many more hours pounding up I-95—because Lily Cava-
naugh Sawyer had once been happy here. In 1968, the year
before Jack’s birth, Lily had been nominated for an Academy Award for her role in a picture called Blaze. Blaze was a better movie than most of Lily’s, and in it she had been able to demonstrate a much richer talent than her usual bad-girl roles had revealed. Nobody expected Lily to win, least of all Lily; but for Lily the customary cliché about the real honor being in the nomination was honest truth—she did feel honored,
deeply and genuinely, and to celebrate this one moment of
real professional recognition, Phil Sawyer had wisely taken her for three weeks to the Alhambra Inn and Gardens, on the other side of the continent, where they had watched the Os-cars while drinking champagne in bed. (If Jack had been
older, and had he had an occasion to care, he might have done the necessary subtraction and discovered that the Alhambra
had been the place of his essential beginning.)
When the Supporting Actress nominations were read, ac-
cording to family legend, Lily had growled to Phil, “If I win this thing and I’m not there, I’ll do the Monkey on your chest in my stiletto heels.”
But when Ruth Gordon had won, Lily had said, “Sure, she
deserves it, she’s a great kid.” And had immediately poked her husband in the middle of the chest and said, “You’d better get me another part like that, you big-shot agent you.”
There had been no more parts like that. Lily’s last role,
two years after Phil’s death, had been that of a cynical ex-prostitute in a film called Motorcycle Maniacs.
It was that period Lily was commemorating now, Jack knew
as he hauled the baggage out of the trunk and the back seat. A
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D’ Agostino bag had torn right down through the big D’AG,
and a jumble of rolled-up socks, loose photographs, chess-
men and the board, and comic books had dribbled over all
else in the trunk. Jack managed to get most of this stuff into other bags. Lily was moving slowly up the hotel steps, pulling herself along on the railing like an old lady. “I’ll find the bell-hop,” she said without turning around.
Jack straightened up from the bulging bags and looked
again at the sky where he was sure he had seen a rainbow.
There was no rainbow, only that uncomfortable, shifting sky.
Then:
“Come to me,” someone said behind him in a small and
perfectly audible voice.
“What?” he asked, turning around. The empty gardens and
drive stretched out before him.
“Yes?” his mother said. She looked crickle-backed, leaning
over the knob of the great wooden door.
“Mistake,” he said. There had been no voice, no rainbow.
He forgot both and looked up at his mother, who was strug-
gling with the vast door. “Hold on, I’ll help,” he called, and trotted up the steps, awkwardly carrying a big suitcase and a straining paper bag filled with sweaters.
4
Until he met Speedy Parker, Jack had moved through the days at the hotel as unconscious of the passage of time as a sleeping dog. His entire life seemed almost dreamlike to him during these days, full of shadows and inexplicable transitions.
Even the terrible news about Uncle Tommy which had come
down the telephone wires the night before had not entirely
awakened him, as shocking as it had been. If Jack had been a mystic, he might have thought that other forces had taken him over and were manipulating his mother’s life and his own.
Jack Sawyer at twelve was a being who required things to do, and the noiseless passivity of these days, after the hubbub of Manhattan, had confused and undone him in some basic way.
Jack had found himself standing on the beach with no rec-
ollection of having gone there, no idea of what he was doing there at all. He supposed he was mourning Uncle Tommy, but
it was as though his mind had gone to sleep, leaving his body
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THE TALISMAN
to fend for itself. He could not concentrate long enough to grasp the plots of the sitcoms he and Lily watched at night, much less keep the nuances of fiction in his head.
“You’re tired from all this moving around,” his mother said, dragging deeply on a cigarette and squinting at him through the smoke. “All you have to do, Jack-O, is relax for a little while. This is a good place. Let’s enjoy it as long as we can.”
Bob Newhart, before them in a slightly too-reddish color on the set, bemusedly regarded a shoe he held in his right hand.
“That’s what I’m doing, Jacky.” She smiled at him. “Relax-
ing and enjoying it.”
He peeked at his watch. Two hours had passed while they
sat in front of the television, and he could not remember anything that had preceded this program.
Jack was getting up to go to bed when the phone rang.
Good old Uncle Morgan Sloat had found them. Uncle Mor-
gan’s news was never very great, but this was apparently a
blockbuster even by Uncle Morgan’s standards. Jack stood in the middle of the room, watching as his mother’s face grew
paler, palest. Her hand crept to her throat, where new lines had appeared over the last few months, and pressed lightly.
She said barely a word until the end, when she whispered,
“Thank you, Morgan,” and hung up. She had turned to Jack
then, looking older and sicker than ever.
“Got to be tough now, Jacky, all right?”
He hadn’t felt tough.
She took his hand then and told him.
“Uncle Tommy was killed in a hit-and-run accident this af-
ternoon, Jack.”
He gasped, feeling as if the wind had been torn out of him.
“He was crossing La Cienega Boulevard and a van hit him.
There was a witness who said it was black, and that the words WILD CHILD were written on the side, but that was . . . was all.”
Lily began to cry. A moment later, almost surprised, Jack
began to cry as well. All of that had happened three days ago, and to Jack it seemed forever.
5
On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood
looking out at the steady water as he stood on an unmarked
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beach before a hotel that looked like a castle in a Sir Walter Scott novel. He wanted to cry but was unable to release his tears. He was surrounded by death, death made up half the
world, there were no rainbows. The WILD CHILD van had sub-
tracted Uncle Tommy from the world. Uncle Tommy, dead in
L.A., too far from the east coast, where even a kid like Jack knew he really belonged. A man who felt he had to put on a
tie before going out to get a roast beef sandwich at Arby’s had no business on the west coast at all.
His father was dead, Uncle Tommy was dead, his mother
might be dying. He felt death here, too, at Arcadia Beach,
where it spoke through telephones in Uncle Morgan’s voice.
It was nothing as cheap or obvious as the melancholy feel of a resort in the off-season, where one kept stumbling over the Ghosts of Summers Past; it seemed to be in the texture of
things, a smell on the ocean breeze. He was scared . . . and he had been scared for a long time. Being here, where it was so quiet, had only helped him to realize it—had helped him to
realize that maybe Death had driven all the way up I-95 from New York, squinting out through cigarette smoke and asking
him to find some bop on the car radio.
He could remember—vaguely—his father telling him that
he was born with an old head, but his head didn’t feel old
now. Right now, his head felt very young. Scared, he thought.
I’m pretty damn scared. This is where the world ends, right?
Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The silence was as
gray as the air—as deadly as the growing circles under her
eyes.
6
When he had wandered into Funworld and met Lester Speedy
Parker after he did not quite know how many days of numbly
drifting through time, that passive feeling of being on hold had somehow left him. Lester Parker was a black man with
crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting through his cheeks.
He was utterly unremarkable now despite whatever he had ac-
complished in his earlier life as a travelling blues musician.
Nor had he said anything particularly remarkable. Yet as soon as Jack had walked aimlessly into Funworld’s game arcade
and met Speedy’s pale eyes he felt all the fuzziness leave him.