Wolves of the Calla (18 page)

A tear spilled down Callahan’s right cheek, then another. He wiped them away absently. “I’ve never dared handle it, but I’ve seen it. Felt its power. Christ the Man Jesus help me, I have Black Thirteen under the floorboards of my church. And it’s come alive. Do you understand me?” He looked at them with his wet eyes.
“It’s come alive.”

Callahan put his face in his hands, hiding it from them.

When the holy man with the scar on his forehead left to get his trailmates, the gunslinger stood watching him go without moving. Roland’s thumbs were hooked into the waistband of his old patched jeans, and he looked as if he could stand that way well into the next age. The moment Callahan was out of sight, however, he turned to his own mates and made an urgent, almost bearish, clutching gesture at the air:
Come to me
. As they did, Roland squatted on his hunkers. Eddie and Jake did the same (and to Susannah, hunkers were almost a way of life). The gunslinger spoke almost curtly.

“Time is short, so tell me, each of you, and don’t shilly-shally: honest or not?”

“Honest,” Susannah said at once, then gave
another little wince and rubbed beneath her left breast.

“Honest,” said Jake.

“Onnes,” said Oy, although he had not been asked.

“Honest,” Eddie agreed, “but look.” He took an unburned twig from the edge of the campfire, brushed away a patch of pine-duff, and wrote in the black earth underneath:

“Live or Memorex?” Eddie said. Then, seeing Susannah’s confusion: “Is it a coincidence, or does it mean something?”

“Who knows?” Jake asked. They were all speaking in low tones, heads together over the writing in the dirt. “It’s like nineteen.”

“I think it’s only a coincidence,” Susannah said. “Surely not
everything
we encounter on our path is ka, is it? I mean, these don’t even
sound
the same.” And she pronounced them,
Calla
with the tongue up, making the broad-a sound,
Callahan
with the tongue down, making a much sharper a-sound. “
Calla
’s Spanish in our world . . . like many of the words you remember from Mejis, Roland. It means street or square, I think . . . don’t hold me to it, because high school Spanish is far behind me now. But if I’m right, using the word as a prefix for the name of a town—or a whole series of them, as seems to be the case in these parts—makes pretty good sense. Not perfect, but pretty good. Callahan, on the other hand . . . ” She shrugged. “What is it? Irish? English?”

“It’s sure not Spanish,” Jake said. “But the nineteen thing—”

“Piss on nineteen,” Roland said rudely. “This isn’t the time for number games. He’ll be back here with his friends in short order, and I would speak to you an-tet of another matter before he does.”

“Do you think he could possibly be right about Black Thirteen?” Jake asked.

“Yes,” Roland said. “Based just on what happened to you and Eddie last night, I think the answer is yes. Dangerous for us to have such a thing if he
is
right, but have it we must. I fear these Wolves out of Thunderclap will if we don’t. Never mind, that need not trouble us now.”

Yet Roland looked very troubled indeed. He turned his regard toward Jake.

“You started when you heard the big farmer’s name. So did you, Eddie, although you concealed it better.”

“Sorry,” Jake said. “I have forgotten the face of—”

“Not even a bit have you,” Roland said. “Unless I have, as well. Because I’ve heard the name myself, and recently. I just can’t remember where.” Then, reluctantly: “I’m getting old.”

“It was in the bookstore,” Jake said. He took his pack, fiddled nervously with the straps, undid them. He flipped the pack open as he spoke. It was as if he had to make sure
Charlie the Choo-Choo
and
Riddle-De-Dum
were still there, still real. “The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. It’s so weird. Once it happened to me and once I
watched
it happen to me. That’d make a pretty good riddle all by itself.”

Roland made a rapid rotating gesture with his
diminished right hand, telling him to go on and be quick.

“Mr. Tower introduced himself,” Jake said, “and then I did the same. Jake Chambers, I said. And
he
said—”

“ ‘Good handle, partner,’” Eddie broke in. “That’s what he said. Then he said Jake Chambers sounded like the name of the hero in a Western novel.”

“‘The guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans up the town, then moves on,’” Jake quoted. “And then he said, ‘Something by Wayne D. Overholser, maybe.’ ” He looked at Susannah and repeated it. “
Wayne D. Overholser
. And if you tell me
that’s
a coincidence, Susannah . . . ” He broke into a sunny, sudden grin. “I’ll tell you to kiss my white-boy ass.”

Susannah laughed. “No need of that, sass-box. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence. And when we meet Callahan’s farmer friend, I intend to ask him what his middle name is. I set my warrant that it’ll not only begin with D, it’ll be something like Dean or Dane, just four letters—” Her hand went back to the place below her breast. “This
gas
! My! What I wouldn’t give for a roll of Tums or even a bottle of—” She broke off again. “Jake, what is it? What’s wrong?”

Jake was holding
Charlie the Choo-Choo
in his hands, and his face had gone dead white. His eyes were huge, shocked. Beside him, Oy whined uneasily. Roland leaned over to look, and his eyes also widened.

“Good gods,” he said.

Eddie and Susannah looked. The title was the
same. The picture was the same: an anthropomorphic locomotive puffing up a hill, its cowcatcher wearing a grin, its headlight a cheerful eye. But the yellow letters across the bottom, Story and Pictures by Beryl Evans, were gone. There was no credit line there at all.

Jake turned the book and looked at the spine. It said
Charlie the Choo-Choo
and McCauley House, Publishers. Nothing else.

South of them now, the sound of voices. Callahan and his friends, approaching. Callahan from the Calla. Callahan of the Lot, he had also called himself.

“Title page, sugar,” Susannah said. “Look there, quick.”

Jake did. Once again there was only the title of the story and the publisher’s name, this time with a colophon.

“Look at the copyright page,” Eddie said.

Jake turned the page. Here, on the verso of the title page and beside the recto where the story began, was the copyright information. Except there
was
no information, not really.

Copyright 1936,

it said. Numbers which added up to nineteen.

The rest was blank.

Susannah was able to observe a good deal on that long and interesting day, because Roland gave her the chance and because, after her morning’s sickness passed off, she felt wholly herself again.

Just before Callahan and his party drew within earshot, Roland murmured to her, “Stay close to me, and not a word from you unless I prompt it. If they take you for my sh’veen, let it be so.”

Under other circumstances, she might have had something pert to say about the idea of being Roland’s quiet little side-wife, his nudge in the night, but there was no time this morning, and in any case, it was far from a joking matter; the seriousness in his face made that clear. Also, the part of the faithful, quiet second appealed to her. In truth,
any
part appealed to her. Even as a child, she had rarely been so happy as when pretending to be someone else.

Which probably explains all there is about you worth knowing, sugar,
she thought.

“Susannah?” Roland asked. “Do you hear me?”

“Hear you well,” she told him. “Don’t you worry about me.”

“If it goes as I want, they’ll see you little and you’ll see them much.”

As a woman who’d grown up black in mid-twentieth-century America (Odetta had laughed and applauded her way through Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man,
often rocking back and forth in her seat like one who has been visited by a revelation), Susannah knew exactly what he wanted. And would give it to him. There was a part of her—a spiteful Detta Walker part—that would always resent Roland’s ascendancy in her heart and mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.

Watching Roland make the introductions (Susannah was presented dead last, after Jake, and almost negligently), she had time to reflect on how fine she felt now that the nagging gas-pains in her left side had departed. Hell, even the lingering headache had gone its way, and
that
sucker had been hanging around—sometimes in the back of her head, sometimes at one temple or the other, sometimes just above her left eye, like a migraine waiting to hatch—for a week or more. And of course there were the mornings. Every one found her feeling nauseated and with a bad case of jelly-leg for the first hour or so. She never vomited, but for that first hour she always felt on the verge of it.

She wasn’t stupid enough to mistake such symptoms, but had reason to know they meant nothing. She just hoped she wouldn’t embarrass herself by swelling up as her Mama’s friend Jessica had done,
not once but twice. Two false pregnancies, and in both cases that woman had looked ready to bust out twins. Triplets, even. But of course Jessica Beasley’s periods had stopped, and that made it all too easy for a woman to believe she was with child. Susannah knew she wasn’t pregnant for the simplest of reasons: she was still menstruating. She had begun a period on the very day they had awakened back on the Path of the Beam, with the Green Palace twenty-five or thirty miles behind them. She’d had another since then. Both courses had been exceptionally heavy, necessitating the use of many rags to soak up the dark flow, and before then her menses had always been light, some months no more than a few of the spots her mother called “a lady’s roses.” Yet she didn’t complain, because before her arrival in this world, her periods had usually been painful and sometimes excruciating. The two she’d had since returning to the Path of the Beam hadn’t hurt at all. If not for the soaked rags she’d carefully buried to one side of their path or the other, she wouldn’t have had a clue that it was her time of the month. Maybe it was the purity of the water.

Of course she knew what all this was about; it didn’t take a rocket scientist, as Eddie sometimes said. The crazy, scrambled dreams she couldn’t recall, the weakness and nausea in the mornings, the transient headaches, the strangely fierce gas attacks and occasional cramps all came down to the same thing: she wanted his baby. More than anything else in the world, she wanted Eddie Dean’s chap growing in her belly.

What she
didn’t
want was to puff up in a humiliating false pregnancy.

Never mind all that now,
she thought as Callahan approached with the others.
Right now you’ve got to watch. Got to see what Roland and Eddie and Jake don’t see. That way nothing gets dropped.
And she felt she could do that job very well.

Really, she had never felt finer in her life.

Callahan came first. Behind him were two men, one who looked about thirty and another who looked to Susannah nearly twice that. The older man had heavy cheeks that would be jowls in another five years or so, and lines carving their courses from the sides of his nose down to his chin. “I-want lines,” her father would have called them (and Dan Holmes had had a pretty good set of his own). The younger man wore a battered sombrero, the older a clean white Stetson that made Susannah want to smile—it looked like the kind of hat the good guy would wear in an old black-and-white Western movie. Still, she guessed a lid like that didn’t come cheap, and she thought the man wearing it had to be Wayne Overholser. “The big farmer,” Roland had called him. The one that had to be convinced, according to Callahan.

But not by us,
Susannah thought, which was sort of a relief. The tight mouth, the shrewd eyes, and most of all those deep-carved lines (there was another slashed vertically into his brow, just above the eyes) suggested sai Overholser would be a pain in the ass when it came to convincing.

Just behind these two—specifically behind the
younger of the two—there came a tall, handsome woman, probably not black but nonetheless nearly as dark-skinned as Susannah herself. Bringing up the rear was an earnest-looking man in spectacles and farmer’s clothes and a likely-looking boy probably two or three years older than Jake. The resemblance between this pair was impossible to miss; they had to be Slightman the Elder and Younger.

Boy may be older than Jake in years,
she thought,
but he’s got a soft look about him, all the same
. True, but not necessarily a bad thing. Jake had seen far too much for a boy not yet in his teens.
Done
too much, as well.

Overholser looked at their guns (Roland and Eddie each wore one of the big revolvers with the sandalwood grips; the .44 Ruger from New York City hung under Jake’s arm in what Roland called a docker’s clutch), then at Roland. He made a perfunctory salute, his half-closed fist skimming somewhere at least close to his forehead. There was no bow. If Roland was offended by this, it didn’t show on his face. Nothing showed on his face but polite interest.