Wolves of the Calla (63 page)

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” Lennie/Bill shrieks. “We ain’t, we ain’t, we ain’t
—
” Ain’t what? Lennie/Bill doesn’t seem to know.

“Hands up!” It’s a different voice, but also coming
from behind the sun-gun dazzle of the light. “Reach for the sky! Right now, you
momzers!”

Their hands shoot up.

“Nah, belay that,” says the first one. They may be great guys, Callahan’s certainly willing to put them on
his
Christmas card list, but it’s clear they’ve never done anything like this before. “Shoes off! Pants off! Now! Right now!”

“What the fuck
—
” George/Nort begins. “Are you guys the cops? If you’re the cops, you gotta give us our rights, our fuckin Miranda
—”

From behind the glaring light, a gun goes off. Callahan sees an orange flash of fire. It’s probably a pistol, but it is to the Hitler Brothers’ modest barroom .32 as a hawk is to a hummingbird. The crash is gigantic, immediately followed by a crunch of plaster and a puff of stale dust. George/Nort and Lennie/Bill both scream. Callahan thinks one of his rescuers
—
probably the one who didn’t shoot
—
also screams.

“Shoes off and pants off! Now! Now! You better have em off before I get to thirty, or you’re dead. Onetwothreefourfi
—”

Again, the speed of the count leaves no time for consideration, let alone remonstrance. George/Nort starts to sit down and Voice Number Two says: “Sit down and we’ll kill you.”

And so the Hitler Brothers stagger around the knapsack, the Polaroid, the gun, and the flashlight like spastic cranes, pulling off their footgear while Voice Number One runs his suicidally rapid count. The shoes come off and the pants go down. George is a boxers guy while Lennie favors briefs of the pee-stained variety. There is no sign of Lennie’s hardon; Lennie’s hardon has decided to take the rest of the night off.

“Now get out,” Voice Number One says.

George faces into the light. His Yankees sweatshirt hangs down over his underwear shorts, which billow almost to his knees. He’s still wearing his fanny-pack. His calves are heavily muscled, but they are trembling. And George’s face is long with sudden dismayed realization.

“Listen, you guys,” he says, “if we go out of here without finishing this guy, they’ll kill us. These are very bad
—”

“If you schmucks aren’t out of here by the time I get to ten,” says Voice Number One, “I’ll kill you myself.”

To which Voice Number Two adds, with a kind of hysterical contempt:
“Gai cocknif en yom,
you cowardly motherfuckers! Stay, get shot, who cares?”

Later, after repeating this phrase to a dozen Jews who only shake their heads in bewilderment, Callahan will happen on an elderly fellow in Topeka who translates
gai cocknif en yom
for him. It means go shit in the ocean.

Voice Number One starts reeling them off again: “Onetwothreefour
—”

George/Nort and Lennie/Bill exchange a cartoon look of indecision, then bolt for the door in their underwear. The big searchlight turns to follow them. They are out; they are gone.

“Follow,” Voice Number One says gruffly to his partner. “If they get the idea to turn back
—”

“Yeahyeah,” says Voice Number Two, and he’s gone.

The brilliant light clicks off. “Turn over on your stomach,” says Voice Number One.

Callahan tries to tell him he doesn’t think he can, that his balls now feel roughly the size of teapots, but all that comes from his mouth is mush, because of his broken jaw. He compromises by rolling over on his left side as far as he can.

“Hold still,” says Voice Number One. “I don’t want to
cut you.” It’s not the voice of a man who does stuff like this for a living. Even in his current state, Callahan can tell that. The guy’s breathing in rapid wheezes that sometimes catch in an alarming way and then start up again. Callahan wants to thank him. It’s one thing to save a stranger if you’re a cop or a fireman or a lifeguard, he supposes. Quite another when you’re just an ordinary member of the greater public. And that’s what his rescuer is, he thinks,
both
his rescuers, although how they came so well prepared he doesn’t know. How could they know the Hitler Brothers’ names? And exactly where were they waiting? Did they come in from the street, or were they in the abandoned laundrymat the whole time? Other stuff Callahan doesn’t know. And doesn’t really care. Because someone saved, someone saved, someone saved his life tonight, and that’s the big thing, the only thing that matters. George and Lennie almost had their hooks in him, din’t they, dear, but the cavalry came at the last minute, just like in a John Wayne movie.

What Callahan wants to do is thank this guy. Where Callahan wants to be is safe in an ambulance and on his way to the hospital before the punks blindside the owner of Voice Number Two outside, or the owner of Voice Number One has an excitement-induced heart attack. He tries and more mush comes out of his mouth. Drunkspeak, what Rowan used to call gubbish. It sounds like
fann-ou.

His hands are cut free, then his feet. The guy doesn’t have a heart attack. Callahan rolls over onto his back again, and sees a pudgy white hand holding the scalpel. On the third finger is a signet ring. It shows an open book. Below it are the words
Ex Libris.
Then the searchlight goes on again and Callahan raises an arm over his eyes. “Christ, man, why are you doing that?” It comes out
Crymah,
I-oo oonnat,
but the owner of Voice Number One seems to understand.

“I should think that would be obvious, my wounded friend,” he says. “Should we meet again, I’d like it to be for the first time. If we pass on the street, I would as soon go unrecognized. Safer that way.”

Gritting footsteps. The light is backing away.

“We’re going to call an ambulance from the pay phone across the street
—”

“No! Don’t do that! What if they come back?” In his quite genuine terror, these words come out with perfect clarity.

“We’ll be watching,” says Voice Number One. The wheeze is fading now. The guy’s getting himself back under control. Good for him. “I think it
is
possible that they’ll come back, the big one was really quite distressed, but if the Chinese are correct, I’m now responsible for your life. It’s a responsibility I intend to live up to. Should they reappear, I’ll throw a bullet at them. Not over their heads, either.” The shape pauses. He looks like a fairly big man himself. Got a gut on him, that much is for sure. “Those were the Hitler Brothers, my friend. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” Callahan whispers. “And you won’t tell me who you are?”

“Better you not know,” says Mr. Ex Libris.

“Do you know who I am?”

A pause. Gritting steps. Mr. Ex Libris is now standing in the doorway of the abandoned laundrymat. “No,” he says. Then, “A priest. It doesn’t matter.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Wait for the ambulance,” says Voice Number One. “Don’t try to move on your own. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you may have internal injuries.”

Then he’s gone. Callahan lies on the floor, smelling bleach and detergent and sweet departed fabric softener.
U wash or we wash,
he thinks,
either way it all comes kleen.
His testicles throb and swell. His jaw throbs and there’s swelling there, too. He can feel his whole face tightening as the flesh puffs up. He lies there and waits for the ambulance and life or the return of the Hitler Brothers and death. For the lady or the tiger. For Diana’s treasure or the deadly biter-snake. And some interminable, uncountable time later, red pulses of light wash across the dusty floor and he knows this time it’s the lady. This time it’s the treasure.

This time it’s life.

“And that,” Callahan said, “is how I ended up in Room 577 of that same hospital that same night.”

Susannah looked at him, wide-eyed. “Are you serious?”

“Serious as a heart attack,” he said. “Rowan Magruder died, I got the living shit beaten out of me, and they slammed me back into the same bed. They must have had just about enough time to remake it, and until the lady came with the morphine-cart and put me out, I lay there wondering if maybe Magruder’s sister might not come back and finish what the Hitler Brothers had started. But why should such things surprise you? There are dozens of these odd crossings in both our stories, do ya. Have you not thought about the coincidence of Calla Bryn Sturgis and my own last name, for instance?”

“Sure we have,” Eddie said.

“What happened next?” Roland asked.

Callahan grinned, and when he did, the gunslinger realized the two sides of the man’s face didn’t quite line up. He’d been jaw-broke, all right. “The storyteller’s favorite question, Roland, but I think what I need to do now is speed my tale up a bit, or we’ll be here all night. The important thing, the part you really want to hear, is the end part, anyway.”

Well, you may think so,
Roland mused, and wouldn’t have been surprised to know all three of his friends were harboring versions of the same thought.

“I was in the hospital for a week. When they let me out, they sent me to a welfare rehab in Queens. The first place they offered me was in Manhattan and a lot closer, but it was associated with Home—we sent people there sometimes. I was afraid that if I went there, I might get another visit from the Hitler Brothers.”

“And did you?” Susannah asked.

“No. The day I visited Rowan in Room 577 of Riverside Hospital and then ended up there myself was May 19th, 1981,” Callahan said. “I went out to Queens in the back of a van with three or four other walking-wounded guys on May 25th. I’m going to say it was about six days after that, just before I checked out and hit the road again, that I saw the story in the
Post
. It was in the front of the paper, but not on the front page.
TWO MEN FOUND SHOT TO DEATH IN CONEY ISLAND
, the headline said.
COPS SAY ‘IT LOOKS LIKE A MOB JOB.’
That was because the faces and hands had been burned with acid. Nevertheless, the cops ID’d both of them: Norton
Randolph and William Garton, both of Brooklyn. There were photos. Mug shots; both of them had long records. They were my guys, all right. George and Lennie.”

“You think the low men got them, don’t you?” Jake asked.

“Yes. Payback’s a bitch.”

“Did the papers ever ID them as the Hitler Brothers?” Eddie asked. “Because, man, we were still scarin each other with those guys when I came along.”

“There was some speculation about that possibility in the tabloids,” Callahan said, “and I’ll bet that in their hearts the reporters who covered the Hitler Brothers murders and mutilations knew it was Randolph and Garton—there was nothing afterward but a few halfhearted copycat cuttings—but no one in the tabloid press wants to kill the bogeyman, because the bogeyman sells papers.”

“Man,” Eddie said. “You
have
been to the wars.”

“You haven’t heard the last act yet,” Callahan said. “It’s a dilly.”

Roland made the twirling go-on gesture, but it didn’t look urgent. He’d rolled himself a smoke and looked about as content as his three companions had ever seen him. Only Oy, sleeping at Jake’s feet, looked more at peace with himself.

“I looked for my footbridge when I left New York for the second time, riding across the GWB with my paperback and my bottle,” Callahan said, “but my footbridge was gone. Over the next couple of months I saw occasional flashes of the highways in hiding—and I remember getting a ten-dollar bill with Chadbourne on it a couple of times—but
mostly they were gone. I saw a lot of Type Three Vampires and remember thinking that they were spreading. But I did nothing about them. I seemed to have lost the urge, the way Thomas Hardy lost the urge to write novels and Thomas Hart Benton lost the urge to paint his murals. ‘Just mosquitoes,’ I’d think. ‘Let them go.’ My job was getting into some town, finding the nearest Brawny Man or Manpower or Job Guy, and also finding a bar where I felt comfortable. I favored places that looked like the Americano or the Blarney Stone in New York.”

“You liked a little steam-table with your booze, in other words,” Eddie said.

“That’s right,” Callahan said, looking at Eddie as one does at a kindred spirit. “Do ya! And I’d protect those places until it was time to move on. By which I mean I’d get tipsy in my favorite neighborhood bar, then finish up the evening—the crawling, screaming, puking-down-the-front-of-your-shirt part—somewhere else.
Al fresco,
usually.”

Jake began, “What—”

“Means he got drunk outdoors, sug,” Susannah told him. She ruffled his hair, then winced and put the hand on her own midsection, instead.

“All right, sai?” Rosalita asked.

“Yes, but if you had somethin with bubbles in it, I surely would drink it.”

Rosalita rose, tapping Callahan on the shoulder as she did so. “Go on, Pere, or it’ll be two in the morning and the cats tuning up in the badlands before you’re done.”

“All right,” he said. “I drank, that’s what it comes down to. I drank every night and raved to anyone who’d listen about Lupe and Rowan and Rowena
and the black man who picked me up in Issaquena County and Ruta, who really might have been full of fun but who sure wasn’t a Siamese cat. And finally I’d pass out.

“This went on until I got to Topeka. Late winter of 1982. That was where I hit my bottom. Do you folks know what that means, to hit a bottom?”

There was a long pause, and then they nodded. Jake was thinking of Ms. Avery’s English class, and his Final Essay. Susannah was recalling Oxford, Mississippi, Eddie the beach by the Western Sea, leaning over the man who had become his dinh, meaning to cut his throat because Roland wouldn’t let him go through one of those magic doors and score a little H.