The Talisman Read online

  Jack sprinted out the door and ran through the dimensionless sunlight to the wide arch leading to the street. Above it he could see the letters DLROWNUF AIDACRA outlined against the sky: at night, colored bulbs would spell out the park's name in both directions. Dust puffed up beneath his Nikes. Jack pushed himself against his own muscles, making them move faster and harder, so that by the time he burst out through the arch, he felt almost as though he were flying.

  Nineteen seventy-six. Jack had been puttering his way up Rodeo Drive on an afternoon in June? July? . . . some afternoon in the drought season, but before that time of the year when everybody started worrying about brushfires in the hills. Now he could not even remember where he had been going. A friend's house? It had not been an errand of any urgency. He had, Jack remembered, just reached the point where he no longer thought of his father in every unoccupied second--for many months after Philip Sawyer's death in a hunting accident, his shade, his loss had sped toward Jack at a bruising speed whenever the boy was least prepared to meet it. Jack was only seven, but he knew that part of his childhood had been stolen from him--his six-year-old self now seemed impossibly naive and thoughtless--but he had learned to trust his mother's strength. Formless and savage threats no longer seemed to conceal themselves in dark corners, closets with half-open doors, shadowy streets, empty rooms.

  The events of that aimless summer afternoon in 1976 had murdered this temporary peace. After it, Jack slept with his light on for six months; nightmares roiled his sleep.

  The car pulled across the street just a few houses up from the Sawyers' white three-story Colonial. It had been a green car, and that was all that Jack had known about it except that it was not a Mercedes--Mercedes was the only kind of automobile he knew by sight. The man at the wheel had rolled down his window and smiled at Jack. The boy's first thought had been that he knew this man--the man had known Phil Sawyer, and wanted just to say hello to his son. Somehow that was conveyed by the man's smile, which was easy and unforced and familiar. Another man leaned forward in the passenger seat and peered toward Jack through blind-man glasses--round and so dark they were nearly black. This second man was wearing a pure white suit. The driver let his smile speak for him a moment longer.

  Then he said, "Sonny, do you know how we get to the Beverly Hills Hotel?" So he was a stranger after all. Jack experienced an odd little flicker of disappointment.

  He pointed straight up the street. The hotel was right up there, close enough so that his father had been able to walk to breakfast meetings in the Loggia.

  "Straight ahead?" the driver asked, still smiling.

  Jack nodded.

  "You're a pretty smart little fellow," the man told him, and the other man chuckled. "Any idea of how far up it is?" Jack shook his head. "Couple of blocks, maybe?"

  "Yeah." He had begun to get uncomfortable. The driver was still smiling, but now the smile looked bright and hard and empty. And the passenger's chuckle had been wheezy and damp, as if he were sucking on something wet.

  "Five, maybe? Six? What do you say?"

  "About five or six, I guess," Jack said, stepping backward.

  "Well, I sure do want to thank you, little fellow," the driver said. "You don't happen to like candy, do you?" He extended a closed fist through the window, turned it palm-up, and opened his fingers: a Tootsie Roll. "It's yours. Take it."

  Jack tentatively stepped forward, hearing in his mind the words of a thousand warnings involving strange men and candy. But this man was still in his car; if he tried anything, Jack could be half a block away before the man got his door open. And to not take it somehow seemed a breach of civility. Jack took another step nearer. He looked at the man's eyes, which were blue and as bright and hard as his smile. Jack's instincts told him to lower his hand and walk away. He let his hand drift an inch or two nearer the Tootsie Roll. Then he made a little stabbing peck at it with his fingers.

  The driver's hand clamped around Jack's, and the passenger in blind-man glasses laughed out loud. Astonished, Jack stared into the eyes of the man gripping his hand and saw them start to change--thought he saw them start to change--from blue to yellow.

  But later they were yellow.

  The man in the other seat pushed his door open and trotted around the back of the car. He was wearing a small gold cross in the lapel of his silk suit coat. Jack pulled frantically away, but the driver smiled brightly, emptily, and held him fast. "NO!" Jack yelled. "HELP!"

  The man in dark glasses opened the rear door on Jack's side.

  "HELP ME!" Jack screamed.

  The man holding him began to squeeze him down into a shape that would fit into the open door. Jack bucked, still yelling, but the man effortlessly tightened his hold. Jack struck at his hands, then tried to push the hands off him. With horror, he realized that what he felt beneath his fingers was not skin. He twisted his head and saw that clamped to his side and protruding from the black sleeve was a hard, pinching thing like a claw or a jointed talon. Jack screamed again.

  From up the street came a loud voice: "Hey, stop messin with that boy! You! Leave that boy alone!"

  Jack gasped with relief, and twisted as hard as he could in the man's arms. Running toward them from the end of the block was a tall thin black man, still shouting. The man holding him dropped Jack to the sidewalk and took off around the back of the car. The front door of one of the houses behind Jack slammed open--another witness.

  "Move, move," said the driver, already stepping on the accelerator. White Suit jumped back into the passenger seat, and the car spun its wheels and squealed diagonally across Rodeo Drive, barely missing a long white Clenet driven by a suntanned man in tennis whites. The Clenet's horn blared.

  Jack picked himself up off the sidewalk. He felt dizzy. A bald man in a tan safari suit appeared beside him and said, "Who were they? Did you get their names?"

  Jack shook his head.

  "How do you feel? We ought to call the police."

  "I want to sit down," Jack said, and the man backed away a step.

  "You want me to call the police?" he asked, and Jack shook his head.

  "I can't believe this," the man said. "Do you live around here? I've seen you before, haven't I?"

  "I'm Jack Sawyer. My house is just down there."

  "The white house," the man said, nodding. "You're Lily Cavanaugh's kid. I'll walk you home, if you like."

  "Where's the other man?" Jack asked him. "The black man--the one who was shouting."

  He took an uneasy step away from the man in the safari suit. Apart from the two of them, the street was empty.

  Lester Speedy Parker had been the man running toward him. Speedy had saved his life back then, Jack realized, and ran all the harder toward the hotel.

  3

  "You get any breakfast?" his mother asked him, spilling a cloud of smoke out of her mouth. She wore a scarf over her hair like a turban, and with her hair hidden that way, her face looked bony and vulnerable to Jack. A half-inch of cigarette smouldered between her second and third fingers, and when she saw him glance at it, she snubbed it out in the ashtray on her dressing table.

  "Ah, no, not really," he said, hovering in the door of her bedroom.

  "Give me a clear yes or no," she said, turning back to the mirror. "The ambiguity is killing me." Her mirror-wrist and mirror-hand, applying the makeup to Lily's face, looked stick-thin.

  "No," he said.

  "Well, hang on for a second and when your mother has made herself beautiful she'll take you downstairs and buy you whatever your heart desires."

  "Okay," he said. "It just seemed so depressing, being there all alone."

  "I swear, what you have to be depressed about . . ." She leaned forward and inspected her face in the mirror. "I don't suppose you'd mind waiting in the living room, Jacky? I'd rather do this alone. Tribal secrets."

  Jack wordlessly turned away and wandered back into the living room.

  When the telephone rang, he jumped about a foot.

  "Sho
uld I get that?" he called out.

  "Thank you," her cool voice came back.

  Jack picked up the receiver and said hello.

  "Hey kid, I finally got you," said Uncle Morgan Sloat. "What in the world is going on in your momma's head? Jesus, we could have a real situation here if somebody doesn't start paying attention to details. Is she there? Tell her she has to talk to me--I don't care what she says, she has to talk to me. Trust me, kiddo."

  Jack let the phone dangle in his hand. He wanted to hang up, to get in the car with his mother and drive to another hotel in another state. He did not hang up. He called out, "Mom, Uncle Morgan's on the phone. He says you have to talk to him."

  She was silent for a moment, and he wished he could have seen her face. Finally she said, "I'll take it in here, Jacky."

  Jack already knew what he was going to have to do. His mother gently shut her bedroom door; he heard her walking back to the dressing table. She picked up the telephone in her bedroom. "Okay, Jacky," she called through the door. "Okay," he called back. Then he put the telephone back to his ear and covered the mouthpiece with his hand so that no one would hear him breathing.

  "Great stunt, Lily," Uncle Morgan said. "Terrific. If you were still in pictures, we could probably get a little mileage out of this. Kind of a 'Why Has This Actress Disappeared?' thing. But don't you think it's time you started acting like a rational person again?"

  "How did you find me?" she asked.

  "You think you're hard to find? Give me a break, Lily, I want you to get your ass back to New York. It's time you stopped running away."

  "Is that what I'm doing, Morgan?"

  "You don't exactly have all the time in the world, Lily, and I don't have enough time to waste to chase you all over New England. Hey, hold on. Your kid never hung up his phone."

  "Of course he did."

  Jack's heart had stopped some seconds earlier.

  "Get off the line, kid," Morgan Sloat's voice said to him.

  "Don't be ridiculous, Sloat," his mother said.

  "I'll tell you what's ridiculous, lady. You holing up in some seedy resort when you ought to be in the hospital, that's ridiculous. Jesus, don't you know we have about a million business decisions to make? I care about your son's education, too, and it's a damn good thing I do. You seem to have given up on that."

  "I don't want to talk to you anymore," Lily said.

  "You don't want to, but you have to. I'll come up there and put you in a hospital by force if I have to. We gotta make arrangements, Lily. You own half of the company I'm trying to run--and Jack gets your half after you're gone. I want to make sure Jack's taken care of. And if you think that taking care of Jack is what you're doing up there in goddam New Hampshire, then you're a lot sicker than you know."

  "What do you want, Sloat?" Lily asked in a tired voice.

  "You know what I want--I want everybody taken care of. I want what's fair. I'll take care of Jack, Lily. I'll give him fifty thousand dollars a year--you think about that, Lily. I'll see he goes to a good college. You can't even keep him in school."

  "Noble Sloat," his mother said.

  "Do you think that's an answer? Lily, you need help and I'm the only one offering."

  "What's your cut, Sloat?" his mother asked.

  "You know damn well. I get what's fair. I get what's coming to me. Your interest in Sawyer and Sloat--I worked my ass off for that company, and it ought to be mine. We could get the paperwork done in a morning, Lily, and then concentrate on getting you taken care of."

  "Like Tommy Woodbine was taken care of," she said. "Sometimes I think you and Phil were too successful, Morgan. Sawyer and Sloat was more manageable before you got into real-estate investments and production deals. Remember when you had only a couple of deadbeat comics and a half-dozen hopeful actors and screenwriters as clients? I liked life better before the megabucks."

  "Manageable, who are you kidding?" Uncle Morgan yelled. "You can't even manage yourself!" Then he made an effort to calm himself. "And I'll forget you mentioned Tom Woodbine. That was beneath even you, Lily."

  "I'm going to hang up now, Sloat. Stay away from here. And stay away from Jack."

  "You are going into a hospital, Lily, and this running around is going to--"

  His mother hung up in the middle of Uncle Morgan's sentence; Jack gently put down his own receiver. Then he took a couple of steps closer to the window, as if not to be seen anywhere near the living-room phone. Only silence came from the closed bedroom.

  "Mom?" he said.

  "Yes, Jacky?" He heard a slight wobble in her voice.

  "You okay? Is everything all right?"

  "Me? Sure." Her footsteps came softly to the door, which cracked open. Their eyes met, his blue to her blue. Lily swung the door all the way open. Again their eyes met, for a moment of uncomfortable intensity. "Of course everything's all right. Why wouldn't it be?" Their eyes disengaged. Knowledge of some kind had passed between them, but what? Jack wondered if she knew that he had listened to her conversation; then he thought that the knowledge they had just shared was--for the first time--the fact of her illness.

  "Well," he said, embarrassed now. His mother's disease, that great unspeakable subject, grew obscenely large between them. "I don't know, exactly. Uncle Morgan seemed . . ." He shrugged.

  Lily shivered, and Jack came to another great recognition. His mother was afraid--at least as afraid as he was.

  She plugged a cigarette in her mouth and snapped open her lighter. Another stabbing look from her deep eyes. "Don't pay any attention to that pest, Jack. I'm just irritated because it really doesn't seem that I'll ever be able to get away from him. Your Uncle Morgan likes to bully me." She exhaled gray smoke. "I'm afraid that I don't have much appetite for breakfast anymore. Why don't you take yourself downstairs and have a real breakfast this time?"

  "Come with me," he said.

  "I'd like to be alone for a while, Jack. Try to understand that."

  Try to understand that.

  Trust me.

  These things that grown-ups said, meaning something else entirely.

  "I'll be more companionable when you come back," she said. "That's a promise."

  And what she was really saying was I want to scream, I can't take any more of this, get out, get out!

  "Should I bring you anything?"

  She shook her head, smiling toughly at him, and he had to leave the room, though he no longer had any stomach for breakfast either. Jack wandered down the corridor to the elevators. Once again, there was only one place to go, but this time he knew it before he ever reached the gloomy lobby and the ashen, censorious desk clerk.

  4

  Speedy Parker was not in the small red-painted shack of an office; he was not out on the long pier, in the arcade where the two old boys were back playing Skee-Ball as if it were a war they both knew they would lose; he was not in the dusty vacancy beneath the roller coaster. Jack Sawyer turned aimlessly in the harsh sunlight, looking down the empty avenues and deserted public places of the park. Jack's fear tightened itself up a notch. Suppose something had happened to Speedy? It was impossible, but what if Uncle Morgan had found out about Speedy (found out what, though?) and had . . . Jack mentally saw the WILD CHILD van careening around a corner, grinding its gears and picking up speed.

  He jerked himself into motion, hardly knowing which way he meant to go. In the bright panic of his mood, he saw Uncle Morgan running past a row of distorting mirrors, turned by them into a series of monstrous and deformed figures. Horns grew on his bald brow, a hump flowered between his fleshy shoulders, his wide fingers became shovels. Jack veered sharply off to the right, and found himself moving toward an oddly shaped, almost round building of white slatlike boards.

  From within it he suddenly heard a rhythmic tap tap tap. The boy ran toward the sound--a wrench hitting a pipe, a hammer striking an anvil, a noise of work. In the midst of the slats he found a doorknob and pulled open a fragile slat-door.

  Jack went forw
ard into striped darkness, and the sound grew louder. The darkness changed form around him, altered its dimensions. He stretched out his hands and touched canvas. This slid aside; instantly, glowing yellow light fell about him. "Travellin Jack," said Speedy's voice.

  Jack turned toward the voice and saw the custodian seated on the ground beside a partially dismantled merry-go-round. He held a wrench in his hand, and before him a white horse with a foamy mane lay impaled by a long silver stake from pommel to belly. Speedy gently put the wrench on the ground. "Are you ready to talk now, son?" he asked.

  4

  Jack Goes Over

  1

  "Yes, I'm ready now," Jack said in a perfectly calm voice, and then burst into tears.

  "Say, Travellin Jack," Speedy said, dropping his wrench and coming to him. "Say, son, take her easy, take her easy now. . . ."

  But Jack couldn't take her easy. Suddenly it was too much, all of it, too much, and it was cry or just sink under a great wave of blackness--a wave which no bright streak of gold could illuminate. The tears hurt, but he sensed the terror would kill him if he did not cry it out.

  "You do your weepin, Travellin Jack," Speedy said, and put his arms around him. Jack put his hot, swollen face against Speedy's thin shirt, smelling the man's smell--something like Old Spice, something like cinnamon, something like books that no one has taken out of the library in a long time. Good smells, comforting smells. He groped his arms around Speedy; his palms felt the bones in Speedy's back, close to the surface, hardly covered by scant meat.

  "You weep if it put you easy again," Speedy said, rocking him. "Sometimes it does. I know. Speedy knows how far you been, Travellin Jack, and how far you got to go, and how you tired. So you weep if it put you easy."

  Jack barely understood the words--only the sounds of them, soothing and calming.

  "My mother's really sick," he said at last against Speedy's chest. "I think she came here to get away from my father's old partner. Mr. Morgan Sloat." He sniffed mightily, let go of Speedy, stepped back, and rubbed at his swollen eyes with the heels of his hands. He was surprised at his lack of embarrassment--always before, his tears had disgusted and shamed him . . . it was almost like peeing your pants. Was that because his mother had always been so tough? He supposed that was part of it, all right; Lily Cavanaugh had little use for tears.