Jack glanced toward the door to his mother’s room.
Twenty minutes later he rapped softly at her door. “Mom?”
A thick mumble answered him. Jack pushed the door open a
crack and looked in. She was lifting her head off the pillow and peering back through half-closed eyes.
“Jacky. Morning. What time?”
“Around eight.”
“God. You starving?” She sat up and pressed the palms of
her hands to her eyes.
“Kind of. I’m sort of sick of sitting in here. I just wondered if you were getting up soon.”
“Not if I can help it. You mind? Go down to the dining
room, get some breakfast. Mess around on the beach, okay?
You’ll have a much better mother today if you give her an-
other hour in bed.”
“Sure,” he said. “Okay. See you later.”
Her head had already dropped back down on the pillow.
Jack switched off the television and let himself out of the room after making sure his key was in the pocket of his jeans.
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The elevator smelled of camphor and ammonia—a maid
had tipped a bottle off a cart. The doors opened, and the gray desk clerk frowned at him and ostentatiously turned away. Being a movie star’s brat doesn’t make you anything special
around here, sonny . . . and why aren’t you in school? Jack turned into the panelled entrance to the dining room—The
Saddle of Lamb—and saw rows of empty tables in a shadowy
vastness. Perhaps six had been set up. A waitress in a white blouse and red ruffled skirt looked at him, then looked away.
Two exhausted-looking old people sat across a table from
each other at the other end of the room. There were no other breakfasters. As Jack looked on, the old man leaned over the table and unselfconsciously cut his wife’s fried egg into four-inch square sections.
“Table for one?” The woman in charge of The Saddle of
Lamb during the day had materialized beside him, and was already plucking a menu off a stack beside the reservation
book.
“Changed my mind, sorry.” Jack escaped.
The Alhambra’s coffee shop, The Beachcomber Lounge,
lay all the way across the lobby and down a long bleak corridor lined with empty display cases. His hunger died at the
thought of sitting by himself at the counter and watching the bored cook slap down strips of bacon on the crusty grill. He would wait until his mother got up: or, better yet, he would go out and see if he could get a doughnut and a little carton of milk at one of the shops up the street on the way into town.
He pushed open the tall heavy front door of the hotel and
went out into the sunlight. For a moment the sudden bright-
ness stung his eyes—the world was a flat glaring dazzle. Jack squinted, wishing he had remembered to bring his sunglasses downstairs. He went across the apron of red brick and down
the four curving steps to the main pathway through the gar-
dens at the front of the hotel.
What happened if she died?
What happened to him—where would he go, who would
take care of him, if the worst thing in the world actually took place and she died, for good and all died, up in that hotel room?
He shook his head, trying to send the terrible thought away before a lurking panic could rush up out of the Alhambra’s
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THE TALISMAN
well-ordered gardens and blast him apart. He would not cry, he would not let that happen to him—and he would not let
himself think about the Tarrytoons and the weight she had
lost, the feeling that he sometimes had that she was too helpless and without direction. He was walking very quickly now, and he shoved his hands into his pockets as he jumped down
off the curving path through the gardens onto the hotel’s
drive. She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. On the run, but from whom? And to where? Here—just to here, this
deserted resort?
He reached the wide street that travelled up the shoreline
toward the town, and now all of the empty landscape before
him was a whirlpool that could suck him down into itself and spit him out into a black place where peace and safety had
never existed. A gull sailed out over the empty road, wheeled around in a wide curve, and dipped back toward the beach.
Jack watched it go, shrinking in the air to a smudge of white above the erratic line of the roller-coaster track.
Lester Speedy Parker, a black man with crinkly gray hair
and heavy lines cutting down through his cheeks, was down
there somewhere inside Funworld and it was Speedy he had
to see. That was as clear to Jack as his sudden insight about his friend Richard’s father.
A gull screeched, a wave bounced hard gold light toward
him, and Jack saw Uncle Morgan and his new friend Speedy
as figures almost allegorically opposed, as if they were statues of NIGHT and DAY, stuck up on plinths, MOON and SUN—the
dark and the light. What Jack had understood as soon as he
had known that his father would have liked Speedy Parker
was that the ex-bluesman had no harm in him. Uncle Morgan,
now . . . he was another kind of being altogether. Uncle Morgan lived for business, for deal-making and hustling; and he was so ambitious that he challenged every even faintly dubious call in a tennis match, so ambitious in fact that he cheated in the penny-ante card games his son had now and then
coaxed him into joining. At least, Jack thought that Uncle Morgan had been cheating in a couple of their games . . . not a man who thought that defeat demanded graciousness.
NIGHT and DAY, MOON and SUN; DARK and LIGHT, and the
black man was the light in these polarities. And when Jack’s mind had pushed him this far, all that panic he had fought off
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in the hotel’s tidy gardens swarmed toward him again. He
lifted his feet and ran.
2
When the boy saw Speedy kneeling down outside the gray
and peeling arcade building—wrapping electrician’s tape
around a thick cord, his steel-wool head bent almost to the pier and his skinny buttocks poking out the worn green seat of his work-pants, the dusty soles of his boots toed down like a pair of upended surfboards—he realized that he had no idea of what he had been planning to say to the custodian, or even if he intended to say anything at all. Speedy gave the roll of black tape another twist around the cord, nodded, took a battered Palmer knife from the flap pocket of his workshirt and sliced the tape off the roll with a flat surgical neatness. Jack would have escaped from here, too, if he could—he was intruding on the man’s work, and anyhow, it was crazy to think that Speedy could really help him in any way. What kind of
help could he give, an old janitor in an empty amusement
park?
Then Speedy turned his head and registered the boy’s pres-
ence with an expression of total and warming welcome—not
so much a smile as a deepening of all those heavy lines in his face—and Jack knew that he was at least no intrusion.
“Travellin Jack,” Speedy said. “I was beginnin to get afraid you decided to stay away from me. Just when we got to be
friends, too. Good to see you again, son.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Good to see you, too.”
Speedy popped the metal knife back into his shirt pocket
and lifted his long bony body upright so easily, so athletically, that he seemed weightless. “This whole place comin down
around my ears,” he said. “I just fix it a little bit at a time, enough so everything works more or less the way it should.”
He stopped in mid-sentence, having had a good look at Jack’s face. “Old world’s not so fine right now, seems like. Travellin Jack got buckled up to a load of worries. That the way it is?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Jack began—he still had no idea of how to
begin expressing the things that troubled him. They could not be put into ordinary sentences, for ordinary sentences made everything seem rational. One . . . two . . . three: Jack’s world
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no longer marched in those straight lines. All he could not say weighed in his chest.
He looked miserably at the tall thin man before him.
Speedy’s hands were thrust deep into his pockets; his thick gray eyebrows pushed toward the deep vertical furrow between them. Speedy’s eyes, so light they were almost no color at all, swung up from the blistered paint of the pier and met Jack’s own—and suddenly Jack felt better again. He did not