Then the room begins filling up with nurses, there’s a doctor with an arrogant face yelling for the patient’s chart, and pretty soon Rowan’s twin sister will be back, this time possibly breathing fire. Callahan decides it’s time to blow this pop-shop, and the greater pop-shop that is New York City. The low men are still interested in him, it seems, very interested indeed, and if they have a base of operations, it’s probably right here in Fun City, USA. Consequently, a return to the West Coast would probably be an excellent idea. He can’t afford another plane ticket, but he has enough cash to ride the Big Gray Dog. Won’t be for the first time, either. Another trip west, why not ? He can see himself with absolute clarity, the man in Seat 29-C: a fresh, unopened package of cigarettes in his shirt pocket; afresh, unopened bottle of Early Times in a paper bag; the new Jfohn D. MacDonald novel, also fresh and unopened, lying on his lap. Maybe he’ll be on the far side of the Hudson and riding through Fort Lee, deep into Chapter One and nipping his second drink before they finally turn off all the machines in Room 577 and his old friend goes out into the darkness and toward whatever waits for us there.
SEVEN
“577,” Eddie said.
“Nineteen,” Jake said.
“Beg pardon?” Callahan asked again.
“Five, seven, and seven,” Susannah said. “Add them, you get nineteen.”
“Does that mean something?”
“Put them all together, they spell mother, a word that means the world to me,” Eddie said with a sentimental smile.
Susannah ignored him. “We don’t know,” she said. “You didn’t leave New York, did you? If you had, you’d have never gotten that.” She pointed to the scar on his forehead.
“Oh, I left,” Callahan said. “Just not quite as soon as I intended. My intention when I left the hospital really was to go back down to Port Authority and buy a ticket on the Forty bus.”
“What’s that?” Jake asked.
“Hobo-speak for the farthest you can go. If you buy a ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska, you’re riding on the Forty bus.”
“Over here, it’d be Bus Nineteen,” Eddie said.
“As I was walking, I got thinking about all the old times. Some of them were funny, like when a bunch of the guys at Home put on a circus show. Some of them were scary, like one night just before dinner when one guy says to this other one, ‘Stop picking your nose, Jeffy, it’s making me sick’ and Jeffy goes ‘Why don’t you pick this, homeboy,’ and he pulls out this giant spring-blade knife and before any of us can move or even figure out what’s happening, Jeffy cuts the other guy’s throat. Lupe’s screaming and I’m yelling Jesus! Holy Jesus!’
and the blood is spraying everywhere because he got the guy’s carotid—or maybe it was the jugular—and then Rowan comes running out of the bathroom holding his pants up with one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other, and do you know what he did?”
“Used the paper,” Susannah said.
Callahan grinned. It made him a younger man. “Yer-bugger, he did. Slapped the whole roll right against the place where the blood was spurting and yelled for Lupe to call 211, which got you an ambulance in those days. And I’m standing there, watching that white toilet paper turn red, working its way in toward the cardboard core. Rowan said ‘Just think of it as the world’s biggest shaving cut’ and we started laughing. We laughed until the tears came out of our eyes.
“I was running through a lot of old times, do ya. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I remember—vaguely—
stopping in at a Smiler’s Market and getting a couple of cans of Bud in a paper sack. I drank one of them and kept on walking. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going—not in my conscious mind, at least—but my feet must have had a mind of their own, because all at once I looked around and I was in front of this place where we used to go to supper sometimes if we were—as they say—in funds. It was on Second and Fifty-second.”
“Chew Chew Mama’s,” Jake said.
Callahan stared at him with real amazement, then looked at Roland. “Gunslinger, you boys are starting to scare me a little.”
Roland only twirled his fingers in his old gesture: Keep going, partner.
“I decided to go in and get a hamburger for old times’ sake,” Callahan said. “And while I was eating the burger, I decided I didn’t want to leave New York without at least looking into Home through the front window. I could stand across the street, like the times when I swung by there after Lupe died. Why not? I’d never been bothered there before. Not by the vampires, not by the low men, either.” He looked at them. “I can’t tell you if I really believed that, or if it was some kind of elaborate, suicidal mind-game. I can recapture a lot of what I felt that night, what I said and how I thought, but not that.
“In any case, I never got to Home. I paid up and I went walking down Second Avenue. Home was at First and Forty-seventh, but I didn’t want to walk directly in front of it So I decided to go down to First and Forty-sixth and cross over there.”
“Why not Forty-eighth?” Eddie asked him quietly. “You could have turned down Forty-eighth, that would have been quicker. Saved you doubling back a block.”
Callahan considered the question, then shook his head. “If there was a reason, I don’t remember.”
“There was a reason,” Susannah said. “You wanted to walk past the vacant lot.”
“Why would I—”
“For the same reason people want to walk past a bakery when the doughnuts are coming out of the oven,”
Eddie said. “Some things are just nice, that’s all.”
Callahan received this doubtfully, then shrugged. “If you say so.”
“I do, sai.”
“In any case, I was walking along, sipping my other beer. I was almost at Second and Forty-sixth when—”
“What was there?” Jake asked eagerly. “What was on that corner in 1981?”
“I don’t…” Callahan began, and then he stopped. “A fence,” he said. “Quite a high one. Ten, maybe twelve feet.”
“Not the one we climbed over,” Eddie said to Roland. “Not unless it grew five feet on its own.”
“There was a picture on it,” Callahan said. “I do remember that. Some sort of street mural, but I couldn’t see what it was, because the street-lights on the corner were out. And all at once it hit me that wasn’t right. All at once an alarm started going off in my head. Sounded a lot like the one that brought all the people into Rowan’s room at the hospital, if you want to know the truth. All at once I couldn’t believe I was where I was.
It was nuts. But at the same time I’m thinking…”
EIGHT
At the same time he’s thinking lt’s all right, just a few lights out is all it is, if there were vampires you’d see them and if there were low men you’d hear the chimes and smell rancid onions and hot metal. All the same he decides to vacate this area, and immediately. Chimes or no chimes, every nerve in his body is suddenly out on his skin, sparking and sizzling.
He turns and there are two men right behind him. There is a space of seconds when they are so surprised by his abrupt change of direction that he probably could have darted between them like an aging running back and gone sprinting back up Second Avenue. But he is surprised, too, and for a further space of seconds the three of them only stand there, staring.
There’s a big Hitler Brother and a little Hitler Brother. The little one is no more than five-two. He’s wearing a loose chambray shirt over black slacks. On his head is a baseball cap turned around backwards. His eyes are as black as drops of tar and his complexion is bad. Callahan immediately thinks of him as Lennie. The big one is maybe six-feet-six, wearing a Yankees sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. He’s got a sandy mustache. He’s wearing a fanny-pack, only around in front so it’s actually a belly-pack. Callahan names this one George.
Callahan turns around, planning to flee down Second Avenue if he’s got the light or if it looks like he can beat the traffic. If that’s impossible, he’ll go down Forty-sixth to the U.N. Plaza Hotel and duck into their lob
—
The big one, George, grabs him by the shirt and yanks him back by his collar. The collar rips, but unfortunately not enough to set him free.
” No you don’t doc, ” the little one says. “No you don’t. ” Then bustles forward, quick as an insect, and before Callahan’s clear on what’s happening, Lennie has reached between his legs, seized his testicles, and