The Talisman

Helen Vaughan? That’s my mom’s sister. She’s a schoolteacher. My dad died last winter, see, and things have been pretty tough – then two weeks ago my mom’s cough got a lot worse and she could hardly get up the stairs and the doctor said she had to stay in bed for as long as she could and she asked her sister if I could come stay with her for a while. Her being a teacher and all, I guess I’ll be in the Oatley school for sure. Aunt Helen wouldn’t let any kid play hooky, you bet.’
    ‘You mean your mother told you to hitchhike all the way from Palmyra to Oatley ?’ the man asked.
    ‘Oh no, not at all – she’d never do that. No, she gave me bus money but I decided to save it. There won’t be much money from home for a long time, I guess, and Aunt Helen doesn’t really have any money. My mom would hate it if she knew I was thumbing it. But it seemed like a waste of money to me. I mean, five bucks is five bucks, and why give it to a bus driver?’
    The man looked sideways at him. ‘How long do you think you’ll be in Oatley?’
    ‘Hard to say. I sure hope my mom gets well pretty soon.’
    ‘Well, don’t hitch back, okay?’
    ‘We don’t have a car anymore,’ Jack said, adding to the Story. He was beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Can you believe this? They came out in the middle of the night and repossessed it. Dirty cowards. They knew everybody would be asleep. They just came out in the middle of the night and stole the car right out of the garage. Mister, I would have fought for that car – and not so I could get a ride to my aunt’s house. When my mom goes to the doctor, she has to walk all the way down the hill and then go about another five blocks just to get to the bus stop. They shouldn’t be able to do that, should they? Just come in and steal your own car? As soon as we could, we were going to start making the payments again. I mean, wouldn’t you call that stealing?’
    ‘If it happened to me, I suppose I would,’ the man said. ‘Well, I hope your mother gets better in a hurry.’
    ‘You and me both,’ Jack said with perfect honesty.
    And that held them until the signs for the Oatley exit began to appear. The salesman pulled back into the breakdown lane just after the exit ramp, smiled again at Jack and said, ‘Good luck, kid.’
    Jack nodded and opened the door.
    ‘I hope you don’t have to spend much time in Oatley, anyhow.’
    Jack looked at him questioningly.
    ‘Well, you know the place, don’t you?’
    ‘A little. Not really.’
    ‘Ah, it’s a real pit. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Gorillaville. You eat the beer, then you drink the glass. Like that.’
    ‘Thanks for the warning,’ Jack said and got out of the car. The salesman waved and dropped the Fairlane into Drive. In moments it was only a dark shape speeding toward the low orange sun.
    3
    For a mile or so the road took him through flat dull countryside – far off, Jack saw small two-story frame houses perched on the edges of fields. The fields were brown and bare, and the houses were not farmhouses. Widely separated, the houses overlooking the desolate fields existed in a gray moveless quiet broken only by the whine of traffic moving along I-90. No cows lowed, no horses whinnied – there were no animals, and no farm equipment. Outside one of the little houses squatted half a dozen junked and rusting cars. These were the houses of men who disliked their own species so thoroughly that even Oatley was too crowded for them. The empty fields gave them the moats they needed around their peeling frame castles.
    At length he came to a crossroads. It looked like a crossroads in a cartoon, two narrow empty roads bisecting each other in an absolute nowhere, then stretching on toward another kind of nowhere. Jack had begun to feel insecure about his sense of direction, and he adjusted the pack on his back and moved up toward the tall rusted iron pipe supporting the black rectangles, themselves rusting, of the street names. Should he have turned left instead of right off the exit ramp? The sign pointing down the road running parallel to the highway read DOGTOWN ROAD . Dogtown? Jack looked down this road and saw only endless flatness, fields full of weeds and the black streak of asphalt rolling on. His own particular streak of asphalt was called MILL ROAD , according to the sign. About a mile ahead it slipped into a tunnel nearly overgrown by leaning trees and an oddly pubic mat of ivy.