The Talisman

so quiet, had only helped him to realize it – had helped him to realize that maybe Death had driven all the way up I-95 from New York, squinting out through cigarette smoke and asking him to find some bop on the car radio.
    He could remember – vaguely – his father telling him that he was born with an old head, but his head didn’t feel old now. Right now, his head felt very young. Scared , he thought. I’m pretty damn scared. This is where the world ends, right?
    Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The silence was as gray as the air – as deadly as the growing circles under her eyes.
    6
    When he had wandered into Funworld and met Lester Speedy Parker after he did not quite know how many days of numbly drifting through time, that passive feeling of being on hold had somehow left him. Lester Parker was a black man with crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting through his cheeks. He was utterly unremarkable now despite whatever he had accomplished in his earlier life as a travelling blues musician. Nor had he said anything particularly remarkable. Yet as soon as Jack had walked aimlessly into Funworld’s game arcade and met Speedy’s pale eyes he felt all the fuzziness leave him. He had become himself again. It was as if a magical current had passed directly from the old man into Jack. Speedy had smiled at him and said, ‘Well, it looks like I got me some company. Little travellin man just walked in.’
    It was true, he was not on hold anymore: just an instant before, he had seemed to be wrapped in wet wool and cotton candy, and now he was set free. A silvery nimbus seemed to play about the old man for an instant, a little aureole of light which disappeared as soon as Jack blinked. For the first time Jack saw that the man was holding the handle of a wide heavy push-broom.
    ‘You okay, son?’ The handyman put one hand in the small of his back, and stretched backward. ‘The world just get worse, or did she get better?’
    ‘Uh, better,’ Jack said.
    ‘Then you come to the right place, I’d say. What do they call you?’
    Little travellin man , Speedy had said that first day, ole Travellin Jack . He had leaned his tall angular body against the Skee-Ball machine and wrapped his arms around the broomhandle as though it were a girl at a dance. The man you see here is Lester Speedy Parker, formerly a travellin man hisself, son, hee hee – oh, yeah, Speedy knew the road, he knew all the roads, way back in the old days. Had me a band, Travellin Jack, played the blues. Git-tar blues. Made me a few records, too, but I won’t shame you by asking if you ever heard em . Every syllable had its own rhythmic lilt, every phrase its rimshot and backbeat; Speedy Parker carried a broom instead of a guitar, but he was still a musician. Within the first five seconds of talking to Speedy, Jack had known that his jazz-loving father would have relished this man’s company.
    He had tagged along behind Speedy for the better part of three or four days, watching him work and helping out when he could. Speedy let him bang in nails, sand down a picket or two that needed paint; these simple tasks done under Speedy’s instructions were the only schooling he was getting, but they made him feel better. Jack now saw his first days in Arcadia Beach as a period of unrelieved wretchedness from which his new friend had rescued him. For Speedy Parker was a friend, that was certain – so certain, in fact, that in it was a quantity of mystery. In the few days since Jack had shaken off his daze (or since Speedy had shaken it off for him by dispelling it with one glance of his light-colored eyes), Speedy Parker had become closer to him than any other friend, with the possible exception of Richard Sloat, whom Jack had known approximately since the cradle. And now, counteracting his terror at losing Uncle Tommy and his fear that his mother was actually dying, he felt the tug of Speedy’s warm wise presence from just down the street.
    Again, and uncomfortably, Jack had his old sense of being directed , of being manipulated: as if a long invisible wire had pulled himself and his mother up to this abandoned place by the sea.
    They had wanted him here, whoever they were.
    Or was that just crazy? In his inner vision he saw a bent old man, clearly out of his mind, muttering to himself as he pushed an empty shopping cart down the sidewalk.
    A gull screamed in the air, and Jack promised himself that he would make himself talk about some of his