“Oh boy, try to get movie money out of me this week.”
“Yeah.”
They smiled at each other, and Jack could not ever remem-
ber a need to cry so badly, or remember loving her so much.
There was a kind of desperate toughness about her now . . .
going back to the Black Lungers was part of that.
Their drinks came. She tipped her glass toward his. “Us.”
“Okay.”
They drank. The waiter came with menus.
“Did I pull his string a little hard before, Jacky?”
“Maybe a little,” he said.
She thought about it, then shrugged it away. “What are you
having?”
“Sole, I guess.”
“Make it two.”
So he ordered for both of them, feeling clumsy and embar-
rassed but knowing it was what she wanted—and he could see
in her eyes when the waiter left that he hadn’t done too bad a job. A lot of that was Uncle Tommy’s doing. After a trip to Hardee’s Uncle Tommy had said: “I think there’s hope for
you, Jack, if we can just cure this revolting obsession with processed yellow cheese.”
The food came. He wolfed his sole, which was hot and
lemony and good. Lily only toyed with hers, ate a few green beans, and then pushed things around on her plate.
“School started up here two weeks ago,” Jack announced
halfway through the meal. Seeing the big yellow buses with
ARCADIA DISTRICT SCHOOLS written on the sides had made him
feel guilty—under the circumstances he thought that was
probably absurd, but there it was. He was playing hooky.
She looked at him, enquiring. She had ordered and fin-
ished a second drink; now the waiter brought a third.
Jack shrugged. “Just thought I’d mention it.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Huh? No! Not here!”
“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t have your goddam vac-
cination papers. They won’t let you in school without a pedi-gree, chum.”
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 23
Jack Lights Out
23
“Don’t call me chum,” Jack said, but Lily didn’t crack a
smile at the old joke.
Boy, why ain’t you in school?
He blinked as if the voice had spoken aloud instead of only in his mind.
“Something?” she asked.
“No. Well . . . there’s a guy at the amusement park. Fun-
world. Janitor, caretaker, something like that. An old black guy. He asked me why I wasn’t in school.”
She leaned forward, no humor in her now, almost frighten-
ingly grim. “What did you tell him?”
Jack shrugged. “I said I was getting over mono. You re-
member that time Richard had it? The doctor told Uncle Mor-
gan Richard had to stay out of school for six weeks, but he could walk around outside and everything.” Jack smiled a little. “I thought he was lucky.”
Lily relaxed a little. “I don’t like you talking to strangers, Jack.”
“Mom, he’s just a—”
“I don’t care who he is. I don’t want you talking to strangers.”
Jack thought of the black man, his hair gray steel wool, his dark face deeply lined, his odd, light-colored eyes. He had been pushing a broom in the big arcade on the pier—the arcade was the only part of Arcadia Funworld that stayed open the year around, but it had been deserted then except for Jack and the black man and two old men far in the back. The two
were playing Skee-Ball in apathetic silence.
But now, sitting here in this slightly creepy restaurant with his mother, it wasn’t the black man who asked the question; it was himself.
Why aren’t I in school?
It be just like she say, son. Got no vaccination, got no pedi-gree. You think she come down here with your birth certificate? That what you think? She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. You—
“Have you heard from Richard?” she broke in, and when
she said it, it came to him—no, that was too gentle. It crashed into him. His hands twitched and his glass fell off the table. It shattered on the floor.
She’s almost dead, Jack.
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 24
24
THE TALISMAN
The voice from the swirling sand-funnel. The one he had
heard in his mind.
It had been Uncle Morgan’s voice. Not maybe, not almost,
not sorta like. It had been a real voice. The voice of Richard’s father.
6
Going home in the car, she asked him, “What happened to
you in there, Jack?”
“Nothing. My heart did this funny little Gene Krupa riff.”
He ran off a quick one on the dashboard to demonstrate.
“Threw a PCV, just like on General Hospital.”
“Don’t wise off to me, Jacky.” In the glow of the dash-
board instruments she looked pale and haggard. A cigarette
smouldered between the second and third fingers of her right hand. She was driving very slowly—never over forty—as she
always drove when she’d had too much to drink. Her seat was pulled all the way forward, her skirt was hiked up so her
knees floated, storklike, on either side of the steering column, and her chin seemed to hang over the wheel. For a moment
she looked haglike, and Jack quickly looked away.
“I’m not,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“I’m not wising off,” he said. “It was like a twitch, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I thought it was something about
Richard Sloat.”
“No.” His father talked to me out of a hole in the sand down on the beach, that’s all. In my head he talked to me, like in a movie where you hear a voice-over. He told me you were almost dead.
“Do you miss him, Jack?”
“Who, Richard?”
“No—Spiro Agnew. Of course Richard.”
“Sometimes.” Richard Sloat was now going to school in
Illinois—one of those private schools where chapel was com-
pulsory and no one had acne.
“You’ll see him.” She ruffled his hair.
“Mom, are you all right?” The words burst out of him. He
could feel his fingers biting into his thighs.
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 25
Jack Lights Out
25
“Yes,” she said, lighting another cigarette (she slowed
down to twenty to do it; an old pick-up swept by them, its
horn blatting). “Never better.”
“How much weight have you lost?”
“Jacky, you can never be too thin or too rich.” She paused
and then smiled at him. It was a tired, hurt smile that told him all the truth he needed to know.
“Mom—”
“No more,” she said. “All’s well. Take my word for it. See
if you can find us some be-bop on the FM.”
“But—”
“Find us some bop, Jacky, and shut up.”
He found some jazz on a Boston station—an alto saxo-
phone elucidating “All the Things You Are.” But under it, a steady, senseless counterpoint, was the ocean. And later, he could see the great skeleton of the roller coaster against the sky. And the rambling wings of the Alhambra Inn. If this was home, they were home.
3
Speedy Parker
1
The next day the sun was back—a hard bright sun that layered itself like paint over the flat beach and the slanting, red-tiled strip of roof Jack could see from his bedroom window. A long low wave far out in the water seemed to harden in the light and sent a spear of brightness straight toward his eyes. To Jack this sunlight felt different from the light in California. It seemed somehow thinner, colder, less nourishing. The wave
out in the dark ocean melted away, then hoisted itself up
again, and a hard dazzling streak of gold leaped across it.
Jack turned away from his window. He had already showered
and dressed, and his body’s clock told him that it was time to start moving toward the schoolbus stop. Seven-fifteen. But of
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 26
26
THE TALISMAN
course he would not go to school today, nothing was normal
anymore, and he and his mother would just drift like ghosts through another twelve hours of daytime. No schedule, no responsibilities, no homework . . . no order at all except for that given them by mealtimes.
Was today even a schoolday? Jack stopped short beside his
bed, feeling a little flicker of panic that his world had become so formless . . . he didn’t think this was a Saturday. Jack counted back to the first absolutely identifiable day his memory could find, which was the previous Sunday. Counting forward made it Thursday. On Thursdays he had computer class
with Mr. Balgo and an early sports period. At least that was what he’d had when his life had been normal, a time that now seemed—though it had come to an end only months ago—
irretrievably lost.
He wandered out of his bedroom into the living room.
When he tugged at the drawstring for the curtains the hard
bright light flooded into the room, bleaching the furniture.
Then he punched the button on the television set and dropped himself onto the stiff couch. His mother would not be up for at least another fifteen minutes. Maybe longer, considering that she’d had three drinks with dinner the night before.