The Talisman

3

Speedy Parker

1

The next day the sun was back—a hard bright sun that layered itself like paint over the flat beach and the slanting, red-tiled strip of roof Jack could see from his bedroom window. A long low wave far out in the water seemed to harden in the light and sent a spear of brightness straight toward his eyes. To Jack this sunlight felt different from the light in California. It seemed somehow thinner, colder, less nourishing. The wave out in the dark ocean melted away, then hoisted itself up again, and a hard dazzling streak of gold leaped across it. Jack turned away from his window. He had already showered and dressed, and his body’s clock told him that it was time to start moving toward the schoolbus stop. Seven-fifteen. But of course he would not go to school today, nothing was normal anymore, and he and his mother would just drift like ghosts through another twelve hours of daytime. No schedule, no responsibilities, no homework . . . no order at all except for that given them by mealtimes.

Was today even a schoolday? Jack stopped short beside his bed, feeling a little flicker of panic that his world had become so formless . . . he didn’t think this was a Saturday. Jack counted back to the first absolutely identifiable day his memory could find, which was the previous Sunday. Counting forward made it Thursday. On Thursdays he had computer class with Mr. Balgo and an early sports period. At least that was what he’d had when his life had been normal, a time that now seemed—though it had come to an end only months ago—irretrievably lost.

He wandered out of his bedroom into the living room. When he tugged at the drawstring for the curtains the hard bright light flooded into the room, bleaching the furniture. Then he punched the button on the television set and dropped himself onto the stiff couch. His mother would not be up for at least another fifteen minutes. Maybe longer, considering that she’d had three drinks with dinner the night before.

Jack glanced toward the door to his mother’s room.

Twenty minutes later he rapped softly at her door. “Mom?” A thick mumble answered him. Jack pushed the door open a crack and looked in. She was lifting her head off the pillow and peering back through half-closed eyes.

“Jacky. Morning. What time?”

“Around eight.”

“God. You starving?” She sat up and pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes.

“Kind of. I’m sort of sick of sitting in here. I just wondered if you were getting up soon.”

“Not if I can help it. You mind? Go down to the dining room, get some breakfast. Mess around on the beach, okay? You’ll have a much better mother today if you give her another hour in bed.”

“Sure,” he said. “Okay. See you later.”

Her head had already dropped back down on the pillow.

Jack switched off the television and let himself out of the room after making sure his key was in the pocket of his jeans.

The elevator smelled of camphor and ammonia—a maid had tipped a bottle off a cart. The doors opened, and the gray desk clerk frowned at him and ostentatiously turned away. Being a movie star’s brat doesn’t make you anything special around here, sonny . . . and why aren’t you in school? Jack turned into the panelled entrance to the dining room—The Saddle of Lamb—and saw rows of empty tables in a shadowy vastness. Perhaps six had been set up. A waitress in a white blouse and red ruffled skirt looked at him, then looked away. Two exhausted-looking old people sat across a table from each other at the other end of the room. There were no other breakfasters. As Jack looked on, the old man leaned over the table and unselfconsciously cut his wife’s fried egg into four-inch square sections.

“Table for one?” The woman in charge of The Saddle of Lamb during the day had materialized beside him, and was already plucking a menu off a stack beside the reservation book.

“Changed my mind, sorry.” Jack escaped.

The Alhambra’s coffee shop, The Beachcomber Lounge, lay all the way across the lobby and down a long bleak corridor lined with empty display cases. His hunger died at the thought of sitting by himself at the counter and watching the bored cook slap down strips of bacon on the crusty grill. He would wait until his mother got up: or, better yet, he would go out and see if he could get a doughnut and a little carton of milk at one of the shops up the street on the way into town.

He pushed open the tall heavy front door of the hotel and went out into the sunlight. For a moment the sudden brightness stung his eyes—the world was a flat glaring dazzle. Jack squinted, wishing he had remembered to bring his sunglasses downstairs. He went across the apron of red brick and down the four curving steps to the main pathway through the gardens at the front of the hotel.

What happened if she died?

What happened to him—where would he go, who would take care of him, if the worst thing in the world actually took place and she died, for good and all died, up in that hotel room?

He shook his head, trying to send the terrible thought away before a lurking panic could rush up out of the Alhambra’s well-ordered gardens and blast him apart. He would not cry, he would not let that happen to him—and he would not let himself think about the Tarrytoons and the weight she had lost, the feeling that he sometimes had that she was too helpless and without direction. He was walking very quickly now, and he shoved his hands into his pockets as he jumped down off the curving path through the gardens onto the hotel’s drive. She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. On the run, but from whom? And to where? Here—just to here, this deserted resort?

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 work-pants, 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.”

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.

“Should 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 forward 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.