Wolves of the Calla (40 page)

It takes another step, then stops. Its shoulders slump. Callahan loses sight of its head when it sags forward. And then, suddenly, the clothes are collapsing, crumpling in on themselves, drifting down to the wet surface of the alley.

Feeling like a man in a dream, Callahan goes forward
to examine them. Lupe Delgado stands against the wall, head back, eyes shut, still lost in whatever dream the vampire has cast over him. Blood trickles down his neck in small and unimportant streams.

Callahan looks at the clothes. The tie is still knotted. The shirt is still inside the suit-coat, and still tucked into the suit-pants. He knows that if he unzipped the fly of those suit-pants, he would see the underwear inside. He picks up one arm of the coat, mostly to confirm its emptiness by touch as well as sight, and the vampire’s watch tumbles out of the sleeve and lands with a clink beside what looks like a class ring.

There is hair. There are teeth, some with fillings. Of the rest of Mr. Mark Cross Briefcase, there is no sign.

Callahan gathers up the clothes. Elton John is still singing “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” but maybe that’s not surprising. It’s a pretty long song, one of those four-minute jobs, must be. He puts the watch on his own wrist and the ring on one of his own fingers, just for temporary safekeeping. He takes the clothes inside, walking past Lupe. Lupe’s still lost in his dream. And the holes in his neck, little bigger than pinpricks to start with, are disappearing.

The kitchen is miraculously empty. Off it, to the left, is a door marked
STORAGE
. Beyond it is a short hall with compartments on both sides. These are behind locked gates made of heavy chickenwire, to discourage pilferage. Canned goods on one side, dry goods on the other. Then clothes. Shirts in one compartment. Pants in another. Dresses and skirts in another. Coats in yet another. At the very end of the hall is a beat-up wardrobe marked
MISCELLANY
. Callahan finds the vampire’s wallet and sticks it in his pocket, on top of his own. The two of them together make quite a lump. Then he unlocks the wardrobe
and tosses in the vampire’s unsorted clothes. It’s easier than trying to take his ensemble apart, although he guesses that when the underwear is found inside the pants, there will be grumbling. At Home, used underwear is not accepted.

“We may cater to the low-bottom crowd,” Rowan Magruder has told Callahan once, “but we do have our standards.”

Never mind their standards now. There’s the vampire’s hair and teeth to think about. His watch, his ring, his wallet
. . .
and God, his briefcase and his shoes! They must still be out there!

Don’t you dare complain,
he tells himself.
Not when ninety-five per cent of him is gone, just conveniently disappeared like the monster in the last reel of a horror movie. God’s been with you so far—I think it’s God—so don’t you dare complain.

Nor does he. He gathers up the hair, the teeth, the briefcase, and takes them to the end of the alley, splashing through puddles, and tosses them over the fence. After a moment’s consideration he throws the watch, wallet, and ring over, too. The ring sticks on his finger for a moment and he almost panics, but at last it comes off and over it goes
—plink.
Someone will take care of this stuff for him. This is New York, after all. He goes back to Lupe and sees the shoes. They are too good to throw away, he thinks; there are years of wear left in those babies. He picks them up and walks back into the kitchen with them dangling from the first two fingers of his right hand. He’s standing there with them by the stove when Lupe comes walking into the kitchen from the alley.

“Don?” he asks. His voice is a little furry, the voice of someone who has just awakened from a sound sleep. It also sounds amused. He points at the shoes hooked over
the tips of Callahan’s fingers. “Were you going to put those in the stew?”

“It might improve the flavor, but no, just in storage,” Callahan says. He is astounded by the calmness of his own voice. And his heart! Beating along at a nice regular sixty or seventy beats a minute. “Someone left them out back. What have
you
been up to?”

Lupe gives him a smile, and when he smiles, he is more beautiful than ever. “Just out there, having a smoke,” he says. “It was too nice to come in. Didn’t you see me?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Callahan said. “You looked lost in your own little world, and I didn’t want to interrupt you. Open the storage-room door for me, would you?”

Lupe opens the door. “That looks like a really nice pair,” he says. “Bally. What’s someone doing, leaving Bally shoes for the drunks?”

“Someone must have changed his mind about them,” Callahan says. He hears the bells, that poison sweetness, and grits his teeth against the sound. The world seems to shimmer for a moment.
Not now,
he thinks.
Ah, not now, please.

It’s not a prayer, he prays little these days, but maybe something hears, because the sound of the chimes fades. The world steadies. From the other room someone is bawling for supper. Someone else is cursing. Same old same old. And he wants a drink. That’s the same, too, only the craving is fiercer than it’s ever been. He keeps thinking about how the rubber grip felt in his hand. The weight of the cleaver. The sound it made. And the taste is back in his mouth. The dead taste of Barlow’s blood. That, too. What did the vampire say in the Petries’ kitchen, after it had broken the crucifix his mother had given him? That it was sad to see a man’s faith fail.

I’ll sit in on the AA meeting tonight,
he thinks, putting a rubber band around the Bally loafers and tossing them in with the rest of the footwear. Sometimes the meetings help. He never says, “I’m Don and I’m an alcoholic,” but sometimes they help.

Lupe is so close behind him when he turns around that he gasps a little.

“Easy, boy,” Lupe says, laughing. He scratches his throat casually. The marks are still there, but they’ll be gone in the morning. Still, Callahan knows the vampires see something. Or smell it. Or some damn thing.

“Listen,” he says to Lupe, “I’ve been thinking about getting out of the city for a week or two. A little R and R. Why don’t we go together? We could go upstate. Do some fishing.”

“Can’t,” Lupe says. “I don’t have any vacation time coming at the hotel until June, and besides, we’re shorthanded here. But if you want to go, I’ll square it with Rowan. No problem.” Lupe looks at him closely. “You could use some time off, looks like. You look tired. And you’re jumpy.”

“Nah, it was just an idea,” Callahan says. He’s not going anywhere. If he stays, maybe he can watch out for Lupe. And he knows something now. Killing them is no harder than swatting bugs on a wall. And they don’t leave much behind. E-Z Kleen-Up, as they say in the TV ads. Lupe will be all right. The Type Threes like Mr. Mark Cross Briefcase don’t seem to kill their prey, or even change them. At least not that he can see, not over the short term. But he will watch, he can do that much. He will mount a guard. It will be one small act of atonement for Jerusalem’s Lot. And Lupe will be all right.

“Except he wasn’t,” Roland said. He was carefully rolling a cigarette from the crumbs at the bottom of his poke. The paper was brittle, the tobacco really not much more than dust.

“No,” Callahan agreed. “He wasn’t. Roland, I have no cigarette papers, but I can do you better for a smoke than that. There’s good tobacco in the house, from down south. I don’t use it, but Rosalita sometimes likes a pipe in the evening.”

“I’ll take you up on that later and say thankya,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t miss it as much as coffee, but almost. Finish your tale. Leave nothing out, I think it’s important we hear it all, but—”

“I know. Time is short.”

“Yes,” Roland said. “Time is short.”

“Then briefly put, my friend contracted this disease—AIDS became the name of choice?”

He was looking at Eddie, who nodded.

“All right,” Callahan said. “It’s as good a name as any, I guess, although the first thing I think of when I hear that word is a kind of diet candy. You may know it doesn’t always spread fast, but in my friend’s case, it moved like a fire in straw. By mid-May of 1976, Lupe Delgado was very ill. He lost his color. He was feverish a lot of the time. He’d sometimes spend the whole night in the bathroom, vomiting. Rowan would have banned him from the kitchen, but he didn’t need to—Lupe banned himself. And then the blemishes began to show up.”

“They called those Kaposi’s sarcoma, I think,” Eddie said. “A skin disease. Disfiguring.”

Callahan nodded. “Three weeks after the blemishes
started showing up, Lupe was in New York General. Rowan Magruder and I went to see him one night in late June. Up until then we’d been telling each other he’d turn it around, come out of it better than ever, hell, he was young and strong. But that night we knew the minute we were in the door that he was all through. He was in an oxygen tent. There were IV lines running into his arms. He was in terrible pain. He didn’t want us to get close to him. It might be catching, he said. In truth, no one seemed to know much about it.”

“Which made it scarier than ever,” Susannah said.

“Yes. He said the doctors believed it was a blood disease spread by homosexual activity, or maybe by sharing needles. And what he wanted us to know, what he kept saying over and over again, was that he was clean, all the drug tests came back negative. ‘Not since nineteen-seventy,’ he kept saying. ‘Not one toke off one joint. I swear to God.’ We said we knew he was clean. We sat on either side of his bed and he took our hands.”

Callahan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.

“Our hands . . . he made us wash them before we left. Just in case, he said. And he thanked us for coming. He told Rowan that Home was the best thing that ever happened to him. That as far as he was concerned, it really
was
home.

“I never wanted a drink as badly as I did that night, leaving New York General. I kept Rowan right beside me, though, and the two of us walked past all the bars. That night I went to bed sober, but I lay there knowing it was really just a matter of
time. The first drink is the one that gets you drunk, that’s what they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, and mine was somewhere close. Somewhere a bartender was just waiting for me to come in so he could pour it out.

“Two nights later, Lupe died.

“There must have been three hundred people at the funeral, almost all of them people who’d spent time in Home. There was a lot of crying and a lot of wonderful things said, some by folks who probably couldn’t have walked a chalk line. When it was over, Rowan Magruder took me by the arm and said, ‘I don’t know who you are, Don, but I know
what
you are—one hell of a good man and one hell of a bad drunk who’s been dry for . . . how long has it been?’

“I thought about going on with the bullshit, but it just seemed like too much work. ‘Since October of last year,’ I said.

“ ‘You want one now,’ he said. ‘That’s all over your face. So I tell you what: if you think taking a drink will bring Lupe back, you have my permission. In fact, come get me and we’ll go down to the Blarney Stone together and drink up what’s in my wallet first. Okay?’

“ ‘Okay,’ I said.

“He said, ‘You getting drunk today would be the worst memorial to Lupe I could think of. Like pissing in his dead face.’

“He was right, and I knew it. I spent the rest of that day the way I spent my second one in New York, walking around, fighting that taste in my mouth, fighting the urge to score a bottle and stake out a park bench. I remember being on Broadway, then over on Tenth Avenue, then way down at Park and
Thirtieth. By then it was getting dark, cars going both ways on Park with their lights on. The sky all orange and pink in the west, and the streets full of this gorgeous long light.

“A sense of peace came over me, and I thought, ‘I’m going to win. Tonight at least, I’m going to win.’ And that was when the chimes started. The loudest ever. I felt as if my head would burst. Park Avenue shimmered in front of me and I thought,
Why, it’s not real at all. Not Park Avenue, not any of it. It’s just a gigantic swatch of canvas. New York is nothing but a backdrop painted on that canvas, and what’s behind it? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. Just blackness.

“Then things steadied again. The chimes faded . . . faded . . . finally gone. I started to walk, very slowly. Like a man walking on thin ice. What I was afraid of was that if I stepped too heavily, I might plunge right out of the world and into the darkness behind it. I know that makes absolutely no sense—hell, I knew it then—but knowing a thing doesn’t always help. Does it?”

“No,” Eddie said, thinking of his days snorting heroin with Henry.

“No,” said Susannah.

“No,” Roland agreed, thinking of Jericho Hill. Thinking of the fallen horn.

“I walked one block, then two, then three. I started to think it was going to be okay. I mean, I might get the bad smell, and I might see a few Type Threes, but I could handle those things. Especially since the Type Threes didn’t seem to recognize me. Looking at them was like looking through one-way glass at suspects in a police interrogation room. But
that night I saw something much, much worse than a bunch of vampires.”

“You saw someone who was actually dead,” Susannah said.

Callahan turned to her with a look of utter, flabbergasted surprise. “How . . . how do you . . . ”

“I know because I’ve been todash in New York, too,” Susannah said. “We all have. Roland says those are people who either don’t know they’ve passed on or refuse to accept it. They’re . . . what’d you call em, Roland?”

“The vagrant dead,” the gunslinger replied. “There aren’t many.”

“There were enough,” Callahan said, “and
they
knew I was there. Mangled people on Park Avenue, one of them a man without eyes, one a woman missing the arm and leg on the right side of her body and burned all over, both of them looking at
me,
as if they thought I could . . .
fix
them, somehow.