“Thought you told me you didn’t have anything, ” Rudebacher says to Callahan.
“Beg your pardon ?”
” You’ve got a bad case of itchy-foot, my friend. It often goes with the other thing.” Rudebacher makes a bottle-tipping gesture with one dishwater-reddened hand. “When a man catches itchy-foot late in life, it’s often incurable. Tell you what, if I didn’t have a wife that’s still a pretty good lay and two kids in college, I might just pack me a bindle and join you. ”
“Yeah?” Callahan asks, fascinated.
“September and October are always the worst,” Rudebacher says dreamily. “You just hear it calling. The birds hear it, too, and go.”
“It?”
Rudebacher gives him a look that says don’t be stupid. “With them it’s the sky. Guys like us, it’s the road. Call of the open fuckin road. Guys like me, kids in school and a wife that still likes it more than just on Saturday night, they turn up the radio a little louder and drown it out. You’re not gonna do that.” He pauses, looks at Callahan shrewdly. “Stay another week? I’ll bump you twenty-five bucks. You make a gahdam fine Monte Cristo.”
Callahan considers, then shakes his head. If Rudebacher was right, if it was only one road, maybe he would stay another week . . . and another… and another. But it’s not just one. It’s all of them, all those highways in hiding, and he remembers the name of his third-grade reader and bursts out laughing. It was called Roads to Everywhere.
“What’s so funny?” Rudebacher asks sourly.
” Nothing, ” Callahan says. “Everything.” He claps his boss on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Dicky. If I get back this way, I’ll stop in.”
“You won’t get back this way,” Dicky Rudebacher says, and of course he is right.
THREE
“I was five years on the road, give or take,” Callahan said as they approached his church, and in a way that was all he said on the subject. Yet they heard more. Nor were they surprised later to find that Jake, on his way into town with Eisenhart and the Slightmans, had heard some of it, too. It was Jake, after all, who was strongest in the touch.
Five years on the road, no more than that.
And all the rest, do ya ken: a thousand lost worlds of the rose.
FOUR
He’s five years on the road, give or take, only there’s a lot more than one road and maybe, under the right circumstances, five years can be forever.
There is Route 71 through Delaware and apples to pick. There’s a little boy named Lars with a broken radio.
Callahan fixes it and Lars’s mother packs him a great and wonderful lunch to go on with, a lunch that seems to last for days. There is Route 317 through rural Kentucky, and a job digging graves with a fellow named Pete Petacki who won’t shut up. A girl comes to watch them, a pretty girl of seventeen or so, sitting on a rock wall with yellow leaves raining down all around her, and Pete Petacki speculates on what it would be like to have those long thighs stripped of the corduroys they’re wearing and wrapped around his neck, what it would be like to be tongue-deep in jailbait. Pete Petacki doesn’t see the blue light around her, and he certainly doesn’t see the way her clothes drift to the ground like feathers later on, when Callahan sits beside her, then draws her close as she slips a hand up his leg and her mouth onto his throat, then thrusts his knife unerringly into the bulge of bone and nerve and gristle at the back of her neck. This is a shot he’s getting very good at.
There is Route 19 through West Virginia, and a little road-dusty carnival that’s looking for a man who can fix the rides and feed the animals. “Or the other way around,” says Greg Chumm, the carny’s greasy-haired owner. “You know, feed the rides and fix the animals. Whatever floats ya boat.” And for awhile, when a strep infection leaves the carny shorthanded (they are swinging down south by now, trying to stay ahead of winter), he finds himself also playing Menso the ESP Wonder, and with surprising success. It is also as Menso that he first sees them, not vampires and not bewildered dead people but tall men with pale, watchful faces that are usually hidden under old-fashioned hats with brims or new-fashioned baseball hats with extra-long bills. In the shadows thrown by these hats, their eyes flare a dusky red, like the eyes of coons or polecats when you catch them in the beam of a flashlight, lurking around your trash barrels. Do they see him ? The
vampires (the Type Threes, at least) do not. The dead people do. And these men, with their hands stuffed into the pockets of their long yellow coats and their hard-case faces peering out from beneath their hats? Do they see? Callahan doesn’t know for sure but decides to take no chances. Three days later, in the town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, he hangs up his black Menso tophat, leaves his greasy coverall on the floor of a pickup truck’s camper cap, and blows Chumm’s Traveling Wonder Show, not bothering with the formality of his final paycheck. On his way out of town, he sees a number of those pet posters nailed to telephone poles. A typical one reads:
LOST! SIAMESE CAT, 2 YRS OLD
ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF RUTA
SHE IS NOISY BUT FULL OF FUN
LARGE REWARD OFFERED
$$$$$$
DIAL 764, WAIT FOR BEEP, GIVE YOUR NUMBER
GOD BLESS YOU FOR HELPING
Who is Ruta? Callahan doesn’t know. All he knows is that she is NOISY but FULL OF FUN. Will she still be noisy when the low men catch up to her? Will she still be full of fun ?
Callahan doubts it.
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.