though the boy was road-dirty and shaggy, even though they
might never have taken on a hitchhiker before in their lives—
looked over and saw him blinking back tears.
Jack mourned Wolf as he sped across Illinois. He had
somehow known that he would have no trouble getting rides
once in that state, and it was true that often all he had to do was stick out his thumb and look an oncoming driver in the
eye—instant ride. Most of the drivers did not even demand
the Story. All he had to do was give some minimal explana-
tion for travelling alone. “I’m going to see a friend in Springfield.” “I have to pick up a car and drive it back home.”
“Great, great,” the drivers said—had they even heard? Jack
could not tell. His mind riffled through a mile-high stack of images of Wolf splashing into a stream to rescue his Territories creatures, Wolf nosing into a fragrant box that had held a hamburger, Wolf pushing food into his shed, bursting into the recording studio, taking the bullets, melting away. . . . Jack did not want to see these things again and again, but he had to and they made his eyes burn with tears.
Not far out of Danville, a short, fiftyish man with iron-gray hair and the amused but stern expression of one who has
taught fifth grade for two decades kept darting sly looks at him from behind the wheel, then finally said, “Aren’t you
cold, buster? You ought to have more than that little jacket.”
“Maybe a little,” Jack said. Sunlight Gardener had thought
the denim jackets warm enough for field-work right through
the winter, but now the weather licked and stabbed right
through its pores.
“I have a coat on the back seat,” the man said. “Take it. No, don’t even try to talk your way out of it. That coat’s yours now. Believe me, I won’t freeze.”
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“But—”
“You have no choice at all in the matter. That is now your
coat. Try it on.”
Jack reached over the back of the seat and dragged a heavy
length of material onto his lap. At first it was shapeless, anonymous. A big patch pocket surfaced, then a toggle button. It was a loden coat, fragrant with pipe tobacco.
“My old one,” the man said. “I just keep it in the car be-
cause I don’t know what to do with it—last year, the kids gave me this goosedown thing. So you have it.”
Jack struggled into the big coat, putting it on right over the denim jacket. “Oh boy,” he said. It was like being embraced by a bear with a taste for Borkum Riff.
“Good,” the man said. “Now if you ever find yourself stand-
ing out on a cold and windy road again, you can thank Myles P. Kiger of Ogden, Illinois, for saving your skin. Your—”
Myles P. Kiger looked as though he were going to say more:
the word hung in the air for a second, the man was still smiling; then the smile warped into goofy embarrassment and Kiger
snapped his head forward. In the gray morning light, Jack saw a mottled red pattern spread out across the man’s cheeks.
Your (something) skin?
Oh, no.
Your beautiful skin. Your touchable, kissable, adorable . . .
Jack pushed his hands deep into the loden coat’s pockets and pulled the coat tightly around him. Myles P. Kiger of Ogden, Illinois, stared straight ahead.
“Ahem,” Kiger said, exactly like a man in a comic book.
“Thanks for the coat,” Jack said. “Really. I’ll be grateful to you whenever I wear it.”
“Sure, okay,” Kiger said, “forget it.” But for a second his face was oddly like poor Donny Keegan’s, back in the Sunlight Home. “There’s a place up ahead,” Kiger said. His voice was choppy, abrupt, full of phony calm. “We can get some
lunch, if you like.”
“I don’t have any money left,” Jack said, a statement ex-
actly two dollars and thirty-eight cents shy of the truth.
“Don’t worry about it.” Kiger had already snapped on his
turn indicator.
They drove into a windswept, nearly empty parking lot be-
fore a low gray structure that looked like a railway car. A neon
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THE TALISMAN
sign above the central door flashed EMPIRE DINER. Kiger
pulled up before one of the diner’s long windows and they left the car. This coat would keep him warm, Jack realized. His
chest and arms seemed protected by woolen armor. Jack be-
gan to move toward the door under the flashing sign, but
turned around when he realized that Kiger was still standing beside the car. The gray-haired man, only an inch or two taller than Jack, was looking at him over the car’s top.
“Say,” Kiger said.
“Look, I’d be happy to give you your coat back,” Jack said.
“No, that’s yours now. I was just thinking I’m not really
hungry after all, and if I keep on going I can make pretty
good time, get home a little earlier.”
“Sure,” Jack said.
“You’ll get another ride here. Easy. I promise. I wouldn’t
drop you here if you were going to be stranded.”
“Fine.”
“Hold on. I said I’d get you lunch, and I will.” He put his hand in his trouser pocket, then held a bill out across the top of the car to Jack. The chill wind ruffled his hair and flattened it against his forehead. “Take it.”
“No, honest,” Jack said. “It’s okay. I have a couple dollars.”
“Get yourself a good steak,” Kiger said, and was leaning
across the top of the car holding out the bill as if offering a life preserver, or reaching for one.
Jack reluctantly came forward and took the bill from
Kiger’s extended fingers. It was a ten. “Thanks a lot. I mean it.”
“Here, why don’t you take the paper, too, have something
to read? You know, if you have to wait a little or something.”
Kiger had already opened his door, and leaned inside to pluck a folded tabloid newspaper off the back seat. “I’ve already read it.” He tossed it over to Jack.
The pockets of the loden coat were so roomy that Jack
could slip the folded paper into one of them.
Myles P. Kiger stood for a moment beside his open car
door, squinting at Jack. “If you don’t mind my saying so,
you’re going to have an interesting life,” he said.
“It’s pretty interesting already,” Jack said truthfully.
Salisbury steak was five dollars and forty cents, and it
came with french fries. Jack sat at the end of the counter
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and opened the newspaper. The story was on the second
page—the day before, he had seen it on the first page of an Indiana newspaper. ARRESTS MADE, RELATED TO SHOCK HORROR DEATHS. Local Magistrate Ernest Fairchild and Police
Officer Frank B. Williams of Cayuga, Indiana, had been
charged with misuse of public monies and acceptance of
bribes in the course of the investigation of the deaths of
six boys at the Sunlight Gardener Scripture Home for Way-
ward Boys. The popular evangelist Robert “Sunlight” Gar-
dener had apparently escaped from the grounds of the Home
shortly before the arrival of the police, and while no war-
rants had as yet been issued for his arrest he was urgently being sought for questioning. WAS HE ANOTHER JIM JONES?
asked a caption beneath a picture of Gardener at his most
gorgeous, arms outspread, hair falling in perfect waves.
Dogs had led the State Police to an area near the electrified fences where boy’s bodies had been buried without cere-mony—five bodies, it appeared, most of them so decom-
posed that identification was not possible. They would
probably be able to identify Ferd Janklow. His parents would be able to give him a real burial, all the while wondering what they had done wrong, exactly; all the while wondering just
how their love for Jesus had condemned their brilliant, rebellious son.
When the Salisbury steak came, it tasted both salty and
woolly, but Jack ate every scrap. And soaked up all the thick gravy with the Empire Diner’s underdone fries. He had just
about finished his meal when a bearded trucker with a Detroit Tigers cap shoved down over long black hair, a parka that
seemed to be made from wolfskins, and a thick cigar in his
mouth paused beside him and asked, “You need a ride west,
kid? I’m going to Decatur.” Halfway to Springfield, just like that.
2
That night, in a three-dollar-a-night hotel the trucker had told him about, Jack had two distinct dreams: or he later remembered these two out of many that deluged his bed, or the two were actually one long joined dream. He had locked his door, peed into the stained and cracked sink in the corner, put his