The Talisman

large roasts were impaled along the length of the spit, and the boys were turning them in unison.

“Fine meats!” the big man was droning. “Fine meats! Fiiine meats! Buy my fine meats! Fine meats here! Fine meats right here!” In an aside to the boy closest to him: “Put your back into it, God pound you.” Then back to his droning, huckstering cry.

A farmer passing with his adolescent daughter raised his hand, and then pointed at the joint of meat second from the left. The boys stopped turning the spit long enough for their boss to hack a slab from the roast and put in on a chunk of bread. One of them ran with it to the farmer, who produced one of the jointed sticks. Watching closely, Jack saw him break off two knuckles of wood and hand them to the boy. As the boy ran back to the stall the customer pocketed his money-stick with the absent but careful gesture of any man repocketing his change, took a gigantic bite of his open-faced sandwich, and handed the rest to his daughter, whose first chomp was almost as enthusiastic as her father’s.

Jack’s stomach boinged and goinged. He had seen what he had to see . . . he hoped.

“Fine meats! Fine meats! Fine—” The big man broke off and looked down at Jack, his beetling brows drawing together over eyes that were small but not entirely stupid. “I hear the song your stomach is singing, friend. If you have money, I’ll take your trade and bless you to God in my prayers tonight. If you haven’t, then get your stupid sheep’s face out of here and go to the devil.”

Both boys laughed, although they were obviously tired—they laughed as if they had no control over the sounds they were making.

But the maddening smell of the slowly cooking meat would not let him leave. He held out the shorter of his jointed sticks and pointed to the roast which was second from the left. He didn’t speak. It seemed safer not to. The vendor grunted, produced his crude knife from his wide belt again, and cut a slice—it was a smaller slice than the one he had cut the farmer, Jack observed, but his stomach had no business with such matters; it was rumbling crazily in anticipation.

The vendor slapped the meat on bread and brought it over himself instead of handing it to either of the boys. He took Jack’s money-stick. Instead of two knuckles, he broke off three.

His mother’s voice, sourly amused, spoke up in his mind: Congratulations, Jack-O . . . you’ve just been screwed.

The vendor was looking at him, grinning around a mouthful of wretched blackish teeth, daring him to say anything, to protest in any way. You just ought to be grateful I only took three knuckles instead of all fourteen of them. I could have, you know. You might as well have a sign hung around your neck, boy: I AM A STRANGER HERE, AND ON MY OWN. So tell me, Sheep’ s-Face: do you want to make an issue of it?

What he wanted didn’t matter—he obviously couldn’t make an issue of it. But he felt that thin, impotent anger again.

“Go on,” the vendor said, tiring of him. He flapped a big hand in Jack’s face. His fingers were scarred, and there was blood under his nails. “You got your food. Now get out of here.”

Jack thought, I could show you a flashlight and you’d run like all the devils of hell were after you. Show you an airplane and you’d probably go crazy. You’re maybe not as tough as you think, chum.

He smiled, perhaps there was something in his smile that the meat-vendor didn’t like, because he drew away from Jack, his face momentarily uneasy. Then his brows beetled together again.

“Get out, I said!” he roared. “Get out, God pound you!” And this time Jack went.

2

The meat was delicious. Jack gobbled it and the bread it sat on, and then unselfconsciously licked the juice from his palms as he strolled along. The meat did taste like pork . . . and yet it didn’t. It was somehow richer, tangier than pork. Whatever it was, it filled the hole in the middle of him with authority. Jack thought he could take it to school in bag lunches for a thousand years.

Now that he had managed to shut his belly up—for a little while, anyway—he was able to look about himself with more interest . . . and although he didn’t know it, he had finally begun to blend into the crowd. Now he was only one more rube from the country come to the market-town, walking slowly between the stalls, trying to gawk in every direction at once. Hucksters recognized him, but only as one more potential mark among many. They yelled and beckoned at him, and as he passed by they yelled and beckoned at whoever happened to be behind him—man, woman, or child. Jack gaped frankly at the wares scattered all around him, wares both wonderful and strange, and amidst all the others staring at them he ceased to be a stranger himself—perhaps because he had given up his effort to seem blase in a place where no one acted blase. They laughed, they argued, they haggled . . . but no one seemed bored.

The market-town reminded him of the Queen’s pavillion without the air of strained tension and too-hectic gaiety—there was the same absurdly rich mingle of smells (dominated by roasting meat and animal ordure), the same brightly dressed crowds (although even the most brightly dressed people Jack saw couldn’t hold a candle to some of the dandies he had seen inside the pavillion), the same unsettling but somehow exhilarating juxtaposition of the perfectly normal, cheek by jowl with the extravagantly strange.

He stopped at a stall where a man was selling carpets with the Queen’s portrait woven into them. Jack suddenly thought of Hank Scoffler’s mom and smiled. Hank was one of the kids Jack and Richard Sloat had hung around with in L.A. Mrs. Scoffler had a thing for the most garish decorations Jack had ever seen. And God, wouldn’t she have loved these rugs, with the image of Laura DeLoessian, her hair done up in a high, regal coronet of braids, woven into them! Better than her velvet paintings of Alaskan stags or the ceramic diorama of the Last Supper behind the bar in the Scoffler living room. . . .

Then the face woven into the rugs seemed to change even as he looked at it. The face of the Queen was gone and it was his mother’s face he saw, repeated over and over and over, her eyes too dark, her skin much too white.

Homesickness surprised Jack again. It rushed through his mind in a wave and he called out for her in his heart—Mom! Hey Mom! Jesus, what am I doing here? Mom!!—wondering with a lover’s longing intensity what she was doing now, right this minute. Sitting at the window, smoking, looking out at the ocean, a book open beside her? Watching TV? At a movie? Sleeping? Dying?

Dead? an evil voice added before he could stop it. Dead, Jack? Already dead?

Stop it.