The Talisman Page 4

  He reached the wide street that travelled up the shoreline toward the town, and now all of the empty landscape before him was a whirlpool that could suck him down into itself and spit him out into a black place where peace and safety had never existed. A gull sailed out over the empty road, wheeled around in a wide curve, and dipped back toward the beach. Jack watched it go, shrinking in the air to a smudge of white above the erratic line of the roller-coaster track.

  Lester Speedy Parker, a black man with crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting down through his cheeks, was down there somewhere inside Funworld and it was Speedy he had to see. That was as clear to Jack as his sudden insight about his friend Richard's father.

  A gull screeched, a wave bounced hard gold light toward him, and Jack saw Uncle Morgan and his new friend Speedy as figures almost allegorically opposed, as if they were statues of NIGHT and DAY, stuck up on plinths, MOON and SUN--the dark and the light. What Jack had understood as soon as he had known that his father would have liked Speedy Parker was that the ex-bluesman had no harm in him. Uncle Morgan, now . . . he was another kind of being altogether. Uncle Morgan lived for business, for deal-making and hustling; and he was so ambitious that he challenged every even faintly dubious call in a tennis match, so ambitious in fact that he cheated in the penny-ante card games his son had now and then coaxed him into joining. At least, Jack thought that Uncle Morgan had been cheating in a couple of their games . . . not a man who thought that defeat demanded graciousness.

  NIGHT and DAY, MOON and SUN; DARK and LIGHT, and the black man was the light in these polarities. And when Jack's mind had pushed him this far, all that panic he had fought off in the hotel's tidy gardens swarmed toward him again. He lifted his feet and ran.

  2

  When the boy saw Speedy kneeling down outside the gray and peeling arcade building--wrapping electrician's tape around a thick cord, his steel-wool head bent almost to the pier and his skinny buttocks poking out the worn green seat of his workpants, the dusty soles of his boots toed down like a pair of upended surfboards--he realized that he had no idea of what he had been planning to say to the custodian, or even if he intended to say anything at all. Speedy gave the roll of black tape another twist around the cord, nodded, took a battered Palmer knife from the flap pocket of his workshirt and sliced the tape off the roll with a flat surgical neatness. Jack would have escaped from here, too, if he could--he was intruding on the man's work, and anyhow, it was crazy to think that Speedy could really help him in any way. What kind of help could he give, an old janitor in an empty amusement park?

  Then Speedy turned his head and registered the boy's presence with an expression of total and warming welcome--not so much a smile as a deepening of all those heavy lines in his face--and Jack knew that he was at least no intrusion.

  "Travellin Jack," Speedy said. "I was beginnin to get afraid you decided to stay away from me. Just when we got to be friends, too. Good to see you again, son."

  "Yeah," Jack said. "Good to see you, too."

  Speedy popped the metal knife back into his shirt pocket and lifted his long bony body upright so easily, so athletically, that he seemed weightless. "This whole place comin down around my ears," he said. "I just fix it a little bit at a time, enough so everything works more or less the way it should." He stopped in mid-sentence, having had a good look at Jack's face. "Old world's not so fine right now, seems like. Travellin Jack got buckled up to a load of worries. That the way it is?"

  "Yeah, sort of," Jack began--he still had no idea of how to begin expressing the things that troubled him. They could not be put into ordinary sentences, for ordinary sentences made everything seem rational. One . . . two . . . three: Jack's world no longer marched in those straight lines. All he could not say weighed in his chest.

  He looked miserably at the tall thin man before him. Speedy's hands were thrust deep into his pockets; his thick gray eyebrows pushed toward the deep vertical furrow between them. Speedy's eyes, so light they were almost no color at all, swung up from the blistered paint of the pier and met Jack's own--and suddenly Jack felt better again. He did not understand why, but Speedy seemed to be able to communicate emotion directly to him: as if they had not met just a week before, but years ago, and had shared far more than a few words in a deserted arcade.

  "Well, that's enough work for now," Speedy said, glancing up in the direction of the Alhambra. "Do any more and I just spoil em. Don't suppose you ever saw my office, did you?"

  Jack shook his head.

  "Time for a little refreshment, boy. The time is right."

  He set off down the pier in his long-legged gait, and Jack trotted after him. As they jumped down the steps of the pier and began going across the scrubby grass and packed brown earth toward the buildings on the far side of the park, Speedy astonished Jack by starting to sing.

  Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack,

  Got a far long way to go,

  Longer way to come back.

  It was not exactly singing, Jack thought, but sort of halfway between singing and talking. If it were not for the words, he would have enjoyed listening to Speedy's rough, confident voice.

  Long long way for that boy to go,

  Longer way to come back.

  Speedy cast an almost twinkling look at him over his shoulder.

  "Why do you call me that?" Jack asked him. "Why am I Travelling Jack? Because I'm from California?"

  They had reached the pale blue ticket booth at the entrance to the roller-coaster enclosure, and Speedy thrust his hands back in the pockets of his baggy green workpants, spun on his heel, and propped his shoulders on the little blue enclosure. The efficiency and quickness of his movements had a quality almost theatrical--as if, Jack thought, he had known the boy was going to ask that particular question at that precise moment.

  He say he come from California,

  Don he know he gotta go right back . . .

  sang Speedy, his ponderous sculptured face filled with emotion that seemed almost reluctant to Jack.

  Say he come all that way,

  Poor Travellin Jack gotta go right back . . .

  "What?" Jack said. "Go back? I think my mom even sold the house--or she rented it or something. I don't know what the hell you're trying to do, Speedy."

  He was relieved when Speedy did not answer him in his chanting, rhythmic sing-song, but said in a normal voice: "Bet you don't remember meetin me before, Jack. You don't, do you?"

  "Meeting you before? Where was this?"

  "California--at least, I think we met back there. Not so's you'd remember, Travellin Jack. It was a pretty busy couple of minutes. Would have been in . . . let me see . . . would have been about four--five years ago. Nineteen seventy-six."

  Jack looked up at him in pure befuddlement. Nineteen seventy-six? He would have been seven years old.

  "Let's go find my little office," Speedy said, and pushed himself off the ticket booth with that same weightless grace.

  Jack followed after him, winding through the tall supports of the roller coaster--black shadows like the grids of tic-tac-toe diagrams overlaid a dusty wasteland sprinkled with beercans and candy wrappers. The tracks of the roller coaster hung above them like an unfinished skyscraper. Speedy moved, Jack saw, with a basketball player's rangy ease, his head up and his arms dangling. The angle of his body, his posture in the crisscrossed gloom beneath the struts, seemed very young--Speedy could have been in his twenties.

  Then the custodian stepped out again into the harsh sunlight, and fifty extra years grayed his hair and seamed the back of his neck. Jack paused as he reached the final row of uprights, sensing as if Speedy Parker's illusory juvenescence were the key to them that the Daydreams were somehow very near, hovering all about him.

  Nineteen seventy-six? California? Jack trailed off after Speedy, who was going toward a tiny red-painted wooden shack back up against the smooth-wire fence on the far side of the amusement park. He was sure that he had never met Speedy in California . . . but
the almost visible presence of his fantasies had brought back to him another specific memory of those days, the visions and sensations of a late afternoon of his sixth year, Jacky playing with a black toy taxi behind the couch in his father's office . . . and his father and Uncle Morgan unexpectedly, magically talking about the Daydreams. They have magic like we have physics, right? An agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science. But can you begin to understand how much fucking clout we'd swing if we gave them electricity? If we got modern weapons to the right guys over there? Do you have any idea?

  Hold on there, Morgan, I have a lot of ideas that apparently have yet to occur to you. . . .

  Jack could almost hear his father's voice, and the peculiar and unsettling realm of the Daydreams seemed to stir in the shadowy wasteland beneath the roller coaster. He began again to trot after Speedy, who had opened the door of the little red shack and was leaning against it, smiling without smiling.

  "You got something on your mind, Travellin Jack. Something that's buzzin in there like a bee. Get on inside the executive suite and tell me about it."

  If the smile had been broader, more obvious, Jack might have turned and run: the spectre of mockery still hung humiliatingly near. But Speedy's whole being seemed to express a welcoming concern--the message of all those deepened lines in his face--and Jack went past him through the door.

  Speedy's "office" was a small board rectangle--the same red as its exterior--without a desk or a telephone. Two upended orange crates leaned against one of the side walls, flanking an unplugged electrical heater that resembled the grille of a mid-fifties Pontiac. In the middle of the room a wooden round-back school chair kept company with an overstuffed chair of faded gray material.

  The arms of the overstuffed chair seemed to have been clawed open by several generations of cats: dingy wisps of stuffing lay across the arms like hair; on the back of the school chair was a complex graffito of scratched-in initials. Junkyard furniture. In one of the corners stood two neat foot-high piles of paperback books, in another the square fake-alligator cover of a cheap record player. Speedy nodded at the heater and said, "You come round here in January, February, boy, you see why I got that. Cold? Shoo." But Jack was now looking at the pictures taped to the wall over the heater and orange crates.

  All but one of the pictures were nudes cut from men's magazines. Women with breasts as large as their heads lolled back against uncomfortable trees and splayed columnar, hardworked legs. To Jack, their faces looked both fascinating and rapacious--as if these women would take bites out of his skin after they kissed him. Some of the women were no younger than his mother; others seemed only a few years older than himself. Jack's eyes grazed over this needful flesh--all of it, young and unyoung, pink or chocolate-brown or honey-yellow, seemed to press toward his touch, and he was too conscious of Speedy Parker standing beside him, watching. Then he saw the landscape in the midst of the nude photographs, and for a second he probably forgot to breathe.

  It too was a photograph; and it too seemed to reach out for him, as if it were three-dimensional. A long grassy plain of a particular, aching green unfurled toward a low, ground-down range of mountains. Above the plain and the mountains ranged a deeply transparent sky. Jack could very nearly smell the freshness of this landscape. He knew that place. He had never been there, not really, but he knew it. That was one of the places of the Daydreams.

  "Kind of catch the eye, don't it?" Speedy said, and Jack remembered where he was. A Eurasian woman with her back to the camera tilted a heart-shaped rear and smiled at him over her shoulder. Yes, Jack thought. "Real pretty place," Speedy said. "I put that one up myself. All these here girls met me when I moved in. Didn't have the heart to rip em off the wall. They sort of do remind me of way back when, times I was on the road."

  Jack looked up at Speedy, startled, and the old man winked at him.

  "Do you know that place, Speedy?" Jack asked. "I mean, do you know where it is?"

  "Maybe so, maybe not. It might be Africa--someplace in Kenya. Or that might be just my memory. Sit down, Travellin Jack. Take the comf'able chair."

  Jack twisted the chair so that he could still see the picture of the Daydream place. "That's Africa?"

  "Might be somewhere a lot closer. Might be somewhere a fellow could get to--get to anytime he liked, that is, if he wanted to see it bad enough."

  Jack suddenly realized that he was trembling, and had been for some time. He balled his hands into fists, and felt the trembling displace itself into his stomach.

  He was not sure that he wanted ever to see the Daydream place, but he looked questioningly over at Speedy, who had perched himself on the school chair. "It isn't anyplace in Africa, is it?"

  "Well, I don't know. Could be. I got my own name for it, son. I just call it the Territories."

  Jack looked back up at the photograph--the long, dimpled plain, the low brown mountains. The Territories. That was right; that was its name.

  They have magic like we have physics, right? An agrarian monarchy . . . modern weapons to the right guys over there . . . Uncle Morgan plotting. His father answering, putting on the brakes: We have to be careful about the way we go in there, partner . . . remember, we owe them, by which I mean we really owe them . . .

  "The Territories," he said to Speedy, tasting the name in his mouth as much as asking a question.

  "Air like the best wine in a rich man's cellar. Soft rain. That's the place, son."

  "You've been there, Speedy?" Jack asked, fervently hoping for a straightforward answer.

  But Speedy frustrated him, as Jack had almost known he would. The custodian smiled at him, and this time it was a real smile, not just a subliminal flare of warmth.

  After a moment Speedy said, "Hell, I never been outside these United States, Travellin Jack. Not even in the war. Never got any farther than Texas and Alabama."

  "How do you know about the . . . the Territories?" The name was just beginning to fit his mouth.

  "Man like me, he hear all kinds of stories. Stories about two-headed parrots, men that fly with their own wings, men who turn into wolves, stories about queens. Sick queens."

  . . . magic like we have physics, right?

  Angels and werewolves. "I've heard stories about werewolves," Jack said. "They're even in cartoons. That doesn't mean anything, Speedy."

  "Probably it don't. But I heard that if a man pulls a radish out of the ground, another man half a mile away will be able to smell that radish--the air so sweet and clear."

  "But angels . . ."

  "Men with wings."

  "And sick queens," Jack said, meaning it as a joke--man, this is some dumb place you make up, broom jockey. But the instant he spoke the words, he felt sick himself. He had remembered the black eye of a gull fixing him with his own mortality as it yanked a clam from its shell: and he could hear hustlin, bustlin Uncle Morgan asking if Jack could put Queen Lily on the line.

  Queen of the Bs. Queen Lily Cavanaugh.

  "Yeah," Speedy said softly. "Troubles everywhere, son. Sick Queen . . . maybe dyin. Dyin, son. And a world or two waitin out there, just waitin to see if anyone can save her."

  Jack stared at him open-mouthed, feeling more or less as if the custodian had just kicked him in the stomach. Save her? Save his mother? The panic started to flood toward him once again--how could he save her? And did all this crazy talk mean that she really was dying, back there in that room?

  "You got a job, Travellin Jack," Speedy told him. "A job that ain't gonna let you go, and that's the Lord's truth. I wish it was different."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Jack said. His breath seemed to be trapped in a hot little pocket situated at the base of his neck. He looked into another corner of the small red room and in the shadow saw a battered guitar propped against the wall. Beside it lay the neat tube of a thin rolled-up mattress. Speedy slept next to his guitar.

  "I wonder," Speedy said. "There comes times, you know what I mean, you know more than you think you know.
One hell of a lot more."

  "But I don't--" Jack began, and then pulled himself up short. He had just remembered something. Now he was even more frightened--another chunk of the past had rushed out at him, demanding his attention. Instantly he was filmed with perspiration, and his skin felt very cold--as if he had been misted by a fine spray from a hose. This memory was what he had fought to repress yesterday morning, standing before the elevators, pretending that his bladder was not about to burst.

  "Didn't I say it was time for a little refreshment?" Speedy asked, reaching down to push aside a loose floorboard.

  Jack again saw two ordinary-looking men trying to push his mother into a car. Above them a huge tree dipped scalloped fronds over the automobile's roof.

  Speedy gently extracted a pint bottle from the gap between the floorboards. The glass was dark green, and the fluid inside looked black. "This gonna help you, son. Just a little taste all you need--send you some new places, help you get started findin that job I told you bout."

  "I can't stay, Speedy," Jack blurted out, now in a desperate hurry to get back to the Alhambra. The old man visibly checked the surprise in his face, then slid the bottle back under the loose floorboard. Jack was already on his feet. "I'm worried," he said.

  "Bout your mom?"

  Jack nodded, moving backward toward the open door.

  "Then you better settle your mind and go see she's all right. You can come back here anytime, Travellin Jack."

  "Okay," the boy said, and then hesitated before running outside. "I think . . . I think I remember when we met before."

  "Nah, nah, my brains got twisted," Speedy said, shaking his head and waving his hands back and forth before him. "You had it right. We never met before last week. Get on back to your mom and set your mind at ease."