This is Jack Sawyer, ladies and gentlemen, down on his knees in a vast field of sweet grass under a morning sky untainted by a single particle of pollution. He is weeping. He knows what has happened, and he is weeping. His heart bursts with fear and joy.
This is Jack Sawyer twenty years along, grown to be a man, and back in the Territories again at last.
It is the voice of his old friend Richard—sometimes known as Rational Richard—that saves him. Richard as he is now, head of his own law firm (Sloat & Associates, Ltd.), not Richard as he was when Jack perhaps knew him best, during long vacation days on Seabrook Island, in South Carolina. The Richard of Seabrook Island had been imaginative, quick-spoken, fast on his feet, mop-topped, skinny as a morning shadow. The current Richard, Corporate Law Richard, is thinning on top, thick in the middle, much in favor of sitting and Bushmills. Also, he has crushed his imagination, so brilliantly playful in those Seabrook Island days, like a troublesome fly. Richard Sloat’s life has been one of reduction, Jack has sometimes thought, but one thing has been added (probably in law school): the pompous, sheeplike sound of hesitation, particularly annoying on the phone, which is now Richard’s vocal signature. This sound starts with the lips closed, then opens out as Richard’s lips spring wide, making him look like an absurd combination of Vienna choirboy and Lord Haw-Haw.
Now, kneeling with his eyes shut in the vast green reach of what used to be his very own north field, smelling the new, deeper smells that he remembers so well and has longed for so fiercely without even realizing it, Jack hears Richard Sloat begin speaking in the middle of his head. What a relief those words are! He knows it’s only his own mind mimicking Richard’s voice, but it’s still wonderful. If Richard were here, Jack thinks he’d embrace his old friend and say, May you pontificate forever, Richie-boy. Sheep bray and all.
Rational Richard says: You realize you’re dreaming, Jack, don’t you? . . . ba-haaaa . . . the stress of opening that package no doubt . . . ba-haaaa . . . no doubt caused you to pass out, and that in turn has caused . . . ba-HAAAA! . . . the dream you are having now.
Down on his knees, eyes still closed and hair hanging in his face, Jack says, “In other words, it’s what we used to call—”
Correct! What we used to call . . . ba-haaaa . . . “Seabrook Island stuff.” But Seabrook Island was a long time ago, Jack, so I suggest you open your eyes, get back on your feet, and remind yourself that should you see anything out of the ordinary . . . b’haa! . . . it’s not really there.
“Not really there,” Jack murmurs. He stands up and opens his eyes.
He knows from the very first look that it is really here, but he holds Richard’s pompous I-look-thirty-five-but-I’m-really-sixty voice in his head, shielding himself with it. Thus he is able to maintain a precarious balance instead of passing out for real, or—perhaps—cracking up entirely.
Above him, the sky is an infinitely clear dark blue. Around him, the hay and timothy is rib-high instead of ankle-high; there has been no Bunny Boettcher in this part of creation to cut it. In fact, there is no house back the way he came, only a picturesque old barn with a windmill standing off to one side.
Where are the flying men? Jack thinks, looking up into the sky, then shakes his head briskly. No flying men; no two-headed parrots; no werewolves. All that was Seabrook Island stuff, a neurosis he picked up from his mother and even passed on to Richard for a while. It was all nothing but . . . ba-haaa . . . bullshit.
He accepts this, knowing at the same time that the real bullshit would be not believing what’s all around him. The smell of the grass, now so strong and sweet, mixed with the more flowery smell of clover and the deeper, basso profundo smell of black earth. The endless sound of the crickets in this grass, living their unthinking cricket lives. The fluttering white field moths. The unblemished cheek of the sky, not marked by a single telephone wire or electrical cable or jet contrail.
What strikes Jack most deeply, however, is the perfection of the field around him. There’s a matted circle where he fell on his knees, the dew-heavy grass crushed to the ground. But there is no path leading to the circle, not a mark of passage through the wet and tender grass. He might have dropped out of the sky. That’s impossible, of course, more Seabrook Island stuff, but—
“I did sort of fall out of the sky, though,” Jack says in a remarkably steady voice. “I came here from Wisconsin. I flipped here.”
Richard’s voice protests this strenuously, exploding in a flurry of hrrumphs and ba-haaas, but Jack hardly notices. It’s just good old Rational Richard, doing his Rational Richard thing inside his head. Richard had lived through stuff like this once before and come out the other side with his mind more or less intact . . . but he’d been twelve. They’d both been twelve that fall, and when you’re twelve, the mind and body are more elastic.
Jack has been turning in a slow circle, seeing nothing but open fields (the mist over them now fading to a faint haze in the day’s growing warmth) and blue-gray woods beyond them. Now there’s something else. To the southwest, there’s a dirt road about a mile away. Beyond it, at the horizon or perhaps just beyond, the perfect summer sky is a little stained with smoke.
Not woodstoves, Jack thinks, not in July, but maybe small manufactories. And . . .
He hears a whistle—three long blasts made faint with distance. His heart seems to grow large in his chest, and the corners of his mouth stretch up in a kind of helpless grin.
“The Mississippi’s that way, by God,” he says, and around him the field moths seem to dance their agreement, lace of the morning. “That’s the Mississippi, or whatever they call it over here. And the whistle, friends and neighbors—”
Two more blasts roll across the making summer day. They are faint with distance, yes, but up close they would be mighty. Jack knows this.
“That’s a riverboat. A damn big one. Maybe a paddle wheeler.”
Jack begins to walk toward the road, telling himself that this is all a dream, not believing a bit of that but using it as an acrobat uses his balance pole. After he’s gone a hundred yards or so, he turns and looks back. A dark line cuts through the timothy, beginning at the place where he landed and cutting straight to where he is. It is the mark of his passage. The only mark of it. Far to the left (in fact almost behind him now) are the barn and the windmill. That’s my house and garage, Jack thinks. At least that’s what they are in the world of Chevrolets, Mideast warfare, and the Oprah Winfrey show.
He walks on, and has almost reached the road when he realizes there is more than smoke in the southwest. There is a kind of vibration, as well. It beats into his head like the start of a migraine headache. And it’s strangely variable. If he stands with his face pointed dead south, that unpleasant pulse is less. Turn east and it’s gone. North and it’s almost gone. Then, as he continues to turn, it comes all the way back to full. Worse than ever now that he’s noticed it, the way the buzz of a fly or the knock of a radiator in a hotel room is worse after you really start to notice it.
Jack turns another slow, full circle. South, and the vibration sinks. East, it’s gone. North, it’s starting to come back. West, it’s coming on strong. Southwest and he’s locked in like the SEEK button on a car radio. Pow, pow, pow. A black and nasty vibration like a headache, a smell like ancient smoke . . .
“No, no, no, not smoke,” Jack says. He’s standing almost up to his chest in summer grass, pants soaked, white moths flittering around his head like a half-assed halo, eyes wide, cheeks once more pale. In this moment he looks twelve again. It is eerie how he has rejoined his younger (and perhaps better) self. “Not smoke, that smells like . . .”
He suddenly makes that urking sound again. Because the smell—not in his nose but in the center of his head—is rotted baloney. The smell of Irma Freneau’s half-rotted, severed foot.
“I’m smelling him,” Jack whispers, knowing it’s not a smell he means. He can make that pulse whatever he wants . . . including, he realizes, gone. “I’m smelling the Fisherman. Either him or . . . I don’t know.”