“What’s a movie, Jack?” Wolf asked. He had been a dreadful problem to Jack, he knew—such a dreadful problem that he now hesitated to protest about anything, or even express unease. But a frightening intuition had come to him: that going to a movie and hitching a ride might be the same thing. Jack called the roaring carts and carriages “cars,” and “Chevys,” and “Jartrans,” and “station-wagons” (these latter, Wolf thought, must be like the coaches in the Territories which carried passengers from one coach-station to the next). Might the bellowing, stinking carriages also be called “movies”? It sounded very possible.
“Well,” Jack said, “it’s easier to show you than to tell you. I think you’ll like it. Come on.”
Jack stumbled coming out of the ditch and went briefly to his knees. “Jack, are you okay?” Wolf asked anxiously.
Jack nodded. They started across the parking lot, which smelled just as bad as Wolf had known it would.
6
Jack had come a good part of the thirty-five miles between Arcanum, Ohio, and Muncie, Indiana, on Wolf’s broad back. Wolf was frightened of cars, terrified of trucks, nauseated by the smells of almost everything, apt to howl and run at sudden loud noises. But he was also almost tireless. As far as that goes, you can strike the “almost,” Jack thought now. So far as I know, he is tireless.
Jack had moved them away from the Arcanum ramp as fast as he could, forcing his wet, aching legs into a rusty trot. His head had been throbbing like a slick, flexing fist inside his skull, waves of heat and cold rushing through him. Wolf moved easily to his left, his stride so long that he was keeping up with Jack easily by doing no more than a moderately fast walk. Jack knew that he had maybe gotten paranoid about the cops, but the man in the CASE FARM EQUIPMENT hat had looked really scared. And pissed.
They hadn’t gone even a quarter of a mile when a deep, burning stitch settled into his side and he asked Wolf if he could give him a piggyback for a while.
“Huh?” Wolf asked.
“You know,” Jack said, and pantomimed.
A big grin had overspread Wolf’s face. Here at last was something he understood; here was something he could do.
“You want a horseyback!” he cried, delighted.
“Yeah, I guess . . .”
“Oh, yeah! Wolf! Here and now! Used to give em to my litter-brothers! Jump up, Jack!” Wolf bent down, holding his curved hands ready, stirrups for Jack’s thighs.
“Now when I get too heavy, just put me d—”
Before he could finish, Wolf had swept him up and was running lightly down the road with him into the dark—really running. The cold, rainy air flipped Jack’s hair back from his hot brow.
“Wolf, you’ll wear yourself out!” Jack shouted.
“Not me! Wolf! Wolf! Runnin here and now!” For the first time since they had come over, Wolf sounded actually happy. He ran for the next two hours, until they were west of Arcanum and travelling along a dark, unmarked stretch of two-lane black-top. Jack saw a deserted barn standing slumped in a shaggy, untended field, and they slept there that night.
Wolf wanted nothing to do with downtown areas where the traffic was a roaring flood and the stinks rose up to heaven in a noxious cloud, and Jack didn’t want anything to do with them, either. Wolf stuck out too much. But he had forced one stop, at a roadside store just across the Indiana line, near Harrisville. While Wolf waited nervously out by the road, hunkering down, digging at the dirt, getting up, walking around in a stiff little circle, then hunkering again, Jack bought a newspaper and checked the weather page carefully. The next full moon was on October 31st—Halloween, that was fitting enough. Jack turned back to the front page so he could see what day it was today . . . yesterday, that had been now. It had been October 26th.
7
Jack pulled open one of the glass doors and stepped inside the lobby of the Town Line Sixplex. He looked around sharply at Wolf, but Wolf looked—for the moment, at least—pretty much okay. Wolf was, in fact, cautiously optimistic . . . at least for the moment. He didn’t like being inside a building, but at least it wasn’t a car. There was a good smell in here—light and sort of tasty. Or would have been, except for a bitter, almost rancid undersmell. Wolf looked left and saw a glass box full of white stuff. That was the source of the good light smell.
“Jack,” he whispered.
“Huh?”
“I want some of that white stuff, please. But none of the pee.”
“Pee? What are you talking about?”
Wolf searched for a more formal word and found it. “Urine.” He pointed at a thing with a light going off and on inside it. BUTTERY FLAVORING, it read. “That’s some kind of urine, isn’t it? It’s got to be, the way it smells.”
Jack smiled tiredly. “A popcorn without the fake butter, right,” he said. “Now pipe down, okay?”
“Sure, Jack,” Wolf said humbly. “Right here and now.”
The ticket-girl had been chewing a big wad of grape-flavored bubble gum. Now she stopped. She looked at Jack, then at Jack’s big, hulking companion. The gum sat on her tongue inside her half-open mouth like a large purple tumor. She rolled her eyes at the guy behind the counter.
“Two, please,” Jack said. He took out his roll of bills, dirty, tag-eared ones with an orphan five hiding in the middle.
“Which show?” Her eyes moved back and forth, back and forth, Jack to Wolf and Wolf to Jack. She looked like a woman watching a hot table-tennis match.
“What’s just starting?” Jack asked her.
“Well . . .” She glanced down at the paper Scotch-taped beside her. “There’s The Flying Dragon in Cinema Four. It’s a kung-fu movie with Chuck Norris.” Back and forth went her eyes, back and forth, back and forth. “Then, in Cinema Six, there’s a double feature. Two Ralph Bakshi cartoons. Wizards and The Lord of the Rings.”
Jack felt relieved. Wolf was nothing but a big, overgrown kid, and kids loved cartoons. This could work out after all. Wolf would maybe find at least one thing in the Country of Bad Smells that would amuse him, and Jack could sleep for three hours.
“That one,” he said. “The cartoons.”
“That’ll be four dollars,” she said. “Bargain Matinee prices end at two.” She pushed a button and two tickets poked out of a slot with a mechanical ratcheting noise. Wolf flinched backward with a small cry.
The girl looked at him, eyebrows raised.
“You jumpy, mister?”
“No, I’m Wolf,” Wolf said. He smiled, showing a great many teeth. Jack would have sworn that Wolf showed more teeth now when he smiled than he had a day or two ago. The girl looked at all those teeth. She wet her lips.
“He’s okay. He just—” Jack shrugged. “He doesn’t get off the farm much. You know.” He gave her the orphan five. She handled it as if she wished she had a pair of tongs to do it with.
“Come on, Wolf.”
As they turned away to the candy-stand, Jack stuffing the one into the pocket of his grimy jeans, the ticket-girl mouthed to the counterman: Look at his nose!
Jack looked at Wolf and saw Wolf’s nose flaring rhythmically.
“Stop that,” he muttered.
“Stop what, Jack?”
“Doing that thing with your nose.”
“Oh. I’ll try, Jack, but—”
“Shh.”
“Help you, son?” the counterman asked.
“Yes, please. A Junior Mints, a Reese’s Pieces, and an extra-large popcorn without the grease.”
The counterman got the stuff and pushed it across to them. Wolf got the tub of popcorn in both hands and immediately began to snaffle it up in great jaw-cracking chomps.
The counterman looked at this silently.
“Doesn’t get off the farm much,” Jack repeated. Part of him was already wondering if these two had seen enough of sufficient oddness to get them thinking that a call to the police might be in order. He thought—not for the first time—that there was a real irony in all this. In New York or L.A., probably no
one would have given Wolf a second look . . . or if a second look, certainly not a third. Apparently the weirdness-toleration level was a lot lower out in the middle of the country. But, of course, Wolf would have flipped out of his gourd long since if they had been in New York or L.A.
“I’ll bet he don’t,” the counterman said. “That’ll be two-eighty.”
Jack paid it with an inward wince, realizing he had just laid out a quarter of his cash for their afternoon at the movies.
Wolf was grinning at the counterman through a mouthful of popcorn. Jack recognized it as Wolf’s A #1 Friendly Smile, but he somehow doubted that the counterman was seeing it that way. There were all those teeth in that smile . . . hundreds of them, it seemed.
And Wolf was flaring his nostrils again.
Screw it, let them call the cops, if that’s what they want to do, he thought with a weariness that was more adult than child. It can’t slow us down much more than we’re slowed down already. He can’t ride in the new cars because he can’t stand the smell of the catalytic convertors and he can’t ride in old cars because they smell like exhaust and sweat and oil and beer and he probably can’t ride in any cars because he’s so goddam claustrophobic. Tell the truth, Jack-O, even if it’s only to yourself. You’re going along telling yourself he’s going to get over it pretty soon, but it’s probably not going to happen. So what are we going to do? Walk across Indiana, I guess. Correction, Wolf is going to walk across Indiana. Me, I’m going to cross Indiana riding horseyback. But first I’m going to take Wolf into this damn movie theater and sleep either until both pictures are over or until the cops arrive. And that is the end of my tale, sir.
“Well, enjoy the show,” the counterman said.
“You bet,” Jack replied. He started away and then realized Wolf wasn’t with him. Wolf was staring at something over the counterman’s head with vacant, almost superstitious wonder. Jack looked up and saw a mobile advertising the re-issue of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters floating around on drafts of convection.
“Come on, Wolf,” he said.
8
Wolf knew it wasn’t going to work as soon as they went through the door.
The room was small, dim, and dank. The smells in here were terrible. A poet, smelling what Wolf was smelling at that moment, might have called it the stink of sour dreams. Wolf was no poet. He only knew that the smell of the popcorn-urine predominated, and that he felt suddenly like throwing up.
Then the lights began to dim even further, turning the room into a cave.
“Jack,” he moaned, clutching at Jack’s arm. “Jack, we oughtta get out of here, okay?”
“You’ll like it, Wolf,” Jack muttered, aware of Wolf’s distress but not of its depth. Wolf was, after all, always distressed to some degree. In this world, the word distress defined him. “Try it.”
“Okay,” Wolf said, and Jack heard the agreement but not the thin waver that meant Wolf was holding on to the last thread of his control with both hands. They sat down with Wolf on the aisle, his knees accordioned up uncomfortably, the tub of popcorn (which he no longer wanted) clutched to his chest.
In front of them a match flared briefly yellow. Jack smelled the dry tang of pot, so familiar in the movies that it could be dismissed as soon as identified. Wolf smelled a forest-fire.
“Jack—!”
“Shhh, picture’s starting.”
And I’m dozing off.
Jack would never know of Wolf’s heroism in the next few minutes; Wolf did not really know of it himself. He only knew that he had to try to stick this nightmare out for Jack’s sake. It must be all right, he thought, look, Wolf, Jack’s going right to sleep, right to sleep right here and now. And you know Jack wouldn’t take you to a Hurt-Place, so just stick it out . . . just wait . . . Wolf! . . . it’ll be all right . . .
But Wolf was a cyclic creature, and his cycle was approaching its monthly climax. His instincts had become exquisitely refined, almost undeniable. His rational mind told him that he would be all right in here, that Jack wouldn’t have brought him otherwise. But that was like a man with an itchy nose telling himself not to sneeze in church because it was impolite.
He sat there smelling forest-fire in a dark, stinking cave, twitching each time a shadow passed down the aisle, waiting numbly for something to fall on him from the shadows overhead. And then a magic window opened at the front of the cave and he sat there in the acrid stink of his own terror-sweat, eyes wide, face a mask of horror, as cars crashed and overturned, as buildings burned, as one man chased another.
“Previews,” Jack mumbled. “Told you you’d like it. . . .”
There were Voices. One said nosmoking. One said don’t litter. One said groupratesavailable. One said Bargain Matinee-priceseveryweekdayuntilfourp.m.
“Wolf, we got screwed,” Jack mumbled. He started to say something else, but it turned into a snore.
A final voice said andnowourfeaturepresentation and that was when Wolf lost control. Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings was in Dolby sound, and the projectionist had orders to really crank it in the afternoons, because that’s when the heads drifted in, and the heads really liked loud Dolby.
There was a screeching, discordant crash of brass. The magic window opened again and now Wolf could see the fire—shifting oranges and reds.
He howled and leaped to his feet, pulling with him a Jack who was more asleep than awake.
“Jack!” he screamed. “Get out! Got to get out! Wolf! See the fire! Wolf! Wolf!”
“Down in front!” someone shouted.
“Shut up, hoser!” someone else yelled.
The door at the back of Cinema 6 opened. “What’s going on in here?”
“Wolf, shut up!” Jack hissed. “For God’s sake—”
“OWWWWWW-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Wolf howled.
A woman got a good look at Wolf as the white light from the lobby fell on him. She screamed and began dragging her little boy out by one arm. Literally dragging him; the kid had fallen to his knees and was skidding up the popcorn-littered carpet of the center aisle. One of his sneakers had come off.
“OWWWWWWWW-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH-HHOOOOOOHHHHOOOOOO!”
The pothead three rows down had turned around and was looking at them with bleary interest. He held a smouldering joint in one hand; a spare was cocked behind his ear. “Far . . . out,” he pronounced. “Fucking werewolves of London strike again, right?”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Okay, we’ll get out. No problem. Just . . . just don’t do that anymore, okay? Okay?”
He started leading Wolf out. The weariness had fallen over him again.
The light of the lobby hit his eyes sharply, needling them. The woman who had dragged the little boy out of the theater was backed into a corner with her arms around the kid. When she saw Jack lead the still-howling Wolf through the double doors of Cinema 6, she swept the kid up and made a break for it.
The counterman, the ticket-girl, the projectionist, and a tall man in a sportcoat that looked as if it belonged on the back of a racetrack tout were clustered together in a tight little group. Jack supposed the guy in the checkered sportcoat and white shoes was the manager.
The doors of the other cinemas in the hive had opened partway. Faces peered out of the darkness to see what all the hooraw was. To Jack, they all looked like badgers peering out of their holes.
“Get out!” the man in the checkered sportcoat said. “Get out, I’ve called the police already, they’ll be here in five minutes.”
Bullshit you did, Jack thought, feeling a ray of hope. You didn’t have time. And if we blow right away, maybe—just maybe—you won’t bother.
“We’re going,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . my big brother’s an epileptic and he just had a seizure. We . . . we forgot his medicine.”
At the word epileptic, the ticket-girl and the counterman recoiled. It was as if Jack had said leper.
“Come on, Wolf.”
He saw the manager’s ey
es drop, saw his lip curl with distaste. Jack followed the glance and saw the wide dark stain on the front of Wolf’s Oshkosh biballs. He had wet himself.
Wolf also saw. Much in Jack’s world was foreign to him, but he apparently knew well enough what that look of contempt meant. He burst into loud, braying, heartbroken sobs.
“Jack, I’m sorry, Wolf is so SORRY!”
“Get him out of here,” the manager said contemptuously, and turned away.
Jack put an arm around Wolf and got him started toward the door. “Come on, Wolf,” he said. He spoke quietly, and with an honest tenderness. He had never felt quite so keenly for Wolf as he did now. “Come on, it was my fault, not yours. Let’s go.”
“Sorry.” Wolf wept brokenly. “I’m no good, God pound me, just no good.”
“You’re plenty good,” Jack said. “Come on.”
He pushed open the door and they went out into the thin, late-October warmth.
The woman with the child was easily twenty yards away, but when she saw Jack and Wolf, she retreated backward toward her car, holding her kid in front of her like a cornered gangster with a hostage.
“Don’t let him come near me!” she screamed. “Don’t let that monster come near my baby! Do you hear? Don’t let him come near me!”
Jack thought he should say something to calm her down, but he couldn’t think what it might be. He was too tired.
He and Wolf started away, heading across the parking lot at an angle. Halfway back to the road, Jack staggered. The world went briefly gray.
He was vaguely aware of Wolf sweeping him up in his arms and carrying him that way, like a baby. Vaguely aware that Wolf was crying.
“Jack, I’m so sorry, please don’t hate Wolf, I can be a good old Wolf, you wait, you’ll see . . .”
“I don’t hate you,” Jack said. “I know you’re . . . you’re a good old—”
Talisman 01 - The Talisman Page 33
