big pockets, steel-toed workboots). Tonight he was wearing a blue cop’s uniform. A large gun with wood grips hung in a holster on his creaking leather belt.

He glanced at Jack, who thought of Smokey saying I’ve heard that ole Digger’s got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly, and flinched back as if guilty of something. Digger Atwell grinned a wide, slow grin. “Decided to stick around for a while, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” Jack muttered, and squirted more Windex onto the juke’s bubble front, although it was already as clean as it was going to get. He was only waiting for Atwell to go away. After a while, Atwell did. Jack turned to watch the beefy cop cross to the bar . . . and that was when the man at the far left end of the bar turned around and looked at him.

Randolph Scott, Jack thought at once, that’s just who he looks like.

But in spite of the rangy and uncompromising lines of his face, the real Randolph Scott had had an undeniable look of heroism; if his good looks had been harsh, they had also been part of a face that could smile. This man looked both bored and somehow crazy.

And with real fright, Jack realized the man was looking at him, at Jack. Nor had he simply turned around during the commercial to see who might be in the bar; he had turned around to look at Jack. Jack knew this was so.

The phone. The ringing phone.

With a tremendous effort, Jack pulled his gaze away. He looked back into the bubble front of the juke and saw his own frightened face hovering, ghostlike, over the records inside.

The telephone began to shriek on the wall.

The man at the left end of the bar looked at it . . . and then looked back at Jack, who stood frozen by the jukebox with his bottle of Windex in one hand and a rag in the other, his hair stiffening, his skin freezing.

“If it’s that asshole again, I’m gonna get me a whistle to start blowing down the phone when he calls, Smokey,” Lori was saying as she walked toward it. “I swear to God I am.”

She might have been an actress in a play, and all the customers extras paid the standard SAG rate of thirty-five dollars a day. The only two real people in the world were him and this dreadful cowboy with the big hands and the eyes Jack could not . . . quite . . . see.

Suddenly, shockingly, the cowboy mouthed these words: Get your ass home. And winked.

The phone stopped ringing even as Lori stretched out her hand to it.

Randolph Scott turned around, drained his glass, and yelled, “Bring me another tapper, okay?”

“I’ll be damned,” Lori said. “That phone’s got the ghosts.”

4

Later on, in the storeroom, Jack asked Lori who the guy was who looked like Randolph Scott.

“Who looks like who?” she asked.