The Talisman

looking straight ahead, ‘Son, are you running away from home?’
    Lewis Farren astonished him by smiling – not grinning and not faking it, but actually smiling. He thought the whole notion of running away from home was funny. It tickled him. The boy glanced at him a fraction of a second after Buddy had looked sideways, and their eyes met.
    For a second, for two seconds, three . . . for however long that moment lasted, Buddy Parkins saw that this unwashed boy sitting beside him was beautiful. He would have thought himself incapable of using that word to describe any male human being above the age of nine months, but underneath the road-grime this Lewis Farren was beautiful. His sense of humor had momentarily murdered his worries, and what shone out of him at Buddy – who was fifty-two years old and had three teenage sons – was a kind of straightforward goodness that had only been dented by a host of unusual experiences. This Lewis Farren, twelve years old by his own account, had somehow gone farther and seen more than Buddy Parkins, and what he had seen and done had made him beautiful.
    ‘No, I’m not a runaway, Mr Parkins,’ the boy said.
    Then he blinked, and his eyes went inward again and lost their brightness, their light, and the boy slumped back against his seat. He pulled up a knee, rested it on the dashboard, and snugged the newspaper up under his bicep.
    ‘No, I guess not,’ Buddy Parkins said, snapping his eyes back to the highway. He felt relieved, though he was not quite sure why. ‘I guess yore not a runaway, Lewis. Yore something, though.’
    The boy did not respond.
    ‘Been workin on a farm, haven’t you?’
    Lewis looked up at him, surprised. ‘I did, yeah. The past three days. Two dollars an hour.’
    And yore mommy didn’t even take the time out from bein sick to wash yore clothes before she sent you to her sister, is that right? Buddy thought. But what he said was ‘Lewis, I’d like you to think about coming home with me. I’m not saying yore on the run or anything, but if yore from anywhere around Cambridge I’ll eat this beat-up old car, tires and all, and I got three boys myself and the youngest one, Billy, he’s only about three years older’n you, and we know how to feed boys around my house. You can stay about as long as you like, depending on how many questions you want to answer. ’Cuz I’ll be asking em, at least after the first time we break bread together.’
    He rubbed one palm over his gray crewcut and glanced across the seat. Lewis Farren was looking more like a boy and less like a revelation. ‘You’ll be welcome, son.’
    Smiling, the boy said, ‘That’s really nice of you, Mr Parkins, but I can’t. I have to go see my, ah, aunt in . . .’
    ‘Buckeye Lake,’ Buddy supplied.
    The boy swallowed and looked forward again.
    ‘I’ll give you help, if you want help,’ Buddy repeated.
    Lewis patted his forearm, sunburned and thick. ‘This ride is a big help, honest.’
    Ten nearly silent minutes later he was watching the boy’s forlorn figure trudge down the exit ramp outside Zanesville. Emmie would probably have brained him if he’d come home with a strange dirty boy to feed, but once she’d seen him and talked to him, Emmie would have brought out the good glasses and the plates her mother had given her. Buddy Parkins didn’t believe that there was any woman named Helen Vaughan in Buckeye Lake, and he wasn’t so sure this mysterious Lewis Farren even had a mother – the boy seemed such an orphan, off on a vast errand. Buddy watched until the boy was taken by the curve of the off-ramp, and he was staring out at space and the enormous yellow-and-purple sign of a shopping mall.
    For a second he thought of jumping out of the car and running after the kid, trying to get him back . . . and then he had a moment of recall of a crowded, smokey scene on the six-o’clock news. Angola, New York. Some disaster too small to be reported more than once, that was what had happened in Angola; one of those little tragedies the world shovels under a mountain of newsprint. All Buddy could catch, in this short, probably flawed moment of memory, was a picture of girders strewn like giant straws over battered cars, jutting up out of a fuming hole in the ground – a hole that might lead down into hell. Buddy Parkins looked once more at the empty place on the road where the boy had been, and then stamped on his clutch and dropped the old car into Low.
    3
    Buddy