Wolves of the Calla

Choo and Riddle-De-Dumwere still there, still real. 'The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. It's so weird. Once it happened to me and once I watched it happen to me. That'd make a pretty good riddle all by itself.'

Roland made a rapid rotating gesture with his diminished right hand, telling him to go on and be quick.

'Mr. Tower introduced himself,' Jake said, 'and then I did the same. Jake Chambers, I said. And he said—'

' 'Good handle, partner,'' Eddie broke in. 'That's what he said. Then he said Jake Chambers sounded like the name of the hero in a Western novel.'

' 'The guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans up the town, then moves on,''Jake quoted. 'And then he said, 'Something by Wayne D. Overholser, maybe.' ' He looked at Susannah and repeated it. 'Wayne D. Overholser . And if you tell me that's a coincidence, Susannah…' He broke into a sunny, sudden grin. 'I'll tell you to kiss my white-boy ass.'

Susannah laughed. 'No need of that, sass-box. I don't believe it's a coincidence. And when we meet Callahan's farmer friend, I intend to ask him what his middle name is. I set my warrant that it'll not only begin with D, it'll be something like Dean or Dane, just four letters—' Her hand went back to the place below her breast. 'This gas! My! What I wouldn't give for a roll of Tums or even a bottle of—' She broke off again. 'Jake, what is it? What's wrong?'

Jake was holding Charlie the Choo-Choo in his hands, and his face had gone dead white. His eyes were huge, shocked. Beside him, Oy whined uneasily. Roland leaned over to look, and his eyes also widened.

'Good gods,' he said.

Eddie and Susannah looked. The title was the same. The picture was the same: an anthropomorphic locomotive puffing up a hill, its cowcatcher wearing a grin, its headlight a cheerful eye.

But the yellow letters across the bottom, Story and Pictures by Beryl Evans, were gone. There was no credit line there at all.

Jake turned the book and looked at the spine. It said Charlie the Choo-Choo and McCauley House, Publishers. Nothing else.

South of them now, the sound of voices. Callahan and his friends, approaching. Callahan from the Calla. Callahan of the Lot, he had also called himself.

'Title page, sugar,' Susannah said. 'Look there, quick.'

Jake did. Once again there was only the title of the story and the publisher's name, this time with a colophon.

'Look at the copyright page,' Eddie said.

Jake turned the page. Here, on the verso of the title page and beside the recto where the story began, was the copyright information. Except there was no information, not really.

Copyright 1936, it said. Numbers which added up to nineteen. The rest was blank.

Chapter V: OVERHOLSER

ONE

Susannah was able to observe a good deal on that long and interesting day, because Roland gave her the chance and because, after her morning's sickness passed off, she felt wholly herself again.

Just before Callahan and his party drew within earshot, Roland murmured to her, 'Stay close to me, and not a word from you unless I prompt it. If they take you for my sh'veen, let it be so.'

Under other circumstances, she might have had something pert to say about the idea of being Roland's quiet little side-wife, his nudge in the night, but there was no time this morning, and in any case, it was far from a joking matter; the seriousness in his face made that clear. Also, the part of the faithful, quiet second appealed to her. In truth, any part appealed to her. Even as a child, she had rarely been so happy as when pretending to be someone else.

Which probably explains all there is about you worth knowing, sugar , she thought.

'Susannah?' Roland asked. 'Do you hear me?'

'Hear you well,' she told him. 'Don't you worry about me.'

'If it goes as I want, they'll see you little and you'll see them much.'

As a woman who'd grown up black in mid-twentieth-century America (Odetta had laughed and applauded her way through Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , often rocking back and forth in her seat like one who has been visited by a revelation), Susannah knew exactly what he wanted. And would give it to him. There was a part of her—a spiteful Detta Walker part—that would always resent Roland's ascendancy in her heart and mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.

TWO

Watching Roland make the introductions (Susannah was presented dead last, after Jake, and almost negligendy), she had time to reflect on how fine she felt now that the nagging gas-pains in her left side had departed. Hell, even the lingering headache had gone its way, and that sucker had been hanging around—sometimes in the back of her head, sometimes at one temple or the other, sometimes just above her left eye, like a migraine waiting to hatch—for a week or more. And of course there were the mornings. Every one found her feeling nauseated and with a bad case of jelly-leg for the first hour or so. She never vomited, but for that first hour she always felt on the verge of it. She wasn't stupid enough to mistake such symptoms, but had reason to know they meant nothing. She just hoped she wouldn't embarrass herself by swelling up as her Mama's friend Jessica had done, not once but twice. Two false pregnancies, and in both cases that woman had looked ready to bust out twins. Triplets, even. But of course Jessica Beasley's periods had stopped, and that made it all too easy for a woman to believe she was with child. Susannah knew she wasn't pregnant for the simplest of reasons: she was still menstruating. She had begun a period on the very day they had awakened back on the Path of the Beam, with the Green Palace twenty-five or thirty miles behind them. She'd had another since then. Both courses had been exceptionally heavy, necessitating the use of many rags to soak up the dark flow, and before then her menses had always been light, some months no more than a few of the spots her mother called 'a lady's roses.' Yet she didn't complain, because before her arrival in this world, her periods had usually been painful and sometimes excruciating. The two she'd had since returning to the Path of the Beam hadn't hurt at all. If not for the soaked rags she'd carefully buried to one side of their path or the other, she wouldn't have had a clue that it was her time of the month. Maybe it was the purity of the water.

Of course she knew what all this was about; it didn't take a rocket scientist, as Eddie sometimes said. The crazy, scrambled dreams she couldn't recall, the weakness and nausea in the mornings, the transient headaches, the strangely fierce gas attacks and occasional cramps all came down to the same thing: she wanted his baby. More than anything else in the world, she wanted Eddie Dean's chap growing in her belly.

What she didn't want was to puff up in a humiliating false pregnancy.

Never mind all that now , she thought as Callahan approached with the others. Right now you've got to watch. Got to see what Roland and Eddie and Jake don't see. That way nothing gets dropped . And she felt she could do that job very well.

Really, she had never felt finer in her life.

THREE