The Talisman

authority, frightened.
    And Ferd Janklow was not here.
    Jack looked around the room and thought with glum humor that if this was ‘fellowship one with the other’, he would hate to see what would happen if Warwick had told them to have ‘a quiet hour’. They sat around the big long room, thirty-nine boys between age nine and age seventeen, looking at their hands, picking at scabs, morosely biting their nails. They all shared a common look – junkies robbed of their fix. They wanted to hear confessions; even more, they wanted to make confessions.
    No one mentioned Ferd Janklow. It was as though Ferd, with his grimaces at Sunlight Gardener’s sermons and his pale Delftware hands, had never existed.
    Jack found himself barely able to restrain an impulse to stand and scream at them. Instead, he began to think as hard as he ever had in his life.
    He’s not here because they killed him. They’re all mad. You think madness isn’t catching? Just look what happened at that nutty place down in South America – when the man in the reflector sunglasses told them to drink the purple grape drink, they said yassuh, boss, and drank it.
    Jack looked around at the dreary, indrawn, tired, blank faces – and thought how they would light, how they would kindle, if Sunlight Gardener strode in here – if he strode in here right here and now.
    They’d do it, too, if Sunlight Gardener asked them to. They’d drink it, and then they’d hold me and Wolf, and they’d pour it down our throats as well. Ferd was right – they see something on my face, or in it, something that came into me in the Territories, and maybe they do love me a little . . . I guess that’s what pulled Heck Bast’s bell-rope, anyway. That slob isn’t used to loving anything or anyone. So, yeah, maybe they do love me a little . . . but they love him a lot more. They’d do it. They’re mad.
    Ferd could have told him that, and, sitting there in the common room, Jack supposed that Ferd had told him.
    He told Jack he had been committed to the Sunlight Home by his parents, born-again Christians who fell down on their knees in the living room whenever anyone on The 700 Club began to say a prayer. Neither of them had understood Ferd, who was cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth. They thought Ferd must be a child of the devil – a communistic, radical humanist changeling. When he ran away for the fourth time and was bagged by none other than Franky Williams, his parents came to the Sunlight Home – where Ferd had of course been stashed – and fell in love with Sunlight Gardener on sight. Here was the answer to all the problems their bright, troublesome, rebellious son had caused them. Sunlight Gardener would educate their son toward the Lord. Sunlight Gardener would show him the error of his ways. Sunlight Gardener would take him off their hands and get him off the streets of Anderson.
    ‘They saw that story about the Sunlight Home on Sunday Report ,’ Ferd told Jack. ‘They sent me a postcard saying God would punish liars and false prophets in a lake of fire. I wrote them back – Rudolph in the kitchen smuggled the letter out for me. Dolph’s a pretty good guy.’ He paused. ‘You know what the Ferd Janklow definition of a good guy is, Jack?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘One who stays bought,’ Ferd said, and laughed a cynical, hurt laugh. ‘Two bucks buys Dolph’s mailman services. So I wrote them a letter and I said that if God punished liars the way they said, then I hoped Sunlight Gardener could find a set of asbestos longjohns in the other world, because he was lying about what goes on here faster than a horse can trot. Everything they had on Sunday Report – the rumors about the strait-jackets and about the Box – it was all true. Oh, they couldn’t prove it. The guy’s a nut, Jack, but he’s a smart nut. If you ever make a mistake about that, he’ll put a real hurt on you and on Phil the Fearless Wolf-Boy for good measure.’
    Jack said, ‘Those Sunday Report guys are usually pretty good at catching people with their hands in the pork barrel. At least, that’s what my mom says.’
    ‘Oh, he was scared. He got real shrill and shrieky. Ever see Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny ? He was like that for a week before they showed up. When they finally got here he was all sweetness and reason, but the week before was a living hell. Mr Ice Cream was shitting in his pants. That was the week he kicked Benny Woodruff down the stairs from the