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“Well, if yo friend Speedy was here,” the black man said, “whoever he might be, or wherever he might be in this wide old world, he might tell you that you cain’t carry the world on yo shoulders, son. You cain’t do that. No one can. Try to carry the world on yo shoulders, why, first it’s gonna break yo back, and then it’s gonna break you sperrit.”
His taillights dot-dashed briefly in the rainy dark at the foot of the ramp, sending reflections in smeary red arrows up the pavement toward where they stood.
But Uncle Tommy had been fond of quoting a Chinese proverb that went: The man whose life you save is your responsibility for the rest of your life.
Then a large brown boulder at the edge of the woods did move, and Jack realized that the boulder was Wolf. He had hunkered down on his heels and was staring at Jack. “Oh, you inconvenient son of a bitch,” Jack said,
Jack grinned, without knowing he was going to do it—the sense of triumph and of something he could only describe as armored virtue took him so much by surprise.
Far out in the ether a million universes away, three specks of dust floated near one another in interstellar space. Jack was the dust, and Jack was the space between. Galaxies unreeled around his head like long spools of paper, and fate punched each in random patterns, turning them into macrocosmic player-piano tapes which would play everything from ragtime to funeral dirges. Jack’s happy teeth bit an orange: Jack’s unhappy flesh screamed as the teeth tore him open. He was a trillion dust-kitties under a billion beds. He was a joey dreaming of its previous life in its mother’s pouch as the
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No, Jack, the Talisman whispered, and he understood why it had yielded to the gentle pressure of his hands. It was alive; of course it was. No, Jack: All will be well . . . all will be well . . . and all manner of things will be well. Only believe; be true; stand; do not falter now. Peace in him—oh such deep peace.
It occurred to him dimly that you could only express your ownership of a thing in terms of how freely you could give it up . . .
You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, his mind hammered at him. You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you don’t learn that in school, you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going head-first into the rocks like a Titan II that didn’t fire off right.
