The Talisman

earthquakes and all. But bein as how you helped me pick up my money and didn’t steal none—I counted every plinkety-plink, so I know—I’ll give you some advice. Some things you cain’t help. Sometimes people get killed because somebody does somethin . . . but if somebody didn’t do that somethin, a whole lot of more people would have got killed. Do you see where I’m pushin, son?”

The dirty sunglasses inclined down toward him.

Jack felt a deep, shuddery relief. He saw, all right. The blind man was talking about hard choices. He was suggesting that maybe there was a difference between hard choices and criminal behavior. And that maybe the criminal wasn’t here.

The criminal might have been the guy who had told him five minutes ago to get his ass home.

“Could even be,” the blind man remarked, hitting a dark D-minor chord on his box, “that all things soive the Lord, just like my momma tole me and your momma might have tole you, if she was a Christian lady. Could be we think we doin one thing but are really doin another. Good Book says all things, even those that seem evil, soive the Lord. What you think, boy?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said honestly. He was all mixed up. He only had to close his eyes and he could see the telephone tearing off the wall, hanging from its wires like a weird puppet.

“Well, it smells like you lettin it drive you to drink.”

“What?” Jack asked, astonished. Then he thought, I thought that Speedy looked like Mississippi John Hurt, and this guy started playing a John Hurt blues . . . and now he’s talking about the magic juice. He’s being careful, but I swear that’s what he’s talking about—it’s got to be!

“You’re a mind-reader,” Jack said in a low voice. “Aren’t you? Did you learn it in the Territories, Speedy?”

“Don’t know nothin bout readin minds,” the blind man said, “but my lamps have been out forty-two year come November, and in forty-two year your nose and ears take up some of the slack. I can smell cheap wine on you, son. Smell it all over you. It’s almost like you washed yo hair widdit!”

Jack felt an odd, dreamy guilt—it was the way he always felt when accused of doing something wrong when he was in fact innocent—mostly innocent, anyway. He had done no more than touch the almost-empty bottle since flipping back into this world. Just touching it filled him with dread—he had come to feel about it the way a fourteenth-century European peasant might have felt about a splinter of the One True Cross or the fingerbone of a saint. It was magic, all right. Powerful magic. And sometimes it got people killed.

“I haven’t been drinking it, honest,” he finally managed. “What I started with is almost gone. It . . . I . . . man, I don’t even like it!” His stomach had begun to clench nervously; just thinking about the magic juice was making him feel nauseated. “But I need to get some more. Just in case.”

“More Poiple Jesus? Boy your age?” The blind man laughed and made a shooing gesture with one hand. “Hell, you don’t need dat. No boy needs dat poison to travel with.”

“But—”

“Here. I’ll sing you a song to cheer you up. Sounds like you could use it.”

He began to sing, and his singing voice was nothing at all like his speaking voice. It was deep and powerful and thrilling, without the Nigger Jim “My-Huck-dat-sure-is-gay!” cadences of his talk. It was, Jack thought, awed, almost the trained, cultured voice of an opera singer, now amusing itself with a little piece of popular fluff. Jack felt goosebumps rise on his arms and back at that rich, full voice. Along the sidewalk which ran along the dull, ochre flank of the mall, heads turned.

“When the red, red robin goes bob-bob-bobbin along, ALONG, there’ll be no more sobbin when he starts throbbin his old . . . sweet SONG—”

Jack was struck by a sweet and terrible familiarity, a sense that he had heard this before, or something very like it, and as the blind man bridged, grinning his crooked, yellowing smile, Jack realized where the feeling was coming from. He knew what had made all those heads turn, as they would have turned if a unicorn had gone galloping across the mall’s parking lot. There was a beautiful, alien clarity in the man’s voice. It was the clarity of, say, air so pure that you could smell a radish when a man pulled one out of the ground half a mile away. It was a good old Tin Pan Alley song . . . but the voice was pure Territories.

“Get up . . . get up, you sleepyhead . . . get out . . . get out, get outta bed . . . live, love, laugh and be ha—”

Both guitar and voice came to a sudden halt. Jack, who had been concentrating fiercely on the blind man’s face (trying subconsciously to peer right through those dark glasses, perhaps, and see if Speedy Parker’s eyes were behind them), now widened his focus and saw two cops standing beside the blind man.

“You know, I don’t hear nothin,” the blind guitarist said, almost coyly, “but I b’lieve I smell somethin blue.”

“Goddammit, Snowball, you know you’re not supposed to work the mall!” one of the cops cried. “What did Judge Hallas tell you the last time he had you in chambers? Downtown between Center Street and Mural Street. No place else. Damn, boy, how senile have you got? Your pecker rotted off yet from that whatall your woman gave you before she took off? Christ, I just don’t—”

His partner put a hand on his arm and nodded toward Jack in a little-pitchers-have-big-ears gesture.

“Go tell your mother she wants you, kid,” the first cop said curtly.

Jack started walking down the sidewalk. He couldn’t stay. Even if there was something he could do, he couldn’t stay. He was lucky the cops’ attention had been taken up by the man they called Snowball. If they had given him a second glance, Jack had no doubt he would have been asked to produce his bona fides. New sneakers or not, the rest of him looked used and battered. It doesn’t take cops long to get good at spotting road-kids, and Jack was a boy on the road if there ever had been one.

He imagined being tossed into the Zanesville pokey while the Zanesville cops, fine upstanding boys in blue who listened to Paul Harvey every day and supported President Reagan, tried to find out whose little boy he was.

No, he didn’t want the Zanesville cops giving him more than the one passing glance.

A motor, throbbing smoothly, coming up behind him.