Angola. The Rainbird Towers.
Jack felt his palms begin to itch and sweat, and he wiped them on his jeans.
THIRTY-ONE FLAVORS, gleamed out a chilly incandescent white light to his left, and when he turned that way he saw a curving hallway on its other side. Shiny brown tiles on the walls and floor; as soon as the curve of the hallway took him out of sight of anyone on the mezzanine level, Jack saw three telephones, which were indeed under transparent plastic bubbles. Across the hall from the telephones were doors to MEN and LADIES.
Beneath the middle bubble, Jack dialed 0, followed by the area code and the number for the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. "Billing?" asked the operator, and Jack said, "This is a collect call for Mrs. Sawyer in four-oh-seven and four-oh-eight. From Jack."
The hotel operator answered, and Jack's chest tightened. She transferred the call to the suite. The telephone rang once, twice, three times.
Then his mother said "Jesus, kid, I'm glad to hear from you! This absentee-mother business is hard on an old girl like me. I kind of miss you when you're not moping around and telling me how to act with waiters."
"You're just too classy for most waiters, that's all," Jack said, and thought that he might begin to cry with relief.
"Are you all right, Jack? Tell me the truth."
"I'm fine, sure," he said. "Yeah, I'm fine. I just had to make sure that you . . . you know."
The phone whispered electronically, a skirl of static that sounded like sand blowing across a beach.
"I'm okay," Lily said. "I'm great. I'm not any worse, anyhow, if that's what you're worried about. I suppose I'd like to know where you are."
Jack paused, and the static whispered and hissed for a moment. "I'm in Ohio now. Pretty soon I'm going to be able to see Richard."
"When are you coming home, Jack-O?"
"I can't say. I wish I could."
"You can't say. I swear, kid, if your father hadn't called you that silly name--and if you'd asked me about this ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later . . ."
A rising tide of static took her voice, and Jack remembered how she'd looked in the tea shop, haggard and feeble, an old woman. When the static receded he asked, "Are you having any trouble with Uncle Morgan? Is he bothering you?"
"I sent your Uncle Morgan away from here with a flea in his ear," she said.
"He was there? He did come? Is he still bothering you?"
"I got rid of the Stoat about two days after you left, baby. Don't waste time worrying about him."
"Did he say where he was going?" Jack asked her, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth the telephone uttered a tortured electronic squeal that seemed to bore right into his head. Jack grimaced and jerked the receiver away from his ear. The awful whining noise of static was so loud that anyone stepping into the corridor would have heard it. "MOM!" Jack shouted, putting the phone as close to his head as he dared. The squeal of static increased, as if a radio between stations had been turned up to full volume.
The line abruptly fell silent. Jack clamped the receiver to his ear and heard only the flat black silence of dead air. "Hey," he said, and jiggled the hook. The flat silence in the phone seemed to press up against his ear.
Just as abruptly, and as if his jiggling the hook had caused it, the dial tone--an oasis of sanity, of regularity, now--resumed. Jack jammed his right hand in his pocket, looking for another coin.
He was holding the receiver, awkwardly, in his left hand as he dug in his pocket; he froze when he heard the dial tone suddenly slot off into outer space.
Morgan Sloat's voice spoke to him as clearly as if good old Uncle Morgan were standing at the next telephone. "Get your ass back home, Jack." Sloat's voice carved the air like a scalpel. "You just get your ass back home before we have to take you back ourselves."
"Wait," Jack said, as if he were begging for time: in fact, he was too terrified to know quite what he was saying.
"Can't wait any longer, little pal. You're a murderer now. That's right, isn't it? You're a murderer. So we're not able to give you any more chances. You just get your can back to that resort in New Hampshire. Now. Or maybe you'll go home in a bag."
Jack heard the click of the receiver. He dropped it. The telephone Jack had used shuddered forward, then sagged off the wall. For a second it drooped on a network of wires; then crashed heavily to the floor.
The door to the men's room banged open behind Jack, and a voice yelled, "Holy SHIT!"
Jack turned to see a thin crewcut boy of about twenty staring at the telephones. He was wearing a white apron and a bow tie: a clerk at one of the shops.
"I didn't do it," Jack said. "It just happened."
"Holy shit." The crewcut clerk goggled at Jack for a split-second, jerked as if to run, and then ran his hands over the crown of his head.
Jack backed away down the hall. When he was halfway down the escalator he finally heard the clerk yelling, "Mr. Olafson! The phone, Mr. Olafson!" Jack fled.
Outside, the air was bright, surprisingly humid. Dazed, Jack wandered across the sidewalk. A half-mile away across the parking lot, a black-and-white police car swung in toward the mall. Jack turned sideways and began to walk down the pavement. Some way ahead, a family of six struggled to get a lawn chair in through the next entrance to the mall. Jack slowed down and watched the husband and wife tilt the long chair diagonally, hindered by the attempts of the smaller children to either sit on the chair or to assist them. At last, nearly in the posture of the flag-raisers in the famous photograph of Iwo Jima, the family staggered through the door. The police car lazily circled through the big parking lot.
Just past the door where the disorderly family had succeeded in planting their chair, an old black man sat on a wooden crate, cradling a guitar in his lap. As Jack slowly drew nearer, he saw the metal cup beside the man's feet. The man's face was hidden behind big dirty sunglasses and beneath the brim of a stained felt hat. The sleeves of his denim jacket were as wrinkled as an elephant's hide.
Jack swerved out to the edge of the pavement to give the man all the room he seemed to warrant, and noticed that around the man's neck hung a sign handwritten in big shaky capital letters on discolored white cardboard. A few steps later he could read the letters.
BLIND SINCE BIRTH
WILL PLAY ANY SONG
GOD BLESS YOU
He had nearly walked past the man holding the beat-up old guitar when he heard him utter, his voice a cracked and juicy whisper, "Yeah-bob."
15
Snowball Sings
1
Jack swung back toward the black man, his heart hammering in his chest.
Speedy?
The black man groped for his cup, held it up, shook it. A few coins rattled in the bottom.
It is Speedy. Behind those dark glasses, it is Speedy.
Jack was sure of it. But a moment later he was just as sure that it wasn't Speedy. Speedy wasn't built square in the shoulders and broad across the chest; Speedy's shoulders were rounded, a little slumped over, and his chest consequently had a slightly caved-in look. Mississippi John Hurt, not Ray Charles.
But I could tell one way or the other for sure if he'd take off those shades.
He opened his mouth to speak Speedy's name aloud, and suddenly the old man began to play, his wrinkled fingers, as dully dark as old walnut that has been faithfully oiled but never polished, moving with limber speed and grace on both strings and frets. He played well, finger-picking the melody. And after a moment, Jack recognized the tune. It had been on one of his father's older records. A Vanguard album called Mississippi John Hurt Today. And although the blind man didn't sing, Jack knew the words:
O kindly friends, tell me, ain't it hard?
To see ole Lewis in a new graveyard,
The angels laid him away. . . .
The blond football player and his three princesses came out of the mall's main doors. Each of the princesses had an ice cream cone. Mr. All-America had a chili-dog in each hand. They sauntered t
oward where Jack stood. Jack, whose whole attention was taken up by the old black man, had not even noticed them. He had been transfixed by the idea that it was Speedy, and Speedy had somehow read his mind. How else could it be that this man had begun to play a Mississippi John Hurt composition just as Jack happened to think Speedy looked like that very man? And a song containing his own road-name, as well?
The blond football player transferred both chili-dogs to his left hand and slapped Jack on the back with his right as hard as he could. Jack's teeth snapped on his own tongue like a bear-trap. The pain was sudden and excruciating.
"You just shake her easy, urine-breath," he said. The princesses giggled and shrieked.
Jack stumbled forward and kicked over the blind man's cup. Coins spilled and rolled. The gentle lilt of the blues tune came to a jangling halt.
Mr. All-America and the Three Little Princesses were already moving on. Jack stared after them and felt the now-familiar impotent hate. This was how it felt to be on your own, just young enough to be at everyone's mercy and to be anyone's meat--anyone from a psychotic like Osmond to a humorless old Lutheran like Elbert Palamountain, whose idea of a pretty fair work-day was to slog and squelch through gluey fields for twelve hours during a steady cold downpour of October rain, and to sit bolt-upright in the cab of his International Harvester truck during lunch hour, eating onion sandwiches and reading from the Book of Job.
Jack had no urge to "get" them, although he had a strange idea that if he wanted to, he could--that he was gaining some sort of power, almost like an electrical charge. It sometimes seemed to him that other people knew that, too--that it was in their faces when they looked at him. But he didn't want to get them; he only wanted to be left alone. He--
The blind man was feeling around himself for the spilled money, his pudgy hands moving gently over the pavement, almost seeming to read it. He happened on a dime, set his cup back up again, and dropped the dime in. Plink!
Faintly, Jack heard one of the princesses: "Why do they let him stay there, he's so gross, you know?"
Even more faintly still: "Yeah, rilly!"
Jack got down on his knees and began to help, picking up coins and putting them into the blind man's cup. Down here, close to the old man, he could smell sour sweat, mildew, and some sweet bland smell like corn. Smartly dressed mall shoppers gave them a wide berth.
"Thankya, thankya," the blind man croaked monotonously. Jack could smell dead chili on his breath. "Thankya, blessya, God blessya, thankya."
He is Speedy.
He's not Speedy.
What finally forced him to speak--and this was not really so odd--was remembering just how little of the magic juice he had left. Barely two swallows now. He did not know if, after what had happened in Angola, he could ever bring himself to travel in the Territories again, but he was still determined to save his mother's life, and that meant he might have to.
And, whatever the Talisman was, he might have to flip into the other world to get it.
"Speedy?"
"Blessya, thankya, God blessya, didn't I hear one go over there?" He pointed.
"Speedy! It's Jack!"
"Ain't nothin speedy round here, boy, No sir." His hands began to whisper-walk along the concrete in the direction he had just pointed. One of them found a nickel and he dropped it into the cup. His other happened to touch the shoe of a smartly dressed young woman who was passing by. Her pretty, empty face wrinkled in almost painful disgust as she drew away from him.
Jack picked the last coin out of the gutter. It was a silver dollar--a big old cartwheel with Lady Liberty on one side.
Tears began to spill out of his eyes. They ran down his dirty face and he wiped them away with an arm that shook. He was crying for Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey, and Heidel. For his mother. For Laura DeLoessian. For the carter's son lying dead in the road with his pockets turned out. But most of all for himself. He was tired of being on the road. Maybe when you rode it in a Cadillac it was a road of dreams, but when you had to hitch it, riding on your thumb and a story that was just about worn out, when you were at everybody's mercy and anyone's meat, it was nothing but a road of trials. Jack felt that he had been tried enough . . . but there was no way to cry it off. If he cried it off, the cancer would take his mother, and Uncle Morgan might well take him.
"I don't think I can do it, Speedy," he wept. "I don't think so, man."
Now the blind man groped for Jack instead of the spilled coins. Those gentle, reading fingers found his arm and closed around it. Jack could feel the hard pad of callus in the tip of each finger. He drew Jack to him, into those odors of sweat and heat and old chili. Jack pressed his face against Speedy's chest.
"Hoo, boy. I don't know no Speedy, but it sounds like you puttin an awful lot on him. You--"
"I miss my mom, Speedy," Jack wept, "and Sloat's after me. It was him on the phone inside the mall, him. And that's not the worst thing. The worst thing was in Angola . . . the Rainbird Towers . . . earthquake . . . five men . . . me, I did it, Speedy, I killed those men when I flipped into this world, I killed them just like my dad and Morgan Sloat killed Jerry Bledsoe that time!"
Now it was out, the worst of it. He had sicked up the stone of guilt that had been in his throat, threatening to choke him, and a storm of weeping seized him--but this time it was relief rather than fear. It was said. It had been confessed. He was a murderer.
"Hooo-eeee!" the black man cried. He sounded perversely delighted. He held Jack with one thin, strong arm, rocked him. "You tryin to carry you one heavy load, boy. You sure am. Maybe you ought to put some of it down."
"I killed em," Jack whispered. "Thielke, Wild, Hagen, Davey . . ."
"Well, if yo friend Speedy was here," the black man said, "whoever he might be, or wherever he might be in this wide old world, he might tell you that you cain't carry the world on yo shoulders, son. You cain't do that. No one can. Try to carry the world on yo shoulders, why, first it's gonna break yo back, and then it's gonna break you sperrit."
"I killed--"
"Put a gun to their heads and shot somebodies, didya?"
"No . . . the earthquake . . . I flipped. . . ."
"Don't know nothin bout dat," the black man said. Jack had pulled away from him a bit and was staring up into the black man's seamed face with wondering curiosity, but the black man had turned his head toward the parking lot. If he was blind, then he had picked out the smoother, slightly more powerful beat of the police car's engine from the others as it approached, because he was looking right at it. "All I know is you seem to have this idear of 'moider' a little broad. Prolly if some fella dropped dead of a heart-attack goin around us as we sit here, you'd think you killed him. 'Oh look, I done moidered that fella on account of where I was sittin, oh woe, oh dooom, oh gloooooom, oh this . . . oh that!' " As he spoke this and that, the blind man punctuated it with a quick change from G to C and back to G again. He laughed, pleased with himself.
"Speedy--"
"Nothin speedy round here," the black man reiterated, and then showed yellow teeth in a crooked grin. " 'Cept maybe how speedy some folks are to put the blame on themselves for things others might have got started. Maybe you runnin, boy, and maybe you bein chased."
G-chord.
"Maybe you be just a little off-base."
C-chord, with a nifty little run in the middle that made Jack grin in spite of himself.
"Might be somebody else gettin on yo case."
Back down to G again, and the blind man laid his guitar aside (while, in the police car, the two cops were flipping to see which of them would actually have to touch Old Snowball if he wouldn't get into the back of the cruiser peaceably).
"Maybe dooom and maybe gloooooom and maybe this and maybe that . . ." He laughed again, as if Jack's fears were the funniest thing he'd ever heard.
"But I don't know what could happen if I--"
"No one ever knows what could happen if they do anything, do dey?" the black man who might or might not be Spee
dy Parker broke in. "No. Dey do not. If you thought about it, you'd stay in yo house all day, ascairt to come out! I don't know yo problems, boy. Don't want to know em. Could be crazy, talkin bout earthquakes and all. But bein as how you helped me pick up my money and didn't steal none--I counted every plinkety-plink, so I know--I'll give you some advice. Some things you cain't help. Sometimes people get killed because somebody does somethin . . . but if somebody didn't do that somethin, a whole lot of more people would have got killed. Do you see where I'm pushin, son?"
The dirty sunglasses inclined down toward him.
Jack felt a deep, shuddery relief. He saw, all right. The blind man was talking about hard choices. He was suggesting that maybe there was a difference between hard choices and criminal behavior. And that maybe the criminal wasn't here.
The criminal might have been the guy who had told him five minutes ago to get his ass home.
"Could even be," the blind man remarked, hitting a dark D-minor chord on his box, "that all things soive the Lord, just like my momma tole me and your momma might have tole you, if she was a Christian lady. Could be we think we doin one thing but are really doin another. Good Book says all things, even those that seem evil, soive the Lord. What you think, boy?"
"I don't know," Jack said honestly. He was all mixed up. He only had to close his eyes and he could see the telephone tearing off the wall, hanging from its wires like a weird puppet.
"Well, it smells like you lettin it drive you to drink."
"What?" Jack asked, astonished. Then he thought, I thought that Speedy looked like Mississippi John Hurt, and this guy started playing a John Hurt blues . . . and now he's talking about the magic juice. He's being careful, but I swear that's what he's talking about--it's got to be!
"You're a mind-reader," Jack said in a low voice. "Aren't you? Did you learn it in the Territories, Speedy?"
"Don't know nothin bout readin minds," the blind man said, "but my lamps have been out forty-two year come November, and in forty-two year your nose and ears take up some of the slack. I can smell cheap wine on you, son. Smell it all over you. It's almost like you washed yo hair widdit!"