In the spring of 1981 he finds himself rolling into the city of Sacramento in the back of what may be the oldest International Harvester stake-bed truck still on the road in California. He’s crammed in with roughly three dozen Mexican illegals, there ismescal and tequila and pot and several bottles of wine, they’re all drunk and done up and Callahan is perhaps the drunkest of them all. The names of his companions come back to him in later years like names spoken in a haze of fever: Escobar…Estrada…Javier…Esteban…Rosario…Echeverria…Caverra. Are they all names he will later encounter in the Calla, or is that just a booze-hallucination? For that matter, what is he to make of his own name, which is so close to that of the place where he finishes up? Calla, Callahan. Calla, Callahan . Sometimes, when he’s long getting to sleep in his pleasant rectory bed, the two names chase each other in his head like the tigers inLittle Black Sambo.

Sometimes a line of poetry comes to him, a paraphrase from (he thinks) Archibald MacLeish’s “Epistle to Be Left in Earth.”It was not the voice of God but only the thunder . That’s not right, but it’s how he remembers it. Not God but the thunder . Or is that only what he wants to believe? How many times has God been denied just that way?

In any case, all of that comes later. When he rolls into Sacramento he’s drunk and he’s happy. There are no questions in his mind. He’s even halfway happy the next day, hangover and all. He finds a job easily; jobs are everywhere, it seems, lying around like apples after a windstorm has gone through the orchard. As long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, that is, or scalded by hot water or sometimes blistered by the handle of an ax or a shovel; in his years on the road no one has ever offered him a stockbroker’s job.

The work he gets in Sacramento is unloading trucks at a block-long bed-and-mattress store called Sleepy John’s. Sleepy John is preparing for his once-yearly Mattre$$ Ma$$acre, and all morning long Callahan and a crew of five other men haul in the kings and queens and doubles. Compared to some of the day-labor he’s done over the last years, this job is a tit.