Roland made the twirling go-on gesture, but it didn't look urgent. He'd rolled himself a smoke and looked about as content as his three companions had ever seen him. Only Oy, sleeping at Jake's feet, looked more at peace with himself.
"I looked for my footbridge when I left New York for the second time, riding across the GWB with my paperback and my bottle," Callahan said, "but my footbridge was gone. Over the next couple of months I saw occasional flashes of the highways in hiding - and I remember getting a ten-dollar bill with Chadbourne on it a couple of times - but mostly they were gone. I saw a lot of Type Three Vampires and remember thinking that they were spreading. But I did nothing about them. I seemed to have lost the urge, the way Thomas Hardy lost the urge to write novels and Thomas Hart Benton lost the urge to paint his murals. 'Just mosquitoes,' I'd think. 'Let them go.' My job was getting into some town, finding the nearest Brawny Man or ManPower or Job Guy, and also finding a bar where I felt comfortable. I favored places that looked like the Americano or the Blarney Stone in New York."
"You liked a little steam-table with your booze, in other words," Eddie said.
"That's right," Callahan said, looking at Eddie as one does at a kindred spirit. "Do ya! And I'd protect those places until it was time to move on. By which I mean I'd get tipsy in my favorite neighborhood bar, then finish up the evening - the crawling, screaming, puking-down-the-front-of-your-shirt part - somewhere else. Alfresco , usually."
Jake began, "What - "
"Means he got drunk outdoors, sug," Susannah told him. She ruffled his hair, then winced and put the hand on her own midsection, instead.
"All right, sai?" Rosalita asked.
"Yes, but if you had somethin with bubbles in it, I surely would drink it."
Rosalita rose, tapping Callahan on the shoulder as she did so. "Go on, Pere, or it'll be two in the morning and the cats tuning up in the badlands before you're done."
"All right," he said. "I drank, that's what it comes down to. I drank every night and raved to anyone who'd listen about Lupe and Rowan and Rowena and the black man who picked me up in Issaquena County and Ruta, who really might have been full of fun but. who sure wasn't a Siamese cat. And finally I'd pass out.
"This went on until I got to Topeka. Late winter of 1982. That was where I hit my bottom. Do you folks know what that means, to hit a bottom?"
There was a long pause, and then they nodded. Jake was thinking of Ms. Avery's English class, and his Final Essay. Susannah was recalling Oxford Mississippi, Eddie the beach by the Western Sea, leaning over the man who had become his dinh, meaning to cut his throat because Roland wouldn't let him go through one of those magic doors and score a little H.
"For me, the bottom came in a jail cell," Callahan said. "It was early morning, and I was actually relatively sober. Also, it was no drunk tank but a cell with a blanket on the cot and an actual seat on the toilet. Compared to some of the places I'd been in, I was farting through satin. The only bothersome things were the name guy... and that song."
TWELVE
The light falling through the cell's small chickenwire-reinforced window is gray, which consequently makes his skin gray. Also his hands are dirty and covered with scratches. The crud under some of his nails is black (dirt) and under some it's maroon (dried blood). He vaguely remembers tussling with someone who kept calling him sir, so he guesses that he might be here on the ever-popular Penal Code 48, Assaulting an Officer. All he wanted - Callahan has a slightly clearer memory of this - was to try on the kid's cap, which was very spiffy. He remembers trying to tell the young cop (from the look of this one, pretty soon they'll be hiring kids who aren't even toilet-trained as police officers, at least in Topeka) that he's always on the lookout for funky new lids, he always wears a cap because he's got the Mark of Cain on his forehead. "Looksh like a crossh," he remembers saying (or trying to say), "but it'sh rilly the Marga-Gain. " Which, in his cups, is about as close as he can come to saying Mark of Cain.
Was really drunk last night, but he doesn't feel so bad as he sits here on the bunk, rubbing a hand through his crazy hair. Mouth doesn't taste so good - sort of like Ruta the Siamese Cat took a dump in it, if you wanted the truth - but his head isn't aching too badly. If only the voices would shut up!Down the hall someone's droning out a seemingly endless list of names in alphabetical order. Closer by, someone is singing his least favorite song: "Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my li-ife tonight ..."
"Nailor!... Naughton!... O'Connor!... O'Shaugnessy!... Oskowski!... Osmer!"
He is just beginning to realize that he is the one singing when the trembling begins in his calves. It works its way up to his knees, then to his thighs, deepening and strengthening as it comes. He can see the big muscles in his legs popping up and down like pistons. What is happening to him ?