The Talisman

And, whatever the Talisman was, he might have to flip into the other world to get it.

“Speedy?”

“Blessya, thankya, God blessya, didn’t I hear one go over there?” He pointed.

“Speedy! It’s Jack!”

“Ain’t nothin speedy round here, boy, No sir.” His hands began to whisper-walk along the concrete in the direction he had just pointed. One of them found a nickel and he dropped it into the cup. His other happened to touch the shoe of a smartly dressed young woman who was passing by. Her pretty, empty face wrinkled in almost painful disgust as she drew away from him.

Jack picked the last coin out of the gutter. It was a silver dollar—a big old cartwheel with Lady Liberty on one side.

Tears began to spill out of his eyes. They ran down his dirty face and he wiped them away with an arm that shook. He was crying for Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey, and Heidel. For his mother. For Laura DeLoessian. For the carter’s son lying dead in the road with his pockets turned out. But most of all for himself. He was tired of being on the road. Maybe when you rode it in a Cadillac it was a road of dreams, but when you had to hitch it, riding on your thumb and a story that was just about worn out, when you were at everybody’s mercy and anyone’s meat, it was nothing but a road of trials. Jack felt that he had been tried enough . . . but there was no way to cry it off. If he cried it off, the cancer would take his mother, and Uncle Morgan might well take him.

“I don’t think I can do it, Speedy,” he wept. “I don’t think so, man.”

Now the blind man groped for Jack instead of the spilled coins. Those gentle, reading fingers found his arm and closed around it. Jack could feel the hard pad of callus in the tip of each finger. He drew Jack to him, into those odors of sweat and heat and old chili. Jack pressed his face against Speedy’s chest.

“Hoo, boy. I don’t know no Speedy, but it sounds like you puttin an awful lot on him. You—”

“I miss my mom, Speedy,” Jack wept, “and Sloat’s after me. It was him on the phone inside the mall, him. And that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing was in Angola . . . the Rainbird Towers . . . earthquake . . . five men . . . me, I did it, Speedy, I killed those men when I flipped into this world, I killed them just like my dad and Morgan Sloat killed Jerry Bledsoe that time!”

Now it was out, the worst of it. He had sicked up the stone of guilt that had been in his throat, threatening to choke him, and a storm of weeping seized him—but this time it was relief rather than fear. It was said. It had been confessed. He was a murderer.

“Hooo-eeee!” the black man cried. He sounded perversely delighted. He held Jack with one thin, strong arm, rocked him. “You tryin to carry you one heavy load, boy. You sure am. Maybe you ought to put some of it down.”

“I killed em,” Jack whispered. “Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey . . .”

“Well, if yo friend Speedy was here,” the black man said, “whoever he might be, or wherever he might be in this wide old world, he might tell you that you cain’t carry the world on yo shoulders, son. You cain’t do that. No one can. Try to carry the world on yo shoulders, why, first it’s gonna break yo back, and then it’s gonna break you sperrit.”

“I killed—”

“Put a gun to their heads and shot somebodies, didya?”

“No . . . the earthquake . . . I flipped. . . .”

“Don’t know nothin bout dat,” the black man said. Jack had pulled away from him a bit and was staring up into the black man’s seamed face with wondering curiosity, but the black man had turned his head toward the parking lot. If he was blind, then he had picked out the smoother, slightly more powerful beat of the police car’s engine from the others as it approached, because he was looking right at it. “All I know is you seem to have this idear of ’moider’ a little broad. Prolly if some fella dropped dead of a heart-attack goin around us as we sit here, you’d think you killed him. ’Oh look, I done moidered that fella on account of where I was sittin, oh woe, oh dooom, oh gloooooom, oh this . . . oh that!’ ” As he spoke this and that, the blind man punctuated it with a quick change from G to C and back to G again. He laughed, pleased with himself.

“Speedy—”

“Nothin speedy round here,” the black man reiterated, and then showed yellow teeth in a crooked grin. “ ’Cept maybe how speedy some folks are to put the blame on themselves for things others might have got started. Maybe you runnin, boy, and maybe you bein chased.”

G-chord.

“Maybe you be just a little off-base.”

C-chord, with a nifty little run in the middle that made Jack grin in spite of himself.

“Might be somebody else gettin on yo case.”

Back down to G again, and the blind man laid his guitar aside (while, in the police car, the two cops were flipping to see which of them would actually have to touch Old Snowball if he wouldn’t get into the back of the cruiser peaceably).

“Maybe dooom and maybe gloooooom and maybe this and maybe that . . .” He laughed again, as if Jack’s fears were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

“But I don’t know what could happen if I—”

“No one ever knows what could happen if they do anything, do dey?” the black man who might or might not be Speedy Parker broke in. “No. Dey do not. If you thought about it, you’d stay in yo house all day, ascairt to come out! I don’t know yo problems, boy. Don’t want to know em. Could be crazy, talkin bout