The Talisman

the landscape. You noticed the hole even if you could not quite identify what was absent.
    Television, television sets . . . Jack continued past the half-timbered little building and saw ahead of him, its front door set only inches back from the verge of the road, another gnomishly small dwelling. This one seemed to have a sod, not thatched, roof, and Jack smiled to himself – this tiny village had reminded him of Hobbiton. Would a Hobbit cable-stringer pull up here and say to the lady of the . . . shack? doghouse? . . . anyhow, would he say, ‘Ma’am, we’re installing cable in your area, and for a small monthly fee – hitch you up right now – you get fifteen new channels, you get Midnight Blue , you get the all-sports and all-weather channels, you get . . .’?
    And that, he suddenly realized, was it. In front of these houses were no poles. No wiring! No TV antennas complicated the sky, no tall wooden poles marched the length of the Western Road, because in the Territories there was no electricity. Which was why he had not permitted himself to identify the absent element. Jerry Bledsoe had been, at least part of the time, Sawyer & Sloat’s electrician and handyman.
    5
    When his father and Morgan Sloat used that name, Bledsoe , he thought he had never heard it before – though, having remembered it, he must have heard the handyman’s last name once or twice. But Jerry Bledsoe was almost always just Jerry , as it said above the pocket on his workshirt. ‘Can’t Jerry do something about the air conditioning?’ ‘Get Jerry to oil the hinges on that door, will you? The squeaks are driving me batshit.’ And Jerry would appear, his work-clothes clean and pressed, his thinning rust-red hair combed flat, his glasses round and earnest, and quietly fix whatever was wrong. There was a Mrs Jerry, who kept the creases sharp and clean in the tan workpants, and several small Jerrys, whom Sawyer & Sloat invariably remembered at Christmas. Jack had been small enough to associate the name Jerry with Tom Cat’s eternal adversary, and so imagined that the handyman and Mrs Jerry and the little Jerrys lived in a giant mouse-hole, accessible by a curved arch cut into a baseboard.
    But who had killed Jerry Bledsoe? His father and Morgan Sloat, always so sweet to the Bledsoe children at Christmastime?
    Jack stepped forward into the darkness of the Western Road, wishing that he had forgotten completely about Sawyer & Sloat’s handyman, that he had fallen asleep as soon as he had crawled behind the couch. Sleep was what he wanted now – wanted it far more than the uncomfortable thoughts which that six-years-dead conversation had aroused in him. Jack promised himself that as soon as he was sure he was at least a couple of miles past the last house, he would find someplace to sleep. A field would do, even a ditch. His legs did not want to move anymore; all his muscles, even his bones, seemed twice their weight.
    It had been just after one of those times when Jack had wandered into some enclosed place after his father and found that Phil Sawyer had somehow contrived a disappearance. Later, his father would manage to vanish from his bedroom, from the dining room, from the conference room at Sawyer & Sloat. On this occasion he executed his mystifying trick in the garage beside the house on Rodeo Drive.
    Jack, sitting unobserved on the little knob of raised land which was the closest thing to a hill offered by this section of Beverly Hills, saw his father leave their house by the front door, cross the lawn while digging in his pockets for money or keys, and let himself into the garage by the side door. The white door on the right side should have swung up seconds later; but it remained stubbornly closed. Then Jack realized that his father’s car was where it had been all this Saturday morning, parked at the curb directly in front of the house. Lily’s car was gone – she’d plugged a cigarette into her mouth and announced that she was taking herself off to a screening of Dirt Track , the latest film by the director of Death’s Darling, and nobody by God had better try to stop her – and so the garage was empty. For minutes. Jack waited for something to happen. Neither the side door nor the big front doors opened. Eventually Jack slid down off the grassy elevation, went to the garage, and let himself in. That wide familiar space was entirely empty. Dark oil stains patterned the gray cement floor. Tools hung from silvery hooks