Wolves of the Calla (61 page)

She leaves. Her sensible low heels go clicking away along the hall. It’s not until they’ve faded completely and left him with the steady beeping of the machines that he realizes he’s trembling all over. He doesn’t think it’s the onset of the dt’s, but by God that’s what it feels like.

When Rowan speaks from beneath his stiff veil of bandages, Callahan nearly screams. What his old friend says is pretty mushy, but Callahan has no trouble figuring it out.

“She’s given that little sermon at least eight times today, and she never bothers to tell anyone that the year I took second in the Beloit, only four other people entered. I guess the war knocked a lot of the poetry out of folks. How you doing, Don?”

The diction is bad, the voice driving it little more than a rasp, but it’s Rowan, all right. Callahan goes to him and takes the hands that lie on the counterpane. They curl over his with surprising firmness.

“As far as the novel goes . . . man, it was third-rate James Jones, and that’s bad.”

“How you doing, Rowan?” Callahan asks. Now he’s crying himself. The goddam room will be floating soon.

“Oh, well, pretty sucky,” says the man under the bandages. Then: “Thanks for coming.”

“Not a problem,” Callahan says. “What do you need from me, Rowan? What can I do?”

“You can stay away from Home,” Rowan says. His voice is fading, but his hands still clasp Callahan’s. “They didn’t want me. It was
you
they were after. Do you understand me, Don?
They were looking for you.
They kept asking me where you were, and by the end I
would have told them if I’d known, believe me. But of course I didn’t.”

One of the machines is beeping faster, the beeps running toward a merge that will trip an alarm. Callahan has no way of knowing this but knows it anyway. Somehow.

“Rowan—did they have red eyes? Were they wearing . . . I don’t know . . . long coats? Like trenchcoats? Did they come in big fancy cars?”

“Nothing like that,” Rowan whispers. “They were probably in their thirties but dressed like teenagers. They looked like teenagers, too. These guys’ll look like teenagers for another twenty years
—
if they live that long
—
and then one day they’ll just be old.”

Callahan thinks,
Just a couple of punks. Is that what he’s saying?
It is, it almost certainly is, but that doesn’t mean the Hitler Brothers weren’t hired by the low men for this particular job. It makes sense. Even the newspaper article, brief as it was, pointed out that Rowan Magruder wasn’t much like the Brothers’ usual type of victim.

“Stay away from Home,” Rowan whispers, but before Callahan can promise, the alarm does indeed go off. For a moment the hands holding his tighten, and Callahan feels a ghost of this man’s old energy, that wild fierce energy that somehow kept Home’s doors open in spite of all the times the bank account went absolutely flat-line, the energy that attracted men who could do all the things Rowan Magruder himself couldn’t.

Then the room begins filling up with nurses, there’s a doctor with an arrogant face yelling for the patient’s chart, and pretty soon Rowan’s twin sister will be back, this time possibly breathing fire. Callahan decides it’s time to blow this pop-shop, and the greater pop-shop that is
New York City. The low men are still interested in him, it seems, very interested indeed, and if they have a base of operations, it’s probably right here in Fun City, USA. Consequently, a return to the West Coast would probably be an excellent idea. He can’t afford another plane ticket, but he has enough cash to ride the Big Grey Dog. Won’t be for the first time, either. Another trip west, why not? He can see himself with absolute clarity, the man in Seat 29-C: a fresh, unopened package of cigarettes in his shirt pocket; a fresh, unopened bottle of Early Times in a paper bag; the new John D. MacDonald novel, also fresh and unopened, lying on his lap. Maybe he’ll be on the far side of the Hudson and riding through Fort Lee, deep into Chapter One and nipping his second drink before they finally turn off all the machines in Room 577 and his old friend goes out into the darkness and toward whatever waits for us there.

“577,” Eddie said.

“Nineteen,” Jake said.

“Beg pardon?” Callahan asked again.

“Five, seven, and seven,” Susannah said. “Add them, you get nineteen.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Put them all together, they spell mother, a word that means the world to me,” Eddie said with a sentimental smile.

Susannah ignored him. “We don’t know,” she said. “You didn’t leave New York, did you? If you had, you’d have never gotten that.” She pointed to the scar on his forehead.

“Oh, I left,” Callahan said. “Just not quite as soon
as I intended. My intention when I left the hospital really was to go back down to Port Authority and buy a ticket on the Forty bus.”

“What’s that?” Jake asked.

“Hobo-speak for the farthest you can go. If you buy a ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska, you’re riding on the Forty bus.”

“Over here, it’d be Bus Nineteen,” Eddie said.

“As I was walking, I got thinking about all the old times. Some of them were funny, like when a bunch of the guys at Home put on a circus show. Some of them were scary, like one night just before dinner when one guy says to this other one, ‘Stop picking your nose, Jeffy, it’s making me sick’ and Jeffy goes ‘Why don’t you pick this, homeboy,’ and he pulls out this giant spring-blade knife and before any of us can move or even figure out what’s happening, Jeffy cuts the other guy’s throat. Lupe’s screaming and I’m yelling ‘Jesus! Holy Jesus!’ and the blood is spraying everywhere because he got the guy’s carotid—or maybe it was the jugular—and then Rowan comes running out of the bathroom holding his pants up with one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other, and do you know what he did?”

“Used the paper,” Susannah said.

Callahan grinned. It made him a younger man. “Yer-bugger, he did. Slapped the whole roll right against the place where the blood was spurting and yelled for Lupe to call 211, which got you an ambulance in those days. And I’m standing there, watching that white toilet paper turn red, working its way in toward the cardboard core. Rowan said ‘Just think of it as the world’s biggest shaving cut’ and we started laughing. We laughed until the tears came
out of our eyes.

“I was running through a lot of old times, do ya. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I remember—vaguely—stopping in at a Smiler’s Market and getting a couple of cans of Bud in a paper sack. I drank one of them and kept on walking. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going—not in my conscious mind, at least—but my feet must have had a mind of their own, because all at once I looked around and I was in front of this place where we used to go to supper sometimes if we were—as they say—in funds. It was on Second and Fifty-second.”

“Chew Chew Mama’s,” Jake said.

Callahan stared at him with real amazement, then looked at Roland. “Gunslinger, you boys are starting to scare me a little.”

Roland only twirled his fingers in his old gesture:
Keep going, partner.

“I decided to go in and get a hamburger for old times’ sake,” Callahan said. “And while I was eating the burger, I decided I didn’t want to leave New York without at least looking into Home through the front window. I could stand across the street, like the times when I swung by there after Lupe died. Why not? I’d never been bothered there before. Not by the vampires, not by the low men, either.” He looked at them. “I can’t tell you if I really believed that, or if it was some kind of elaborate, suicidal mind-game. I can recapture a lot of what I felt that night, what I said and how I thought, but not that.

“In any case, I never got to Home. I paid up and I went walking down Second Avenue. Home was at First and Forty-seventh, but I didn’t want to walk directly in front of it. So I decided to go
down to First and Forty-sixth and cross over there.”

“Why not Forty-eighth?” Eddie asked him quietly. “You could have turned down Forty-eighth, that would have been quicker. Saved you doubling back a block.”

Callahan considered the question, then shook his head. “If there was a reason, I don’t remember.”

“There was a reason,” Susannah said. “You wanted to walk past the vacant lot.”

“Why would I—”

“For the same reason people want to walk past a bakery when the doughnuts are coming out of the oven,” Eddie said. “Some things are just nice, that’s all.”

Callahan received this doubtfully, then shrugged. “If you say so.”

“I do, sai.”

“In any case, I was walking along, sipping my other beer. I was almost at Second and Forty-sixth when—”

“What was there?” Jake asked eagerly. “What was on that corner in 1981?”

“I don’t . . . ” Callahan began, and then he stopped. “A fence,” he said. “Quite a high one. Ten, maybe twelve feet.”

“Not the one we climbed over,” Eddie said to Roland. “Not unless it grew five feet on its own.”

“There was a picture on it,” Callahan said. “I do remember that. Some sort of street mural, but I couldn’t see what it was, because the street-lights on the corner were out. And all at once it hit me that wasn’t right. All at once an alarm started going off in my head. Sounded a lot like the one that
brought all the people into Rowan’s room at the hospital, if you want to know the truth. All at once I couldn’t believe I was where I was. It was nuts. But at the same time I’m thinking . . . ”

At the same time he’s thinking
It’s all right, just a few lights out is all it is, if there were vampires you’d see them and if there were low men you’d hear the chimes and smell rancid onions and hot metal.
All the same he decides to vacate this area, and immediately. Chimes or no chimes, every nerve in his body is suddenly out on his skin, sparking and sizzling.

He turns and there are two men right behind him. There is a space of seconds when they are so surprised by his abrupt change of direction that he probably could have darted between them like an aging running back and gone sprinting back up Second Avenue. But he is surprised, too, and for a further space of seconds the three of them only stand there, staring.

There’s a big Hitler Brother and a little Hitler Brother. The little one is no more than five-two. He’s wearing a loose chambray shirt over black slacks. On his head is a baseball cap turned around backwards. His eyes are as black as drops of tar and his complexion is bad. Callahan immediately thinks of him as Lennie. The big one is maybe six-feet-six, wearing a Yankees sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. He’s got a sandy mustache. He’s wearing a fanny-pack, only around in front so it’s actually a belly-pack. Callahan names this one George.

Callahan turns around, planning to flee down Second Avenue if he’s got the light or if it looks like he can beat the
traffic. If that’s impossible, he’ll go down Forty-sixth to the U.N. Plaza Hotel and duck into their lob
—

The big one, George, grabs him by the shirt and yanks him back by his collar. The collar rips, but unfortunately not enough to set him free.

“No you don’t, doc,” the little one says. “No you don’t.” Then bustles forward, quick as an insect, and before Callahan’s clear on what’s happening, Lennie has reached between his legs, seized his testicles, and squeezed them violently together. The pain is immediate and enormous, a swelling sickness like liquid lead.

“Like-at, niggah-lovvah?” Lennie asks him in a tone that seems to convey genuine concern, that seems to say “We want this to mean as much to you as it does to us.” Then he yanks Callahan’s testicles forward and the pain trebles. Enormous rusty saw-teeth sink into Callahan’s belly and he thinks,
He’ll rip them off, he’s already turned them to jelly and now he’s going to rip them right off, there’s nothing holding them on but a little loose skin and he’s going to—

He begins to scream and George clamps a hand over his mouth. “Quit it!” he snarls at his partner. “We’re on the fucking street, did you forget that?”

Even while the pain is eating him alive, Callahan is mulling the situation’s queerly inverted quality: George is the Hitler Brother in charge, not Lennie. George is the
big
Hitler Brother. It’s certainly not the way Steinbeck would have written it.

Then, from his right, a humming sound arises. At first he thinks it’s the chimes, but the humming is sweet. It’s strong, as well. George and Lennie feel it. And they don’t like it.

“Whazzat?” Lennie asks. “Did you hear sumpun?”

“I don’t know. Let’s get him back to the place. And keep
your hands off his balls. Later you can yank em all you want, but for now just help me.”

One on either side of him, and all at once he is being propelled back up Second Avenue. The high board fence runs past on their right. That sweet, powerful humming sound is coming from behind it.
If I could get over that fence, I’d be all right,
Callahan thinks. There’s something in there, something powerful and good. They wouldn’t dare go near it.

Perhaps this is so, but he doubts he could scramble over a board fence ten feet high even if his balls weren’t blasting out enormous bursts of their own painful Morse Code, even if he couldn’t feel them swelling in his underwear. All at once his head lolls forward and he vomits a hot load of half-digested food down the front of his shirt and pants. He can feel it soaking through to his skin, warm as piss.

Two young couples, obviously together, are headed the other way. The young men are big, they could probably mop up the street with Lennie and perhaps even give George a run for his money if they ganged up on him, but right now they are looking disgusted and clearly want nothing more than to get their dates out of Callahan’s general vicinity as quickly as they possibly can.