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 bottles of wine, they’re all drunk and done up and Callahan is perhaps the drunkest of them all. The names of his companions come back to him in later years like names spoken in a haze of fever: Escobar… Estrada…Javier… Esteban…
Rosario… Echeverria… Caverra. Are they all names he will later encounter in the Calla, or is that just a booze-hallucination? For that matter, what is he to make of his own name, which is so close to that of the place where he finishes up? Calla, Callahan. Calla, Callahan. Sometimes, when he’s long getting to sleep in his pleasant rectory bed, the two names chase each other in his head like the tigers in Little Black Sambo.
Sometimes a line of poetry comes to him, a paraphrase from (he thinks) Archibald MacLeish’s “Epistle to Be Left in Earth. ” It was not the voice of God but only the thunder. That’s not right, but it’s how he remembers it. Not God but the thunder. Or is that only what he wants to believe? How many times has God been denied just that way ?
In any case, all of that comes later. When he rolls into Sacramento he’s drunk and he’s happy. There are no questions in his mind. He’s even halfway happy the next day, hangover and all. He finds a job easily; jobs are everywhere, it seems, lying around like apples after a windstorm has gone through the orchard. As long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, that is, or scalded by hot water or sometimes blistered by the handle of an ax or a shovel; in his years on the road no one has ever offered him a stockbroker’s job.
The work he gets in Sacramento is unloading trucks at a block-long bed-and-mattress store called Sleepy John’s. Sleepy John is preparing for his once-yearly Mattre$$ Ma$$acre, and all morning long Callahan and a crew of five other men haul in the kings and queens and doubles. Compared to some of the day-labor he’s done over the last years, this job is a tit.
At lunch, Callahan and the rest of the men sit in the shade of the loading dock. So far as he can tell, there’s no one in this crew from the International-Harvester, but he wouldn’t swear to it; he was awfully drunk. All he knows for sure is that he’s once again the only guy present with a white skin. All of them are eating enchiladas from Crazy Mary’s down the road. There’s a dirty old boombox sitting on a pile of crates, playing salsa. Two young men tango together while the others— Callahan included— put aside their lunches so they can clap along.
A young woman in a skirt and blouse comes out, watches the men dance disapprovingly, then looks at Callahan. “You’re anglo, right?” she says.
“Anglo as the day is long,” Callahan agrees.
” Then maybe you’d like this. Certainly no good to the rest of them.” She hands him the newspaper— the Sacramento Bee— then looks at the dancing Mexicans. “Beaners,” she says, and the subtext is in the tone: What can you do ?
Callahan considers rising to his feet and kicking her narrow can’t-dance anglo ass for her, but it’s noon, too late in the day to get another job if he loses this one. And even if he doesn’t wind up in the calabozo for assault, he won’t get paid. He settles for giving her turned back the finger, and laughs when several of the men applaud. The young woman wheels, looks at them suspiciously, then goes back inside. Still grinning, Callahan shakes open the paper. The grin lasts until he gets to the page marked national briefs, then fades in a hurry. Between a story about a train derailment in Vermont and a bank robbery in Missouri, he finds this: AWARD-WINNING “STREET ANGEL” CRITICAL
NEW YORK (AP) Rowan R. Magruder, owner and Chief Supervisor of what may be America’s most highly regarded shelter for the homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted, is in critical condition after being assaulted by the so-called Hitler Brothers. The Hitler Brothers have been operating in the five boroughs of New York for at least eight years. According to police, they are believed responsible for over three dozen assaults and the deaths of two men. Unlike their other victims, Magruder is neither black nor Jewish, but he was found in a doorway not far from Home, the shelter he founded in 1968, with the Hitler Brothers’ trademark swastika cut into his forehead. Magruder had also suffered multiple stab-wounds.