Tell me the truth; I will know a lie, those eyes said. You look like a certain bad boy I first met in Californiaare you that boy? And for a moment, everything trembled on his lips Jack, Im Jack Sawyer, yeah, Im the kid from California, the Queen of this world was my mother, only I died, and I know your boss, I know MorganUncle Morganand Ill tell you anything you want to know if only youll stop looking at me with those freakedout eyes of yours, sure, because Im only a kid, and thats what kids do, they tell, they tell everything Then he heard his mothers voice, tough, on the edge of a jeer You gonna spill your guts to this guy, JackO? THIS guy? He smells like a distress sale at the mens cologne counter and he looks like a medieval version of Charles Manson . . . but you suit yourself. You can fool him if you wantno sweatbut you suit yourself. Who are you? Osmond asked again, drawing even closer, and on his face Jack now saw total confidencehe was used to getting the answers he wanted from people . . . and not just from twelveyearold kids, either. Jack took a deep, trembling breath (When you want max volumewhen you want to get it all the way up to the back row of the balconyyou gotta bring it from your diaphragm, Jacky. It just kind of gets passed through the old voxbox on the way up) and screamed I WAS GOING TO GO RIGHT BACK! HONEST TO GOD! Osmond, who had been leaning even farther forward in anticipation of a broken and strengthless whisper, recoiled as if Jack had suddenly reached out and slapped him. He stepped on the trailing rawhide tails of his whip with one booted foot and came close to tripping over them. You damned Godpounding little I WAS GOING TO! PLEASE DONT WHIP ME OSMOND I WAS GOING TO GO BACK! I NEVER WANTED TO COME HERE I NEVER I NEVER I NEVER Captain Farren lunged forward and struck him in the back. Jack sprawled fulllength in the mud, still screaming. Hes simpleminded, as I told you, he heard the Captain saying. I apologize, Osmond. You can be sure hell be beaten within an inch of his life. He Whats he doing here in the first place? Osmond shrieked. His voice was now as high and shrewish as any fishwifes. Whats your snotnosed puling bratbastard doing here at all? Dont offer to show me his pass! I know he has no pass! You sneaked him in to feed at the Queens table . . . to steal the Queens silver, for all I know . . . hes bad . . . one looks enough to tell anyone that hes very, intolerably, most indubitably bad! The whip came down again, not the mild cough of a Daisy air rifle this time but the loud clean report of a .22, and Jack had time to think I know where thats going, and then a large fiery hand clawed into his back. The pain seemed to sink into his flesh, not diminishing but actually intensifying. It was hot and maddening. He screamed and writhed in the mud. Bad! Most awfully bad! Indubitably bad! Each bad was punctuated by another crack of Osmonds whip, another fiery handprint, another scream from Jack. His back was burning. He had no idea how long it might have gone onOsmond seemed to be working himself into a hotter frenzy with each blowbut then a new voice shouted Osmond! Osmond! There you are! Thank God! A commotion of running footsteps. Osmonds voice, furious and slightly out of breath Well? Well? What is it? A hand grasped Jacks elbow and helped him to his feet. When he staggered, the arm attached to the hand slipped around his waist and supported him. It was difficult to believe that the Captain who had been so hard and sure during their bewildering tour of the pavillion could now be so gentle. Jack staggered again. The world kept wanting to swim out of focus. Trickles of warm blood ran down his back. He looked at Osmond with swiftawakening hatred, and it was good to feel that hatred. It was a welcome antidote to the fear and the confusion. You did thatyou hurt me, you cut me. And listen to me, Jiggs, if I get a chance to pay you back Are you all right? the Captain whispered. Yes. What? Osmond screamed at the two men who had interrupted Jacks whipping. The first was one of the dandies Jack and the Captain had passed going to the secret room. The other looked a bit like the carter Jack had seen almost immediately upon his return to the Territories. This fellow looked badly frightened, and hurt as wellblood was welling from a gash on the left side of his head and had covered most of the left side of his face. His left arm was scraped and his jerkin was torn. What are you saying, you jackass? My wagon overturned coming around the bend on the far side of AllHands Village, the carter said. He spoke with the slow, dazed patience of one in deep shock. My sons kilt, my Lord. Crushed to death under the barrels. He was just sixteen last MayFarm Day. His mother What? Osmond screamed again. Barrels? Ale? Not the Kingsland? You dont mean to tell me youve overturned a full wagonload of Kingsland Ale, you stupid goats penis? You dont mean to tell me that, do yoooooouuuuuuu? Osmonds voice rose on the last word like the voice of a man making savage mockery of an operatic diva. It wavered and warbled. At the same time he began to dance again . . . but in rage this time. The combination was so weird that Jack had to raise both hands to stifle an involuntary giggle. The movement caused his shirt to scrape across his welted back, and that sobered him even before the Captain muttered a warning word. Patiently, as if Osmond had missed the only important fact (and so it must have seemed to him), the carter began again He was just sixteen last MayFarm Day. His mother didnt want him to come with me. I cant think what Osmond raised his whip and brought it whickering down with blinding and unexpected speed. At one moment the handle was grasped loosely in his left hand, the whip itself with its rawhide tails trailing in the mud; at the next there was a whipcrack not like the sound of a .22 but more like that of a toy rifle. The carter staggered back, shrieking, his hands clapped to his face. Fresh blood ran loosely through his dirty fingers. He fell over, screaming, My Lord! My Lord! My Lord! in a muffled, gargling voice. Jack moaned Lets get out of here. Quick! Wait, the Captain said. The grim set of his face seemed to have loosened the smallest bit. There might have been hope in his eyes. Osmond whirled to the dandy, who took a step back, his thick red mouth working. Was it the Kingsland? Osmond panted. Osmond, you shouldnt tax yourself so Osmond flicked his left wrist upward; the whips steeltipped rawhide tails clattered against the dandys boots. The dandy took another step backward. Dont tell me what I should or shouldnt do, he said. Only answer my questions. Im vexed, Stephen, Im most intolerably, indubitably vexed. Was it the Kingsland? Yes, Stephen said. I regret to say it, but On the Outpost Road? Osmond On the Outpost Road, you dripping penis? Yes, Stephen gulped. Of course, Osmond said, and his thin face was split by a hideous white grin. Where is AllHands Village, if not on the Outpost Road? Can a village fly? Huh? Can a village somehow fly from one road to another, Stephen? Can it? Can it? No, Osmond, of course not. No. And so there are barrels all over the Outpost Road, is that correct? Is it correct for me to assume that there are barrels and an overturned alewagon blocking the Outpost Road while the best ale in the Territories soaks into the ground for the earthworms to carouse on? Is that correct? Yes . . . yes. But Morgan is coming by the Outpost Road! Osmond screamed. Morgan is coming and you know how he drives his horses! If his diligence comes around a bend and upon that mess, his driver may not have time to stop! He could be overturned! He could be killed! DearGod, Stephen said, all as one word. His pallid face went two shades whiter. Osmond nodded slowly. I think, if Morgans diligence were to overturn, we would all do better to pray for his death than for his recovery. Butbut Osmond turned from him and almost ran back to where the Captain of the Outer Guards stood with his son. Behind Osmond, the hapless carter still writhed in the mud, bubbling My Lords. Osmonds eyes touched Jack and then swept over him as if he werent there. Captain Farren, he said. Have you followed the events of the last five minutes? Yes, Osmond. Have you followed them closely? Have you gleaned them? Have you gleaned them most closely? Yes. I think so. Do you think so? What an excellent Captain you are, Captain! We will talk more, I think, about how such an excellent Captain could produce such a frogs testicle of a son. His eyes touched Jacks face briefly, coldly. But theres no time for that now, is there? No. I suggest that you summon a dozen of your brawniest men and that you doubletime themno, tripletime themout to the Outpost Road. Youll be able to follow your nose, to the site of the accident, wont you? Yes, Osmond. Osmond glanced quickly at the sky. Morgan is expected at six of the clockperhaps a little sooner. It is nowtwo. I would say two. Would you say two, Captain? Yes, Osmond. And what would you say, you little turd? Thirteen? Twentythree? Eightyone of the clock? Jack gaped. Osmond grimaced contemptuously, and Jack felt the clear tide of his hate rise again. You hurt me, and if I get the chance! Osmond looked back at the Captain. Until five of the clock, I suggest that you be at pains to save whatever barrels may still be whole. After five, I suggest you simply clear the road as rapidly as you can. Do you understand? Yes, Osmond. Then get out of here. Captain Farren brought a fist to his forehead and bowed. Gaping stupidly, still hating Osmond so fiercely that his brains seemed to pulse, Jack did the same. Osmond had whirled away from them before the salute was even fairly begun. He was striding back toward the carter, popping his whip, making it cough out those Daisy air rifle sounds. The carter heard Osmonds approach and began to scream. Come on, the Captain said, pulling Jacks arm for the last time. You dont want to see this. No, Jack managed. God, no. But as Captain Farren pushed the righthand gate open and they finally left the pavillion, Jack heard itand he heard it in his dreams that night one whistling carbinecrack after another, each followed by a scream from the doomed carter. And Osmond was making a sound. The man was panting, out of breath, and so it was hard to tell exactly what that sound was, without turning around to look at his facesomething Jack did not want to do. He was pretty sure he knew, though. He thought Osmond was laughing. 5 They were in the public area of the pavillion grounds now. The strollers glanced at Captain Farren from the corners of their eyes . . . and gave him a wide berth. The Captain strode swiftly, his face tight and dark with thought. Jack had to trot in order to catch up. We were lucky, the Captain said suddenly. Damned lucky. I think he meant to kill you. Jack gaped at him, his mouth dry and hot. Hes mad, you know. Mad as the man who chased the cake. Jack had no idea what that might mean, but he agreed that Osmond was mad. What Wait, the Captain said. They had come back around to the small tent where the Captain had taken Jack after seeing the sharks tooth. Stand right here and wait for me. Speak to no one. The Captain entered the tent. Jack stood watching and waiting. A juggler passed him, glancing at Jack but never losing his rhythm as he tossed half a dozen balls in a complex and airy pattern. A straggle of dirty children followed him as the children followed the Piper out of Hamelin. A young woman with a dirty baby at one huge breast told him she could teach him something to do with his little man besides let piss out of it, if he had a coin or two. Jack looked uncomfortably away, his face hot. The girl cawed laughter. Oooooo, this pretty young mans SHY! Come over here, pretty! Come Get out, slut, or youll finish the day in the underkitchens. It was the Captain. He had come out of the tent with another man. This second fellow was old and fat, but he shared one characteristic with Farrenhe looked like a real soldier rather than one from Gilbert and Sullivan. He was trying to fasten the front of his uniform over his bulging gut while holding a curly, French hornlike instrument at the same time. The girl with the dirty baby scurried away with never another look at Jack. The Captain took the fat mans horn so he could finish buttoning, and passed another word with him. The fat man nodded, finished with his shirt, took his horn back, and then strode off, blowing it. It was not like the sound Jack had heard on his first flip into the Territories; that had been many horns, and their sound had been somehow showy the sound of heralds. This was like a factory whistle, announcing work to be done. The Captain returned to Jack. Come with me, he said. Where? Outpost Road, Captain Farren said, and then he cast a wondering, halffearful eye down on Jack Sawyer. What my fathers father called Western Road. It goes west through smaller and smaller villages until it reaches the Outposts. Beyond the Outposts it goes into nowhere . . . or hell. If youre going west, youll need God with you, boy. But Ive heard it said He Himself never ventures beyond the Outposts. Come on. Questions crowded Jacks minda million of thembut the Captain set a killer pace and he didnt have the spare breath to ask them. They breasted the rise south of the great pavillion and passed the spot where he had first flipped back out of the Territories. The rustic funfair was now closeJack could hear a barker cajoling patrons to try their luck on Wonder the DevilDonkey; to stay on two minutes was to win a prize, the barker cried. His voice came on the seabreeze with perfect clarity, as did the mouthwatering smell of hot foodroast corn as well as meat this time. Jacks stomach rumbled. Now safely away from Osmond the Great and Terrible, he was ravenous. Before they quite reached the fair, they turned right on a road much wider than the one which led toward the great pavillion. Outpost Road, Jack thought, and then, with a little chill of fear and anticipation in his belly, he corrected himself No . . . Western Road. The way to the Talisman. Then he was hurrying after Captain Farren again. 6 Osmond had been right; they could have followed their noses, if necessary. They were still a mile outside the village with that odd name when the first sour tang of spilled ale came to them on the breeze. Eastwardbearing traffic on the road was heavy. Most of it was wagons drawn by lathered teams of horses (none with two heads, however). The wagons were, Jack supposed, the Diamond Reos and Peterbilts of this world. Some were piled high with bags and bales and sacks, some with raw meat, some with clacking cages of chickens. On the outskirts of AllHands Village, an open wagon filled with women swept by them at an alarming pace. The women were laughing and shrieking. One got to her feet, raised her skirt all the way to her hairy crotch, and did a tipsy bump and grind. She would have tumbled over the side of the wagon and into the ditchprobably breaking her neckif one of her colleagues hadnt grabbed her by the back of the skirt and pulled her rudely back down. Jack blushed again he saw the girls white breast, its nipple in the dirty babys working mouth. Oooooo, this pretty young mans SHY! God! Farren muttered, walking faster than ever. They were all drunk! Drunk on spilled Kingsland! Whores and driver both! Hes apt to wreck them on the road or drive them right off the seacliffsno great loss. Diseased sluts! At least, Jack panted, the road must be fairly clear, if all this traffic can get through. Mustnt it? They were in AllHands Village now. The wide Western Road had been oiled here to lay the dust. Wagons came and went, groups of people crossed the street, and everyone seemed to be talking too loudly. Jack saw two men arguing outside what might have been a restaurant. Abruptly, one of them threw a punch. A moment later, both men were rolling on the ground. Those whores arent the only ones drunk on Kingsland, Jack thought. I think everyone in this towns had a share. All of the big wagons that passed us came from here, Captain Farren said. Some of the smaller ones may be getting through, but Morgans diligence isnt small, boy. Morgan Never mind Morgan now. The smell of the ale grew steadily sharper as they passed through the center of the village and out the other side. Jacks legs ached as he struggled to keep up with the Captain. He guessed they had now come perhaps three miles. How far is that in my world? he thought, and that thought made him think of Speedys magic juice. He groped frantically in his jerkin, convinced it was no longer therebut it was, held securely within whatever Territories undergarment had replaced his Jockey shorts. Once they were on the western side of the village, the wagontraffic decreased, but the pedestrian traffic headed east increased dramatically. Most of the pedestrians were weaving, staggering, laughing. They all reeked of ale. In some cases, their clothes were dripping, as if they had lain fulllength in it and drunk of it like dogs. Jack supposed they had. He saw a laughing man leading a laughing boy of perhaps eight by the hand. The man bore a nightmarish resemblance to the hateful desk clerk at the Alhambra, and Jack understood with perfect clarity that this man was that mans Twinner. Both he and the boy he led by the hand were drunk, and as Jack turned to look after them, the little boy began to vomit. His fatheror so Jack supposed him to bejerked him hard by the arm as the boy attempted to flounder his way into the brushy ditch, where he could be sick in relative privacy. The kid reeled back to his father like a curdog on a short leash, spraying puke on an elderly man who had collapsed by the side of the road and was snoring there. Captain Farrens face grew blacker and blacker. God pound them all, he said. Even those furthest into their cups gave the scarred Captain a wide and prudent berth. While in the guardpost outside the pavillion, he had belted a short, businesslike leather scabbard around his waist. Jack assumed (not unreasonably) that it contained a short, businesslike sword. When any of the sots came too close, the Captain touched the sword and the sot detoured quickly away. Ten minutes lateras Jack was becoming sure he could no longer keep upthey arrived at the site of the accident. The driver had been coming out of the turn on the inside when the wagon had tilted and gone over. As a result, the kegs had sprayed all the way across the road. Many of them were smashed, and the road was a quagmire for twenty feet. One horse lay dead beneath the wagon, only its hindquarters visible. Another lay in the ditch, a shattered chunk of barrelstave protruding from its ear. Jack didnt think that could have happened by accident. He supposed the horse had been badly hurt and someone had put it out of its misery by the closest means at hand. The other horses were nowhere to be seen. Between the horse under the wagon and the one in the ditch lay the carters son, spreadeagled on the road. Half of his face stared up at the bright blue Territories sky with an expression of stupid amazement. Where the other half had been was now only red pulp and splinters of white bone like flecks of plaster. Jack saw that his pockets had been turned out. Wandering around the scene of the accident were perhaps a dozen people. They walked slowly, often bending over to scoop ale twohanded from a hoofprint or to dip a handkerchief or a tornoff piece of singlet into another puddle. Most of them were staggering. Voices were raised in laughter and in quarrelsome shouts. After a good deal of pestering, Jacks mother had allowed him to go with Richard to see a midnight double feature of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead at one of Westwoods dozen or so movie theaters. The shuffling, drunken people here reminded him of the zombies in those two films. Captain Farren drew his sword. It was as short and businesslike as Jack had imagined, the very antithesis of a sword in a romance. It was little more than a long butchers knife, pitted and nicked and scarred, the handle wrapped in old leather that had been sweated dark. The blade itself was dark . . . except for the cutting edge. That looked bright and keen and very sharp. Make away, then! Farren bawled. Make away from the Queens ale, Godpounders! Make away and keep your guts where they belong! Growls of displeasure met this, but they moved away from Captain Farrenall except one hulk of a man with tufts of hair growing at wildly random points from his otherwise bald skull. Jack guessed his weight at close to three hundred pounds, his height at just shy of seven feet. Dyou like the idea of taking on all of us, sojer? this hulk asked, and waved one grimy hand at the knot of villagers who had stepped away from the swamp of ale and the litter of barrels at Farrens order. Sure, Captain Farren said, and grinned at the big man. I like it fine, just as long as youre first, you great drunken clot of shit. Farrens grin widened, and the big man faltered away from its dangerous power. Come for me, if you like. Carving you will be the first good thing thats happened to me all day. Muttering, the drunken giant slouched away. Now, all of you! Farren shouted. Make away! Theres a dozen of my men just setting out from the Queens pavillion! Theyll not be happy with this duty and I dont blame them and I cant be responsible for them! I think youve just got time to get back to the village and hide in your cellars before they arrive there! It would be prudent to do so! Make away! They were already streaming back toward the village of AllHands, the big man who had challenged the Captain in their van. Farren grunted and then turned back to the scene of the accident. He removed his jacket and covered the face of the carters son with it. I wonder which of them robbed the lads pockets as he lay dead or dying in the roadstead, Farren said meditatively. If I knew, Id have them hung on a cross by nightfall. Jack made no answer. The Captain stood looking down at the dead boy for a long time, one hand rubbing at the smooth, ridged flesh of the scar on his face. When he looked up at Jack, it was as if he had just come to. Youve got to leave now, boy. Right away. Before Osmond decides hed like to investigate my idiot son further. How bad is it going to be with you? Jack asked. The Captain smiled a little. If youre gone, Ill have no trouble. I can say that I sent you back to your mother, or that I was overcome with rage and hit you with a chunk of wood and killed you. Osmond would believe either. Hes distracted. They all are. Theyre waiting for her to die. It will be soon. Unless . . . He didnt finish. Go, Farren said. Dont tarry. And when you hear Morgans diligence coming, get off the road and get deep into the woods. Deep. Or hell smell you like a cat smells a rat. He knows instantly if something is out of order. His order. Hes a devil. Will I hear it coming? His diligence? Jack asked timidly. He looked at the road beyond the litter of barrels. It rose steadily upward, toward the edge of a piney forest. It would be dark in there, he thought . . . and Morgan would be coming the other way. Fear and loneliness combined in the sharpest, most disheartening wave of unhappiness he had ever known. Speedy, I cant do this! Dont you know that? Im just a kid! Morgans diligence is drawn by six pairs of horses and a thirteenth to lead, Farren said. At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth. Youll hear it, all right. Plenty of time to burrow down. Just make sure you do. Jack whispered something. What? Farren asked sharply. I said I dont want to go, Jack said, only a little louder. Tears were close and he knew that once they began to fall he was going to lose it, just blow his cool entirely and ask Captain Farren to get him out of it, protect him, something I think its too late for your wants to enter into the question, Captain Farren said. I dont know your tale, boy, and I dont want to. I dont even want to know your name. Jack stood looking at him, shoulders slumped, eyes burning, his lips trembling. Get your shoulders up! Farren shouted at him with sudden fury. Who are you going to save? Where are you going? Not ten feet, looking like that! Youre too young to be a man, but you can at least pretend, cant you? You look like a kicked dog! Stung, Jack straightened his shoulders and blinked his tears back. His eyes fell on the remains of the carters son and he thought At least Im not like that, not yet. Hes right. Being sorry for myself is a luxury I cant afford. It was true. All the same, he could not help hating the scarred Captain a little for reaching inside him and pushing the right buttons so easily. Better, Farren said dryly. Not much, but a little. Thanks, Jack said sarcastically. You cant cry off, boy. Osmonds behind you. Morgan will soon be behind you as well. And perhaps . . . perhaps there are problems wherever you came from, too. But take this. If Parkus sent you to me, hed want me to give you this. So take it, and then go. He was holding out a coin. Jack hesitated, then took it. It was the size of a Kennedy halfdollar, but much heavieras heavy as gold, he guessed, although its color was dull silver. What he was looking at was the face of Laura DeLoessian in profilehe was struck again, briefly but forcibly, by her resemblance to his mother. No, not just resemblancein spite of such physical dissimilarities as the thinner nose and rounder chin, she was his mother. Jack knew it. He turned the coin over and saw an animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. It seemed to be looking at Jack. It made him a little nervous, and he put the coin inside his jerkin, where it joined the bottle of Speedys magic juice. Whats it for? he asked Farren. Youll know when the time comes, the Captain replied. Or perhaps you wont. Either way, Ive done my duty by you. Tell Parkus so, when you see him. Jack felt wild unreality wash over him again. Go, son, Farren said. His voice was lower, but not necessarily more gentle. Do your job . . . or as much of it as you can. In the end, it was that feeling of unrealitythe pervasive sense that he was no more than a figment of someone elses hallucinationthat got him moving. Left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot. He kicked aside a splinter of alesoaked wood. Stepped over the shattered remnants of a wheel. Detoured around the end of the wagon, not impressed by the blood drying there or the buzzing flies. What was blood or buzzing flies in a dream? He reached the end of the muddy, wood and barrellittered stretch of road, and looked back . . . but Captain Farren had turned the other way, perhaps to look for his men, perhaps so he would not have to look at Jack. Either way, Jack reckoned, it came to the same thing. A back was a back. Nothing to look at. He reached inside his jerkin, tentatively touched the coin Farren had given him, and then gripped it firmly. It seemed to make him feel a little better. Holding it as a child might hold a quarter given him to buy a treat at the candy store, Jack went on. 7 It might have been as little as two hours later when Jack heard the sound Captain Farren had described as thunder rolling along the earthor it might have been as long as four. Once the sun passed below the western rim of the forest (and it did that not long after Jack had entered it), it became difficult to judge the time. On a number of occasions vehicles came out of the west, presumably bound for the Queens pavillion. Hearing each one come (and vehicles could be heard a long way away here; the clarity with which sound carried made Jack think of what Speedy had said about one man pulling a radish out of the ground and another smelling it half a mile away) made him think of Morgan, and each time he hurried first down into the ditch and then up the other side, and so into the woods. He didnt like being in these dark woodsnot even a little way in, where he could still peer around the trunk of a tree and see the road; it was no restcure for the nerves, but he liked the idea of Uncle Morgan (for so he still believed Osmonds superior to be, in spite of what Captain Farren had said) catching him out on the road even less. So each time he heard a wagon or carriage approaching he got out of sight, and each time the vehicle passed he went back to the road. Once, while he was crossing the damp and weedy righthand ditch, something ranor slitheredover his foot, and Jack cried out. The traffic was a pain in the tail, and it wasnt exactly helping him to make better time, but there was also something comforting about the irregular passage of wagonsthey served notice that he wasnt alone, at least. He wanted to get the hell out of the Territories altogether. Speedys magic juice was the worst medicine hed ever had in his life, but he would gladly have taken a bellychoking swig of it if someoneSpeedy himself, for examplehad just happened to appear in front of him and assure him that, when he opened his eyes again, the first thing he would see would be a set of McDonalds golden archeswhat his mother called The Great Tits of America. A sense of oppressive danger was growing in hima feeling that the forest was indeed dangerous, that there were things in it aware of his passage, that perhaps the forest itself was aware of his passage. The trees had gotten closer to the road, hadnt they? Yes. Before, they had stopped at the ditches. Now they infested those as well. Before, the forest had seemed composed solely of pines and spruces. Now other sorts of trees had crept in, some with black boles that twisted together like gnarls of rotted strings, some that looked like weird hybrids of firs and fernsthese latter had nastylooking gray roots that gripped at the ground like pasty fingers. Our boy? these nasty things seemed to whisper inside of Jacks head. OUR boy? All in your mind, JackO. Youre just freaking out a little. Thing was, he didnt really believe that. The trees were changing. That sense of thick oppression in the airthat sense of being watchedwas all too real. And he had begun to think that his minds obsessive return to monstrous thoughts was almost something he was picking up from the forest . . . as if the trees themselves were sending to him on some horrible shortwave. But Speedys bottle of magic juice was only halffull. Somehow that had to last him all the way across the United States. It wouldnt last until he was out of New England if he sipped a little every time he got the willies. His mind also kept returning to the amazing distance he had travelled in his world when he had flipped back from the Territories. A hundred and fifty feet over here had equalled half a mile over there. At that rateunless the ratio of distance travelled were somehow variable, and Jack recognized that it might behe could walk ten miles over here and be damn near out of New Hampshire over there. It was like wearing sevenleague boots. Still, the trees . . . those gray, pasty roots . . . When it starts to get really darkwhen the sky goes from blue to purpleIm flipping back. Thats it; thats all she wrote. Im not walking through these woods after dark. And if I run out of magic juice in Indiana or something, ole Speedy can just send me another bottle by UPS, or something. Still thinking these thoughtsand thinking how much better it made him feel to have a plan (even if the plan only encompassed the next two hours or so)Jack suddenly realized he could hear another vehicle and a great many horses. Cocking his head, he stopped in the middle of the road.


His eyes widened, and two pictures suddenly unspooled behind his eyes with shutterlike speed the big car the two men had been inthe car that had not been a Mercedesand then the WILD CHILD van, speeding down the street and away from Uncle Tommys corpse, blood dripping from the broken plastic fangs of its grille. He saw the hands on the vans steering wheel . . . but they werent hands. They were weird, articulated hooves. At the full gallop, that damned hearse sounds like thunder rolling along the earth. Now, hearing itthe sound still distant but perfectly clear in the pure airJack wondered how he could have even thought those other approaching wagons might be Morgans diligence. He would certainly never make such a mistake again. The sound he heard now was perfectly ominious, thick with a potential for evilthe sound of a hearse, yes, a hearse driven by a devil. He stood frozen in the road, almost hypnotized, as a rabbit is hypnotized by headlights. The sound grew steadily louderthe thunder of the wheels and hooves, the creak of leather rigging. Now he could hear the drivers voice Heeyah! Heeeyahhh! HEEEEEYAHHHH! He stood in the road, stood there, his head drumming with horror. Cant move, oh dear God oh dear Christ I cant move Mom Mom Muhhhhhmeeeee! He stood in the road and the eye of his imagination saw a huge black thing like a stagecoach tearing up the road, pulled by black animals that looked more like pumas than horses; he saw black curtains flapping in and out of the coachs windows; he saw the driver standing on the teeterboard, his hair blown back, his eyes as wild and crazed as those of a psycho with a switchblade. He saw it coming toward him, never slowing. He saw it run him down. That broke the paralysis. He ran to the right, skidding down the side of the road, catching his foot under one of those gnarled roots, falling, rolling. His back, relatively quiet for the last couple of hours, flared with fresh pain, and Jack drew his lips back with a grimace. He got to his feet and scurried into the woods, hunched over. He slipped first behind one of the black trees, but the touch of the gnarly trunkit was a bit like the banyans he had seen while on vacation on Hawaii year before lastwas oily and unpleasant. Jack moved to the left and behind the trunk of a pine. The thunder of the coach and its outriders grew steadily louder. At every second Jack expected the company to flash by toward AllHands Village. Jacks fingers squeezed and relaxed on the pines gummy back. He bit at his lips. Directly ahead was a narrow but perfectly clear sightline back to the road, a tunnel with sides of leaf and fern and pine needles. And just when Jack had begun to think that Morgans party would never arrive, a dozen or more mounted soldiers passed heading east, riding at a gallop. The one in the lead carried a banner, but Jack could not make out its device . . . nor was he sure he wanted to. Then the diligence flashed across Jacks narrow sightline. The moment of its passage was briefno more than a second, perhaps less than thatbut Jacks recall of it was total. The diligence was a gigantic vehicle, surely a dozen feet high. The trunks and bundles lashed with stout cord to the top added another three feet. Each horse in the team which pulled it wore a black plume on its headthese plumes were blown back almost flat in a speedgenerated wind. Jack thought later that Morgan must need a new team for every run, because these looked close to the end of their endurance. Foam and blood sprayed back from their working mouths in curds; their eyes rolled crazily, showing arcs of white. As in his imaginingor his visionblack crepe curtains flew and fluttered through glassless windows. Suddenly a white face appeared in one of those black oblongs, a white face framed in strange, twisted carvingwork. The sudden appearance of that face was as shocking as the face of a ghost in the ruined window of a haunted house. It was not the face of Morgan Sloat . . . but it was. And the owner of that face knew that Jackor some other danger, just as hated and just as personalwas out there. Jack saw this in the widening of the eyes and the sudden vicious downtwist of the mouth. Captain Farren had said Hell smell you like a rat, and now Jack thought dismally Ive been smelled, all right. He knows Im here, and what happens now? Hell stop the whole bunch of them, I bet, and send the soldiers into the woods after me. Another band of soldiersthese protecting Morgans diligence from the rearswept by. Jack waited, his hands frozen to the bark of the pine, sure that Morgan would call a halt. But no halt came; soon the heavy thunder of the diligence and its outriders began to fade. His eyes. Thats whats the same. Those dark eyes in that white face. And Our boy? YESSSS! Something slithered over his foot . . . and up his ankle. Jack screamed and floundered backward, thinking it must be a snake. But when he looked down he saw that one of those gray roots had slipped up his foot . . . and now it ringed his calf. Thats impossible, he thought stupidly. Roots dont move He pulled back sharply, yanking his leg out of the rough gray manacle the root had formed. There was thin pain in his calf, like the pain of a ropeburn. He raised his eyes and felt sick fear slip into his heart. He thought he knew now why Morgan had sensed him and gone on anyway; Morgan knew that walking in this forest was like walking into a jungle stream infested with piranhas. Why hadnt Captain Farren warned him? All Jack could think was that the scarred Captain must not have known; must never have been this far west. The grayish roots of those firfern hybrids were all moving nowrising, falling, scuttling along the mulchy ground toward him. Ents and Entwives, Jack thought crazily. BAD Ents and Entwives. One particularly thick root, its last six inches dark with earth and damp, rose and wavered in front of him like a cobra piped up from a fakirs basket. OUR boy! YESS! It darted toward him and Jack backed away from it, aware that the roots had now formed a living screen between him and the safety of the road. He backed into a tree . . . and then lurched away from it, screaming, as its bark began to ripple and twitch against his backit was like feeling a muscle which has begun to spasm wildly. Jack looked around and saw one of those black trees with the gnarly trunks. Now the trunk was moving, writhing. Those twisted knots of bark formed something like a dreadful runnelled face, one eye widely, blackly open, the other drawn down in a hideous wink. The tree split open lower down with a grinding, rending sound, and whitishyellow sap began to drool out. OURS! Oh, yesssss! Roots like fingers slipped between Jacks upper arm and ribcage, as if to tickle. He tore away, holding on to the last of his rationality with a huge act of will, groping in his jerkin for Speedys bottle. He was awarefaintlyof a series of gigantic ripping sounds. He supposed the trees were tearing themselves right out of the ground. Tolkien had never been like this. He got the bottle by the neck and pulled it out. He scrabbled at the cap, and then one of those gray roots slid easily around his neck. A moment later it pulled as bitterly tight as a hangmans noose. Jacks breath stopped. The bottle tumbled from his fingers as he grappled with the thing that was choking him. He managed to work his fingers under the root. It was not cold and stiff but warm and limber and fleshlike. He struggled with it, aware of the choked gargling sound coming from him and the slick of spittle on his chin. With a final convulsive effort he tore the root free. It tried to circle his wrist then, and Jack whipped his arm away from it with a cry. He looked down and saw the bottle twisting and bumping away, one of those gray roots coiled about its neck. Jack leaped for it. Roots grabbed his legs, circled them. He fell heavily to the earth, stretching, reaching, the tips of his fingers digging at the thick black forest soil for an extra inch He touched the bottles slick green side . . . and seized it. He pulled as hard as he could, dimly aware that the roots were all over his legs now, crisscrossing like bonds, holding him firmly. He spun the cap off the bottle. Another root floated down, cobweblight, and tried to snatch the bottle away from him. Jack pushed it away and raised the bottle to his lips. That smell of sickish fruit suddenly seemed everywhere, a living membrane. Speedy, please let it work! As more roots slid over his back and around his waist, turning him helplessly this way and that, Jack drank, cheap wine splattering both of his cheeks. He swallowed, groaning, praying, and it was no good, it wasnt working, his eyes were still closed but he could feel the roots entangling his arms and legs, could feel 8 the water soaking into his jeans and his shirt, could smell Water? mud and damp, could hear Jeans? Shirt? the steady croak of frogs and Jack opened his eyes and saw the orange light of the setting sun reflected from a wide river. Unbroken forest grew on the east side of this river; on the western side, the side that he was on, a long field, now partially obscured with evening groundmist, rolled down to the waters edge. The ground here was wet and squelchy. Jack was lying at the edge of the water, in the boggiest area of all. Thick weeds still grew herethe hard frosts that would kill them were still a month or more awayand Jack had gotten entangled in them, the way a man awakening from a nightmare may entangle himself in the bedclothes. He scrambled and stumbled to his feet, wet and slimed with the fragrant mud, the straps of his pack pulling under his arms. He pushed the weedy fragments from his arms and face with horror. He started away from the water, then looked back and saw Speedys bottle lying in the mud, the cap beside it. Some of the magic juice had either run out or been spilled in his struggle with the malignant Territories trees. Now the bottle was no more than a third full. He stood there a moment, his caked sneakers planted in the oozy muck, looking out at the river. This was his world; this was the good old United States of America. He didnt see the golden arches he had hoped for, or a skyscraper, or an earth satellite blinking overhead in the darkening sky, but he knew where he was as well as he knew his own name. The question was, had he ever been in that other world at all? He looked around at the unfamiliar river, the likewise unfamiliar countryside, and listened to the distant mellow mooing of cows. He thought Youre somewhere different. This sure isnt Arcadia Beach anymore, JackO. No, it wasnt Arcadia Beach, but he didnt know the area surrounding Arcadia Beach well enough to say for sure that he was more than four or five miles awayjust enough inland, say, to no longer be able to smell the Atlantic. He had come back as if waking from a nightmarewas it not possible that was all it had been, the whole thing, from the carter with his load of flycrawling meat to the living trees? A sort of waking nightmare in which sleepwalking had played a part? It made sense. His mother was dying, and he now thought he had known that for quite a whilethe signs had been there, and his subconscious had drawn the correct conclusion even while his conscious mind denied it. That would have contributed the correct atmosphere for an act of selfhypnosis, and that crazy wino Speedy Parker had gotten him in gear. Sure. It all hung together. Uncle Morgan would have loved it. Jack shivered and swallowed hard. The swallow hurt. Not the way a sore throat hurts, but the way an abused muscle hurts. He raised his left hand, the one not holding the bottle, and rubbed his palm gently against his throat. For a moment he looked absurdly like a woman checking for dewlaps or wrinkles. He found a welted abrasion just above his adams apple. It hadnt bled much, but it was almost too painful to touch. The root that had closed about his throat had done that. True, Jack whispered, looking out at the orange water, listening to the twank of the bullfrogs and the mooing, distant cows. All true. 9 Jack began walking up the slope of the field, setting the riverand the eastat his back. After he had gone half a mile, the steady rub and shift of the pack against his throbbing back (the strokes Osmond had laid on were still there, too, the shifting pack reminded him) triggered a memory. He had refused Speedys enormous sandwich, but hadnt Speedy slipped the remains into his pack anyway, while Jack was examining the guitarpick? His stomach pounced on the idea. Jack unshipped the pack then and there, standing in a curdle of groundmist beneath the evening star. He unbuckled one of the flaps, and there was the sandwich, not just a piece or a half, but the whole thing, wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. Jacks eyes filled with a warmth of tears and he wished that Speedy were here so he could hug him. Ten minutes ago you were calling him a crazy old wino. His face flamed at that, but his shame didnt stop him from gobbling the sandwich in half a dozen big bites. He rebuckled his pack and reshouldered it. He went on, feeling betterwith that whistling hole in his gut stopped up for the time being, Jack felt himself again. Not long after, lights twinkled up out of the growing darkness. A farmhouse. A dog began to barkthe heavy bark of a really big fellowand Jack froze for a moment. Inside, he thought. Or chained up. I hope. He bore to the right, and after a while the dog stopped barking. Keeping the lights of the farmhouse as a guide, Jack soon came out on a narrow blacktop road. He stood looking from right to left, having no idea which way to go. Well, folks, heres Jack Sawyer, halfway between hoot and holler, wet through to the skin and sneakers packed with mud. Way to go, Jack! The loneliness and homesickness rose in him again. Jack fought them off. He put a drop of spit on his left index finger, then spanked the drop sharply. The larger of the two halves flew off to the rightor so it seemed to Jackand so he turned that way and began to walk. Forty minutes later, drooping with weariness (and hungry again, which was somehow worse), he saw a gravelpit with a shed of some sort standing beyond a chainedoff access road. Jack ducked under the chain and went to the shed. The door was padlocked shut, but he saw that the earth had eroded under one side of the small outbuilding. It was the work of a minute to remove his pack, wriggle under the sheds side, and then pull the pack in after him. The lock on the door actually made him feel safer. He looked around and saw that he was in with some very old toolsthis place hadnt been used in a long time, apparently, and that suited Jack just fine. He stripped to the skin, not liking the feel of his clammy, muddy clothes. He felt the coin Captain Farren had given him in one of his pants pockets, resting there like a giant amid his little bit of more ordinary change. Jack took it out and saw that Farrens coin, with the Queens head on one side and the winged lion on the otherhad become a 1921 silver dollar. He looked fixedly at the profile of Lady Liberty on the cartwheel for some time, and then slipped it back into the pocket of his jeans. He rooted out fresh clothes, thinking he would put the dirty ones in his pack in the morningthey would be dry thenand perhaps clean them along the way, maybe in a Laundromat, maybe just in a handy stream. While searching for socks, his hand encountered something slim and hard. Jack pulled it out and saw it was his toothbrush. At once, images of home and safety and rationalityall the things a toothbrush could representrose up and overwhelmed him. There was no way that he could beat these emotions down or turn them aside this time. A toothbrush was a thing meant to be seen in a welllighted bathroom, a thing to be used with cotton pajamas on the body and warm slippers on the feet. It was nothing to come upon in the bottom of your knapsack in a cold, dark toolshed on the edge of a gravelpit in a deserted rural town whose name you did not even know. Loneliness raged through him; his realization of his outcast status was now complete. Jack began to cry. He did not weep hysterically or shriek as people do when they mask rage with tears; he cried in the steady sobs of one who has discovered just how alone he is, and is apt to remain for a long time yet. He cried because all safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. Loneliness was here, a reality; but in this situation, insanity was also too much of a possibility. Jack fell asleep before the sobs had entirely run their course. He slept curled around his pack, naked except for clean underpants and socks. The tears had cut clean courses down his dirty cheeks, and he held his toothbrush loosely in one hand. 8 The Oatley Tunnel 1 Six days later, Jack had climbed nearly all the way out of his despair. By the end of his first days on the road, he seemed to himself to have grown from childhood right through adolescence into adulthoodinto competence. It was true that he had not returned to the Territories since he had awakened on the western bank of the river, but he could rationalize that, and the slower travelling it involved, by telling himself that he was saving Speedys juice for when he really needed it. And anyhow, hadnt Speedy told him to travel mainly on the roads in this world? Just following orders, pal. When the sun was up and the cars whirled by him thirty, forty miles west and his stomach was full, the Territories seemed unbelievably distant and dreamlike they were like a movie he was beginning to forget, a temporary fantasy. Sometimes, when Jack leaned back into the passenger seat of some schoolteachers car and answered the usual questions about the Story, he actually did forget. The Territories left him, and he was againor nearly sothe boy he had been at the start of the summer. Especially on the big state highways, when a ride dropped him off near the exit ramp, he usually saw the next car pulling off to the side ten or fifteen minutes after he stuck his thumb into the air. Now he was somewhere near Batavia, way over in the western part of New York State, walking backward down the breakdown lane of I90, his thumb out again, working his way toward Buffaloafter Buffalo, he would start to swing south. It was a matter, Jack thought, of working out the best way to accomplish something and then just doing it. Rand McNally and the Story had gotten him this far; all he needed was enough luck to find a driver going all the way to Chicago or Denver (or Los Angeles, if were going to daydream about luck, Jackybaby), and he could be on his way home again before the middle of October. He was suntanned, he had fifteen dollars in his pocket from his last jobdishwasher at the Golden Spoon Diner in Auburnand his muscles felt stretched and toughened. Though sometimes he wanted to cry, he had not given in to his tears since that first miserable night. He was in control, that was the difference. Now that he knew how to proceed, had worked it out so painstakingly, he was on top of what was happening to him; he thought he could see the end of his journey already, though it was so far ahead of him. If he travelled mainly in this world, as Speedy had told him, he could move as quickly as he had to and get back to New Hampshire with the Talisman in plenty of time. It was going to work, and he was going to have many fewer problems than he had expected. That, at least, was what Jack Sawyer was imagining as a dusty blue Ford Fairlane swerved off to the shoulder of the road and waited for him to run up to it, squinting into the lowering sun. Thirty or forty miles, he thought to himself. He pictured the page from Rand McNally he had studied that morning, and decided Oatley. It sounded dull, small, and safehe was on his way, and nothing could hurt him now. 2 Jack bent down and looked in the window before opening the Fairlanes door. Fat sample books and printed fliers lay messily over the back seat; two oversize briefcases occupied the passenger seat. The slightly paunchy blackhaired man who now seemed almost to be mimicking Jacks posture, bending over the wheel and peering through the open window at the boy, was a salesman. The jacket to his blue suit hung from the hook behind him; his tie was at halfmast, his sleeves were rolled. A salesman in his midthirties, tooling comfortably through his territory. He would love to talk, like all salesmen. The man smiled at him and picked up first one of the outsize briefcases, hoisting it over the top of the seat and onto the litter of papers behind, then the other. Lets create a little room, he said. Jack knew that the first thing the man would ask him was why he was not at school. He opened the door, said, Hey, thanks, and climbed in. Going far? the salesman asked, checking the rearview mirror as he slid the gearlever down into drive and swung back out onto the road. Oatley, Jack said. I think its about thirty miles. You just flunked geography, the salesman said. Oatleys more like fortyfive miles. He turned his head to look at Jack, and surprised the boy by winking at him. No offense, he said, but I hate to see young kids hitching. Thats why I always pick em up when I see em. At least I know theyre safe with me. No touchiefeelie, know what I mean? Too many crazies out there, kid. You read the papers? I mean, Im talking carnivores. You could turn yourself into an endangered species. I guess youre right, Jack said. But I try to be pretty careful. You live somewhere back there, I take it? The man was still looking at him, snatching little birdlike peeks ahead down the road, and Jack frantically searched his memory for the name of a town back down the road. Palmyra. Im from Palmyra. The salesman nodded, said, Nice enough old place, and turned back to the highway. Jack relaxed back into the comfortable plush of the seat. Then the man finally said, I guess youre not actually playing hooky, are you? and it was time yet again for the Story. He had told it so often, varying the names of the towns involved as he worked westward, that it had a slick, monologuelike feel in his mouth. No, sir. Its just that I have to go over to Oatley to live with my Aunt Helen for a little while. Helen Vaughan? Thats my moms sister. Shes a schoolteacher. My dad died last winter, see, and things have been pretty toughthen two weeks ago my moms cough got a lot worse and she could hardly get up the stairs and the doctor said she had to stay in bed for as long as she could and she asked her sister if I could come stay with her for a while. Her being a teacher and all, I guess Ill be in Oatley school for sure. Aunt Helen wouldnt let any kid play hooky, you bet. You mean your mother told you to hitchhike all the way from Palmyra to Oatley? the man asked. Oh no, not at allshed never do that. No, she gave me bus money but I decided to save it. There wont be much money from home for a long time, I guess, and Aunt Helen doesnt really have any money. My mom would hate it if she knew I was thumbing it. But it seemed like a waste of money to me. I mean, five bucks is five bucks, and why give it to a bus driver? The man looked sideways at him. How long do you think youll be in Oatley? Hard to say. I sure hope my mom gets well pretty soon. Well, dont hitch back, okay? We dont have a car anymore, Jack said, adding to the Story. He was beginning to enjoy himself. Can you believe this? They came out in the middle of the night and repossessed it. Dirty cowards. They knew everybody would be asleep. They just came out in the middle of the night and stole the car right out of the garage. Mister, I would have fought for that carand not so I could get a ride to my aunts house. When my mom goes to the doctor, she has to walk all the way down the hill and then go about another five blocks just to get to the bus stop. They shouldnt be able to do that, should they? Just come in and steal your own car? As soon as we could, we were going to start making the payments again. I mean, wouldnt you call that stealing? If it happened to me, I suppose I would, the man said. Well, I hope your mother gets better in a hurry. You and me both, Jack said with perfect honesty. And that held them until the signs for the Oatley exit began to appear. The salesman pulled back into the breakdown lane just after the exit ramp, smiled again at Jack and said, Good luck, kid. Jack nodded and opened the door. I hope you dont have to spend much time in Oatley, anyhow. Jack looked at him questioningly. Well, you know the place, dont you? A little. Not really. Ah, its a real pit. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Gorillaville. You eat the beer, then you drink the glass. Like that. Thanks for the warning, Jack said and got out of the car. The salesman waved and dropped the Fairlane into drive. In moments it was only a dark shape speeding toward the low orange sun. 3 For a mile or so the road took him through flat dull countrysidefar off, Jack saw small twostory frame houses perched on the edges of fields. The fields were brown and bare, and the houses were not farmhouses. Widely separated, the houses overlooking the desolate fields existed in a gray moveless quiet broken only by the whine of traffic moving along I90. No cows lowed, no horses whinniedthere were no animals, and no farm equipment. Outside one of the little houses squatted half a dozen junked and rusting cars. These were the houses of men who disliked their own species so thoroughly that even Oatley was too crowded for them. The empty fields gave them the moats they needed around their peeling frame castles. At length he came to a crossroads. It looked like a crossroads in a cartoon, two narrow empty roads bisecting each other in an absolute nowhere, then stretching on toward another kind of nowhere. Jack had begun to feel insecure about his sense of direction, and he adjusted the pack on his back and moved up toward the tall rusted iron pipe supporting the black rectangles, themselves rusting, of the street names. Should he have turned left instead of right off the exit ramp? The sign pointing down the road running parallel to the highway read DOGTOWN ROAD. Dogtown? Jack looked down this road and saw only endless flatness, fields full of weeds and the black streak of asphalt rolling on. His own particular streak of asphalt was called MILL ROAD, according to the sign. About a mile ahead it slipped into a tunnel nearly overgrown by leaning trees and an oddly pubic mat of ivy. A white sign hung in the thickness of ivy, seemingly supported by it. The words were too small to be read. Jack put his right hand in his pocket and clutched the coin Captain Farren had given him. His stomach talked to him. He was going to need dinner soon, so he had to move off this spot and find a town where he could earn his meals. Mill Road it wasat least he could go far enough to see what was on the other side of the tunnel. Jack pushed himself toward it, and the dark opening in the bank of trees enlarged with every step. Cool and damp and smelling of brick dust and overturned earth, the tunnel seemed to take the boy in and then tighten down around him. For a moment Jack feared that he was being led undergroundno circle of light ahead showed the tunnels endbut then realized that the asphalt floor was level. TURN ON LIGHTS, the sign outside the tunnel had read. Jack bumped into a brick wall and felt grainy powder crumble onto his hands. Lights, he said to himself, wishing he had one to turn on. The tunnel must, he realized, bend somewhere along its length. He had cautiously, slowly, carefully, walked straight into the wall, like a blind man with his hands extended. Jack groped his way along the wall. When the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons did something like this, he usually wound up splashed across the front of a truck. Something rattled busily along the floor of the tunnel, and Jack froze. A rat, he thought. Maybe a rabbit out taking a shortcut between fields. But it had sounded bigger than that. He heard it again, farther away in the dark, and took another blind step forward. Ahead of him, just once, he heard an intake of breath. And stopped, wondering Was that an animal? Jack held his fingertips against the damp brick wall, waiting for the exhalation. It had not sounded like an animalcertainly no rat or rabbit inhaled so deeply. He crept a few inches forward, almost unwilling to admit to himself that whatever was up there had frightened him. Jack froze again, hearing a quiet little sound like a raspy chuckle come out of the blackness before him. In the next second a familiar but unidentifiable smell, coarse, strong, and musky, drifted toward him out of the tunnel. Jack looked back over his shoulder. The entrance was now only halfvisible, halfobscured by the curve of the wall, a long way off and looking about the size of a rabbithole. Whats in here? he called out. Hey! Anything in here with me? Anybody? He thought he heard something whisper deeper into the tunnel. He was not in the Territories, he reminded himselfat the worst he might have startled some imbecilic dog who had come into the cool dark for a nap. In that case, hed be saving its life by waking it up before a car came along. Hey, dog! he yelled. Dog! And was rewarded instantly by the sound of paws trotting through the tunnel. But were they . . . going out or coming in? He could not tell, listening to the soft pad pad pad, whether the animal was leaving or approaching. Then it occurred to him that maybe the noise was coming toward him from behind, and he twisted his neck and looked back and saw that he had moved far enough along so that he could not see that entrance, either. Where are you, dog? he said. Something scratched the ground only a foot or two behind him, and Jack jumped forward and struck his shoulder, hard, against the curve of the wall. He sensed a shapedoglike, perhapsin the darkness. Jack stepped forwardand was stopped short by a sense of dislocation so great that he imagined himself back in the Territories. The tunnel was filled with that musky, acrid zooodor, and whatever was coming toward him was not a dog. A gust of cold air smelling of grease and alcohol pushed toward him. He sensed that shape getting nearer. Only for an instant he had a glimpse of a face hanging in the dark, glowing as if with its own sick and fading interior light, a long, bitter face that should have been almost youthful but was not. Sweat, grease, a stink of alcohol on the breath that came from it. Jack flattened himself against the wall, raising his fists, even as the face faded back into the dark. In the midst of his terror he thought he heard footfalls softly, quickly covering the ground toward the tunnels entrance, and turned his face from the square foot of darkness which had spoken to him to look back. Darkness, silence. The tunnel was empty now. Jack squeezed his hands under his armpits and gently fell back against the brick, taking the blow on his knapsack. A moment later he began to edge forward again. As soon as Jack was out of the tunnel, he turned around to face it. No sounds emerged, no weird creatures slunk toward him. He took three steps forward, peered in. And then his heart nearly stopped, because coming toward him were two huge orange eyes. They halved the distance between themselves and Jack in seconds. He could not movehis feet were past the ankles in asphalt. Finally he managed to extend his hands, palmout, in the instinctive gesture of wardingoff. The eyes continued toward him, and a horn blasted. Seconds before the car burst out of the tunnel, revealing a redfaced man waving a fist, Jack threw himself out of the way. SHIIITHEEAAA . . . came from the contorted mouth. Still dazed, Jack turned and watched the car speed downhill toward a village that had to be Oatley.


4 Situated in a long depression in the land, Oatley spread itself out meagerly from two principal streets. One, the continuation of Mill Road, dipped past an immense and shabby building set in the midst of a vast parking lota factory, Jack thoughtto become a strip of usedcar lots (sagging pennants), fastfood franchises (The Great Tits of America), a bowling alley with a huge neon sign (BOWLARAMA!), grocery stores, gas stations. Past all this, Mill Road became Oatleys five or six blocks of downtown, a strip of old twostory buildings before which cars were parked nosein. The other street was obviously the location of Oatleys most important houseslarge frame buildings with porches and long slanting lawns. Where these streets intersected stood a traffic light winking its red eye in the late afternoon. Another light perhaps eight blocks down changed to green before a high dingy manywindowed building that looked like a mental hospital, and so was probably the high school. Fanning out from the two streets was a jumble of little houses interspersed with anonymous buildings fenced in behind tall wire mesh. Many of the windows in the factory were broken, and some of the windows in the strip of downtown had been boarded over. Heaps of garbage and fluttering papers littered the fencedin concrete yards. Even the important houses seemed neglected, with their sagging porches and bleachedout paint jobs. These people would own the usedcar lots filled with unsaleable automobiles. For a moment Jack considered turning his back on Oatley and making the hike to Dogtown, wherever that was. But that would mean walking through the Mill Road tunnel again. From down in the middle of the shopping district a car horn blatted, and the sound unfurled toward Jack full of an inexpressible loneliness and nostalgia. He could not relax until he was all the way to the gates of the factory, the Mill Road tunnel far up behind him. Nearly a third of the windows along the dirtybrick facade had been broken in, and many of the others showed blank brown squares of cardboard. Even out on the road, Jack could smell machine oil, grease, smouldering fanbelts, and clashing gears. He put his hands in his pockets and walked downhill as quickly as he could. 5 Seen close up, the town was even more depressed than it had looked from the hill. The salesmen at the car lots leaned against the windows in their offices, too bored to come outside. Their pennants hung tattered and joyless, the onceoptimistic signs propped along the cracked sidewalk fronting the rows of carsONE OWNER! FANTASTIC BUY! CAR OF THE WEEK!had yellowed. The ink had feathered and run on some of the signs, as if they had been left out in the rain. Very few people moved along the streets. As Jack went toward the center of town, he saw an old man with sunken cheeks and gray skin trying to wrestle an empty shopping cart up onto a curb. When he approached, the old man screeched something hostile and frightened and bared gums as black as a badgers. He thought Jack was going to steal his cart! Sorry, Jack said, his heart pounding again. The old man was trying to hug the whole cumbersome body of the cart, protecting it, all the while showing those blackened gums to his enemy. Sorry, Jack repeated. I was just going to . . . Fusshhingfeef! FusshhingFEEEFF! the old man screeched, and tears crawled into the wrinkles on his cheeks. Jack hurried off. Twenty years before, during the sixties, Oatley must have prospered. The relative brightness of the strip of Mill Road leading out of town was the product of that era when stocks went gogo and gas was still cheap and nobody had heard the term discretionary income because they had plenty of it. People had sunk their money into franchise operations and little shops and for a time had, if not actually flourished, held their heads above the waves. This short series of blocks still had that superficial hopefulnessbut only a few bored teenagers sat in the franchise restaurants, nursing medium Cokes, and in the plateglass windows of too many of the little shops placards as faded as those in the usedcar lots announced EVERYTHING MUST GO! CLOSING SALE. Jack saw no signs advertising for help, and kept on walking. Downtown Oatley showed the reality beneath the happy clowns colors left behind by the sixties. As Jack trudged along these blocks of bakedlooking brick buildings, his pack grew heavier, his feet more tender. He would have walked to Dogtown after all, if it were not for his feet and the necessity of going through the Mill Road tunnel again. Of course there was no snarling manwolf lurking in the dark therehed worked that out by now. No one could have spoken to him in the tunnel. The Territories had shaken him. First the sight of the Queen, then that dead boy beneath the cart with half his face gone. Then Morgan; the trees. But that was there, where such things could bewere, perhaps, even normal. Here, normality did not admit such gaudiness. He was before a long, dirty window above which the flaking slogan FURNITURE DEPOSITORY was barely legible on the brickwork. He put his hands to his eyes and stared in. A couch and a chair, each covered by a white sheet, sat fifteen feet apart on a wide wooden floor. Jack moved farther down the block, wondering if he was going to have to beg for food. Four men sat in a car before a boardedup shop a little way down the block. It took Jack a moment to see that the car, an ancient black DeSoto that looked as though Broderick Crawford should come bustling out of it, had no tires. Taped to the windshield was a yellow fivebyeight card which read FAIR WEATHER CLUB. The men inside, two in front and two in back, were playing cards. Jack stepped up to the front passenger window. Excuse me, he said, and the cardplayer closest to him rolled a fishy gray eye toward him. Do you know where Get lost, the man said. His voice sounded squashed and phlegmy, unfamiliar with speech. The face halfturned to Jack was deeply pitted with acne scars and oddly flattened out, as if someone had stepped on it when the man was an infant. I just wondered if you knew somewhere I could get a couple days work. Try Texas, said the man in the drivers seat, and the pair in the back seat cracked up, spitting beer out over their hands of cards. I told you, kid, get lost, said the flatfaced grayeyed man closest to Jack. Or Ill personally pound the shit out of you. It was just the truth, Jack understoodif he stayed there a moment longer, this mans rage would boil over and he would get out of the car and beat him senseless. Then the man would get back in the car and open another beer. Cans of Rolling Rock covered the floor, the opened ones tipped every which way, the fresh ones linked by white plastic nooses. Jack stepped backward, and the fisheye rolled away from him. Guess Ill try Texas after all, he said. He listened for the sound of the DeSotos door creaking open as he walked away, but all he heard being opened was another Rolling Rock. Crack! Hiss! He kept moving. He got to the end of the block and found himself looking across the towns other main street at a dying lawn filled with yellow weeds from which peeked fiberglass statues of Disneylike fawns. A shapeless old woman gripping a flyswatter stared at him from a porch swing. Jack turned away from her suspicious gaze and saw before him the last of the lifeless brick buildings on Mill Road. Three concrete steps led up to a proppedopen screen door. A long, dark window contained a glowing BUDWEISER sign and, a foot to the right of that, the painted legend UPDIKES OATLEY TAP. And several inches beneath that, handwritten on a yellow fivebyeight card like the one on the DeSoto, were the miraculous words HELP WANTED. Jack pulled the knapsack off his back, bunched it under one arm, and went up the steps. For no more than an instant, moving from the tired sunlight into the darkness of the bar, he was reminded of stepping past the thick fringe of ivy into the Mill Road tunnel. 9 Jack in the Pitcher Plant 1 Not quite sixty hours later a Jack Sawyer who was in a very different frame of mind from that of the Jack Sawyer who had ventured into the Oatley tunnel on Wednesday was in the chilly storeroom of the Oatley Tap, hiding his pack behind the kegs of Busch which sat in the rooms far corner like aluminum bowling pins in a giants alley. In less than two hours, when the Tap finally shut down for the night, Jack meant to run away. That he should even think of it in such a fashionnot leaving, not moving on, but running awayshowed how desperate he now believed his situation to be. I was six, six, John B. Sawyer was six, Jacky was six. Six. This thought, apparently nonsensical, had fallen into his mind this evening and had begun to repeat there. He supposed it went a long way toward showing just how scared he was now, how certain he was that things were beginning to close in on him. He had no idea what the thought meant; it just circled and circled, like a wooden horse bolted to a carousel. Six. I was six. Jacky Sawyer was six. Over and over, round and round she goes. The storeroom shared a wall in common with the taproom itself, and tonight that wall was actually vibrating with noise; it throbbed like a drumhead. Until twenty minutes before, it had been Friday night, and both Oatley Textiles and Weaving and Dogtown Custom Rubber paid on Friday. Now the Oatley Tap was full to the overflow point . . . and past. A big poster to the left of the bar read OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 220 PERSONS IS IN VIOLATION OF GENESEE COUNTY FIRE CODE 331. Apparently fire code 331 was suspended on the weekends, because Jack guessed there were more than three hundred people out there now, boogying away to a countrywestern band which called itself The Genny Valley Boys. It was a terrible band, but they had a pedalsteel guitar. Theres guys around here thatd fuck a pedalsteel, Jack, Smokey had said. Jack! Lori yelled over the wall of sound. Lori was Smokeys woman. Jack still didnt know what her last name was. He could barely hear her over the juke, which was playing at full volume while the band was on break. All five of them were standing at the far end of the bar, Jack knew, tanking up on halfprice Black Russians. She stuck her head through the storeroom door. Tired blond hair, held back with childish white plastic barrettes, glittered in the overhead fluorescent. Jack, if you dont run that keg out real quick, I guess hell give your arm a try. Okay, Jack said. Tell him Ill be right there. He felt gooseflesh on his arms, and it didnt come entirely from the storerooms damp chill. Smokey Updike was no one to fool withSmokey who wore a succession of paper frycooks hats on his narrow head, Smokey with his large plastic mailorder dentures, grisly and somehow funereal in their perfect evenness, Smokey with his violent brown eyes, the scleras an ancient, dirty yellow. Smokey Updike who in some way still unknown to Jackand who was all the more frightening for thathad somehow managed to take him prisoner. The jukebox fell temporarily silent, but the steady roar of the crowd actually seemed to go up a notch to make up for it. Some Lake Ontario cowboy raised his voice in a big, drunken YeeeeeHAW! A woman screamed. A glass broke. Then the jukebox took off again, sounding a little like a Saturn rocket achieving escape velocity. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Raw. Jack bent over one of the aluminum kegs and dragged it out about three feet, his mouth screwed down in a painful wince, sweat standing out on his forehead in spite of the airconditioned chill, his back protesting. The keg gritted and squealed on the unadorned cement. He stopped, breathing hard, his ears ringing. He wheeled the handtruck over to the keg of Busch, stood it up, then went around to the keg again. He managed to rock it up on its rim and walk it forward, toward where the handtruck stood. As he was setting it down he lost control of itthe big barkeg weighed only a few pounds less than Jack did himself. It landed hard on the foot of the handtruck, which had been padded with a remnant of carpet so as to soften just such landings. Jack tried to both steer it and get his hands out of the way in time. He was slow. The keg mashed his fingers against the back of the handtruck. There was an agonizing thud, and he somehow managed to get his throbbing, pulsing fingers out of there. Jack stuck all the fingers of his left hand in his mouth and sucked on them, tears standing in his eyes. Worse than jamming his fingers, he could hear the slow sigh of gases escaping through the breathercap on top of the keg. If Smokey hooked up the keg and it came out foamy . . . or, worse yet, if he popped the cap and the beer went a gusher in his face . . . Best not to think of those things. Last night, Thursday night, when hed tried to run Smokey out a keg, the keg had gone right over on its side. The breathercap had shot clear across the room. Beer foamed whitegold across the storeroom floor and ran down the drain. Jack had stood there, sick and frozen, oblivious to Smokeys shouts. It wasnt Busch, it was Kingsland. Not beer but alethe Queens Own. That was when Smokey hit him for the first timea quick looping blow that drove Jack into one of the storerooms splintery walls. There goes your pay for today, Smokey had said. And you never want to do that again, Jack. What chilled Jack most about that phrase you never want to do that again was what it assumed that there would be lots of opportunities for him to do that again; as if Smokey Updike expected him to be here a long, long time. Jack, hurry it up! Coming. Jack puffed. He pulled the handtruck across the room to the door, felt behind himself for the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open. He hit something large and soft and yielding. Christ, watch it! Whoops, sorry, Jack said. Ill whoops you, asshole, the voice replied. Jack waited until he heard heavy steps moving on down the hall outside the storeroom and then tried the door again. The hall was narrow and painted a bilious green. It stank of shit and piss and TidyBowl. Holes had been punched through both plaster and lath here and there; graffiti lurched and staggered everywhere, written by bored drunks waiting to use either POINTERS or SETTERS. The largest of them all had been slashed across the green paint with a black Magic Marker, and it seemed to scream out all of Oatleys dull and objectless fury. SEND ALL AMERICAN NIGGERS AND JEWS TO IRAN, it read. The noise from the taproom was loud in the storeroom; out here it was a great wave of sound which never seemed to break. Jack took one glance back into the storeroom over the top of the keg tilted on the handtruck, trying to make sure his pack wasnt visible. He had to get out. Had to. The dead phone that had finally spoken, seeming to encase him in a capsule of dark ice . . . that had been bad. Randolph Scott was worse. The guy wasnt really Randolph Scott; he only looked the way Scott had looked in his fifties films. Smokey Updike was perhaps worse still . . . although Jack was no longer sure of that. Not since he had seen (or thought he had seen) the eyes of the man who looked like Randolph Scott change color. But that Oatley itself was worst of all . . . he was sure of that. Oatley, New York, deep in the heart of Genny County, seemed now to be a horrible trap that had been laid for him . . . a kind of municipal pitcher plant. One of natures real marvels, the pitcher plant. Easy to get in. Almost impossible to get out. 2 A tall man with a great swinging gut porched in front of him stood waiting to use the mens room. He was rolling a plastic toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other and glaring at Jack. Jack supposed that it was the big mans gut that he had hit with the door. Asshole, the fat man repeated, and then the mensroom door jerked open. A man strode out. For a heartstopping moment his eyes and Jacks eyes met. It was the man who looked like Randolph Scott. But this was no moviestar; this was just an Oatley millhand drinking up his weeks pay. Later on he would leave in a halfpaidfor doorsucker Mustang or maybe on a threequarterspaidfor motorcyclea big old Harley with a BUY AMERICAN sticker plastered on the nacelle, probably. His eyes turned yellow. No, your imagination, Jack, just your imagination. Hes just just a millhand who was giving him the eye because he was new. He had probably gone to high school here in town, played football, knocked up a Catholic cheerleader and married her, and the cheerleader had gotten fat on chocolates and Stouffers frozen dinners; just another Oatley oaf, just But his eyes turned yellow. Stop it! They did not! Yet there was something about him that made Jack think of what had happened when he was coming into town . . . what had happened in the dark. The fat man who had called Jack an asshole shrank back from the rangy man in the Levis and the clean white Tshirt. Randolph Scott started toward Jack. His big, veined hands swung at his sides. His eyes sparkled an icy blue . . . and then began to change, to moil and lighten. Kid, he said, and Jack fled with clumsy haste, butting the swinging door open with his fanny, not caring who he hit. Noise pounced on him. Kenny Rogers was bellowing an enthusiastic redneck paean to someone named Reuben James. You allus turned your other CHEEK, Kenny testified to this room of shuffling, sullenfaced drunks, and said theres a better world waitin for the MEEK! Jack saw no one here who looked particularly meek. The Genny Valley Boys were trooping back onto the bandstand and picking up their instruments. All of them but the pedal steel player looked drunk and confused . . . perhaps not really sure of where they were. The pedal steel player only looked bored. To Jacks left, a woman was talking earnestly on the Taps pay phonea phone Jack would never touch again if he had his way about it, not for a thousand dollars. As she talked, her drunken companion probed and felt inside her halfopen cowboy shirt. On the big dancefloor, perhaps seventy couples groped and shuffled, oblivious of the current songs bright uptempo, simply squeezing and grinding, hands gripping buttocks, lips spitsealed together, sweat running down cheeks and making large circles under the armpits. Well thank Gawd, Lori said, and flipped up the hinged partition at the side of the bar for him. Smokey was halfway down the bar, filling up Glorias tray with ginandtonics, vodka sours, and what seemed to be beers only competition for the Oatley Town Drink Black Russians. Jack saw Randolph Scott come out through the swinging door. He glanced toward Jack, his blue eyes catching Jacks again at once. He nodded slightly, as if to say Well talk. Yessirree. Maybe well talk about what might or might not be in the Oatley tunnel. Or about bullwhips. Or sick mothers. Maybe well talk about how youre gonna be in Genny County for a long, long time . . . maybe until youre an old man crying over a shopping cart. What do you think, Jacky? Jack shuddered. Randolph Scott smiled, as if he had seen the shudder . . . or felt it. Then he moved off into the crowd and the thick air. A moment later Smokeys thin, powerful fingers bit into Jacks shoulderhunting for the most painful place and, as always, finding it. They were educated, nerveseeking fingers. Jack, you just got to move faster, Smokey said. His voice sounded almost sympathetic, but his fingers dug and moved and probed. His breath smelled of the pink Canada Mints he sucked almost constantly. His mailorder false teeth clicked and clacked. Sometimes there was an obscene slurping as they slipped a little and he sucked them back into place. You got to move faster or Im going to have to light a fire under your ass. You understand what Im saying? Yyeah, Jack said. Trying not to moan. All right. Thats good then. For an excruciating second Smokeys fingers dug even deeper, grinding with a bitter enthusiasm at the neat little nest of nerves there. Jack did moan. That was good enough for Smokey. He let up. Help me hook this keg up, Jack. And lets make it fast. Friday night, people got to drink. Saturday morning, Jack said stupidly. Then, too. Come on. Jack somehow managed to help Smokey lift the keg into the square compartment under the bar. Smokeys thin, ropey muscles bulged and writhed under his Oatley Tap Tshirt. The paper frycooks hat on his narrow weasels head stayed in place, its leading edge almost touching his left eyebrow, in apparent defiance of gravity. Jack watched, holding his breath, as Smokey flicked off the red plastic breathercap on the keg. The keg breathed more gustily than it should have done . . . but it didnt foam. Jack let his breath out in a silent gust. Smokey spun the empty toward him. Get that back in the storeroom. And then swamp out the bathroom. Remember what I told you this afternoon. Jack remembered. At three oclock a whistle like an airraid siren had gone off, almost making him jump out of his skin. Lori had laughed, had said Check out Jack, SmokeyI think he just went weewee in his Tuffskins. Smokey had given her a narrow, unsmiling look and motioned Jack over. Told Jack that was the payday whistle at the Oatley T  W. Told Jack that a whistle very much like it was going off at Dogtown Rubber, a company that made beachtoys, inflatable rubber dolls, and condoms with names like Ribs of Delight. Soon, he said, the Oatley Tap would begin filling up. And you and me and Lori and Gloria are going to move just as fast as lightning, Smokey said, because when the eagle screams on Friday, we got to make up for what this place dont make every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. When I tell you to run me out a keg, you want to have it out to me before I finish yelling. And youre in the mens room every half an hour with your mop. On Friday nights, a guy blows his groceries every fifteen minutes or so. I got the womens, Lori said, coming over. Her hair was thin, wavy gold, her complexion as white as a comicbook vampires. She either had a cold or a bad coke habit; she kept sniffing. Jack guessed it was a cold. He doubted if anyone in Oatley could afford a bad coke habit. Women aint as bad as men, though. Almost, but not quite. Shut up, Lori. Up yours, she said, and Smokeys hand flickered out like lightning. There was a crack and suddenly the imprint of Smokeys palm was printed red on one of Loris pallid cheeks like a childs Tattoodle. She began to snivel . . . but Jack was sickened and bewildered to see an expression in her eyes that was almost happy. It was the look of a woman who believed such treatment was a sign of caring. You just keep hustling and well have no problem, Smokey said. Remember to move fast when I yell for you to run me out a keg. And remember to get in the mens can with your mop every half an hour and clean up the puke. And then he had told Smokey again that he wanted to leave and Smokey had reiterated his false promise about Sunday afternoon . . . but what good did it do to think of that? There were louder screams now, and harsh caws of laughter. The crunch of a breaking chair and a wavering yell of pain. A fistfightthe third of the nighthad broken out on the dance floor. Smokey uttered a curse and shoved past Jack. Get rid of that keg, he said. Jack got the empty onto the dolly and trundled it back toward the swinging door, looking around uneasily for Randolph Scott as he went. He saw the man standing in the crowd that was watching the fight, and relaxed a little. In the storeroom he put the empty keg with the others by the loadingbayUpdikes Oatley Tap had already gone through six kegs tonight. That done, he checked his pack again. For one panicky moment he thought it was gone, and his heart began to hammer in his chestthe magic juice was in there, and so was the Territories coin that had become a silver dollar in this world. He moved to the right, sweat now standing out on his forehead, and felt between two more kegs. There it washe could trace the curve of Speedys bottle through the green nylon of the pack. His heartbeat began to slow down, but he felt shaky and rubberleggedthe way you feel after a narrow escape. The mens toilet was a horror. Earlier in the evening Jack might have vomited in sympathy, but now he actually seemed to be getting used to the stench . . . and that was somehow the worst thing of all. He drew hot water, dumped in Comet, and began to run his soapy mop back and forth through the unspeakable mess on the floor. His mind began to go back over the last couple of days, worrying at them the way an animal in a trap will worry at a limb that has been caught. 3 The Oatley Tap had been dark, and dingy, and apparently dead empty when Jack first walked into it. The plugs on the juke, the pinball machine, and the Space Invaders game were all pulled. The only light in the place came from the Busch display over the bara digital clock caught between the peaks of two mountains, looking like the weirdest UFO ever imagined. Smiling a little, Jack walked toward the bar. He was almost there when a flat voice said from behind him, This is a bar. No minors. What are you, stupid? Get out. Jack almost jumped out of his skin. He had been touching the money in his pocket, thinking it would go just as it had at the Golden Spoon he would sit on a stool, order something, and then ask for the job. It was of course illegal to hire a kid like himat least without a work permit signed by his parents or a guardianand that meant they could get him for under the minimum wage. Way under. So the negotiations would start, usually beginning with Story 2Jack and the Evil Stepfather. He whirled around and saw a man sitting alone in one of the booths, looking at him with chilly, contemptuous alertness. The man was thin, but ropes of muscles moved under his white undershirt and along the sides of his neck. He wore baggy white cooks pants. A paper cap was cocked forward over his left eyebrow. His head was narrow, weasellike. His hair was cut short, graying at the edges. Between his big hands were a stack of invoices and a Texas Instruments calculator. I saw your Help Wanted sign, Jack said, but now without much hope. This man was not going to hire him, and Jack was not sure he would want to work for him anyway. This guy looked mean. You did, huh? the man in the booth said. You must have learned to read on one of the days you werent playing hooky. There was a package of Phillies Cheroots on the table. He shook one out. Well, I didnt know it was a bar, Jack said, taking a step back toward the door. The sunlight seemed to come through the dirty glass and then just fall dead on the floor, as if the Oatley Tap were located in a slightly different dimension. I guess I thought it was . . . you know, a bar and grill. Something like that. Ill just be going. Come here. The mans brown eyes were looking at him steadily now. No, hey, thats all right, Jack said nervously. Ill just Come here. Sit down. The man popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail and lit the cigar. A fly which had been preening on his paper hat buzzed away into the darkness. His eyes remained on Jack. I aint gonna bite you. Jack came slowly over to the booth, and after a moment he slipped in on the other side and folded his hands in front of him neatly. Some sixty hours later, swamping out the mens toilet at twelvethirty in the morning with his sweaty hair hanging in his eyes, Jack thoughtno, he knewthat it was his own stupid confidence that had allowed the trap to spring shut (and it had shut the moment he sat down opposite Smokey Updike, although he had not known it then). The Venus flytrap is able to close on its hapless, insectile victims; the pitcher plant, with its delicious smell and its deadly, glassysmooth sides, only waits for some flying asshole of a bug to buzz on down and inside . . . where it finally drowns in the rainwater the pitcher collects. In Oatley the pitcher was full of beer instead of rainwaterthat was the only difference. If he had run But he hadnt run. And maybe, Jack thought, doing his best to meet that cold brown stare, there would be a job here after all. Minette Banberry, the woman who owned and operated the Golden Spoon in Auburn, had been pleasant enough to Jack, had even given him a little hug and a peck of a kiss as well as three thick sandwiches when he left, but he had not been fooled. Pleasantness and even a remote sort of kindness did not preclude a cold interest in profits, or even something very close to outright greed. The minimum wage in New York was three dollars and forty cents an hourthat information had been posted in the Golden Spoons kitchen by law, on a bright pink piece of paper almost the size of a movie poster. But the shortorder cook was a Haitian who spoke little English and was almost surely in the country illegally, Jack thought. The guy cooked like a whiz, though, never allowing the spuds or the fried clams to spend a moment too long in the Fryolaters. The girl who helped Mrs. Banberry with the waitressing was pretty but vacant and on a workrelease program for the retarded in Rome. In such cases, the minimum wage did not apply, and the lisping, retarded girl told Jack with unfeigned awe that she was getting a dollar and twentyfive cents each hour, and all for her. Jack himself was getting a dollarfifty. He had bargained for that, and he knew that if Mrs. Banberry hadnt been strappedher old dishwasher had quit just that morning, had gone on his coffeebreak and just never come backshe would not have bargained at all; would have simply told him take the buck and a quarter, kid, or see whats down the road. Its a free country. Now, he thought, with the unknowing cynicism that was also a part of his new selfconfidence, here was another Mrs. Banberry. Male instead of female, ropeskinny instead of fat and grandmotherly, sour instead of smiling, but almost surely a Mrs. Banberry for a that and a that. Looking for a job, huh? The man in the white pants and the paper hat put his cigar down in an old tin ashtray with the word CAMELS embossed on the bottom. The fly stopped washing its legs and took off. Yes, sir, but like you say, this is a bar and all The unease stirred in him again. Those brown eyes and yellowed scleras troubled himthey were the eyes of some old hunting cat that had seen plenty of errant mice like him before. Yeah, its my place, the man said. Smokey Updike. He held his hand out. Surprised, Jack shook it. It squeezed Jacks hand once, hard, almost to the point of pain. Then it relaxed . . . but Smokey didnt let go. Well? he said. Huh? Jack said, aware he sounded stupid and a little afraidhe felt stupid and a little afraid. And he wanted Updike to let go of his hand. Didnt your folks ever teach you to innerduce yourself? This was so unexpected that Jack came close to gabbling out his real name instead of the one he had used at the Golden Spoon, the name he also used if the people who picked him up asked for his handle. That namewhat he was coming to think of as his roadnamewas Lewis Farren. Jack SawahSawtelle, he said. Updike held his hand yet a moment longer, those brown eyes never moving. Then he let it go. Jack SawahSawtelle, he said. Must be the longest fucking name in the phonebook, huh, kid? Jack flushed but said nothing. You aint very big, Updike said. You think you could manage to rock a ninetypound keg of beer up on its side and walk it onto a handdolly? I think so, Jack said, not knowing if he could or not. It didnt look as if it would be much of a problem, anywayin a place as dead as this, the guy probably only had to change kegs when the one hooked up to the taps went flat. As if reading his mind, Updike said, Yeah, nobody here now. But we get pretty busy by four, five oclock. And on weekends the place really fills up. Thats when youd earn your keep, Jack. Well, I dont know, Jack said.