and so was probably the high school. Fanning out from the
two streets was a jumble of little houses interspersed with anonymous buildings fenced in behind tall wire mesh.
Many of the windows in the factory were broken, and
some of the windows in the strip of downtown had been
boarded over. Heaps of garbage and fluttering papers littered the fenced-in concrete yards. Even the important houses
seemed neglected, with their sagging porches and bleached-
out paint jobs. These people would own the used-car lots
filled with unsaleable automobiles.
For a moment Jack considered turning his back on Oatley
and making the hike to Dogtown, wherever that was. But that would mean walking through the Mill Road tunnel again.
From down in the middle of the shopping district a car horn blatted, and the sound unfurled toward Jack full of an inex-pressible loneliness and nostalgia.
He could not relax until he was all the way to the gates of the factory, the Mill Road tunnel far up behind him. Nearly a third of the windows along the dirty-brick facade had been
broken in, and many of the others showed blank brown
squares of cardboard. Even out on the road, Jack could smell machine oil, grease, smouldering fanbelts, and clashing
gears. He put his hands in his pockets and walked downhill as quickly as he could.
5
Seen close up, the town was even more depressed than it had looked from the hill. The salesmen at the car lots leaned
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against the windows in their offices, too bored to come outside. Their pennants hung tattered and joyless, the once-
optimistic signs propped along the cracked sidewalk fronting the rows of cars—ONE OWNER! FANTASTIC BUY! CAR OF THE
WEEK!—had yellowed. The ink had feathered and run on
some of the signs, as if they had been left out in the rain. Very few people moved along the streets. As Jack went toward the center of town, he saw an old man with sunken cheeks and
gray skin trying to wrestle an empty shopping cart up onto a curb. When he approached, the old man screeched something
hostile and frightened and bared gums as black as a badger’s.
He thought Jack was going to steal his cart! “Sorry,” Jack
said, his heart pounding again. The old man was trying to hug the whole cumbersome body of the cart, protecting it, all the while showing those blackened gums to his enemy. “Sorry,”
Jack repeated. “I was just going to . . .”
“Fusshhingfeef! FusshhingFEEEFF!” the old man
screeched, and tears crawled into the wrinkles on his cheeks.
Jack hurried off.
Twenty years before, during the sixties, Oatley must have
prospered. The relative brightness of the strip of Mill Road leading out of town was the product of that era when stocks went go-go and gas was still cheap and nobody had heard the term “discretionary income” because they had plenty of it.
People had sunk their money into franchise operations and little shops and for a time had, if not actually flourished, held their heads above the waves. This short series of blocks still had that superficial hopefulness—but only a few bored
teenagers sat in the franchise restaurants, nursing medium
Cokes, and in the plate-glass windows of too many of the little shops placards as faded as those in the used-car lots announced EVERYTHING MUST GO! CLOSING SALE. Jack saw no
signs advertising for help, and kept on walking.
Downtown Oatley showed the reality beneath the happy
clown’s colors left behind by the sixties. As Jack trudged
along these blocks of baked-looking brick buildings, his pack grew heavier, his feet more tender. He would have walked to Dogtown after all, if it were not for his feet and the necessity of going through the Mill Road tunnel again. Of course there was no snarling man-wolf lurking in the dark there—he’d
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worked that out by now. No one could have spoken to him in
the tunnel. The Territories had shaken him. First the sight of the Queen, then that dead boy beneath the cart with half his face gone. Then Morgan; the trees. But that was there, where such things could be—were, perhaps, even normal. Here, normality did not admit such gaudiness.
He was before a long, dirty window above which the flak-
ing slogan FURNITURE DEPOSITORY was barely legible on the
brickwork. He put his hands to his eyes and stared in. A couch and a chair, each covered by a white sheet, sat fifteen feet apart on a wide wooden floor. Jack moved farther down the
block, wondering if he was going to have to beg for food.
Four men sat in a car before a boarded-up shop a little way down the block. It took Jack a moment to see that the car, an ancient black DeSoto that looked as though Broderick Craw-ford should come bustling out of it, had no tires. Taped to the windshield was a yellow five-by-eight card which read FAIR
WEATHER CLUB. The men inside, two in front and two in back, were playing cards. Jack stepped up to the front passenger
window.
“Excuse me,” he said, and the cardplayer closest to him
rolled a fishy gray eye toward him. “Do you know where—”
“Get lost,” the man said. His voice sounded squashed and
phlegmy, unfamiliar with speech. The face half-turned to Jack was deeply pitted with acne scars and oddly flattened out, as if someone had stepped on it when the man was an infant.
“I just wondered if you knew somewhere I could get a cou-
ple days’ work.”
“Try Texas,” said the man in the driver’s seat, and the pair in the back seat cracked up, spitting beer out over their hands of cards.
“I told you, kid, get lost,” said the flat-faced gray-eyed man closest to Jack. “Or I’ll personally pound the shit out of you.”
It was just the truth, Jack understood—if he stayed there a moment longer, this man’s rage would boil over and he would get out of the car and beat him senseless. Then the man would get back in the car and open another beer. Cans of Rolling
Rock covered the floor, the opened ones tipped every which
way, the fresh ones linked by white plastic nooses. Jack
stepped backward, and the fish-eye rolled away from him.
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“Guess I’ll try Texas after all,” he said. He listened for the sound of the DeSoto’s door creaking open as he walked away, but all he heard being opened was another Rolling Rock.
Crack! Hiss!
He kept moving.
He got to the end of the block and found himself looking
across the town’s other main street at a dying lawn filled with yellow weeds from which peeked fiberglass statues of
Disney-like fawns. A shapeless old woman gripping a fly-
swatter stared at him from a porch swing.
Jack turned away from her suspicious gaze and saw before
him the last of the lifeless brick buildings on Mill Road.
Three concrete steps led up to a propped-open screen door. A long, dark window contained a glowing BUDWEISER sign and,
a foot to the right of that, the painted legend UPDIKE’S OATLEY
TAP. And several inches beneath that, handwritten on a yellow five-by-eight card like the one on the DeSoto, were the miraculous words HELP WANTED. Jack pulled the knapsack off his
back, bunched it under one arm, and went up the steps. For no more than an instant, moving from the tired sunlight into the darkness of the bar, he was reminded of stepping past the
thick fringe of ivy into the Mill Road tunnel.
9
Jack in the Pitcher Plant
1
Not quite sixty hours later a Jack Sawyer who was in a very different frame of mind from that of the Jack Sawyer who had ventured into the Oatley tunnel on Wednesday was in the
chilly storeroom of the Oatley Tap, hiding his pack behind the kegs of Busch which sat in the room’s far corner like aluminum bowling pins in a giant’s alley. In less than two hours, when the Tap finally shut down for the night, Jack meant to
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run away. That he should even think of it in such a fashion—
not leaving, not moving on, but running away—showed how desperate he now believed his situation to be.
I was six, six, John B. Sawyer was six, Jacky was six. Six.
This thought, apparently nonsensical, had fallen into his
mind this evening and had begun to repeat there. He supposed it went a long way toward showing just how scared he was
now, how certain he was that things were beginning to close in on him. He had no idea what the thought meant; it just circled and circled, like a wooden horse bolted to a carousel.