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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."