The Talisman

to trouble him. He looked as though he had not seen as much as five dollars all together since the previous Christmas. Still . . . Buddy thought that somewhere along the line this Farren kid was jiving him.
    For one thing, he smelled like farm, not town. Buddy Parkins and his brothers ran three hundred acres not far from Amanda, about thirty miles southeast of Columbus, and Buddy knew that he could not be wrong about this. This boy smelled like Cambridge, and Cambridge was country. Buddy had grown up with the smell of farmland and barnyard, of manure and growing corn and pea vineries, and the unwashed clothes of this boy beside him had absorbed all these familiar odors.
    And there were the clothes themselves. Mrs Farren must have been awful sick, Buddy thought, if she sent her boy off down the road in ripped jeans so stiff with dirt the wrinkles seemed bronzed. And the shoes! Lewis Farren’s sneakers were about to fall off his feet, the laces all spliced together and the fabric split or worn through in a couple of places on each shoe.
    ‘So they got yore daddy’s car, did they, Lewis?’ Buddy asked.
    ‘Just like I said, that’s right – the lousy cowards came out after midnight and just stole it right out of the garage. I don’t think they should be allowed to do that. Not from people who work hard and really are going to start making their payments as soon as they can. I mean, do you? You don’t, do you?’
    The boy’s honest, sunburned face was turned toward him as if this were the most serious question since the Nixon Pardon or maybe the Bay of Pigs, and all Buddy’s instincts were to agree – he would be inclined to agree with any generally good-hearted opinion uttered by a boy so redolent of farm work. ‘I guess there’s two sides to everything when you come down to it,’ Buddy Parkins said, not very happily. The boy blinked, and then turned away to face forward again. Again Buddy felt his anxiety, the cloud of worry that seemed to hang over the boy, and was almost sorry he had not given Lewis Farren the agreement he seemed to need.
    ‘I suppose yore aunt’s in the grade school over there in Buckeye Lake,’ Buddy said, at least in part hoping to lighten the boy’s misery. Point to the future, not the past.
    ‘Yes, sir, that’s right. She teaches in the grade school. Helen Vaughan.’ His expression did not change.
    But Buddy had heard it again – he didn’t consider himself any Henry Higgins, the professor guy in that musical, but he knew for certain sure that young Lewis Farren didn’t talk like anyone who had been raised in Ohio. The kid’s voice was all wrong, too pushed-together and full of the wrong ups and downs. It wasn’t an Ohio voice at all. It especially was not a rural Ohioan’s voice. It was an accent .
    Or was it possible that some boy from Cambridge, Ohio, could learn to talk like that? Whatever his crazy reason might be? Buddy supposed it was.
    On the other hand, the newspaper this Lewis Farren had never once unclamped from beneath his left elbow seemed to validate Buddy Parkins’s deepest and worst suspicion, that his fragrant young companion was a runaway and his every word a lie. The name of the paper, visible to Buddy with only the slightest tilt of his head, was The Angola Herald . There was that Angola in Africa that a lot of Englishmen had rushed off to as mercenaries, and there was Angola, New York – right up there on Lake Erie. He’d seen pictures of it on the news not long ago, but could not quite remember why.
    ‘I’d like to ask you a question, Lewis,’ he said, and cleared his throat.
    ‘Yes?’ the boy said.
    ‘How come a boy from a nice little burg on U.S. Forty is carrying around a paper from Angola, New York? Which is one hell of a long way away. I’m just curious, son.’
    The boy looked down at the paper flattened under his arm and hugged it even closer to him, as if he were afraid it might squirm away. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I found it.’
    ‘Oh, hell,’ Buddy said.
    ‘Yes, sir. It was on a bench at the bus station back home.’
    ‘You went to the bus station this morning?’
    ‘Right before I decided to save the money and hitch. Mr Parkins, if you can get me to the turnoff at Zanesville, I’ll only have a short ride left. Could probably get to my aunt’s house before dinner.’
    ‘Could be,’ Buddy said, and drove in an uncomfortable silence for several miles. Finally he could bear it no longer, and he said, very quietly and while