The Talisman

of those grassy ripples ran away in the direction of the tower. Jack imagined the way that rickety thing must be swaying and felt his stomach turn over.
    NEVER get me up there, he thought, not for a million bucks.
    And then the thing he had been afraid might happen since the moment he had observed that there were men on the tower now did happen: one of them fell.
    Jack came to his feet. His face wore the dismayed, slack-jawed expression of anyone who has ever been present at a circus performance where some dangerous trick has gone wrong – the tumbler who falls badly and lies in a huddled heap, the aerialist who misses her grip and bounces off the net with a thud, the human pyramid that unexpectedly collapses, spilling bodies into a heap.
    Oh shit, oh cripes, oh –
    Jack’s eyes suddenly widened. For a moment his jaw sagged even farther – until it was almost lying on his breastbone, in fact – and then it came up and his mouth spread in a dazed, unbelieving grin. The man hadn’t fallen from the tower, nor had he been blown off it. There were tonguelike protrusions on two sides of the platform – they looked like diving boards – and the man had simply walked out to the end of one of these and jumped off. Halfway down something began to unfurl – a parachute, Jack thought, but it would never have time to open.
    Only it hadn’t been a parachute.
    It was wings.
    The man’s fall slowed and then stopped completely while he was still some fifty feet above the high fieldgrass. Then it reversed itself. The man was now flying upward and outward, the wings going up so high they almost touched – like the crowns on the heads of that Henny Youngman parrot – and then driving downward again with immense power, like the arms of a swimmer in a finishing sprint.
    Oh wow , Jack thought, driven back to the dumbest cliché he knew by his total, utter amazement. This topped everything; this was an utter pisser. Oh wow, look at that, oh wow .
    Now a second man leaped from the diving board at the top of the tower; now a third; now a fourth. In less than five minutes there must have been fifty men in the air, flying complicated but discernible patterns: out from the tower, describe a figure-eight, back over the tower and out to the other side, another figure-eight, back to the tower, alight on the platform, do it all again.
    They spun and danced and crisscrossed in the air. Jack began to laugh with delight. It was a little like watching the water ballets in those corny old Esther Williams movies. Those swimmers – Esther Williams herself most of all, of course – always made it look easy, as if you yourself could dip and swirl like that, or as if you and a few of your friends could easily come off the opposite sides of the diving board in timed choreography, making a kind of human fountain.
    But there was a difference. The men flying out there did not give that sense of effortlessness; they seemed to be expending prodigious amounts of energy to stay in the air, and Jack felt with sudden certainty that it hurt, the way some of the calisthenics in phys ed – leg-lifts, or halfway sit-ups, for instance – hurt. No pain, no gain! Coach would roar if someone had the nerve to complain.
    And now something else occurred to him – the time his mother had taken him with her to see her friend Myrna, who was a real ballet dancer, practicing in the loft of a dance studio on lower Wilshire Boulevard. Myrna was part of a ballet troupe and Jack had seen her and the other dancers perform – his mother often made him go with her and it was mostly boring stuff, like church or Sunrise Semester on TV. But he had never seen Myrna in practice . . . never that close up. He had been impressed and a little frightened by the contrast between seeing ballet on stage, where everyone seemed to either glide or mince effortlessly on the tips of their pointes , and seeing it from less than five feet away, with harsh daylight pouring in the floor-to-ceiling windows and no music – only the choreographer rhythmically clapping his hands and yelling harsh criticisms. No praise; only criticisms. Their faces ran with sweat. Their leotards were wet with sweat. The room, as large and airy as it was, stank of sweat. Sleek muscles trembled and fluttered on the nervous edge of exhaustion. Corded tendons stood out like insulated cables. Throbbing veins popped out on foreheads and necks. Except for the choreographer’s clapping and angry, hectoring shouts, the