The Talisman

these few pounds. Jack simply stood quiet in the suite’s living room a moment, feeling – unexpectedly powerfully – the absence of any person or thing to whom he could say goodbye. His mother would not return to the suite until she could be sure he was gone: if she saw him now, she’d order him to stay. He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly. In the end he went to the telephone pad printed with a drawing of the hotel on eggshell-thin paper, and with the Alhambra’s blunt narrow pencil wrote the three lines that were most of what he had to say:
     
    Thanks
    I love you
    and will be back
    4
    Jack moved down Boardwalk Avenue in the thin northern sun, wondering where he should . . . flip. That was the word for it. And should he see Speedy once more before he ‘flipped’ into the Territories? He almost had to talk to Speedy once more, because he knew so little about where he was going, whom he might meet, what he was looking for . . . she look just like a crystal ball . Was that all the instruction Speedy intended to give him about the Talisman? That, and the warning not to drop it? Jack felt almost sick with lack of preparation – as if he had to take a final exam in a course he’d never attended.
    He also felt that he could flip right where he stood, he was that impatient to begin, to get started, to move. He had to be in the Territories again , he suddenly understood; in the welter of his emotions and longings, that thread brightly shone. He wanted to breathe that air; he hungered for it. The Territories, the long plains and ranges of low mountains, called him, the fields of tall grass and the streams that flashed through them. Jack’s entire body yearned for that landscape. And he might have taken the bottle out of his pocket and forced a mouthful of the awful juice down his throat on the spot if he had not just then seen the bottle’s former owner tucked up against a tree, butt on heels and hands laced across his knees. A brown grocery bag lay beside him, and atop the bag was an enormous sandwich of what looked like liver sausage and onion.
    ‘you’re movin now,’ Speedy said, smiling up at him. ‘you’re on your way, I see. Say your goodbyes? Your momma know you won’t be home for a while?’
    Jack nodded, and Speedy held up the sandwich. ‘You hungry? This one, it’s too much for me.’
    ‘I had something to eat,’ the boy said. ‘I’m glad I can say goodbye to you.’
    ‘Ole Jack on fire, he rarin to go,’ Speedy said, cocking his long head sideways. ‘Boy gonna move.’
    ‘Speedy?’
    ‘But don’t take off without a few little things I brought for you. I got em here in this bag, you wanna see?’
    ‘Speedy?’
    The man squinted up at Jack from the base of the tree.
    ‘Did you know that my father used to call me Travelling Jack?’
    ‘Oh, I probably heard that somewhere,’ Speedy said, grinning at him. ‘Come over here and see what I brought you. Plus, I have to tell you where to go first, don’t I?’
    Relieved, Jack walked across the sidewalk to Speedy’s tree. The old man set his sandwich in his lap and fished the bag closer to him. ‘Merry Christmas,’ Speedy said, and brought forth a tall, battered old paperback book. It was, Jack saw, an old Rand McNally road atlas.
    ‘Thanks,’ Jack said, taking the book from Speedy’s outstretched hand.
    ‘Ain’t no maps over there, so you stick as much as you can to the roads in ole Rand McNally. That way you’ll get where you’re goin.’
    ‘Okay,’ Jack said, and slipped out of the knapsack so that he could slide the big book down inside it.
    ‘The next thing don’t have to go in that fancy rig you carryin on your back,’ Speedy said. He put the sandwich on the flat paper bag and stood up all in one long smooth motion. ‘No, you can carry this right in your pocket.’ He dipped his fingers into the left pocket of his workshirt. What emerged, clamped between his second and third fingers like one of Lily’s Tarrytoons, was a white triangular object it took the boy a moment to recognize as a guitar-pick. ‘You take this and keep it. You’ll want to show it to a man. He’ll help you.’
    Jack turned the pick over in his fingers. He had never seen one like it – of ivory, with scrimshaw filigrees and patterns winding around it in slanted lines like some kind of unearthly writing. Beautiful in the abstract, it was almost too heavy