with red flashgun eyes, but not today. Today there is sunshine in a new America on the west side of a restored
footbridge across the Hudson.
On Main Street he stops in front of the Leabrook Homestyle Diner and there is a sign in the window reading
SHORT-ORDER COOK WANTED. Don Callahan short-ordered through most of his time at seminary and
did more than his share of the same at Home on the East Side of Manhattan. He thinks he might fit right in
here at the Leabrook Homestyle. Turns out he's right, although it takes three shifts before the ability to crack
a pair of eggs one-handed onto the grill comes swimming back to him. The owner, a long drink of water
named Dicky Rudebacher, asks Callahan if he has any medical problems— "catching stuff," he calls it— and
nods simple acceptance when Callahan says he doesn't. He doesn't ask Callahan for any paperwork, not so
much as a Social Security number. He wants to pay his new short-order off the books, if that 'snot a problem.
Callahan assures him it is not.
"One more thing," says Dicky Rudebacher, and Callahan waits for the shoe to drop. Nothing would surprise
him, but all Rudebacher says is: "You look like a drinking man."
Callahan allows as how he has been known to take a drink.
"So have I," Rudebacher says. "In this business it's the way you protect your gahdam sanity. I ain't gonna
smell your breath when you come in… if you come in on time. Miss coming in on time twice, though, and
you're on your way to wherever. I ain't going to tell you that again."
Callahan short-orders at the Leabrook Homestyle Diner for three weeks, and stays two blocks down at the
Sunset Motel. Only it's not always the Homestyle, and it's not always the Sunset. On his fourth day in town,
he wakes up in the Sunrise Motel, and the Leabrook Homestyle Diner is the Fort Lee Homestyle Diner. The
Leabook Register which people have been leaving behind on the counter becomes the Fort Lee Register-
American. He is not exactly relieved to discover Gerald Ford has reassumed the Presidency.
When Rudebacher pays him at the end of his first week—in Fort Lee—Grant is on the fifties, Jackson is on
the twenties, and Alexander Hamilton is on the single ten in the envelope the boss hands him. At the end of
the second week—in Leabrook—Abraham Lincoln is on the fifties and someone named Chadbourne is on the
ten. It's still Andrew Jackson on the twenties, which is something of a relief. In Callahan's motel room, the
bedcover is pink in Leabrook and orange in Fort Lee. This is handy. He always knows which version of New
Jersey he's in as soon as he wakes up.
Twice he gets drunk. The second time, after closing, Dicky Rudebacher joins him and matches him drink for
drink. "This used to be a great country," the Leabrook version of Rudebacher mourns, and Callahan thinks
how great it is that some things don't change; the fundamental bitch-and-moans apply as time goes by.
But his shadow starts getting longer earlier each day, he has seen his first Type Three vampire waiting in line
to buy a ticket at the Leabrook Twin Cinema, and one day he gives notice.
"Thought you told me you didn't have anything, " Rudebacher says to Callahan.
"Beg your pardon ?"
"You've got a bad case of itchy-foot, my friend. It often goes with the other thing." Rudebacher makes a
bottle-tipping gesture with one dishwater-reddened hand. "When a man catches itchy-foot late in life, it's
often incurable. Tell you what, if I didn't have a wife that's still a pretty good lay and two kids in college, I
might just pack me a bindle and join you. "
"Yeah?" Callahan asks, fascinated.
"September and October are always the worst," Rudebacher says dreamily. "You just hear it calling. The
birds hear it, too, and go."
"It?"
Rudebacher gives him a look that says don't be stupid. "With them it's the sky. Guys like us, it's the road. Call
of the open fuckin road. Guys like me, kids in school and a wife that still likes it more than just on Saturday
night, they turn up the radio a little louder and drown it out. You're not gonna do that." He pauses, looks at
Callahan shrewdly. "Stay another week? I'll bump you twenty-five bucks. You make a gahdam fine Monte
Cristo."
Callahan considers, then shakes his head. If Rudebacher was right, if it was only one road, maybe he would
stay another week . . . and another… and another. But it's not just one. It's all of them, all those highways in
hiding, and he remembers the name of his third-grade reader and bursts out laughing. It was called Roads to
Everywhere.
"What's so funny?" Rudebacher asks sourly.
"Nothing, " Callahan says. "Everything." He claps his boss on the shoulder. "You're a good man, Dicky. If I
get back this way, I'll stop in."
"You won't get back this way," Dicky Rudebacher says, and of course he is right.
THREE
"I was five years on the road, give or take," Callahan said as they approached his church, and in a way that
was all he said on the subject. Yet they heard more. Nor were they surprised later to find that Jake, on his way
into town with Eisenhart and the Slightmans, had heard some of it, too. It was Jake, after all, who was
strongest in the touch.
Five years on the road, no more than that.
And all the rest, do ya ken: a thousand lost worlds of the rose.
FOUR
He's five years on the road, give or take, only there's a lot more than one road and maybe, under the right
circumstances, five years can be forever.
There is Route 71 through Delaware and apples to pick. There's a little boy named Lars with a broken radio.
Callahan fixes it and Lars's mother packs him a great and wonderful lunch to go on with, a lunch that seems
to last for days. There is Route 317 through rural Kentucky, and a job digging graves with a fellow named
Pete Petacki who won't shut up. A girl comes to watch them, a pretty girl of seventeen or so, sitting on a rock
wall with yellow leaves raining down all around her, and Pete Petacki speculates on what it would be like to
have those long thighs stripped of the corduroys they're wearing and wrapped around his neck, what it would
be like to be tongue-deep in jailbait. Pete Petacki doesn't see the blue light around her, and he certainly
doesn't see the way her clothes drift to the ground like feathers later on, when Callahan sits beside her, then
draws her close as she slips a hand up his leg and her mouth onto his throat, then thrusts his knife unerringly
into the bulge of bone and nerve and gristle at the back of her neck. This is a shot he's getting very good at.
There is Route 19 through West Virginia, and a little road-dusty carnival that's looking for a man who can fix
the rides and feed the animals. "Or the other way around," says Greg Chumm, the carny's greasy-haired
owner. "You know, feed the rides and fix the animals. Whatever floats ya boat." And for awhile, when a strep
infection leaves the carny shorthanded (they are swinging down south by now, trying to stay ahead of
winter), he finds himself also playing Menso the ESP Wonder, and with surprising success. It is also as
Menso that he first sees them, not vampires and not bewildered dead people but tall men with pale, watchful
faces that are usually hidden under old-fashioned hats with brims or new-fashioned baseball hats with extra-
long bills. In the shadows thrown by these hats, their eyes flare a dusky red, like the eyes of coons or polecats
when you catch them in the beam of a flashlight, lurking around your trash barrels. Do they see him? The
vampires (the Type Threes, at least) do not. The dead people do. And these men, with their hands stuffed into
the pockets of their long yellow coats and their hard-case faces peering out from beneath their hats? Do they
see? Callahan doesn't know for sure but decides to take no chances. Three days later, in the town of Yazoo
City, Mississippi, he hangs up his black Menso tophat, leaves his greasy coverall on the floor of a pickup
truck's camper cap, and blows Chumm's Traveling Wonder Show, not bothering with the formality of his final
paycheck. On his way out of town, he sees a number of those pet posters nailed to telephone poles. A typical
one reads:
LOST! SIAMESE CAT, 2 YRS OLD
ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF RUTA
SHE IS NOISY BUT FULL OF FUN
LARGE REWARD OFFERED
$$$$$$
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."
FIVE
Picking oranges in Florida. Pushing a broom in New Orleans. Mucking out horse-stalls in Lufkin, Texas.
Handing out real estate brochures on street corners in Phoenix, Arizona. Working jobs that pay cash.
Observing the ever-changing faces on the bills. Noting the different names in the papers, Jimmy Carter is
elected President, but so are Ernest "Fritz" Hollings and Ronald Reagan. George Bush is also elected
President. Gerald Ford decides to run again and he is elected President. The names in the papers (those of
the celebrities change the most frequently, and there are many he has never heard of) don't matter. The faces
on the currency don't matter. What matters is the sight of a weathervane against a violent pink sunset, the
sound of his heels on an empty road in Utah, the sound of the wind in the New Mexico desert, the sight of a
child skipping rope beside a junked-out Chevrolet Caprice in Fossil, Oregon. What matters is the whine of
the powerlines beside Highway 50 west of Elko, Nevada, and a dead crow in a ditch outside Rainbarrel
Springs. Sometimes he's sober and sometimes he gets drunk. Once he lays up in an abandoned shed—this is
just over the California state line from Nevada—and drinks for four days straight. It ends with seven hours
