The Talisman

dollar-fifty. He had bargained for that, and he knew that if Mrs Banberry hadn’t been strapped – her old dishwasher had quit just that morning, had gone on his coffee-break and just never come back – she would not have bargained at all; would have simply told him take the buck and a quarter, kid, or see what’s down the road. It’s a free country.
    Now, he thought, with the unknowing cynicism that was also a part of his new self-confidence, here was another Mrs Banberry. Male instead of female, rope-skinny instead of fat and grandmotherly, sour instead of smiling, but almost surely a Mrs Banberry for a’ that and a’ that.
    ‘Looking for a job, huh?’ The man in the white pants and the paper hat put his cigar down in an old tin ashtray with the words CAMELS embossed on the bottom. The fly stopped washing its legs and took off.
    ‘Yes, sir, but like you say, this is a bar and all—’
    The unease stirred in him again. Those brown eyes and yellowed scleras troubled him – they were the eyes of some old hunting cat that had seen plenty of errant mice like him before.
    ‘Yeah, it’s my place,’ the man said. ‘Smokey Updike.’ He held his hand out. Surprised, Jack shook it. It squeezed Jack’s hand once, hard, almost to the point of pain. Then it relaxed . . . but Smokey didn’t let go. ‘Well?’ he said.
    ‘Huh?’ Jack said, aware he sounded stupid and a little afraid – he felt stupid and a little afraid. And he wanted Updike to let go of his hand.
    ‘Didn’t your folks ever teach you to innerduce yourself?’
    This was so unexpected that Jack came close to gabbling out his real name instead of the one he had used at the Golden Spoon, the name he also used if the people who picked him up asked for his handle. That name – what he was coming to think of as his ‘road-name’ – was Lewis Farren.
    ‘Jack Saw – ah – Sawtelle,’ he said.
    Updike held his hand yet a moment longer, those brown eyes never moving. Then he let it go. ‘Jack Saw-ah-Sawtelle,’ he said. ‘Must be the longest fucking name in the phonebook, huh, kid?’
    Jack flushed but said nothing.
    ‘You ain’t very big,’ Updike said. ‘You think you could manage to rock a ninety-pound keg of beer up on its side and walk it onto a hand-dolly?’
    ‘I think so,’ Jack said, not knowing if he could or not. It didn’t look as if it would be much of a problem, anyway – in a place as dead as this, the guy probably only had to change kegs when the one hooked up to the taps went flat.
    As if reading his mind, Updike said, ‘Yeah, nobody here now. But we get pretty busy by four, five o’clock. And on weekends the place really fills up. That’s when you’d earn your keep, Jack.’
    ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Jack said. ‘How much would the job pay?’
    ‘Dollar an hour,’ Updike said. ‘Wish I could pay you more, but—’ He shrugged and tapped the stack of bills. He even smiled a little, as if to say You see how it is, kid, everything in Oatley is running down like a cheap pocket-watch someone forgot to wind – ever since about 1971 it’s been running down . But his eyes did not smile. His eyes were watching Jack’s face with still, catlike concentration.
    ‘Gee, that’s not very much,’ Jack said. He spoke slowly but he was thinking as fast as he could.
    The Oatley Tap was a tomb – there wasn’t even a single bombed-out old alky at the bar nursing a beer and watching General Hospital on the tube. In Oatley you apparently drank in your car and called it a club. A dollar-fifty an hour was a hard wage when you were busting your buns; in a place like this, a buck an hour might be an easy one.
    ‘Nope,’ Updike agreed, going back to his calculator, ‘it ain’t.’ His voice said Jack could take it or leave it; there would be no negotiations.
    ‘Might be all right,’ Jack said.
    ‘Well, that’s good,’ Updike said. ‘We ought to get one other thing straight, though. Who you running from and who’s looking for you?’ The brown eyes were on him again, and they drilled hard. ‘If you got someone on your back-trail, I don’t want him fucking up my life.’
    This did not shake Jack’s confidence much. He wasn’t the world’s brightest kid, maybe, but bright enough to know he wouldn’t last long on the road without a second cover story for prospective employers. This was Story #2 – The Wicked Stepfather.
    ‘I’m from a little town in Vermont,’ he said. ‘Fenderville. My mom and dad got