Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [137]
“This led me to a place I should have gotten to much sooner, even after a month of binge drinking. I realized they’d find Rowan Magruder and Home and all sorts of other people who knew me there. Part-time workers, volunteers, dozens of clients. Hell, after nine months, hundreds of clients.
“On top of that, there was the lure of those roads.” Callahan looked at Eddie and Susannah. “Do you know there’s a footbridge over the Hudson River to New Jersey? It’s practically in the shadow of the GWB, a plank footbridge that still has a few wooden drinking troughs for cows and horses along one side.”
Eddie laughed the way a man will when he realizes one of his lower appendages is being shaken briskly. “Sorry, Father, but that’s impossible. I’ve been over the George Washington Bridge maybe five hundred times in my life. Henry and I used to go to Palisades Park all the time. There’s no plank bridge.”
“There is, though,” Callahan said calmly. “It goes back to the early nineteenth century, I should say, although it’s been repaired quite a few times since then. In fact, there’s a sign halfway across that says BICENTENNIAL REPAIRS COMPLETED 1975 BY LAMERK INDUSTRIES. I recalled that name the first time I saw Andy the robot. According to the plate on his chest, that’s the company that made him.”
“We’ve seen the name before, too,” Eddie said. “In the city of Lud. Only there it said LaMerk Foundry.”
“Different divisions of the same company, probably,” Susannah said.
Roland said nothing, only made that impatient twirling gesture with the remaining two fingers of his right hand: hurry up, hurry up.
“It’s there, but it’s hard to see,” Callahan said. “It’s in hiding. And it’s only the first of the secret ways. From New York they radiate out like a spider’s web.”
“Todash turnpikes,” Eddie murmured. “Dig the concept.”
“I don’t know if that’s right or not,” Callahan said. “I only know I saw extraordinary things in my wanderings over the next few years, and I also met a lot of good people. It seems almost an insult to call them normal people, or ordinary people, but they were both. And certainly they give such words as normal and ordinary a feel of nobility for me.
“I didn’t want to leave New York without seeing Rowan Magruder again. I wanted him to know that maybe I had pissed in Lupe’s dead face—I’d gotten drunk, surely enough—but I hadn’t dropped my pants all the way down and done the other thing. Which is my too-clumsy way of saying I hadn’t given up entirely. And that I’d decided not just to cower like a rabbit in a flashlight beam.”
Callahan had begun to weep again. He wiped at his eyes with the sleeves of his shirt. “Also, I suppose I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we’re still alive, after all. I wanted to give him a hug, and pass along the kiss Lupe had given me. Plus the same message: You’re too valuable to lose. I—”
He saw Rosalita hurrying down the lawn with her skirt twitched up slightly at the ankle, and broke off. She handed him a flat piece of slate upon which something had been chalked. For a wild moment Eddie imagined a message flanked by stars and moons: LOST! ONE STRAY DOG WITH MANGLED FRONT PAW! ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF ROLAND! BAD-TEMPERED, PRONE TO BITE, BUT WE LOVE HIM ANYWAY!!!
“It’s from Eisenhart,” Callahan said, looking up. “If Overholser’s the big farmer in these parts, and Eben Took’s the big businessman, then you’d have to call Vaughn Eisenhart the big rancher. He says that he, Slightman Elder and Younger, and your Jake would meet us at Our Lady falls noon, if it do ya fine. It’s hard to make out his shorthand, but I think he’d have you visit farms, smallholds, and ranches on your way back out to the Rocking B, where you’d spend the night. Does it do ya?”
“Not quite,” Roland said. “I’d much like to have my map before I set off.”
Callahan considered this, then looked at Rosalita. Eddie decided the woman was probably a lot more than just a housekeeper. She had withdrawn out of earshot,