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THE TALISMAN
He had become himself again. It was as if a magical current had passed directly from the old man into Jack. Speedy had
smiled at him and said, “Well, it looks like I got me some
company. Little travellin man just walked in.”
It was true, he was not on hold anymore: just an instant before, he had seemed to be wrapped in wet wool and cotton
candy, and now he was set free. A silvery nimbus seemed to
play about the old man for an instant, a little aureole of light which disappeared as soon as Jack blinked. For the first time Jack saw that the man was holding the handle of a wide heavy push-broom.
“You okay, son?” The handyman put one hand in the small
of his back, and stretched backward. “The world just get
worse, or did she get better?”
“Uh, better,” Jack said.
“Then you come to the right place, I’d say. What do they
call you?”
Little travellin man, Speedy had said that first day, ole Travellin Jack. He had leaned his tall angular body against the Skee-Ball machine and wrapped his arms around the broom-handle as though it were a girl at a dance. The man you see here is Lester Speedy Parker, formerly a travellin man hisself, son, hee hee—oh yeah, Speedy knew the road, he knew all the roads, way back in the old days. Had me a band, Travellin Jack, played the blues. Git-tar blues. Made me a few records, too, but I won’t shame you by asking if you ever heard em.
Every syllable had its own rhythmic lilt, every phrase its
rimshot and backbeat; Speedy Parker carried a broom instead of a guitar, but he was still a musician. Within the first five seconds of talking to Speedy, Jack had known that his jazz-loving father would have relished this man’s company.
He had tagged along behind Speedy for the better part of
three or four days, watching him work and helping out when
he could. Speedy let him bang in nails, sand down a picket or two that needed paint; these simple tasks done under Speedy’s instructions were the only schooling he was getting, but they made him feel better. Jack now saw his first days in Arcadia Beach as a period of unrelieved wretchedness from which his new friend had rescued him. For Speedy Parker was a friend, that was certain—so certain, in fact, that in it was a quantity of mystery. In the few days since Jack had shaken off his daze
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(or since Speedy had shaken it off for him by dispelling it with one glance of his light-colored eyes), Speedy Parker had become closer to him than any other friend, with the possible exception of Richard Sloat, whom Jack had known approximately since the cradle. And now, counteracting his terror at losing Uncle Tommy and his fear that his mother was actually dying, he felt the tug of Speedy’s warm wise presence from
just down the street.
Again, and uncomfortably, Jack had his old sense of being directed, of being manipulated: as if a long invisible wire had pulled himself and his mother up to this abandoned place by the sea.
They wanted him here, whoever they were.
Or was that just crazy? In his inner vision he saw a bent
old man, clearly out of his mind, muttering to himself as he pushed an empty shopping cart down the sidewalk.
A gull screamed in the air, and Jack promised himself that
he would make himself talk about some of his feelings with Speedy Parker. Even if Speedy thought he was nuts; even if
he laughed at Jack. He would not laugh, Jack secretly knew.
They were old friends because one of the things Jack under-
stood about the old custodian was that he could say almost
anything to him.
But he was not ready for all that yet. It was all too crazy, and he did not understand it yet himself. Almost reluctantly Jack turned his back on Funworld and trudged across the sand toward the hotel.
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The Funnel Opens
1
It was a day later, but Jack Sawyer was no wiser. He had, however, had one of the greatest nightmares of all time last night. In it, some terrible creature had been coming for his mother—a dwarfish monstrosity with misplaced eyes and rotting, cheesy skin. “Your mother’s almost dead, Jack, can you say hallelujah?” this monstrosity had croaked, and Jack knew—the way you knew things in dreams—that it was radioactive, and that if it touched him, he would die, too. He had awakened with his body drenched in sweat, on the edge of a bitter scream. It took the steady pounding of the surf to reacquaint him with where he was, and it was hours before he could go back to sleep.
He had meant to tell his mother about the dream this
morning, but Lily had been sour and uncommunicative, hid-
ing in a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was only as he started out of the hotel coffee shop on some trumped-up errand that she smiled at him a little.
“Think about what you want to eat tonight.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Anything but fast food. I did not come all the way
from L.A. to New Hampshire in order to poison myself with
hotdogs.”
“Let’s try one of those seafood places in Hampton Beach,”
Jack said.
“Fine. Go on and play.”
Go on and play, Jack thought with a bitterness utterly unlike him. Oh yeah, Mom, way to go. Too cool. Go on and play.
With who? Mom, why are you here? Why are we here? How sick are you? How come you won’t talk to me about Uncle Tommy? What’s Uncle Morgan up to? What—
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Questions, questions. And not one of them worth a darned
thing, because there was no one to answer them.
Unless Speedy—
But that was ridiculous; how could one old black man he’d
just met solve any of his problems?
Still, the thought of Speedy Parker danced at the edge of
his mind as Jack ambled across the boardwalk and down to
the depressingly empty beach.
2
This is where the world ends, right? Jack thought again.
Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The calendar said
it was still summer, but summer ended here at Arcadia Beach on Labor Day. The silence was gray as the air.
He looked down at his sneakers and saw that there was
some sort of tarry goo on them. Beach crud, he thought.
Some kind of pollution. He had no idea where he had picked it up and he stepped back from the edge of the water, uneasy.
The gulls in the air, swooping and crying. One of them
screamed overhead and he heard a flat cracking that was al-
most metallic. He turned in time to see it come in for a fluttering, awkward landing on a hump of rock. The gull turned its head in rapid, almost robotic movements, as if to verify it was alone, and then it hopped down to where the clam it had
dropped lay on the smooth, hard-packed sand. The clam had
cracked open like an egg and Jack saw raw meat inside, still twitching . . . or perhaps that was his imagination.
Don’t want to see this.
But before he could turn away, the gull’s yellow, hooked
beak was pulling at the meat, stretching it like a rubber band, and he felt his stomach knot into a slick fist. In his mind he could hear that stretched tissue screaming—nothing coherent, only stupid flesh crying out in pain.
He tried to look away from the seagull again and he
couldn’t. The gull’s beak opened, giving him a brief glimpse of dirty pink gullet. The clam snapped back into its cracked shell and for a moment the gull was looking at him, its eyes a deadly black, confirming every horrible truth: fathers die, mothers die, uncles die even if they went to Yale and look as
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THE TALISMAN
solid as bank walls in their three-piece Savile Row suits. Kids die too, maybe . . . and at the end all there may be is the stupid, unthinking scream of living tissue.
“Hey,” Jack said aloud, not aware he was doing anything
but thinking inside his own head. “Hey, give me a break.”
The gull sat over its catch, regarding him with its beady
black eyes. Then it began to dig at the meat again. Want some, Jack? It’s still twitching! By God, it’s so fresh it hardly knows it’s dead!
The strong yellow beak hooked into the meat again and
pulled. Strettttchhhhhh—
It snapped. The gull’s head went up toward the gray Sep-