The Talisman

could hear hustlin, bustlin Uncle Morgan asking if Jack could put Queen Lily on the line.
    Queen of the Bs. Queen Lily Cavanaugh.
    ‘Yeah,’ Speedy said softly. ‘Troubles everywhere, son. Sick Queen . . . maybe dyin. Dyin , son. And a world or two waitin out there, just waitin to see if anyone can save her.’
    Jack stared at him open-mouthed, feeling more or less as if the custodian had just kicked him in the stomach. Save her? Save his mother? The panic started to flood toward him once again – how could he save her? And did all this crazy talk mean that she really was dying, back there in that room?
    ‘You got a job, travellin Jack,’ Speedy told him. ‘A job that ain’t gonna let you go, and that’s the Lord’s truth. I wish it was different.’
    ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Jack said. His breath seemed to be trapped in a hot little pocket situated at the base of his neck. He looked into another corner of the small red room and in the shadow saw a battered guitar propped against the wall. Beside it lay the neat tube of a thin rolled-up mattress. Speedy slept next to his guitar.
    ‘I wonder,’ Speedy said. ‘There comes times, you know what I mean, you know more than you think you know. One hell of a lot more.’
    ‘But I don’t—’ Jack began, and then pulled himself up short. He had just remembered something. Now he was even more frightened – another chunk of the past had rushed out at him, demanding his attention. Instantly he was filmed with perspiration, and his skin felt very cold – as if he had been misted by a fine spray from a hose. This memory was what he had fought to repress yesterday morning, standing before the elevators, pretending that his bladder was not about to burst.
    ‘Didn’t I say it was time for a little refreshment?’ Speedy asked, reaching down to push aside a loose floorboard.
    Jack again saw two ordinary-looking men trying to push his mother into a car. Above them a huge tree dipped scalloped fronds over the automobile’s roof.
    Speedy gently extracted a pint bottle from the gap between the floorboards. The glass was dark green, and the fluid inside looked black. ‘This gonna help you, son. Just a little taste all you need – send you some new places, help you get started findin that job I told you bout.’
    ‘I can’t stay, Speedy,’ Jack blurted out, now in a desperate hurry to get back to the Alhambra. The old man visibly checked the surprise in his face, then slid the bottle back under the loose floorboard. Jack was already on his feet. ‘I’m worried,’ he said.
    ‘Bout your mom?’
    Jack nodded, moving backward toward the open door.
    ‘Then you better settle your mind and go see she’s all right. You can come back here anytime, Travellin Jack.’
    ‘Okay,’ the boy said, and then hesitated before running outside. ‘I think . . . I remember when we met before.’
    ‘Nah, nah, my brains got twisted,’ Speedy said, shaking his head and waving his hands back and forth before him. ‘You had it right. We never met before last week. Get on back to your mom and set your mind at ease.’
    Jack sprinted out the door and ran through the dimensionless sunlight to the wide arch leading to the street. Above it he could see the letters DLROWNUF AIDACRA outlined against the sky: at night, colored bulbs would spell out the park’s name in both directions. Dust puffed up beneath his Nikes. Jack pushed himself against his own muscles, making them move faster and harder, so that by the time he burst out through the arch, he felt almost as though he were flying.
    Nineteen seventy-six. Jack had been puttering his way up Rodeo Drive on an afternoon in June? July? . . . some afternoon in the drought season, but before that time of the year when everybody started worrying about brushfires in the hills. Now he could not even remember where he had been going. A friend’s house? It had not been an errand of any urgency. He had, Jack remembered, just reached the point where he no longer thought of his father in every unoccupied second – for many months after Philip Sawyer’s death in a hunting accident, his shade, his loss had sped toward Jack at a bruising speed whenever the boy was least prepared to meet it. Jack was only seven, but he knew that a part of his childhood had been stolen from him – his six-year-old self now seemed impossibly naive and thoughtless – but he had learned to trust his mother’s strength. Formless and savage