Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [133]
“I know because I’ve been todash in New York, too,” Susannah said. “We all have. Roland says those are people who either don’t know they’ve passed on or refuse to accept it. They’re…what’d you call em, Roland?”
“The vagrant dead,” the gunslinger replied. “There aren’t many.”
“There were enough,” Callahan said, “and they knew I was there. Mangled people on Park Avenue, one of them a man without eyes, one a woman missing the arm and leg on the right side of her body and burned all over, both of them looking at me, as if they thought I could…fix them, somehow.
“I ran. And I must have run one hell of a long way, because when I came back to something like sanity, I was sitting on the curb at Second Avenue and Nineteenth Street, head hung down, panting like a steam engine.
“Some old geezer came along and asked if I was all right. By then I’d caught enough of my breath to tell him that I was. He said that in that case I’d better move along, because there was an NYPD radio-car just a couple of blocks away and it was coming in our direction. They’d roust me for sure, maybe bust me. I looked the old guy in the eyes and said, ‘I’ve seen vampires. Killed one, even. And I’ve seen the walking dead. Do you think I’m afraid of a couple of cops in a radio-car?’
“He backed off. Said to keep away from him. Said I’d looked okay, so he tried to do me a favor. Said this was what he got. ‘In New York, no good deed goes unpunished,’ he said, and stomped off down the street like a kid having a tantrum.
“I started laughing. I got up off the curb and looked down at myself. My shirt was untucked all the way around. I had crud on my pants from running into something, I couldn’t even remember what. I looked around, and there by all the saints and all the sinners was the Americano Bar. I found out later there are several of them in New York, but I thought then that one had moved down from the Forties just for me. I went inside, took the stool at the end of the bar, and when the bartender came down, I said, ‘You’ve been keeping something for me.’
“ ‘Is that so, my pal?’ he said.
“ ‘Yes,’ I said.
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you tell me what it is, and I’ll get it for you.’
“ ‘It’s Bushmills, and since you’ve had it since last October, why don’t you add the interest and make it a double.’
Eddie winced. “Bad idea, man.”
“Right then it seemed like the finest idea ever conceived by the mind of mortal man. I’d forget Lupe, stop seeing dead people, perhaps even stop seeing the vampires…the mosquitoes, as I came to think of them.
“By eight o’clock I was drunk. By nine, I was very drunk. By ten, I was as drunk as I’d ever been. I have a vague memory of the barman throwing me out. A slightly better one of waking up the next morning in the park, under a blanket of newspapers.”
“Back to the beginning,” Susannah murmured.
“Aye, lady, back to the beginning, you say true, I say thankya. I sat up. I thought my head was going to split wide open. I put it down between my knees, and when it didn’t explode, I raised it again. There was an old woman sitting on a bench about twenty yards away from me, just an old lady with a kerchief on her head feeding the squirrels from a paper bag filled with nuts. Only that blue light was crawling all over her cheeks and brow, going into and out of her mouth when she breathed. She was one of them. A mosquito. The walking dead were gone, but I could still see the Type Threes.
“Getting drunk again seemed like a logical response to this, but I had one small problem: no money. Someone had apparently rolled me while I was sleeping it off under my newspaper blanket, and there goes your ballgame.” Callahan smiled. There was nothing pleasant about it.
“That day I did find Manpower. I found it the next day, too, and the day after that. Then I got drunk. That became my habit during the Summer of the Tall Ships: work three days sober, usually shoving a wheelbarrow on some construction site or lugging big boxes for some company moving floors, then spend one night getting enormously