socks. The sweater, too, came out. At the last minute he remembered his toothbrush. Then he slid the straps over his
shoulders and felt the pull of the weight on his back—not too heavy. He could walk all day, carrying only these few pounds.
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Jack simply stood quiet in the suite’s living room a moment, feeling—unexpectedly powerfully—the absence of any person or thing to whom he could say goodbye. His mother
would not return to the suite until she could be sure he was gone: if she saw him now, she’d order him to stay. He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly.
In the end he went to the telephone pad printed with a drawing of the hotel on eggshell-thin paper, and with the Alhambra’s blunt narrow pencil wrote the three lines that were most of what he had to say:
Thanks
I love you
and will be back
4
Jack moved down Boardwalk Avenue in the thin northern sun,
wondering where he should . . . flip. That was the word for it.
And should he see Speedy once more before he “flipped” into the Territories? He almost had to talk to Speedy once more, because he knew so little about where he was going, whom he might meet, what he was looking for. . . . she look just like a crystal ball. Was that all the instruction Speedy intended to give him about the Talisman? That, and the warning not to
drop it? Jack felt almost sick with lack of preparation—as if he had to take a final exam in a course he’d never attended.
He also felt that he could flip right where he stood, he was that impatient to begin, to get started, to move. He had to be in the Territories again, he suddenly understood; in the welter of his emotions and longings, that thread brightly shone. He wanted to breathe that air; he hungered for it. The Territories, the long plains and ranges of low mountains, called him, the fields of tall grass and the streams that flashed through them.
Jack’s entire body yearned for that landscape. And he might have taken the bottle out of his pocket and forced a mouthful of the awful juice down his throat on the spot if he had not just then seen the bottle’s former owner tucked up against a
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tree, butt on heels and hands laced across his knees. A brown grocery bag lay beside him, and atop the bag was an enormous sandwich of what looked like liver sausage and onion.
“You’re movin now,” Speedy said, smiling up at him.
“You’re on your way, I see. Say your goodbyes? Your momma
know you won’t be home for a while?”
Jack nodded, and Speedy held up the sandwich. “You hun-
gry? This one, it’s too much for me.”
“I had something to eat,” the boy said. “I’m glad I can say goodbye to you.”
“Ole Jack on fire, he rarin to go,” Speedy said, cocking his long head sideways. “Boy gonna move.”
“Speedy?”
“But don’t take off without a few little things I brought for you. I got em here in this bag, you wanna see?”
“Speedy?”
The man squinted up at Jack from the base of the tree.
“Did you know that my father used to call me Travelling
Jack?”
“Oh, I probably heard that somewhere,” Speedy said, grin-
ning at him. “Come over here and see what I brought you.
Plus, I have to tell you where to go first, don’t I?”
Relieved, Jack walked across the sidewalk to Speedy’s
tree. The old man set his sandwich in his lap and fished the bag closer to him. “Merry Christmas,” Speedy said, and
brought forth a tall, battered old paperback book. It was, Jack saw, an old Rand McNally road atlas.
“Thanks,” Jack said, taking the book from Speedy’s out-
stretched hand.
“Ain’t no maps over there, so you stick as much as you can
to the roads in ole Rand McNally. That way you’ll get where you’re goin.”
“Okay,” Jack said, and slipped out of the knapsack so that
he could slide the big book down inside it.
“The next thing don’t have to go in that fancy rig you car-
ryin on your back,” Speedy said. He put the sandwich on the flat paper bag and stood up all in one long smooth motion.
“No, you can carry this right in your pocket.” He dipped his fingers into the left pocket of his workshirt. What emerged, clamped between his second and third fingers like one of
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Lily’s Tarrytoons, was a white triangular object it took the boy a moment to recognize as a guitar-pick. “You take this and
keep it. You’ll want to show it to a man. He’ll help you.”
Jack turned the pick over in his fingers. He had never seen one like it—of ivory, with scrimshaw filigrees and patterns winding around it in slanted lines like some kind of unearthly writing. Beautiful in the abstract, it was almost too heavy to be a useful fingerpick.
“Who’s the man?” Jack asked. He slipped the pick into one
of his pants pockets.
“Big scar on his face—you’ll see him pretty soon after you
land in the Territories. He’s a guard. Fact is, he’s a Captain of the Outer Guards, and he’ll take you to a place where you can see a lady you has to see. Well, a lady you ought to see. So you know the other reason you’re puttin your neck on the line.
My friend over there, he’ll understand what you’re doin and he’ll figure out a way to get you to the lady.”
“This lady . . .” Jack began.
“Yep,” Speedy said. “You got it.”
“She’s the Queen.”
“You take a good look at her, Jack. You see what you see
when you sees her. You see what she is, understand? Then you hit out for the west.” Speedy stood examining him gravely, almost as if he were just now doubting that he’d ever see Jack Sawyer again, and then the lines in his face twitched and he said, “Steer clear of ole Bloat. Watch for his trail—his own and his Twinner’s. Ole Bloat can find out where you went if you’re not careful, and if he finds out he’s gonna be after you like a fox after a goose.” Speedy shoved his hands in his
pockets and regarded Jack again, looking very much as
though he wished he could think of more to say. “Get the Talisman, son,” he concluded. “Get it and bring it back safe. It gonna be your burden but you got to be bigger than your burden.”
Jack was concentrating so hard on what Speedy was telling
him that he squinted into the man’s seamed face. Scarred
man, Captain of the Outer Guards. The Queen. Morgan Sloat,
after him like a predator. In an evil place over on the other side of the country. A burden. “Okay,” he said, wishing suddenly that he were back in the Tea and Jam Shoppe with his
mother.
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Speedy smiled jaggedly, warmly. “Yeah-bob. Ole Travellin
Jack is okey-doke.” The smile deepened. “Bout time for you
to sip at that special juice, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess it is,” Jack said. He tugged the dark bottle out of his hip pocket and unscrewed the cap. He looked back up at
Speedy, whose pale eyes stabbed into his own.
“Speedy’ll help you when he can.”
Jack nodded, blinked, and raised the neck of the bottle to
his mouth. The sweetly rotten odor which leaped out of the
bottle nearly made his throat close itself in an involuntary spasm. He tipped the bottle up and the taste of the odor invaded his mouth. His stomach clenched. He swallowed, and
rough, burning liquid spilled down his throat.
Long seconds before Jack opened his eyes, he knew from
the richness and clarity of the smells about him that he had flipped into the Territories. Horses, grass, a dizzying scent of raw meat; dust; the clear air itself.
Interlude
Sloat in This World (I)
“I know I work too hard,” Morgan Sloat told his son Richard that evening. They were speaking on the telephone, Richard
standing at the communal telephone in the downstairs corri-
dor of his dormitory, his father sitting at his desk on the top floor of one of Sawyer & Sloat’s first and sweetest real-estate deals in Beverly Hills. “But I tell you kid, there are a lot of times when you have to do something yourself to get it done right. Especially when my late partner’s family is involved.
It’s just a short trip, I hope. Probably I’ll get everything nailed down out there in goddam New Hampshire in less than a