Dark Tower V, The Read online

  “No you don’t, doc,” the little one says. “No you don’t.” Then bustles forward, quick as an insect, and before Callahan’s clear on what’s happening, Lennie has reached between his legs, seized his testicles, and squeezed them violently together. The pain is immediate and enormous, a swelling sickness like liquid lead.

  “Like-at, niggah-lovvah?” Lennie asks him in a tone that seems to convey genuine concern, that seems to say “We want this to mean as much to you as it does to us.” Then he yanks Callahan’s testicles forward and the pain trebles. Enormous rusty saw-teeth sink into Callahan’s belly and he thinks, He’ll rip them off, he’s already turned them to jelly and now he’s going to rip them right off, there’s nothing holding them on but a little loose skin and he’s going to—

  He begins to scream and George clamps a hand over his mouth. “Quit it!” he snarls at his partner. “We’re on the fucking street, did you forget that?”

  Even while the pain is eating him alive, Callahan is mulling the situation’s queerly inverted quality: George is the Hitler Brother in charge, not Lennie. George is the big Hitler Brother. It’s certainly not the way Steinbeck would have written it.

  Then, from his right, a humming sound arises. At first he thinks it’s the chimes, but the humming is sweet. It’s strong, as well. George and Lennie feel it. And they don’t like it.

  “Whazzat?” Lennie asks. “Did you hear sumpun?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get him back to the place. And keep your hands off his balls. Later you can yank em all you want, but for now just help me.”

  One on either side of him, and all at once he is being propelled back up Second Avenue. The high board fence runs past on their right. That sweet, powerful humming sound is coming from behind it. If I could get over that fence, I’d be all right, Callahan thinks. There’s something in there, something powerful and good. They wouldn’t dare go near it.

  Perhaps this is so, but he doubts he could scramble over a board fence ten feet high even if his balls weren’t blasting out enormous bursts of their own painful Morse Code, even if he couldn’t feel them swelling in his underwear. All at once his head lolls forward and he vomits a hot load of half-digested food down the front of his shirt and pants. He can feel it soaking through to his skin, warm as piss.

  Two young couples, obviously together, are headed the other way. The young men are big, they could probably mop up the street with Lennie and perhaps even give George a run for his money if they ganged up on him, but right now they are looking disgusted and clearly want nothing more than to get their dates out of Callahan’s general vicinity as quickly as they possibly can.

  “He just had a little too much to drink,” George says, smiling sympathetically, “and then whoopsy-daisy. Happens to the best of us from time to time.”

  They’re the Hitler Brothers! Callahan tries to scream. These guys are the Hitler Brothers! They killed my friend and now they’re going to kill me! Get the police! But of course nothing comes out, in nightmares like this it never does, and soon the couples are headed the other way. George and Lennie continue to move Callahan briskly along the block of Second Avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh. His feet are barely touching the concrete. His Chew Chew Mama Swissburger is now steaming on his shirt. Oh boy, he can even smell the mustard he put on it.

  “Lemme see his hand,” George says as they near the next intersection, and when Lennie grabs Callahan’s left hand, George says, “No, dipstick, the other one.”

  Lennie holds out Callahan’s right hand. Callahan couldn’t stop him if he tried. His lower belly has been filled with hot, wet cement. His stomach, meanwhile, seems to be quivering at the back of his throat like a small, frightened animal.

  George looks at the scar on Callahan’s right hand and nods. “Yuh, it’s him, all right. Never hurts to be sure. Come on, let’s go, Faddah. Double-time, hup-hup!”

  When they get to Forty-seventh, Callahan is swept off the main thoroughfare. Down the hill on the left is a pool of bright white light: Home. He can even see a few slope-shouldered silhouettes, men standing on the corner, talking Program and smoking. I might even know some of them, he thinks confusedly. Hell, probably do.

  But they don’t go that far. Less than a quarter of the way down the block between Second Avenue and First, George drags Callahan into the doorway of a deserted storefront with a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign in both of its soaped-over windows. Lennie just kind of circles them, like a yapping terrier around a couple of slow-moving cows.

  “Gonna fuck you up, niggah-lovvah!” he’s chanting. “We done a thousand just like you, gonna do a million before we’re through, we can cut down any niggah, even when the niggah’s biggah, that’s from a song I’m writin, it’s a song called ‘Kill All Niggah-Lovin Fags,’ I’m gonna send it to Merle Haggard when I’m done, he’s the best, he’s the one told all those hippies to squat n shit in their hats, fuckin Merle’s for America, I got a Mustang 380 and I got Hermann Goering’s Luger, you know that, niggah-lovvah?”

  “Shut up, ya little punkass,” George says, but he speaks with fond absentmindedness, reserving his real attention for finding the key he wants on a fat ring of them and then opening the door of the empty storefront. Callahan thinks, To him Lennie’s like the radio that’s always playing in an auto repair shop or the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant, he doesn’t even hear him anymore, he’s just part of the background noise.

  “Yeah, Nort,” Lennie says, and then goes right on. “Fuckin Goering’s fuckin Luger, that’s right, and I might blow your fuckin balls off with it, because we know the truth about what niggah-lovvahs like you are doin to this country, right, Nort?”

  “Told you, no names,” George/Nort says, but he speaks indulgently and Callahan knows why: he’ll never be able to give any names to the police, not if things go the way these douchebags plan.

  “Sorry Nort but you niggah-lovvahs you fuckin Jewboy intellectuals are the ones fuckin this country up, so I want you to think about that when I pull your fuckin balls right off your fuckin scrote—”

  “The balls are the scrote, numbwit,” George/Nort says in a weirdly scholarly voice, and then: “Bingo!”

  The door opens. George/Nort shoves Callahan through it. The storefront is nothing but a dusty shadowbox smelling of bleach, soap, and starch. Thick wires and pipes stick out of two walls. He can see cleaner squares on the walls where coin-op washing machines and dryers once stood. On the floor is a sign he can just barely read in the dimness: TURTLE BAY WASHATERIA U WASH OR WE WASH EITHER WAY IT ALL COMES KLEEN!

  All comes kleen, right, Callahan thinks. He turns toward them and isn’t very surprised to see George/Nort pointing a gun at him. It’s not Hermann Goering’s Luger, looks more to Callahan like the sort of cheap .32 you’d buy for sixty dollars in a bar uptown, but he’s sure it would do the job. George/Nort unzips his belly-pack without taking his eyes from Callahan—he’s done this before, both of them have, they are old hands, old wolves who have had a good long run for themselves—and pulls out a roll of duct tape. Callahan remembers Lupe’s once saying America would collapse in a week without duct tape. “The secret weapon,” he called it. George/Nort hands the roll to Lennie, who takes it and scurries forward to Callahan with that same insectile speed.

  “Putcha hands behind ya, niggah-reebop,” Lennie says.

  Callahan doesn’t.

  George/Nort waggles the pistol at him. “Do it or I put one in your gut, Faddah. You ain’t never felt pain like that, I promise you.”

  Callahan does it. He has no choice. Lennie darts behind him.

  “Put em togetha, niggah-reebop,” Lennie says. “Don’tchoo know how this is done? Ain’tchoo ever been to the movies?” He laughs like a loon.

  Callahan puts his wrists together. There comes a low snarling sound as Lennie pulls duct-tape off the roll and begins taping Callahan’s arms behind his back. He stands taking deep breaths of dust and bleach and the comforting, somehow childlike per
fume of fabric softener.

  “Who hired you?” he asks George/Nort. “Was it the low men?”

  George/Nort doesn’t answer, but Callahan thinks he sees his eyes flicker. Outside, traffic passes in bursts. A few pedestrians stroll by. What would happen if he screamed? Well, he supposes he knows the answer to that, doesn’t he? The Bible says the priest and the Levite passed by the wounded man, and heard not his cries, “but a certain Samaritan…had compassion on him.” Callahan needs a good Samaritan, but in New York they are in short supply.

  “Did they have red eyes, Nort?”

  Nort’s own eyes flicker again, but the barrel of the gun remains pointed at Callahan’s midsection, steady as a rock.

  “Did they drive big fancy cars? They did, didn’t they? And how much do you think your life and this little shitpoke’s life will be worth, once—”

  Lennie grabs his balls again, squeezes them, twists them, pulls them down like windowshades. Callahan screams and the world goes gray. The strength runs out of his legs and his knees come totally unbuckled.

  “Annnd hee’s DOWN!” Lennie cries gleefully. “Mo-Hammer-head A-Lee is DOWN! THE GREAT WHITE HOPE HAS PULLED THE TRIGGAH ON THAT LOUDMOUTH NIGGAH AND PUT ’IM ON THE CANVAS! I DON’T BELEEEEVE IT!” It’s a Howard Cosell imitation, and so good that even in his agony Callahan feels like laughing. He hears another wild purring sound and now it’s his ankles that are being taped together.

  George/Nort brings a knapsack over from the corner. He opens it and rummages out a Polaroid One-Shot. He bends over Callahan and suddenly the world goes dazzle-bright. In the immediate aftermath, Callahan can see nothing but phantom shapes behind a hanging blue ball at the center of his vision. From it comes George/Nort’s voice.

  “Remind me to get another one, after. They wanted both.”

  “Yeah, Nort, yeah!” The little one sounds almost rabid with excitement now, and Callahan knows the real hurting’s about to start. He remembers an old Dylan song called “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and thinks, It fits. Better than “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” that’s for sure.

  He’s enveloped by a fog of garlic and tomatoes. Someone had Italian for dinner, possibly while Callahan was getting his face slapped in the hospital. A shape looms out of the dazzle. The big guy. “Doesn’t matter to you who hired us,” says George/Nort. “Thing is, we were hired, and as far as anyone’s ever gonna be concerned, Faddah, you’re just another niggah-lovvah like that guy Magruder and the Hitler Brothers done cleaned your clock. Mostly we’re dedicated, but we will work for a dollar, like any good American.” He pauses, and then comes the ultimate, existential absurdity: “We’re popular in Queens, you know.”

  “Fuck yourself,” Callahan says, and then the entire right side of his face explodes in agony. Lennie has kicked him with a steel-toed work-boot, breaking his jaw in what will turn out to be a total of four places.

  “Nice talk,” he hears Lennie say dimly from the insane universe where God has clearly died and lies stinking on the floor of a pillaged heaven. “Nice talk for a Faddah.” Then his voice goes up, becomes the excited, begging whine of a child: “Let me, Nort! C’mon, let me! I wanna do it!”

  “No way,” George/Nort says. “I do the forehead swastikas, you always fuck them up. You can do the ones on his hands, okay?”

  “He’s tied up! His hands’re covered in that fuckin—”

  “After he’s dead,” George/Nort explains with a terrible patience. “We’ll unwrap his hands after he’s dead and you can—”

  “Nort, please ! I’ll do that thing you like. And listen!” Lennie’s voice brightens. “Tell you what! If I start to fuck up, you tell me and I’ll stop! Please, Nort? Please?”

  “Well…” Callahan has heard this tone before, too. The indulgent father who can’t deny a favorite, if mentally challenged, child. “Well, okay.”

  His vision is clearing. He wishes to God it wasn’t. He sees Lennie remove a flashlight from the backpack. George has pulled a folded scalpel from his fanny-pack. They exchange tools. George trains the flashlight on Callahan’s rapidly swelling face. Callahan winces and slits his eyes. He has just enough vision to see Lennie swing the scalpel out with his tiny yet dexterous fingers.

  “Ain’t this gonna be good !” Lennie cries. He is rapturous with excitement. “Ain’t this gonna be so good !”

  “Just don’t fuck it up,” George says.

  Callahan thinks, If this was a movie, the cavalry would come just about now. Or the cops. Or fucking Sherlock Holmes in H. G. Wells’s time machine.

  But Lennie kneels in front of him, the hardon in his pants all too visible, and the cavalry doesn’t come. He leans forward with the scalpel outstretched, and the cops don’t come. Callahan can smell not garlic and tomatoes on this one but sweat and cigarettes.

  “Wait a second, Bill,” George/Nort says, “I got an idea, let me draw it on for you first. I got a pen in my pocket.”

  “Fuck that,” Lennie/Bill breathes. He stretches out the scalpel. Callahan can see the razor-sharp blade trembling as the little man’s excitement is communicated to it, and then it passes from his field of vision. Something cold traces his brow, then turns hot, and Sherlock Holmes doesn’t come. Blood pours into his eyes, dousing his vision, and neither does James Bond Perry Mason Travis McGee Hercule Poirot Miss Fucking Marple.

  The long white face of Barlow rises in his mind. The vampire’s hair floats around his head. Barlow reaches out. “Come, false priest,” he’s saying, “learn of a true religion.” There are two dry snapping sounds as the vampire’s fingers break off the arms of the cross his mother gave him.

  “Oh you fuckin nutball,” George/Nort groans, “that ain’t a swastika, that’s a fuckin cross ! Gimme that!”

  “Stop it, Nort, gimme a chance, I ain’t done!”

  Squabbling over him like a couple of kids while his balls ache and his broken jaw throbs and his sight drowns in blood. All those seventies-era arguments about whether or not God was dead, and Christ, look at him! Just look at him! How could there be any doubt?

  And that is when the cavalry arrives.

  Nine

  “What exactly do you mean?” Roland asked. “I would hear this part very well, Pere.”

  They were still sitting at the table on the porch, but the meal was finished, the sun was down, and Rosalita had brought ’seners. Callahan had broken his story long enough to ask her to sit with them and so she had. Beyond the screens, in the rectory’s dark yard, bugs hummed, thirsty for the light.

  Jake touched what was in the gunslinger’s mind. And, suddenly impatient with all this secrecy, he put the question himself: “Were we the cavalry, Pere?”

  Roland looked shocked, then actually amused. Callahan only looked surprised.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “You didn’t see them, did you?” Roland asked. “You never actually saw the people who rescued you.”

  “I told you the Hitler Brothers had a flashlight,” Callahan said. “Say true. But these other guys, the cavalry…”

  Ten

  Whoever they are, they have a searchlight. It fills the abandoned Washateria with a glare brighter than the flash of the cheapie Polaroid, and unlike the Polaroid, it’s constant. George/Nort and Lennie/Bill cover their eyes. Callahan would cover his, if his arms weren’t duct-taped behind him.

  “Nort, drop the gun! Bill, drop the scalpel!” The voice coming from the huge light is scary because it’s scared. It’s the voice of someone who might do damn near anything. “I’m gonna count to five and then I’m gonna shoot the both of yez, which is what’chez deserve.” And then the voice behind the light begins to count not slowly and portentously but with alarming speed. “Onetwothreefour—” It’s as if the owner of the voice wants to shoot, wants to hurry up and get the bullshit formality over with. George/Nort and Lennie/Bill have no time to consider their options. They throw down the pistol and the scalpel and the pistol goes off w
hen it hits the dusty lino, a loud BANG like a kid’s toy pistol that’s been loaded with double caps. Callahan has no idea where the bullet goes. Maybe even into him. Would he even feel it if it did? Doubtful.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” Lennie/Bill shrieks. “We ain’t, we ain’t, we ain’t—” Ain’t what? Lennie/Bill doesn’t seem to know.

  “Hands up!” It’s a different voice, but also coming from behind the sun-gun dazzle of the light. “Reach for the sky! Right now, you momzers !”

  Their hands shoot up.

  “Nah, belay that,” says the first one. They may be great guys, Callahan’s certainly willing to put them on his Christmas card list, but it’s clear they’ve never done anything like this before. “Shoes off! Pants off! Now! Right now!”

  “What the fuck—” George/Nort begins. “Are you guys the cops? If you’re the cops, you gotta give us our rights, our fuckin Miranda—”

  From behind the glaring light, a gun goes off. Callahan sees an orange flash of fire. It’s probably a pistol, but it is to the Hitler Brothers’ modest barroom .32 as a hawk is to a hummingbird. The crash is gigantic, immediately followed by a crunch of plaster and a puff of stale dust. George/Nort and Lennie/Bill both scream. Callahan thinks one of his rescuers—probably the one who didn’t shoot—also screams.

  “Shoes off and pants off! Now! Now! You better have em off before I get to thirty, or you’re dead. Onetwothreefourfi—”

  Again, the speed of the count leaves no time for consideration, let alone remonstrance. George/Nort starts to sit down and Voice Number Two says: “Sit down and we’ll kill you.”

  And so the Hitler Brothers stagger around the knapsack, the Polaroid, the gun, and the flashlight like spastic cranes, pulling off their footgear while Voice Number One runs his suicidally rapid count. The shoes come off and the pants go down. George is a boxers guy while Lennie favors briefs of the pee-stained variety. There is no sign of Lennie’s hardon; Lennie’s hardon has decided to take the rest of the night off.