The Talisman

another Herbert Tarrytoon from the butt of the one smouldering in the ashtray.)
    ‘Boy!’ the Captain whispered, and shook him so hard that Jack’s lolling head snapped on his neck. ‘Boy! Dammit! If you faint on me . . .’
    ‘I’m okay,’ Jack said – his voice seemed to come from far away; it sounded like the voice of the Dodgers announcer when you were cruising by Chavez Ravine at night with the top down, echoing and distant, the play-by-play of baseball in a sweet dream. ‘Okay, lay off me, what do you say? Give me a break.’
    The Captain stopped shaking him but looked at him warily.
    ‘Okay,’ Jack said again, and abruptly he slapped his own cheek as hard as he could – Ow! But the world came swimming back into focus.
    He had almost died in his crib. In that apartment they’d had back then, the one he barely remembered, the one his mother always called the Technicolor Dream Palace because of the spectacular view of the Hollywood Hills from the living room. He had almost died in his crib, and his father and Morgan Sloat had been drinking wine, and when you drank a lot of wine you had to pee a lot, and he remembered the Technicolor Dream Palace well enough to know that you got from the living room to the nearest bathroom by going through the room that had been his when he was a baby.
    He saw it: Morgan Sloat getting up, grinning easily, saying something like Just a sec while I make some room, Phil ; his father hardly looking around because Haystack Calhoun was getting ready to put the Spinner or the Sleeper on some hapless opponent; Morgan passing from the TV-brightness of the living room into the ashy dimness of the nursery, where little Jacky Sawyer lay sleeping in his Pooh pajamas with the feet, little Jacky Sawyer warm and secure in a dry diaper. He saw Uncle Morgan glancing furtively back at the bright square of the door to the living room, his balding brow turning to ladder-rungs, his lips pursing like the chilly mouth of a lake bass; he saw Uncle Morgan take a throw-pillow from a nearby chair, saw him put it gently and yet firmly over the sleeping baby’s entire head, holding it there with one hand while he held the other hand flat on the baby’s back. And when all movement had stopped, he saw Uncle Morgan put the pillow back on the chair where Lily sat to nurse, and go into the bathroom to urinate.
    If his mother hadn’t come in to check on him almost immediately . . .
    Chilly sweat broke out all over his body.
    Had it been that way? It could have been. His heart told him it had been. The coincidence was too utterly perfect, too seamlessly complete.
    At the age of six weeks, the son of Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, had died in his crib.
    At the age of six weeks, the son of Phil and Lily Sawyer had almost died in his crib . . . and Morgan Sloat had been there .
    His mother always finished the story with a joke: how Phil Sawyer had almost racked up their Chrysler, roaring to the hospital after Jacky had already started breathing again.
    Pretty funny, all right. Yeah.

2
    ‘Now come on ,’ the Captain said.
    ‘All right,’ Jack said. He still felt weak, dazed. ‘All right, let’s g—’
    ‘ Shhhh! ’ The Captain looked around sharply at the sound of approaching voices. The wall to their right was not wood but heavy canvas. It stopped four inches short of the floor, and Jack saw booted feet passing by in the gap. Five pairs. Soldiers’ boots.
    One voice cut through the babble: ‘. . . didn’t know he had a son.’
    ‘Well,’ a second answered, ‘bastards sire bastards – a fact you should well know, Simon.’
    There was a roar of brutal, empty laughter at this – the sort of laughter Jack heard from some of the bigger boys at school, the ones who busted joints behind the woodshop and called the younger boys mysterious but somehow terrifying names: queerboy and humpa-jumpa and morphadite . Each of these somehow slimy terms was followed by a coarse ribband of laughter exactly like this.
    ‘Cork it! Cork it up!’ – a third voice. ‘If he hears you, you’ll be walking Outpost Line before thirty suns have set!’
    Mutters.
    A muffled burst of laughter.
    Another jibe, this one unintelligible. More laughter as they passed on.
    Jack looked at the Captain, who was staring at the short canvas wall with his lips drawn back from his teeth all the way to the gumlines. No question who they were talking about. And if they were talking, there might be someone listening .