the road again, that I saw the story in the Post. It was in the front of the paper, but not on the front page,
TWO MEN FOUND SHOT TO DEATH IN CONEY ISLAND, the headline said. COPS SAY 'IT LOOKS
LIKE A MOB JOB.' That was because the faces and hands had been burned with acid. Nevertheless, the cops
ID'd both of them: Norton Randolph and William Garton, both of Brooklyn. There were photos. Mug shots;
both of them had long records. They were my guys, all right. George and Lennie."
"You think the low men got them, don't you? "Jake asked.
"Yes. Payback's a bitch."
"Did the papers ever ID them as the Hitler Brothers?" Eddie asked. "Because, man, we were still scarin each
other with those guys when I came along."
"There was some speculation about that possibility in the tabloids," Callahan said, "and I'll bet that in their
hearts the reporters who covered the Hitler Brothers murders and mutilations knew it was Randolph and
Garton—there was nothing afterward but a few halfhearted copycat cuttings—but no one in the tabloid press
wants to kill the bogeyman, because the bogeyman sells papers."
"Man," Eddie said. "You have been to the wars."
"You haven't heard the last act yet," Callahan said. "It's a dilly."
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 ?
"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 asshole 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
Callahan was silent for a moment. He sipped at his coffee, grimaced, and poured himself a knock of sweet
cider, instead.
"I knew how the climb back starts," he said. "I'd taken enough low-bottom drunks to enough AA meetings on
the East Side, God knows. So when they let me out, I found AA in Topeka and started going every day. I
never looked ahead, never looked behind. 'The past is history, the future's a mystery,' they say. Only this time,
instead of sitting in the back of the room and saying nothing, I forced myself to go right down front, and
during the introductions I'd say, 'I'm Don C. and I don't want to drink anymore.' I did want to, every day I
wanted to, but in AA they have sayings for everything, and one of them is 'Fake it till you make it.' And little
by little, I did make it. I woke up one day in the fall of 1982 and realized I really didn't want to drink
anymore. The compulsion, as they say, had been lifted.
"I moved on. You're not supposed to make any big changes in the first year of sobriety, but one day when I
was in Gage Park—the Reinisch Rose Garden, actually…" He trailed off, looking at them. "What? Do you
know it? Don't tell me you know the Reinisch!"
"We've been there," Susannah said quietly. "Seen the toy train."
"That," Callahan said, "is amazing."
"It's nineteen o'clock and all the birds are singing," Eddie said. He wasn't smiling.
"Anyway, the Rose Garden was where I spotted the first poster. HAVE YOU SEEN CALLAHAN, OUR
IRISH SETTER. SCAR ON PAW, SCAR ON FOREHEAD. GENEROUS REWARD. Et cetera, et cetera.
They'd finally gotten the name right. I decided it was time to move on while I still could. So I went to
Detroit, and there I found a place called The Lighthouse Shelter. It was a wet shelter. It was, in fact, Home
without Rowan Magruder. They were doing good work there, but they were barely staggering along. I signed
on. And that's where I was in December of 1983, when it happened."
"When what happened?" Susannah asked.
It was Jake Chambers who answered. He knew, was perhaps the only one of them who could know. It had
happened to him, too, after all.
"That was when you died," Jake said.
"Yes, that's right," Callahan said. He showed no surprise at all. They might have been discussing rice, or the
possibility that Andy ran on ant-nomics. "That's when I died. Roland, I wonder if you'd roll me a cigarette? I
