The Talisman

there, walking back and forth with his hands in his pockets, his large bald head gleaming mellowly under the white-out sky. On the turnpike, big semis droned by, filling the air with the stink of burned diesel fuel. The woods here were trashed-out, the way the woods bordering any interstate rest area always were. Empty Dorito bags. Squashed Big Mac boxes. Crimped Pepsi and Budweiser cans with pop-tops that rattled inside if you kicked them. Smashed bottles of Wild Irish Rose and Five O’Clock gin. A pair of shredded nylon panties over there, with a mouldering sanitary napkin still glued to the crotch. A rubber poked over a broken branch. Plenty of nifty stuff, all right, hey-hey. And lots of graffiti jotted on the walls of the men’s room, almost all of it the sort a fellow like Emory W. Light could really relate to: I LIKE TO SUK BIG FAT COX. BE HERE AT 4 FOR THE BEST BLOJOB YOU EVER HAD. REEM OUT MY BUTT . And here was a gay poet with large aspirations: LET THE HOLE HUMAN RACE / JERK OFF ON MY SMILING FACE .
    I’m homesick for the Territories , Jack thought, and there was no surprise at all in the realization. Here he stood behind two brick outhouses off I-70 somewhere in western Ohio, shivering in a ragged sweater he had bought in a thrift store for a buck and a half, waiting for that large bald man down there to get back on his horse and ride.
    Jack’s POLICY was simplicity itself: don’t antagonize a man with large bald hands and a large bald voice.
    Jack sighed with relief. Now it was starting to work. An expression that was half-anger, half-disgust, had settled over Emory W. Light’s large bald face. He went back to his car, got in, backed up so fast he almost hit the pick-up truck passing behind him (there was a brief blare of horns and the passenger in the truck shot Emory W. Light the finger), and then left.
    Now it was only a matter of standing on the ramp where the rest-area traffic rejoined the turnpike traffic with his thumb out . . . and, he hoped, catching a ride before it started to rain.
    Jack spared another look around. Ugly, wretched . These words came quite naturally to mind as he looked around at the littery desolation here on the rest area’s pimply backside. It occurred to Jack that there was a feeling of death here – not just at this rest area or on the interstate roads but pressed deep into all the country he had travelled. Jack thought that sometimes he could even see it, a desperate shade of hot dark brown, like the exhaust from the short-stack of a fast-moving Jimmy-Pete.
    The new homesickness came back – the wanting to go to the Territories and see that dark blue sky, the slight curve at the edge of the horizon . . .
    But it plays those Jerry Bledsoe changes.
    Don’t know nothin bout dat . . . All I know is you seem to have this idear of ‘moider’ a little broad . . .
    Walking down to the rest area – now he really did have to urinate – Jack sneezed three times, quickly. He swallowed and winced at the hot prickle in his throat. Getting sick, oh yeah. Great. Not even into Indiana yet, fifty degrees, rain in the forecast, no ride, and now I’m –
    The thought broke off cleanly. He stared at the parking lot, his mouth falling wide open. For one awful moment he thought he was going to wet his pants as everything below his breastbone seemed to cramp and squeeze.
    Sitting in one of the twenty or so slant parking spaces, its deep green surface now dulled with road-dirt, was Uncle Morgan’s BMW. No chance of a mistake; no chance at all. California vanity plates MLS , standing for Morgan Luther Sloat. It looked as if it had been driven fast and hard.
    But if he flew to New Hampshire, how can his car be here? Jack’s mind yammered. It’s a coincidence, Jack, just a –
    Then he saw the man standing with his back to him at the pay telephone and knew it was no coincidence. He was wearing a bulky Army-style anorak, fur-lined, a garment more suited to five below than to fifty degrees. Back-to or not, there was no mistaking those broad shoulders and that big, loose, hulking frame.
    The man at the phone started to turn around, crooking the phone between his ear and shoulder.
    Jack drew back against the brick side of the men’s toilet.
    Did he see me?
    No , he answered himself. No, I don’t think so. But –
    But Captain Farren had said that Morgan – that other Morgan – would smell him like a cat smells a rat, and so he had. From his hiding place in that dangerous forest,