Jack twisted the chair so that he could still see the picture of the Daydream place. “That’s Africa? ”
“Might be somewhere a lot closer. Might be somewhere a
fellow could get to—get to anytime he liked, that is, if he wanted to see it bad enough.”
Jack suddenly realized that he was trembling, and had
been for some time. He balled his hands into fists, and felt the trembling displace itself into his stomach.
He was not sure that he wanted ever to see the Daydream
place, but he looked questioningly over at Speedy, who had
perched himself on the school chair. “It isn’t anyplace in
Africa, is it?”
“Well, I don’t know. Could be. I got my own name for it,
son. I just call it the Territories.”
Jack looked back up at the photograph—the long, dimpled
plain, the low brown mountains. The Territories. That was
right; that was its name.
They have magic like we have physics, right? An agrarian monarchy . . . modern weapons to the right guys over
there . . . Uncle Morgan plotting. His father answering, putting on the brakes: We have to be careful about the way we go in there, partner . . . remember, we owe them, by which I mean we really owe them . . .
“The Territories,” he said to Speedy, tasting the name in
his mouth as much as asking a question.
“Air like the best wine in a rich man’s cellar. Soft rain.
That’s the place, son.”
“You’ve been there, Speedy?” Jack asked, fervently hoping
for a straightforward answer.
But Speedy frustrated him, as Jack had almost known he
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would. The custodian smiled at him, and this time it was a
real smile, not just a subliminal flare of warmth.
After a moment Speedy said, “Hell, I never been outside
these United States, Travellin Jack. Not even in the war.
Never got any farther than Texas and Alabama.”
“How do you know about the . . . the Territories?” The
name was just beginning to fit his mouth.
“Man like me, he hear all kinds of stories. Stories about
two-headed parrots, men that fly with their own wings, men
who turn into wolves, stories about queens. Sick queens.”
. . . magic like we have physics, right?
Angels and werewolves. “I’ve heard stories about were-
wolves,” Jack said. “They’re even in cartoons. That doesn’t mean anything, Speedy.”
“Probably it don’t. But I heard that if a man pulls a radish out of the ground, another man half a mile away will be able to smell that radish—the air so sweet and clear.”
“But angels . . .”
“Men with wings.”
“And sick queens,” Jack said, meaning it as a joke— man, this is some dumb place you make up, broom jockey. But the instant he spoke the words, he felt sick himself. He had remembered the black eye of a gull fixing him with his own
mortality as it yanked a clam from its shell: and he could hear hustlin, bustlin Uncle Morgan asking if Jack could put Queen Lily on the line.
Queen of the Bs. Queen Lily Cavanaugh.
“Yeah,” Speedy said softly. “Troubles everywhere, son.
Sick Queen . . . maybe dyin. Dyin, son. And a world or two waitin out there, just waitin to see if anyone can save her.”
Jack stared at him open-mouthed, feeling more or less as if the custodian had just kicked him in the stomach. Save her?
Save his mother? The panic started to flood toward him once again—how could he save her? And did all this crazy talk mean that she really was dying, back there in that room?
“You got a job, Travellin Jack,” Speedy told him. “A job
that ain’t gonna let you go, and that’s the Lord’s truth. I wish it was different.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said. His
breath seemed to be trapped in a hot little pocket situated at
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THE TALISMAN
the base of his neck. He looked into another corner of the
small red room and in the shadow saw a battered guitar
propped against the wall. Beside it lay the neat tube of a thin rolled-up mattress. Speedy slept next to his guitar.
“I wonder,” Speedy said. “There comes times, you know
what I mean, you know more than you think you know. One
hell of a lot more.”
“But I don’t—” Jack began, and then pulled himself up
short. He had just remembered something. Now he was even
more frightened—another chunk of the past had rushed out at him, demanding his attention. Instantly he was filmed with
perspiration, and his skin felt very cold—as if he had been misted by a fine spray from a hose. This memory was what he had fought to repress yesterday morning, standing before the elevators, pretending that his bladder was not about to burst.
“Didn’t I say it was time for a little refreshment?” Speedy asked, reaching down to push aside a loose floorboard.
Jack again saw two ordinary-looking men trying to push
his mother into a car. Above them a huge tree dipped scal-
loped fronds over the automobile’s roof.
Speedy gently extracted a pint bottle from the gap between
the floorboards. The glass was dark green, and the fluid inside looked black. “This gonna help you, son. Just a little taste all you need—send you some new places, help you get started
findin that job I told you bout.”
“I can’t stay, Speedy,” Jack blurted out, now in a desperate hurry to get back to the Alhambra. The old man visibly
checked the surprise in his face, then slid the bottle back under the loose floorboard. Jack was already on his feet. “I’m worried,” he said.
“Bout your mom?”
Jack nodded, moving backward toward the open door.
“Then you better settle your mind and go see she’s all
right. You can come back here anytime, Travellin Jack.”
“Okay,” the boy said, and then hesitated before running
outside. “I think . . . I think I remember when we met before.”
“Nah, nah, my brains got twisted,” Speedy said, shaking
his head and waving his hands back and forth before him.
“You had it right. We never met before last week. Get on back to your mom and set your mind at ease.”
Jack sprinted out the door and ran through the dimension-
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less sunlight to the wide arch leading to the street. Above it he could see the letters DLROWNUF AIDACRA outlined against the sky: at night, colored bulbs would spell out the park’s name in both directions. Dust puffed up beneath his Nikes. Jack
pushed himself against his own muscles, making them move
faster and harder, so that by the time he burst out through the arch, he felt almost as though he were flying.
Nineteen seventy-six. Jack had been puttering his way up
Rodeo Drive on an afternoon in June? July? . . . some afternoon in the drought season, but before that time of the year when everybody started worrying about brushfires in the
hills. Now he could not even remember where he had been
going. A friend’s house? It had not been an errand of any urgency. He had, Jack remembered, just reached the point where he no longer thought of his father in every unoccupied
second—for many months after Philip Sawyer’s death in a
hunting accident, his shade, his loss had sped toward Jack at a bruising speed whenever the boy was least prepared to meet
it. Jack was only seven, but he knew that part of his childhood had been stolen from him—his six-year-old self now seemed
impossibly naive and thoughtless—but he had learned to trust his mother’s strength. Formless and savage threats no longer seemed to conceal themselves in dark corners, closets with
half-open doors, shadowy streets, empty rooms.
The events of that aimless summer afternoon in 1976 had
murdered this temporary peace. After it, Jack slept with his light on for six months; nightmares roiled his sleep.
The car pulled across the street just a few houses up from
the Sawyers’ white three-story Colonial. It had been a green car, and that was all that Jack had known about it except that it was not a Mercedes—Mercedes was the only kind of automobile he knew by sight. The man at the wheel had rolled
down his window and smiled at Jack. The boy’s first thought had been that he knew this man—the man had known Phil
Sawyer, and wanted just to say hello to his son. Somehow that was conveyed by the man’s smile, which was easy and un-forced and familiar. Another man leaned forward in the pas-
senger seat and peered toward Jack through blind-man
glasses—round and so dark they were nearly black. This sec-
ond man was wearing a pure white suit. The driver let his