The Talisman

9

Jack in the Pitcher Plant

1

Not quite sixty hours later a Jack Sawyer who was in a very different frame of mind from that of the Jack Sawyer who had ventured into the Oatley tunnel on Wednesday was in the chilly storeroom of the Oatley Tap, hiding his pack behind the kegs of Busch which sat in the room’s far corner like aluminum bowling pins in a giant’s alley. In less than two hours, when the Tap finally shut down for the night, Jack meant to run away. That he should even think of it in such a fashion—not leaving, not moving on, but running away—showed how desperate he now believed his situation to be.

I was six, six, John B. Sawyer was six, Jacky was six. Six.

This thought, apparently nonsensical, had fallen into his mind this evening and had begun to repeat there. He supposed it went a long way toward showing just how scared he was now, how certain he was that things were beginning to close in on him. He had no idea what the thought meant; it just circled and circled, like a wooden horse bolted to a carousel.

Six. I was six. Jacky Sawyer was six.

Over and over, round and round she goes.

The storeroom shared a wall in common with the taproom itself, and tonight that wall was actually vibrating with noise; it throbbed like a drumhead. Until twenty minutes before, it had been Friday night, and both Oatley Textiles and Weaving and Dogtown Custom Rubber paid on Friday. Now the Oatley Tap was full to the overflow point . . . and past. A big poster to the left of the bar read OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 220 PERSONS IS IN VIOLATION OF GENESEE COUNTY FIRE CODE 331. Apparently fire code 331 was suspended on the weekends, because Jack guessed there were more than three hundred people out there now, boogying away to a country-western band which called itself The Genny Valley Boys. It was a terrible band, but they had a pedal-steel guitar. “There’s guys around here that’d fuck a pedal-steel, Jack,” Smokey had said.

“Jack!” Lori yelled over the wall of sound.

Lori was Smokey’s woman. Jack still didn’t know what her last name was. He could barely hear her over the juke, which was playing at full volume while the band was on break. All five of them were standing at the far end of the bar, Jack knew, tanking up on half-price Black Russians. She stuck her head through the storeroom door. Tired blond hair, held back with childish white plastic barrettes, glittered in the overhead fluorescent.

“Jack, if you don’t run that keg out real quick, I guess he’ll give your arm a try.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Tell him I’ll be right there.”

He felt gooseflesh on his arms, and it didn’t come entirely from the storeroom’s damp chill. Smokey Updike was no one to fool with—Smokey who wore a succession of paper fry-cook’s hats on his narrow head, Smokey with his large plastic mail-order dentures, grisly and somehow funereal in their perfect evenness, Smokey with his violent brown eyes, the scleras an ancient, dirty yellow. Smokey Updike who in some way still unknown to Jack—and who was all the more frightening for that—had somehow managed to take him prisoner.

The jukebox fell temporarily silent, but the steady roar of the crowd actually seemed to go up a notch to make up for it. Some Lake Ontario cowboy raised his voice in a big, drunken “Yeeeee-HAW!” A woman screamed. A glass broke. Then the jukebox took off again, sounding a little like a Saturn rocket achieving escape velocity.

Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road.

Raw.

Jack bent over one of the aluminum kegs and dragged it out about three feet, his mouth screwed down in a painful wince, sweat standing out on his forehead in spite of the air-conditioned chill, his back protesting. The keg gritted and squealed on the unadorned cement. He stopped, breathing hard, his ears ringing.

He wheeled the hand-truck over to the keg of Busch, stood it up, then went around to the keg again. He managed to rock it up on its rim and walk it forward, toward where the hand-truck stood. As he was setting it down he lost control of it—the big bar-keg weighed only a few pounds less than Jack did himself. It landed hard on the foot of the hand-truck, which had been padded with a remnant of carpet so as to soften just such landings. Jack tried to both steer it and get his hands out of the way in time. He was slow. The keg mashed his fingers against the back of the hand-truck. There was an agonizing thud, and he somehow managed to get his throbbing, pulsing fingers out of there. Jack stuck all the fingers of his left hand in his mouth and sucked on them, tears standing in his eyes.

Worse than jamming his fingers, he could hear the slow sigh of gases escaping through the breather-cap on top of the keg. If Smokey hooked up the keg and it came out foamy . . . or, worse yet, if he popped the cap and the beer went a gusher in his face . . .

Best not to think of those things.

Last night, Thursday night, when he’d tried to “run Smokey out a keg,” the keg had gone right over on its side. The breather-cap had shot clear across the room. Beer foamed white-gold across the storeroom floor and ran down the drain. Jack had stood there, sick and frozen, oblivious to Smokey’s shouts. It wasn’t Busch, it was Kingsland. Not beer but ale—the Queen’s Own.

That was when Smokey hit him for the first time—a quick looping blow that drove Jack into one of the storeroom’s splintery walls.

“There goes your pay for today,” Smokey had said. “And you never want to do that again, Jack.”

What chilled Jack most about that phrase you never want to do that again was what it assumed: that there would be lots of opportunities for him to do that again; as if Smokey Updike expected him to be here a long, long time.

“Jack, hurry it up!”

“Coming.” Jack puffed. He pulled the hand-truck across the room to the door, felt behind himself for the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. He hit something large and soft and yielding.

“Christ, watch it!”

“Whoops, sorry,” Jack said.

“I’ll whoops you, asshole,” the voice replied.

Jack waited until he heard heavy steps moving on down the hall outside the storeroom and then tried the door again.

The hall was narrow and painted a bilious green. It stank of shit and piss and TidyBowl. Holes had been punched through both plaster and lath here and there; graffiti lurched and staggered everywhere, written by bored drunks waiting to use either POINTERS or SETTERS. The largest of them all had been slashed across the green paint with a black Magic Marker, and it seemed to scream out all of Oatley’s dull and objectless fury. SEND ALL AMERICAN NIGGERS AND JEWS TO IRAN, it read.

The noise from the taproom was loud in the storeroom; out here it was a great wave of sound which never seemed to break. Jack took one glance back into the storeroom over the top of the keg tilted on the hand-truck, trying to make sure his pack wasn’t visible.

He had to get out. Had to. The dead phone that had finally spoken, seeming to encase him in a capsule of dark ice . . . that had been bad. Randolph Scott was worse. The guy wasn’t really Randolph Scott; he only looked the way Scott had looked in his fifties films. Smokey Updike was perhaps worse still . . . although Jack was no longer sure of that. Not since he had seen (or thought he had seen) the eyes of the man who looked like Randolph Scott change color.

But that Oatley itself was worst of all . . . he was sure of that.

Oatley, New York, deep in the heart of Genny County, seemed now to be a horrible trap that had been laid for him . . . a kind of municipal pitcher plant. One of nature’s real marvels, the pitcher plant. Easy to get in. Almost impossible to get out.

2

A tall man with a great swinging gut porched in front of him stood waiting to use the men’s room. He was rolling a plastic toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and glaring at Jack. Jack supposed that it was the big man’s gut that he had hit with the door.

“Asshole,” the fat man repeated, and then the men’s-room door jerked open. A man strode out. For a heart-stopping moment his eyes and Jack’s eyes met. It was the man who looked like Randolph Scott. But this was no movie-star; this was just an Oatley millhand drinking up his week’s pay. Later on he would leave in a half-paid-for doorsucker Mustang or maybe on a three-quarters-paid-for motorcycle—a big old Harley with a BUY AMERICAN sticker plastered on the nacelle, probably.

His eyes turned yellow.

No, your imagination, Jack, just your imagination. He’s just—

—just a millhand who was giving him the eye because he was new. He had probably gone to high school here in town, played football, knocked up a Catholic cheerleader and married her, and the cheerleader had gotten fat on chocolates and Stouffer’s frozen dinners; just another Oatley oaf, just—

But his eyes turned yellow.

Stop it! They did not!

Yet there was something about him that made Jack think of what had happened when he was coming into town . . . what had happened in the dark.

The fat man who had called Jack an asshole shrank back from the rangy man in the Levi’s and the clean white T-shirt. Randolph Scott started toward Jack. His big, veined hands swung at his sides.

His eyes sparkled an icy blue . . . and then began to change, to moil and lighten.

“Kid,” he said, and Jack fled with clumsy haste, butting the swinging door open with his fanny, not caring who he hit.

Noise pounced on him. Kenny Rogers was bellowing an enthusiastic redneck paean to someone named Reuben James. “You allus turned your other CHEEK,” Kenny testified to this room of shuffling, sullen-faced drunks, “and said there’s a better world waitin for the MEEK!” Jack saw no one here who looked particularly meek. The Genny Valley Boys were trooping back onto the bandstand and picking up their instruments. All of them but the pedal steel player looked drunk and confused . . . perhaps not really sure of where they were. The pedal steel player only looked bored.

To Jack’s left, a woman was talking earnestly on the Tap’s pay phone—a phone Jack would never touch again if he had his way about it, not for a thousand dollars. As she talked, her drunken companion probed and felt inside her half-open cow-boy shirt. On the big dancefloor, perhaps seventy couples groped and shuffled, oblivious of the current song’s bright up-tempo, simply squeezing and grinding, hands gripping buttocks, lips spit-sealed together, sweat running down cheeks and making large circles under the armpits.

“Well thank Gawd,” Lori said, and flipped up the hinged partition at the side of the bar for him. Smokey was halfway down the bar, filling up Gloria’s tray with gin-and-tonics, vodka sours, and what seemed to be beer’s only competition for the Oatley Town Drink: Black Russians.

Jack saw Randolph Scott come out through the swinging door. He glanced toward Jack, his blue eyes catching Jack’s again at once. He nodded slightly, as if to say: We’ll talk. Yessirree. Maybe we’ll talk about what might or might not be in the Oatley tunnel. Or about bullwhips. Or sick mothers. Maybe we’ll talk about how you’re gonna be in Genny County for a long, long time . . . maybe until you’re an old man crying over a shopping cart. What do you think, Jacky?

Jack shuddered.

Randolph Scott smiled, as if he had seen the shudder . . . or felt it. Then he moved off into the crowd and the thick air.

A moment later Smokey’s thin, powerful fingers bit into Jack’s shoulder—hunting for the most painful place and, as always, finding it. They were educated, nerve-seeking fingers.

“Jack, you just got to move faster,” Smokey said. His voice sounded almost sympathetic, but his fingers dug and moved and probed. His breath smelled of the pink Canada Mints he sucked almost constantly. His mail-order false teeth clicked and clacked. Sometimes there was an obscene slurping as they slipped a little and he sucked them back into place. “You got to move faster or I’m going to have to light a fire under your ass. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Y-yeah,” Jack said. Trying not to moan.

“All right. That’s good then.” For an excruciating second Smokey’s fingers dug even deeper, grinding with a bitter enthusiasm at the neat little nest of nerves there. Jack did moan. That was good enough for Smokey. He let up.

“Help me hook this keg up, Jack. And let’s make it fast. Friday night, people got to drink.”

“Saturday morning,” Jack said stupidly.

“Then, too. Come on.”

Jack somehow managed to help Smokey lift the keg into the square compartment under the bar. Smokey’s thin, ropey muscles bulged and writhed under his Oatley Tap T-shirt. The paper fry-cook’s hat on his narrow weasel’s head stayed in place, its leading edge almost touching his left eyebrow, in apparent defiance of gravity. Jack watched, holding his breath, as Smokey flicked off the red plastic breather-cap on the keg. The keg breathed more gustily than it should have done . . . but it didn’t foam. Jack let his breath out in a silent gust.

Smokey spun the empty toward him. “Get that back in the storeroom. And then swamp out the bathroom. Remember what I told you this afternoon.”

Jack remembered. At three o’clock a whistle like an air-raid siren had gone off, almost making him jump out of his skin. Lori had laughed, had said: Check out Jack, Smokey—I think he just went wee-wee in his Tuffskins. Smokey had given her a narrow, unsmiling look and motioned Jack over. Told Jack that was the payday whistle at the Oatley T & W. Told Jack that a whistle very much like it was going off at Dogtown Rubber, a company that made beach-toys, inflatable rubber dolls, and condoms with names like Ribs of Delight. Soon, he said, the Oatley Tap would begin filling up.

“And you and me and Lori and Gloria are going to move just as fast as lightning,” Smokey said, “because when the eagle screams on Friday, we got to make up for what this place don’t make every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. When I tell you to run me out a keg, you want to have it out to me before I finish yelling. And you’re in the men’s room every half an hour with your mop. On Friday nights, a guy blows his groceries every fifteen minutes or so.”

“I got the women’s,” Lori said, coming over. Her hair was thin, wavy gold, her complexion as white as a comic-book vampire’s. She either had a cold or a bad coke habit; she kept sniffing. Jack guessed it was a cold. He doubted if anyone in Oatley could afford a bad coke habit. “Women ain’t as bad as men, though. Almost, but not quite.”

“Shut up, Lori.”

“Up yours,” she said, and Smokey’s hand flickered out like lightning. There was a crack and suddenly the imprint of Smokey’s palm was printed red on one of Lori’s pallid cheeks like a child’s Tattoodle. She began to snivel . . . but Jack was sickened and bewildered to see an expression in her eyes that was almost happy. It was the look of a woman who believed such treatment was a sign of caring.

“You just keep hustling and we’ll have no problem,” Smokey said. “Remember to move fast when I yell for you to run me out a keg. And remember to get in the men’s can with your mop every half an hour and clean up the puke.”

And then he had told Smokey again that he wanted to leave and Smokey had reiterated his false promise about Sunday afternoon . . . but what good did it do to think of that?

There were louder screams now, and harsh caws of laughter. The crunch of a breaking chair and a wavering yell of pain. A fistfight—the third of the night—had broken out on the dance floor. Smokey uttered a curse and shoved past Jack. “Get rid of that keg,” he said.

Jack got the empty onto the dolly and trundled it back toward the swinging door, looking around uneasily for Randolph Scott as he went. He saw the man standing in the crowd that was watching the fight, and relaxed a little.

In the storeroom he put the empty keg with the others by the loading-bay—Updike’s Oatley Tap had already gone through six kegs tonight. That done, he checked his pack again. For one panicky moment he thought it was gone, and his heart began to hammer in his chest—the magic juice was in there, and so was the Territories coin that had become a silver dollar in this world. He moved to the right, sweat now standing out on his forehead, and felt between two more kegs. There it was—he could trace the curve of Speedy’s bottle through the green nylon of the pack. His heartbeat began to slow down, but he felt shaky and rubber-legged—the way you feel after a narrow escape.

The men’s toilet was a horror. Earlier in the evening Jack might have vomited in sympathy, but now he actually seemed to be getting used to the stench . . . and that was somehow the worst thing of all. He drew hot water, dumped in Comet, and began to run his soapy mop back and forth through the unspeakable mess on the floor. His mind began to go back over the last couple of days, worrying at them the way an animal in a trap will worry at a limb that has been caught.

3

The Oatley Tap had been dark, and dingy, and apparently dead empty when Jack first walked into it. The plugs on the juke, the pinball machine, and the Space Invaders game were all pulled. The only light in the place came from the Busch display over the bar—a digital clock caught between the peaks of two mountains, looking like the weirdest UFO ever imagined.

Smiling a little, Jack walked toward the bar. He was almost there when a flat voice said from behind him, “This is a bar. No minors. What are you, stupid? Get out.”

Jack almost jumped out of his skin. He had been touching the money in his pocket, thinking it would go just as it had at the Golden Spoon: he would sit on a stool, order something, and then ask for the job. It was of course illegal to hire a kid like him—at least without a work permit signed by his parents or a guardian—and that meant they could get him for under the minimum wage. Way under. So the negotiations would start, usually beginning with Story #2—Jack and the Evil Stepfather.

He whirled around and saw a man sitting alone in one of the booths, looking at him with chilly, contemptuous alertness. The man was thin, but ropes of muscles moved under his white undershirt and along the sides of his neck. He wore baggy white cook’s pants. A paper cap was cocked forward over his left eyebrow. His head was narrow, weasellike. His hair was cut short, graying at the edges. Between his big hands were a stack of invoices and a Texas Instruments calculator.

“I saw your Help Wanted sign,” Jack said, but now without much hope. This man was not going to hire him, and Jack was not sure he would want to work for him anyway. This guy looked mean.

“You did, huh?” the man in the booth said. “You must have learned to read on one of the days you weren’t playing hooky.” There was a package of Phillies Cheroots on the table. He shook one out.

“Well, I didn’t know it was a bar,” Jack said, taking a step back toward the door. The sunlight seemed to come through the dirty glass and then just fall dead on the floor, as if the Oatley Tap were located in a slightly different dimension. “I guess I thought it was . . . you know, a bar and grill. Something like that. I’ll just be going.”

“Come here.” The man’s brown eyes were looking at him steadily now.

“No, hey, that’s all right,” Jack said nervously. “I’ll just—”

“Come here. Sit down.” The man popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail and lit the cigar. A fly which had been preening on his paper hat buzzed away into the darkness. His eyes remained on Jack. “I ain’t gonna bite you.”

Jack came slowly over to the booth, and after a moment he slipped in on the other side and folded his hands in front of him neatly. Some sixty hours later, swamping out the men’s toilet at twelve-thirty in the morning with his sweaty hair hanging in his eyes, Jack thought—no, he knew—that it was his own stupid confidence that had allowed the trap to spring shut (and it had shut the moment he sat down opposite Smokey Updike, although he had not known it then). The Venus flytrap is able to close on its hapless, insectile victims; the pitcher plant, with its delicious smell and its deadly, glassy-smooth sides, only waits for some flying asshole of a bug to buzz on down and inside . . . where it finally drowns in the rainwater the pitcher collects. In Oatley the pitcher was full of beer instead of rainwater—that was the only difference.

If he had run—

But he hadn’t run. And maybe, Jack thought, doing his best to meet that cold brown stare, there would be a job here after all. Minette Banberry, the woman who owned and operated the Golden Spoon in Auburn, had been pleasant enough to Jack, had even given him a little hug and a peck of a kiss as well as three thick sandwiches when he left, but he had not been fooled. Pleasantness and even a remote sort of kindness did not preclude a cold interest in profits, or even something very close to outright greed.

The minimum wage in New York was three dollars and forty cents an hour—that information had been posted in the Golden Spoon’s kitchen by law, on a bright pink piece of paper almost the size of a movie poster. But the short-order cook was a Haitian who spoke little English and was almost surely in the country illegally, Jack thought. The guy cooked like a whiz, though, never allowing the spuds or the fried clams to spend a moment too long in the Fryolaters. The girl who helped Mrs. Banberry with the waitressing was pretty but vacant and on a work-release program for the retarded in Rome. In such cases, the minimum wage did not apply, and the lisping, retarded girl told Jack with unfeigned awe that she was getting a dollar and twenty-five cents each hour, and all for her.

Jack himself was getting a dollar-fifty. He had bargained for that, and he knew that if Mrs. Banberry hadn’t been strapped—her old dishwasher had quit just that morning, had gone on his coffee-break and just never come back—she would not have bargained at all; would have simply told him take the buck and a quarter, kid, or see what’s down the road. It’s a free country.

Now, he thought, with the unknowing cynicism that was also a part of his new self-confidence, here was another Mrs. Banberry. Male instead of female, rope-skinny instead of fat and grandmotherly, sour instead of smiling, but almost surely a Mrs. Banberry for a’ that and a’ that.

“Looking for a job, huh?” The man in the white pants and the paper hat put his cigar down in an old tin ashtray with the word CAMELS embossed on the bottom. The fly stopped washing its legs and took off.

“Yes, sir, but like you say, this is a bar and all—”

The unease stirred in him again. Those brown eyes and yellowed scleras troubled him—they were the eyes of some old hunting cat that had seen plenty of errant mice like him before.

“Yeah, it’s my place,” the man said. “Smokey Updike.” He held his hand out. Surprised, Jack shook it. It squeezed Jack’s hand once, hard, almost to the point of pain. Then it relaxed . . . but Smokey didn’t let go. “Well?” he said.

“Huh?” Jack said, aware he sounded stupid and a little afraid—he felt stupid and a little afraid. And he wanted Updike to let go of his hand.

“Didn’t your folks ever teach you to innerduce yourself?”

This was so unexpected that Jack came close to gabbling out his real name instead of the one he had used at the Golden Spoon, the name he also used if the people who picked him up asked for his handle. That name—what he was coming to think of as his “road-name”—was Lewis Farren.

“Jack Saw—ah—Sawtelle,” he said.

Updike held his hand yet a moment longer, those brown eyes never moving. Then he let it go. “Jack Saw-ah-Sawtelle,” he said. “Must be the longest fucking name in the phonebook, huh, kid?”

Jack flushed but said nothing.

“You ain’t very big,” Updike said. “You think you could manage to rock a ninety-pound keg of beer up on its side and walk it onto a hand-dolly?”

“I think so,” Jack said, not knowing if he could or not. It didn’t look as if it would be much of a problem, anyway—in a place as dead as this, the guy probably only had to change kegs when the one hooked up to the taps went flat.

As if reading his mind, Updike said, “Yeah, nobody here now. But we get pretty busy by four, five o’clock. And on weekends the place really fills up. That’s when you’d earn your keep, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Jack said. “How much would the job pay?”

“Dollar an hour,” Updike said. “Wish I could pay you more, but—” He shrugged and tapped the stack of bills. He even smiled a little, as if to say You see how it is, kid, everything in Oatley is running down like a cheap pocket-watch someone forgot to wind—ever since about 1971 it’s been running down. But his eyes did not smile. His eyes were watching Jack’s face with still, catlike concentration.

“Gee, that’s not very much,” Jack said. He spoke slowly but he was thinking as fast as he could.

The Oatley Tap was a tomb—there wasn’t even a single bombed-out old alky at the bar nursing a beer and watching General Hospital on the tube. In Oatley you apparently drank in your car and called it a club. A dollar-fifty an hour was a hard wage when you were busting your buns; in a place like this, a buck an hour might be an easy one.

“Nope,” Updike agreed, going back to his calculator, “it ain’t.” His voice said Jack could take it or leave it; there would be no negotiations.

“Might be all right,” Jack said.

“Well, that’s good,” Updike said. “We ought to get one other thing straight, though. Who you running from and who’s looking for you?” The brown eyes were on him again, and they drilled hard. “If you got someone on your backtrail, I don’t want him fucking up my life.”

This did not shake Jack’s confidence much. He wasn’t the world’s brightest kid, maybe, but bright enough to know he wouldn’t last long on the road without a second cover story for prospective employers. This was a Story #2—The Wicked Stepfather.

“I’m from a little town in Vermont,” he said. “Fenderville. My mom and dad got divorced two years ago. My dad tried to get custody of me, but the judge gave me to my mom. That’s what they do most of the time.”

“Fucking-A they do.” He had gone back to his bills and was bent so far over the pocket calculator that his nose was almost touching the keys. But Jack thought he was listening all the same.

“Well, my dad went out to Chicago and he got a job in a plant out there,” Jack said. “He writes to me just about every week, I guess, but he quit coming back last year, when Aubrey beat him up. Aubrey’s—”

“Your stepfather,” Updike said, and for just a moment Jack’s eyes narrowed and his original distrust came back. There was no sympathy in Updike’s voice. Instead, Updike seemed almost to be laughing at him, as if he knew the whole tale was nothing but a great big swatch of whole cloth.

“Yeah,” he said. “My mom married him a year and a half ago. He beats on me a lot.”

“Sad, Jack. Very sad.” Now Updike did look up, his eyes sardonic and unbelieving. “So now you’re off to Shytown, where you and Dads will live happily ever after.”

“Well, I hope so,” Jack said, and he had a sudden inspiration. “All I know is that my real dad never hung me up by the neck in my closet.” He pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, baring the mark there. It was fading now; during his stint at the Golden Spoon it had still been a vivid, ugly red-purple—like a brand. But at the Golden Spoon he’d never had occasion to uncover it. It was, of course, the mark left by the root that had nearly choked the life from him in that other world.

He was gratified to see Smokey Updike’s eyes widen in surprise and what might almost have been shock. He leaned forward, scattering some of his pink and yellow pages. “Holy Jesus, kid,” he said. “Your stepfather did that?”

“That’s when I decided I had to split.”

“Is he going to show up here, looking for his car or his motorcycle or his wallet or his fucking dope-stash?”

Jack shook his head.

Smokey looked at Jack for a moment longer, and then pushed the OFF button on the calculator. “Come on back to the storeroom with me, kid,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to see if you can really rock one of those kegs up on its side. If you can run me out a keg when I need one, you can have the job.”

4

Jack demonstrated to Smokey Updike’s satisfaction that he could get one of the big aluminum kegs up on its rim and walk it forward just enough to get it on the foot of the dolly. He even made it look fairly easy—dropping a keg and getting punched in the nose was still a day away.

“Well, that ain’t too bad,” Updike said. “You ain’t big enough for the job and you’ll probably give yourself a fucking rupture, but that’s your nevermind.”

He told Jack he could start at noon and work through until one in the morning (“For as long as you can hack it, anyway”). Jack would be paid, Updike said, at closing time each night. Cash on the nail.

They went back out front and there was Lori, dressed in dark blue basketball shorts so brief that the edges of her rayon panties showed, and a sleeveless blouse that had almost surely come from Mammoth Mart in Batavia. Her thin blond hair was held back with plastic barrettes and she was smoking a Pall Mall, its end wet and heavily marked with lipstick. A large silver crucifix dangled between her breasts.

“This is Jack,” Smokey said. “You can take the Help Wanted sign out of the window.”

“Run, kid,” Lori said. “There’s still time.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Make me.”

Updike slapped her butt, not in a loving way but hard enough to send her against the padded edge of the bar. Jack blinked and thought of the sound Osmond’s whip had made.

“Big man,” Lori said. Her eyes brimmed with tears . . . and yet they also looked contented, as if this was just the way things were supposed to be.

Jack’s earlier unease was now clearer, sharper . . . now it was almost fright.

“Don’t let us get on your case, kid,” Lori said, headed past him to the sign in the window. “You’ll be okay.”

“Name’s Jack, not kid,” Smokey said. He had gone back to the booth where he had “interviewed” Jack and began gathering up his bills. “A kid’s a fucking baby goat. Didn’t they teach you that in school? Make the kid a couple of burgers. He’s got to go to work at noon.”

She got the HELP WANTED sign out of the window and put it behind the jukebox with the air of one who has done this a good many times before. Passing Jack, she winked at him.

The telephone rang.

All three of them looked toward it, startled by its abrupt shrilling. To Jack it looked for a moment like a black slug stuck to the wall. It was an odd moment, almost timeless. He had time to notice how pale Lori was—the only color in her cheeks came from the reddish pocks of her fading adolescent acne. He had time to study the cruel, rather secretive planes of Smokey Updike’s face and to see the way the veins stood out on the man’s long hands. Time to see the yellowed sign over the phone reading PLEASE LIMIT YOUR CALLS TO THREE MINUTES.

The phone rang and rang in the silence.

Jack thought, suddenly terrified: It’s for me. Long distance . . . long, LONG distance.

“Answer that, Lori,” Updike said, “what are you, simple?”

Lori went to the phone.

“Oatley Tap,” she said in a trembling, faint voice. She listened. “Hello? Hello? . . . Oh, fuck off.”

She hung up with a bang.

“No one there. Kids. Sometimes they want to know if we got Prince Albert in a can. How do you like your burgers, kid?”

“Jack!” Updike roared.

“Jack, okay, okay, Jack. How do you like your burgers, Jack?”

Jack told her and they came medium, just right, hot with brown mustard and Bermuda onions. He gobbled them and drank a glass of milk. His unease abated with his hunger. Kids, as she had said. Still, his eyes drifted back to the phone every once in a while, and he wondered.

5

Four o’clock came, and as if the Tap’s total emptiness had been only a clever piece of stage setting to lure him in—like the pitcher plant with its innocent look and its tasty smell—the door opened and nearly a dozen men in work-clothes came sauntering in. Lori plugged in the juke, the pinball machine, and Space Invaders game. Several of the men bellowed greetings at Smokey, who grinned his narrow grin, exposing the big set of mail-order dentures. Most ordered beer. Two or three ordered Black Russians. One of them—a member of the Fair Weather Club, Jack was almost sure—dropped quarters into the jukebox, summoning up the voices of Mickey Gilley, Eddie Rabbit, Waylon Jennings, others. Smokey told him to get the mop-bucket and squeegee out of the storeroom and swab down the dancefloor in front of the bandstand, which waited, deserted, for Friday night and The Genny Valley Boys. He told Jack when it was dry he wanted him to put the Pledge right to it. “You’ll know it’s done when you can see your own face grinnin up at you,” Smokey said.

6

So his time of service at Updike’s Oatley Tap began.

We get pretty busy by four, five o’clock.

Well, he couldn’t very well say that Smokey had lied to him. Up until the very moment Jack pushed away his plate and began making his wage, the Tap had been deserted. But by six o’clock there were maybe fifty people in the Tap, and the brawny waitress—Gloria—came on duty to yells and hooraws from some of the patrons. Gloria joined Lori, serving a few carafes of wine, a lot of Black Russians, and oceans of beer.

Besides the kegs of Busch, Jack lugged out case after case of bottled beer—Budweiser, of course, but also such local favorites as Genesee, Utica Club, and Rolling Rock. His hands began to blister, his back to ache.

Between trips to the storeroom for cases of bottled beer and trips to the storeroom to “run me out a keg, Jack” (a phrase for which he was already coming to feel an elemental dread), he went back to the dancefloor, the mop-bucket, and the big bottle of Pledge. Once an empty beer-bottle flew past his head, missing him by inches. He ducked, heart racing, as it shattered against the wall. Smokey ran the drunken perpetrator out, his dentures bared in a great false alligator grin. Looking out the window, Jack saw the drunk hit a parking-meter hard enough to pop the red VIOLATION flag up.

“Come on, Jack,” Smokey called impatiently from the bar, “it missed you, didn’t it? Clean that mess up!”

Smokey sent him into the men’s can half an hour later. A middle-aged man with a Joe Pyne haircut was standing woozily at one of the two ice-choked urinals, one hand braced against the wall, the other brandishing a huge uncircumcised penis. A puddle of puke steamed between his spraddled workboots.

“Clean her up, kid,” the man said, weaving his way back toward the door and clapping Jack on the back almost hard enough to knock him over. “Man’s gotta make room any way he can, right?”

Jack was able to wait until the door closed, and then he could control his gorge no longer.

He managed to make it into the Tap’s only stall, where he was faced with the unflushed and sickeningly fragrant spoor of the last customer. Jack vomited up whatever remained of his dinner, took a couple of hitching breaths, and then vomited again. He groped for the flush with a shaking hand and pushed it. Waylon and Willie thudded dully through the walls, singing about Luckenbach, Texas.

Suddenly his mother’s face was before him, more beautiful than it had ever been on any movie screen, her eyes large and dark and sorrowing. He saw her alone in their rooms at the Alhambra, a cigarette smouldering forgotten in the ashtray beside her. She was crying. Crying for him. His heart seemed to hurt so badly that he thought he would die from love for her and want of her—for a life where there were no things in tunnels, no women who somehow wanted to be slapped and made to cry, no men who vomited between their own feet while taking a piss. He wanted to be with her and hated Speedy Parker with a black completeness for ever having set his feet on this awful road west.

In that moment whatever might have remained of his self-confidence was demolished—it was demolished utterly and forever. Conscious thought was overmastered by a deep, elemental, wailing, childish cry: I want my mother please God I want my MOTHER—

He trembled his way out of the stall on watery legs, thinking Okay that’s it everybody out of the pool fuck you Speedy this kid’s going home. Or whatever you want to call it. In that moment he didn’t care if his mother might be dying. In that moment of inarticulate pain he became totally Jack’s Jack, as unconsciously self-serving as an animal on which any carnivore may prey: deer, rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk. In that moment he would have been perfectly willing to let her die of the cancer metastasizing wildly outward from her lungs if only she would hold him and then kiss him goodnight and tell him not to play his goddam transistor in bed or read with a flashlight under the covers for half the night.

He put his hand against the wall and little by little managed to get hold of himself. This taking-hold was no conscious thing but a simple tightening of the mind, something that was very much Phil Sawyer and Lily Cavanaugh. He’d made a mistake, yeah, but he wasn’t going back. The Territories were real and so the Talisman might also be real; he was not going to murder his mother with faintheartedness.

Jack filled his mop-bucket with hot water from the spigot in the storeroom and cleaned up the mess.

When he came out again, it was half past ten and the crowd in the Tap began to thin out—Oatley was a working town, and its working drinkers went home early on weeknights.

Lori said, “You look as pale as pastry, Jack. You okay?”

“Do you think I could have a gingerale?” he asked.

She brought him one and Jack drank it while he finished waxing the dancefloor. At quarter to twelve Smokey ordered him back to the storeroom to “run out a keg.” Jack managed the keg—barely. At quarter to one Smokey started bawling for people to finish up. Lori unplugged the juke—Dick Curless died with a long, unwinding groan—to a few half-hearted cries of protest. Gloria unplugged the games, donned her sweater (it was as pink as the Canada Mints Smokey ate regularly, as pink as the false gums of his dentures), and left. Smokey began to turn out the lights and to urge the last four or five drinkers out the door.

“Okay, Jack,” he said when they were gone. “You did good. There’s room for improvement, but you got a start, anyway. You can doss down in the storeroom.”

Instead of asking for his pay (which Smokey did not offer anyway), Jack stumbled off toward the storeroom, so tired that he looked like a slightly smaller version of the drunks so lately ushered out.

In the storeroom he saw Lori squatting down in one corner—the squat caused her basketball shorts to ride up to a point that was nearly alarming—and for a moment Jack thought with dull alarm that she was going through his knapsack. Then he saw that she had spread a couple of blankets on a layer of burlap apple-sacks. Lori had also put down a small satin pillow which said NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR on one side.

“Thought I’d make you a little nest, kid,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said. It was a simple, almost offhand act of kindness, but Jack found himself having to struggle from bursting into tears. He managed a smile instead. “Thanks a lot, Lori.”

“No problem. You’ll be all right here, Jack. Smokey ain’t so bad. Once you get to know him, he ain’t half bad.” She said this with an unconscious wistfulness, as if wishing it were so.

“Probably not,” Jack said, and then he added impulsively, “but I’m moving on tomorrow. Oatley’s just not for me, I guess.”

She said: “Maybe you’ll go, Jack . . . and maybe you’ll decide to stay awhile. Why don’t you sleep on it?” There was something forced and unnatural about this little speech—it had none of the genuineness of her grin when she’d said Thought I’d make you a little nest. Jack noticed it, but was too tired to do more than that.

“Well, we’ll see,” he said.

“Sure we will,” Lori agreed, going to the door. She blew a kiss toward him from the palm of one dirty hand. “Good night, Jack.”

“Good night.”

He started to pull off his shirt . . . and then left it on, deciding he would just take off his sneakers. The storeroom was cold and chilly. He sat down on the apple-sacks, pulled the knots, pushed off first one and then the other. He was about to lie back on Lori’s New York World’s Fair souvenir—and he might well have been sound asleep before his head ever touched it—when the telephone began to ring out in the bar, shrilling into the silence, drilling into it, making him think of wavering, pasty-gray roots and bullwhips and two-headed ponies.

Ring, ring, ring, into the silence, into the dead silence.

Ring, ring, ring, long after the kids who call up to ask about Prince Albert in a can have gone to bed. Ring, ring, ring, Hello, Jacky it’s Morgan and I felt you in my woods, you smart little shit I SMELLED you in my woods, and how did you ever get the idea that you were safe in your world? My woods are there, too. Last chance, Jacky. Get home or we send out the troops. You won’t have a chance. You won’t—

Jack got up and ran across the storeroom floor in his stocking feet. A light sweat that felt freezing cold, seemed to cover his entire body.

He opened the door a crack.

Ring, ring, ring, ring.

Then finally: “Hello, Oatley Tap. And this better be good.” Smokey’s voice. A pause. “Hello?” Another pause. “Fuck off!” Smokey hung up with a bang, and Jack heard him re-cross the floor and then start up the stairs to the small overhead apartment he and Lori shared.

7

Jack looked unbelievingly from the green slip of paper in his left hand to the small pile of bills—all ones—and change by his right. It was eleven o’clock the next morning. Thursday morning, and he had asked for his pay.

“What is this?” he asked, still unable to believe it.

“You can read,” Smokey said, “and you can count. You don’t move as fast as I’d like, Jack—at least not yet—but you’re bright enough.”

Now he sat with the green slip in one hand and the money by the other. Dull anger began to pulse in the middle of his forehead like a vein. GUEST CHECK, the green slip was headed. It was the exact same form Mrs. Banberry had used in the Golden Spoon. It read:

1 hmbrg$1.35 1 hmbrg$1.35 1 lrg mk.55 1 gin-ale.55 Tx.30

At the bottom the figure $4.10 was written in large numbers and circled. Jack had made nine dollars for his four-to-one stint. Smokey had charged off nearly half of it; what he had left by his right hand was four dollars and ninety cents.

He looked up, furious—first at Lori, who looked away as if vaguely embarrassed, and then at Smokey, who simply looked back.

“This is a cheat,” he said thinly.

“Jack, that’s not true. Look at the menu prices—”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it!”

Lori flinched a little, as if expecting Smokey to clout him one . . . but Smokey only looked at Jack with a kind of terrible patience.

“I didn’t charge you for your bed, did I?”

“Bed!” Jack shouted, feeling the hot blood boil up into his cheeks. “Some bed! Cut-open burlap bags on a concrete floor! Some bed! I’d like to see you try to charge me for it, you dirty cheat!”

Lori made a scared sound and shot a look at Smokey . . . but Smokey only sat across from Jack in the booth, the thick blue smoke of a Cheroot curling up between them. A fresh paper fry-cook’s hat was cocked forward on Smokey’s narrow head.

“We talked about you dossing down back there,” Smokey said. “You asked if it came with the job. I said it did. No mention was made of your meals. If it had been brought up, maybe something could have been done. Maybe not. Point is, you never brought it up, so now you got to deal with that.”

Jack sat shaking, tears of anger standing in his eyes. He tried to talk and nothing came out but a small strangled groan. He was literally too furious to speak.

“Of course, if you wanted to discuss an employees’ discount on your meals now—”

“Go to hell!” Jack managed finally, snatching up the four singles and the little strew of change. “Teach the next kid who comes in here how to look out for number one! I’m going!”

He crossed the floor toward the door, and in spite of his anger he knew—did not just think but flat-out knew—that he wasn’t going to make the sidewalk.

“Jack.”

He touched the doorknob, thought of grasping it and turning it—but that voice was undeniable and full of a certain threat. He dropped his hand and turned around, his anger leaving him. He suddenly felt shrunken and old. Lori had gone behind the bar, where she was sweeping and humming. She had apparently decided that Smokey wasn’t going to work Jack over with his fists, and since nothing else really mattered, everything was all right.

“You don’t want to leave me in the lurch with my weekend crowd coming up.”

“I want to get out of here. You cheated me.”

“No sir,” Smokey said, “I explained that. If anyone blotted your copybook, Jack, it was you. Now we could discuss your meals—fifty percent off the food, maybe, and even free sodas. I never went that far before with the younger help I hire from time to time, but this weekened’s going to be especially hairy, what with all the migrant labor in the county for the apple-picking. And I like you, Jack. That’s why I didn’t clout you one when you raised your voice to me, although maybe I should have. But I need you over the weekend.”

Jack felt his rage return briefly, and then die away again.

“What if I go anyhow?” he asked. “I’m five dollars to the good, anyway, and being out of this shitty little town might be just as good as a bonus.”

Looking at Jack, still smiling his narrow smile, Smokey said, “You remember going into the men’s last night to clean after some guy who whoopsed his cookies?”

Jack nodded.

“You remember what he looked like?”

“Crewcut. Khakis. So what?”

“That’s Digger Atwell. His real name’s Carlton, but he spent ten years taking care of the town cemeteries, so everyone got calling him Digger. That was—oh, twenty or thirty years ago. He went on the town cops back around the time Nixon got elected President. Now he’s Chief of Police.”

Smokey picked up his Cheroot, puffed at it, and looked at Jack.

“Digger and me go back,” Smokey said. “And if you was to just walk out of here now, Jack, I couldn’t guarantee that you wouldn’t have some trouble with Digger. Might end up getting sent home. Might end up picking the apples on the town’s land—Oatley Township’s got . . . oh, I guess forty acres of good trees. Might end up getting beat up. Or . . . I’ve heard that ole Digger’s got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly.”

Jack thought of that clublike penis. He felt both sick and cold.

“In here, you’re under my wing, so to speak,” Smokey said. “Once you hit the street, who can say? Digger’s apt to be cruising anyplace. You might get over the town line with no sweat. On the other hand, you might just see him pulling up beside you in that big Plymouth he drives. Digger ain’t totally bright, but he does have a nose, sometimes, Or . . . someone might give him a call.”

Behind the bar, Lori was doing dishes. She dried her hands, turned on the radio, and began to sing along with an old Steppenwolf song.

“Tell you what,” Smokey said. “Hang in there, Jack. Work the weekend. Then I’ll pack you into my pick-up and drive you over the town line myself. How would that be? You’ll go out of here Sunday noon with damn near thirty bucks in your poke that you didn’t have coming in. You’ll go out thinking that Oatley’s not such a bad place after all. So what do you say?”

Jack looked into those brown eyes, noted the yellow scleras and the small flecks of red; he noted Smokey’s big, sincere smile lined with false teeth; he even saw with a weird and terrifying sense of déjà vu that the fly was back on the paper fry-cook’s hat, preening and washing its hair-thin forelegs.

He suspected Smokey knew that he knew that everything Updike had said was a lie, and didn’t even care. After working into the early hours of Saturday morning and then Sunday morning, Jack would sleep until maybe two Sunday afternoon. Smokey would tell him he couldn’t give him that ride because Jack had woken up too late; now he, Smokey, was too busy watching the Colts and the Patriots. And Jack would not only be too tired to walk, he would be too afraid that Smokey might lose interest in the Colts and Patriots just long enough to call his good friend Digger Atwell and say, “He’s walking down Mill Road right now, Digger old boy, why don’t you pick him up? Then get over here for the second half. Free beer, but don’t you go puking in my urinal until I get the kid back here.”

That was one scenario. There were others that he could think of, each a little different, each really the same at bottom.

Smokey Updike’s smile widened a little.