Stephen King - Wolves of the Calla

Callahan is amazed. He has never heard the word friends invested with such contempt .

" But where are they now that he's down and going out?" Rowena Magruder Rowlings asks him. "Hmmm? Where are all the people he cured, all the newspaper feature reporters who called him a genius? Where's Jane Pauley? She interviewed him on the Today show, you know. Twice! Where's that fucking Mother Teresa? He said in one of his letters they were calling her the little saint when she came to Home, well he could use a saint now, my brother could use a saint right now, some laying-on of hands, so where the hell is she ?"

Tears rolling down her cheeks. Her bosom rising and falling. She is beautiful and terrible. Callahan thinks of a picture he saw once of Shiva, the Hindu destroyer-god . Not enough arms, he thinks, and has to fight a crazy, suicidal urge to laugh .

" They're not here. There's just you and me, right? And him. He could have won a Nobel Prize for literature. Or he could have taught four hundred students a year for thirty years. Could have touched twelve thousand minds with his. Instead, he's lying here in a hospital bed with his face cut off, and they'll have to take up a subscription from his fucking flophouse to pay for his last illness - if you call getting cut to pieces an illness - and his coffin, and his burial."

She looks at him, face naked and smiling, her cheeks gleaming with moisture and runners of snot hanging from her nose.

" In his previous other life, Father Callahan, he was the Street Angel. But this is his final other life. Glamorous, isn't it? I'm going down the hall to the canteen for coffee and a danish. I'll be therefor ten minutes or so. Plenty of time for you to have your little visit. Do me a favor and be gone when I get back. You and all the rest of his do-gooders make me sick ."

She leaves. Her sensible low heels go clicking away along the hall. It's not until they've faded completely and left him with the steady beeping of the machines that he realizes he's trembling all over. He doesn't think it's the onset of the dt's, but by God that's what it feels like.

When Rowan speaks from beneath his stiff veil of bandages, Callahan nearly screams. What his old friend says is pretty mushy, but Callahan has no trouble figuring it out.

"She's given that little sermon at least eight times today, and she never bothers to tell anyone that the year I took second in the Beloit, only four other people entered. I guess the war knocked a lot of the poetry out of folks. How you doing, Don?"

The diction is bad, the voice driving it little more than a rasp, but it's Rowan, all right. Callahan goes to him and takes the hands that lie on the counterpane. They curl over his with surprising firmness.

" As far as the novel goes… man, it was third-rate James Jones, and that's bad ."

"How you doing, Rowan?" Callahan asks. Now he's crying himself. The goddam room will be floating soon.

"Oh, well, pretty sucky," says the man under the bandages. Then: "Thanks for coming."

"Not a problem, " Callahan says. "What do you need from me, Rowan? What can I do?"

" You can stay away from Home," Rowan says. His voice is fading, but his hands still clasp Callahan's. "They didn't want me. It was you they were after. Do you understand me, Don ? They were looking for you. They kept asking me where you were, and by the end I would have told them if I'd known, believe me. But of course I didn't. "

One of the machines is beeping faster, the beeps running toward a merge that will trip an alarm. Callahan has no way of knowing this but knows it anyway. Somehow.

" Rowan - did they have red eyes? Were they wearing… I don't know… long coats? Like trenchcoats? Did they come in big fancy cars?"

" Nothing like that," Rowan whispers. "They were probably in their thirties but dressed like teenagers. They looked like teenagers, too. These guys'll look like teenagers for another twenty years - if they live that long - and then one day they'll just be old . "

Callahan thinks , Just a couple of punks. Is that what he's saying? It is, it almost certainly is, but that doesn't mean the Hitler Brothers weren't hired by the low men for this particular job. It makes sense. Even the newspaper article, brief as it was, pointed out that Rowan Magruder wasn't much like the Brothers' usual type of victim .

"Stay away from Home," Rowan whispers, but before Callahan can promise, the alarm does indeed go off. For a moment the hands holding his tighten, and Callahan feels a ghost of this man's old energy, that wild fierce energy that somehow kept Home's doors open in spite of all the times the bank account went absolutely flat-line, the energy that attracted men who could do all the things Rowan Magruder himself couldn't.

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.

"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?"