Wolves of the Calla (43 page)

And he understands instinctively that this is almost certainly true. He has stumbled upon a great, possibly endless, confluence of worlds. They are all America, but they are all different. There are highways which lead through them,
and he can see them.

He walks rapidly to the Leabrook end of the footbridge, then pauses again.
Suppose I can’t find my way back?
he thinks.
Suppose I get lost and wander and never find my way back to the America where Fort Lee is on the west side of the George Washington Bridge and Gerald Ford (of all people!) is the President of the United States?

And then he thinks:
So what if I do? So fucking what?

When he steps off on the Jersey side of the footbridge he’s grinning, truly lighthearted for this first time since the day he presided over Danny Glick’s grave in the town of Jerusalem’s Lot. A couple of boys with fishing poles are walking toward him. “Would one of you young fellows care to welcome me to New Jersey?” Callahan asks, grinning more widely than ever.

“Welcome to En-Jay, man,” one of them says, willingly enough, but both of them give Callahan a wide berth and a careful look. He doesn’t blame them, but it doesn’t cut into his splendid mood in the slightest. He feels like a man who has been let out of a gray and cheerless prison on a sunny day. He begins to walk faster, not turning around to give the skyline of Manhattan a single goodbye glance. Why would he? Manhattan is the past. The multiple Americas which lie ahead of him, those are the future.

He is in Leabrook. There are no chimes. Later there will be chimes and vampires; later there will be more messages chalked on sidewalks and sprayed on brick walls (not all about him, either). Later he will see the low men in their outrageous red Cadillacs and green Lincolns and purple Mercedes-Benz sedans, low men with red flashgun eyes, but not today. Today there is sunshine in a new America on the west side of a restored footbridge across the Hudson.

On Main Street he stops in front of the Leabrook Homestyle
Diner and there is a sign in the window reading
SHORT-ORDER COOK WANTED
. Don Callahan short-ordered through most of his time at seminary and did more than his share of the same at Home on the East Side of Manhattan. He thinks he might fit right in here at the Leabrook Homestyle. Turns out he’s right, although it takes three shifts before the ability to crack a pair of eggs one-handed onto the grill comes swimming back to him. The owner, a long drink of water named Dicky Rudebacher, asks Callahan if he has any medical problems
—
“catching stuff,” he calls it
—
and nods simple acceptance when Callahan says he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask Callahan for any paperwork, not so much as a Social Security number. He wants to pay his new short-order off the books, if that’s not a problem. Callahan assures him it is not.

“One more thing,” says Dicky Rudebacher, and Callahan waits for the shoe to drop. Nothing would surprise him, but all Rudebacher says is: “You look like a drinking man.”

Callahan allows as how he has been known to take a drink.

“So have I,” Rudebacher says. “In this business it’s the way you protect your gahdam sanity. I ain’t gonna smell your breath when you come in
. . .
if you come in on time. Miss coming in on time twice, though, and you’re on your way to wherever. I ain’t going to tell you that again.”

Callahan short-orders at the Leabrook Homestyle Diner for three weeks, and stays two blocks down at the Sunset Motel. Only it’s not always the Homestyle, and it’s not always the Sunset. On his fourth day in town, he wakes up in the Sun
rise
Motel, and the Leabrook Homestyle Diner is the Fort Lee Homestyle Diner. The Leabrook
Register
which people have been leaving behind on the counter becomes the Fort Lee
Register-American.
He is
not exactly relieved to discover Gerald Ford has reassumed the Presidency.

When Rudebacher pays him at the end of his first week
—
in Fort Lee
—
Grant is on the fifties, Jackson is on the twenties, and Alexander Hamilton is on the single ten in the envelope the boss hands him. At the end of the second week
—
in Leabrook
—
Abraham Lincoln is on the fifties and someone named Chadbourne is on the ten. It’s still Andrew Jackson on the twenties, which is something of a relief. In Callahan’s motel room, the bedcover is pink in Leabrook and orange in Fort Lee. This is handy. He always knows which version of New Jersey he’s in as soon as he wakes up.

Twice he gets drunk. The second time, after closing, Dicky Rudebacher joins him and matches him drink for drink. “This used to be a great country,” the Leabrook version of Rudebacher mourns, and Callahan thinks how great it is that some things don’t change; the fundamental bitch-and-moans apply as time goes by.

But his shadow starts getting longer earlier each day, he has seen his first Type Three vampire waiting in line to buy a ticket at the Leabrook Twin Cinema, and one day he gives notice.

“Thought you told me you didn’t have anything,” Rudebacher says to Callahan.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You’ve got a bad case of itchy-foot, my friend. It often goes with the other thing.” Rudebacher makes a bottle-tipping gesture with one dishwater-reddened hand. “When a man catches itchy-foot late in life, it’s often incurable. Tell you what, if I didn’t have a wife that’s still a pretty good lay and two kids in college, I might just pack me a bindle and join you.”

“Yeah?” Callahan asks, fascinated.

“September and October are always the worst,” Rudebacher says dreamily. “You just hear it calling. The birds hear it, too, and go.”

“It?”

Rudebacher gives him a look that says don’t be stupid. “With them it’s the sky. Guys like us, it’s the road. Call of the open fuckin road. Guys like me, kids in school and a wife that still likes it more than just on Saturday night, they turn up the radio a little louder and drown it out. You’re not gonna do that.” He pauses, looks at Callahan shrewdly. “Stay another week? I’ll bump you twenty-five bucks. You make a gahdam fine Monte Cristo.”

Callahan considers, then shakes his head. If Rudebacher was right, if it was only one road, maybe he would stay another week
. . .
and another
. . .
and another. But it’s not just one. It’s all of them, all those highways in hiding, and he remembers the name of his third-grade reader and bursts out laughing. It was called
Roads to Everywhere.

“What’s so funny?” Rudebacher asks sourly.

“Nothing,” Callahan says. “Everything.” He claps his boss on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Dicky. If I get back this way, I’ll stop in.”

“You won’t get back this way,” Dicky Rudebacher says, and of course he is right.

“I was five years on the road, give or take,” Callahan said as they approached his church, and in a way that was all he said on the subject. Yet they heard more. Nor were they surprised later to find that Jake, on his way into town with Eisenhart and
the Slightmans, had heard some of it, too. It was Jake, after all, who was strongest in the touch.

Five years on the road,
no more than that.

And all the rest, do ya ken: a thousand lost worlds of the rose.

He’s five years on the road, give or take, only there’s a lot more than one road and maybe, under the right circumstances, five years can be forever.

There is Route 71 through Delaware and apples to pick. There’s a little boy named Lars with a broken radio. Callahan fixes it and Lars’s mother packs him a great and wonderful lunch to go on with, a lunch that seems to last for days. There is Route 317 through rural Kentucky, and a job digging graves with a fellow named Pete Petacki who won’t shut up. A girl comes to watch them, a pretty girl of seventeen or so, sitting on a rock wall with yellow leaves raining down all around her, and Pete Petacki speculates on what it would be like to have those long thighs stripped of the corduroys they’re wearing and wrapped around his neck, what it would be like to be tongue-deep in jailbait. Pete Petacki doesn’t see the blue light around her, and he certainly doesn’t see the way her clothes drift to the ground like feathers later on, when Callahan sits beside her, then draws her close as she slips a hand up his leg and her mouth onto his throat, then thrusts his knife unerringly into the bulge of bone and nerve and gristle at the back of her neck. This is a shot he’s getting very good at.

There is Route 19 through West Virginia, and a little road-dusty carnival that’s looking for a man who can fix the rides and feed the animals. “Or the other way around,” says Greg Chumm, the carny’s greasy-haired
owner. “You know, feed the rides and fix the animals. Whatever floats ya boat.” And for awhile, when a strep infection leaves the carny shorthanded (they are swinging down south by now, trying to stay ahead of winter), he finds himself also playing Menso the ESP Wonder, and with surprising success. It is also as Menso that he first sees
them,
not vampires and not bewildered dead people but tall men with pale, watchful faces that are usually hidden under old-fashioned hats with brims or new-fashioned baseball hats with extra-long bills. In the shadows thrown by these hats, their eyes flare a dusky red, like the eyes of coons or polecats when you catch them in the beam of a flashlight, lurking around your trash barrels. Do
they
see
him?
The vampires (the Type Threes, at least) do not. The dead people do. And these men, with their hands stuffed into the pockets of their long yellow coats and their hardcase faces peering out from beneath their hats? Do they see? Callahan doesn’t know for sure but decides to take no chances. Three days later, in the town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, he hangs up his black Menso tophat, leaves his greasy coverall on the floor of a pickup truck’s camper cap, and blows Chumm’s Traveling Wonder Show, not bothering with the formality of his final paycheck. On his way out of town, he sees a number of those pet posters nailed to telephone poles. A typical one reads:

LOST! SIAMESE CAT, 2 YRS OLD
ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF RUTA
SHE IS NOISY BUT FULL OF FUN
LARGE REWARD OFFERED
$ $ $ $ $ $
DIAL 764, WAIT FOR BEEP, GIVE YOUR NUMBER
GOD BLESS YOU FOR HELPING

Who is Ruta? Callahan doesn’t know. All he knows is that she is
NOISY
but
FULL OF FUN
.
Will she still be noisy when the low men catch up to her? Will she still be full of fun?

Callahan doubts it.

But he has his own problems and all he can do is pray to the God in whom he no longer strictly believes that the men in the yellow coats won’t catch up to her.

Later that day, thumbing on the side of Route 3 in Issaquena County under a hot gunmetal sky that knows nothing of December and approaching Christmas, the chimes come again. They fill his head, threatening to pop his eardrums and blow pinprick hemorrhages across the entire surface of his brain. As they fade, a terrible certainty grips him: they are coming. The men with the red eyes and big hats and long yellow coats are on their way.

Callahan bolts from the side of the road like a chaingang runaway, clearing the pond-scummy ditch like Superman: at a single bound. Beyond is an old stake fence overgrown with drifts of kudzu and what might be poison sumac. He doesn’t care if it’s poison sumac or not. He dives over the fence, rolls over in high grass and burdocks, and peers out at the highway through a hole in the foliage.

For a moment or two there’s nothing. Then a white-over-red Cadillac comes pounding down Highway 3 from the direction of Yazoo City. It’s doing seventy easy, and Callahan’s peephole is small, but he still sees them with supernatural clarity: three men, two in what appear to be yellow dusters, the third in what might be a flight-jacket. All three are smoking; the Cadillac’s closed cabin fumes with it.

They’ll see me they’ll hear me they’ll sense me,
Callahan’s mind yammers, and he forces it away from its own panicky wretched certainty,
yanks
it away. He forces
himself to think of that Elton John song
—
“Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my
li-iife
tonight
. . . ”
and it seems to work. There is one terrible, heart-stopping moment when he thinks the Caddy is slowing
—
long enough for him to imagine them chasing him through this weedy, forgotten field, chasing him down, dragging him into an abandoned shed or barn
—
and then the Caddy roars over the next hill, headed for Natchez, maybe. Or Copiah. Callahan waits another ten minutes. “Got to make sure they’re not trickin on you, man,” Lupe might have said. But even as he waits, he knows this is only a formality. They’re not trickin on him; they flat missed him. How? Why?

The answer dawns on him slowly
—an
answer, at least, and he’s damned if it doesn’t feel like the right one. They missed him because he was able to slip into a different version of America as he lay behind the tangle of kudzu and sumac, peering out at Route 3. Maybe different in only a few small details
—
Lincoln on the one and Washington on the five instead of the other way around, let us say
—
but enough. Just enough. And that’s good, because these guys aren’t brain-blasted, like the dead folks, or blind to him, like the bloodsucking folks. These people, whoever they are, are the most dangerous of all.

Finally, Callahan goes back out to the road. Eventually a black man in a straw hat and overalls comes driving along in an old beat-up Ford. He looks so much like a Negro farmer from a thirties movie that Callahan almost expects him to laugh and slap his knee and give out occasional cries of
“Yassuh,
boss! Ain’t
dat
de troof!” Instead, the black man engages him in a discussion about politics prompted by an item on National Public Radio, to which he is listening. And when Callahan leaves him, in Shady Grove, the black man gives him five dollars and a spare baseball cap.