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 0'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 Rowlings 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 therefor 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."
She leaves. Her sensible low heels go clicking away along the hall. It's not until they've faded completely and
left him with the steady beeping of the machines that he realizes he's trembling all over. He doesn't think it's
the onset of the dt's, but by God that's what it feels like.
When Rowan speaks from beneath his stiff veil of bandages, Callahan nearly screams. What his old friend
says is pretty mushy, but Callahan has no trouble figuring it out.
"She's given that little sermon at least eight times today, and she never bothers to tell anyone that the year I
took second in the Beloit, only four other people entered. I guess the war knocked a lot of the poetry out of
folks. How you doing, Don?"
The diction is bad, the voice driving it little more than a rasp, but it's Rowan, all right. Callahan goes to him
and takes the hands that lie on the counterpane. They curl over his with surprising firmness.
"As far as the novel goes… man, it was third-rate James Jones, and that's bad."
"How you doing, Rowan?" Callahan asks. Now he's crying himself. The goddam room will be floating soon.
"Oh, well, pretty sucky," says the man under the bandages. Then: "Thanks for coming."
"Not a problem, " Callahan says. "What do you need from me, Rowan ? What can I do?"
"You can stay away from Home," Rowan says. His voice is fading, but his hands still clasp Callahan's. "They
didn't want me. It was you they were after. Do you understand me, Don ? They were looking for you. They
kept asking me where you were, and by the end I would have told them if I'd known, believe me. But of course
I didn't. "
One of the machines is beeping faster, the beeps running toward a merge that will trip an alarm. Callahan
has no way of knowing this but knows it anyway. Somehow.
"Rowan—did they have red eyes ? Were they wearing… I don't know… long coats? Like trenchcoats? Did
they come in big fancy cars?"
"Nothing like that," Rowan whispers. "They were probably in their thirties but dressed like teenagers. They
looked like teenagers, too. These guys'll look like teenagers for another twenty years—if they live that long—
and then one day they'll just be old. "
Callahan thinks, Just a couple of punks. Is that what he's saying? It is, it almost certainly is, but that doesn't
mean the Hitler Brothers weren't hired by the low men for this particular job. It makes sense. Even the
newspaper article, brief as it was, pointed out that Rowan Magruder wasn't much like the Brothers' usual
type of victim.
"Stay away from Home," Rowan whispers, but before Callahan can promise, the alarm does indeed go off.
For a moment the hands holding his tighten, and Callahan feels a ghost of this man's old energy, that wild
fierce energy that somehow kept Home's doors open in spite of all the times the bank account went absolutely
flat-line, the energy that attracted men who could do all the things Rowan Magruder himself couldn't.
Then the room begins filling up with nurses, there's a doctor with an arrogant face yelling for the patient's
chart, and pretty soon Rowan's twin sister will be back, this time possibly breathing fire. Callahan decides
it's time to blow this pop-shop, and the greater pop-shop that is New York City. The low men are still
interested in him, it seems, very interested indeed, and if they have a base of operations, it's probably right
here in Fun City, USA. Consequently, a return to the West Coast would probably be an excellent idea. He
can't afford another plane ticket, but he has enough cash to ride the Big Gray Dog. Won't be for the first
time, either. Another trip west, why not ? He can see himself with absolute clarity, the man in Seat 29-C: a
fresh, unopened package of cigarettes in his shirt pocket; afresh, unopened bottle of Early Times in a paper
bag; the new Jfohn D. MacDonald novel, also fresh and unopened, lying on his lap. Maybe he'll be on the far
side of the Hudson and riding through Fort Lee, deep into Chapter One and nipping his second drink before
they finally turn off all the machines in Room 577 and his old friend goes out into the darkness and toward
whatever waits for us there.
SEVEN
"577," Eddie said.
"Nineteen," Jake said.
"Beg pardon?" Callahan asked again.
"Five, seven, and seven," Susannah said. "Add them, you get nineteen."
"Does that mean something?"
"Put them all together, they spell mother, a word that means the world to me," Eddie said with a sentimental
smile.
Susannah ignored him. "We don't know," she said. "You didn't leave New York, did you? If you had, you'd
have never gotten that." She pointed to the scar on his forehead.
"Oh, I left," Callahan said. "Just not quite as soon as I intended. My intention when I left the hospital really
was to go back down to Port Authority and buy a ticket on the Forty bus."
"What's that?" Jake asked.
"Hobo-speak for the farthest you can go. If you buy a ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska, you're riding on the Forty
bus."
"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
At the same time he's thinking lt's all right, just a few lights out is all it is, if there were vampires you'd see
them and if there were low men you'd hear the chimes and smell rancid onions and hot metal. All the same he
decides to vacate this area, and immediately. Chimes or no chimes, every nerve in his body is suddenly out
on his skin, sparking and sizzling.
He turns and there are two men right behind him. There is a space of seconds when they are so surprised by
his abrupt change of direction that he probably could have darted between them like an aging running back
and gone sprinting back up Second Avenue. But he is surprised, too, and for a further space of seconds the
three of them only stand there, staring.
There's a big Hitler Brother and a little Hitler Brother. The little one is no more than five-two. He's wearing
a loose chambray shirt over black slacks. On his head is a baseball cap turned around backwards. His eyes
are as black as drops of tar and his complexion is bad. Callahan immediately thinks of him as Lennie. The
big one is maybe six-feet-six, wearing a Yankees sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. He's got a sandy
