We get pretty busy by four, five o'clock.
Well, he couldn't very well say that Smokey had lied to him. Up until the very moment Jack pushed away his plate and began making his wage, the Tap had been deserted. But by six o'clock there were maybe fifty people in the Tap, and the brawny waitress - Gloria - came on duty to yells and hoo-raws from some of the patrons. Gloria joined Lori, serving a few carafes of wine, a lot of Black Russians, and oceans of beer.
Besides the kegs of Busch, Jack lugged out case after case of bottled beer - Budweiser, of course, but also such local favorites as Genesee, Utica Club, and Rolling Rock. His hands began to blister, his back to ache.
Between trips to the storeroom for cases of bottled beer and trips to the storeroom to 'run me out a keg, Jack' (a phrase for which he was already coming to feel an elemental dread), he went back to the dancefloor, the mop-bucket, and the big bottle of Pledge. Once an empty beer-bottle flew past his head, missing him by inches. He ducked, heart racing, as it shattered against the wall. Smokey ran the drunken perpetrator out, his dentures bared in a great false alligator grin. Looking out the window, Jack saw the drunk hit a parking-meter hard enough to pop the red VIOLATION flag up.
'Come on, Jack,' Smokey called impatiently from the bar, 'it missed you, didn't it? Clean that mess up!'
Smokey sent him into the men's can half an hour later. A middle-aged man with a Joe Pyne haircut was standing woozily at one of the two ice-choked urinals, one hand braced against the wall, the other brandishing a huge uncircumcised penis. A puddle of puke steamed between his spraddled work-boots.
'Clean her up, kid,' the man said, weaving his way back toward the door and clapping Jack on the back almost hard enough to knock him over. 'Man's gotta make room any way he can, right?'
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 f**k 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 flash-light 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 week-nights.
Lori said, 'You look as pale as pastry, Jack. You okay?'