Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [211]
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 seem to need something a little stronger than apple cider.”
Fourteen
There’s an old tradition at Lighthouse, one that goes back…jeez, must be all of four