Jack was able to wait until the door closed, and then he could control his gorge no longer.
He managed to make it into the Tap's only stall, where he was faced with the unflushed and sickeningly fragrant spoor of the last customer. Jack vomited up whatever remained of his dinner, took a couple of hitching breaths, and then vomited again. He groped for the flush with a shaking hand and pushed it. Waylon and Willie thudded dully through the walls, singing about Luckenbach, Texas.
Suddenly his mother's face was before him, more beautiful than it had ever been on any movie screen, her eyes large and dark and sorrowing. He saw her alone in their rooms at the Alhambra, a cigarette smouldering forgotten in the ashtray beside her. She was crying. Crying for him. His heart seemed to hurt so badly that he thought he would die from love for her and want of her--for a life where there were no things in tunnels, no women who somehow wanted to be slapped and made to cry, no men who vomited between their own feet while taking a piss. He wanted to be with her and hated Speedy Parker with a black completeness for ever having set his feet on this awful road west.
In that moment whatever might have remained of his self-confidence was demolished--it was demolished utterly and forever. Conscious thought was overmastered by a deep, elemental, wailing, childish cry: I want my mother please God I want my MOTHER--
He trembled his way out of the stall on watery legs, thinking Okay that's it everybody out of the pool fuck you Speedy this kid's going home. Or whatever you want to call it. In that moment he didn't care if his mother might be dying. In that moment of inarticulate pain he became totally Jack's Jack, as unconsciously self-serving as an animal on which any carnivore may prey: deer, rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk. In that moment he would have been perfectly willing to let her die of the cancer metastasizing wildly outward from her lungs if only she would hold him and then kiss him goodnight and tell him not to play his goddam transistor in bed or read with a flashlight under the covers for half the night.
He put his hand against the wall and little by little managed to get hold of himself. This taking-hold was no conscious thing but a simple tightening of the mind, something that was very much Phil Sawyer and Lily Cavanaugh. He'd made a mistake, yeah, but he wasn't going back. The Territories were real and so the Talisman might also be real; he was not going to murder his mother with faintheartedness.
Jack filled his mop-bucket with hot water from the spigot in the storeroom and cleaned up the mess.
When he came out again, it was half past ten and the crowd in the Tap began to thin out--Oatley was a working town, and its working drinkers went home early on weeknights.
Lori said, "You look as pale as pastry, Jack. You okay?"
"Do you think I could have a gingerale?" he asked.
She brought him one and Jack drank it while he finished waxing the dancefloor. At quarter to twelve Smokey ordered him back to the storeroom to "run out a keg." Jack managed the keg--barely. At quarter to one Smokey started bawling for people to finish up. Lori unplugged the juke--Dick Curless died with a long, unwinding groan--to a few half-hearted cries of protest. Gloria unplugged the games, donned her sweater (it was as pink as the Canada Mints Smokey ate regularly, as pink as the false gums of his dentures), and left. Smokey began to turn out the lights and to urge the last four or five drinkers out the door.
"Okay, Jack," he said when they were gone. "You did good. There's room for improvement, but you got a start, anyway. You can doss down in the storeroom."
Instead of asking for his pay (which Smokey did not offer anyway), Jack stumbled off toward the storeroom, so tired that he looked like a slightly smaller version of the drunks so lately ushered out.
In the storeroom he saw Lori squatting down in one corner--the squat caused her basketball shorts to ride up to a point that was nearly alarming--and for a moment Jack thought with dull alarm that she was going through his knapsack. Then he saw that she had spread a couple of blankets on a layer of burlap apple-sacks. Lori had also put down a small satin pillow which said NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR on one side.
"Thought I'd make you a little nest, kid," she said.
"Thanks," he said. It was a simple, almost offhand act of kindness, but Jack found himself having to struggle from bursting into tears. He managed a smile instead. "Thanks a lot, Lori."
"No problem. You'll be all right here, Jack. Smokey ain't so bad. Once you get to know him, he ain't half bad." She said this with an unconscious wistfulness, as if wishing it were so.
"Probably not," Jack said, and then he added impulsively, "but I'm moving on tomorrow. Oatley's just not for me, I guess."
She said: "Maybe you'll go, Jack . . . and maybe you'll decide to stay awhile. Why don't you sleep on it?" There was something forced and unnatural about this little speech--it had none of the genuineness of her grin when she'd said Thought I'd make you a little nest. Jack noticed it, but was too tired to do more than that.
"Well, we'll see," he said.
"Sure we will," Lori agreed, going to the door. She blew a kiss toward him from the palm of one dirty hand. "Good night, Jack."
"Good night."
He started to pull off his shirt . . . and then left it on, deciding he would just take off his sneakers. The storeroom was cold and chilly. He sat down on the apple-sacks, pulled the knots, pushed off first one and then the other. He was about to lie back on Lori's New York World's Fair souvenir--and he might well have been sound asleep before his head ever touched it--when the telephone began to ring out in the bar, shrilling into the silence, drilling into it, making him think of wavering, pasty-gray roots and bullwhips and two-headed ponies.
Ring, ring, ring, into the silence, into the dead silence.
Ring, ring, ring, long after the kids who call up to ask about Prince Albert in a can have gone to bed. Ring, ring, ring, Hello, Jacky it's Morgan and I felt you in my woods, you smart little shit I SMELLED you in my woods, and how did you ever get the idea that you were safe in your world? My woods are there, too. Last chance, Jacky. Get home or we send out the troops. You won't have a chance. You won't--
Jack got up and ran across the storeroom floor in his stocking feet. A light sweat that felt freezing cold, seemed to cover his entire body.
He opened the door a crack.
Ring, ring, ring, ring.
Then finally: "Hello, Oatley Tap. And this better be good." Smokey's voice. A pause. "Hello?" Another pause. "Fuck off!" Smokey hung up with a bang, and Jack heard him re-cross the floor and then start up the stairs to the small overhead apartment he and Lori shared.
7
Jack looked unbelievingly from the green slip of paper in his left hand to the small pile of bills--all ones--and change by his right. It was eleven o'clock the next morning. Thursday morning, and he had asked for his pay.
"What is this?" he asked, still unable to believe it.
"You can read," Smokey said, "and you can count. You don't move as fast as I'd like, Jack--at least not yet--but you're bright enough."
Now he sat with the green slip in one hand and the money by the other. Dull anger began to pulse in the middle of his forehead like a vein. GUEST CHECK, the green slip was headed. It was the exact same form Mrs. Banberry had used in the Golden Spoon. It read:
1 hmbrg $1.35
1 hmbrg $1.35
1 lrg mk .55
1 gin-ale .55
Tx .30
At the bottom the figure $4.10 was written in large numbers and circled. Jack had made nine dollars for his four-to-one stint. Smokey had charged off nearly half of it; what he had left by his right hand was four dollars and ninety cents.
He looked up, furious--first at Lori, who looked away as if vaguely embarrassed, and then at Smokey, who simply looked back.
"This is a cheat," he said thinly.
"Jack, that's not true. Look at the menu prices--"
"That's not what I mean and you know it!"
Lori flinched a little, as if expecting Smokey to clout him one . . . but Smokey only looked at Ja
ck with a kind of terrible patience.
"I didn't charge you for your bed, did I?"
"Bed!" Jack shouted, feeling the hot blood boil up into his cheeks. "Some bed! Cut-open burlap bags on a concrete floor! Some bed! I'd like to see you try to charge me for it, you dirty cheat!"
Lori made a scared sound and shot a look at Smokey . . . but Smokey only sat across from Jack in the booth, the thick blue smoke of a Cheroot curling up between them. A fresh paper fry-cook's hat was cocked forward on Smokey's narrow head.
"We talked about you dossing down back there," Smokey said. "You asked if it came with the job. I said it did. No mention was made of your meals. If it had been brought up, maybe something could have been done. Maybe not. Point is, you never brought it up, so now you got to deal with that."
Jack sat shaking, tears of anger standing in his eyes. He tried to talk and nothing came out but a small strangled groan. He was literally too furious to speak.
"Of course, if you wanted to discuss an employees' discount on your meals now--"
"Go to hell!" Jack managed finally, snatching up the four singles and the little strew of change. "Teach the next kid who comes in here how to look out for number one! I'm going!"
He crossed the floor toward the door, and in spite of his anger he knew--did not just think but flat-out knew--that he wasn't going to make the sidewalk.
"Jack."
He touched the doorknob, thought of grasping it and turning it--but that voice was undeniable and full of a certain threat. He dropped his hand and turned around, his anger leaving him. He suddenly felt shrunken and old. Lori had gone behind the bar, where she was sweeping and humming. She had apparently decided that Smokey wasn't going to work Jack over with his fists, and since nothing else really mattered, everything was all right.
"You don't want to leave me in the lurch with my weekend crowd coming up."
"I want to get out of here. You cheated me."
"No sir," Smokey said, "I explained that. If anyone blotted your copybook, Jack, it was you. Now we could discuss your meals--fifty percent off the food, maybe, and even free sodas. I never went that far before with the younger help I hire from time to time, but this weekened's going to be especially hairy, what with all the migrant labor in the county for the apple-picking. And I like you, Jack. That's why I didn't clout you one when you raised your voice to me, although maybe I should have. But I need you over the weekend."
Jack felt his rage return briefly, and then die away again.
"What if I go anyhow?" he asked. "I'm five dollars to the good, anyway, and being out of this shitty little town might be just as good as a bonus."
Looking at Jack, still smiling his narrow smile, Smokey said, "You remember going into the men's last night to clean after some guy who whoopsed his cookies?"
Jack nodded.
"You remember what he looked like?"
"Crewcut. Khakis. So what?"
"That's Digger Atwell. His real name's Carlton, but he spent ten years taking care of the town cemeteries, so everyone got calling him Digger. That was--oh, twenty or thirty years ago. He went on the town cops back around the time Nixon got elected President. Now he's Chief of Police."
Smokey picked up his Cheroot, puffed at it, and looked at Jack.
"Digger and me go back," Smokey said. "And if you was to just walk out of here now, Jack, I couldn't guarantee that you wouldn't have some trouble with Digger. Might end up getting sent home. Might end up picking the apples on the town's land--Oatley Township's got . . . oh, I guess forty acres of good trees. Might end up getting beat up. Or . . . I've heard that ole Digger's got a taste for kids on the road. Boys, mostly."
Jack thought of that clublike penis. He felt both sick and cold.
"In here, you're under my wing, so to speak," Smokey said. "Once you hit the street, who can say? Digger's apt to be cruising anyplace. You might get over the town line with no sweat. On the other hand, you might just see him pulling up beside you in that big Plymouth he drives. Digger ain't totally bright, but he does have a nose, sometimes, Or . . . someone might give him a call."
Behind the bar, Lori was doing dishes. She dried her hands, turned on the radio, and began to sing along with an old Steppenwolf song.
"Tell you what," Smokey said. "Hang in there, Jack. Work the weekend. Then I'll pack you into my pick-up and drive you over the town line myself. How would that be? You'll go out of here Sunday noon with damn near thirty bucks in your poke that you didn't have coming in. You'll go out thinking that Oatley's not such a bad place after all. So what do you say?"
Jack looked into those brown eyes, noted the yellow scleras and the small flecks of red; he noted Smokey's big, sincere smile lined with false teeth; he even saw with a weird and terrifying sense of deja vu that the fly was back on the paper fry-cook's hat, preening and washing its hair-thin forelegs.
He suspected Smokey knew that he knew that everything Updike had said was a lie, and didn't even care. After working into the early hours of Saturday morning and then Sunday morning, Jack would sleep until maybe two Sunday afternoon. Smokey would tell him he couldn't give him that ride because Jack had woken up too late; now he, Smokey, was too busy watching the Colts and the Patriots. And Jack would not only be too tired to walk, he would be too afraid that Smokey might lose interest in the Colts and Patriots just long enough to call his good friend Digger Atwell and say, "He's walking down Mill Road right now, Digger old boy, why don't you pick him up? Then get over here for the second half. Free beer, but don't you go puking in my urinal until I get the kid back here."
That was one scenario. There were others that he could think of, each a little different, each really the same at bottom.
Smokey Updike's smile widened a little.
10
Elroy
1
When I was six . . .
The Tap, which had begun to wind down by this time on his previous two nights, was roaring along as if the patrons expected to greet the dawn. He saw two tables had vanished--victims of the fistfight that had broken out just before his last expedition into the john. Now people were dancing where the tables had been.
"About time," Smokey said as Jack staggered the length of the bar on the inside and put the case down by the refrigerator compartments. "You get those in there and go back for the fucking Bud. You should have brought that first, anyway."
"Lori didn't say--"
Hot, incredible pain exploded in his foot as Smokey drove one heavy shoe down on Jack's sneaker. Jack uttered a muffled scream and felt tears sting his eyes.
"Shut up," Smokey said. "Lori don't know shit from Shinola, and you are smart enough to know it. Get back in there and run me out a case of Bud."
He went back to the storeroom, limping on the foot Smokey had stomped, wondering if the bones in some of his toes might be broken. It seemed all too possible. His head roared with smoke and noise and the jagged ripsaw rhythm of The Genny Valley Boys, two of them now noticeably weaving on the bandstand. One thought stood out clearly: it might not be possible to wait until closing. He really might not be able to last that long. If Oatley was a prison and the Oatley Tap was his cell, then surely exhaustion was as much his warder as Smokey Updike--maybe even more so.
In spite of his worries about what the Territories might be like at this place, the magic juice seemed more and more to promise him his only sure way out. He could drink some and flip over . . . and if he could manage to walk a mile west over there, two at the most, he could drink a bit more and flip back into the U.S.A. well over the town line of this horrible little place, perhaps as far west as Bushville or even Pembroke.
When I was six, when Jack-O was six, when--
He got the Bud and stumble-staggered out through the door again . . . and the tall, rangy cowboy with the big hands, the one who looked like Randolph Scott, was standing there, looking at him.
"Hello, Jack," he said, and Jack saw with rising terror that the irises of the man's eyes were as yellow as chicken-
claws. "Didn't somebody tell you to get gone? You don't listen very good, do you?"
Jack stood with the case of Bud dragging at the ends of his arms, staring into those yellow eyes, and suddenly a horrid idea hammered into his mind: that this had been the lurker in the tunnel--this man-thing with its dead yellow eyes.
"Leave me alone," he said--the words came out in a wintery little whisper.
He crowded closer. "You were supposed to get gone."
Jack tried to back up . . . but now he was against the wall, and as the cowboy who looked like Randolph Scott leaned toward him, Jack could smell dead meat on its breath.
2
Between the time Jack started work on Thursday at noon and four o'clock, when the Tap's usual after-work crowd started to come in, the pay phone with the PLEASE LIMIT YOUR CALLS TO THREE MINUTES sign over it rang twice.
The first time it rang, Jack felt no fear at all--and it turned out to be only a solicitor for the United Fund.
Two hours later, as Jack was bagging up the last of the previous night's bottles, the telephone began to shrill again. This time his head snapped up like an animal which scents fire in a dry forest . . . except it wasn't fire he sensed, but ice. He turned toward the telephone, which was only four feet from where he was working, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He thought he must see the pay phone caked with ice, ice that was sweating through the phone's black plastic case, extruding from the holes in the earpiece and the mouthpiece in lines of blue ice as thin as pencil-leads, hanging from the rotary dial and the coin return in icicle beards.
But it was just the phone, and all the coldness and death was on the inside.
He stared at it, hypnotized.
"Jack!" Smokey yelled. "Answer the goddam phone! What the fuck am I paying you for?"
Jack looked toward Smokey, as desperate as a cornered animal . . . but Smokey was staring back with the thin-lipped, out-of-patience expression that he got on his face just before he popped Lori one. He started toward the phone, barely aware that his feet were moving; he stepped deeper and deeper into that capsule of coldness, feeling the gooseflesh run up his arms, feeling the moisture crackle in his nose.