The Talisman

his sole, which was hot and lemony and good. Lily only toyed with hers, ate a few green beans, and then pushed things around on her plate.
    ‘School started up here two weeks ago,’ Jack announced halfway through the meal. Seeing the big yellow buses with ARCADIA DISTRICT SCHOOLS written on the sides had made him feel guilty – under the circumstances he thought that was probably absurd, but there it was. He was playing hooky.
    She looked at him, enquiring. She had ordered and finished a second drink; now the waiter brought a third.
    Jack shrugged. ‘Just thought I’d mention it.’
    ‘Do you want to go?’
    ‘Huh? No! Not here!’
    ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t have your goddam vaccination papers. They won’t let you in school without a pedigree, chum.’
    ‘Don’t call me chum,’ Jack said, but Lily didn’t crack a smile at the old joke.
    Boy, why ain’t you in school?
    He blinked as if the voice had spoken aloud instead of only in his mind.
    ‘Something?’ she asked.
    ‘No. Well . . . there’s a guy at the amusement park. Funworld. Janitor, caretaker, something like that. An old black guy. He asked me why I wasn’t in school.’
    She leaned forward, no humor in her now, almost frighteningly grim. ‘What did you tell him?’
    Jack shrugged. ‘I said I was getting over mono. You remember that time Richard had it? The doctor told Uncle Morgan Richard had to stay out of school for six weeks, but he could walk around outside and everything.’ Jack smiled a little. ‘I thought he was lucky.’
    Lily relaxed a little. ‘I don’t like you talking to strangers, Jack.’
    ‘Mom, he’s just a—’
    ‘I don’t care who he is. I don’t want you talking to strangers.’
    Jack thought of the black man, his hair gray steel wool, his dark face deeply lined, his odd, light-colored eyes. He had been pushing a broom in the big arcade on the pier – the arcade was the only part of Arcadia Funworld that stayed open the year around, but it had been deserted then except for Jack and the black man and two old men far in the back. The two were playing Skee-Ball in apathetic silence.
    But now, sitting here in this slightly creepy restaurant with his mother, it wasn’t the black man who asked the question; it was himself.
    Why aren’t I in school?
    It be just like she say, son. Got no vaccination, got no pedigree. You think she come down here with your birth certificate? That what you think? She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. You –
    ‘Have you heard from Richard?’ she broke in, and when she said it, it came to him – no, that was too gentle. It crashed into him. His hands twitched and his glass fell off the table. It shattered on the floor.
    She’s almost dead, Jack.
    The voice from the swirling sand-funnel. The one he had heard in his mind.
    It had been Uncle Morgan’s voice. Not maybe, not almost, not sorta like. It had been a real voice. The voice of Richard’s father.
    6
    Going home in the car, she asked him, ‘What happened to you in there, Jack?’
    ‘Nothing. My heart did this funny little Gene Krupa riff.’ He ran off a quick one on the dashboard to demonstrate. ‘Threw a PCV, just like on General Hospital .’
    ‘Don’t wise off to me, Jacky.’ In the glow of the dashboard instruments she looked pale and haggard. A cigarette smouldered between the second and third fingers of her right hand. She was driving very slowly – never over forty – as she always drove when she’d had too much to drink. Her seat was pulled all the way forward, her skirt was hiked up so her knees floated, storklike, on either side of the steering column, and her chin seemed to hang over the wheel. For a moment she looked haglike, and Jack quickly looked away.
    ‘I’m not,’ he mumbled.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m not wising off,’ he said. ‘It was like a twitch, that’s all. I’m sorry.’ ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I thought it was something about Richard Sloat.’
    ‘No.’ His father talked to me out of a hole in the sand down on the beach, that’s all. In my head he talked to me, like in a movie where you hear a voiceover. He told me you were almost dead.
    ‘Do you miss him, Jack?’
    ‘Who, Richard?’
    ‘No – Spiro Agnew. Of course Richard.’
    ‘Sometimes.’ Richard Sloat was now going to school in Illinois – one of those private schools where chapel was compulsory and no one had acne.
    ‘You’ll see him.’ She ruffled his hair.
    ‘Mom, are you all