Wolves of the Calla (64 page)

“For me, the bottom came in a jail cell,” Callahan said. “It was early morning, and I was actually relatively sober. Also, it was no drunk tank but a cell with a blanket on the cot and an actual seat on the toilet. Compared to some of the places I’d been in, I was farting through satin. The only bothersome things were the name guy . . . and that song.”

The light falling through the cell’s small chickenwire-reinforced window is gray, which consequently makes his skin gray. Also his hands are dirty and covered with scratches. The crud under some of his nails is black (dirt) and under some it’s maroon (dried blood). He vaguely remembers tussling with someone who kept calling him sir, so he guesses that he might be here on the ever-popular Penal Code 48, Assaulting an Officer. All he wanted
—
Callahan has a slightly clearer memory of
this
—
was to try on the kid’s cap, which was very spiffy. He remembers trying to tell the young cop (from the look of this one, pretty soon they’ll be hiring kids who aren’t even toilet-trained as police officers, at least in Topeka) that he’s always on the lookout for funky new lids, he always wears a cap because he’s got the Mark of Cain on his forehead. “Looksh like a crossh,” he remembers saying (or trying to say), “but it’sh rilly the Marga-Gain.” Which, in his cups, is about as close as he can come to saying
Mark of Cain.

Was really drunk last night, but he doesn’t feel so bad as he sits here on the bunk, rubbing a hand through his crazy hair. Mouth doesn’t taste so good
—
sort of like Ruta the Siamese Cat took a dump in it, if you wanted the truth
—
but his head isn’t aching too badly. If only the voices would shut up! Down the hall someone’s droning out a seemingly endless list of names in alphabetical order. Closer by, someone is singing his least favorite song: “Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my
li-ife
tonight
. . . ”

“Nailor! . . . Naughton! . . . O’Connor! . . . O’Shaugnessy! . . . Oskowski! . . . Osmer!”

He is just beginning to realize that
he
is the one singing when the trembling begins in his calves. It works its way up to his knees, then to his thighs, deepening and strengthening as it comes. He can see the big muscles in his legs popping up and down like pistons. What is happening to him?

“Palmer! . . . Palmgren!”

The trembling hits his crotch and lower belly. His underwear shorts darken as he sprays them with piss. At the same time his feet start snapping out into the air, as if he’s trying to punt invisible footballs with both of them at the same time.
I’m seizing,
he thinks
. This is probably
it. I’m probably going out. Bye-bye blackbird.
He tries to call for help and nothing comes out of his mouth but a low chugging sound. His arms begin to fly up and down. Now he’s punting invisible footballs with his feet while his arms shout hallelujah, and the guy down the hall is going to go on until the end of the century, maybe until the next Ice Age.

“Peschier! . . . Peters! . . . Pike! . . . Polovik! . . . Rance! . . . Rancourt!”

Callahan’s upper body begins to snap back and forth. Each time it snaps forward he comes closer to losing his balance and falling on the floor. His hands fly up. His feet fly out. There is a sudden spreading pancake of warmth on his ass and he realizes he has just shot the chocolate.

“Ricupero! . . . Robillard! . . . Rossi!”

He snaps backward, all the way to the whitewashed concrete wall where someone has scrawled
BANGO SKANK
and
JUST HAD MY
19
TH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
!
Then forward, this time with the full-body enthusiasm of a Muslim at morning prayers. For a moment he’s staring at the concrete floor from between his naked knees and then he overbalances and goes down on his face. His jaw, which has somehow healed in spite of the nightly binges, rebreaks in three of the original four places. But, just to bring things back into perfect balance
—
four’s the magic number
—
this time his nose breaks, too. He lies jerking on the floor like a hooked fish, his body fingerpainting in the blood, shit, and piss.
Yeah, I’m going out,
he thinks.

“Ryan! . . . Sannelli! . . . Scher!”

But gradually the extravagant
grand mal
jerks of his body moderate to
petit mal,
and then to little more than
twitches. He thinks someone must come, but no one does, not at first. The twitches fade away and now he’s just Donald Frank Callahan, lying on the floor of a jail cell in Topeka, Kansas, where somewhere farther down the hall a man continues working his way through the alphabet.

“Seavey! . . . Sharrow! . . . Shatzer!”

Suddenly, for the first time in months, he thinks of how the cavalry came when the Hitler Brothers were getting ready to carve him up there in that deserted laundrymat on East Forty-seventh. And they were really going to do it
—
the next day or the day after, someone would have found one Donald Frank Callahan, dead as the fabled mackerel and probably wearing his balls for earrings. But then the cavalry came and
—

That was no cavalry,
he thinks as he lies on the floor, his face swelling up again, meet the new face, same as the old face.
That was Voice Number One and Voice Number Two.
Only that isn’t right, either. That was two men, middle-aged at the least, probably getting a little on the old side. That was Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cocknif En Yom, whatever that means. Both of them scared to death. And right to be scared. The Hitler Brothers might not have done a thousand as Lennie had boasted, but they had done plenty and killed some of them, they were a couple of human copperheads, and yes, Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cocknif were absolutely right to be scared. It had turned out all right for them, but it might not have done. And if George and Lennie had turned the tables, what then? Why, instead of finding one dead man in the Turtle Bay Washateria, whoever happened in there first would have found three. That would have made the front page of the
Post
for sure! So those guys had risked their lives, and here was what they’d risked it for, six or eight months on down the line: a dirty emaciated busted up asshole drunk,
his underwear drenched with piss on one side and full of shit on the other. A daily drinker and a nightly drunk.

And that is when it happens. Down the hall, the steady slow-chanting voice has reached Sprang, Steward, and Sudby; in this cell up the hall, a man lying on a dirty floor in the long light of dawn finally reaches his bottom, which is, by definition, that point from which you can descend no lower unless you find a shovel and actually start to dig.

Lying as he is, staring directly along the floor, the dust-bunnies look like ghostly groves of trees and the lumps of dirt look like the hills in some sterile mining country. He thinks:
What is it, February? February of 1982? Something like that. Well, I tell you what. I’ll give myself one year to try and clean up my act. One year to do something—anything—to justify the risk those two guys took. If I can do something, I’ll go on. But if I’m still drinking in February of 1983, I’ll kill myself.

Down the corridor, the chanting voice has finally reached
Targenfield.

Callahan was silent for a moment. He sipped at his coffee, grimaced, and poured himself a knock of sweet cider, instead.

“I knew how the climb back starts,” he said. “I’d taken enough low-bottom drunks to enough AA meetings on the East Side, God knows. So when they let me out, I found AA in Topeka and started going every day. I never looked ahead, never looked behind. ‘The past is history, the future’s a mystery,’ they say. Only this time, instead of sitting in the back of the room and saying nothing, I forced myself to go right down front, and during the introductions I’d say, ‘I’m Don C. and I don’t
want to drink anymore.’ I
did
want to, every day I wanted to, but in AA they have sayings for everything, and one of them is ‘Fake it till you make it.’ And little by little, I
did
make it. I woke up one day in the fall of 1982 and realized I really didn’t want to drink anymore. The compulsion, as they say, had been lifted.

“I moved on. You’re not supposed to make any big changes in the first year of sobriety, but one day when I was in Gage Park—the Reinisch Rose Garden, actually . . . ” He trailed off, looking at them. “What? Do you know it? Don’t tell me you know the Reinisch!”

“We’ve been there,” Susannah said quietly. “Seen the toy train.”

“That,” Callahan said, “is amazing.”

“It’s nineteen o’clock and all the birds are singing,” Eddie said. He wasn’t smiling.

“Anyway, the Rose Garden was where I spotted the first poster.
HAVE YOU SEEN CALLAHAN, OUR IRISH SETTER. SCAR ON PAW, SCAR ON FOREHEAD. GENEROUS REWARD
. Et cetera, et cetera. They’d finally gotten the name right. I decided it was time to move on while I still could. So I went to Detroit, and there I found a place called The Lighthouse Shelter. It was a wet shelter. It was, in fact, Home without Rowan Magruder. They were doing good work there, but they were barely staggering along. I signed on. And that’s where I was in December of 1983, when it happened.”

“When what happened?” Susannah asked.

It was Jake Chambers who answered. He knew, was perhaps the only one of them who
could
know. It had happened to him, too, after all.

“That was when you died,” Jake said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Callahan said. He showed no surprise at all. They might have been discussing rice, or the possibility that Andy ran on ant-nomics. “That’s when I died. Roland, I wonder if you’d roll me a cigarette? I seem to need something a little stronger than apple cider.”

There’s an old tradition at Lighthouse, one that goes back
. . .
jeez, must be all of four years (The Lighthouse Shelter has only been in existence for five). It’s Thanksgiving in the gym of Holy Name High School on West Congress Street. A bunch of the drunks decorate the place with orange and brown crepe paper, cardboard turkeys, plastic fruit and vegetables. American reap-charms, in other words. You had to have at least two weeks’ continuous sobriety to get on this detail. Also
—
this is something Ward Huckman, Al McCowan, and Don Callahan have agreed to among themselves
—
no wet brains are allowed on Decoration Detail, no matter how long they’ve been sober.

On Turkey Day, nearly a hundred of Detroit’s finest alkies, hypes, and half-crazed homeless gather at Holy Name for a wonderful dinner of turkey, taters, and all the trimmings. They are seated at a dozen long tables in the center of the basketball court (the legs of the tables are protected by swags of felt, and the diners eat in their stocking feet). Before they dig in
—
this is part of the custom
—
they go swiftly around the tables (“Take more than ten seconds, boys, and I’m cutting you off,” Al has warned) and everyone says one thing they’re grateful for. Because it’s Thanksgiving, yes, but also because one of the principal tenets of the AA program is that a grateful alcoholic doesn’t get drunk and a grateful addict doesn’t get stoned.

It goes fast, and because Callahan is just sitting there, not thinking of anything in particular, when it’s his turn he almost blurts out something that could have caused him trouble. At the very least, he would have been tabbed as a guy with a bizarre sense of humor.

“I’m grateful I haven’t . . . ” he begins, then realizes what he’s about to say, and bites it back. They’re looking at him expectantly, stubble-faced men and pale, doughy women with limp hair, all carrying about them the dirty-breeze subway station aroma that’s the smell of the streets. Some already call him
Faddah,
and how do they know? How
could
they know? And how would they feel if they knew what a chill it gives him to hear that? How it makes him remember the Hitler Brothers and the sweet, childish smell of fabric softener? But they’re looking at him. “The clients.” Ward and Al are looking at him, too.

“I’m grateful I haven’t had a drink or a drug today,” he says, falling back on the old faithful, there’s always that to be grateful for. They murmur their approval, the man next to Callahan says he’s grateful his sister’s going to let him come for Christmas, and no one knows how close Callahan has come to saying “I’m grateful I haven’t seen any Type Three vampires or lost-pet posters lately.”

He thinks it’s because God has taken him back, at least on a trial basis, and the power of Barlow’s bite has finally been cancelled. He thinks he’s lost the cursed gift of seeing, in other words. He doesn’t test this by trying to go into a church, however
—
the gym of Holy Name High is close enough for him, thanks. It never occurs to him
—
at least in his conscious mind
—
that they want to make sure the net’s all the way around him this time. They may be slow learners, Callahan will eventually come to realize, but they’re not
no
learners.

Then, in early December, Ward Huckman receives a
dream letter. “Christmas done come early, Don! Wait’ll you see this, Al!” Waving the letter triumphantly. “Play our cards right, and boys, our worries about next year are
over!”

Al McCowan takes the letter, and as he reads it his expression of conscious, careful reserve begins to melt. By the time he hands the letter to Don, he’s grinning from ear to ear.

The letter is from a corporation with offices in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. It’s on rag bond so luxurious you want to cut it into a shirt and wear it next to your skin. It says that the corporation is planning to give away twenty million dollars to twenty charitable organizations across the United States, a million each. It says that the corporation must do this before the end of the calendar year 1983. Potential recipients include food pantries, homeless shelters, two clinics for the indigent, and a prototype AIDS testing program in Spokane. One of the shelters is Lighthouse. The signature is Richard P. Sayre, Executive Vice President, Detroit. It all looks on the up-and-up, and the fact that all three of them have been invited to the corporation’s Detroit offices to discuss this gift also seems on the up-and-up. The date of the meeting
—
what will be the date of Donald Callahan’s death
—
is December 19th, 1983. A Monday.