ELEVEN
“Except he wasn’t,” Roland said. He was carefully rolling a cigarette from the crumbs at the bottom of his poke. The paper was brittle, the tobacco really not much more than dust.
“No,” Callahan agreed. “He wasn’t. Roland, I have no cigarette papers, but I can do you better for a smoke than that. There’s good tobacco in the house, from down south. I don’t use it, but Rosalita sometimes likes a pipe in the evening.”
“I’ll take you up on that later and say thankya,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t miss it as much as coffee, but almost. Finish your tale. Leave nothing out, I think it’s important we hear it all, but—”
“I know. Time is short.”
“Yes,” Roland said. “Time is short.”
“Then briefly put, my friend contracted this disease—AIDS became the name of choice?”
He was looking at Eddie, who nodded.
“All right,” Callahan said. “It’s as good a name as any, I guess, although the first thing I think of when I hear that word is a kind of diet candy. You may know it doesn’t always spread fast, but in my friend’s case, it moved like a fire in straw. By mid-May of 1976, Lupe Delgado was very ill. He lost his color. He was feverish a lot of the time. He’d sometimes spend the whole night in the bathroom, vomiting. Rowan would have banned him from the kitchen, but he didn’t need to—Lupe banned himself. And then the blemishes began to show up.”
“They called those Kaposi’s sarcoma, I think,” Eddie said. “A skin disease. Disfiguring.”
Callahan nodded. “Three weeks after the blemishes started showing up, Lupe was in New York General. Rowan Magruder and I went to see him one night in late June. Up until then we’d been telling each other he’d turn it around, come out of it better than ever, hell, he was young and strong. But that night we knew the minute we were in the door that he was all through. He was in an oxygen tent. There were IV lines running into his arms. He was in terrible pain. He didn’t want us to get close to him. It might be catching, he said. In truth, no one seemed to know much about it.”
“Which made it scarier than ever,” Susannah said.
“Yes. He said the doctors believed it was a blood disease spread by homosexual activity, or maybe by sharing needles. And what he wanted us to know, what he kept saying over and over again, was that he was clean, all the drug tests came back negative. ‘Not since nineteen-seventy,’ he kept saying. ‘Not one toke off one joint. I swear to God.’ We said we knew he was clean. We sat on either side of his bed and he took our hands.”
Callahan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.
“Our hands . . . he made us wash them before we left. Just in case, he said. And he thanked us for coming. He told Rowan that Home was the best thing that ever happened to him. That as far as he was concerned, it really was home.
“I never wanted a drink as badly as I did that night, leaving New York General. I kept Rowan right beside me, though, and the two of us walked past all the bars. That night I went to bed sober, but I lay there knowing it was really just a matter of time. The first drink is the one that gets you drunk, that’s what they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, and mine was somewhere close. Somewhere a bartender was just waiting for me to come in so he could pour it out.
“Two nights later, Lupe died.
“There must have been three hundred people at the funeral, almost all of them people who’d spent time in Home. There was a lot of crying and a lot of wonderful things said, some by folks who probably couldn’t have walked a chalk line. When it was over, Rowan Magruder took me by the arm and said, ‘I don’t know who you are, Don, but I know what you are—one hell of a good man and one hell of a bad drunk who’s been dry for . . . how long has it been?’
“I thought about going on with the bullshit, but it just seemed like too much work. ‘Since October of last year,’ I said.
“ ‘You want one now,’ he said. ‘That’s all over your face. So I tell you what: if you think taking a drink will bring Lupe back, you have my permission. In fact, come get me and we’ll go down to the Blarney Stone together and drink up what’s in my wallet first. Okay?’
“ ‘Okay,’ I said.
“He said, ‘You getting drunk today would be the worst memorial to Lupe I could think of. Like pissing in his dead face.’
“He was right, and I knew it. I spent the rest of that day the way I spent my second one in New York, walking around, fighting that taste in my mouth, fighting the urge to score a bottle and stake out a park bench. I remember being on Broadway, then over on Tenth Avenue, then way down at Park and Thirtieth. By then it was getting dark, cars going both ways on Park with their lights on. The sky all orange and pink in the west, and the streets full of this gorgeous long light.
“A sense of peace came over me, and I thought, ‘I’m going to win. Tonight at least, I’m going to win.’ And that was when the chimes started. The loudest ever. I felt as if my head would burst. Park Avenue shimmered in front of me and I thought, Why, it’s not real at all. Not Park Avenue, not any of it. It’s just a gigantic swatch of canvas. New York is nothing but a backdrop painted on that canvas, and what’s behind it? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. Just blackness.
“Then things steadied again. The chimes faded . . . faded . . . finally gone. I started to walk, very slowly. Like a man walking on thin ice. What I was afraid of was that if I stepped too heavily, I might plunge right out of the world and into the darkness behind it. I know that makes absolutely no sense—hell, I knew it then—but knowing a thing doesn’t always help. Does it?”
“No,” Eddie said, thinking of his days snorting heroin with Henry.
“No,” said Susannah.
“No,” Roland agreed, thinking of Jericho Hill. Thinking of the fallen horn.
“I walked one block, then two, then three. I started to think it was going to be okay. I mean, I might get the bad smell, and I might see a few Type Threes, but I could handle those things. Especially since the Type Threes didn’t seem to recognize me. Looking at them was like looking through one-way glass at suspects in a police interrogation room. But that night I saw something much, much worse than a bunch of vampires.”
“You saw someone who was actually dead,” Susannah said.
Callahan turned to her with a look of utter, flabbergasted surprise. “How . . . how do you . . . ”
“I know because I’ve been todash in New York, too,” Susannah said. “We all have. Roland says those are people who either don’t know they’ve passed on or refuse to accept it. They’re . . . what’d you call em, Roland?”
“The vagrant dead,” the gunslinger replied. “There aren’t many.”
“There were enough,” Callahan said, “and they knew I was there. Mangled people on Park Avenue, one of them a man without eyes, one a woman missing the arm and leg on the right side of her body and burned all over, both of them looking at me, as if they thought I could . . . fix them, somehow.
“I ran. And I must have run one hell of a long way, because when I came back to something like sanity, I was sitting on the curb at Second Avenue and Nineteenth Street, head hung down, panting like a steam engine.
“Some old geezer came along and asked if I was all right. By then I’d caught enough of my breath to tell him that I was. He said that in that case I’d better move along, because there was an NYPD radio-car just a couple of blocks away and it was coming in our direction. They’d roust me for sure, maybe bust me. I looked the old guy in the eyes and said, ‘I’ve seen vampires. Killed one, even. And I’ve seen the walking dead. Do you think I’m afraid of a couple of cops in a radio-car?’
“He backed off. Said to keep away from him. Said I’d looked okay, so he tried to do me a favor. Said this was what he got. ‘In New York, no good deed goes unpunished,’ he said, and stomped off down the street like a kid having a tantrum.
“I started laughing. I got up off the curb and looked down at myself. My shirt was untucked all the way around. I had crud on my pants from running into something, I couldn’t even remember what. I looked around, and there by all the saints and all the sinners was the Americano Bar. I found out later there are several of them in New York, but I thought then that one had moved down from the Forties just for me. I went inside, took the stool at the end of the bar, and when the bartender came down, I said, ‘You’ve been keeping something for me.’
“ ‘Is that so, my pal?’ he said.
“ ‘Yes,’ I said.
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you tell me what it is, and I’ll get it for you.’
“ ‘It’s Bushmills, and since you’ve had it since last October, why don’t you add the interest and make it a double.’
Eddie winced. “Bad idea, man.”
“Right then it seemed like the finest idea ever conceived by the mind of mortal man. I’d forget Lupe, stop seeing dead people, perhaps even stop seeing the vampires . . . the mosquitoes, as I came to think of them.
“By eight o’clock I was drunk. By nine, I was very drunk. By ten, I was as drunk as I’d ever been. I have a vague memory of the barman throwing me out. A slightly better one of waking up the next morning in the park, under a blanket of newspapers.”
“Back to the beginning,” Susannah murmured.
“Aye, lady, back to the beginning, you say true, I say thankya. I sat up. I thought my head was going to split wide open. I put it down between my knees, and when it didn’t explode, I raised it again. There was an old woman sitting on a bench about twenty yards away from me, just an old lady with a kerchief on her head feeding the squirrels from a paper bag filled with nuts. Only that blue light was crawling all over her cheeks and brow, going into and out of her mouth when she breathed. She was one of them. A mosquito. The walking dead were gone, but I could still see the Type Threes.
“Getting drunk again seemed like a logical response to this, but I had one small problem: no money. Someone had apparently rolled me while I was sleeping it off under my newspaper blanket, and there goes your ballgame.” Callahan smiled. There was nothing pleasant about it.
“That day I did find Manpower. I found it the next day, too, and the day after that. Then I got drunk. That became my habit during the Summer of the Tall Ships: work three days sober, usually shoving a wheelbarrow on some construction site or lugging big boxes for some company moving floors, then spend one night getting enormously drunk and the next day recovering. Then start all over again. Take Sundays off. That was my life in New York that summer. And everywhere I went, it seemed that I heard that Elton John song, ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight.’ I don’t know if that was the summer it was popular or not. I only know I heard it everywhere. Once I worked five days straight for Covay Movers. The Brother Outfit, they called themselves. For sobriety, that was my personal best that July. The guy in charge came up to me on the fifth day and asked me how I’d like to hire on full-time.
“ ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘The day-labor contracts specifically forbid their guys from taking a steady job with any outside company for a month.’
“ ‘Ah, fuck that,’ he says, ‘everyone winks at that bullshit. What do you say, Donnie? You’re a good man. And I got an idea you could do a little more than buck furniture up on the truck. You want to think about it tonight?’
“I thought about it, and thinking led back to drinking, as it always did that summer. As it always does for those of the alcoholic persuasion. Back to me sitting in some little bar across from the Empire State Building, listening to Elton John on the juke-box. ‘Almost had your hooks in me, din’tcha, dear?’ And when I went back to work, I checked in with a different day-labor company, one that had never heard of the fucking Brother Outfit.”
Callahan spat out the word fucking in a kind of desperate snarl, as men do when vulgarity has become for them a kind of linguistic court of last resort.
“You drank, you drifted, you worked,” Roland said. “But you had at least one other piece of business that summer, did you not?”
“Yes. It took me a little while to get going. I saw several of them—the woman feeding the squirrels in the park was only the first—but they weren’t doing anything. I mean, I knew what they were, but it was still hard to kill them in cold blood. Then, one night in Battery Park, I saw another one feeding. I had a fold-out knife in my pocket by then, carried it everywhere. I walked up behind him while he was eating and stabbed him four times: once in the kidneys, once between the ribs, once high up in the back, once in the neck. I put all my strength into the last one. The knife came out the other side with the thing’s Adam’s apple skewered on it like a piece of steak on a shish kebab. Made a kind of ripping sound.”
Callahan spoke matter-of-factly, but his face had grown very pale.
“What had happened in the alley behind Home happened again—the guy disappeared right out of his clothes. I’d expected it, but of course I couldn’t be sure until it actually happened.”
“One swallow does not make a summer,” Susannah said.
Callahan nodded. “The victim was this kid of about fifteen, looked Puerto Rican or maybe Dominican. He had a boombox between his feet. I don’t remember what it was playing, so it probably wasn’t ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight.’ Five minutes went by. I was about to start snapping my fingers under his nose or maybe patting his cheeks, when he blinked, staggered, shook his head, and came around. He saw me standing there in front of him and the first thing he did was grab his boombox. He held it to his chest, like it was a baby. Then he said, ‘What joo want, man?’ I said I didn’t want anything, not a single thing, no harm and no foul, but I was curious about those clothes lying beside him. The kid looked, then knelt down and started going through the pockets. I thought he’d find enough to keep him occupied—more than enough—and so I just walked away. And that was the second one. The third one was easier. The fourth one, easier still. By the end of August, I’d gotten half a dozen. The sixth was the woman I’d seen in the Marine Midland Bank. Small world, isn’t it?
“Quite often I’d go down to First and Forty-seventh and stand across from Home. Sometimes I’d find myself there in the late afternoon, watching the drunks and the homeless people showing up for dinner. Sometimes Rowan would come out and talk to them. He didn’t smoke, but he always kept cigarettes in his pockets, a couple of packs, and he’d pass them out until they were gone. I never made any particular effort to hide from him, but if he ever pegged me, I never saw any sign of it.”
“You’d probably changed by then,” Eddie said.
Callahan nodded. “Hair down to my shoulders, and coming in gray. A beard. And of course I no longer took any pains about my clothes. Half of what I was wearing by then came from the vampires I’d killed. One of them was a bicycle messenger guy, and he had a great pair of motorcycle boots. Not Bally loafers, but almost new, and my size. Those things last forever. I’ve still got them.” He nodded toward the house. “But I don’t think any of that was why he didn’t recognize me. In Rowan Magruder’s business, dealing with drunks and hypes and homeless people who’ve got one foot in reality and the other in the Twilight Zone, you get used to seeing big changes in people, and usually not changes for the better. You teach yourself to see who’s under the new bruises and the fresh coats of dirt. I think it was more like I’d become one of what you call the vagrant dead, Roland. Invisible to the world. But I think those people—those former people—must be tied to New York—”
“They never go far,” Roland agreed. His cigarette was done; the dry paper and crumbles of tobacco had disappeared up to his fingernails in two puffs. “Ghosts always haunt the same house.”
“Of course they do, poor things. And I wanted to leave. Every day the sun would set a little earlier, and every day I’d feel the call of those roads, those highways in hiding, a little more strongly. Some of it might have been the fabled geographic cure, to which I believe I have already alluded. It’s a wholly illogical but nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place; that the urge to self-destruct will magically disappear. Some of it was undoubtedly the hope that in another place, a wider place, there would be no more vampires or walking dead people to cope with. But mostly it was other things. Well . . . one very big thing.” Callahan smiled, but it was no more than a stretch of the lips exposing the gums. “Someone had begun hunting me.”
“The vampires,” Eddie said.
“Ye-ess . . . ” Callahan bit at his lip, then repeated it with a little more conviction. “Yes. But not just the vampires. Even when that had to be the most logical idea, it didn’t seem entirely right. I knew it wasn’t the dead, at least; they could see me, but didn’t care about me one way or another, except maybe for the hope that I might be able to fix them or put them out of their misery. But the Type Threes couldn’t see me, as I’ve told you—not as the thing hunting them, anyway. And their attention spans are short, as if they’re infected to some degree by the same amnesia they pass on to their victims.
“I first became aware that I was in trouble one night in Washington Square Park, not long after I killed the woman from the bank. That park had become a regular haunt of mine, although God knows I wasn’t the only one. In the summer it was a regular open-air dormitory. I even had my own favorite bench, although I didn’t get it every night . . . didn’t even go there every night.
“On this particular evening—thundery and sultry and close—I got there around eight o’clock. I had a bottle in a brown bag and a book of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I approached the bench, and there, spray-painted across the back of another bench near mine, I saw a graffito that said HE COMES HERE. HE HAS A BURNED HAND.”
“Oh my Lord God,” Susannah said, and put a hand to her throat.
“I left the park at once and slept in an alley twenty blocks away. There was no doubt in my mind that I was the subject of that graffito. Two nights later I saw one on the sidewalk outside a bar on Lex where I liked to drink and sometimes have a sandwich if I was, as they say, in funds. It had been done in chalk and the foot-traffic had rubbed it to a ghost, but I could still read it. It said the same thing: HE COMES HERE. HE HAS A BURNED HAND. There were comets and stars around the message, as if whoever wrote it had actually tried to dress it up. A block down, spray-painted on a No Parking sign: HIS HAIR IS MOSTLY WHITE NOW. The next morning, on the side of a cross-town bus: HIS NAME MIGHT BE COLLINGWOOD. Two or three days after that, I started to see lost-pet posters around a lot of the places that had come to be my places—Needle Park, the Central Park West side of The Ramble, the City Lights bar on Lex, a couple of folk music and poetry clubs down in the Village.”
“Pet posters,” Eddie mused. “You know, in a way that’s brilliant.”
“They were all the same,” Callahan said. “HAVE YOU SEEN OUR IRISH SETTER? HE IS A STUPID OLD THING BUT WE LOVE HIM. BURNED RIGHT FOREPAW. ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF KELLY, COLLINS, OR COLLINGWOOD. WE WILL PAY A VERY LARGE REWARD. And then a row of dollar signs.”
“Who would posters like that be aimed at?” Susannah asked.
Callahan shrugged. “Don’t know, exactly. The vampires, perhaps.”
Eddie was rubbing his face wearily. “All right, let’s see. We’ve got the Type Three vampires . . . and the vagrant dead . . . and now this third group. The ones that went around putting up lost-pet posters that weren’t about pets and writing stuff on buildings and sidewalks. Who were they?”
“The low men,” Callahan said. “They call themselves that, sometimes, although there are women among them. Sometimes they call themselves regulators. A lot of them wear long yellow coats . . . but not all. A lot of them have blue coffins tattooed on their hands . . . but not all.”
“Big Coffin Hunters, Roland,” Eddie murmured.
Roland nodded but never took his eyes from Callahan. “Let the man talk, Eddie.”
“What they are—what they really are—is soldiers of the Crimson King,” Callahan said. And he crossed himself.