business decisions to make? I care about your son’s educa-
tion, too, and it’s a damn good thing I do. You seem to have given up on that.”
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 42
42
THE TALISMAN
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Lily said.
“You don’t want to, but you have to. I’ll come up there and put you in a hospital by force if I have to. We gotta make
arrangements, Lily. You own half of the company I’m trying to run—and Jack gets your half after you’re gone. I want to make sure Jack’s taken care of. And if you think that taking care of Jack is what you’re doing up there in goddam New
Hampshire, then you’re a lot sicker than you know.”
“What do you want, Sloat?” Lily asked in a tired voice.
“You know what I want—I want everybody taken care of. I
want what’s fair. I’ll take care of Jack, Lily. I’ll give him fifty thousand dollars a year—you think about that, Lily. I’ll see he goes to a good college. You can’t even keep him in school.”
“Noble Sloat,” his mother said.
“Do you think that’s an answer? Lily, you need help and
I’m the only one offering.”
“What’s your cut, Sloat?” his mother asked.
“You know damn well. I get what’s fair. I get what’s com-
ing to me. Your interest in Sawyer and Sloat—I worked my
ass off for that company, and it ought to be mine. We could get the paperwork done in a morning, Lily, and then concentrate on getting you taken care of.”
“Like Tommy Woodbine was taken care of,” she said.
“Sometimes I think you and Phil were too successful, Morgan. Sawyer and Sloat was more manageable before you got
into real-estate investments and production deals. Remember when you had only a couple of deadbeat comics and a half-dozen hopeful actors and screenwriters as clients? I liked life better before the megabucks.”
“Manageable, who are you kidding?” Uncle Morgan
yelled. “You can’t even manage yourself!” Then he made an
effort to calm himself. “And I’ll forget you mentioned Tom
Woodbine. That was beneath even you, Lily.”
“I’m going to hang up now, Sloat. Stay away from here.
And stay away from Jack.”
“You are going into a hospital, Lily, and this running
around is going to—”
His mother hung up in the middle of Uncle Morgan’s sen-
tence; Jack gently put down his own receiver. Then he took a couple of steps closer to the window, as if not to be seen any-
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 43
Jack Lights Out
43
where near the living-room phone. Only silence came from
the closed bedroom.
“Mom?” he said.
“Yes, Jacky?” He heard a slight wobble in her voice.
“You okay? Is everything all right?”
“Me? Sure.” Her footsteps came softly to the door, which
cracked open. Their eyes met, his blue to her blue. Lily swung the door all the way open. Again their eyes met, for a moment of uncomfortable intensity. “Of course everything’s all right.
Why wouldn’t it be?” Their eyes disengaged. Knowledge of
some kind had passed between them, but what? Jack won-
dered if she knew that he had listened to her conversation; then he thought that the knowledge they had just shared
was—for the first time—the fact of her illness.
“Well,” he said, embarrassed now. His mother’s disease,
that great unspeakable subject, grew obscenely large between them. “I don’t know, exactly. Uncle Morgan seemed . . .” He shrugged.
Lily shivered, and Jack came to another great recognition.
His mother was afraid—at least as afraid as he was.
She plugged a cigarette in her mouth and snapped open
her lighter. Another stabbing look from her deep eyes. “Don’t pay any attention to that pest, Jack. I’m just irritated because it really doesn’t seem that I’ll ever be able to get away from him. Your Uncle Morgan likes to bully me.” She exhaled gray smoke. “I’m afraid that I don’t have much appetite for breakfast anymore. Why don’t you take yourself downstairs and
have a real breakfast this time?”
“Come with me,” he said.
“I’d like to be alone for a while, Jack. Try to understand
that.”
Try to understand that.
Trust me.
These things that grown-ups said, meaning something else
entirely.
“I’ll be more companionable when you come back,” she
said. “That’s a promise.”
And what she was really saying was I want to scream, I
can’t take any more of this, get out, get out!
“Should I bring you anything?”
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 44
44
THE TALISMAN
She shook her head, smiling toughly at him, and he had to
leave the room, though he no longer had any stomach for
breakfast either. Jack wandered down the corridor to the elevators. Once again, there was only one place to go, but this time he knew it before he ever reached the gloomy lobby and the ashen, censorious desk clerk.
4
Speedy Parker was not in the small red-painted shack of an
office; he was not out on the long pier, in the arcade where the two old boys were back playing Skee-Ball as if it were a war they both knew they would lose; he was not in the dusty vacancy beneath the roller coaster. Jack Sawyer turned aim-
lessly in the harsh sunlight, looking down the empty avenues and deserted public places of the park. Jack’s fear tightened itself up a notch. Suppose something had happened to
Speedy? It was impossible, but what if Uncle Morgan had
found out about Speedy (found out what, though?) and
had . . . Jack mentally saw the WILD CHILD van careening
around a corner, grinding its gears and picking up speed.
He jerked himself into motion, hardly knowing which way
he meant to go. In the bright panic of his mood, he saw Uncle Morgan running past a row of distorting mirrors, turned by
them into a series of monstrous and deformed figures. Horns grew on his bald brow, a hump flowered between his fleshy
shoulders, his wide fingers became shovels. Jack veered
sharply off to the right, and found himself moving toward an oddly shaped, almost round building of white slatlike boards.
From within it he suddenly heard a rhythmic tap tap tap.
The boy ran toward the sound—a wrench hitting a pipe, a
hammer striking an anvil, a noise of work. In the midst of the slats he found a doorknob and pulled open a fragile slat-door.
Jack went forward into striped darkness, and the sound
grew louder. The darkness changed form around him, altered
its dimensions. He stretched out his hands and touched can-
vas. This slid aside; instantly, glowing yellow light fell about him. “Travellin Jack,” said Speedy’s voice.
Jack turned toward the voice and saw the custodian seated
on the ground beside a partially dismantled merry-go-round.
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 45
Jack Lights Out
45
He held a wrench in his hand, and before him a white horse
with a foamy mane lay impaled by a long silver stake from
pommel to belly. Speedy gently put the wrench on the
ground. “Are you ready to talk now, son?” he asked.
4
Jack Goes Over
1
“Yes, I’m ready now,” Jack said in a perfectly calm voice, and then burst into tears.
“Say, Travellin Jack,” Speedy said, dropping his wrench
and coming to him. “Say, son, take her easy, take her easy
now. . . .”
But Jack couldn’t take her easy. Suddenly it was too much,
all of it, too much, and it was cry or just sink under a great wave of blackness—a wave which no bright streak of gold
could illuminate. The tears hurt, but he sensed the terror
would kill him if he did not cry it out.
“You do your weepin, Travellin Jack,” Speedy said, and put
his arms around him. Jack put his hot, swollen face against Speedy’s thin shirt, smelling the man’s smell—something like Old Spice, something like cinnamon, something like books
that no one has taken out of the library in a long time. Good smells, comforting smells. He groped his arms around
Speedy; his palms felt the bones in Speedy’s back, close to the surface, hardly covered by scant meat.
“You weep if it put you easy again,” Speedy said, rocking
him. “Sometimes it does. I know. Speedy knows how far you
been, Travellin Jack, and how far you got to go, and how you tired. So you weep if it put you easy.”
Jack barely understood the words—only the sounds of
them, soothing and calming.
“My mother’s really sick,” he said at last against Speedy’s
King_0345444884_6p_01_r1.qxd 8/13/01 1:04 PM Page 46
46
THE TALISMAN
chest. “I think she came here to get away from my father’s
old partner. Mr. Morgan Sloat.” He sniffed mightily, let go of Speedy, stepped back, and rubbed at his swollen eyes
with the heels of his hands. He was surprised at his lack of embarrassment—always before, his tears had disgusted and