Well, he couldn’t very well say that Smokey had lied to
him. Up until the very moment Jack pushed away his plate and began making his wage, the Tap had been deserted. But by
six o’clock there were maybe fifty people in the Tap, and the brawny waitress—Gloria—came on duty to yells and hooraws from some of the patrons. Gloria joined Lori, serving a few carafes of wine, a lot of Black Russians, and oceans of beer.
Besides the kegs of Busch, Jack lugged out case after case
of bottled beer—Budweiser, of course, but also such local favorites as Genesee, Utica Club, and Rolling Rock. His hands began to blister, his back to ache.
Between trips to the storeroom for cases of bottled beer
and trips to the storeroom to “run me out a keg, Jack” (a
phrase for which he was already coming to feel an elemen-
tal dread), he went back to the dancefloor, the mop-bucket, and the big bottle of Pledge. Once an empty beer-bottle flew past his head, missing him by inches. He ducked, heart racing, as it shattered against the wall. Smokey ran the drunken perpetrator out, his dentures bared in a great false alligator grin. Looking out the window, Jack saw the drunk hit
a parking-meter hard enough to pop the red VIOLATION
flag up.
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“Come on, Jack,” Smokey called impatiently from the bar,
“it missed you, didn’t it? Clean that mess up!”
Smokey sent him into the men’s can half an hour later. A
middle-aged man with a Joe Pyne haircut was standing
woozily at one of the two ice-choked urinals, one hand braced against the wall, the other brandishing a huge uncircumcised penis. A puddle of puke steamed between his spraddled workboots.
“Clean her up, kid,” the man said, weaving his way back
toward the door and clapping Jack on the back almost hard
enough to knock him over. “Man’s gotta make room any way
he can, right?”
Jack was able to wait until the door closed, and then he
could control his gorge no longer.
He managed to make it into the Tap’s only stall, where he
was faced with the unflushed and sickeningly fragrant spoor of the last customer. Jack vomited up whatever remained of
his dinner, took a couple of hitching breaths, and then vomited again. He groped for the flush with a shaking hand and pushed it. Waylon and Willie thudded dully through the walls, singing about Luckenbach, Texas.
Suddenly his mother’s face was before him, more beautiful
than it had ever been on any movie screen, her eyes large and dark and sorrowing. He saw her alone in their rooms at the
Alhambra, a cigarette smouldering forgotten in the ashtray
beside her. She was crying. Crying for him. His heart seemed to hurt so badly that he thought he would die from love for her and want of her—for a life where there were no things in tunnels, no women who somehow wanted to be slapped and
made to cry, no men who vomited between their own feet
while taking a piss. He wanted to be with her and hated
Speedy Parker with a black completeness for ever having set his feet on this awful road west.
In that moment whatever might have remained of his self-
confidence was demolished—it was demolished utterly and
forever. Conscious thought was overmastered by a deep, ele-
mental, wailing, childish cry: I want my mother please God I want my MOTHER—
He trembled his way out of the stall on watery legs, think-
ing Okay that’s it everybody out of the pool fuck you Speedy
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this kid’s going home. Or whatever you want to call it. In that moment he didn’t care if his mother might be dying. In that moment of inarticulate pain he became totally Jack’s Jack, as unconsciously self-serving as an animal on which any carnivore may prey: deer, rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk. In that moment he would have been perfectly willing to let her die of the cancer metastasizing wildly outward from her lungs if only
she would hold him and then kiss him goodnight and tell him not to play his goddam transistor in bed or read with a flashlight under the covers for half the night.
He put his hand against the wall and little by little man-
aged to get hold of himself. This taking-hold was no con-
scious thing but a simple tightening of the mind, something that was very much Phil Sawyer and Lily Cavanaugh. He’d
made a mistake, yeah, but he wasn’t going back. The Territories were real and so the Talisman might also be real; he was not going to murder his mother with faintheartedness.
Jack filled his mop-bucket with hot water from the spigot
in the storeroom and cleaned up the mess.
When he came out again, it was half past ten and the
crowd in the Tap began to thin out—Oatley was a working
town, and its working drinkers went home early on week-
nights.
Lori said, “You look as pale as pastry, Jack. You okay?”
“Do you think I could have a gingerale?” he asked.
She brought him one and Jack drank it while he finished
waxing the dancefloor. At quarter to twelve Smokey ordered
him back to the storeroom to “run out a keg.” Jack managed
the keg—barely. At quarter to one Smokey started bawling
for people to finish up. Lori unplugged the juke—Dick Cur-
less died with a long, unwinding groan—to a few half-
hearted cries of protest. Gloria unplugged the games, donned her sweater (it was as pink as the Canada Mints Smokey ate
regularly, as pink as the false gums of his dentures), and left.
Smokey began to turn out the lights and to urge the last four or five drinkers out the door.
“Okay, Jack,” he said when they were gone. “You did
good. There’s room for improvement, but you got a start, anyway. You can doss down in the storeroom.”
Instead of asking for his pay (which Smokey did not offer
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anyway), Jack stumbled off toward the storeroom, so tired
that he looked like a slightly smaller version of the drunks so lately ushered out.
In the storeroom he saw Lori squatting down in one cor-
ner—the squat caused her basketball shorts to ride up to a
point that was nearly alarming—and for a moment Jack
thought with dull alarm that she was going through his knapsack. Then he saw that she had spread a couple of blankets on a layer of burlap apple-sacks. Lori had also put down a small satin pillow which said NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR on one side.
“Thought I’d make you a little nest, kid,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said. It was a simple, almost offhand act of
kindness, but Jack found himself having to struggle from
bursting into tears. He managed a smile instead. “Thanks a
lot, Lori.”
“No problem. You’ll be all right here, Jack. Smokey ain’t
so bad. Once you get to know him, he ain’t half bad.” She said this with an unconscious wistfulness, as if wishing it were so.
“Probably not,” Jack said, and then he added impulsively,
“but I’m moving on tomorrow. Oatley’s just not for me, I guess.”
She said: “Maybe you’ll go, Jack . . . and maybe you’ll de-
cide to stay awhile. Why don’t you sleep on it?” There was
something forced and unnatural about this little speech—it
had none of the genuineness of her grin when she’d said
Thought I’d make you a little nest. Jack noticed it, but was too tired to do more than that.
“Well, we’ll see,” he said.
“Sure we will,” Lori agreed, going to the door. She blew a
kiss toward him from the palm of one dirty hand. “Good
night, Jack.”
“Good night.”
He started to pull off his shirt . . . and then left it on, deciding he would just take off his sneakers. The storeroom was cold and chilly. He sat down on the apple-sacks, pulled the knots, pushed off first one and then the other. He was about to lie back on Lori’s New York World’s Fair souvenir—and he might well
have been sound asleep before his head ever touched it—when the telephone began to ring out in the bar, shrilling into the silence, drilling into it, making him think of wavering, pasty-gray roots and bullwhips and two-headed ponies.
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Ring, ring, ring, into the silence, into the dead silence.
Ring, ring, ring, long after the kids who call up to ask
about Prince Albert in a can have gone to bed. Ring, ring,
ring, Hello, Jacky it’s Morgan and I felt you in my woods, you smart little shit I SMELLED you in my woods, and how did you ever get the idea that you were safe in your world? My woods are there, too. Last chance, Jacky. Get home or we send out the troops. You won’t have a chance. You won’t—