The Talisman

hard enough to knock him over. ‘Man’s gotta make room any way he can, right?’
    Jack was able to wait until the door closed, and then he could control his gorge no longer.
    He managed to make it into the Tap’s only stall, where he was faced with the unflushed and sickeningly fragrant spoor of the last customer. Jack vomited up whatever remained of his dinner, took a couple of hitching breaths, and then vomited again. He groped for the flush with a shaking hand and pushed it. Waylon and Willie thudded dully through the walls, singing about Luckenbach, Texas.
    Suddenly his mother’s face was before him, more beautiful than it had ever been on any movie screen, her eyes large and dark and sorrowing. He saw her alone in their rooms at the Alhambra, a cigarette smouldering forgotten in an ashtray beside her. She was crying. Crying for him. His heart seemed to hurt so badly that he thought he would die from love for her and want of her – for a life where there were no things in tunnels, no women who somehow wanted to be slapped and made to cry, no men who vomited between their own feet while taking a piss. He wanted to be with her and hated Speedy Parker with a black completeness for ever having set his feet on this awful road west.
    In that moment whatever might have remained of his self-confidence was demolished – it was demolished utterly and forever. Conscious thought was overmastered by a deep, elemental, wailing, childish cry: I want my mother please God I want my MOTHER –
    He trembled his way out of the stall on watery legs, thinking Okay that’s it everybody out of the pool fuck you Speedy this kid’s going home. Or whatever you want to call it . In that moment he didn’t care if his mother might be dying. In that moment of inarticulate pain he became totally Jack’s Jack, as unconsciously self-serving as an animal on which any carnivore may prey: deer, rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk. In that moment he would have been perfectly willing to let her die of the cancer metastasizing wildly outward from her lungs if only she would hold him and then kiss him goodnight and tell him not to play his goddam transistor in bed or read with a flashlight under the covers for half the night.
    He put his hand against the wall and little by little managed to get hold of himself. This taking-hold was no conscious thing but a simple tightening of the mind, something that was very much Phil Sawyer and Lily Cavanaugh. He’d made a mistake, a big mistake, yeah, but he wasn’t going back. The Territories were real and so the Talisman might also be real; he was not going to murder his mother with faintheartedness.
    Jack filled his mop-bucket with hot water from the spigot in the storeroom and cleaned up the mess.
    When he came out again, it was half past ten and the crowd in the Tap had begun to thin out – Oatley was a working town, and its working drinkers went home early on weeknights.
    Lori said, ‘You look as pale as pastry, Jack. You okay?’
    ‘Do you think I could have a gingerale?’ he asked.
    She brought him one and Jack drank it while he finished waxing the dancefloor. At quarter to twelve Smokey ordered him back to the storeroom to ‘run out a keg’. Jack managed the keg – barely. At quarter to one Smokey started bawling for people to finish up. Lori unplugged the juke – Dick Curless died with a long, unwinding groan – to a few halfhearted cries of protest. Gloria unplugged the games, donned her sweater (it was as pink as the Canada Mints Smokey ate regularly, as pink as the false gums of his dentures), and left. Smokey began to turn out the lights and to urge the last four or five drinkers out the door.
    ‘Okay, Jack,’ he said when they were gone. ‘You did good. There’s room for improvement, but you got a start, anyway. You can doss down in the storeroom.’
    Instead of asking for his pay (which Smokey did not offer anyway), Jack stumbled off toward the storeroom, so tired that he looked like a slightly smaller version of the drunks so lately ushered out.
    In the storeroom he saw Lori squatting down in one corner – the squat caused her basketball shorts to ride up to a point that was nearly alarming – and for a moment Jack thought with dull alarm that she was going through his knapsack. Then he saw that she had spread a couple of blankets on a layer of burlap apple-sacks. Lori had also put down a small satin pillow which said NEW YORK WORLD ’ S FAIR on one side.
    ‘Thought I’d make