The Talisman

had left three days before on their yearly November hunting trip – another college chum, Randy Glover, owned a luxurious hunting lodge in Blessington, Utah. Glover usually hunted with them, but that year he had been cruising in the Caribbean. Morgan called to say that Phil had been shot, apparently by another hunter. He and Tommy Woodbine had packed him out of the wilderness on a lashed-together stretcher. Phil had regained consciousness in the back of Glover’s Jeep Cherokee, Morgan said, and had asked that Morgan send his love to Lily and Jack. He died fifteen minutes later, as Morgan drove wildly toward Green River and the nearest hospital.
    Morgan had not killed Phil; there was Tommy to testify that the three of them had been together when the shot rang out, if any testimony had ever been required (and, of course, none ever was).
    But that was not to say he couldn’t have hired it done, Jack thought now. And it was not to say that Uncle Tommy might not have harbored his own long doubts about what had happened. If so, maybe Uncle Tommy hadn’t been killed just so that Jack and his dying mother would be totally unprotected from Morgan’s depredations. Maybe he had died because Morgan was tired of wondering if the old faggot might finally hint to the surviving son that there might have been more to Phil Sawyer’s death than an accident. Jack felt his skin crawl with dismay and revulsion.
    ‘Was that man around before your father and my father went hunting together that last time?’ Jack asked fiercely.
    ‘Jack, I was four years old—’
    ‘No, you weren’t, you were six . You were four when he started coming, you were six when my father got killed in Utah. And you don’t forget much, Richard. Did he come around before my father died?’
    ‘That was the time he came almost every night for a week,’ Richard said, his voice barely audible. ‘Just before the last hunting trip.’
    Although none of this was precisely Richard’s fault, Jack was unable to contain his bitterness. ‘My dad dead in a hunting accident in Utah, Uncle Tommy run down in L.A. The deathrate among your father’s friends is very fucking high, Richard.’
    ‘Jack—’ Richard began in a small, trembling voice.
    ‘I mean, it’s all water over the dam, or spilled milk, or pick your cliché,’ Jack said. ‘But when I showed up at your school, Richard, you called me crazy.’
    ‘Jack, you don’t under—’
    ‘No, I guess I don’t. I was tired and you gave me a place to sleep. Fine. I was hungry and you got me some food. Great. But what I needed most was for you to believe me. I knew it was too much to expect, but jeepers! You knew the guy I was talking about! You knew he’d been in your father’s life before! And you just said something like “Good old Jack’s been spending too much time in the hot sun out there on Seabrook Island and blah-blah-blah!” Jesus, Richard, I thought we were better friends than that.’
    ‘You still don’t understand.’
    ‘What? That you were too afraid of Seabrook Island stuff to believe in me a little?’ Jack’s voice wavered with tired indignation.
    ‘No. I was afraid of more than that.’
    ‘Oh yeah?’ Jack stopped and looked at Richard’s pale, miserable face truculently. ‘What could be more than that for Rational Richard?’
    ‘I was afraid,’ Richard said in a perfectly calm voice. ‘I was afraid that if I knew any more about those secret pockets . . . that man Osmond, or what was in the closet that time, I wouldn’t be able to love my father anymore. And I was right.’
    Richard covered his face with his thin, dirty fingers and began to cry.
    6
    Jack stood watching Richard cry and damned himself for twenty kinds of fool. No matter what else Morgan was, he was still Richard Sloat’s father; Morgan’s ghost lurked in the shape of Richard’s hands and in the bones of Richard’s face. Had he forgotten those things? No – but for a moment his bitter disappointment in Richard had covered them up. And his increasing nervousness had played a part. The Talisman was very, very close now, and he felt it in his nerve-endings the way a horse smells water in the desert or a distant grass-fire in the plains. That nerviness was coming out in a kind of prancy skittishness.
    Yeah, well, this guy’s supposed to be your best buddy, Jack-O – get a little funky if you have to, but don’t trample Richard. The kid’s sick, just in case you hadn’t noticed.
    He reached for Richard.