The Talisman

Parkins’s memory was more accurate than he imagined. If he could have seen the first page of the month-old Angola Herald ‘Lewis Farren’, that enigmatic boy, had been holding so protectively yet fearfully beneath his arm, these are the words he would have read:
    FREAK EARTHQUAKE KILLS 5
    by Herald staff reporter Joseph Gargan
    Work on the Rainbird Towers, intended to be Angola’s tallest and most luxurious condominium development and still six months from completion, was tragically halted yesterday as an unprecedented earth tremor collapsed the structure of the building, burying many construction workers beneath the rubble. Five bodies have been retrieved from the ruins of the proposed condominium, and two other workers have not yet been found but these are presumed dead. All seven workers were welders and fitters in the employ of Speiser Construction, and all were on the girders of the building’s top two floors at the time of the incident.
    Yesterday’s tremor was the first earthquake in Angola’s recorded history. Armin Van Pelt of New York University’s Geology Department, contacted today by telephone, described the fatal quake as a ‘seismic bubble’. Representatives of the State Safety Commission are continuing their examinations of the site, as is a team of . . .
    The dead men were Robert Heidel, twenty-three; Thomas Thielke, thirty-four; Jerome Wild, forty-eight; Michael Hagen, twenty-nine; and Bruce Davey, thirty-nine. The two men still missing were Arnold Schulkamp, fifty-four, and Theodore Rasmussen, forty-three. Jack no longer had to look at the newspaper’s front page to remember their names. The first earthquake in the history of Angola, New York, had occurred on the day he had flipped away from the Western Road and landed on the town’s border. Part of Jack Sawyer wished that he could have gone home with big kindly Buddy Parkins, eaten dinner around the table in the kitchen with the Parkins family – boiled beef and deep-dish apple pie – and then snuggled into the Parkinses’ guest bed and pulled the homemade quilt up over his head. And not moved, except toward the table, for four or five days. But part of the trouble was that he saw that knotty-pine kitchen table heaped with crumbly cheese, and on the other side of the table a mouse-hole was cut into a giant baseboard; and from holes in the jeans of the three Parkins boys protruded thin long tails. Who plays these Jerry Bledsoe changes, Daddy? Heidel, Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey; Schulkamp and Rasmussen . Those Jerry changes? He knew who played them.
    4
    The huge yellow-and-purple sign reading BUCKEYE MALL floated ahead of Jack as he came around the final curve of the off-ramp, drifted past his shoulder and reappeared on his other side, at which point he could finally see that it was erected on a tripod of tall yellow poles in the shopping-center parking lot. The mall itself was a futuristic assemblage of ochre-colored buildings that seemed to be windowless – a second later, Jack realized that the mall was covered, and what he was seeing was only the illusion of separate buildings. He put his hand in his pocket and fingered the tight roll of twenty-three single dollar bills which was his earthly fortune.
    In the cool sunlight of an early autumn afternoon, Jack sprinted across the street toward the mall’s parking lot.
    If it had not been for his conversation with Buddy Parkins, Jack would very likely have stayed on U.S. 40 and tried to cover another fifty miles – he wanted to get to Illinois, where Richard Sloat was, in the next two or three days. The thought of seeing his friend Richard again had kept him going during the weary days of nonstop work on Elbert Palamountain’s farm: the image of spectacled, serious-faced Richard Sloat in his room at Thayer School, in Springfield, Illinois, had fueled him as much as Mrs Palamountain’s generous meals. Jack still wanted to see Richard, and as soon as he could: but Buddy Parkins’s inviting him home had somehow unstrung him. He could not just climb into another car and begin all over again on the Story. (In any case, Jack reminded himself, the Story seemed to be losing its potency.) The shopping mall gave him a perfect chance to drop out for an hour or two, especially if there was a movie theater somewhere in there – right now, Jack could have watched the dullest, soppiest Love Story of a movie.
    And before the movie, were he lucky enough to find a theater, he would be able to