Wolves of the Calla (44 page)

“I have money,” Callahan says, trying to give back the five.

“A man on the run never has enough,” says the black man. “And please don’t tell me you’re not on the run. Don’t insult my intelligence.”

“I thank you,” Callahan says.

“De nada,
” says the black man. “Where are you going? Roughly speaking?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Callahan replies, then smiles. “Roughly speaking.”

Picking oranges in Florida. Pushing a broom in New Orleans. Mucking out horse-stalls in Lufkin, Texas. Handing out real estate brochures on streetcorners in Phoenix, Arizona. Working jobs that pay cash. Observing the ever-changing faces on the bills. Noting the different names in the papers. Jimmy Carter is elected President, but so are Ernest “Fritz” Hollings and Ronald Reagan. George Bush is also elected President. Gerald Ford decides to run again and
he
is elected President. The names in the papers (those of the celebrities change the most frequently, and there are many he has never heard of) don’t matter. The faces on the currency don’t matter. What matters is the sight of a weathervane against a violent pink sunset, the sound of his heels on an empty road in Utah, the sound of the wind in the New Mexico desert, the sight of a child skipping rope beside a junked-out Chevrolet Caprice in Fossil, Oregon. What matters is the whine of the powerlines beside Highway 50 west of Elko, Nevada, and a dead crow in a ditch outside Rainbarrel Springs. Sometimes he’s sober and sometimes he gets drunk. Once he lays up in an abandoned shed
—
this is just over the
California state line from Nevada
—
and drinks for four days straight. It ends with seven hours of off-and-on vomiting. For the first hour or so, the puking is so constant and so violent he is convinced it will kill him. Later on, he can only wish it would. And when it’s over, he swears to himself that he’s done, no more booze for him, he’s finally learned his lesson, and a week later he’s drunk again and staring up at the strange stars behind the restaurant where he has hired on as a dishwasher. He is an animal in a trap and he doesn’t care. Sometimes there are vampires and sometimes he kills them. Mostly he lets them live, because he’s afraid of drawing attention to himself
—
the attention of the low men. Sometimes he asks himself what he thinks he’s doing, where the hell he’s going, and such questions are apt to send him in search of the next bottle in a hurry. Because he’s really not going anywhere. He’s just following the highways in hiding and dragging his trap along behind him, he’s just listening to the call of those roads and going from one to the next. Trapped or not, sometimes he is happy; sometimes he sings in his chains like the sea. He wants to see the next weathervane standing against the next pink sunset. He wants to see the next silo crumbling at the end of some disappeared farmer’s long-abandoned north field and see the next droning truck with
TONOPAH GRAVEL
or
ASPLUNDH HEAVY CONSTRUCTION
written on the side. He’s in hobo heaven, lost in the split personalities of America. He wants to hear the wind in canyons and know that he’s the only one who hears it. He wants to scream and hear the echoes run away. When the taste of Barlow’s blood is too strong in his mouth, he wants to drink. And, of course, when he sees the lost-pet posters or the messages chalked on the sidewalks, he wants to move on. Out west he sees fewer of them, and neither his name nor his description is on
any of them. From time to time he sees vampires cruising
—
give us this day our daily blood
—
but he leaves them be. They’re mosquitoes, after all, no more than that.

In the spring of 1981 he finds himself rolling into the city of Sacramento in the back of what may be the oldest International Harvester stake-bed truck still on the road in California. He’s crammed in with roughly three dozen Mexican illegals, there is
mescal
and tequila and pot and several bottles of wine, they’re all drunk and done up and Callahan is perhaps the drunkest of them all. The names of his companions come back to him in later years like names spoken in a haze of fever: Escobar
. . .
Estrada
. . .
Javier
. . .
Esteban
. . .
Rosario
. . .
Echeverria
. . .
Caverra. Are they all names he will later encounter in the Calla, or is that just a booze-hallucination? For that matter, what is he to make of his own name, which is so close to that of the place where he finishes up?
Calla, Callahan. Calla, Callahan.
Sometimes, when he’s long getting to sleep in his pleasant rectory bed, the two names chase each other in his head like the tigers in
Little Black Sambo.

Sometimes a line of poetry comes to him, a paraphrase from (he thinks) Archibald MacLeish’s “Epistle to Be Left in Earth.”
It was not the voice of God but only the thunder.
That’s not right, but it’s how he remembers it
. Not God but the thunder.
Or is that only what he wants to believe? How many times has God been denied just that way?

In any case, all of that comes later. When he rolls into Sacramento he’s drunk and he’s happy. There are no questions in his mind. He’s even halfway happy the next day, hangover and all. He finds a job easily; jobs are everywhere, it seems, lying around like apples after a windstorm has gone through the orchard. As long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, that is, or scalded by hot water or
sometimes blistered by the handle of an ax or a shovel; in his years on the road no one has ever offered him a stockbroker’s job.

The work he gets in Sacramento is unloading trucks at a block-long bed-and-mattress store called Sleepy John’s. Sleepy John is preparing for his once-yearly Mattre$$ Ma$$acre, and all morning long Callahan and a crew of five other men haul in the kings and queens and doubles. Compared to some of the day-labor he’s done over the last years, this job is a tit.

At lunch, Callahan and the rest of the men sit in the shade of the loading dock. So far as he can tell, there’s no one in this crew from the International Harvester, but he wouldn’t swear to it; he was awfully drunk. All he knows for sure is that he’s once again the only guy present with a white skin. All of them are eating enchiladas from Crazy Mary’s down the road. There’s a dirty old boombox sitting on a pile of crates, playing salsa. Two young men tango together while the others
—
Callahan included
—
put aside their lunches so they can clap along.

A young woman in a skirt and blouse comes out, watches the men dance disapprovingly, then looks at Callahan. “You’re anglo, right?” she says.

“Anglo as the day is long,” Callahan agrees.

“Then maybe you’d like this. Certainly no good to the rest of them.” She hands him the newspaper
—
the Sacramento
Bee—
then looks at the dancing Mexicans. “Beaners,” she says, and the subtext is in the tone: What can you do?

Callahan considers rising to his feet and kicking her narrow can’t-dance anglo ass for her, but it’s noon, too late in the day to get another job if he loses this one. And even if he doesn’t wind up in the
calabozo
for assault, he won’t get paid. He settles for giving her turned back the finger, and
laughs when several of the men applaud. The young woman wheels, looks at them suspiciously, then goes back inside. Still grinning, Callahan shakes open the paper. The grin lasts until he gets to the page marked
NATIONAL BRIEFS
, then fades in a hurry. Between a story about a train derailment in Vermont and a bank robbery in Missouri, he finds this:

AWARD-WINNING “STREET ANGEL” CRITICAL

NEW YORK (AP) Rowan R. Magruder, owner and Chief Supervisor of what may be America’s most highly regarded shelter for the homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted, is in critical condition after being assaulted by the so-called Hitler Brothers. The Hitler Brothers have been operating in the five boroughs of New York for at least eight years. According to police, they are believed responsible for over three dozen assaults and the deaths of two men. Unlike their other victims, Magruder is neither black nor Jewish, but he was found in a doorway not far from Home, the shelter he founded in 1968, with the Hitler Brothers’ trademark swastika cut into his forehead. Magruder had also suffered multiple stab-wounds.

Home gained nationwide notice in 1977, when Mother Teresa visited, helped to serve dinner, and prayed with the clients. Magruder himself was the subject of a
Newsweek
cover story in 1980, when the East Side’s so-called “Street Angel” was named Manhattan’s Man of the Year by Mayor Ed Koch.

A doctor familiar with the case rated Magruder’s chances of pulling through as “no higher than three in ten.” He said that, as well as being branded, Magruder was blinded by his assailants. “I think of
myself as a merciful man,” the doctor said, “but in my opinion, the men who did this should be beheaded.”

Callahan reads the article again, wondering if this is “his” Rowan Magruder or another one
—
a Rowan Magruder from a world where a guy named Chadbourne is on some of the greenbacks, say. He’s somehow sure that it’s his, and that he was meant to see this particular item. Certainly he is in what he thinks of as the “real world” now, and it’s not just the thin sheaf of currency in his wallet that tells him so. It’s a feeling, a kind of tone. A truth. If so (and it
is
so, he knows it), how much he has missed out here on the hidden highways. Mother Teresa came to visit! Helped to ladle out soup! Hell, for all Callahan knows, maybe she cooked up a big old mess of Toads n Dumplins! Could’ve; the recipe was right there, Scotch-taped to the wall beside the stove. And an award! The cover of
Newsweek!
He’s pissed he didn’t see that, but you don’t see the news magazines very regularly when you’re traveling with the carnival and fixing the Krazy Kups or mucking out the bull-stalls behind the rodeo in Enid, Oklahoma.

He is so deeply ashamed that he doesn’t even
know
he’s ashamed. Not even when Juan Castillo says, “Why joo crine, Donnie?”

“Am I?” he asks, and wipes underneath his eyes, and yeah, he is. He is crying. But he doesn’t know it’s for shame, not then. He assumes it’s shock, and probably part of it is. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Where joo goan?” Juan persists. “Lunch break’s almost over, man.”

“I have to leave,” Callahan says. “I have to go back east.”

“You take off, they ain goan pay joo.”

“I know,” Callahan says. “It’s okay.”

And what a lie that is. Because nothing’s okay.

Nothing.

“I had a couple of hundred dollars sewn into the bottom of my backpack,” Callahan said. They were now sitting on the steps of the church in the bright sunshine. “I bought an airplane ticket back to New York. Speed was of the essence—of course—but that really wasn’t the only reason. I had to get off those highways in hiding.” He gave Eddie a small nod. “The todash turnpikes. They’re as addictive as the booze—”

“More,” Roland said. He saw three figures coming toward them: Rosalita, shepherding the Tavery twins, Frank and Francine. The girl had a large sheet of paper in her hands and was carrying it out in front of her with an air of reverence that was almost comic. “Wandering’s the most addictive drug there is, I think, and every hidden road leads on to a dozen more.”

“You say true, I say thankya,” Callahan replied. He looked gloomy and sad and, Roland thought, a little lost.

“Pere, we’d hear the rest of your tale, but I’d have you save it until evening. Or tomorrow evening, if we don’t get back until then. Our young friend Jake will be here shortly—”

“You know that, do you?” Callahan asked, interested but not disbelieving.

“Aye,” Susannah said.

“I’d see what you have in there before he comes,” Roland said. “The story of how you came by it is part of
your
story, I think—”

“Yes,” Callahan said. “It is. The
point
of my story, I think.”

“—and must wait its place. As for now, things are stacking up.”

“They have a way of doing that,” Callahan said. “For months—sometimes even years, as I tried to explain to you—time hardly seems to exist. Then everything comes in a gasp.”

“You say true,” Roland said. “Step over with me to see the twins, Eddie. I believe the young lady has her eye on you.”

“She can look as much as she wants,” Susannah said good-humoredly. “Lookin’s free. I might just sit here in the sun on these steps, Roland, if it’s all the same to you. Been a long time since I rode, and I don’t mind telling you that I’m saddle-sore. Not having any lower pins seems to put everything else out of whack.”

“Do ya either way,” Roland said, but he didn’t mean it and Eddie knew he didn’t. The gunslinger wanted Susannah to stay right where she was, for the time being. He could only hope Susannah wasn’t catching the same vibe.

As they walked toward the children and Rosalita, Roland spoke to Eddie, low and quick. “I’m going into the church with him by myself. Just know that it’s not the both of you I want to keep away from whatever’s in there. If it
is
Black Thirteen—and I believe it must be—it’s best she not go near it.”

“Given her delicate condition, you mean. Roland, I would have thought Suze having a miscarriage would almost be something you’d want.”

Roland said: “It’s not a miscarriage that concerns me. I’m worried about Black Thirteen making the thing inside her even stronger.” He paused again.
“
Both
things, mayhap. The baby and the baby’s keeper.”

“Mia.”

“Yes, her.” Then he smiled at the Tavery twins. Francine gave him a perfunctory smile in return, saving full wattage for Eddie.