The Talisman (24 page)

13

The Men in the Sky

1

It was a shock to discover that the money he had worked so hard to get literally
had
turned into sticks—they looked like toy snakes made by an inept craftsman. The shock lasted only for a moment, however, and he laughed ruefully at himself. The sticks
were
money, of course. When he came over here,
everything
changed. Silver dollar to gryphon-coin, shirt to jerkin, English to Territories speech, and good old American money to—well, to jointed sticks. He had flipped over with about twenty-two dollars in all, and he guessed that he had exactly the same amount in Territories money, although he had counted fourteen joints on one of the money-sticks and better than twenty on the other.

The problem wasn’t so much money as cost—he had very little idea of what was cheap and what was dear, and as he walked through the market, Jack felt like a contestant on
The New Price Is Right
—only, if he flubbed it here, there wouldn’t be any consolation prize and a clap on the back from Bob Barker; if he flubbed it here, they might . . . well, he didn’t know for sure
what
they might do. Run him out for sure. Hurt him, rough him up? Maybe. Kill him? Probably not, but it was impossible to be absolutely certain. They were little people. They were not political. And he was a stranger.

Jack walked slowly from one end of the loud and busy market-day throng to the other, wrestling with the problem. It now centered mostly in his stomach—he was dreadfully hungry. Once he saw Henry, dickering with a man who had goats to sell. Mrs. Henry stood near him, but a bit behind, giving the men room to trade. Her back was to Jack, but she had the baby hoisted in her arms—
Jason, one of the little Henrys
, Jack thought—but Jason saw him. The baby waved one chubby hand at Jack and Jack turned away quickly, putting as much crowd as he could between himself and the Henrys.

Everywhere was the smell of roasting meat, it seemed. He saw vendors slowly turning joints of beef over charcoal fires both small and ambitious; he saw ’prentices laying thick slices of what looked like pork on slabs of homemade bread and taking them to the buyers. They looked like runners at an auction. Most of the buyers were farmers like Henry, and it appeared that they also called for food the way people entered a bid at an auction—they simply raised one of their hands imperiously, the fingers splayed out. Jack watched several of these transactions closely, and in every case the medium of exchange was the jointed sticks . . . but how many knuckles would be enough? he wondered. Not that it mattered. He had to eat, whether the transaction marked him as a stranger or not.

He passed a mime-show, barely giving it a glance although the large audience that had gathered—women and children, most of them—roared with appreciative laughter and applauded. He moved toward a stall with canvas sides where a big man with tattoos on his slabbed biceps stood on one side of a trench of smouldering charcoal in the earth. An iron spit about seven feet long ran over the charcoal. A sweating, dirty boy stood at each end. Five large roasts were impaled along the length of the spit, and the boys were turning them in unison.

“Fine meats!” the big man was droning. “Fine meats!
Fiiine
meats! Buy my fine meats! Fine meats here! Fine meats right here!” In an aside to the boy closest to him: “Put your back into it, God pound you.” Then back to his droning, huckstering cry.

A farmer passing with his adolescent daughter raised his hand, and then pointed at the joint of meat second from the left. The boys stopped turning the spit long enough for their boss to hack a slab from the roast and put in on a chunk of bread. One of them ran with it to the farmer, who produced one of the jointed sticks. Watching closely, Jack saw him break off two knuckles of wood and hand them to the boy. As the boy ran back to the stall the customer pocketed his money-stick with the absent but careful gesture of any man repocketing his change, took a gigantic bite of his open-faced sandwich, and handed the rest to his daughter, whose first chomp was almost as enthusiastic as her father’s.

Jack’s stomach boinged and goinged. He had seen what he had to see . . . he hoped.

“Fine meats! Fine meats! Fine—” The big man broke off and looked down at Jack, his beetling brows drawing together over eyes that were small but not entirely stupid. “I hear the song your stomach is singing, friend. If you have money, I’ll take your trade and bless you to God in my prayers tonight. If you haven’t, then get your stupid sheep’s face out of here and go to the devil.”

Both boys laughed, although they were obviously tired—they laughed as if they had no control over the sounds they were making.

But the maddening smell of the slowly cooking meat would not let him leave. He held out the shorter of his jointed sticks and pointed to the roast which was second from the left. He didn’t speak. It seemed safer not to. The vendor grunted, produced his crude knife from his wide belt again, and cut a slice—it was a smaller slice than the one he had cut the farmer, Jack observed, but his stomach had no business with such matters; it was rumbling crazily in anticipation.

The vendor slapped the meat on bread and brought it over himself instead of handing it to either of the boys. He took Jack’s money-stick. Instead of two knuckles, he broke off three.

His mother’s voice, sourly amused, spoke up in his mind:
Congratulations, Jack-O . . . you’ve just been screwed
.

The vendor was looking at him, grinning around a mouthful of wretched blackish teeth, daring him to say anything, to protest in any way.
You just ought to be grateful I only took three knuckles instead of all fourteen of them. I could have, you know. You might as well have a sign hung around your neck, boy:
I AM A STRANGER HERE, AND ON MY OWN
.
So tell me, Sheep’ s-Face: do you want to make an issue of it?

What he wanted didn’t matter—he obviously
couldn’t
make an issue of it. But he 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, 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 nothing odd or off-rhythm in it.

“Laddie, you looked as if you only had one friend left on this side o’ the moon and you just saw the Wild White Wolf come out o’ the north an’ gobble him down with a silver spoon.”

Jack smiled a little. The rug salesman turned away and took something from a smaller display to the right of the largest rug—it was oval and had a short handle. As he turned it over the sun flashed across it—it was a mirror. To Jack it looked small and cheap, the sort of thing you might get for knocking over all three wooden milk-bottles in a carnival game.

“Here, laddie,” the rug salesman said. “Take a look and see if I’m not right.”

Jack looked into the mirror and gaped, for a moment so stunned he thought his heart must have forgotten to beat. It was him, but he looked like something from Pleasure Island in the Disney version of
Pinocchio
, where too much pool-shooting and cigar-smoking had turned boys into donkeys. His eyes, normally as blue and round as an Anglo-Saxon heritage could make them, had gone brown and almond-shaped. His hair, coarsely matted and falling across the middle of his forehead, had a definite manelike look. He raised one hand to brush it away, and touched only bare skin—in the mirror, his fingers seemed to fade right through the hair. He heard the vendor laugh, pleased. Most amazing of all, long jackass-ears dangled down to below his jawline. As he stared, one of them twitched.

He thought suddenly:
I HAD one of these!

And on the heels of that:
In the
Daydreams
I had one of these. Back in the regular world it was . . . was . . .

He could have been no more than four. In the regular world (he had stopped thinking of it as the
real
world without even noticing) it had been a great big glass marble with a rosy center. One day while he was playing with it, it had rolled down the cement path in front of their house and before he could catch it, it had fallen down a sewer grate. It had been gone—forever, he had thought then, sitting on the curb with his face propped on his dirty hands and weeping. But it wasn’t; here was that old toy rediscovered, just as wonderful now as it had been when he was three or four. He grinned, delighted. The image changed and Jack the Jackass became Jack the Cat, his face wise and secret with amusement. His eyes went from donkey-brown to tomcat-green. Now pert little gray-furred ears cocked alertly where the droopy donkey-ears had dangled.

“Better,” the vendor said. “Better, my son. I like to see a happy boy. A happy boy is a healthy boy, and a healthy boy finds his way in the world.
Book of Good Farming
says that, and if it doesn’t, it should. I may just scratch it in my copy, if I ever scratch up enough scratch from my pumpkin-patch to buy a copy someday. Want the glass?”

“Yes!” Jack cried. “Yeah, great!” He groped for his sticks. Frugality was forgotten. “How much?”

The vendor frowned and looked around swiftly to see if they were being watched. “Put it away, my son. Tuck it down deep, that’s the way. You show your scratch, you’re apt to lose the batch. Dips abound on market-ground.”

“What?”

“Never mind. No charge. Take it. Half of em get broken in the back of my wagon when I drag em back to my store come tenmonth. Mothers bring their little ’uns over and they try it but they don’t buy it.”

“Well, at least you don’t deny it,” Jack said.

The vendor looked at him with some surprise and then they both burst out laughing.

“A happy boy with a snappy mouth,” the vendor said. “Come see me when you’re older and bolder, my son. We’ll take your mouth and head south and treble what we peddle.”

Jack giggled. This guy was better than a rap record by the Sugarhill Gang.