“What about Turtleback Lane, and the walk-ins? I meant to ask him — ”
“We can find it.”
“Are you sure? Because I think we need to go there.”
“I think so, too. Come on. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
THIRTEEN
The taillights of the old Ford had hardly cleared the end of the driveway before Stephen King
opened his eyes. The first thing he did was look at the clock. Almost four. He should have been rolling after Joe ten minutes ago, but the nap he’d taken had done him good. He felt wonderful.
Refreshed. Cleaned out in some weird way. He thought, If every nap could do that, taking them would be a national law.
Maybe so, but Betty Jones was going to be seriously worried if she didn’t see the Cherokee
turning into her yard by four-thirty. King reached for the phone to call her, but his eyes fell to the pad on the desk below it, instead. The sheets were headed CALLING ALL BLOWHARDS. A
little something from one of his sisters-in-law.
Face going blank again, King reached for the pad and the pen beside it. He bent and wrote:
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, not to worry, you’ve got the key.
He paused, looking fixedly at this, then wrote:
Dad-a-chud, dad-a-ched, see it, Jake! The key is red!
He paused again, then wrote:
Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee, give this boy a plastic key.
He looked at what he had written with deep affection. Almost love. God almighty, but he felt
fine! These lines meant nothing at all, and yet writing them afforded a satisfaction so deep it was almost ecstasy.
King tore off the sheet.
Balled it up.
Ate it.
It stuck for a moment in his throat and then — ulp! —down it went. Good deal! He snatched
the
(ad-a-chee)
key to the Jeep off the wooden key-board (which was itself shaped like a key) and hurried
outside. He’d get Joe, they’d come back here and pack, they’d grab supper at Mickey- Dee’s in South Paris. Correction, Mickey-Ztee’s. He felt he could eat a couple of Quarter Pounders all by himself. Fries, too. Damn, but he felt good!
When he reached Kansas Road and turned toward town, he flipped on the radio and got the
McCoys, singing “Hang On, Sloopy” — always excellent. His mind drifted, as it so often did while listening to the radio, and he found himself thinking of the characters from that old story, The Dark Tower. Not that there were many left; as he recalled, he’d killed most of them off, even the kid. Didn’t know what else to do with him, probably. That was usually why you got rid of
characters, because you didn’t know what else to do with them. What had his name been, Jack?
No, that was the haunted Dad in The Shining. The Dark Tower kid had been Jake. Excellent choice of name for a story with a Western motif, something right out of Wayne D. Overholser or
Ray Hogan. Was it possible Jake could come back into that story, maybe as a ghost? Of course
he could. The nice thing about tales of the supernatural, King reflected, was that nobody had to really die. They could always come back, like that guy Barnabas on Dark Shadows. Barnabas Collins had been a vampire.
“Maybe the kid comes back as a vampire,” King said, and laughed. “Watch out, Roland, dinner is served and dinner be you!” But that didn’t feel right. What, then? Nothing came, but that was all right. In time, something might. Probably when he least expected it; while feeding the cat or changing the baby or just walking dully along, as Auden said in that poem about suffering.
No suffering today. Today he felt great.
Yar, just call me Tony the Tiger.
On the radio, the McCoys gave way to Troy Shondell, singing “This Time.”
That Dark Tower thing had been sort of interesting, actually. King thought, Maybe when we get back from up north I ought to dig it out. Take a look at it.
Not a bad idea.
STAVE: Commala-come-call
We hail the One who made us all,
Who made the men and made the maids,
Who made the great and small.
RESPONSE: Commala-come-call!
He made the great and small!
And yet how great the hand of fate
That rules us one and all.
12th STANZA
JAKE AND CALLAHAN
Jake and Callahan
ONE
Don Callahan had had many dreams of returning to America. Usually they began with him
waking up under a high, fair desert sky full of the puffy clouds baseball players call “angels” or in his own rectory bed in the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. No matter which locale it
happened to be, he’d be nearly overwhelmed with relief, his first instinct for prayer. Oh, thank God. Thank God it was only a dream and finally I am awake.
He was awake now, no question of that.
He turned a complete circle in the air and saw Jake do exactly the same in front of him. He
lost one of his sandals. He could hear Oy yapping and Eddie roaring in protest. He could hear
taxi horns, that sublime New York street music, and something else, as well: a preacher. Really cruising along, by the sound of him. Third gear, at least. Maybe over drive . . .
One of Callahan’s ankles clipped the side of the Unfound Door as he went through and there
was a burst of terrific pain from that spot. Then the ankle (and the area around it) went numb.
There was a speedy riffle of todash chimes, like a thirty-three-and-a-third record played at forty-five rpm. A buffet of conflicting air currents hit him, and suddenly he was smelling gasoline and exhaust instead of the Doorway Cave’s dank air. First street music; now street perfume.
For a moment there were two preachers. Henchick behind, roaring ” Behold, the door opens! ”
and another one ahead, bellowing ” Say GAWD, brotha, that’s right, say GAWD on Second
Avenue! ”
More twins, Callahan thought — there was time for that —and then the door behind him
blammed shut and the only God-shouter was the one on Second Avenue. Callahan also had time
to think Welcome home, you sonofabitch, welcome back to America, and then he landed.
TWO
It was quite an all-out crash, but he came down hard on his hands and knees. His jeans protected the latter parts to some degree (although they tore), but the sidewalk scraped what felt like an acre of skin from his palms. He heard the rose, singing powerfully and undisturbed.
Callahan rolled over onto his back and looked up at the sky, snarling with pain, holding his bleeding, buzzing hands in front of his face. A drop of blood from the left one splashed onto his cheek like a tear.
“Where the fuck did you come from, my friend?” asked an astounded black man in gray fatigues. He seemed to have been the only one to mark Don Callahan’s dramatic re-entry into
America. He was staring down at the man on the sidewalk with wide eyes.
“Oz,” Callahan said, and sat up.
His hands stung fiercely and now his ankle was back, complaining in loud yozvp-yowp-yowp bursts of pain that were in perfect synch with his elevated heartbeat. “Go on, fella. Get out of here. I’m okay, so twenty-three skidoo.”
“Whatever you say, bro. Later.”
The man in the gray fatigues — a janitor just off-shift was Callahan’s guess — started
walking. He favored Callahan with one final glance — still amazed but already beginning to
doubt what he’d seen — and then skirted the little crowd listening to the street preacher. A
moment later he was gone.
Callahan got to his feet and stood on one of the steps leading up to Hammarskjöld Plaza,
looking for Jake. He didn’t see him. He looked the other way, for the Unfound Door, but that was gone, too.
” Now listen, my friends! Listen, I say God, I say God’s love, I say gimme hallelujah! ”
“Hallelujah,” said a member of the street preacher’s crowd, not really sounding all that into it.
” I say amen, thank you, brotha! Now listen because this is America’s time of TESTING and America is FAILING her TEST! This country needs a BOMB, not a new-kew-lar one but a
GAWD-BOMB, can you say hallelujah’? ”
“Jake!” Callahan shouted. “Jake, where are you? Jake!”
“Oy.” That was Jake, his voice raised in a scream. ” Oy, LOOK OUT! ”
There was a yapping, excited bark Callahan would have recognized anywhere. Then the
scream of locked tires.
The blare of a horn . . .
And the thud.
THREE
Callahan forgot about his bashed ankle and sizzling palms. He ran around the preacher’s little
crowd (it had turned as one to the street and the preacher had quit his rant in mid-flow) and saw Jake standing in Second Avenue, in front of a Yellow Cab that had slewed to a crooked stop no