began to cry.
6
Jack stood watching Richard cry and damned himself for
twenty kinds of fool. No matter what else Morgan was, he
was still Richard Sloat’s father; Morgan’s ghost lurked in the shape of Richard’s hands and in the bones of Richard’s face.
Had he forgotten those things? No—but for a moment his bit-
ter disappointment in Richard had covered them up. And his
increasing nervousness had played a part. The Talisman was
very, very close now, and he felt it in his nerve-endings the way a horse smells water in the desert or a distant grass-fire in the plains. That nerviness was coming out in a kind of prancy skittishness.
Yeah, well, this guy’s supposed to be your best buddy,
Jack-O—get a little funky if you have to, but don’t trample Richard. The kid’s sick, just in case you hadn’t noticed.
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He reached for Richard. Richard tried to push him away.
Jack was having none of that. He held Richard. The two of
them stood that way in the middle of the deserted railroad bed for a while, Richard’s head on Jack’s shoulder.
“Listen,” Jack said awkwardly, “try not to worry too much
about . . . you know . . . everything . . . just yet, Richard. Just kind of try to roll with the changes, you know?” Boy, that
sounded really stupid. Like telling somebody they had cancer but don’t worry because pretty soon we’re going to put Star Wars on the VCR and it’ll cheer you right up.
“Sure,” Richard said. He pushed away from Jack. The tears
had cut clean tracks on his dirty face. He wiped an arm across his eyes and tried to smile. “A’ wi’ be well an’ a’ wi’ be
well—”
“An’ a’ manner a’ things wi’ be well,” Jack chimed in—
they finished together, then laughed together, and that was all right.
“Come on,” Richard said. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To get your Talisman,” Richard said. “The way you’re
talking, it must be in Point Venuti. It’s the next town up the line. Come on, Jack. Let’s get going. But walk slow—I’m not done talking yet.”
Jack looked at him curiously, and then they started walk-
ing again—but slowly.
7
Now that the dam had broken and Richard had allowed him-
self to begin remembering things, he was an unexpected fountain of information. Jack began to feel as if he had been
working a jigsaw puzzle without knowing that several of the most important pieces were missing. It was Richard who had
had most of those pieces all along. Richard had been in the survivalist camp before; that was the first piece. His father had owned it.
“Are you sure it was the same place, Richard?” Jack asked
doubtfully.
“I’m sure,” Richard said. “It even looked a little familiar to me on the other side, there. When we got back over . . . over here . . . I was sure.”
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Jack nodded, unsure what else to do.
“We used to stay in Point Venuti. That’s where we always
stayed before we came here. The train was a big treat. I mean, how many dads have their own private train?”
“Not many,” Jack said. “I guess Diamond Jim Brady and
some of those guys had private trains, but I don’t know if they were dads or not.”
“Oh, my dad wasn’t in their league,” Richard said, laugh-
ing a little, and Jack thought: Richard, you might be surprised.
“We’d drive up to Point Venuti from L.A. in a rental car.
There was a motel we stayed at. Just the two of us.” Richard stopped. His eyes had gone misty with love and remembering.
“Then—after we hung out there for a while—we’d take my
dad’s train up to Camp Readiness. It was just a little train.” He looked at Jack, startled. “Like the one we came on, I guess.”
“Camp Readiness?”
But Richard appeared not to have heard him. He was look-
ing at the rusted tracks. They were whole here, but Jack
thought Richard might be remembering the twisted ripples
they had passed some way back. In a couple of places the
ends of rail-sections actually curved up into the air, like broken guitar-strings. Jack guessed that in the Territories those tracks would be in fine shape, neatly and lovingly maintained.
“See, there used to be a trolley line here,” Richard said.
“This was back in the thirties, my father said. The Mendocino County Red Line. Only it wasn’t owned by the county, it was owned by a private company, and they went broke, because in California . . . you know . . .”
Jack nodded. In California, everyone used cars. “Richard,
why didn’t you ever tell me about this place?”
“That was the one thing my dad said never to tell you. You
and your parents knew we sometimes took vacations in north-
ern California and he said that was all right, but I wasn’t to tell you about the train, or Camp Readiness. He said if I told, Phil would be mad because it was a secret.”
Richard paused.
“He said if I told, he’d never take me again. I thought it
was because they were supposed to be partners. I guess it was more than that.
“The trolley line went broke because of the cars and the
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freeways.” He paused thoughtfully. “That was one thing about the place you took me to, Jack. Weird as it was, it didn’t stink of hydrocarbons. I could get into that.”
Jack nodded again, saying nothing.
“The trolley company finally sold the whole line—grand-
father clause and all—to a development company. They
thought people would start to move inland, too. Except it
didn’t happen.”
“Then your father bought it.”
“Yes, I guess so. I don’t really know. He never talked much about buying the line . . . or how he replaced the trolley tracks with these railroad tracks.”
That would have taken a lot of work, Jack thought, and
then he thought of the ore-pits, and Morgan of Orris’s apparently unlimited supply of slave labor.
“I know he replaced them, but only because I got a book
on railroads and found out there’s a difference in gauge. Trolleys run on ten-gauge track. This is sixteen-gauge.”
Jack knelt, and yes, he could see a very faint double indentation inside the existing tracks—that was where the trolley tracks had been.
“He had a little red train,” Richard said dreamily. “Just an engine and two cars. It ran on diesel fuel. He used to laugh about it and say that the only thing that separated the men from the boys was the price of their toys. There was an old trolley station on the hill above Point Venuti, and we’d go up there in the rental car and park and go on in. I remember how that station smelled—kind of old, but nice . . . full of old sunlight, sort of. And the train would be there. And my dad . . .
he’d say, ‘All aboard for Camp Readiness, Richard! You got
your ticket?’ And there’d be lemonade . . . or iced tea . . . and we sat up in the cab . . . sometimes he’d have stuff . . . supplies . . . behind . . . but we’d sit up front . . . and . . . and . . .”
Richard swallowed hard and swiped a hand across his
eyes.
“And it was a nice time,” he finished. “Just him and me. It was pretty cool.”
He looked around, his eyes shiny with unshed tears.
“There was a plate to turn the train around at Camp Readi-
ness,” he said. “Back in those days. The old days.”
Richard uttered a terrible strangled sob.
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“Richard—”
Jack tried to touch him.
Richard shook him off and stepped away, brushing tears
from his cheeks with the backs of his hands.
“Wasn’t so grown-up then,” he said, smiling. Trying to.
“Nothing was so grown-up then, was it, Jack?”
“No,” Jack said, and now he found he was crying himself.
Oh Richard. Oh my dear one.
“No,” Richard said, smiling, looking around at the en-
croaching woods and brushing the tears away with the dirty
backs of his hands, “nothing was so grown-up back then. In
the old days, when we were just kids. Back when we all lived in California and nobody lived anywhere else.”
He looked at Jack, trying to smile.
“Jack, help me,” he said. “I feel like my leg is caught in
some stuh-stupid truh-truh-hap and I . . . I . . .”
Then Richard fell on his knees with his hair in his tired
face, and Jack got down there with him, and I can bear to tell you no more—only that they comforted each other as well as