Wolves of the Calla

ELEVEN

'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 re-make 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. Alfresco, 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.

'For me, the bottom came in a jail cell,' Callahan said. 'It was early morning, and I was actually relatively sober. Also, it was no drunk tank but a cell with a blanket on the cot and an actual seat on the toilet. Compared to some of the places I'd been in, I was farting through satin. The only bothersome things were the name guy… and that song.'

TWELVE

The light falling through the cell's small chickenwire-reinforced window is gray, which consequently makes his skin gray. Also his hands are dirty and covered with scratches. The crud under some of his nails is black (dirt) and under some it's maroon (dried blood). He vaguely remembers tussling with someone who kept calling him sir, so he guesses that he might be here on the ever-popular Penal Code 48, Assaulting an Officer. All he wanted -Callahan has a slightly clearer memory of this - was to try on the kid's cap, which was very spiffy. He remembers trying to tell the young cop (from the look of this one, pretty soon they'll be hiring kids who aren't even toilet-trained as police officers, at least in Topeka) that he's always on the lookout for funky new lids, he always wears a cap because he's got the Mark of Cain on his forehead. 'Looksh like a crossh,' he remembers saying (or trying to say), 'but it'sh rilly the Marga-Gain. ' Which, in his cups, is about as close as he can come to saying Mark of Cain.

Was really drunk last night, but he doesn't feel so bad as he sits here on the bunk, rubbing a hand through his crazy hair. Mouth doesn't taste so good -sort of like Ruta the Siamese Cat took a dump in it, if you wanted the truth -but his head isn't aching too badly. If only the voices would shut up!Down the hall someone's droning out a seemingly endless list of names in alphabetical order. Closer by, someone is singing his least favorite song: 'Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my li-ife tonight…'

'Nailor!… Naughton!… O'Connor!… O'Shaugnessy!… Oskowski!… Osmer!'

He is just beginning to realize that he is the one singing when the trembling begins in his calves. It works its way up to his knees, then to his thighs, deepening and strengthening as it comes. He can see the big muscles in his legs popping up and down like pistons. What is happening to him?

'Palmer!… Palmgren!'

The trembling hits his crotch and lower belly. His underwear shorts darken as he sprays them with piss. At the same time his feet start snapping out into the air, as if he's trying to punt invisible footballs with both of them at the same time. I'm seizing, he thinks. This is probably it. I'm probably going out. Bye-bye blackbird. He tries to call for help and nothing conies out of his mouth but a low chugging sound. His arms begin to fly up and down. Now he's punting invisible footballs with his feet while his arms shout hallelujah, and the guy down the hall is going to go on until the end of the century, maybe until the next Ice Age.

'Peschier!… Peters!… Pike!… Polovik!… Ranee!… Rancourt!'

Callahan's upper body begins to snap back and forth. Each time it snaps forward he comes closer to losing his balance and falling on the floor. His hands fly up. His feet fly out. There is a sudden spreading pancake of warmth on his ass and he realizes he has just shot the chocolate.

'Ricupero!… Robillard!… Rossi!'

He snaps backward, all the way to the whitewashed concrete wall where someone has scrawled BANGO SKANK and Just had my 19th Nervous Breakdown! Then forward, this time with the full-body enthusiasm of a Muslim at morning prayers. For a moment he's staring at the concrete floor from between his naked knees and then he overbalances and goes down on his face. His jaw, which has somehow healed in spite of the nightly binges, rebreaks in three of the original four places. But, just to bring things back into perfect balance -four's the magic number -this time his nose breaks, too. He lies jerking on the floor like a hooked fish, his body fingerpaintingin the blood, shit, and piss.Yeah, I'm going out, he thinks.

'Ryan!… Sannelli!… Scher!'

But gradually the extravagant grand mal jerks of his body moderate to petit mal, and then to little more than twitches. He thinks someone must come, but no one does, not at first. The twitches fade away and now he's just Donald Frank Callahan, lying on the floor of a