"Palmer!... Palmgren!"
The trembling hits his crotch and lower belly. His underwear shorts darken as he sprays them with piss. At the same time his feet start snapping out into the air, as if he's trying to punt invisible footballs with both of them at the same time . I'm seizing, he thinks . This is probably it. I'm probably going out. Bye-bye blackbird. He tries to call for help and nothing conies out of his mouth but a low chugging sound. His arms begin to fly up and down. Now he's punting invisible footballs with his feet while his arms shout hallelujah, and the guy down the hall is going to go on until the end of the century, maybe until the next Ice Age .
"Peschier!... Peters!... Pike!... Polovik!... Ranee!... Rancourt!"
Callahan's upper body begins to snap back and forth. Each time it snaps forward he comes closer to losing his balance and falling on the floor. His hands fly up. His feet fly out. There is a sudden spreading pancake of warmth on his ass and he realizes he has just shot the chocolate.
"Ricupero!... Robillard!... Rossi!"
He snaps backward, all the way to the whitewashed concrete wall where someone has scrawled BANGO SKANK and Just had my 19th Nervous Breakdown! Then forward, this time with the full-body enthusiasm of a Muslim at morning prayers. For a moment he's staring at the concrete floor from between his naked knees and then he overbalances and goes down on his face. His jaw, which has somehow healed in spite of the nightly binges, rebreaks in three of the original four places. But, just to bring things back into perfect balance - four's the magic number - this time his nose breaks, too. He lies jerking on the floor like a hooked fish, his body fingerpaintingin the blood, shit, and piss.Yeah , I'm going out, he thinks.
"Ryan!... Sannelli!... Scher!"
But gradually the extravagant grand mal jerks of his body moderate to petit mal, and then to little more than twitches. He thinks someone must come, but no one does, not at first. The twitches fade away and now he's just Donald Frank Callahan, lying on the floor of a jail cell in Topeka, Kansas, where somewhere farther down the hall a man continues working his way through the alphabet .
"Seavey!... Sharrow!... Shatzer!"
Suddenly, for the first time in months, he thinks of how the cavalry came when the Hitler Brothers were getting ready to carve him up there in that deserted laundrymat on East Forty-seventh. And they were really going to do it - the next day or the day after, someone would have found one Donald Frank Callahan, dead as the fabled mackerel and probably wearing his balls for earrings. But then the cavalry came and -
That was no cavalry, he thinks as he lies on the floor, his face swelling up again, meet the new face, same as the old face . That was Voice Number One and Voice Number Two. Only that isn't right, either. That was two men, middle-aged at the least, probably getting a little on the old side. That was Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cock-nifEn Yom, whatever that means. Both of them scared to death. And right to be scared. The Hitler Brothers might not have done a thousand as Lennie had boasted, but they had done plenty and killed some of them, they were a couple of human copperheads, and yes, Mr. Ex Libris and Mr. Gai Cocknif were absolutely right to be scared. It had turned out all right for them, but it might not have done. And if George and Lennie had turned the tables, what then? Why, instead of finding one dead man in the Turtle Bay Washateria, whoever happened in there first would have found three. That would have made the frontpage of the Post for sure! So those guys had risked their lives, and here was what they'd risked it for, six or eight months on down the line: a dirty emaciated busted up ass**le drunk, his underwear drenched with piss on one side and full of shit on the other. A daily drinker and a nightly drunk .
And that is when it happens. Down the hall, the steady slow-chanting voice has reached Sprang, Steward, and Sudby; in this cell up the hall, a man lying on a dirty floor in the long light of dawn finally reaches his bottom, which is, by definition, that point from which you can descend no lower unless you find a shovel and actually start to dig.
Lying as he is, staring directly along the floor, the dust-bunnies look like ghostly groves of trees and the lumps of dirt look like the hills in some sterile mining country. He thinks : What is it, February? February of 1982? Something like that. Well, I tell you what. I'll give myself one year to try and clean up my act. One year to do something - anything - to justify the risk those two guys took. If I can do something, I'll go on. But if I'm still drinking in February of 1983, I'll kill myself.
Down the corridor, the chanting voice has finally reached Targenfield.
THIRTEEN