The Talisman

– like anyone who has lived for any length of time on the California coast, he was afraid of fire – but heard none. Even the woods here seemed New Englandy, thick and heavy with moisture. Certainly it was the antithesis of the pale-brown country around Baja, with its clear, bone-dry air. The woods were almost smug with life; the railway itself was a slowly closing lane between the encroaching trees, shrubs, and ubiquitous ivy ( poison ivy, I bet, Jack thought, scratching unconsciously at the bites on his hands), with the faded blue sky an almost matching lane overhead. Even the cinders on the railroad bed were mossy. This place seemed secret, a place for secrets.
    He set a hard pace, and not only to get the two of them off this track before the cops or the firemen showed up. The pace also assured Richard’s silence. He was toiling too hard to keep up to talk . . . or ask questions.
    They had gone perhaps two miles and Jack was still congratulating himself on this conversation-strangling ploy when Richard called out in a tiny, whistling voice, ‘Hey, Jack—’
    Jack turned just in time to see Richard, who had fallen a bit behind, toppling forward. The blemishes stood out on his paper-white skin like birthmarks.
    Jack caught him – barely. Richard seemed to weigh no more than a paper bag.
    ‘Oh, Christ, Richard!’
    ‘Felt okay until a second or two ago,’ Richard said in that same tiny, whistling voice. His respiration was very fast, very dry. His eyes were half-closed. Jack could see only whites and tiny arcs of blue irises. ‘Just got . . . faint. Sorry.’
    From behind them came another heavy, belching explosion, followed by the rattling sound of train-debris falling on the tin roof on the Quonset hut. Jack glanced that way, then anxiously up the tracks.
    ‘Can you hang on to me? I’ll piggyback you a ways.’ Shades of Wolf , he thought.
    ‘I can hang on.’
    ‘If you can’t, say so.’
    ‘Jack,’ Richard said with a heartening trace of that old fussy Richard-irritation, ‘if I couldn’t hang on, I wouldn’t say that I could.’
    Jack set Richard on his feet. Richard stood there, swaying, looking as if someone could blow once in his face and topple him over backward. Jack turned and squatted, the soles of his sneakers on one of the old rotted ties. He made his arms into thigh-stirrups, and Richard put his own arms around Jack’s neck. Jack got to his feet and started to shag along the crossties at a fast walk that was very nearly a jog. Carrying Richard seemed to be no problem at all, and not just because Richard had lost weight. Jack had been running kegs of beer, carrying cartons, picking apples. He had spent time picking rocks in Sunlight Gardener’s Far Field, can you gimme hallelujah. It had toughened him, all of that. But the toughening went deeper into the fiber of his essential self than something as simple and mindless as physical exercise could go. Nor was all of it a simple function of flipping back and forth between the two worlds like an acrobat, or of that other world – gorgeous as it could be – rubbing off on him like wet paint. Jack recognized in a dim sort of way that he had been trying to do more than simply save his mother’s life; from the very beginning he had been trying to do something greater than that. He had been trying to do a good work, and his dim realization now was that such mad enterprises must always be toughening.
    He did begin to jog.
    ‘If you make me seasick,’ Richard said, his voice jiggling in time with Jack’s footfalls, ‘I’ll just vomit on your head.’
    ‘I knew I could count on you, Richie-boy,’ Jack panted, grinning.
    ‘I feel . . . extremely foolish up here. Like a human pogo stick.’
    ‘Probably just how you look, chum.’
    ‘Don’t . . . call me chum,’ Richard whispered, and Jack’s grin widened. He thought, Oh Richard, you bastard, live forever .
    4
    ‘I knew that man,’ Richard whispered from above Jack.
    It startled him, as if out of a doze. He had picked Richard up ten minutes ago, they had covered another mile, and there was still no sign of civilization of any kind. Just the tracks, and that smell of salt in the air.
    The tracks , Jack wondered. Do they go where I think they go?
    ‘What man?’
    ‘The man with the whip and the machine-pistol. I knew him. I used to see him around.’
    ‘When?’ Jack panted.
    ‘A long time ago. When I was a little kid.’ Richard then added with great reluctance, ‘Around the