The Talisman

(a large bald hand) lying on his thigh, and when he looked at Ferguson/Darrent/Light, he would see an expression of half-mad hope in the eyes (mixed with half-mad guilt) and a stipple of sweat on the upper lip (in the case of Darrent, the sweat had gleamed through a dark moustache like tiny white eyes peering through scant underbrush).

Ferguson had asked him if he would like to make ten dollars.

Darrent had upped that to twenty.

Light, in a large bald voice that nonetheless cracked and quivered through several registers, asked him if he couldn’t use fifty dollars—he always kept a fifty in the heel of his left shoe, he said, and he’d just love to give it to Master Lewis Farren. There was a place they could go near Randolph. An empty barn.

Jack did not make any correlation between the steadily increasing monetary offers from Light in his various incarnations and any changes his adventures might be working on him—he was not introspective by nature and had little interest in self-analysis.

He had learned quickly enough how to deal with fellows like Emory W. Light. His first experience with Light, when Light had been calling himself Tom Ferguson, had taught him that discretion was by far the better part of valor. When Ferguson put his hand on Jack’s thigh, Jack had responded automatically out of a California sensibility in which gays had been merely part of the scenery: “No thanks, mister. I’m strictly A.C.”

He had been groped before, certainly—in movie theaters, mostly, but there had been the men’s-shop clerk in North Hollywood who had cheerfully offered to blow him in a changing booth (and when Jack told him no thanks, the clerk said, “Fine, now try on the blue blazer, okay?”).

These were annoyances a good-looking twelve-year-old boy in Los Angeles simply learned to put up with, the way a pretty woman learns to put up with being groped occasionally on the subway. You eventually find a way to cope without letting it spoil your whole day. The deliberate passes, such as the one this Ferguson was making, were less of a problem than the sudden gropes from ambush. They could simply be shunted aside.

At least in California they could. Eastern gays—especially out here in the sticks—apparently had a different way of dealing with rejection.

Ferguson had come to a screeching, sliding halt, leaving forty yards of rubber behind his Pontiac and throwing a cloud of shoulder-dust into the air.

“Who you calling D.C.?” he screamed. “Who you calling queer? I’m not queer! Jesus! Give a kid a fucking ride and he calls you a fucking queer!”

Jack was looking at him, dazed. Unprepared for the sudden stop, he had thumped his head a damned good one on the padded dash. Ferguson, who had only a moment before been looking at him with melting brown eyes, now looked ready to kill him.

“Get out!” Ferguson yelled. “You’re the queer, not me! You’re the queer! Get out, you little queerboy! Get out! I’ve got a wife! I’ve got kids! I’ve probably got bastards scattered all over New England! I’m not queer! You’re the queer, not me, SO GET OUT OF MY CAR!”

More terrified than he had been since his encounter with Osmond, Jack had done just that. Ferguson tore out, spraying him with gravel, still raving. Jack staggered over to a rock wall, sat down, and began to giggle. The giggles became shrieks of laughter, and he decided right then and there that he would have to develop A POLICY, at least until he got out of the boondocks. “Any serious problem demands A POLICY,” his father had said once. Morgan had agreed vigorously, but Jack decided he shouldn’t let that hold him back.

His POLICY had worked well enough with Bob Darrent, and he had no reason to believe it wouldn’t also work with Emory Light . . . but in the meantime he was cold and his nose was running. He wished Light would head em up and move em out. Standing in the trees, Jack could see him down there, walking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, his large bald head gleaming mellowly under the white-out sky. On the turnpike, big semis droned by, filling the air with the stink of burned diesel fuel. The woods here were trashed-out, the way the woods bordering any interstate rest area always were. Empty Dorito bags. Squashed Big Mac boxes. Crimped Pepsi and Budweiser cans with pop-tops that rattled inside if you kicked them. Smashed bottles of Wild Irish Rose and Five O’Clock gin. A pair of shredded nylon panties over there, with a mouldering sanitary napkin still glued to the crotch. A rubber poked over a broken branch. Plenty of nifty stuff, all right, hey-hey. And lots of graffiti jotted on the walls of the men’s room, almost all of it the sort a fellow like Emory W. Light could really relate to: I LIKE TO SUK BIG FAT COX. BE HERE AT 4 FOR THE BEST BLOJOB YOU EVER HAD. REEM OUT MY BUTT. And here was a gay poet with large aspirations: LET THE HOLE HUMAN RACE/JERK OFF ON MY SMILING FACE.

I’m homesick for the Territories, Jack thought, and there was no surprise at all in the realization. Here he stood behind two brick outhouses off I-70 somewhere in western Ohio, shivering in a ragged sweater he had bought in a thrift store for a buck and a half, waiting for that large bald man down there to get back on his horse and ride.

Jack’s POLICY was simplicity itself: don’t antagonize a man with large bald hands and a large bald voice.

Jack sighed with relief. Now it was starting to work. An expression that was half-anger, half-disgust, had settled over Emory W. Light’s large bald face. He went back to his car, got in, backed up so fast he almost hit the pick-up truck passing behind him (there was a brief blare of horns and the passenger in the truck shot Emory W. Light the finger), and then left.

Now it was only a matter of standing on the ramp where the rest-area traffic rejoined the turnpike traffic with his thumb out . . . and, he hoped, catching a ride before it started to rain.

Jack spared another look around. Ugly, wretched. These words came quite naturally to mind as he looked around at the littery desolation here on the rest area’s pimply backside. It occurred to Jack that there was a feeling of death here—not just at this rest area or on the interstate roads but pressed deep into all the country he had travelled. Jack thought that sometimes he could even see it, a desperate shade of hot dark brown, like the exhaust from the shortstack of a fast-moving Jimmy-Pete.

The new homesickness came back—the wanting to go to the Territories and see that dark blue sky, the slight curve at the edge of the horizon. . . .

But it plays those Jerry Bledsoe changes.

Don’t know nothin bout dat . . . All I know is you seem to have this idear of “moider” a little broad. . . .

Walking down to the rest area—now he really did have to urinate—Jack sneezed three times, quickly. He swallowed and winced at the hot prickle in his throat. Getting sick, oh yeah. Great. Not even into Indiana yet, fifty