mysterious deepening blue dusk of each coming night, listening first to John Fogerty and then to the wind, John Fogerty again and then the wind again.
They ate at Stuckeys’. They ate at Burger Kings. They
stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken. At the latter, Jack and
Richard got dinners; Wolf got a Family-Style Bucket and ate all twenty-one pieces. From the sounds, he ate most of the
bones as well. This made Jack think of Wolf and the popcorn.
Where had that been? Muncie. The outskirts of Muncie—the
Town Line Sixplex. Just before they had gotten their asses
slammed into the Sunlight Home. He grinned . . . and then
felt something like an arrow slip into his heart. He looked out the window so Richard wouldn’t see the gleam of his tears.
They stopped on the second night in Julesburg, Colorado,
and Wolf cooked them a huge picnic supper on a portable bar-becue he produced from the trunk. They ate in a snowy field by starlight, bundled up in heavy parkas bought out of the
guitar-case stash. A meteor-shower flashed overhead, and
Wolf danced in the snow like a child.
“I love that guy,” Richard said thoughtfully.
“Yeah, me too. You should have met his brother.”
“I wish I had.” Richard began to gather up the trash. What
he said next flummoxed Jack almost completely. “I’m forget-
ting a lot of stuff, Jack.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. Every mile I remember a little less about what
happened. It’s all getting misty. And I think . . . I think that’s the way I want it. Look, are you really sure your mother’s
okay?”
Three times Jack had tried to call his mother. There was no answer. He was not too worried about this. Things were okay.
He hoped. When he got there, she would be there. Sick . . .
but still alive. He hoped.
“Yes.”
“Then how come she doesn’t answer the phone?”
“Sloat played some tricks with the phones,” Jack said. “He
played some tricks with the help at the Alhambra, too, I bet.
She’s still okay. Sick . . . but okay. Still there. I can feel her.”
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“And if this healing thing works—” Richard grimaced a
little, then plunged. “You still . . . I mean, you still think she’d let me . . . you know, stay with you guys?”
“No,” Jack said, helping Richard pick up the remains of
supper. “She’ll want to see you in an orphanage, probably. Or maybe in jail. Don’t be a dork, Richard, of course you can
stay with us.”
“Well . . . after all my father did . . .”
“That was your dad, Richie,” Jack said simply. “Not you.”
“And you won’t always be reminding me? You know . . .
jogging my memory?”
“Not if you want to forget.”
“I do, Jack. I really do.”
Wolf was coming back.
“You guys ready? Wolf!”
“All ready,” Jack said. “Listen, Wolf, how about that Scott Hamilton tape I got in Cheyenne?”
“Sure, Jack. Then how about some Creedence?”
“ ‘Run Through the Jungle,’ right?”
“Good tune, Jack! Heavy! Wolf! God-pounding heavy tune!”
“You bet, Wolf.” He rolled his eyes at Richard. Richard
rolled his back, and grinned.
The next day they rolled across Nebraska and Iowa; a day
later they tooled past the gutted ruin of the Sunlight Home.
Jack thought Wolf had taken them past it on purpose, that he perhaps wanted to see the place where his brother had died.
He turned up the Creedence tape in the cassette player as loud as it would go, but Jack still thought he heard the sound of Wolf sobbing.
Time—suspended swatches of time. Jack seemed almost
to be floating, and there was a feeling of suspension, triumph, valediction. Work honorably discharged.
Around sunset of the fifth day, they crossed into New En-
gland.
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Journey’s End
1
The whole long drive from California to New England
seemed, once they had got so far, to have taken place in a single long afternoon and evening. An afternoon that lasted days, an evening perhaps life-long, bulging with sunsets and music and emotions. Great humping balls of fire, Jack thought, I’m really out of it, when he happened for the second time in what he assumed to be about an hour to look at the discreet little clock set in the dashboard—and discovered that three hours
had winked past him. Was it even the same day? “Run
Through the Jungle” pumped through the air; Wolf bobbed
his head in time, grinning unstoppably, infallibly finding the best roads; the rear window showing the whole sky opening
in great bands of twilight color, purple and blue and that particular deep plangent red of the down-going sun. Jack could remember every detail of this long long journey, every word, every meal, every nuance of the music, Zoot Sims or John
Fogerty or simply Wolf delighting himself with the noises of the air, but the true span of time had warped itself in his mind to a concentration like a diamond’s. He slept in the cushiony backseat and opened his eyes on light or darkness, on sunlight or stars. Among the things he remembered with particular
sharpness, once they had crossed into New England and the
Talisman began to glow again, signalling the return of normal time—or perhaps the return of time itself to Jack Sawyer—
were the faces of people peering into the back seat of the El Dorado (people in parking lots, a sailor and an ox-faced girl in a convertible at a stoplight in a sunny little town in Iowa, a skinny Ohio kid wearing Breaking Away–style bicycle gear) in order to see if maybe Mick Jagger or Frank Sinatra had decided to pay them a call. Nope, just us, folks. Sleep kept steal-
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THE TALISMAN
ing him away. Once he awoke (Colorado? Illinois?) to the
thumping of rock music, Wolf snapping his fingers while
keeping the big car rolling smoothly, a bursting sky of orange and purple and blue, and saw that Richard had somewhere ac-quired a book and was reading it with the aid of the El Do-
rado’s recessed passenger light. The book was Broca’s Brain.
Richard always knew what time it was. Jack rolled his eyes
upward and let the music, the evening colors, take him. They had done it, they had done everything . . . everything except what they would have to do in an empty little resort town in New Hampshire.
Five days, or one long, dreaming twilight? “Run Through
the Jungle.” Zoot Sims’s tenor saxophone saying Here’s a story for you, do you like this story? Richard was his brother, his brother.
Time returned to him about when the Talisman came back
to life, during the magical sunset of the fifth day. Oatley, Jack thought on the sixth day. I could have shown Richard the Oatley tunnel, and whatever’s left of the Tap, I could have shown Wolf which way to go . . . but he did not want to see Oatley again, there was no satisfaction or pleasure in that. And he was conscious now of how close they had come, of how far
they had travelled while he drifted through time like a whistle.
Wolf had brought them to the great broad artery of I-95, now that they were in Connecticut, and Arcadia Beach lay only a few states away, up the indented New England coast. From
now on Jack counted the miles, and the minutes, too.
2
At quarter past five on the evening of December 21st, some
three months after Jack Sawyer had set his face—and his
hopes—on the west, a black El Dorado Cadillac swung into
the crushed-gravel driveway of the Alhambra Inn and Gar-
dens in the town of Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire. In the
west, the sunset was a mellow valediction of reds and oranges fading to yellow . . . and blue . . . and royal purple. In the gardens themselves, naked branches clattered together in a bitter winter wind. Amid them, until a day not quite a week ago, had been a tree which caught and ate small animals—chipmunks,
birds, the desk clerk’s starveling, slat-sided cat. This small
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tree had died very suddenly. The other growing things in the garden, though skeletal now, still bided with dormant life.
The El Dorado’s steel-belted radials popped and cracked
over the gravel. From inside, muffled behind the polarized
glass, came the sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival. “The people who know my magic,” John Fogerty sang, “have filled the land with smoke.”
The Cadillac stopped in front of the wide double doors.
There was only darkness beyond them. The double headlights
went out and the long car stood in shadow, tailpipe idling
white exhaust, orange parking lights gleaming.
Here at the end of day; here at sunset with color fanning up from the western sky in glory.