Wolves of the Calla (60 page)

In the pantry, Jake drank long and deep, then poured water into a bowl for Oy and carried it into Pere Callahan’s bedroom. He felt guilty about being in here (and about having a billy-bumbler in here with him), but the bedcovers on Callahan’s narrow bed had been turned down, the pillow had been plumped up, and both beckoned him. He put down the bowl and Oy quietly began to lap water. Jake undressed down to his new underwear, then lay back and closed his eyes.

Probably won’t be able to actually sleep,
he thought,
I wasn’t ever any good at taking naps, even back when Mrs. Shaw used to call me ’Bama.

Less than a minute later he was snoring lightly, with one arm slung over his eyes. Oy slept on the floor beside him with his nose on one paw.

Eddie and Susannah sat side by side on the bed in the guest room. Eddie could still hardly believe this: not only a nap, but a nap in an actual bed. Luxury piled on luxury. He wanted nothing more than to lie down, take Suze in his arms, and sleep that way, but one matter needed to be addressed first. It had been nagging him all day, even during the heaviest of their impromptu politicking.

“Suze, about Tian’s Gran-pere—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she said at once.

He raised his eyebrows, surprised. Although he supposed he’d known.

“We could get into this,” she said, “but I’m
tired. I want to go to sleep. Tell Roland what the old guy told you, and tell Jake if you want to, but don’t tell me. Not yet.” She sat next to him, her brown thigh touching his white one, her brown eyes looking steadily into his hazel ones. “Do you hear me?”

“Hear you very well.”

“Say thankya big-big.”

He laughed, took her in his arms, kissed her.

And shortly they were also asleep with their arms around each other and their foreheads touching. A rectangle of light moved steadily up their bodies as the sun sank. It had moved back into the true west, at least for the time being. Roland saw this for himself as he rode slowly down the drive to the Old Fella’s rectory-house with his aching legs kicked free of the stirrups.

Rosalita came out to greet him. “Hile, Roland—long days and pleasant nights.”

He nodded. “May you have twice the number.”

“I ken ye might ask some of us to throw the dish against the Wolves, when they come.”

“Who told you so?”

“Oh . . . some little bird whispered it in my ear.”

“Ah. And would you? If asked?”

She showed her teeth in a grin. “Nothing in this life would give me more pleasure.” The teeth disappeared and the grin softened into a true smile. “Although perhaps the two of us together could discover some pleasure that comes close. Would’ee see my little cottage, Roland?”

“Aye. And would you rub me with that magic oil of yours again?”

“Is it rubbed ye’d be?”

“Aye.”

“Rubbed hard, or rubbed soft?”

“I’ve heard a little of both best eases an aching joint.”

She considered this, then burst into laughter and took his hand. “Come. While the sun shines and this little corner of the world sleeps.”

He came with her willingly, and went where she took him. She kept a secret spring surrounded by sweet moss, and there he was refreshed.

Callahan finally returned around five-thirty, just as Eddie, Susannah, and Jake were turning out. At six, Rosalita and Sarey Adams served out a dinner of greens and cold chicken on the screened-in porch behind the rectory. Roland and his friends ate hungrily, the gunslinger taking not just seconds but thirds. Callahan, on the other hand, did little but move his food from place to place on his plate. The tan on his face gave him a certain look of health, but didn’t hide the dark circles under his eyes. When Sarey—a cheery, jolly woman, fat but light on her feet—brought out a spice cake, Callahan only shook his head.

When there was nothing left on the table but cups and the coffee pot, Roland brought out his tobacco and raised his eyebrows.

“Do ya,” Callahan said, then raised his voice. “Rosie, bring this guy something to tap into!”

“Big man, I could listen to you all day,” Eddie said.

“So could I,” Jake agreed.

Callahan smiled. “I feel the same way about you boys, at least a little.” He poured himself half a cup of coffee. Rosalita brought Roland a pottery cup for his ashes. When she had gone, the Old Fella said, “I should have finished this story yesterday. I spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about how to tell the rest.”

“Would it help if I told you I already know some of it?” Roland asked.

“Probably not. You went up to the Doorway Cave with Henchick, didn’t you?”

“Yes. He said there was a song on the speaking machine that sent them up there to find you, and that you wept when you heard it. Was it the one you spoke of?”

“ ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight,’ yes. And I can’t tell you how strange it was to be sitting in a Manni cabin in Calla Bryn Sturgis, looking toward the darkness of Thunderclap and listening to Elton John.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Susannah said. “You’re way ahead of us, Pere. Last we knew, you were in Sacramento, it was 1981, and you’d just found out your friend got cut up by these so-called Hitler Brothers.” She looked sternly from Callahan to Jake and finally to Eddie. “I have to say, gentlemen, that you don’t seem to have made much progress in the matter of peaceful living since the days when I left America.”

“Don’t blame it on me,” Jake said. “I was in school.”

“And I was stoned,” Eddie said.

“All right, I’ll take the blame,” Callahan said, and they all laughed.

“Finish your story,” Roland said. “Maybe you’ll sleep better tonight.”

“Maybe I will,” Callahan said. He thought for a minute, then said: “What I remember about the hospital—what I guess everyone remembers—is the smell of the disinfectant and the sound of the machines. Mostly the machines. The way they beep. The only other stuff that sounds like that is the equipment in airplane cockpits. I asked a pilot once, and he said the navigational gear makes that sound. I remember thinking that night that there must be a hell of a lot of navigating going on in hospital ICUs.

“Rowan Magruder wasn’t married when I worked at Home, but I guessed that must have changed, because there was a woman sitting in the chair by his bed, reading a paperback. Well-dressed, nice green suit, hose, low-heeled shoes. At least I felt okay about facing her; I’d cleaned up and combed up as well as I could, and I hadn’t had a drink since Sacramento. But once we were actually face-to-face, I wasn’t okay at all. She was sitting with her back to the door, you see. I knocked on the jamb, she turned toward me, and my so-called self-possession took a hike. I took a step back and crossed myself. First time since the night Rowan and I visited Lupe in that same joint. Can you guess why?”

“Of course,” Susannah said. “Because the pieces fit together. The pieces
always
fit together. We’ve seen it again and again and again. We just don’t know what the picture is.”

“Or can’t grasp it,” Eddie said.

Callahan nodded. “It was like looking at Rowan, only with long blond hair and breasts. His twin sister. And she laughed. She asked me if I thought I’d seen a ghost. I felt . . . surreal. As if I’d slipped into another of those other worlds,
like
the real one—if there is such a thing—but not quite the same. I felt this mad urge to drag out my wallet and see who was on the bills. It wasn’t just the resemblance; it was her laughing. Sitting there beside a man who had her face, assuming he had any face left at all under the bandages, and laughing.”

“Welcome to Room 19 of the Todash Hospital,” Eddie said.

“Beg pardon?”

“I only meant I know the feeling, Don. We all do. Go on.”

“I introduced myself and asked if I could come in. And when I asked it, I was thinking back to Barlow, the vampire. Thinking,
You have to invite them in the first time. After that, they can come and go as they please
. She told me of course I could come in. She said she’d come from Chicago to be with him in what she called ‘his closing hours.’ Then, in that same pleasant voice, she said, ‘I knew who you were right away. It’s the scar on your hand. In his letters, Rowan said he was quite sure you were a religious man in your other life. He used to talk about people’s other lives all the time, meaning before they started drinking or taking drugs or went insane or all three. This one was a carpenter in his other life. That one was a model in her other life. Was he right about you?’ All in that pleasant voice. Like a woman making conversation at a cocktail party. And Rowan
lying there with his head covered in bandages. If he’d been wearing sunglasses, he would have looked like Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man.

“I came in. I said I’d once been a religious man, yes, but that was all in the past. She put out her hand. I put out mine. Because, you see, I thought . . . ”

He puts out his hand because he has made the assumption that she wants to shake with him. The pleasant voice has fooled him. He doesn’t realize that what Rowena Magruder Rawlings is actually doing is
raising
her hand, not putting it out. At first he doesn’t even realize he has been slapped, and hard enough to make his left ear ring and his left eye water; he has a confused idea that the sudden warmth rising in his left cheek must be some sort of cockamamie allergy thing, perhaps a stress reaction. Then she is advancing on him with tears streaming down her weirdly Rowan-like face.

“Go on and look at him,” she says. “Because guess what? This is my
brother’s
other life! The only one he has left! Get right up close and get a good look at it. They poked out his eyes, they took off one of his cheeks
—
you can see the teeth in there, peekaboo! The police showed me photographs. They didn’t want to, but I made them. They poked a hole in his heart, but I guess the doctors plugged that. It’s his liver that’s killing him. They poked a hole in that, too, and it’s dying.”

“Miss Magruder, I
—”

“It’s Mrs. Rawlings,” she tells him, “not that it’s anything to you, one way or the other. Go on. Get a good look. See what you’ve done to him.”

“I was in California
. . .
I saw it in the paper
. . . ”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she says. “I’m sure. But you’re the only one I can get hold of, don’t you see? The only one who was close to him. His other pal died of the Queer’s Disease, and the rest aren’t here. They’re eating free food down at his flophouse, I suppose, or talking about what happened at their meetings. How it makes them
feel.
Well, Reverend Callahan
—
or is it Father? I saw you cross yourself
—
let me tell you how this makes
me
feel. It
. . .
makes
. . .
me
. . . FURIOUS.”
She is still speaking in the pleasant voice, but when he opens his mouth to speak again she puts a finger across his lips and there is so much force pressing back against his teeth in that single finger that he gives up. Let her talk, why not? It’s been years since he’s heard a confession, but some things are like riding a bicycle.

“He graduated from NYU
cum laude,
” she says. “Did you know that? He took second in the Beloit Poetry Prize Competition in 1949, did you know
that?
As an undergraduate! He wrote a novel
. . .
a beautiful novel
. . .
and it’s in my attic, gathering dust.”

Callahan can feel soft warm dew settling on his face. It is coming from her mouth.

“I asked him
—
no, begged him
—
to go on with his writing and he laughed at me, said he was no good. ‘Leave that to the Mailers and O’Haras and Irwin Shaws,’ he said, ‘people who can really do it. I’ll wind up in some ivory-tower office, puffing on a meerschaum pipe and looking like Mr. Chips.’

“And that would have been all right, too,” she says, “but then he got involved in the Alcoholics Anonymous program, and from there it was an easy jump to running the flophouse. And hanging with his friends. Friends like you.”

Callahan is amazed. He has never heard the word
friends
invested with such contempt.

“But where are they now that he’s down and going out?” Rowena Magruder Rawlings asks him. “Hmmm? Where are all the people he cured, all the newspaper feature reporters who called him a genius? Where’s Jane Pauley? She interviewed him on the
Today
show, you know. Twice! Where’s that fucking Mother Teresa? He said in one of his letters they were calling her the little saint when she came to Home, well he could use a saint now, my brother could use a saint right now, some laying-on of hands, so where the hell is she?”

Tears rolling down her cheeks. Her bosom rising and falling. She is beautiful and terrible. Callahan thinks of a picture he saw once of Shiva, the Hindu destroyer-god.
Not enough arms,
he thinks, and has to fight a crazy, suicidal urge to laugh.

“They’re not here. There’s just you and me, right? And him. He could have won a Nobel Prize for literature. Or he could have taught four hundred students a year for thirty years. Could have touched twelve thousand minds with his. Instead, he’s lying here in a hospital bed with his face cut off, and they’ll have to take up a subscription from his fucking flophouse to pay for his last illness
—
if you call getting cut to pieces an illness
—
and his coffin, and his burial.”

She looks at him, face naked and smiling, her cheeks gleaming with moisture and runners of snot hanging from her nose.

“In his previous other life, Father Callahan, he was the Street Angel. But this is his
final
other life. Glamorous, isn’t it? I’m going down the hall to the canteen for coffee and a danish. I’ll be there for ten minutes or so. Plenty of time for you to have your little visit. Do me a favor and be
gone when I get back. You and all the rest of his do-gooders make me sick.”