The Talisman

felt that thin, impotent anger again.
    ‘Go on,’ the vendor said, tiring of him. He flapped a big hand in Jack’s face. His fingers were scarred, and there was blood under his nails. ‘You got your food. Now get out of here.’
    Jack thought, I could show you a flashlight and you’d run like all the devils of hell were after you. Show you an airplane and you’d probably go crazy. You’re maybe not as tough as you think, chum.
    He smiled, and perhaps there was something in his smile that the meat-vendor didn’t like, because he drew away from Jack, his face momentarily uneasy. Then his brows beetled together again.
    ‘Get out, I said!’ he roared. ‘Get out, God pound you!’ And this time Jack went.
    2
    The meat was delicious. Jack gobbled it and the bread it sat on, and then unselfconsciously licked the juice from his palms as he strolled along. The meat did taste like pork . . . and yet it didn’t. It was somehow richer, tangier than pork. Whatever it was, it filled the hole in the middle of him with authority. Jack thought he could take it to school in bag lunches for a thousand years.
    Now that he had managed to shut his belly up – for a little while, anyway – he was able to look about himself with more interest . . . and although he didn’t know it, he had finally begun to blend into the crowd. Now he was only one more rube from the country come to the market-town, walking slowly between the stalls, trying to gawk in every direction at once. Hucksters recognized him, but only as one more potential mark among many. They yelled and beckoned at him, and as he passed by they yelled and beckoned at whoever happened to be behind him – man, woman, or child. Jack gaped frankly at the wares scattered all around him, wares both wonderful and strange, and amidst all the others staring at them he ceased to be a stranger himself – perhaps because he had given up his effort to seem blasé in a place where no one acted blasé . They laughed, they argued, they haggled . . . but no one seemed bored.
    The market-town reminded him of the Queen’s pavillion without the air of strained tension and too-hectic gaiety – there was the same absurdly rich mingle of smells (dominated by roasting meat and animal ordure), the same brightly dressed crowds (although even the most brightly dressed people Jack saw couldn’t hold a candle to some of the dandies he had seen inside the pavillion), the same unsettling but somehow exhilarating juxtaposition of the perfectly normal, cheek by jowl with the extravagantly strange.
    He stopped at a stall where a man was selling carpets with the Queen’s portrait woven into them. Jack suddenly thought of Hank Scoffler’s mom and smiled. Hank was one of the kids Jack and Richard Sloat had hung around with in L.A. Mrs Scoffler had a thing for the most garish decorations Jack had ever seen. And God, wouldn’t she have loved these rugs, with the image of Laura DeLoessian, her hair done up in a high, regal coronet of braids, woven into them! Better than her velvet paintings of Alaskan stags or the ceramic diorama of the Last Supper behind the bar in the Scoffler living room . . .
    Then the face woven into the rugs seemed to change even as he looked at it. The face of the Queen was gone and it was his mother’s face he saw, repeated over and over and over, her eyes too dark, her skin much too white.
    Homesickness surprised Jack again. It rushed through his mind in a wave and he called out for her in his heart – Mom! Hey, Mom! Jesus, what am I doing here? Mom!! – wondering with a lover’s longing intensity what she was doing now, right this minute. Sitting at the window, smoking, looking out at the ocean, a book open beside her? Watching TV? At a movie? Sleeping? Dying?
    Dead? an evil voice added before he could stop it. Dead, Jack? Already dead?
    Stop it.
    He felt the burning sting of tears.
    ‘Why so sad, my little lad?’
    He looked up, startled, and saw the rug salesman looking at him. He was as big as the meat-vendor, and his arms were also tattooed, but his smile was open and sunny. There was no meanness in it. That was a big difference.
    ‘It’s nothing,’ Jack said.
    ‘If it’s nothing makes you look like that, you ought to be thinking of something , my son, my son.’
    ‘I looked that bad, did I?’ Jack asked, smiling a little. He had also grown unselfconscious about his speech – at least for the moment – and perhaps that was why the rug salesman heard