The Talisman

They thought people would start to move inland, too. Except it didn’t happen.’
    ‘Then your father bought it.’
    ‘Yes, I guess so. I don’t really know. He never talked much about buying the line . . . or how he replaced the trolley tracks with these railroad tracks.’
    That would have taken a lot of work, Jack thought, and then he thought of the ore-pits, and Morgan of Orris’s apparently unlimited supply of slave labor.
    ‘I know he replaced them, but only because I got a book on railroads and found out there’s a difference in gauge. Trolleys run on ten-gauge track. This is sixteen-gauge.’
    Jack knelt, and yes, he could see a very faint double indentation inside the existing tracks – that was where the trolley tracks had been.
    ‘He had a little red train,’ Richard said dreamily. ‘Just an engine and two cars. It ran on diesel fuel. He used to laugh about it and say that the only thing that separated the men from the boys was the price of their toys. There was an old trolley station on the hill above Point Venuti, and we’d go up there in the rental car and park and go on in. I remember how that station smelled – kind of old, but nice . . . full of old sunlight, sort of. And the train would be there. And my dad . . . he’d say, “All aboard for Camp Readiness, Richard! You got your ticket?” And there’d be lemonade . . . or iced tea . . . and we sat up in the cab . . . sometimes he’d have stuff . . . supplies . . . behind . . . but we’d sit up front . . . and . . . and . . .’
    Richard swallowed hard and wiped a hand across his eyes.
    ‘And it was a nice time,’ he finished. ‘Just him and me. It was pretty cool.’
    He looked around, his eyes shiny with unshed tears.
    ‘There was a plate to turn the train around at Camp Readiness,’ he said. ‘Back in those days. The old days.’
    Richard uttered a terrible strangled sob.
    ‘Richard—’
    Jack tried to touch him.
    Richard shook him off and stepped away, brushing tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands.
    ‘Wasn’t so grown-up then,’ he said, smiling. Trying to. ‘ Nothing was so grown up then, was it, Jack?’
    ‘No,’ Jack said, and now he found he was crying himself.
    Oh Richard. Oh my dear one.
    ‘No,’ Richard said, smiling, looking around at the encroaching woods and brushing the tears away with the dirty backs of his hands, ‘nothing was so grown-up back then. In the old days, when we were just kids. Back when we all lived in California and nobody lived anywhere else.’
    He looked at Jack, trying to smile.
    ‘Jack, help me,’ he said. ‘I feel like my leg is caught in some stuh-stupid truh-truh-hap and I . . . I . . .’
    Then Richard fell on his knees with his hair in his tired face, and Jack got down there with him, and I can bear to tell you no more – only that they comforted each other as well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter experience, that is never quite good enough.
    8
    ‘The fence was new back then,’ Richard said when he could continue speaking. They had walked on a ways. A whippoorwill sang from a tall sturdy oak. The smell of salt in the air was stronger. ‘I remember that. And the sign – CAMP READINESS , that’s what it said. There was an obstacle course, and ropes to climb, and other ropes that you hung on to and then swung over big puddles of water. It looked sort of like boot-camp in a World War Two movie about the Marines. But the guys using the equipment didn’t look much like Marines. They were fat, and they were all dressed the same – gray sweat-suits with CAMP READINESS written on the chest in small letters, and red piping on the sides of the sweat-pants. They all looked like they were going to have heart-attacks or strokes any minute. Maybe both at the same time. Sometimes we stayed overnight. A couple of times we stayed the whole weekend. Not in the Quonset hut; that was like a barracks for the guys who were paying to get in shape.’
    ‘If that’s what they were doing.’
    ‘Yeah, right. If that’s what they were doing. Anyway, we stayed in a big tent and slept on cots. It was a blast.’ Again, Richard smiled wistfully. ‘But you’re right, Jack – not all the guys shagging around the place looked like businessmen trying to get in shape. The others—’
    ‘What about the others?’ Jack asked quietly.
    ‘Some of them – a lot of them – looked like those big hairy creatures in the other world,’ Richard said in a low