The Talisman

teeth in a crooked grin. ‘Cept maybe how speedy some folks are to put the blame on themselves for things others might have got started. Maybe you runnin, boy, and maybe you being chased .’
    G-chord.
    ‘Maybe you be just a little off- base .’
    C-chord, with a nifty little run in the middle that made Jack grin in spite of himself.
    ‘Might be somebody else gettin on yo case .’
    Back down to G again, and the blind man laid his guitar aside (while, in the police car, the two cops were flipping to see which of them would actually have to touch Old Snowball if he wouldn’t get into the back of the cruiser peaceably).
    ‘Maybe dooom an maybe gloooooom an maybe this an maybe that . . .’ He laughed again, as if Jack’s fears were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
    ‘But I don’t know what could happen if I—’
    ‘No one ever knows what could happen if they do anything, do dey?’ the black man who might or might not be Speedy Parker broke in. ‘No. Dey do not . If you thought about it, you’d stay in yo house all day, ascairt to come out! I don’t know yo problems, boy. Don’t want to know em. Could be crazy, talkin bout earthquakes and all. But bein as how you helped me pick up my money and didn’t steal none – I counted every plinkety-plink , so I know – I’ll give you some advice. Some things you cain’t help. Sometimes people get killed because somebody does something . . . but if somebody didn’t do that somethin, a whole lot of more people would have got killed. Do you see where I’m pushin, son?’
    The dirty sunglasses inclined down toward him.
    Jack felt a deep, shuddery relief. He saw, all right. The blind man was talking about hard choices. He was suggesting that maybe there was a difference between hard choices and criminal behavior. And that maybe the criminal wasn’t here.
    The criminal might have been the guy who had told him five minutes ago to get his ass home.
    ‘Could even be,’ the blind man remarked, hitting a dark D-minor chord on his box, ‘that all things soive the Lord, just like my momma tole me and your momma might have tole you, if she was a Christian lady. Could be we think we doin one thing but are really doin another. Good Book says all things, even those that seem evil, soive the Lord. What you think, boy?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Jack said honestly. He was all mixed up. He only had to close his eyes and he could see the telephone tearing off the wall, hanging from its wires like a weird puppet.
    ‘Well, it smells like you lettin it drive you to drink.’
    ‘What?’ Jack asked, astonished. Then he thought, I thought that Speedy looked like Mississippi John Hurt, and this guy started playing a John Hurt blues . . . and now he’s talking about the magic juice. He’s being careful, but I swear that’s what he’s talking about – it’s got to be!
    ‘You’re a mind-reader,’ Jack said in a low voice. ‘Aren’t you? Did you learn it in the Territories, Speedy?’
    ‘Don’t know nothin bout readin minds,’ the blind man said, ‘but my lamps have been out forty-two year come November, and in forty-two year your nose and ears take up some of the slack. I can smell cheap wine on you, son. Smell it all over you . It’s almost like you washed yo hair widdit!’
    Jack felt an odd, dreamy guilt – it was the way he always felt when accused of doing something wrong when he was in fact innocent – mostly innocent, anyway. He had done no more than touch the almost-empty bottle since flipping back into this world. Just touching it filled him with dread – he had come to feel about it the way a fourteenth-century European peasant might have felt about a splinter of the One True Cross or the fingerbone of a saint. It was magic, all right. Powerful magic. And sometimes it got people killed.
    ‘I haven’t been drinking it, honest,’ he finally managed. ‘What I started with is almost gone. It . . . I . . . man, I don’t even like it!’ His stomach had begun to clench nervously; just thinking about the magic juice was making him feel nauseated. ‘But I need to get some more. Just in case.’
    ‘More Poiple Jesus? Boy your age?’ The blind man laughed and made a shooing gesture with one hand. ‘Hell, you don’t need dat . No boy needs dat poison to travel with.’
    ‘But—’
    ‘Here. I’ll sing you a song to cheer you up. Sounds like you could use it.’
    He began to sing, and his singing voice was nothing at all like his speaking voice.