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 .
'I have money , ' Callahan says, trying to give back the five .
'A man on the run never has enough,' says the black man. 'And please don't tell me you're not on the run. Don't insult my intelligence.'
'I thank you ,' Callahan says .
'De nada,' says the black man. 'Where are you going! Roughly speaking ?'
'I don't have a clue,' Callahan replies, then smiles. 'Roughly speaking.'
FIVE Picking oranges in Florida. Pushing a broom in New Orleans. Mucking out horse-stalls in Lufkin, Texas. Handing out real estate brochures on street corners in Phoenix, Arizona. Working jobs that pay cash. Observing the ever-changing faces on the bills. Noting the different names in the papers, Jimmy Carter is elected President, but so are Ernest 'Fritz' Hollings and Ronald Reagan. George Bush is also elected President. Gerald Ford decides to run again and he is elected President. The names in the papers (those of the celebrities change the most frequently, and there are many he has never heard of) don't matter. The faces on the currency don't matter. What matters is the sight of a weathervane against a violent pink sunset, the sound of his heels on an empty road in Utah, the sound of the wind in the New Mexico desert, the sight of a child skipping rope beside a junked-out Chevrolet Caprice in Fossil, Oregon. What matters is the whine of the powerlines beside Highway 50 west of Elko, Nevada, and a dead crow in a ditch outside Rainbarrel Springs. Sometimes he's sober and sometimes he gets drunk. Once he lays up in an abandoned shed —this is just over the California state line from Nevada —and drinks for four days straight. It ends with seven hours of off-and-on vomiting. For the first hour or so, the puking is so constant and so violent he is convinced it will kill him. Later on, he can only wish it would. And when it's over, he swears to himself that he's done, no more booze for him, hes finally learned his lesson, and a week later lies drunk again and staring up at the strange stars behind the restaurant where he has hired on as a dishwasher. He is an animal in a trap and he doesn't care. Sometimes there are vampires and sometimes he kills them. Mostly he lets them live, because he's afraid of drawing attention to himself- —the attention of the low men. Sometimes he asks himself what he thinks he's doing, where the hell he's going, and such questions are apt to send him in search of the next bottle in a hurry. Because he's really not going anywhere. He's just following the highways in hiding and dragging his trap along behind him, he's just listening to the call of those roads and going from one to the next. Trapped or not, sometimes he is happy; sometimes he sings in his chains like the sea. He wants to see the next weathervane standing against the next pink sunset. He wants to see the next silo crumbling at the end of some disappeared farmer's long-abandoned north field and see the next droning truck with TONOPAH GRAVEL or ASPLUNDH HEAVY CONSTRUCTION written on the side. He's in hobo heaven, lost in the split personalities of America. He wants to hear the wind in canyons and know that he's the only one who hears it. He wants to scream and hear the echoes run away. When the taste of Barlow's blood is too strong in his mouth, he wants to drink. And, of course, when he sees the lost-pet posters or the messages chalked on the sidewalks, he wants to move on. Out west he sees fewer of them, and neither his name nor his description is on any of them. From time to time he sees vampires cruising —give us this day our daily blood —but he leaves them be. They're mosquitoes, after all, no more than that .
In the spring of 1981 he finds himself rolling into the city of Sacramento in the back of what may be the oldest International-Harvester stake-bed truck still on the road in California. He's crammed in with roughly three dozen Mexican illegals, there is mescal and tequila and pot and several
