The broad, hairy face and frightened eyes of a boy who wasn't a boy at all: This is a bad place, Jacky, Wolf knows. And it was, it was a very bad place. They put him in a box, put good old Wolf in a box, and finally they killed him. Wolf died of a disease called America.
"Wolf!" the running man in the field gasps. "Wolf, ah, God, I'm sorry!"
Faces and voices, all those faces and voices, rising in front of his eyes, dinning into his ears, demanding to be seen and heard, filling him with that sense of climax, every defense on the verge of being washed away like a breakwater before a tidal wave.
Nausea roars through him and tilts the world. He makes that urking sound again, and this time it fills the back of his throat with a taste he remembers: the taste of cheap, rough wine. And suddenly it's New Hampshire again, Arcadia Funworld again. He and Speedy are standing beside the carousel again, all those frozen horses ("All carousel horses is named, don't you know that, Jack?"), and Speedy is holding out a bottle of wine and telling him it's magic juice, one little sip and he'll go over, flip over ¡ª
"No!" Jack cries, knowing it's already too late. "I don't want to go over!"
The world tilts the other way and he falls into the grass on his hands and knees with his eyes squeezed shut. He doesn't need to open them; the richer, deeper smells that suddenly fill his nose tell him everything he needs to know. That, and the sense of coming home after so many dark years when almost every waking motion and decision has in some way been dedicated to canceling (or at least postponing) the arrival of this very moment.
This is Jack Sawyer, ladies and gentlemen, down on his knees in a vast field of sw
eet grass under a morning sky untainted by a single particle of pollution. He is weeping. He knows what has happened, and he is weeping. His heart bursts with fear and joy.
This is Jack Sawyer twenty years along, grown to be a man, and back in the Territories again at last.
It is the voice of his old friend Richard ¡ª sometimes known as Rational Richard ¡ª that saves him. Richard as he is now, head of his own law firm (Sloat & Associates, Ltd. ), not Richard as he was when Jack perhaps knew him best, during long vacation days on Seabrook Island, in South Carolina. The Richard of Seabrook Island had been imaginative, quick-spoken, fast on his feet, mop-topped, skinny as a morning shadow. The current Richard, Corporate Law Richard, is thinning on top, thick in the middle, much in favor of sitting and Bushmills. Also, he has crushed his imagination, so brilliantly playful in those Seabrook Island days, like a troublesome fly. Richard Sloat's life has been one of reduction, Jack has sometimes thought, but one thing has been added (probably in law school): the pompous, sheeplike sound of hesitation, particularly annoying on the phone, which is now Richard's vocal signature. This sound starts with the lips closed, then opens out as Richard's lips spring wide, making him look like an absurd combination of Vienna choirboy and Lord Haw-Haw.
Now, kneeling with his eyes shut in the vast green reach of what used to be his very own north field, smelling the new, deeper smells that he remembers so well and has longed for so fiercely without even realizing it, Jack hears Richard Sloat begin speaking in the middle of his head. What a relief those words are! He knows it's only his own mind mimicking Richard's voice, but it's still wonderful. If Richard were here, Jack thinks he'd embrace his old friend and say, May you pontificate forever, Richie-boy. Sheep bray and all.
Rational Richard says: You realize you're dreaming, Jack, don't you? . . . ba-haaaa . . . the stress of opening that package no doubt . . . ba-haaaa . . . no doubt caused you to pass out, and that in turn has caused . . . ba-HAAAA! . . . the dream you are having now.
Down on his knees, eyes still closed and hair hanging in his face, Jack says, "In other words, it's what we used to call ¡ª "
Correct! What we used to call . . . ba-haaaa . . . "Seabrook Island stuff. " But Seabrook Island was a long time ago, Jack, so I suggest you open your eyes, get back on your feet, and remind yourself that should you see anything out of the ordinary . . . b'haa! . . . it's not really there.
"Not really there," Jack murmurs. He stands up and opens his eyes.
He knows from the very first look that it is really here, but he holds Richard's pompous I-look-thirty-five-but-I'm-really-sixty voice in his head, shielding himself with it. Thus he is able to maintain a precarious balance instead of passing out for real, or ¡ª perhaps ¡ª cracking up entirely.
Above him, the sky is an infinitely clear dark blue. Around him, the hay and timothy is rib-high instead of ankle-high; there has been no Bunny Boettcher in this part of creation to cut it. In fact, there is no house back the way he came, only a picturesque old barn with a windmill standing off to one side.
Where are the flying men? Jack thinks, looking up into the sky, then shakes his head briskly. No flying men; no two-headed parrots; no werewolves. All that was Seabrook Island stuff, a neurosis he picked up from his mother and even passed on to Richard for a while. It was all nothing but . . . ba-haaa . . . bullshit.
He accepts this, knowing at the same time that the real bullshit would be not believing what's all around him. The smell of the grass, now so strong and sweet, mixed with the more flowery smell of clover and the deeper, basso profundo smell of black earth. The endless sound of the crickets in this grass, living their unthinking cricket lives. The fluttering white field moths. The unblemished cheek of the sky, not marked by a single telephone wire or electrical cable or jet contrail.
What strikes Jack most deeply, however, is the perfection of the field around him. There's a matted circle where he fell on his knees, the dew-heavy grass crushed to the ground. But there is no path leading to the circle, not a mark of passage through the wet and tender grass. He might have dropped out of the sky. That's impossible, of course, more Seabrook Island stuff, but ¡ª
"I did sort of fall out of the sky, though," Jack says in a remarkably steady voice. "I came here from Wisconsin. I flipped here. "
Richard's voice protests this strenuously, exploding in a flurry of hrrumphs and ba-haaas, but Jack hardly notices. It's just good old Rational Richard, doing his Rational Richard thing inside his head. Richard had lived through stuff like this once before and come out the other side with his mind more or less intact . . . but he'd been twelve. They'd both been twelve that fall, and when you're twelve, the mind and body are more elastic.
Jack has been turning in a slow circle, seeing nothing but open fields (the mist over them now fading to a faint haze in the day's growing warmth) and blue-gray woods beyond them. Now there's something else. To the southwest, there's a dirt road about a mile away. Beyond it, at the horizon or perhaps just beyond, the perfect summer sky is a little stained with smoke.
Not woodstoves, Jack thinks, not in July, but maybe small manufactories. And . . .
He hears a whistle ¡ª three long blasts made faint with distance. His heart seems to grow large in his chest, and the corners of his mouth stretch up in a kind of helpless grin.
"The Mississippi's that way, by God," he says, and around him the field moths seem to dance their agreement, lace of the morning. "That's the Mississippi, or whatever they call it over here. And the whistle, friends and neighbors ¡ª "
Two more blasts roll across the making summer day. They are faint with distance, yes, but up close they would be mighty. Jack knows this.
"That's a riverboat. A damn big one. Maybe a paddle wheeler. "
Jack begins to walk toward the road, telling himself that this is all a dream, not believing a bit of that but using it as an acrobat uses his balance pole. After he's gone a hundred yards or so, he turns and looks back. A dark line cuts through the timothy, beginning at the place where he landed and cutting straight to where he is. It is the mark of his passage. The only mark of it. Far to the left (in fact almost behind him now) are the barn and the windmill. That's my house and garage, Jack thinks. At least that's what they are in the world of Chevrolets, Mideast warfare, and the Oprah Winfrey show.
He walks on, and has almost reached the road when he realizes there is more than smoke in the southwest. There is a kind of vibration, as well. It beats into his head like the start of a migraine headache. And it's strangely variable. If he stands with his face pointed dead south, that unpleasant pulse is less. Turn east and it's gone. North and it's almost gone. Then, as he continues to turn, it comes all the way back to full. Worse than ever now that he's noticed it, the way the buzz of a fly or the knock of a radiator in a hotel room is worse after you really start to notice it.
Jack turns another slow, full circle. South, and the vibration sinks. East, it's gone. North, it's starting to come back. West, it's coming on strong. Southwest and he's locked in like the SEEK button on a car radio. Pow, pow, pow. A black and nasty vibration like a headache, a smell like ancient smoke . . .
"No, no, no, not smoke," Jack says. He's standing almost up to his chest in summer grass, pants soaked, white moths flittering around his head like a half-assed halo, eyes wide, cheeks once more pale. In this moment he looks twelve again. It is eerie how he has rejoined his younger (and perhaps better) self. "Not smoke, that smells like . . . "
He suddenly makes that urking sound again. Because the smell ¡ª not in his nose but in the center of his head ¡ª is rotted baloney. The smell of Irma Freneau's half-rotted, severed foot.
"I'm smelling him," Jack whispers, knowing it's not a smell he means. He can make that pulse whatever he wants . . . including, he realizes, gone. "I'm smelling the Fisherman. Either him or . . . I don't know. "
He starts walking, and a hundred yards later he stops again. The pulse in his head is indeed
gone. It has faded out the way radio stations do when the day warms and the temperature thickens. It's a relief.
Jack has almost reached the road, which no doubt leads one way to some version of Arden and the other way to versions of Centralia and French Landing, when he hears an irregular drumming sound. He feels it as well, running up his legs like a Gene Krupa backbeat.
He turns to the left, then shouts in mingled surprise and delight. Three enormous brown creatures with long, lolloping ears go leaping past Jack's position, rising above the grass, sinking back into it, then rising above it again. They look like rabbits crossed with kangaroos. Their protruding black eyes stare with comic terror. Across the road they go, their flat feet (white-furred instead of brown) slapping up dust.
"Christ!" Jack says, half-laughing and half-sobbing. He whacks himself in the center of his forehead with the heel of his palm. "What was that, Richie-boy? Got any comments on that?"
Richie, of course does. He tells Jack that Jack has just suffered an extremely vivid . . . ba-haaa! . . . hallucination.
"Of course," Jack says. "Giant bunny rabbits. Get me to the nearest A. A. meeting. " Then, as he steps out onto the road, he looks toward the southwestern horizon again. At the haze of smoke there. A village. And do the residents fear as the shadows of the evening come on? Fear the coming of the night? Fear the creature that is taking their children? Do they need a coppiceman? Of course they do. Of course they ¡ª
Something is lying on the road. Jack bends down and picks up a Mil-waukee Brewers baseball cap, jarringly out of place in this world of giant hopping range rabbits, but indubitably real. Judging from the plastic adjustment band in the back, it's a child's baseball cap. Jack looks inside, knowing what he'll find, and there it is, carefully inked on the bill: TY MARSHALL. The cap's not as wet as Jack's jeans, which are soaked with morning dew, but it's not dry, either. It has been lying here on the edge of the road, he thinks, since yesterday. The logical assumption would be that Ty's abductor brought Ty this way, but Jack doesn't believe that. Perhaps it is the lingering pulse of vibration that gives rise to a different thought, a different image: the Fisherman, with Ty carefully stashed away, walking out this dirt road. Under his arm is a wrapped shoe box decorated with bogus stamps. On his head is Ty's baseball hat, kind of balancing there because it's really too small for the Fisherman. Still, he doesn't want to change the adjustment band. Doesn't want Jack to mistake it for a man's cap, even for a single second. Because he is teasing Jack, inviting Jack into the game.
"Took the boy in our world," Jack mutters. "Escaped with him to this world. Stashed him someplace safe, like a spider stashing a fly. Alive? Dead? Alive, I think. Don't know why. Maybe it's just what I want to believe. Leave it. Then he went to wherever he stashed Irma. Took her foot and brought it to me. Brought it through this world, then flipped back to my world to leave it on the porch. Lost the hat on the way, maybe? Lost it off his head?"
Jack doesn't think so. Jack thinks this fuck, this skell, this world-hopping dirtbag, left the cap on purpose. Knew that if Jack walked this road he'd find it.
Holding the hat to his chest like a Miller Park fan showing respect to the flag during the national anthem, Jack closes his eyes and concentrates. It's easier than he would have expected, but he supposes some things you never forget ¡ª how to peel an orange, how to ride a bike, how to flip back and forth between worlds.
Boy like you don't need no cheap wine, anyhow, he hears his old friend Speedy Parker say, and there's the edge of a laugh in Speedy's voice. At the same time, that sense of vertigo twists through Jack again. A moment later he hears the alarming sound of an oncoming car.
He steps back, opening his eyes as he does so. Catches a glimpse of a tarred road ¡ª Norway Valley Road, but ¡ª
A horn blares and a dusty old Ford slams by him, the passenger side-view mirror less than nine inches from Jack Sawyer's nose. Warm air, once again filled with the faint but pungent odor of hydrocarbons, surfs over Jack's cheeks and brow, along with some farm kid's indignant voice:
" ¡ª hell out of the road, assshollle ¡ª "
"Resent being called an asshole by some cow-college graduate," Jack says in his best Rational Richard voice, and although he adds a pompous Ba-haaa! for good measure, his heart is pumping hard. Man, he'd almost flipped back right in front of that guy!
Please, Jack, spare me, Richard said. You dreamed the whole thing.
Jack knows better. Although he looks around himself in total amazement, the core of his heart isn't amazed at all, no, not even a little bit. He still has the cap, for one thing ¡ª Ty Marshall's Brewers cap. And for another, the bridge across Tamarack Creek is just over the next rise. In the other world, the one where giant rabbits went hopping past you, he has walked maybe a mile. In this one he's come at least four.
That's the way it was before, he thinks, that's the way it was when Jacky was six. When everybody lived in California and nobody lived anywhere else.
But that's wrong. Somehow wrong.
Jack stands at the side of the road that was dirt a few seconds ago and is tarred now, stands looking down into Ty Marshall's baseball cap and trying to figure out exactly what is wrong and how it's wrong, knowing he probably won't be able to turn the trick. All that was a long time ago, and besides, he's worked at burying his admittedly bizarre childhood memories since he was thirteen. More than half his life, in other words. A person can't dedicate that much time to forgetting, then suddenly just snap his fingers and expect ¡ª
Jack snaps his fingers. Says to the warming summer morning: "What happened when Jacky was six?" And answers his own question: "When Jacky was six, Daddy played the horn. "
What does that mean?
"Not Daddy," Jack says suddenly. "Not my daddy. Dexter Gordon. The tune was called 'Daddy Played the Horn. ' Or maybe the album. The LP. " He stands there, shaking his head, then nods. "Plays. Daddy Plays. 'Daddy Plays the Horn. ' " And just like that it all comes back. Dexter Gordon playing on the hi-fi. Jacky Sawyer behind the couch, playing with his toy London taxi, so satisfying because of its weight, which somehow made it seem more real than a toy. His father and Richard's father talking. Phil Sawyer and Morgan Sloat.
Imagine what this guy would be like over there, Uncle Morgan had said, and that had been Jack Sawyer's first hint of the Territories. When Jacky was six, Jacky got the word. And ¡ª
"When Jacky was twelve, Jacky actually went there," he says.
Ridiculous! Morgan's son trumpets. Utterly . . . ba-haaa! . . . ridiculous! Next you'll be telling me there really were men in the sky!
But before Jack can tell his mental version of his old pal that or anything else, another car arrives. This one pulls up beside him. Looking suspiciously out of the driver's window (the expression is habitual, Jack has found, and means nothing in itself ) is Elvena Morton, Henry Leyden's housekeeper.
"What in the tarnal are you doin' way down here, Jack Sawyer?" she asks.
He gives her a smile. "Didn't sleep very well, Mrs. Morton. Thought I'd take a little walk to clear my head. "
"And do you always go walking through the dews and the damps when you want to clear your head?" she asks, casting her eyes down at his jeans, which are wet to the knee and even a bit beyond. "Does that help?"
"I guess I got lost in my own thoughts," he says.
"I guess you did," she says. "Get in and I'll give you a lift most of the way back to your place. Unless, that is, you've got a little more head clearing to do. "
Jack has to grin. That's a good one. Reminds him of his late mother, actually. (When asked by her impatient son what was for dinner and when it would be served, Lily Cavanaugh was apt to say, "Fried farts with onions, wind pudding and air sauce for dessert, come and get it at ha' past a pickle. ")
"I guess my head's as clear as I can expect today," he says, and goes around the front of Mrs. Morton's old brown Toyota. There's a brown bag on the passenger seat with leafy stuff poking o
ut of it. Jack moves it to the middle, then sits down.
"I don't know if the early bird gets the worm," she says, driving on, "but the early shopper gets the best greens at Roy's, I can tell you that. Also, I like to get there before the layabouts. "
"Layabouts, Mrs. Morton?"
She gives him her best suspicious look, eyes cutting to the side, right corner of her mouth quirked down as if at the taste of something sour.
"Take up space at the lunch counter and talk about the Fisherman this and the Fisherman that. Who he might be, what he might be ¡ª a Swede or a Pole or an Irish ¡ª and of course what they'll do to him when he's caught, which he would have been long ago if anyone but that nummie-squarehead Dale Gilbertson was in charge of things. So says they. Easy to take charge when you got your ass cozied down on one of Roy Soderholm's stools, cuppa coffee in one hand and a sinker in the other. So thinks I. Course, half of 'em's also got the unemployment check in their back pockets, but they won't talk about that. My father used to say, 'Show me a man who's too good to hay in July and I'll show you a man that won't turn a hand the rest of the year, neither. ' "
Jack settles in the passenger bucket, knees against the dash, and watches the road unroll. They'll be back in no time. His pants are starting to dry and he feels oddly at peace. The nice thing about Elvena Morton is that you don't have to hold up your end of the conversation, because she is glad to take care of everything. Another Lily-ism occurs to him. Of a very talkative person (Uncle Morgan, for instance), she was apt to say that So-and-so's tongue was "hung in the middle and running on both ends. "
He grins a little, and raises a casual hand to hide his mouth from Mrs. M. She'd ask him what was so funny, and what would he tell her? That he had just been thinking her tongue was hung in the middle? But it's also funny how the thoughts and memories are flooding back. Did he just yesterday try to call his mother, forgetting she was dead? That now seems like something he might have done in a different life. Maybe it was a different life. God knows he doesn't seem like the same man who swung his legs out of bed this morning, wearily, and with a feeling best described as doomish. He feels fully alive for the first time since . . . well, since Dale first brought him out this very same road, he supposes, and showed him the nice little place that had once belonged to Dale's father.
Elvena Morton, meanwhile, rolls on.
"Although I also admit that I take any excuse to get out of the house when he starts with the Mad Mongoloid," she says. The Mad Mon-goloid is Mrs. Morton's term for Henry's Wisconsin Rat persona. Jack nods understanding, not knowing that before many hours are passed, he will be meeting a fellow nicknamed the Mad Hungarian. Life's little coincidences.
"It's always early in the morning that he takes it into his head to do the Mad Mongoloid, and I've told him, 'Henry, if you have to scream like that and say awful things and then play that awful music by kids who never should have been let near a tuba, let alone an electrical guitar, why do you do it in the morning when you know it spoils you for the whole day?' And it does, he gets a headache four times out of every five he pretends to be the Mad Mongoloid and by afternoon he's lying in his bedroom with an icebag on his poor forehead and not a bite of lunch will he take on those days, neither. Sometimes his supper will be gone when I check the next day ¡ª I always leave it in the same place in the refrigerator, unless he tells me he wants to cook himself ¡ª but half the time it's still there and even when it's gone I think that sometimes he just tips it down the garbage disposer. "
Jack grunts. It's all he has to do. Her words wash over him and he thinks of how he will put the sneaker in a Baggie, handling it with the fire tongs, and when he turns it over at the police station, the chain of evidence will begin. He's thinking about how he needs to make sure there's nothing else in the sneaker box, and check the wrapping paper. He also wants to check those sugar packets. Maybe there's a restaurant name printed under the bird pictures. It's a longshot, but ¡ª
"And he says, 'Mrs. M. , I can't help it. Some days I just wake up as the Rat. And although I pay for it later, there's such joy in it while the fit is on me. Such total joy. ' And I asked him, I said, 'How can there be joy in music about children wanting to kill their parents and eat fetuses and have sex with animals' ¡ª as one of those songs really was about, Jack, I heard it clear as day ¡ª 'and all of that?' I asked him, and he said ¡ª Uhhp, here we are. "
They have indeed reached the driveway leading to Henry's house. A quarter of a mile further along is the roof of Jack's own place. His Ram pickup twinkles serenely in the driveway. He can't see his porch, most certainly can't see the horror that lies upon its boards, waiting for someone to clean it up. To clean it up in the name of decency.
"I could run you all the way up," she says. "Why don't I just do that?"
Jack, thinking of the sneaker and the rotten baloney smell hanging around it, smiles, shakes his head, and quickly opens the passenger door. "Guess I need to do a little more thinking after all," he says.
She looks at him with that expression of discontented suspicion which is, Jack suspects, love. She knows that Jack has brightened Henry Leyden's life, and for that alone he believes she loves him. He likes to hope so, anyway. It occurs to him that she never mentioned the baseball cap he's holding, but why would she? In this part of the world, every man's got at least four.
He starts up the road, hair flopping (his days of styled cuts at Chez-Chez on Rodeo Drive are long behind him now ¡ª this is the Coulee Country, and when he thinks of it at all, he gets his hair cut by old Herb Roeper down on Chase Street next to the Amvets), his gait as loose and lanky as a boy's. Mrs. Morton leans out her window and calls after him. "Change out of those jeans, Jack! The minute you get back! Don't let them dry on you! That's how arthritis starts!"