State of Indiana’s eye would fall most often. Bars on the
windows upstairs, okay. Bars on the kitchen windows? Jack
didn’t think so. They would raise too many questions.
The kitchen might make a good jumping-off point for an
escape attempt, so Jack studied it carefully.
It looked a lot like the cafeteria kitchen at his school in California. The floor and walls were tiled, the big sinks and counters stainless steel. The cupboards were nearly the size of vegetable bins. An old conveyor-belt dishwasher stood
against one wall. Three boys were already operating this
hoary antique under the supervision of a man in cook’s
whites. The man was narrow, pallid, and possessed of a ratlike little face. An unfiltered cigarette was pasted to his upper lip, and that identified him in Jack’s mind as a possible ally. He doubted if Sunlight Gardener would let any of his own people smoke cigarettes.
On the wall, he saw a framed certificate which announced
that this public kitchen had been rated acceptable under standards set by the State of Indiana and the U.S. Government.
And no, there were no bars on the frosted-glass windows.
The ratlike man looked over at Jack, peeled his cigarette
off his lower lip, and tossed it into one of the sinks.
“New fish, you and your buddy, huh?” he asked. “Well,
you’ll be old fish soon enough. The fish get old real quick here in the Sunlight Home, don’t they, Sonny?”
He grinned insolently at Sonny Singer. It was quite obvi-
ous that Singer did not know how to cope with such a smile; he looked confused and unsure, just a kid again.
“You know you’re not supposed to talk to the boys,
Rudolph,” he said.
“You can just cram it up your ass anytime you can’t roll it down the alley or kick it in the air, buddy-roo,” Rudolph said, flicking his eyes lazily over Singer. “You know that, don’t you?”
Singer looked at him, lips first trembling, then writhing,
then pushing together hard.
He suddenly turned around. “Night-chapel!” he shouted
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THE TALISMAN
furiously. “Night-chapel, come on, let’s go, get those tables cleared and let’s get up the hall, we’re late! Night-chapel!”
5
The boys trooped down a narrow staircase lit by naked bulbs enclosed in wire mesh. The walls were dank plaster, and Jack didn’t like the way Wolf ’s eyeballs were rolling.
After that, the cellar chapel was a surprise. Most of the
downstairs area—which was considerable—had been con-
verted into a spare, modern chapel. The air down here was
good—not too warm, not too cold. And fresh. Jack could hear the whispering of convection units somewhere near. There
were five pews split by a central aisle, leading up to a dais with a lectern and a simple wooden cross hung on a purple
velvet backdrop.
Somewhere, an organ was playing.
The boys filed quietly into the pews. The microphone on
the lectern had a large, professional-looking baffle on the end of it. Jack had been in plenty of studio sound-rooms with his mother, often sitting patiently by and reading a book or doing his homework assignments while she did TV overdubs or
looped unclear dialogue, and he knew that sort of baffle was meant to keep the speaker from “popping” the mike. He
thought it a strange thing to see in the chapel of a religious boarding home for wayward boys. Two video cameras stood
at either side of the lectern, one to catch Sunlight Gardener’s right profile, the other to catch his left. Neither was turned on this evening. There were heavy purple drapes on the walls. On the right, they were unbroken. Set into the left wall, however, was a glass rectangle. Jack could see Casey crouched over an extremely professional-looking sound-board, reel-to-reel tape recorder close to his right hand. As Jack watched, Casey
grabbed a pair of cans from the board and slipped them over his ears.
Jack looked up and saw hardwood beams rising in a series
of six modest arches. Between them was drilled white com-
position board . . . soundproofing. The place looked like a chapel, but it was a very efficient combination TV-and-radio studio. Jack suddenly thought of Jimmy Swaggart, Rex Hum-bard, Jack Van Impe.
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Folks, just lay yo hand on yo television set, and you gone be HEALED!!!
He suddenly felt like screaming with laughter.
A small door to the left of the podium opened, and Sun-
light Gardener stepped out. He was dressed in white from
head to toe, and Jack saw expressions varying from exaltation to outright adoration on the faces of many of the boys, but Jack again had to restrain himself from a wild laughing-spree.
The vision in white approaching the lectern reminded him of a series of commercials he had seen as a very young child.
He thought Sunlight Gardener looked like the Man from
Glad.
Wolf turned toward him and whispered hoarsely, “What’s
the matter, Jack? You smell like something’s really funny.”
Jack snorted so hard into the hand cupped over his mouth
that he blew colorless snot all over his fingers.
Sunlight Gardener, his face glowing with ruddy good
health, turned the pages of the great Bible on the lectern, apparently lost in deepest meditation. Jack saw the glowering scorched-earth landscape of Heck Bast’s face, the narrow,
suspicious face of Sonny Singer. He sobered up in a hurry.
In the glass booth, Casey was sitting up, watching Gar-
dener alertly. And as Gardener raised his handsome face from his Bible and fastened his cloudy, dreaming, and utterly insane eyes upon his congregation, Casey flipped a switch. The reels of the big tape recorder began to turn.
6
“Fret not thyself because of evildoers,”
said Sunlight Gardener. His voice was low, musical, thoughtful.
“Neither be thou envious against
the workers of iniquity.
For they shall soon be cut down like the grass,
and wither as the green herb.
Trust in the Lord, and do good;
so shalt thou dwell in the Territories—”
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(Jack Sawyer felt his heart take a nasty, leaping turn in his chest)
“—and verily thou shalt be fed.
Delight thyself also in the Lord;
and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
Commit thy way unto the Lord;
trust also in him;
and he shall bring it to pass. . . .
Cease from anger, and forsake wrath;
fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.
For evildoers shall be cut off:
but those that wait upon the Lord,
they shall inherit his Territory.”
Sunlight Gardener closed the Book.
“May God,” he said, “add His Blessing to the reading of
His Holy Word.”
He looked down at his hands for a long, long time. In
Casey’s glass booth, the wheels of the tape recorder turned.
Then he looked up again, and in his mind Jack suddenly
heard this man scream: Not the Kingsland? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve overturned a full wagonload of Kingsland Ale, you stupid goat’s penis? You don’t mean to tell me that, do yoooooouuuuuuu?
Sunlight Gardener studied his young male congregation
closely and earnestly. Their faces looked back at him—round faces, lean faces, bruised faces, faces flaring with acne, faces that were sly, and faces that were open and youthful and
lovely.
“What does it mean, boys? Do you understand Psalm
Thirty-seven? Do you understand this lovely, lovely song?”
No, their faces said—sly and open, clear and sweet, pitted and poxed. Not too much, only got as far as the fifth grade, been on the road, been on the bum, been in trouble . . . tell me . . . tell me. . . .
Suddenly, shockingly, Gardener shrieked into the mike, “It
means DON’T SWEAT IT! ”
Wolf recoiled, moaning a little.
“Now you know what that means, don’t you? You boys
have heard that one, haven’t you?”
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“Yeah!” someone shouted from behind Jack.
“OH-YEAH! ” Sunlight Gardener echoed, beaming.
“DON’T SWEAT IT! NEGATIVE PERSPIRATION! They
are good words, aren’t they, boys? Those are some kind of
gooooood words, OH-YEAH! ”
“Yeah! . . . YEAH!”
“This Psalm says you don’t have to WORRY about the
evildoers! NO SWEAT! OH-YEAH! It says you don’t have to WORRY about the workers of sin and iniquity! NEGATIVE
PERSPIRATION! This Psalm here says that if you WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord, EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE SO
COOL! Do you understand that, boys? Do you have an understanding ear for that?”
“Yeah!”
“Hallelujah!” Heck Bast cried, grinning divinely.
“Amen!” a boy with a great lazy eye behind his magnify-ing spectacles returned.
Sunlight Gardener took the mike with practiced ease, and
Jack was again reminded of a Las Vegas lounge performer.
Gardener began to walk back and forth with nervous, mincing rapidity. He sometimes did a jigging little half-step in his clean white leather shoes; now he was Dizzy Gillespie, now