Wolves of the Calla dt-5

by Stephen King

  On Main Street he stops in front of the Leabrook Homestyle Diner and there is a sign in the window reading SHORT-ORDER COOK WANTED. Don Callahan short-ordered through most of his time at seminary and did more than his share of the same at Home on the East Side of Manhattan. He thinks he might fit right in here at the Leabrook Homestyle. Turns out he's right, although it takes three shifts before the ability to crack a pair of eggs one-handed onto the grill comes swimming back to him. The owner, a long drink of water named Dicky Rudebacher, asks Callahan if he has any medical problems - "catching stuff," he calls it - and nods simple acceptance when Callahan says he doesn't. He doesn't ask Callahan for any paperwork, not so much as a Social Security number. He wants to pay his new short-order off the books, if that 'snot a problem. Callahan assures him it is not.

  "One more thing," says Dicky Rudebacher, and Callahan waits for the shoe to drop. Nothing would surprise him, but all Rudebacher says is: "You look like a drinking man."

  Callahan allows as how he has been known to take a drink.

  "So have I," Rudebacher says. "In this business it's the way you protect your gahdam sanity. I ain't gonna smell your breath when you come in… if you come in on time. Miss coming in on time twice, though, and you're on your way to wherever. I ain't going to tell you that again."

  Callahan short-orders at the Leabrook Homestyle Diner for three weeks, and stays two blocks down at the Sunset Motel. Only it's not always the Homestyle, and it's not always the Sunset. On his fourth day in town, he wakes up in the Sunrise Motel, and the Leabrook Homestyle Diner is the Fort Lee Homestyle Diner. The Leabook Register which people have been leaving behind on the counter becomes the Fort Lee Register-American. He is not exactly relieved to discover Gerald Ford has reassumed the Presidency.

  When Rudebacher pays him at the end of his first week -in Fort Lee -Grant is on the fifties, Jackson is on the twenties, and Alexander Hamilton is on the single ten in the envelope the boss hands him. At the end of the second week -in Leabrook -Abraham Lincoln is on the fifties and someone named Chadbourne is on the ten. It's still Andrew Jackson on the twenties, which is something of a relief. In Callahan's motel room, the bedcover is pink in Leabrook and orange in Fort Lee. This is handy. He always knows which version of New Jersey he's in as soon as he wakes up.

  Twice he gets drunk. The second time, after closing, Dicky Rudebacher joins him and matches him drink for drink. "This used to be a great country," the Leabrook version of Rudebacher mourns, and Callahan thinks how great it is that some things don't change; the fundamental bitch-and-moans apply as time goes by.

  But his shadow starts getting longer earlier each day, he has seen his first Type Three vampire waiting in line to buy a ticket at the Leabrook Twin Cinema, and one day he gives notice.

  "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.

  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?