Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [132]
Callahan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.
“Our hands…he made us wash them before we left. Just in case, he said. And he thanked us for coming. He told Rowan that Home was the best thing that ever happened to him. That as far as he was concerned, it really was home.
“I never wanted a drink as badly as I did that night, leaving New York General. I kept Rowan right beside me, though, and the two of us walked past all the bars. That night I went to bed sober, but I lay there knowing it was really just a matter of time. The first drink is the one that gets you drunk, that’s what they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, and mine was somewhere close. Somewhere a bartender was just waiting for me to come in so he could pour it out.
“Two nights later, Lupe died.
“There must have been three hundred people at the funeral, almost all of them people who’d spent time in Home. There was a lot of crying and a lot of wonderful things said, some by folks who probably couldn’t have walked a chalk line. When it was over, Rowan Magruder took me by the arm and said, ‘I don’t know who you are, Don, but I know what you are—one hell of a good man and one hell of a bad drunk who’s been dry for…how long has it been?’
“I thought about going on with the bullshit, but it just seemed like too much work. ‘Since October of last year,’ I said.
“ ‘You want one now,’ he said. ‘That’s all over your face. So I tell you what: if you think taking a drink will bring Lupe back, you have my permission. In fact, come get me and we’ll go down to the Blarney Stone together and drink up what’s in my wallet first. Okay?’
“ ‘Okay,’ I said.
“He said, ‘You getting drunk today would be the worst memorial to Lupe I could think of. Like pissing in his dead face.’
“He was right, and I knew it. I spent the rest of that day the way I spent my second one in New York, walking around, fighting that taste in my mouth, fighting the urge to score a bottle and stake out a park bench. I remember being on Broadway, then over on Tenth Avenue, then way down at Park and Thirtieth. By then it was getting dark, cars going both ways on Park with their lights on. The sky all orange and pink in the west, and the streets full of this gorgeous long light.
“A sense of peace came over me, and I thought, ‘I’m going to win. Tonight at least, I’m going to win.’ And that was when the chimes started. The loudest ever. I felt as if my head would burst. Park Avenue shimmered in front of me and I thought, Why, it’s not real at all. Not Park Avenue, not any of it. It’s just a gigantic swatch of canvas. New York is nothing but a backdrop painted on that canvas, and what’s behind it? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. Just blackness.
“Then things steadied again. The chimes faded…faded…finally gone. I started to walk, very slowly. Like a man walking on thin ice. What I was afraid of was that if I stepped too heavily, I might plunge right out of the world and into the darkness behind it. I know that makes absolutely no sense—hell, I knew it then—but knowing a thing doesn’t always help. Does it?”
“No,” Eddie said, thinking of his days snorting heroin with Henry.
“No,” said Susannah.
“No,” Roland agreed, thinking of Jericho Hill. Thinking of the fallen horn.
“I walked one block, then two, then three. I started to think it was going to be okay. I mean, I might get the bad smell, and I might see a few Type Threes, but I could handle those things. Especially since the Type Threes didn’t seem to recognize me. Looking at them was like looking through one-way glass at suspects in a police interrogation room. But that night I saw something much, much worse than a bunch of vampires.”
“You saw someone who was actually dead,” Susannah said.
Callahan turned to her