The Talisman

“An old cowboy actor. He was sitting down at the end of the bar.”

She shrugged. “They all look the same to me, Jack. Just a bunch of swinging dicks out for a good time. On Thursday nights they usually pay for it with the little woman’s Beano money.”

“He calls beers ’tappers.’ ”

Her eyes lit. “Oh yeah! Him. He looks mean.” She said this last with actual appreciation . . . as if admiring the straightness of his nose or the whiteness of his smile.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name,” Lori said. “He’s only been around the last week or two. I guess the mill must be hiring again. It—”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack, did I tell you to run me out a keg or not?”

Jack had been in the process of walking one of the big kegs of Busch onto the foot of the hand-dolly. Because his weight and the keg’s weight were so close, it was an act requiring a good deal of careful balancing. When Smokey shouted from the doorway, Lori screamed and Jack jumped. He lost control of the keg and it went over on its side, the cap shooting out like a champagne cork, beer following in a white-gold jet. Smokey was still shouting at him but Jack could only stare at the beer, frozen . . . until Smokey popped him one.

When he got back out to the taproom perhaps twenty minutes later, holding a Kleenex against his swelling nose, Randolph Scott had been gone.

5

I’m six.

John Benjamin Sawyer is six.

Six—

Jack shook his head, trying to clear this steady, repeating thought out as the rangy millhand who was not a millhand leaned closer and closer. His eyes . . . yellow and somehow scaly. He—it— blinked, a rapid, milky, swimming blink, and Jack realized it had nictitating membranes over its eyeballs.

“You were supposed to get gone,” it whispered again, and reached toward Jack with hands that were beginning to twist and plate and harden.

The door banged open, letting in a raucous flood of the Oak Ridge Boys.

“Jack, if you don’t quit lollygagging, I’m going to have to make you sorry,” Smokey said from behind Randolph Scott. Scott stepped backward. No melting, hardening hooves here; his hands were just hands again—big and powerful, their backs crisscrossed with prominent ridged veins. There was another milky, swirling sort of blink that didn’t involve the eyelids at all . . . and then the man’s eyes were not yellow but a simple faded blue. He gave Jack a final glance and then headed toward the men’s room.

Smokey came toward Jack now, his paper cap tipped forward, his narrow weasel’s head slightly inclined, his lips parted to show his alligator teeth.

“Don’t make me speak to you again,” Smokey said. “This is your last warning, and don’t you think I don’t mean it.”

As it had against Osmond, Jack’s fury suddenly rose up—that sort of fury, closely linked as it is to a sense of hopeless injustice, is perhaps never as strong as it is at twelve—college students sometimes think they feel it, but it is usually little more than an intellectual echo.

This time it boiled over.

“I’m not your dog, so don’t you treat me like I am,” Jack said, and took a step toward Smokey Updike on legs that were still rubbery with fear.

Surprised—possibly even flabbergasted—by Jack’s totally unexpected anger, Smokey backed up a step.

“Jack, I’m warning you—”

“No, man, I’m warning you,” Jack heard himself say. “I’m not Lori. I don’t want to be hit. And if you hit me, I’m going to hit you back, or something.”

Smokey Updike’s discomposure was only momentary. He had most assuredly not seen everything—not living in Oatley, he hadn’t—but he thought he had, and even for a minor leaguer, sometimes assurance can be enough.

He reached out to grab Jack’s collar.

“Don’t you smart off to me, Jack,” he said, drawing Jack close. “As long as you’re in Oatley, my dog is just what you are. As long as you’re in Oatley I’ll pet you when I want and I’ll beat you when I want.”

He adminstered a single neck-snapping shake. Jack bit his tongue and cried out. Hectic spots of anger now glowed in Smokey’s pale cheeks like cheap rouge.

“You may not think that is so right now, but Jack, it is. As long as you’re in Oatley you’re my dog, and you’ll be in Oatley until I decide to let you go. And we might as well start getting that learned right now.”

He pulled his fist back. For a moment the three naked sixty-watt bulbs which hung in this narrow hallway sparkled crazily on the diamond chips of the horseshoe-shaped pinky ring he wore. Then the fist pistoned forward and slammed into the side of Jack’s face. He was driven backward into the graffiti-covered wall, the side of his face first flaring and then going numb. The taste of his own blood washed into his mouth.

Smokey looked at him—the close, judgmental stare of a man who might be thinking about buying a heifer or a lottery number. He must not have seen the expression he wanted to see in Jack’s eye, because he grabbed the dazed boy again, presumably the better to center him for a second shot.

At that moment a woman shrieked, from the Tap, “No, Glen! No!” There was a tangle of bellowing male voices, most of them alarmed. Another woman screamed—a high, drilling sound. Then a gunshot.

“Shit on toast!” Smokey cried, enunciating each word as carefully as an actor on a