Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [249]
“Where’s your pal Deepneau today?” Eddie asked.
“Oncologist. Two years ago, Aaron started seeing blood in the toilet bowl when he moved his bowels. A younger man, he thinks ‘Goddam hemorrhoids’ and buys a tube of Preparation H. Once you’re in your seventies, you assume the worst. In his case it was bad but not terrible. Cancer moves slower when you get to be his age; even the Big C gets old. Funny to think of, isn’t it? Anyway, they baked it with radiation and they say it’s gone, but Aaron says you don’t turn your back on cancer. He goes back every three months, and that’s where he is. I’m glad. He’s an old cockuh but still a hothead.”
I should introduce Aaron Deepneau to Jamie Jaffords, Eddie thought. They could play Castles instead of chess, and yarn away the days of the Goat Moon.
Tower, meanwhile, was smiling sadly. He adjusted his glasses on his face. For a moment they stayed straight, and then they tilted again. The tilt was somehow worse than the crack; made Tower look slightly crazy as well as vulnerable. “He’s a hothead and I’m a coward. Perhaps that’s why we’re friends—we fit around each other’s wrong places, make something that’s almost whole.”
“Say maybe you’re a little hard on yourself,” Eddie said.
“I don’t think so. My analyst says that anyone who wants to know how the children of an A-male father and a B-female mother turn out would only have to study my case-history. He also says—”
“Cry your pardon, Calvin, but I don’t give much of a shit about your analyst. You held onto the lot up the street, and that’s good enough for me.”
“I don’t take any credit for that,” Calvin Tower said morosely. “It’s like this”—he picked up the book that he’d put down beside the coffee-maker—“and the other ones he threatened to burn. I just have a problem letting things go. When my first wife said she wanted a divorce and I asked why, she said, ‘Because when I married you, I didn’t understand. I thought you were a man. It turns out you’re a packrat.’ ”
“The lot is different from the books,” Eddie said.
“Is it? Do you really think so?” Tower was looking at him, fascinated. When he raised his coffee cup, Eddie was pleased to see that the worst of his shakes had subsided.
“Don’t you?”
“Sometimes I dream about it,” Tower said. “I haven’t actually been in there since Tommy Graham’s deli went bust and I paid to have it knocked down. And to have the fence put up, of course, which was almost as expensive as the men with the wrecking ball. I dream there’s a field of flowers in there. A field of roses. And instead of just to First Avenue, it goes on forever. Funny dream, huh?”
Eddie was sure that Calvin Tower did indeed have such dreams, but he thought he saw something else in the eyes hiding behind the cracked and tilted glasses. He thought Tower was letting this dream stand for all the dreams he would not tell.
“Funny,” Eddie agreed. “I think you better pour me another slug of that mud, beg ya I do. We’ll have us a little palaver.”
Tower smiled and once more raised the book Andolini had meant to charbroil. “Palaver. It’s the kind of thing they’re always saying in here.”
“Do you say so?”
“Uh-huh.”
Eddie held out his hand. “Let me see.”
At first Tower hesitated, and Eddie saw the bookshop owner’s face briefly harden with a misery mix of emotions.
“Come on, Cal, I’m not gonna wipe my ass with it.”
“No. Of course not. I’m sorry.” And at that moment Tower looked sorry, the way an alcoholic might look after a particularly destructive bout of drunkenness. “I just…certain books are very important