The Talisman

2

The Funnel Opens

1

It was a day later, but Jack Sawyer was no wiser. He had, however, had one of the greatest nightmares of all time last night. In it, some terrible creature had been coming for his mother—a dwarfish monstrosity with misplaced eyes and rotting, cheesy skin. “Your mother’s almost dead, Jack, can you say hallelujah?” this monstrosity had croaked, and Jack knew—the way you knew things in dreams—that it was radioactive, and that if it touched him, he would die, too. He had awakened with his body drenched in sweat, on the edge of a bitter scream. It took the steady pounding of the surf to reacquaint him with where he was, and it was hours before he could go back to sleep.

He had meant to tell his mother about the dream this morning, but Lily had been sour and uncommunicative, hiding in a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was only as he started out of the hotel coffee shop on some trumped-up errand that she smiled at him a little.

“Think about what you want to eat tonight.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Anything but fast food. I did not come all the way from L.A. to New Hampshire in order to poison myself with hotdogs.”

“Let’s try one of those seafood places in Hampton Beach,” Jack said.

“Fine. Go on and play.”

Go on and play, Jack thought with a bitterness utterly unlike him. Oh yeah, Mom, way to go. Too cool. Go on and play. With who? Mom, why are you here? Why are we here? How sick are you? How come you won’t talk to me about Uncle Tommy? What’s Uncle Morgan up to? What—

Questions, questions. And not one of them worth a darned thing, because there was no one to answer them.

Unless Speedy—

But that was ridiculous; how could one old black man he’d just met solve any of his problems?

Still, the thought of Speedy Parker danced at the edge of his mind as Jack ambled across the boardwalk and down to the depressingly empty beach.

2

This is where the world ends, right? Jack thought again.

Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The calendar said it was still summer, but summer ended here at Arcadia Beach on Labor Day. The silence was gray as the air.

He looked down at his sneakers and saw that there was some sort of tarry goo on them. Beach crud, he thought. Some kind of pollution. He had no idea where he had picked it up and he stepped back from the edge of the water, uneasy.

The gulls in the air, swooping and crying. One of them screamed overhead and he heard a flat cracking that was almost metallic. He turned in time to see it come in for a fluttering, awkward landing on a hump of rock. The gull turned its head in rapid, almost robotic movements, as if to verify it was alone, and then it hopped down to where the clam it had dropped lay on the smooth, hard-packed sand. The clam had cracked open like an egg and Jack saw raw meat inside, still twitching . . . or perhaps that was his imagination.

Don’t want to see this.

But before he could turn away, the gull’s yellow, hooked beak was pulling at the meat, stretching it like a rubber band, and he felt his stomach knot into a slick fist. In his mind he could hear that stretched tissue screaming—nothing coherent, only stupid flesh crying out in pain.

He tried to look away from the seagull again and he couldn’t. The gull’s beak opened, giving him a brief glimpse of dirty pink gullet. The clam snapped back into its cracked shell and for a moment the gull was looking at him, its eyes a deadly black, confirming every horrible truth: fathers die, mothers die, uncles die even if they went to Yale and look as solid as bank walls in their three-piece Savile Row suits. Kids die too, maybe . . . and at the end all there may be is the stupid, unthinking scream of living tissue.

“Hey,” Jack said aloud, not aware he was doing anything but thinking inside his own head. “Hey, give me a break.”

The gull sat over its catch, regarding him with its beady black eyes. Then it began to dig at the meat again. Want some, Jack? It’s still twitching! By God, it’s so fresh it hardly knows it’s dead!

The strong yellow beak hooked into the meat again and pulled. Strettttchhhhhh—

It snapped. The gull’s head went up toward the gray September sky and its throat worked. And again it seemed to be looking at him, the way the eyes in some pictures seemed always to look at you no matter where you went in the room. And the eyes . . . he knew those eyes.

Suddenly he wanted his mother—her dark blue eyes. He could not remember wanting her with such desperation since he had been very, very small. La-la, he heard her sing inside his head, and her voice was the wind’s voice, here for now, somewhere else all too soon. La-la, sleep now, Jacky, baby-bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting. And all that jazz. Memories of being rocked, his mother smoking one Herbert Tareyton after another, maybe looking at a script—blue pages, she called them, he remembered that: blue pages. La-la, Jacky, all is cool. I love you, Jacky. Shhh . . . sleep. La-la.

The gull was looking at him.

With sudden horror that engorged his throat like hot salt water he saw it really was looking at him. Those black eyes (whose?) were seeing him. And he knew that look.

A raw strand of flesh still dangled from the gull’s beak. As he looked, the gull sucked it in. Its beak opened in a weird but unmistakable grin.

He turned then and ran, head down, eyes shut against the hot salt tears, sneakers digging against the sand, and if there was a way to go up, go up and up, up to some gull’s-eye view, one would have seen only him, only his tracks, in all that gray day; Jack Sawyer, twelve and alone, running back toward the inn, Speedy Parker forgotten, his voice nearly lost in tears and wind, crying the negative over and over again: no and no and no.

3

He paused at the top of the beach, out of breath. A hot stitch ran up his left side from the middle of his ribs to the deepest part of his armpit. He sat down on one of the benches the town put out for old people and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

Got to get control of yourself. If Sergeant Fury goes Section Eight, who’s gonna lead the Howling Commandos?

He smiled and actually did feel a little better. From up here, fifty feet from the water, things looked a little better. Maybe it was the change in barometric pressure, or something. What had happened to Uncle Tommy was horrible, but he supposed he would get over it, learn to accept. That was what his mother said, anyway. Uncle Morgan had been unusually pesty just lately, but then, Uncle Morgan had always been sort of a pest.

As for his mother . . . well, that was the big one, wasn’t it?

Actually, he thought, sitting on the bench and digging at the verge of the sand beyond the boardwalk with one toe, actually his mother might still be all right. She could be all right; it was certainly possible. After all, no one had come right out and said it was the big C, had they? No. If she had cancer, she wouldn’t have brought him here, would she? More likely they’d be in Switzerland, with his mother taking cold mineral baths and scoffing goat-glands, or something. And she would do it, too.

So maybe—

A low, dry whispering sound intruded on his consciousness. He looked down and his eyes widened. The sand had begun to move by the instep of his left sneaker. The fine white grains were sliding around in a small circle perhaps a finger’s length in diameter. The sand in the middle of this circle suddenly collapsed, so that now there was a dimple in the sand. It was maybe two inches deep. The sides of this dimple were also in motion: around and around, moving in rapid counterclockwise circuits.

Not real, he told himself immediately, but his heart began to speed up again. His breathing also began to come faster. Not real, it’s one of the Daydreams, that’s all, or maybe it’s a crab or something . . .

But it wasn’t a crab and it wasn’t one of the Daydreams—this was not the other place, the one he dreamed about when things were boring or maybe a little scary, and it sure as hell wasn’t any crab.

The sand spun faster, the sound arid and dry, making him think of static electricity, of an experiment they had done in science last year with a Leyden jar. But more than either of these, the minute sound was like a long lunatic gasp, the final breath of a dying man.

More sand collapsed inward and began to spin. Now it was not a dimple; it was a funnel in the sand, a kind of reverse dust-devil. The bright yellow of a gum wrapper was revealed, covered, revealed, covered, revealed again—each time it showed up again. Jack could read more of it as the funnel grew: JU, then JUI, then JUICY F. The funnel grew and the sand was jerked away from the gum wrapper again. It was as quick and rude as an unfriendly hand jerking down the covers on a made bed. JUICY FRUIT, he read, and then the wrapper flapped upward.

The sand turned faster and faster, in a hissing fury. Hhhhhhaaaaahhhhhhhh was the sound the sand made. Jack stared at it, fascinated at first, and then horrified. The sand was opening like a large dark eye: it was the eye of the gull that had dropped the clam on the rock and then pulled the living meat out of it like a rubber band.

Hhhhhhaaaahhhhh, the sand-spout mocked in its dead, dry voice. That was not a mind-voice. No matter how much Jack wished it were only in his head, that voice was real. His false teeth flew, Jack, when the old WILD CHILD hit him, out they went, rattledy-bang! Yale or no Yale, when the old WILD CHILD van comes and knocks your false teeth out, Jacky, you got to go. And your mother—

Then he was running again, blindly, not looking back, his hair blown off his forehead, his eyes wide and terrified.

4

Jack walked as quickly as he could through the dim lobby of the hotel. All the atmosphere of the place forbade running: it was as quiet as a library, and the gray light which fell through the tall mullioned windows softened and blurred the already faded carpets. Jack broke into a trot as he passed the desk, and the stooped ashen-skinned day-clerk chose that second to emerge through an arched wooden passage. The clerk said nothing, but his permanent scowl dragged the corners of his mouth another centimeter downward. It was like being caught running in church. Jack wiped his sleeve across his forehead, made himself walk the rest of the way to the elevators. He punched the button, feeling the desk clerk’s frown burning between his shoulder blades. The only time this week that Jack had seen the desk clerk smile had been when the man had recognized his mother. The smile had met only the minimum standards for graciousness.

“I suppose that’s how old you have to be to remember Lily Cavanaugh,” she had said to Jack as soon as they were alone in their rooms. There had been a time, and not so long ago, when being identified, recognized from any one of the fifty movies she had made during the fifties and sixties (“Queen of the Bs,” they called her; her own comment: “Darling of the Drive-ins”)—whether by a cabdriver, waiter, or the lady selling blouses at the Wilshire Boulevard Saks—perked her mood for hours. Now even that simple pleasure had gone dry for her.

Jack jigged before the unmoving elevator doors, hearing an impossible and familiar voice lifting to him from a whirling funnel of sand. For a second he saw Thomas Woodbine, solid comfortable Uncle Tommy Woodbine, who was supposed to have been one of his guardians—a strong wall against trouble and confusion—crumpled and dead on La Cienega Boulevard, his teeth like popcorn twenty feet away in the gutter. He stabbed the button again.

Hurry up!

Then he saw something worse—his mother hauled into a waiting car by two impassive men. Suddenly Jack had to urinate. He flattened his palm against the button, and the bent gray man behind the desk uttered a phlegmy sound of disapproval. Jack pressed the edge of his other hand into that magic place just beneath his stomach which lessened the pressure on his bladder. Now he could hear the slow whir of the descending elevator. He closed his eyes, squeezed his legs together. His mother looked uncertain, lost and confused, and the men forced her into the car as easily as they would a weary collie dog. But that was not really happening, he knew; it was a memory—part of it must have been one of the Daydreams—and it had happened not to his mother but to him.

As the mahogany doors of the elevator slid away to reveal a shadowy interior from which his own face met him in a foxed and peeling mirror, that scene from his seventh year wrapped around him once again, and he saw one man’s eyes turn to yellow, felt the other’s hand alter into something clawlike, hard and inhuman . . . he jumped into the elevator as if he had been jabbed with a fork.

Not possible: the Daydreams were not possible, he had not seen a man’s eyes turning from blue to yellow, and his mother was fine and dandy, there was nothing to be scared of, nobody was dying, and danger was what a seagull meant to a clam. He closed his eyes and the elevator toiled upward.

That thing in the sand had laughed at him.

Jack squeezed through the opening as soon as the doors began to part. He trotted past the closed mouths of the other elevators, turned right into the panelled corridor and ran past the sconces and paintings toward their rooms. Here running seemed less a sacrilege. They had 407 and 408, consisting of two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a living room with a view of the long smooth beach and the vastness of the ocean. His mother had appropriated flowers from somewhere, arranged them in vases, and set her little array of framed photographs beside them. Jack at five, Jack at eleven, Jack as an infant in the arms of his father. His father, Philip Sawyer, at the wheel of the old DeSoto he and Morgan Sloat had driven to California in the unimaginable days when they had been so poor they had often slept in the car.

When Jack threw open 408, the door to the living room, he called out, “Mom? Mom?”

The flowers met him, the photographs smiled; there was no answer. “Mom!” The door swung shut behind him. Jack felt his stomach go cold. He rushed through the living room to the large bedroom on the right. “Mom!” Another vase of tall bright flowers. The empty bed looked starched and ironed, so stiff a quarter would bounce off the quilt. On the bedside table stood an assortment of brown bottles containing vitamins and other pills. Jack backed out. His mother’s window showed black waves rolling and rolling toward him.

Two men getting out of a nondescript car, themselves nondescript, reaching for her . . .

“Mom!” he shouted.

“I hear you, Jack,” came his mother’s voice through the bathroom door. “What on earth . . . ?”

“Oh,” he said, and felt all his muscles relax. “Oh, sorry. I just didn’t know where you were.”

“Taking a bath,” she said. “Getting ready for dinner. Is that still allowed?”

Jack realized that he no longer had to go to the bathroom. He dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs and closed his eyes in relief. She was still okay—

Still okay for now, a dark voice whispered, and in his mind he saw that sand funnel open again, whirling.

5

Seven or eight miles up the coast road, just outside Hampton Township, they found a restaurant called The Lobster Chateau. Jack had given a very sketchy account of his day—already he was backing away from the terror he had experienced on the beach, letting it diminish in his memory. A waiter in a red jacket printed with the yellow image of a lobster across the back showed them to a table beside a long streaky window.

“Would Madam care for a drink?” The waiter had a stony-cold off-season New England face, and looking at it, suspecting the resentment of his Ralph Lauren sport coat and his mother’s carelessly worn Halston afternoon dress behind those watery blue eyes, Jack felt a more familiar terror needle him—simple homesickness. Mom, if you’re not really sick, what the hell are we doing here? The place is empty! It’s creepy! Jesus!

“Bring me an elementary martini,” she said.

The waiter raised his eyebrows. “Madam?”

“Ice in a glass,” she said. “Olive on ice. Tanqueray gin over olive. Then—are you getting this?”

Mom, for God’s sake, can’t you see his eyes? You think you’re being charming—he thinks you’re making fun of him! Can’t you see his eyes?

No. She couldn’t. And that failure of empathy, when she had always been so sharp about how other people were feeling, was another stone against his heart. She was withdrawing . . . in all ways.

“Yes, madam.”

“Then,” she said, “you take a bottle of vermouth—any brand—and hold it against the glass. Then you put the vermouth back on the shelf and bring the glass to me. ’Kay?”

“Yes, madam.” Watery-cold New England eyes, staring at his mother with no love at all. We’re alone here, Jack thought, really realizing it for the first time. Jeez, are we. “Young sir?”

“I’d like a Coke,” Jack said miserably.

The waiter left. Lily rummaged in her purse, came up with a package of Herbert Tarrytoons (so she had called them since he had been a baby, as in “Bring me my Tarrytoons from over there on the shelf, Jacky,” and so he still thought of them) and lit one. She coughed out smoke in three harsh bursts.

It was another stone against his heart. Two years ago, his mother had given up smoking entirely. Jack had waited for her to backslide with that queer fatalism which is the flip side of childish credulity and innocence. His mother had always smoked; she would soon smoke again. But she had not . . . not until three months ago, in New York. Carltons. Walking around the living room in the apartment on Central Park West, puffing like a choo-choo, or squatting in front of the record cabinet, pawing through her old rock records or her dead husband’s old jazz records.

“You smoking again, Mom?” he’d asked her.

“Yeah, I’m smoking cabbage leaves,” she’d said.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why don’t you turn on the TV?” she’d responded with uncharacteristic sharpness, turning toward him, her lips pressed tightly together. “Maybe you can find Jimmy Swaggart or Reverend Ike. Get down there in the hallelujah corner with the amen sisters.”

“Sorry,” he’d muttered.

Well—it was only Carltons. Cabbage leaves. But here were the Herbert Tarrytoons—the blue-and-white old-fashioned pack, the mouthpieces that looked like filters but which weren’t. He could remember, vaguely, his father telling somebody that he smoked Winstons and his wife smoked Black Lungers.

“See anything weird, Jack?” she asked him now, her overbright eyes fixed on him, the cigarette held in its old, slightly eccentric position between the second and third fingers of the right hand. Daring him to say something. Daring him to say, “Mom, I notice you’re smoking Herbert Tarrytoons again—does this mean you figure you don’t have anything left to lose?”

“No,” he said. That miserable, bewildered homesickness swept him again, and he felt like weeping. “Except this place. It’s a little weird.”

She looked around and grinned. Two other waiters, one fat, one thin, both in red jackets with golden lobsters on the back, stood by the swing doors to the kitchen, talking quietly. A velvet rope hung across the entrance to a huge dining room beyond the alcove where Jack and his mother sat. Chairs were overturned in ziggurat shapes on the tables in this dark cave. At the far end, a huge window-wall looked out on a gothic shorescape that made Jack think of Death’s Darling, a movie his mother had been in. She had played a young woman with a lot of money who married a dark and handsome stranger against her parents’ wishes. The dark and handsome stranger took her to a big house by the ocean and tried to drive her crazy. Death’s Darling had been more or less typical of Lily Cavanaugh’s career—she had starred in a lot of black-and-white films in which handsome but forgettable actors drove around in Ford convertibles with their hats on.

The sign hanging from the velvet rope barring the entrance to this dark cavern was ludicrously understated: THIS SECTION CLOSED.

“It is a little grim, isn’t it?” she said.

“It’s like the Twilight Zone,” he replied, and she barked her harsh, infectious, somehow lovely laugh.

“Yeah, Jacky, Jacky, Jacky,” she said, and leaned over to ruffle his too-long hair, smiling.

He pushed her hand away, also smiling (but oh, her fingers felt like bones, didn’t they? She’s almost dead, Jack . . . ). “Don’t touch-a da moichendise.”

“Off my case.”

“Pretty hip for an old bag.”

“Oh boy, try to get movie money out of me this week.”

“Yeah.”

They smiled at each other, and Jack could not ever remember a need to cry so badly, or remember loving her so much. There was a kind of desperate toughness about her now . . . going back to the Black Lungers was part of that.

Their drinks came. She tipped her glass toward his. “Us.”

“Okay.”

They drank. The waiter came with menus.

“Did I pull his string a little hard before, Jacky?”

“Maybe a little,” he said.

She thought about it, then shrugged it away. “What are you having?”

“Sole, I guess.”

“Make it two.”

So he ordered for both of them, feeling clumsy and embarrassed but knowing it was what she wanted—and he could see in her eyes when the waiter left that he hadn’t done too bad a job. A lot of that was Uncle Tommy’s doing. After a trip to Hardee’s Uncle Tommy had said: “I think there’s hope for you, Jack, if we can just cure this revolting obsession with processed yellow cheese.”

The food came. He wolfed his sole, which was hot and lemony and good. Lily only toyed with hers, ate a few green beans, and then pushed things around on her plate.

“School started up here two weeks ago,” Jack announced halfway through the meal. Seeing the big yellow buses with ARCADIA DISTRICT SCHOOLS written on the sides had made him feel guilty—under the circumstances he thought that was probably absurd, but there it was. He was playing hooky.

She looked at him, enquiring. She had ordered and finished a second drink; now the waiter brought a third.

Jack shrugged. “Just thought I’d mention it.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Huh? No! Not here!”

“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t have your goddam vaccination papers. They won’t let you in school without a pedigree, chum.”

“Don’t call me chum,” Jack said, but Lily didn’t crack a smile at the old joke.

Boy, why ain’t you in school?

He blinked as if the voice had spoken aloud instead of only in his mind.

“Something?” she asked.

“No. Well . . . there’s a guy at the amusement park. Fun-world. Janitor, caretaker, something like that. An old black guy. He asked me why I wasn’t in school.”

She leaned forward, no humor in her now, almost frighteningly grim. “What did you tell him?”

Jack shrugged. “I said I was getting over mono. You remember that time Richard had it? The doctor told Uncle Morgan Richard had to stay out of school for six weeks, but he could walk around outside and everything.” Jack smiled a little. “I thought he was lucky.”

Lily relaxed a little. “I don’t like you talking to strangers, Jack.”

“Mom, he’s just a—”

“I don’t care who he is. I don’t want you talking to strangers.”

Jack thought of the black man, his hair gray steel wool, his dark face deeply lined, his odd, light-colored eyes. He had been pushing a broom in the big arcade on the pier—the arcade was the only part of Arcadia Funworld that stayed open the year around, but it had been deserted then except for Jack and the black man and two old men far in the back. The two were playing Skee-Ball in apathetic silence.

But now, sitting here in this slightly creepy restaurant with his mother, it wasn’t the black man who asked the question; it was himself.

Why aren’t I in school?

It be just like she say, son. Got no vaccination, got no pedigree. You think she come down here with your birth certificate? That what you think? She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. You—

“Have you heard from Richard?” she broke in, and when she said it, it came to him—no, that was too gentle. It crashed into him. His hands twitched and his glass fell off the table. It shattered on the floor.

She’s almost dead, Jack.

The voice from the swirling sand-funnel. The one he had heard in his mind.

It had been Uncle Morgan’s voice. Not maybe, not almost, not sorta like. It had been a real voice. The voice of Richard’s father.

6

Going home in the car, she asked him, “What happened to you in there, Jack?”

“Nothing. My heart did this funny little Gene Krupa riff.” He ran off a quick one on the dashboard to demonstrate. “Threw a PCV, just like on General Hospital.”

“Don’t wise off to me, Jacky.” In the glow of the dashboard instruments she looked pale and haggard. A cigarette smouldered between the second and third fingers of her right hand. She was driving very slowly—never over forty—as she always drove when she’d had too much to drink. Her seat was pulled all the way forward, her skirt was hiked up so her knees floated, storklike, on either side of the steering column, and her chin seemed to hang over the wheel. For a moment she looked haglike, and Jack quickly looked away.

“I’m not,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“I’m not wising off,” he said. “It was like a twitch, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I thought it was something about Richard Sloat.”

“No.” His father talked to me out of a hole in the sand down on the beach, that’s all. In my head he talked to me, like in a movie where you hear a voice-over. He told me you were almost dead.

“Do you miss him, Jack?”

“Who, Richard?”

“No—Spiro Agnew. Of course Richard.”

“Sometimes.” Richard Sloat was now going to school in Illinois—one of those private schools where chapel was compulsory and no one had acne.

“You’ll see him.” She ruffled his hair.

“Mom, are you all right?” The words burst out of him. He could feel his fingers biting into his thighs.

“Yes,” she said, lighting another cigarette (she slowed down to twenty to do it; an old pick-up swept by them, its horn blatting). “Never better.”

“How much weight have you lost?”

“Jacky, you can never be too thin or too rich.” She paused and then smiled at him. It was a tired, hurt smile that told him all the truth he needed to know.

“Mom—”

“No more,” she said. “All’s well. Take my word for it. See if you can find us some be-bop on the FM.”

“But—”

“Find us some bop, Jacky, and shut up.”

He found some jazz on a Boston station—an alto saxophone elucidating “All the Things You Are.” But under it, a steady, senseless counterpoint, was the ocean. And later, he could see the great skeleton of the roller coaster against the sky. And the rambling wings of the Alhambra Inn. If this was home, they were home.