The Talisman by Stephen King

Phil Sawyer had underestimated him, and that still ran-

kled. Because Phil had thought of him as a sort of trained rattlesnake to be let out of his cage only under controlled

circumstances, so had others. The lot attendant, a hillbilly in a broken cowboy hat, eyed him as he marched around his little car, looking for dents and dings. The Di-Gel melted most of the fiery ball in his chest. Sloat felt his collar growing

clammy with sweat. The attendant knew better than to try to buddy up: Sloat had verbally peeled the man’s hide weeks

ago, after discovering a tiny wrinkle in the BMW’s door. In the midst of his rant, he had seen violence begin to darken in the hillbilly’s green eyes, and a sudden upsurge of joy had made him waddle in toward the man, still cutting off skin, almost hoping that the attendant would take a poke at him.

Abruptly, the hillbilly had lost his momentum; feebly, indeed apologetically suggested that maybe that-there l’il nuthin of a ding came from somewhere else? Parking service at a restaurant, maybe? The way those bozos treat cars, y’know, and the light ain’t so good that time a night, why . . .

“Shut your stinking mouth,” Sloat had said. “That little

nothing, as you call it, is going to cost me about twice what you make in a week. I should fire you right now, cowpoke,

and the only reason I’m not going to is that there’s about a two percent chance you might be right; when I came out of

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Chasen’s last night maybe I didn’t look under the door handle, maybe I DID and maybe I DIDN’T, but if you ever talk to me

again, if you ever say any more than ‘Hello, Mr. Sloat’ or

‘Goodbye, Mr. Sloat,’ I’ll get you fired so fast you’ll think you were beheaded.” So the hillbilly watched him inspect his car, knowing that if Sloat found any imperfections in the car’s finish he would bring down the axe, afraid even to come close

enough to utter the ritual goodbye. Sometimes from the win-

dow that overlooked the parking lot Sloat had seen the attendant furiously wiping some flaw, bird dropping or splash of mud, off the BMW’s hood. And that’s management, buddy.

When he pulled out of the lot he checked the rear-view

mirror and saw on the hillbilly’s face an expression very like the last one Phil Sawyer had worn in the final seconds of his life, out in the middle of nowhere in Utah. He smiled all the way to the freeway on-ramp.

Philip Sawyer had underestimated Morgan Sloat from the

time of their first meeting, when they were freshmen at Yale.

It could have been, Sloat reflected, that he had been easy

to underestimate—a pudgy eighteen-year-old from Akron,

graceless, overweighted with anxieties and ambitions, out of Ohio for the first time in his life. Listening to his classmates talk easily about New York, about “21” and the Stork Club,

about seeing Brubeck at Basin Street and Erroll Garner at the Vanguard, he’d sweated to hide his ignorance. “I really like the downtown part,” he’d thrown in, as casually as he could.

Palms wet, cramped by curled-in fingers. (Mornings, Sloat often found his palms tattooed with dented bruises left by his fingernails.) “What downtown part, Morgan?” Tom Woodbine

had asked him. The others cackled. “You know, Broadway

and the Village. Around there.” More cackles, harsher. He had been unattractive and badly dressed; his wardrobe consisted of two suits, both charcoal-gray and both apparently made for a man with a scarecrow’s shoulders. He had begun losing his hair in high school, and pink scalp showed through his short, flattened-down haircuts.

No, no beauty had Sloat been, and that had been part of it.

The others made him feel like a clenched fist: those morning bruises were shadowy little photographs of his soul. The oth-

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ers, all interested in the theater like himself and Sawyer, possessed good profiles, flat stomachs, easy careless manners.

Sprawled across the lounge chairs of their suite in Davenport while Sloat, in a haze of perspiration, stood that he might not wrinkle his suit pants and thereby get a few more days’ wear out of them, they sometimes resembled a gathering of young

gods—cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders like the golden fleece. They were on their way to becoming actors,

playwrights, songwriters. Sloat had seen himself as a director: entangling them all in a net of complications and designs

which only he could unwind.

Sawyer and Tom Woodbine, both of whom seemed

unimaginably rich to Sloat, were roommates. Woodbine had

only a lukewarm interest in theater and hung around their

undergraduate drama workshop because Phil did. Another

gilded private-school boy, Thomas Woodbine differed from

the others because of his absolute seriousness and straightforwardness. He intended to become a lawyer, and already

seemed to have the probity and impartiality of a judge. (In fact, most of Woodbine’s acquaintances imagined that he

would wind up on the Supreme Court, much to the embar-

rassment of the boy himself.) Woodbine was without ambi-

tion in Sloat’s terms, being interested far more in living

rightly than in living well. Of course he had everything, and what he by some accident lacked other people were quick to

give him: how could he, so spoiled by nature and friendships, be ambitious? Sloat almost unconsciously detested Woodbine, and could not bring himself to call him “Tommy.”

Sloat directed two plays during his four years at Yale: No Exit, which the student paper called “a furious confusion,”

and Volpone. This was described as “churning, cynical, sinister, and almost unbelievably messy.” Sloat was held responsible for most of these qualities. Perhaps he was not a director after all—his vision too intense and crowded. His ambitions did not lessen, they merely shifted. If he was not eventually to be behind the camera, he could be behind the people in front of it. Phil Sawyer had also begun to think this way—Phil had never been certain where his love of theater might take him, and thought he might have a talent for representing actors and writers. “Let’s go to Los Angeles and start an agency,” Phil

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said to him in their senior year. “It’s nutty as hell and our parents will hate it, but maybe we’ll make it work. So we starve for a couple of years.”

Phil Sawyer, Sloat had learned since their freshman year,

was not rich after all. He just looked rich.

“And when we can afford him, we’ll get Tommy to be our

lawyer. He’ll be out of law school by then.”

“Sure, okay,” Sloat had said, thinking that he could stop

that one when the time came. “What should we call our-

selves?”

“Anything you like. Sloat and Sawyer? Or should we stick

to the alphabet?”

“Sawyer and Sloat, sure, that’s great, alphabetical order,”

Sloat said, seething because he imagined that his partner had euchred him into forever suggesting that he was somehow

secondary to Sawyer.

Both sets of parents did hate the idea, as Phil had pre-

dicted, but the partners in the infant talent agency drove to Los Angeles in the old DeSoto (Morgan’s, another demonstration of how much Sawyer owed him), set up an office in a North Hollywood building with a happy population of

rats and fleas, and started hanging around the clubs, passing out their spandy-new business cards. Nothing—nearly four

months of total failure. They had a comic who got too drunk to be funny, a writer who couldn’t write, a stripper who insisted on being paid in cash so that she could stiff her agents.

And then late one afternoon, high on marijuana and whiskey, Phil Sawyer had gigglingly told Sloat about the Territories.

“You know what I can do, you ambitious so-and-so? Oh,

can I travel, partner. All the way.”

Shortly after that, both of them travelling now, Phil Sawyer met a rising young actress at a studio party and within an hour had their first important client. And she had three friends similarly unhappy with their agents. And one of the friends had a boyfriend who had actually written a decent filmscript and

needed an agent, and the boyfriend had a boyfriend . . . Before their third year was over, they had a new office, new

apartments, a slice of the Hollywood pie. The Territories, in a fashion that Sloat accepted but never understood, had blessed them.

Sawyer dealt with the clients; Sloat with the money, the in-

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vestments, the business side of the agency. Sawyer spent

money—lunches, airplane tickets—Sloat saved it, which was

all the justification he needed to skim a little of the cream off the top. And it was Sloat who kept pushing them into new areas, land development, real estate, production deals. By the time Tommy Woodbine arrived in Los Angeles, Sawyer &