“I have everything I need,” he said, hoping that she would not press him on the first two questions. The silence stretched out and out, and finally he said, “I guess I’ll mainly walk. I can’t talk about it much, Mom.”
“Travelling Jack,” she said. “I can almost believe . . .”
“Yes,” Jack said. “Yes.” He was nodding. And maybe, he thought, you know some of what she knows, the real Queen, and that’s why you are letting go this easily. “That’s right. I can believe, too. That’s what makes it right.”
“Well . . . since you say you’ll go no matter what I say . . .”
“I will, too.”
“. . . then I guess it doesn’t matter what I say.” She looked at him bravely. “It does matter, though. I know. I want you to get back here as quick as you can, sonny boy. You’re not going right away, are you?”
“I have to.” He inhaled deeply. “Yes. I am going right away. As soon as I leave you.”
“I could almost believe in this rigamarole. You’re Phil Sawyer’s son, all right. You haven’t found a girl somewhere in this place, have you . . . ?” She looked at him very sharply. “No. No girl. Okay. Save my life. Off with you.” She shook her head, and he thought he saw an extra brightness in her eyes. “If you’re going to leave, get out of here, Jacky. Call me tomorrow.”
“If I can.” He stood up.
“If you can. Of course. Forgive me.” She looked down at nothing, and he saw that her eyes were unfocused. Red dots burned in the middle of her cheeks.
Jack leaned over and kissed her, but she just waved him away. The waitress stared at the two of them as if they were performing a play. Despite what his mother had just said, Jack thought that he had brought the level of her disbelief down to something like fifty percent; which meant that she no longer knew what to believe.
She focused on him for a moment, and he saw that hectic brightness blazing in her eyes again. Anger; tears? “Take care,” she said, and signalled the waitress.
“I love you,” Jack said.
“Never get off on a line like that.” Now she was almost smiling. “Get travelling, Jack. Get going before I realize how crazy this is.”
“I’m gone,” he said, and turned away and marched out of the restaurant. His head felt tight, as if the bones in his skull had just grown too large for their covering of flesh. The empty yellow sunlight attacked his eyes. Jack heard the door of the Arcadia Tea and Jam Shoppe banging shut an instant after the little bell had sounded. He blinked; ran across Boardwalk Avenue without looking for cars. When he reached the pavement on the other side, he realized that he would have to go back to their suite for some clothes. His mother had still not emerged from the tea shop by the time Jack was pulling open the hotel’s great front door.
The desk clerk stepped backward and sullenly stared. Jack felt some sort of emotion steaming off the man, but for a second could not remember why the clerk should react so strongly to the sight of him. The conversation with his mother—actually much shorter than he had imagined it would be—seemed to have lasted for days. On the other side of the vast gulf of time he’d spent in the Tea and Jam Shoppe, he had called the clerk a creep. Should he apologize? He no longer actually remembered what had caused him to flare up at the clerk. . . .
His mother had agreed to his going—she had given him permission to take his journey, and as he walked through the crossfire of the deskman’s glare he finally understood why. He had not mentioned the Talisman, not explicitly, but even if he had—if he had spoken of the most lunatic aspect of his mission—she would have accepted that too. And if he’d said that he was going to bring back a foot-long butterfly and roast it in the oven, she’d have agreed to eat roast butterfly. It would have been an ironic, but a real, agreement. In part this showed the depth of her fear, that she would grasp at such straws.
But she would grasp because at some level she knew that these were bricks, not straws. His mother had given him permission to go because somewhere inside her she, too, knew about the Territories.
Did she ever wake up in the night with that name, Laura DeLoessian, sounding in her mind?
Up in 407 and 408, he tossed clothes into his knapsack almost randomly: if his fingers found it in a drawer and it was not too large, in it went. Shirts, socks, a sweater, Jockey shorts. Jack tightly rolled up a pair of tan jeans and forced them in, too; then he realized that the pack had become uncomfortably heavy, and pulled out most of the shirts and socks. The sweater, too, came out. At the last minute he remembered his toothbrush. Then he slid the straps over his shoulders and felt the pull of the weight on his back—not too heavy. He could walk all day, carrying only these few pounds. Jack simply stood quiet in the suite’s living room a moment, feeling—unexpectedly powerfully—the absence of any person or thing to whom he could say goodbye. His mother would not return to the suite until she could be sure he was gone: if she saw him now, she’d order him to stay. He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly. In the end he went to the telephone pad printed with a drawing of the hotel on eggshell-thin paper, and with the Alhambra’s blunt narrow pencil wrote the three lines that were most of what he had to say:
Thanks
I love you
and will be back
4
Jack moved down Boardwalk Avenue in the thin northern sun, wondering where he should . . . flip. That was the word for it. And should he see Speedy once more before he “flipped” into the Territories? He almost had to talk to Speedy once more, because he knew so little about where he was going, whom he might meet, what he was looking for. . . . she look just like a crystal ball. Was that all the instruction Speedy intended to give him about the Talisman? That, and the warning not to drop it? Jack felt almost sick with lack of preparation—as if he had to take a final exam in a course he’d never attended.
He also felt that he could flip right where he stood, he was that impatient to begin, to get started, to move. He had to be in the Territories again, he suddenly understood; in the welter of his emotions and longings, that thread brightly shone. He wanted to breathe that air; he hungered for it. The Territories, the long plains and ranges of low mountains, called him, the fields of tall grass and the streams that flashed through them. Jack’s entire body yearned for that landscape. And he might have taken the bottle out of his pocket and forced a mouthful of the awful juice down his throat on the spot if he had not just then seen the bottle’s former owner tucked up against a tree, butt on heels and hands laced across his knees. A brown grocery bag lay beside him, and atop the bag was an enormous sandwich of what looked like liver sausage and onion.
“You’re movin now,” Speedy said, smiling up at him. “You’re on your way, I see. Say your goodbyes? Your momma know you won’t be home for a while?”
Jack nodded, and Speedy held up the sandwich. “You hungry? This one, it’s too much for me.”
“I had something to eat,” the boy said. “I’m glad I can say goodbye to you.”
“Ole Jack on fire, he rarin to go,” Speedy said, cocking his long head sideways. “Boy gonna move.”
“Speedy?”
“But don’t take off without a few little things I brought for you. I got em here in this bag, you wanna see?”
“Speedy?”
The man squinted up at Jack from the base of the tree.
“Did you know that my father used to call me Travelling Jack?”
“Oh, I probably heard that somewhere,” Speedy said, grinning at him. “Come over here and see what I brought you. Plus, I have to tell you where to go first, don’t I?”
Relieved, Jack walked across the sidewalk to Speedy’s tree. The old man set his sandwich in his lap and fished the bag closer to him. “Merry Christmas,” Speedy said, and brought forth a tall, battered old paperback book. It was, Jack saw, an old Rand McNally road atlas.
“Thanks,” Jack said, taking the book from Speedy’s outstretched hand.
“Ain’t no maps over there, so you stick as much as you can to the roads in ole Rand McNally. That way you’ll get where you’re goin.”
“Okay,” Jack said, and slipped out of the knapsack so that he could slide the big book down inside it.
“The next thing don’t have to go in that fancy rig you carryin on your back,” Speedy said. He put the sandwich on the flat paper bag and stood up all in one long smooth motion. “No, you can carry this right in your pocket.” He dipped his fingers into the left pocket of his workshirt. What emerged, clamped between his second and third fingers like one of Lily’s Tarrytoons, was a white triangular object it took the boy a moment to recognize as a guitar-pick. “You take this and keep it. You’ll want to show it to a man. He’ll help you.”
Jack turned the pick over in his fingers. He had never seen one like it—of ivory, with scrimshaw filigrees and patterns winding around it in slanted lines like some kind of unearthly writing. Beautiful in the abstract, it was almost too heavy to be a useful fingerpick.
“Who’s the man?” Jack asked. He slipped the pick into one of his pants pockets.
“Big scar on his face—you’ll see him pretty soon after you land in the Territories. He’s a guard. Fact is, he’s a Captain of the Outer Guards, and he’ll take you to a place where you can see a lady you has to see. Well, a lady you ought to see. So you know the other reason you’re puttin your neck on the line. My friend over there, he’ll understand what you’re doin and he’ll figure out a way to get you to the lady.”
“This lady . . .” Jack began.
“Yep,” Speedy said. “You got it.”
“She’s the Queen.”
“You take a good look at her, Jack. You see what you see when you sees her. You see what she is, understand? Then you hit out for the west.” Speedy stood examining him gravely, almost as if he were just now doubting that he’d ever see Jack Sawyer again, and then the lines in his face twitched and he said, “Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s. Ole Bloat can find out where you went if you’re not careful, and if he finds out he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.” Speedy shoved his hands in his pockets and regarded Jack again, looking very much as though he wished he could think of more to say. “Get the Talisman, son,” he concluded. “Get it and bring it back safe. It gonna be your burden but you got to be bigger than your burden.”
Jack was concentrating so hard on what Speedy was telling him that he squinted into the man’s seamed face. Scarred man, Captain of the Outer Guards. The Queen. Morgan Sloat, after him like a predator. In an evil place over on the other side of the country. A burden. “Okay,” he said, wishing suddenly that he were back in the Tea and Jam Shoppe with his mother.
Speedy smiled jaggedly, warmly. “Yeah-bob. Ole Travellin Jack is okey-doke.” The smile deepened. “Bout time for you to sip at that special juice, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess it is,” Jack said. He tugged the dark bottle out of his hip pocket and unscrewed the cap. He looked back up at Speedy, whose pale eyes stabbed into his own.
“Speedy’ll help you when he can.”
Jack nodded, blinked, and raised the neck of the bottle to his mouth. The sweetly rotten odor which leaped out of the bottle nearly made his throat close itself in an involuntary spasm. He tipped the bottle up and the taste of the odor invaded his mouth. His stomach clenched. He swallowed, and rough, burning liquid spilled down his throat.
Long seconds before Jack opened his eyes, he knew from the richness and clarity of the smells about him that he had flipped into the Territories. Horses, grass, a dizzying scent of raw meat; dust; the clear air itself.
Interlude
Sloat in This World (I)
“I know I work too hard,” Morgan Sloat told his son Richard that evening. They were speaking on the telephone, Richard standing at the communal telephone in the downstairs corridor of his dormitory, his father sitting at his desk on the top floor of one of Sawyer & Sloat’s first and sweetest real-estate deals in Beverly Hills. “But I tell you kid, there are a lot of times when you have to do something yourself to get it done right. Especially when my late partner’s family is involved. It’s just a short trip, I hope. Probably I’ll get everything nailed down out there in goddam New Hampshire in less than a week. I’ll give you another call when it’s all over. Maybe we’ll go railroading in California, just like the old days. There’ll be justice yet. Trust your old man.”
The deal for the building had been particularly sweet because of Sloat’s willingness to do things himself. After he and Sawyer had negotiated the purchase of a short-term lease, then (after a gunfire of lawsuits) a long-term lease, they had fixed their rental rates at so much per square foot, done the necessary alterations, and advertised for new tenants. The only holdover tenant was the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, dribbling in rent at about a third of what the space was worth. Sloat had tried reasonable discussions with the Chinese, but when they saw that he was trying to talk them into paying more rent, they suddenly lost the ability to speak or understand English. Sloat’s attempts at negotiation limped along for a few days, and then he happened to see one of the kitchen help carrying a bucket of grease out through the back door of the kitchen. Feeling better already, Sloat followed the man into a dark, narrow cul-de-sac and watched him tip the grease into a garbage can. He needed no more than that. A day later, a chain-link fence separated the cul-de-sac from the restaurant; yet another day later, a Health Department inspector served the Chinese with a complaint and a summons. Now the kitchen help had to take all their refuse, grease included, out through the dining area and down a chain-link dog run Sloat had constructed alongside the restaurant. Business fell off: the customers caught odd, unpleasant odors from the nearby garbage. The owners rediscovered the English language, and volunteered to double their monthly payment. Sloat responded with a grateful-sounding speech that said nothing. And that night, having primed himself with three large martinis, Sloat drove from his house to the restaurant and took a baseball bat from the trunk of his car and smashed in the long window which had once given a pleasant view of the street but now looked out at a corridor of fencing which ended in a huddle of metal bins.
He had done those things . . . but he hadn’t exactly been Sloat when he did them.
The next morning the Chinese requested another meeting and this time offered to quadruple their payment. “Now you’re talking like men,” Sloat told the stony-faced Chinese. “And I’ll tell you what! Just to prove we’re all on the same team, we’ll pay half the cost of replacing your window.”
Within nine months of Sawyer & Sloat’s taking possession of the building, all the rents had increased significantly and the initial cost and profit projections had begun to look wildly pessimistic. By now this building was one of Sawyer & Sloat’s more modest ventures, but Morgan Sloat was as proud of it as of the massive new structures they had put up downtown. Just walking past the place where he’d put up the fence as he came in to work in the morning reminded him—daily—of how much he had contributed to Sawyer & Sloat, how reasonable were his claims!
This sense of the justice of his ultimate desires kindled within him as he spoke to Richard—after all, it was for Richard that he wanted to take over Phil Sawyer’s share of the company. Richard was, in a sense, his immortality. His son would be able to go to the best business schools and then pick up a law degree before he came into the company; and thus fully armed, Richard Sloat would carry all the complex and delicate machinery of Sawyer & Sloat into the next century. The boy’s ridiculous ambition to become a chemist could not long survive his father’s determination to murder it—Richard was smart enough to see that what his father did was a hell of a lot more interesting, not to mention vastly more remunerative, than working with a test tube over a Bunsen burner. That “research chemist” stuff would fade away pretty quickly, once the boy had a glimpse of the real world. And if Richard was concerned about being fair to Jack Sa
wyer, he could be made to understand that fifty thousand a year and a guaranteed college education was not only fair but magnanimous. Princely. Who could say that Jack wanted any part of the business, anyhow, or that he would possess any talent for it?
Besides, accidents happened. Who could even say that Jack Sawyer would live to see twenty?
“Well, it’s really a matter of getting all the papers, all the ownership stuff, finally straight,” Sloat told his son. “Lily’s been hiding out from me for too long. Her brain is strictly cottage cheese by now, take my word for it. She probably has less than a year to live. So if I don’t hump myself off to see her now that I have her pinned down, she could stall long enough to put everything into probate—or into a trust fund, and I don’t think your friend’s momma would let me administer it. Hey, I don’t want to bore you with my troubles. I just wanted to tell you that I won’t be home for a few days, in case you call. Send me a letter or something. And remember about the train, okay? We gotta do that again.”
The boy promised to write, to work hard, to not worry about his father or Lily Cavanaugh or Jack.
And sometime when this obedient son was, say, in his senior year at Stanford or Yale, Sloat would introduce him to the Territories. Richard would be six or seven years younger than he had been himself when Phil Sawyer, cheerfully crack-brained on grass in their first little North Hollywood office, had first puzzled, then infuriated (because Sloat had been certain Phil was laughing at him), then intrigued his partner (for surely Phil was too stoned to have invented all this science-fiction crapola about another world). And when Richard saw the Territories, that would be it—if he had not already done it by himself, they’d change his mind for him. Even a small peek into the Territories shook your confidence in the omniscience of scientists.
Sloat ran the palm of his hand over the shiny top of his head, then luxuriantly fingered his moustache. The sound of his son’s voice had obscurely, irrelevantly comforted him: as long as there was Richard politely coming along behind him, all was well and all was well and all manner of things was well. It was night already in Springfield, Illinois, and in Nelson House, Thayer School, Richard Sloat was padding down a green corridor back to his desk, perhaps thinking of the good times they’d had, and would have again, aboard Morgan’s toy train line in coastal California. He’d be asleep by the time his father’s jet punished the resistant air far above and some hundred miles farther north; but Morgan Sloat would push aside the panel over his first-class window and peer down, hoping for moonlight and a parting of the clouds.
Talisman 01 - The Talisman Page 9