The Talisman

21

The Sunlight Home

1

The Home looked like something made from a child’s blocks, Jack thought—it had grown randomly as more space was needed. Then he saw that the numerous windows were barred, and the sprawling building immediately seemed penal, rather than childish.

Most of the boys in the fields had put down their tools to watch the progress of the police car.

Franky Williams pulled up into the wide, rounded end of the drive. As soon as he had cut off his engine, a tall figure stepped through the front door and stood regarding them from the top of the steps, his hands knitted together before him. Beneath a full head of longish wavy white hair, the man’s face seemed unrealistically youthful—as if these chipped, vitally masculine features had been created or at least assisted by plastic surgery. It was the face of a man who could sell anything, anywhere, to anybody. His clothes were as white as his hair: white suit, white shoes, white shirt, and a trailing white silk scarf around his neck. As Jack and Wolf got out of the back seat, the man in white pulled a pair of dark green sunglasses from his suitpocket, put them on, and appeared to examine the two boys for a moment before smiling—long creases split his cheeks. Then he removed the sunglasses and put them back in his pocket.

“Well,” he said. “Well, well, well. Where would we all be without you, Officer Williams?”

“Afternoon, Reverend Gardener,” the policeman said.

“Is it the usual sort of thing, or were these two bold fellows actually engaged in criminal activity?”

“Vagrants,” said the cop. Hands on hips, he squinted up at Gardener as if all that whiteness hurt his eyes. “Refused to give Fairchild their right names. This one, the big one,” he said, pointing a thumb at Wolf, “he wouldn’t talk at all. I had to nail him in the head just to get him in the car.”

Gardener shook his head tragically. “Why don’t you bring them up here so they can introduce themselves, and then we’ll take care of the various formalities. Is there any reason why the two of them should look so, ah, shall we say, ’befuddled’?”

“Just that I cracked that big one behind the ears.”

“Ummmmm.” Gardener stepped backward, steepling his fingers before his chest.

As Williams prodded the boys up the steps to the long porch, Gardener cocked his head and regarded his new arrivals. Jack and Wolf reached the top of the steps and moved tentatively onto the surface of the porch. Franky Williams wiped his forehead and huffed himself up beside them. Gardener was smiling mistily, but his eyes switched back and forth between the boys. The second after something hard, cold, and familiar jumped out of his eyes at Jack, the Reverend again twitched the sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. The smile remained misty and delicate, but even wrapped as he was in a sense of false security, Jack felt frozen by that glance—because he had seen it before.

Reverend Gardener pulled the sunglasses below the bridge of his nose and peered playfully over the tops of the frames. “Names? Names? Might we have some names from you two gentlemen?”

“I’m Jack,” the boy said, and then stopped—he did not want to say one more word until he had to. Reality seemed to fold and buckle about Jack for a moment: he felt that he had been jerked back into the Territories, but that now the Territories were evil and threatening, and that foul smoke, jumping flames, the screams of tortured bodies filled the air.

A powerful hand closed over his elbow and held him upright. Instead of the foulness and smoke, Jack smelled some heavy sweet cologne, applied too liberally. A pair of melancholy gray eyes were looking directly into his.

“And have you been a bad boy, Jack? Have you been a very bad boy?”

“No, we were just hitching, and—”

“I think you’re a trifle stoned,” said the Reverend Gardener. “We’ll have to see that you get some special attention, won’t we?” The hand released his elbow; Gardener stepped neatly away, and pushed the sunglasses up over his eyes again. “You do possess a last name, I imagine.”

“Parker,” Jack said.

“Yesss.” Gardener whipped the glasses off his head, executed a dancing little half-turn, and was scrutinizing Wolf. He had given no indication whether he believed Jack or not.

“My,” he said. “You’re a healthy specimen, aren’t you? Positively strapping. We’ll certainly be able to find a use for a big strong boy like you around here, praise the Lord. And might I ask you to emulate Mr. Jack Parker here, and give me your name?”

Jack looked uneasily at Wolf. His head was bowed, and he was breathing heavily. A glistening line of slobber went from the corner of his mouth to his chin. A black smudge, half-dirt, half-grease, covered the front of the stolen Athletic Department sweatshirt. Wolf shook his head, but the gesture seemed to have no content—he might have been shaking away a fly.

“Name, son? Name? Name? Are you called Bill? Paul? Art? Sammy? No—something exceedingly foursquare, I’m sure. George, perhaps?”

“Wolf,” said Wolf.

“Ah, that is nice.” Gardener beamed at both of them. “Mr. Parker and Mr. Wolf. Perhaps you’ll escort them inside, Officer Williams? And aren’t we happy that Mr. Bast is in residence already? For the presence of Mr. Hector Bast—one of our stewards, by the way—means that we shall probably be able to outfit Mr. Wolf.” He peered at the two boys over the frames of his sunglasses. “One of our beliefs here at the Scripture Home is that the soldiers of the Lord march best when they march in uniform. And Heck Bast is nearly as large as your friend Wolf, young Jack Parker. So from the points of view of both clothing and discipline you shall be very well served indeed. A comfort, yes?”

“Jack,” Wolf said in a low voice.

“Yes.”

“My head hurts, Jack. Hurts bad.”

“Your little head pains you, Mr. Wolf?” Reverend Sunlight Gardener half-danced toward Wolf and gently patted his arm. Wolf snatched his arm away, his face working into an exaggerated reflex of disgust. The cologne, Jack knew—that heavy cloying odor would have been like ammonia in Wolf’s sensitive nostrils.

“Never mind, son,” said Gardener, seemingly unaffected by Wolf’s withdrawal from him. “Mr. Bast or Mr. Singer, our other steward, will see to that inside. Frank, I thought I told you to get them into the Home.”

Officer Williams reacted as if he had been jabbed in the back with a pin. His face grew more feverish, and he jerked his peculiar body across the porch to the front door.

Sunlight Gardener twinkled at Jack again, and the boy saw that all his dandified animation was only a kind of sterile self-amusement: the man in white was cold and crazy within. A heavy gold chain rattled out of Gardener’s sleeve and came to rest against the base of his thumb. Jack heard the whistle of a whip cutting through the air, and this time he recognized Gardener’s dark gray eyes.

Gardener was Osmond’s Twinner.

“Inside, young fellows,” Gardener said, half-bowing and indicating the open door.

2

“By the way, Mr. Parker,” Gardener said, once they had gone in, “is it possible that we’ve met before? There must be some reason you look so familiar to me, mustn’t there?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, looking carefully around the odd interior of the Scripture Home.

Long couches covered with a dark blue fabric sat against the wall on the forest-green carpet; two massive leather-topped desks had been placed against the opposite wall. At one of the desks a pimply teenager glanced at them dully, then returned to the video screen before him, where a TV preacher was inveighing against rock and roll. The teenage boy seated at the adjoining desk straightened up and fixed Jack with an aggressive stare. He was slim and black-haired and his narrow face looked clever and bad-tempered. To the pocket of his white turtleneck sweater was pinned a rectangular nameplate of the sort worn by soldiers: SINGER.

“But I do think we have met each other somewhere, don’t you, my lad? I assure you, we must have—I don’t forget, I am literally incapable of forgetting, the face of a boy I have encountered. Have you ever been in trouble before this, Jack?”

Jack said, “I never saw you before.”

Across the room, a massive boy had lifted himself off one of the blue couches and was now standing at attention. He too wore a white turtleneck sweater and a military nameplate. His hands wandered nervously from his sides to his belt, into the pockets of his blue jeans, back to his sides. He was at least six-three and seemed to weigh nearly three hundred pounds. Acne burned across his cheeks and forehead. This, clearly, was Bast.

“Well, perhaps it will come to me later,” Sunlight Gardener said. “Heck, come up here and help our new arrivals at the desk, will you?”

Bast lumbered forward, scowling. He made a point of coming up very close to Wolf before he sidestepped past him, scowling more fiercely all the while—if Wolf had opened his eyes, which he did not, he would have seen no more than the ravaged moonscape of Bast’s forehead and the mean small eyes, like a bear’s eyes, bulging up at him from beneath crusty brows. Bast switched his gaze to Jack, muttered, “C’mon,” and flapped a hand toward the desk.

“Registration, then take them up to the laundry for clothes,” Gardener said in a flat voice. He smiled with chromelike brilliance at Jack. “Jack Parker,” he said softly. “I wonder who you really are, Jack Parker. Bast, make sure everything is out of his pockets.”

Bast grinned.

Sunlight Gardener drifted across the room toward an obviously impatient Franky Williams and languidly withdrew a long leather wallet from his jacket’s inside pocket. Jack saw him begin to count money out into the policeman’s hands.

“Pay attention, snotface,” said the boy behind the desk, and Jack snapped around to face him. The boy was playing with a pencil, the smirk on his face an utterly inadequate disguise for what seemed to Jack’s keyed-up perceptions his characteristic anger—a rage that bubbled far down within him, eternally stoked. “Can he write?”

“Jeez, I don’t think so,” Jack said.

“Then you’ll have to sign in for him.” Singer shoved two legal-sized sheets of paper at him. “Print on the top line, write on the bottom one. Where the X’s are.” He fell back into his chair, raising the pencil to his lips, and slumped eloquently into its corner. Jack supposed that was a trick learned from the very Reverend Sunlight Gardener.

JACK PARKER, he printed, and scrawled something like that at the bottom of the sheet. PHILIP JACK WOLF. Another scrawl, even less like his real handwriting.

“Now you’re wards of the State of Indiana, and that’s what you’ll be for the next thirty days, unless you decide to stay longer.” Singer twitched the papers back toward himself. “You’ll be—”

“Decide?” Jack asked. “What do you mean, decide?”

A trifle of red grew smooth beneath Singer’s cheeks. He jerked his head to one side and seemed to smile. “I guess you don’t know that over sixty percent of our kids are here voluntarily. It’s possible, yeah. You could decide to stay here.”

Jack tried to keep his face expressionless.

Singer’s mouth twitched violently, as if a fishhook had snagged it. “This is a pretty good place, and if I ever hear you ranking it I’ll pound the shit out of you—it’s the best place you’ve ever been in, I’m sure. I’ll tell you another thing: you got no choice. You have to respect the Sunlight Home. You understand?”

Jack nodded his head.

“How about him? Does he?”

Jack looked up at Wolf, who was blinking slowly and breathing through his mouth.

“I think so.”

“All right. The two of you will be bunkmates. The day starts at five in the morning, when we have chapel. Fieldwork until seven, then breakfast in the dining hall. Back to the field until noon, when we get lunch plus Bible readings—everybody gets a crack at this, so you better start thinking about what you’ll read. None of that sexy stuff from the Song of Songs, either, unless you want to find out what discipline means. More work after lunch.”

He looked sharply up at Jack. “Hey, don’t think that you work for nothing at the Sunlight Home. Part of our arrangement with the state is that everybody gets a fair hourly wage, which is set against the cost of keeping you here—clothes and food, electricity, heating, stuff like that. You are credited fifty cents an hour. That means that you earn five dollars a day for the hours you put in—thirty dollars a week. Sundays are spent in the Sunlight Chapel, except for the hour when we actually put on the Sunlight Gardener Gospel Hour.”

The red smoothed itself out under the surface of his skin again, and Jack nodded in recognition, being more or less obliged to.

“If you turn out right and if you can talk like a human being, which most people can’t, then you might get a shot at OS—Outside Staff. We’ve got two squads of OS, one that works the streets, selling hymn sheets and flowers and Reverend Gardener’s pamphlets, and the other one on duty at the airport. Anyhow, we got thirty days to turn you two scumbags around and make you see how dirty and filthy and diseased your crummy lives were before you came here, and this is where we start, right now exactly.”

Singer stood up, his face the color of a blazing autumn leaf, and delicately set the tips of his fingers atop his desk. “Empty your pockets. Right now.”

“Right here and now,” Wolf mumbled, as if by rote.

“TURN EM OUT!” Singer shouted. “I WANT TO SEE IT ALL!”

Bast stepped up beside Wolf. Reverend Gardener, having seen Franky Williams to his car, drifted expressively into Jack’s vicinity.

“Personal possessions tend to tie our boys too much to the past, we’ve found,” Gardener purred to Jack. “Destructive. We find this a very helpful tool.”

“EMPTY YOUR POCKETS!” Singer bawled, now nearly in a straightforward rage.

Jack pulled from his pockets the random detritus of his time on the road. A red handkerchief Elbert Palamountain’s wife had given him when she’d seen him wipe his nose on his sleeve, two matchbooks, the few dollars and scattered change that was all of his money—a total of six dollars and forty-two cents—the key to room 407 of the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. He closed his fingers over the three objects he intended to keep. “I guess you want my pack, too,” he said.

“Sure, you sorry little fart,” Singer ranted, “of course we want your foul backpack, but first we want whatever you’re trying to hide. Get it out—right now.”

Reluctantly Jack took Speedy’s guitar-pick, the croaker marble, and the big wheel of the silver dollar from his pocket and put them in the nest of the handkerchief. “They’re just good-luck stuff.”

Singer snatched up the pick. “Hey, what’s this? I mean, what is it?”

“Fingerpick.”

“Yeah, sure.” Singer turned it over in his fingers, sniffed it. If he had bitten it, Jack would have slugged him in the face. “Fingerpick. You tellin me the truth?”

“A friend of mine gave it to me,” Jack said, and suddenly felt as lonely and adrift as he ever had during these weeks of travelling. He thought of Snowball outside the shopping mall, who had looked at him with Speedy’s eyes, who in some fashion Jack did not understand had actually been Speedy Parker. Whose name he had just adopted for his own.

“Bet he stole it,” Singer said to no one in particular, and dropped the pick back into the handkerchief beside the coin and the marble. “Now the knapsack.” When Jack had unshouldered the backpack, handed it over, Singer pawed through it for some minutes in growing distaste and frustration. The distaste was caused by the condition of the few clothes Jack had left, the frustration by the reluctance of the pack to yield up any drugs.

Speedy, where are you now?

“He’s not holding,” Singer complained. “You think we should do a skin search?”

Gardener shook his head. “Let us see what we can learn from Mr. Wolf.”

Bast shouldered up even closer. Singer said, “Well?”

“He doesn’t have anything in his pockets,” Jack said.

“I want those pockets EMPTY! EMPTY!” Singer yelled. “ON THE TABLE!”

Wolf tucked his chin into his chest and clamped his eyes shut.

“You don’t have anything in your pockets, do you?” Jack asked.

Wolf nodded once, very slowly.

“He’s holding! The dummy’s holding!” Singer crowed. “Come on, you big dumb idiot, get the stuff out on the table.” He clapped his hands sharply together twice. “Oh wow, Williams never searched him! Fairchild never did! This is incredible—they’re going to look like such morons.”

Bast shoved his face up to Wolf’s and snarled, “If you don’t empty your pockets onto that table in a hurry, I’m going to tear your face off.”

Jack softly said, “Do it, Wolf.”

Wolf groaned. Then he removed his balled right hand from its overall pocket. He leaned over the desk, brought his hand forward, and opened his fingers. Three wooden matches and two small water-polished stones, grained and straited and colorful, fell out onto the leather. When his left hand opened, two more pretty little stones rolled alongside the others.

“Pills!” Singer snatched at them.

“Don’t be an idiot, Sonny,” Gardener said.

“You made me look like a jerk,” Singer said in low but vehement tones to Jack as soon as they were on the staircase to the upper floors. These stairs were covered with a shabby rose-patterned carpet. Only the principal downstairs rooms of the Sunlight Scripture Home had been decorated, dressed up—the rest of it looked rundown and ill cared for. “You’re gonna be sorry, I promise you that—in this place, nobody makes Sonny Singer into a jackass. I practically run this place, you two idiots. Christ!” He pushed his burning narrow face into Jack’s. “That was a great stunt back there, the dummy and his fuckin stones. It’ll be a long time before you get over that one.”

“I didn’t know he had anything in his pockets,” Jack said.

A step ahead of Jack and Wolf, Singer abruptly stopped moving. His eyes narrowed; his entire face seemed to contract. Jack understood what was going to happen a second before Singer’s hand slapped stingingly over the side of his face.

“Jack?” Wolf whispered.

“I’m okay,” he said.

“When you hurt me, I’ll hurt you back twice as bad,” Singer said to Jack. “When you hurt me in front of Reverend Gardener, I’ll hurt you four times as bad, you got that?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I think I got it. Aren’t we supposed to get some clothes?”

Singer whirled around and marched upward, and for a second Jack stood still and watched the other boy’s thin intense back go up the stairs. You, too, he said to himself. You and Osmond. Someday. Then he followed, and Wolf trudged after.

In a long room stacked with boxes Singer fidgeted at the door while a tall boy with a passionless bland face and the demeanor of a sleepwalker researched the shelves for their clothes.

“Shoes, too. You get him into regulation shoes or you’re gonna be holding a shovel all day,” Singer said from the doorway, conspicuously not looking at the clerk. Weary disgust—it would have been another of Sunlight Gardener’s lessons.

The boy finally located a size thirteen pair of the heavy square black lace-ups in a corner of the storeroom, and Jack got them on Wolf’s feet. Then Singer took them up another flight to the dormitory floor. Here there was no attempt to disguise the real nature of the Sunlight Home. A narrow corridor ran the entire length of the top of the house—it might have been fifty feet long. Rows of narrow doors with inset eye-level windows marched down either side of the long corridor. To Jack, the so-called dormitory looked like a prison.

Singer took them a short way up the narrow hall and paused before one of the doors. “On their first day, nobody works. You start the full schedule tomorrow. So get in here for now and look at your Bibles or something until five. I’ll come back and let you out in time for the confession period. And change into the Sunlight clothes, hey?”

“You mean you’re going to lock us in there for the next three hours?” Jack asked.

“You want me to hold your hand?” Singer exploded, his face reddening again. “Look. If you were a voluntary, I could let you walk around, get a look at the place. But since you’re a ward of the state on a referral from a local police department, you’re one step up from being a convicted criminal. Maybe in thirty days you’ll be voluntaries, if you’re lucky. In the meantime, get in your room and start acting like a human being made in God’s image instead of like an animal.” He impatiently fitted a key into the lock, swung the door open, and stood beside it. “Get in there. I got work to do.”

“What happens to all our stuff?”

Singer theatrically sighed. “You little creep, do you think we’d be interested in stealing anything you could have?”

Jack kept himself from responding.

Singer sighed again. “Okay. We keep it all for you, in a folder with your name on it. In Reverend Gardener’s office downstairs—that’s where we keep your money, too, right up until the time you get released. Okay? Get in there now before I report you for disobedience. I mean it.”

Wolf and Jack went into the little room. When Singer slammed the door, the overhead light automatically went on, revealing a windowless cubicle with a metal bunkbed, a small corner sink, and a metal chair. Nothing more. On the white Sheetrock walls yellowing tape marks showed where pictures had been put up by the room’s previous inhabitants. The lock clicked shut. Jack and Wolf turned to see Singer’s driven face in the small rectangular window. “Be good, now,” he said, grinning, and disappeared.

“No, Jacky,” Wolf said. The ceiling was no more than an inch from the top of his head. “Wolf can’t stay here.”

“You’d better sit down,” Jack said. “You want the top or the bottom bunk?”

“Huh?”

“Take the bottom one and sit down. We’re in trouble here.”

“Wolf knows, Jacky. Wolf knows. This is a bad bad place. Can’t stay.”

“Why is it a bad place? How do you know it, I mean?”

Wolf sat heavily on the lower bunk, dropped his new clothes on the floor, and idly picked up the book and two pamphlets set out there. The book was a Bible bound in some artificial fabric that looked like blue skin; the pamphlets, Jack saw by looking at those on his own bunk, were entitled The High Road to Everlasting Grace and God Loves You! “Wolf knows. You know, too, Jacky.” Wolf looked up at him, almost scowling. Then he glanced back down at the books in his hands, began turning them over, almost shuffling them. They were, Jack supposed, the first books Wolf had ever seen.

“The white man,” Wolf said, almost too softly for Jack to hear.

“White man?”

Wolf held up one of the pamphlets, its back cover showing. The whole rear cover was a black-and-white photograph of Sunlight Gardener, his beautiful hair lifting in a breeze, his arms outstretched—a man of everlasting grace, beloved of God.

“Him,” Wolf said. “He kills, Jacky. With whips. This is one of his places. No Wolf should ever be in one of his places. No Jack Sawyer, either. Never. We have to get away from here, Jacky.”

“We’ll get out,” Jack said. “I promise you. Not today, not tomorrow—we have to work it out. But soon.”

Wolf’s feet protruded far past the edge of his bunk. “Soon.”

3

Soon, he had promised, and Wolf had required the promise. Wolf was terrified. Jack could not tell if Wolf had ever seen Osmond in the Territories, but he had certainly heard of him. Osmond’s reputation in the Territories, at least among members of the Wolf family, appeared to be even worse than Morgan’s. But though both Wolf and Jack had recognized Osmond in Sunlight Gardener, Gardener had not recognized them—which brought up two possibilities. Either Gardener was just having fun with them, pretending ignorance; or he was a Twinner like Jack’s mother, profoundly connected to a Territories figure but unaware of the connection at any but the deepest level.

And if that was true, as Jack thought it was, then he and Wolf could wait for the really right moment to escape. They had time to watch, time to learn.

Jack put on the scratchy new clothes. The square black shoes seemed to weigh several pounds apiece, and to be suited to either foot. With difficulty, he persuaded Wolf to put on the Sunlight Home uniform. Then the two of them lay down. Jack heard Wolf begin to snore, and after a while, he drifted off himself. In his dreams his mother was somewhere in the dark, calling for him to help her, help her.