The Talisman

before, during the sixties, Oatley must have prospered. The relative brightness of the strip of Mill Road leading out of town was the product of that era when stocks went go-go and gas was still cheap and nobody had heard the term ‘discretionary income’ because they had plenty of it. People had sunk their money into franchise operations and little shops and for a time had, if not actually flourished, held their heads above the waves. This short series of blocks still had that superficial hopefulness – but only a few bored teenagers sat in the franchise restaurants, nursing medium Cokes, and in the plate-glass windows of too many of the little shops placards as faded as those in the used-car lots announced EVERYTHING MUST GO! CLOSING SALE . Jack saw no signs advertising for help, and kept on walking.
    Downtown Oatley showed the reality beneath the happy clown’s colors left behind by the sixties. As Jack trudged along these blocks of baked-looking brick buildings, his pack grew heavier, his feet more tender. He would have walked to Dogtown after all, if it were not for his feet and the necessity of going through the Mill Road tunnel again. Of course there was no snarling man-wolf lurking in the dark there – he’d worked that out by now. No one could have spoken to him in the tunnel. The Territories had shaken him. First the sight of the Queen, then that dead boy beneath the cart with half his face gone. Then Morgan; the trees. But that was there , where such things could be – were, perhaps, even normal. Here , normality did not admit such gaudiness.
    He was before a long, dirty window above which the flaking slogan FURNITURE DEPOSITORY was barely legible on the brickwork. He put his hands to his eyes and stared in. A couch and a chair, each covered by a white sheet, sat fifteen feet apart on a wide wooden floor. Jack moved farther down the block, wondering if he was going to have to beg for food.
    Four men sat in a car before a boarded-up shop a little way down the block. It took Jack a moment to see that the car, an ancient black DeSoto that looked as though Broderick Crawford should come bustling out of it, had no tires. Taped to the windshield was a yellow five-by-eight card which read FAIR WEATHER CLUB . The men inside, two in front and two in back, were playing cards. Jack stepped up to the front passenger window.
    ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and the cardplayer closest to him rolled a fishy gray eye toward him. ‘Do you know where—’
    ‘Get lost,’ the man said. His voice sounded squashed and phlegmy, unfamiliar with speech. The face half-turned to Jack was deeply pitted with acne scars and oddly flattened out, as if someone had stepped on it when the man was an infant.
    ‘I just wondered if you knew somewhere I could get a couple days’ work.’
    ‘Try Texas,’ said the man in the driver’s seat, and the pair in the back seat cracked up, spitting beer out over their hands of cards.
    ‘I told you, kid, get lost,’ said the flatfaced gray-eyed man closest to Jack. ‘Or I’ll personally pound the shit out of you.’
    It was just the truth, Jack understood – if he stayed there a moment longer, this man’s rage would boil over and he would get out of the car and beat him senseless. Then the man would get back in the car and open another beer. Cans of Rolling Rock covered the floor, the opened ones tipped every which way, the fresh ones linked by white plastic nooses. Jack stepped backward, and the fish-eye rolled away from him. ‘Guess I’ll try Texas after all,’ he said. He listened for the sound of the DeSoto’s door creaking open as he walked away, but all he heard being opened was another Rolling Rock.
    Crack! Hiss!
    He kept moving.
    He got to the end of the block and found himself looking across the town’s other main street at a dying lawn filled with yellow weeds from which peeked fiberglass statues of Disneylike fawns. A shapeless old woman gripping a flyswatter stared at him from a porch swing.
    Jack turned away from her suspicious gaze and saw before him the last of the lifeless brick buildings on Mill Road. Three concrete steps led up to a propped-open screen door. A long, dark window contained a glowing BUDWEISER sign and, a foot to the right of that, the painted legend UPDIKE’S OATLEY TAP . And several inches beneath that, hand-written on a yellow five-by-eight card like the one on the DeSoto, were the miraculous words HELP WANTED . Jack pulled the knapsack off his