"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