THE LADY OF SHADOWS
CHAPTER 1
DETTA AND ODETTA
1
Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfect schizophrenic―if there was such a person―would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life.
Adler should have met Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes.
"―last gunslinger," Andrew said.
He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andrew always talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over her mind the way you let warm water flow over your hair and face in the shower. But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.
"I beg pardon?"
"Oh, it was just some column in the paper," Andrew said. "I dunno who wrote it. I didn't notice. One of those political fellas. Prob'ly you'd know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and I cried the night he was elected―"
She smiled, touched in spite of herself. Andrew said his ceaseless chatter was something he couldn't stop, wasn't responsible for, that it was just the Irish in him coming out, and most of it was nothing―cluckings and chirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-baked political opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from any number of weird sources (among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flying saucers, which he called you-foes)― but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected.
"But I didn't cry when that son of a bitch―pardon my French, Miz Holmes―when that son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn't cried since, and it's been―what, two months?"
Three months and two days, she thought.
"Something like that, I guess."
Andrew nodded. "Then I read this column―in The DailyNews, it mighta been―yesterday, about how Johnson's probably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won't be the same. The guy said America had seen the passage of the world's last gunslinger."
"I don't think John Kennedy was that at all," Odetta said, and if her voice was sharper than the one Andrew was accustomed to hearing (which it must have been, because she saw his eyes give a startled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince), it was because she felt herself touched by this, too. It was absurd, but it was also a fact. There was something about that phrase―America has seen the passage of the world's last gunslinger― that rang deeply in her mind. It was ugly, it was untrue―John Kennedy had been a peacemaker, not a leather-slapping Billy the Kid type, that was more in the Goldwater line―but it had also for some reason given her goosebumps.
"Well, the guy said there would be no shortage of shooters in the world," Andrew went on, regarding her nervously in the rear-view mirror. "He mentioned Jack Ruby for one, and Castro, and this fellow in Haiti―"
"Duvalier," she said. "Poppa Doc."
"Yeah, him, and Diem―"
"The Diem brothers are dead."
"Well, he said Jack Kennedy was different, that's all. He said he would draw, but only if someone weaker needed him to draw, and only if there was nothing else to do. He said Kennedy was savvy enough to know that sometimes talking don't do no good. He said Kennedy knew if it's foaming at the mouth you have to shoot it."
His eyes continued to regard her apprehensively.
"Besides, it was just some column I read."
The limo was gliding up Fifth Avenue now, headed toward Central Park West, the Cadillac emblem on the end of the hood cutting the frigid February air.
"Yes," Odetta said mildly, and Andrew's eyes relaxed a trifle. "I understand. I don't agree, but I understand."
You are a liar; a voice spoke up in her mind. This was a voice she heard quite often. She had even named it. It was the voice of The Goad. You understand perfectly and agree completely. Lie to Andrew if you feel it necessary, but for God's sake don't lie to yourself, woman.
Yet part of her protested, horrified. In a world which had become a nuclear powder keg upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake―perhaps one of suicidal proportions―to believe there was a difference between good shooters and bad shooters. There were too many shaky hands holding lighters near too many fuses. This was no world for gunslingers. If there had ever been a time for them, it had passed.
Hadn't it?
She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed at her temples. She could feel one of her headaches coming on. Sometimes they threatened, like an ominous buildup of thunderheads on a hot summer afternoon, and then blew away … as those ugly summer brews sometimes simply slipped away in one direction or another, to stomp their thunders and lightnings into the ground of some other place.
She thought, however, that this time the storm was going to happen. It would come complete with thunder, lightning, and hail the size of golf-balls.
The streetlights marching up Fifth Avenue seemed much too bright.
"So how was Oxford , Miz Holmes?" Andrew asked tentatively.
"Humid. February or not, it was very humid." She paused, telling herself she wouldn't say the words that were crowding up her throat like bile, that she would swallow them back down. To say them would be needlessly brutal. Andrew's talk of the world's last gunslinger had been just more of the man's endless prattling. But on top of everything else it was just a bit too much and it came out anyway, what she had no business saying. Her voice sounded as calm and as resolute as ever, she supposed, but she was not fooled: she knew a blurt when she heard one. "The bail bondsman came very promptly, of course; he had been notified in advance. They held onto us as long as they could nevertheless, and I held on as long as I could, but I guess they won that one, because I ended up wetting myself.'' She saw Andrew's eyes wince away again and she wanted to stop and couldn't stop. "It's what they want to teach you, you see. Partly because it frightens you, I suppose, and a frightened person may not come down to their precious Southland and bother them again. But I think most of them―even the dumb ones and they are by all means not all dumb―know the change will come in the end no matter what they do, and so they take the chance to degrade you while they still can. To teach you you can be degraded. You can swear before God, Christ, and the whole company of Saints that you will not, will not, will not soil yourself, but if they hold onto you long enough of course you do. The lesson is that you're just an animal in a cage, no more than that, no better than that. Just an animal in a cage. So I wet myself. I can still smell dried urine and that damned holding cell. They think we are descended from the monkeys, you know. And that's exactly what I smell like to myself right now.
"A monkey."
She saw Andrew's eyes in the rear-view mirror and was sorry for the way his eyes looked. Sometimes your urine wasn't the only thing you couldn't hold.
"I'm sorry, Miz Holmes."
"No," she said, rubbing at her temples again. "I am the one who is sorry. It's been a trying three days, Andrew."
"I should think so," he said in a shocked old-maidish voice that made her laugh in spite of herself. But most of her wasn't laughing. She thought she had known what she was getting into, that she had fully anticipated how bad it could get. She had been wrong.
A trying three days. Well, that was one way to put it. Another might be that her three days in Oxford , Mississippi had been a short season in hell. But there were some things you couldn't say. Some things you would die before saying … unless you were called upon to testify to them before the Throne of God the Father Almighty, where, she supposed, even the truths that caused the hellish thunderstorms in that strange gray jelly between your ears (the scientists said that gray jelly was nerveless, and if that wasn't a hoot and a half she didn't know what was) must be admitted.
"I just want to get home and bathe, bathe, bathe, and sleep, sleep, sleep. Then I reckon I will be as right as rain."
"Why, sure! That's just what you're going to be!" Andrew wanted to apologize for something, and this was as close as he could come. And beyond this he didn't want to risk further conversation. So the two of them rode in unaccustomed silence to the gray Victorian block of apartments on the corner of Fifth and Central Park South, a very exclusive gray Victorian block of apartments, and she supposed that made her a blockbuster, and she knew there were people in those poshy-poshy flats who would not speak to her unless they absolutely had to, and she didn't really care. Besides, she was above them, and they knew she was above them. It had occurred to her on more than one occasion that it must have galled some of them mightily, knowing there was a nigger living in the penthouse apartment of this fine staid old building where once the only black hands allowed had been clad in white gloves or perhaps the thin black leather ones of a chauffeur. She hoped it did gall them mightily, and scolded herself for being mean, for being unchristian, but she did wish it, she hadn't been able to stop the piss pouring into the crotch of her fine silk imported underwear and she didn't seem to be able to stop this other flood of piss, either. It was mean, it was unchristian, and almost as bad―no, worse, at least as far as the Movement was concerned, it was counterproductive. They were going to win the rights they needed to win, and probably this year: Johnson, mindful of the legacy which had been left him by the slain President (and perhaps hoping to put another nail in the coffin of Barry Goldwater), would do more than oversee the passage of the Civil Rights Act; if necessary he would ram it into law. So it was important to minimize the scarring and the hurt. There was more work to be done. Hate would not help do that work. Hate would, in fact, hinder it.
But sometimes you went on hating just the same.
Oxford Town had taught her that, too.
2
Detta Walker had absolutely no interest in the Movement and much more modest digs. She lived in the loft of a peeling Greenwich Village apartment building. Odetta didn't know about the loft and Detta didn't know about the penthouse and the only one left who suspected something was not quite right was Andrew Feeny, the chauffeur. He had begun working for Odetta's father when Odetta was fourteen and Detta Walker hardly existed at all.
Sometimes Odetta disappeared. These disappearances might be a matter of hours or of days. Last summer she had disappeared for three weeks and Andrew had been ready to call the police when Odetta called him one evening and asked him to bring the car around at ten the next day―she planned to do some shopping, she said.
It trembled on his lips to cry out Miz Holmes! Where haveyou been? But he had asked this before and had received only puzzled stares―truly puzzled stares, he was sure―in return. Right here, she would say. Why, right here, Andrew―you've been driving me two or three places every day, haven't you? You aren't starting to go a little mushy in the head, are you? Then she would laugh and if she was feeling especially good (as she often seemed to feel after her disappearances), she would pinch his cheek.
"Very good, Miz Holmes," he had said. "Ten it is."
That scary time she had been gone for three weeks, Andrew had put down the phone, closed his eyes, and said a quick prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Miz Holmes's safe return. Then he had rung Howard, the doorman at her building.
"What time did she come in?"
"Just about twenty minutes ago," Howard said.
"Who brought her?"
"Dunno. You know how it is. Different car every time. Sometimes they park around the block and I don't see em at all, don't even know she's back until I hear the buzzer and look out and see it's her." Howard paused, then added: "She's got one hell of a bruise on her cheek."
Howard had been right. It sure had been one hell of a bruise, and now it was getting better. Andrew didn't like to think what it might have looked like when it was fresh. Miz Holmes appeared promptly at ten the next morning, wearing a silk sundress with spaghetti-thin straps (this had been late July), and by then the bruise had started to yellow. She had made only a perfunctory effort to cover it with make-up, as if knowing that too much effort to cover it would only draw further attention to it.
"How did you get that, Miz Holmes?" he asked.
She laughed merrily. "You know me, Andrew―clumsy as ever. My hand slipped on the grab-handle while I was getting out of the tub yesterday―I was in a hurry to catch the national news. I fell and banged the side of my face." She gauged his face. "You're getting ready to start blithering about doctors and examinations, aren't you? Don't bother answering; after all these years I can read you like a book. I won't go, so you needn't bother asking. I'm just as fine as paint. Onward, Andrew! I intend to buy half of Saks', all of Gimbels, and eat everything at Four Seasons in between."
"Yes, Miz Holmes," he had said, and smiled. It was a forced smile, and forcing it was not easy. That bruise wasn't a day old; it was a week old, at least … and he knew better, anyway, didn't he? He had called her every night at seven o'clock for the last week, because if there was one time when you could catch Miz Holmes in her place, it was when the Huntley-Brinkley Report came on. A regular junkie for her news was Miz Holmes. He had done it every night, that was, except last night. Then he had gone over and wheedled the passkey from Howard. A conviction had been growing on him steadily that she had had just the sort of accident she had described … only instead of getting a bruise or a broken bone, she had died, died alone, and was lying up there dead right now. He had let himself in, heart thumping, feeling like a cat in a dark room criss-crossed with piano wires. Only there had been nothing to be nervous about. There was a butter-dish on the kitchen counter, and although the butter had been covered it had been out long enough to be growing a good crop of mould. He got there at ten minutes of seven and had left by five after. In the course of his quick examination of the apartment, he had glanced into the bathroom. The tub had been dry, the towels neatly―even austerely―arrayed, the room's many grab-handles polished to a bright steel gleam that was unspotted with water.
He knew the accident she had described had not happened.
But Andrew had not believed she was lying, either. She had believed what she had told him.
He looked in the rear-view mirror again and saw her rubbing her temples lightly with the tips of her fingers. He didn't like it. He had seen her do that too many times before one of her disappearances.
3
Andrew left the motor running so she could have the benefit of the heater, then went around to the trunk. He looked at her two suitcases with another wince. They looked as if petulant men with small minds and large bodies had kicked them relentlessly back and forth, damaging the bags in a way they did not quite dare damage Miz Holmes herself―the way they might have damaged him, for instance, if he had been there. It wasn't just that she was a woman; she was a nigger, an uppity northern nigger messing where she had no business messing, and they probably figured a woman like that deserved just what she got. Thing was, she was also a rich nigger. Thing was, she was almost as well-known to the American public as Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King. Thing was, she'd gotten her rich nigger face on the cover of Time magazine and it was a little harder to get away with sticking someone like that in the 'toolies and then saying What? No sir, boss, we sho dint see nobody looked like that down here, did we, boys? Thing was, it was a little harder to work yourself up to hurting a woman who was the only heir to Holmes Dental Industries when there were twelve Holmes plants in the sunny South, one of them just one county over from Oxford Town, Oxford Town.
So they'd done to her suitcases what they didn't dare do to her.
He looked at these mute indications of her stay in Oxford Town with shame and fury and love, emotions as mute as the scars on the luggage that had gone away looking smart and had come back looking dumb and thumped. He looked, temporarily unable to move, and his breath puffed out on the frosty air.
Howard was coming out to help, but Andrew paused a moment longer before grasping the handles of the cases. Whoare you, Miz Holmes? Who are you really? Where do you go sometimes, and what do you do that seems so bad that you have to make up a false history of the missing hours or days even to yourself? And he thought something else in the moment before Howard arrived, something weirdly apt: Where's the rest of you?
You want to quit thinking like that. If anyone around here was going to do any thinking like that it would be Miz Holmes, but she doesn't and so you don't need to, either.
Andrew lifted the bags out of the trunk and handed them to Howard, who asked in a low voice: "Is she all right?"
"I think so," Andrew replied, also pitching his voice low. "Just tired is all. Tired all the way down to her roots."
Howard nodded, took the battered suitcases, and started back inside. He paused only long enough to tip his cap to Odetta Holmes―who was almost invisible behind the smoked glass windows―in a soft and respectful salute.
When he was gone, Andrew took out the collapsed stainless steel scaffolding at the bottom of the trunk and began to unfold it. It was a wheelchair.
Since August 19th, 1959 , some five and a half years before, the part of Odetta Holmes from the knees down had been as missing as those blank hours and days.
4
Before the subway incident, Detta Walker had had only been conscious a few times―those were like coral islands which look isolated to one above them but are, in fact, only nodes in the spine of a long archipelago which is mostly underwater. Odetta suspected Detta not at all, and Detta had no idea that there was such a person as Odetta … but Detta at least had a clear understanding that something was wrong, that someone was fucking with her life. Odetta's imagination novelized all sorts of things which had happened when Detta was in charge of her body; Detta was not so clever. She thought she remembered things, some things, at least, but a lot of the time she didn't.
Detta was at least partially aware of the blanks.
She could remember the china plate. She could remember that. She could remember slipping it into the pocket of her dress, looking over her shoulder all the while to make sure the Blue Woman wasn't there, peeking. She had to make sure because the china plate belonged to the Blue Woman. The china plate was, Detta understood in some vague way, a forspecial. Detta took it for that why. Detta remembered taking it to a place she knew (although she didn't know how she knew) as The Drawers, a smoking trash-littered hole in the earth where she had once seen a burning baby with plastic skin. She remembered putting the plate carefully down on the gravelly ground and then starting to step on it and stopping, remembered taking off her plain cotton panties and putting them into the pocket where the plate had been, and then carefully slipping the first finger of her left hand carefully against the cut in her at the place where Old Stupid God had joined her and all other girls and women imperfectly, but something about that place must be right, because she remembered the jolt, remembered wanting to press, remembered not pressing, remembered how delicious her vagina had been naked, without the cotton panties in the way of it and the world, and she had not pressed, not until her shoe pressed, her black patent leather shoe, not until her shoe pressed down on the plate, then she pressed on the cut with her finger the way she was pressing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate with her foot, she remembered the way the black patent leather shoe covered the delicate blue webbing on the edge of the plate, she remembered the press, yes, she remembered pressing in The Drawers, pressing with finger and foot, remembered the delicious promise of finger and cut, remembered that when the plate snapped with a bitter brittle snap a similar brittle pleasure had skewered upward from that cut into her guts like an arrow, she remembered the cry which had broken from her lips, an unpleasant cawing like the sound of a crow scared up from a cornpatch, she could remember staring dully at the fragments of the plate and then taking the plain white cotton panties slowly out of her dress pocket and putting them on again, step-ins, so she had heard them called in some time unhoused in memory and drifting loose like turves on a flood-tide, step-ins, good, because first you stepped out to do your business and then you stepped back in, first one shiny patent leather shoe and then the other, good, panties were good, she could remember drawing them up her legs so clearly, drawing them past her knees, a scab on the left one almost ready to fall off and leave clean pink new babyskin, yes, she could remember so clearly it might not have been a week ago or yesterday but only one single moment ago, she could remember how the waistband had reached the hem of her party dress, the clear contrast of white cotton against brown skin, like cream, yes, like that, cream from a pitcher caught suspended over coffee, the texture, the panties disappearing under the hem of the dress, except then the dress was burnt orange and the panties were not going up but down but they were still white but not cotton, they were nylon, cheap see-through nylon panties, cheap in more ways than one, and she remembered stepping out of them, she remembered how they glimmered on the floormat of the '46 Dodge DeSoto, yes, how white they were, how cheap they were, not anything dignified like underwear but cheap panties, the girl was cheap and it was good to be cheap, good to be on sale, to be on the block not even like a whore but like a good breedsow; she remembered no round china plate but the round white face of a boy, some surprised drunk fraternity boy, he was no china plate but his face was as round as the Blue Woman's china plate had been, and there was webbing on his cheeks, and this webbing looked as blue as the webbing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate had been, but that was only because the neon was red, the neon was garish, in the dark the neon from the roadhouse sign made the spreading blood from the places on his cheeks where she had clawed him look blue, and he had said Why did youwhy did you why did you do, and then he unrolled the window so he could get his face outside to puke and she remembered hearing Dodie Stevens on the jukebox, singing about tan shoes with pink shoelaces and a big Panama with a purple hatband, she remembered the sound of his puking was like gravel in a cement mixer, and his penis, which moments before had been a livid exclamation point rising from the tufted tangle of his pubic hair, was collapsing into a weak white question mark; she remembered the hoarse gravel sounds of his vomiting stopped and then started again and she thought Well I guess he ain't made enough to lay this foundation yet and laughing and pressing her finger (which now came equipped with a long shaped nail) against her vagina which was bare but no longer bare because it was overgrown with its own coarse briared tangle, and there had been the same brittle breaking snap inside her, and it was still as much pain as it was pleasure (but better, far better, than nothing at all), and then he was grabbing blindly for her and saying in a hurt breaking tone Oh you goddamned nigger cunt and she went on laughing just the same, dodging him easily and snatching up her panties and opening the door on her side of the car, feeling the last blind thud of his fingers on the back of her blouse as she ran into a May night that was redolent of early honeysuckle, red-pink neon light stuttering off the gravel of some postwar parking lot, stuffing her panties, her cheap slick nylon panties not into the pocket of her dress but into a purse jumbled with a teenager's cheerful conglomeration of cosmetics, she was running, the light was stuttering, and then she was twenty-three and it was not panties but a rayon scarf, and she was casually slipping it into her purse as she walked along a counter in the Nice Notions section of Macy's―a scarf which sold at that time for $1.99.
Cheap.
Cheap like the white nylon panties.
Cheap.
Like her.
The body she inhabited was that of a woman who had inherited millions, but that was not known and didn't matter―the scarf was white, the edging blue, and there was that same little breaking sense of pleasure as she sat in the back seat of the taxi, and, oblivious of the driver, held the scarf in one hand, looking at it fixedly, while her other hand crept up under her tweed skirt and beneath the leg-band of her white panties, and that one long dark finger took care of the business that needed to be taken care of in a single merciless stroke.
So sometimes she wondered, in a distracted sort of way, where she was when she wasn't here, but mostly her needs were too sudden and pressing for any extended contemplation, and she simply fulfilled what needed to be fulfilled, did what needed to be done.
Roland would have understood.
5
Odetta could have taken a limo everywhere, even in 1959―although her father was still alive and she was not as fabulously rich as she would become when he died in 1962, the money held in trust for her had become hers on her twenty-fifth birthday, and she could do pretty much as she liked. But she cared very little for a phrase one of the conservative columnists had coined a year or two before―the phrase was "limosine liberal,'' and she was young enough not to want to be seen as one even if she really was one. Not young enough (or stupid enough!) to believe that a few pairs of faded jeans and the khaki shirts she habitually wore in any real way changed her essential status, or riding the bus or the subway when she could have used the car (but she had been self-involved enough not to see Andrew's hurt and deep puzzlement; he liked her and thought it must be some sort of personal rejection), but young enough to still believe that gesture could sometimes overcome (or at least overset) truth.
On the night of August 19th, 1959 , she paid for the gesture with half her legs … and half her mind.
6
Odetta had been first tugged, then pulled, and finally caught up in the swell which would eventually turn into a tidal wave. In 1957, when she became involved, the thing which eventually became known as the Movement had no name. She knew some of the background, knew the struggle for equality had gone on not since the Emancipation Proclamation but almost since the first boatload of slaves had been brought to America (to Georgia, in fact, the colony the British founded to get rid of their criminals and debtors), but for Odetta it always seemed to begin in the same place, with the same three words: I'm not movin.
The place had been a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the words had been spoken by a black woman named Rosa Lee Parks, and the place from which Rosa Lee Parks was not movin was from the front of the city bus to the back of the city bus, which was, of course, the Jim Crow part of the city bus. Much later, Odetta would sing "We Shall Not Be Moved" with the rest of them, and it always made her think of Rosa Lee Parks, and she never sang it without a sense of shame. It was so easy to sing we with your arms linked to the arms of a whole crowd; that was easy even for a woman with no legs. So easy to sing we, so easy to be we. There had been no we on that bus, that bus that must have stank of ancient leather and years of cigar and cigarette smoke, that bus with the curved ad cards saying things like LUCKY STRIKE L.S.M.F.T. and ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE and DRINK OVALTINE! YOU'LL SEE WHAT WE MEAN! and CHESTERFIELD , TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES, no we under the disbelieving gazes of the motorman, the white passengers among whom she sat, the equally disbelieving stares of the blacks at the back.
No we.
No marching thousands.
Only Rosa Lee Parks starting a tidal wave with three words: I'm not movin.
Odetta would think If I could do something like that―if I could be that brave—I think I could be happy for the rest of my life. But that sort of courage is not in me.
She had read of the Parks incident, but with little interest at first. That came little by little. It was hard to say exactly when or how her imagination had been caught and fired by that at first almost soundless racequake which had begun to shake the south.
A year or so later a young man she was dating more or less regularly began taking her down to the Village, where some of the young (and mostly white) folk-singers who performed there had added some new and startling songs to their repetoire―suddenly, in addition to all those old wheezes about how John Henry had taken his hammer and outraced the new steam-hammer (killing himself in the process, lawd, lawd) and how Bar'bry Allen had cruelly rejected her lovesick young suitor (and ended up dying of shame, lawd, lawd), there were songs about how it felt to be down and out and ignored in the city, how it felt to be turned away from a job you could do because your skin was the wrong color, how it felt to be taken into a jail cell and whipped by Mr. Charlie because your skin was dark and you had dared, lawd, lawd, to sit in the white folks' section of the lunch-counter at an F.W. Woolworths' in Montgomery, Alabama.
Absurdly or not, it was only then that she had become curious about her own parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. She would never read Roots― she was in another world and time long before that book was written, perhaps even thought of, by Alex Haley, but it was at this absurdly late time in her life when it first dawned upon her that not so many generations back her progenitors had been taken in chains by white men. Surely the fact had occurred to her before, but only as a piece of information with no real temperature gradient, like an equation, never as something which bore intimately upon her own life.
Odetta totted up what she knew, and was appalled by the smallness of the sum. She knew her mother had been born in Odetta , Arkansas , the town for which she (the only child) had been named. She knew her father had been a small-town dentist who had invented and patented a capping process which had lain dormant and unremarked for ten years and which had then, suddenly, made him a moderately wealthy man. She knew that he had developed a number of other dental processes during the ten years before and the four years after the influx of wealth, most of them either orthodontic or cosmetic in nature, and that, shortly after moving to New York with his wife and daughter (who had been born four years after the original patent had been secured), he had founded a company called Holmes Dental Industries, which was now to teeth what Squibb was to antibiotics.
But when she asked him what life had been like during all the years between―the years when she hadn't been there, and the years when she had, her father wouldn't tell her. He would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn't tell her anything. He closed that part of himself off to her. Once her ma, Alice―he called her ma or sometimes Allie if he'd had a few or was feeling good―said, "Tell her about the time those men shot at you when you drove the Ford through the covered bridge, Dan," and he gave Odetta's ma such a gray and forbidding look that her ma, always something of a sparrow, had shrunk back in her seat and said no more.
Odetta had tried her mother once or twice alone after that night, but to no avail. If she had tried before, she might have gotten something, but because he wouldn't speak, she wouldn't speak either―and to him, she realized, the past―those relatives, those red dirt roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless windows ungraced by a single simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harassment, those neighbor children who went dressed in smocks which had begun life as flour sacks―all of that was for him buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps. He would not speak, perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South. All else was hidden beneath that impervious outer cover. His past was so well-protected that there had been no gap to slide through, no way past that perfect capped barrier and into the throat of revelation.
Detta knew things, but Detta didn't know Odetta and Odetta didn't know Detta, and so the teeth lay as smooth and closed as a redan gate there, also.
She had some of her mother's shyness in her as well as her father's unblinking (if unspoken) toughness, and the only time she had dared pursue him further on the subject, to suggest that what he was denying her was a deserved trust fund never promised and apparenily never to mature, had been one night in his library. He had shaken his Wall Street Journal carefully, closed it, folded it, and laid it aside on the deal table beside the standing lamp. He had removed his rimless steel spectacles and had laid them on top of the paper. Then he had looked at her, a thin black man, thin almost to the point of emaciation, tightly kinked gray hair now drawing rapidly away from the deepening hollows of his temples where tender clocksprings of veins pulsed steadily, and he had said only, Idon't talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world had moved on since then.
Roland would have understood.
7
When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS written upon it, he saw things he did not understand at all―but he understood they didn't matter.
It was Eddie Dean's world, but beyond that it was only a confusion of lights, people and objects―more objects than he had ever seen in his life. Lady-things, from the look of them, and apparently for sale. Some under glass, some arranged in tempting piles and displays. None it mattered any more than the movement as that world flowed past the edges of the doorway before them. The doorway was the Lady's eyes. He was looking through them just as he had looked through Eddie's eyes when Eddie had moved up the aisle of the sky-carriage.
Eddie, on the other hand, was thunderstruck. The revolver in his hand trembled and dropped a little. The gunslinger could have taken it from him easily but did not. He only stood quietly. It was a trick he had learned a long time ago.
Now the view through the doorway made one of those turns the gunslinger found so dizzying―but Eddie found this same abrupt swoop oddly comforting. Roland had never seen a movie. Eddie had seen thousands, and what he was looking at was like one of those moving point-of-view shots they did in ones like Halloween and The Shining. He even knew what they called the gadget they did it with. Steadi-Cam. That was it.
"Star Wars, too," he muttered. "Death Star. That fuckin crack, remember?"
Roland looked at him and said nothing.
Hands―dark brown hands―entered what Roland saw as a doorway and what Eddie was already starting to think of as some sort of magic movie screen … a movie screen which, under the right circumstances, you might be able to walk into the way that guy had just walked out of the screen and into the real world in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Bitchin movie.
Eddie hadn't realized how bitchin until just now.
Except that movie hadn't been made yet on the other side of the door he was looking through. It was New York, okay―somehow the very sound of the taxi-cab horns, as mute and faint as they were―proclaimed that―and it was some New York department store he had been in at one time or another, but it was … was …
"It's older," he muttered.
"Before your when?" the gunslinger asked.
Eddie looked at him and laughed shortly. "Yeah. If you want to put it that way, yeah."
"Hello, Miss Walker ," a tentative voice said. The view in the doorway rose so suddenly that even Eddie was a bit dizzied and he saw a saleswoman who obviously knew the owner of the black hands―knew her and either didn't like her or feared her. Or both. "Help you today?"
"This one." The owner of the black hands held up a white scarf with a bright blue edge. "Don't bother to wrap it up, babe, just stick it in a bag."
"Cash or ch―"
"Cash, it's always cash, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's fine, Miss Walker."
"I'm so glad you approve, dear."
There was a little grimace on the salesgirl's face―Eddie just caught it as she turned away. Maybe it was something as simple as being talked to that way by a woman the salesgirl considered an "uppity nigger" (again it was more his experience in movie theaters than any knowledge of history or even life on the streets as he had lived it that caused this thought, because this was like watching a movie either set or made in the '60s, something like that one with Sidney Steiger and Rod Poitier, In the Heat of the Night ), but it could also be something even simpler: Roland's Lady of the Shadows was, black or white, one rude bitch.
And it didn't really matter, did it? None of it made a damned bit of difference. He cared about one thing and one thing only and that was getting the fuck out.
That was New York , he could almost smell New York .
And New York meant smack.
He could almost smell that, too.
Except there was a hitch, wasn't there?
One big motherfucker of a hitch.
8
Roland watched Eddie carefully, and although he could have killed him six times over at almost any time he wanted, he had elected to remain still and silent and let Eddie work the situation out for himself. Eddie was a lot of things, and a lot of them were not nice (as a fellow who had consciously let a child drop to his death, the gunslinger knew the difference between nice and not quite well), but one thing Eddie wasn't was stupid.
He was a smart kid.
He would figure it out.
So he did.
He looked back at Roland, smiled without showing his teeth, twirled the gunslinger's revolver once on his finger, clumsily, burlesquing a show-shooter's fancy coda, and then he held it out to Roland, butt first.
"This thing might as well be a piece of shit for all the good it can do me, isn't that right?"
You can talk bright when you want to, Roland thought. Why do you so often choose to talk stupid, Eddie? Is it because you think that's the way they talked in the place where your brother went with his guns?
"Isn't that right?" Eddie repeated.
Roland nodded.
"If I had plugged you, what would have happened to that door?"
"I don't know. I suppose the only way to find out would be to try it and see."
"Well, what do you think would happen?"
"I think it would disappear."
Eddie nodded. That was what he thought, too. Poof! Gone like magic! Now ya see it, my friends, now ya don't. It was really no different than what would happen if the projectionist in a movie-theater were to draw a six-shooter and plug the projector, was it?
If you shot the projector, the movie stopped.
Eddie didn't want the picture to stop.
Eddie wanted his money's worth.
"You can go through by yourself," Eddie said slowly.
"Yes."
"Sort of."
"Yes."
"You wind up in her head. Like you wound up in mine.''
"Yes."
"So you can hitchhike into my world, but that's all."
Roland said nothing. Hitchhike was one of the words Eddie sometimes used that he didn't exactly understand … but he caught the drift.
"But you could go through in your body. Like at Balazar's." He was talking out loud but really talking to himself. "Except you'd need me for that, wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
"Then take me with you."
The gunslinger opened his mouth, but Eddie was already rushing on.
"Not now, I don't mean now," he said. "I know it would cause a riot or some goddam thing if we just … popped out over there." He laughed rather wildly. "Like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, except without any hat, sure I did. We'll wait until she's alone, and―"
"No."
"I'll come back with you," Eddie said. "I swear it, Roland. I mean, I know you got a job to do, and I know I'm a part of it. I know you saved my ass at Customs, but I think I saved yours at Balazar's―now what do you think?"
"I think you did," Roland said. He remembered the way Eddie had risen up from behind the desk, regardless of the risk, and felt an instant of doubt.
But only an instant.
"So? Peter pays Paul. One hand washes the other. All I want to do is go back for a few hours. Grab some take-out chicken, maybe a box of Dunkin Donuts." Eddie nodded toward the doorway, where things had begun to move again. "So what do you say?"
"No," the gunslinger said, but for a moment he was hardly thinking about Eddie. That movement up the aisle―the Lady, whoever she was, wasn't moving the way an ordinary person moved―wasn't moving, for instance, the way Eddie had moved when Roland looked through his eyes, or (now that he stopped to think of it, which he never had before, any more than he had ever stopped and really noticed the constant presence of his own nose in the lower range of his peripheral vision) the way he moved himself. When one walked, vision became a mild pendulum: left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, the world rocking back and forth so mildly and gently that after awhile―shortly after you began to walk, he supposed―you simply ignored it. There was none of that pendulum movement in the Lady's walk―she simply moved smoothly up the aisle, as if riding along tracks. Ironically, Eddie had had this same perception … only to Eddie it had looked like a SteadiCam shot. He had found this perception comforting because it was familiar.
To Roland it was alien … but then Eddie was breaking in, his voice shrill.
"Well why not? Just why the fuck not?"
"Because you don't want chicken," the gunslinger said. "I know what you call the things you want, Eddie. You want to 'fix.' You want to 'score.' "
"So what?" Eddie cried―almost shrieked. "So what if I do? I said I'd come back with you! You got my promise! I mean, you got my fuckin PROMISE! What else do you want? You want me to swear on my mother's name? Okay, I swear on my mother's name! You want me to swear on my brother Henry's name? All right, I swear! I swear! I SWEAR!"
Enrico Balazar would have told him, but the gunslinger didn't need the likes of Balazar to tell him this one fact of life: Never trust a junkie.
Roland nodded toward the door. "Until after the Tower, at least, that part of your life is done. After that I don't care. After that you're free to go to hell in your own way. Until then I need you."
''Oh you fuckin shitass liar,'' Eddie said softly. There was no audible emotion in his voice, but the gunslinger saw the glisten of tears in his eyes. Roland said nothing. "You know there ain't gonna be no after, not for me, not for her, or whoever the Christ this third guy is. Probably not for you, either―you look as fuckin wasted as Henry did at his worst. If we don't die on the way to your Tower we'll sure as shit die when we get there so why are you lying to me?"
The gunslinger felt a dull species of shame but only repeated: "At least for now, that part of your life is done."
"Yeah?" Eddie said. "Well, I got some news for you, Roland. I know what's gonna happen to your real body when you go through there and inside of her. I know because I saw it before. I don't need your guns. I got you by that fabled place where the short hairs grow, my friend. You can even turn her head the way you turned mine and watch what I do to the rest of you while you're nothing but your goddam ka. I'd like to wait until nightfall, and drag you down by the water. Then you could watch the lobsters chow up on the rest of you. But you might be in too much of a hurry for that."
Eddie paused. The graty breaking of the waves and the steady hollow conch of the wind both seemed very loud.
"So I think I'll just use your knife to cut your throat."
"And close that door forever?"
"You say that part of my life is done. You don't just mean smack, either. You mean New York , America , my time, everything. If that's how it is, I want this part done, too. The scenery sucks and the company stinks. There are times, Roland, when you make Jimmy Swaggart look almost sane."
"There are great wonders ahead," Roland said. "Great adventures. More than that, there is a quest to course upon, and a chance to redeem your honor. There's something else, too. You could be a gunslinger. I needn't be the last after all. It's in you, Eddie. I see it. I feel it."
Eddie laughed, although now the tears were coursing down his cheeks. "Oh, wonderful. Wonderful! Just what I need! My brother Henry. He was a gunslinger. In a place called Viet Nam , that was. It was great for him. You should have seen him when he was on a serious nod, Roland. He couldn't find his way to the fuckin bathroom without help. If there wasn't any help handy, he just sat there and watched Big Time Wrestling and did it in his fuckin pants. It's great to be a gunslinger. I can see that. My brother was a doper and you're out of your fucking gourd."
"Perhaps your brother was a man with no clear idea of honor."
"Maybe not. We didn't always get a real clear picture of what that was in the Projects. It was just a word you used after Your if you happened to get caught smoking reefer or lifting the spinners off some guy's T-Bird and got ho'ed up in court for it."
Eddie was crying harder now, but he was laughing, too.
"Your friends, now. This guy you talk about in your sleep, for instance, this dude Cuthbert―"
The gunslinger started in spite of himself. Not all his long years of training could stay that start.
"Did they get this stuff you're talking about like a goddam Marine recruiting sergeant? Adventure, quests, honor?"
"They understood honor, yes," Roland said slowly, thinking of all the vanished others.
"Did it get them any further than gunslinging got my brother?"
The gunslinger said nothing.
"I know you," Eddie said. "I seen lots of guys like you. "You're just another kook singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers' with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other. I don't want no honor. I just want a chicken dinner and fix. In that order. So I'm telling you: go on through. You can. But the minute you're gone, I'm gonna kill the rest of you."
The gunslinger said nothing.
Eddie smiled crookedly and brushed the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands. "You want to know what we call this back home?"
"What?"
"A Mexican stand-off."
For a moment they only looked at each other, and then Roland looked sharply into the doorway. They had both been partially aware―Roland rather more than Eddie―that there had been another of those swerves, this time to the left. Here was an array of sparkling jewelry. Some was under protective glass but because most wasn't, the gunslinger supposed it was trumpery stuff … what Eddie would have called costume jewelry. The dark brown hands examined a few things in what seemed an only cursory manner, and then another salesgirl appeared. There had been some conversation which neither of them really noticed, and the Lady (some Lady, Eddie thought) asked to see something else. The salesgirl went away, and that was when Roland's eyes swung sharply back.
The brown hands reappeared, only now they held a purse. It opened. And suddenly the hands were scooping things―seemingly, almost certainly, at random―into the purse.
"Well, you're collecting quite a crew, Roland," Eddie said, bitterly amused. "First you got your basic white junkie, and then you got your basic black shoplif―"
But Roland was already moving toward the doorway between the worlds, moving swiftly, not looking at Eddie at all.
"I mean it!" Eddie screamed. "You go through and I'll cut your throat, I'll cut your fucking thr―"
Before he could finish, the gunslinger was gone. All that was left of him was his limp, breathing body lying upon the beach.
For a moment Eddie only stood there, unable to believe that Roland had done it, had really gone ahead and done this idiotic thing in spite of his promise―his sincere fucking guarantee, as far as that went―of what the consequences would be.
He stood for a moment, eyes rolling like the eyes of a frightened horse at the onset of a thunderstorm … except of course there was no thunderstorm, except for the one in the head.
All right. All right, goddammit.
There might only be a moment. That was all the gun-slinger might give him, and Eddie damned well knew it. He glanced at the door and saw the black hands freeze with a gold necklace half in and half out of a purse that already glittered like a pirate's cache of treasure. Although he could not hear it, Eddie sensed that Roland was speaking to the owner of the black hands.
He pulled the knife from the gunslinger's purse and then rolled over the limp, breathing body which lay before the doorway. The eyes were open but blank, rolled up to the whites.
"Watch, Roland!" Eddie screamed. That monotonous, idiotic, never-ending wind blew in his ears. Christ, it was enough to drive anyone bugshit. "Watch very closely! I want to complete your fucking education! I want to show you what happens when you fuck over the Dean brothers!"
He brought the knife down to the gunslinger's throat.
1
Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfect schizophrenic―if there was such a person―would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life.
Adler should have met Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes.
"―last gunslinger," Andrew said.
He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andrew always talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over her mind the way you let warm water flow over your hair and face in the shower. But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as if on a thorn.
"I beg pardon?"
"Oh, it was just some column in the paper," Andrew said. "I dunno who wrote it. I didn't notice. One of those political fellas. Prob'ly you'd know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and I cried the night he was elected―"
She smiled, touched in spite of herself. Andrew said his ceaseless chatter was something he couldn't stop, wasn't responsible for, that it was just the Irish in him coming out, and most of it was nothing―cluckings and chirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-baked political opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from any number of weird sources (among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flying saucers, which he called you-foes)― but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected.
"But I didn't cry when that son of a bitch―pardon my French, Miz Holmes―when that son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn't cried since, and it's been―what, two months?"
Three months and two days, she thought.
"Something like that, I guess."
Andrew nodded. "Then I read this column―in The DailyNews, it mighta been―yesterday, about how Johnson's probably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won't be the same. The guy said America had seen the passage of the world's last gunslinger."
"I don't think John Kennedy was that at all," Odetta said, and if her voice was sharper than the one Andrew was accustomed to hearing (which it must have been, because she saw his eyes give a startled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince), it was because she felt herself touched by this, too. It was absurd, but it was also a fact. There was something about that phrase―America has seen the passage of the world's last gunslinger― that rang deeply in her mind. It was ugly, it was untrue―John Kennedy had been a peacemaker, not a leather-slapping Billy the Kid type, that was more in the Goldwater line―but it had also for some reason given her goosebumps.
"Well, the guy said there would be no shortage of shooters in the world," Andrew went on, regarding her nervously in the rear-view mirror. "He mentioned Jack Ruby for one, and Castro, and this fellow in Haiti―"
"Duvalier," she said. "Poppa Doc."
"Yeah, him, and Diem―"
"The Diem brothers are dead."
"Well, he said Jack Kennedy was different, that's all. He said he would draw, but only if someone weaker needed him to draw, and only if there was nothing else to do. He said Kennedy was savvy enough to know that sometimes talking don't do no good. He said Kennedy knew if it's foaming at the mouth you have to shoot it."
His eyes continued to regard her apprehensively.
"Besides, it was just some column I read."
The limo was gliding up Fifth Avenue now, headed toward Central Park West, the Cadillac emblem on the end of the hood cutting the frigid February air.
"Yes," Odetta said mildly, and Andrew's eyes relaxed a trifle. "I understand. I don't agree, but I understand."
You are a liar; a voice spoke up in her mind. This was a voice she heard quite often. She had even named it. It was the voice of The Goad. You understand perfectly and agree completely. Lie to Andrew if you feel it necessary, but for God's sake don't lie to yourself, woman.
Yet part of her protested, horrified. In a world which had become a nuclear powder keg upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake―perhaps one of suicidal proportions―to believe there was a difference between good shooters and bad shooters. There were too many shaky hands holding lighters near too many fuses. This was no world for gunslingers. If there had ever been a time for them, it had passed.
Hadn't it?
She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed at her temples. She could feel one of her headaches coming on. Sometimes they threatened, like an ominous buildup of thunderheads on a hot summer afternoon, and then blew away … as those ugly summer brews sometimes simply slipped away in one direction or another, to stomp their thunders and lightnings into the ground of some other place.
She thought, however, that this time the storm was going to happen. It would come complete with thunder, lightning, and hail the size of golf-balls.
The streetlights marching up Fifth Avenue seemed much too bright.
"So how was Oxford , Miz Holmes?" Andrew asked tentatively.
"Humid. February or not, it was very humid." She paused, telling herself she wouldn't say the words that were crowding up her throat like bile, that she would swallow them back down. To say them would be needlessly brutal. Andrew's talk of the world's last gunslinger had been just more of the man's endless prattling. But on top of everything else it was just a bit too much and it came out anyway, what she had no business saying. Her voice sounded as calm and as resolute as ever, she supposed, but she was not fooled: she knew a blurt when she heard one. "The bail bondsman came very promptly, of course; he had been notified in advance. They held onto us as long as they could nevertheless, and I held on as long as I could, but I guess they won that one, because I ended up wetting myself.'' She saw Andrew's eyes wince away again and she wanted to stop and couldn't stop. "It's what they want to teach you, you see. Partly because it frightens you, I suppose, and a frightened person may not come down to their precious Southland and bother them again. But I think most of them―even the dumb ones and they are by all means not all dumb―know the change will come in the end no matter what they do, and so they take the chance to degrade you while they still can. To teach you you can be degraded. You can swear before God, Christ, and the whole company of Saints that you will not, will not, will not soil yourself, but if they hold onto you long enough of course you do. The lesson is that you're just an animal in a cage, no more than that, no better than that. Just an animal in a cage. So I wet myself. I can still smell dried urine and that damned holding cell. They think we are descended from the monkeys, you know. And that's exactly what I smell like to myself right now.
"A monkey."
She saw Andrew's eyes in the rear-view mirror and was sorry for the way his eyes looked. Sometimes your urine wasn't the only thing you couldn't hold.
"I'm sorry, Miz Holmes."
"No," she said, rubbing at her temples again. "I am the one who is sorry. It's been a trying three days, Andrew."
"I should think so," he said in a shocked old-maidish voice that made her laugh in spite of herself. But most of her wasn't laughing. She thought she had known what she was getting into, that she had fully anticipated how bad it could get. She had been wrong.
A trying three days. Well, that was one way to put it. Another might be that her three days in Oxford , Mississippi had been a short season in hell. But there were some things you couldn't say. Some things you would die before saying … unless you were called upon to testify to them before the Throne of God the Father Almighty, where, she supposed, even the truths that caused the hellish thunderstorms in that strange gray jelly between your ears (the scientists said that gray jelly was nerveless, and if that wasn't a hoot and a half she didn't know what was) must be admitted.
"I just want to get home and bathe, bathe, bathe, and sleep, sleep, sleep. Then I reckon I will be as right as rain."
"Why, sure! That's just what you're going to be!" Andrew wanted to apologize for something, and this was as close as he could come. And beyond this he didn't want to risk further conversation. So the two of them rode in unaccustomed silence to the gray Victorian block of apartments on the corner of Fifth and Central Park South, a very exclusive gray Victorian block of apartments, and she supposed that made her a blockbuster, and she knew there were people in those poshy-poshy flats who would not speak to her unless they absolutely had to, and she didn't really care. Besides, she was above them, and they knew she was above them. It had occurred to her on more than one occasion that it must have galled some of them mightily, knowing there was a nigger living in the penthouse apartment of this fine staid old building where once the only black hands allowed had been clad in white gloves or perhaps the thin black leather ones of a chauffeur. She hoped it did gall them mightily, and scolded herself for being mean, for being unchristian, but she did wish it, she hadn't been able to stop the piss pouring into the crotch of her fine silk imported underwear and she didn't seem to be able to stop this other flood of piss, either. It was mean, it was unchristian, and almost as bad―no, worse, at least as far as the Movement was concerned, it was counterproductive. They were going to win the rights they needed to win, and probably this year: Johnson, mindful of the legacy which had been left him by the slain President (and perhaps hoping to put another nail in the coffin of Barry Goldwater), would do more than oversee the passage of the Civil Rights Act; if necessary he would ram it into law. So it was important to minimize the scarring and the hurt. There was more work to be done. Hate would not help do that work. Hate would, in fact, hinder it.
But sometimes you went on hating just the same.
Oxford Town had taught her that, too.
2
Detta Walker had absolutely no interest in the Movement and much more modest digs. She lived in the loft of a peeling Greenwich Village apartment building. Odetta didn't know about the loft and Detta didn't know about the penthouse and the only one left who suspected something was not quite right was Andrew Feeny, the chauffeur. He had begun working for Odetta's father when Odetta was fourteen and Detta Walker hardly existed at all.
Sometimes Odetta disappeared. These disappearances might be a matter of hours or of days. Last summer she had disappeared for three weeks and Andrew had been ready to call the police when Odetta called him one evening and asked him to bring the car around at ten the next day―she planned to do some shopping, she said.
It trembled on his lips to cry out Miz Holmes! Where haveyou been? But he had asked this before and had received only puzzled stares―truly puzzled stares, he was sure―in return. Right here, she would say. Why, right here, Andrew―you've been driving me two or three places every day, haven't you? You aren't starting to go a little mushy in the head, are you? Then she would laugh and if she was feeling especially good (as she often seemed to feel after her disappearances), she would pinch his cheek.
"Very good, Miz Holmes," he had said. "Ten it is."
That scary time she had been gone for three weeks, Andrew had put down the phone, closed his eyes, and said a quick prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Miz Holmes's safe return. Then he had rung Howard, the doorman at her building.
"What time did she come in?"
"Just about twenty minutes ago," Howard said.
"Who brought her?"
"Dunno. You know how it is. Different car every time. Sometimes they park around the block and I don't see em at all, don't even know she's back until I hear the buzzer and look out and see it's her." Howard paused, then added: "She's got one hell of a bruise on her cheek."
Howard had been right. It sure had been one hell of a bruise, and now it was getting better. Andrew didn't like to think what it might have looked like when it was fresh. Miz Holmes appeared promptly at ten the next morning, wearing a silk sundress with spaghetti-thin straps (this had been late July), and by then the bruise had started to yellow. She had made only a perfunctory effort to cover it with make-up, as if knowing that too much effort to cover it would only draw further attention to it.
"How did you get that, Miz Holmes?" he asked.
She laughed merrily. "You know me, Andrew―clumsy as ever. My hand slipped on the grab-handle while I was getting out of the tub yesterday―I was in a hurry to catch the national news. I fell and banged the side of my face." She gauged his face. "You're getting ready to start blithering about doctors and examinations, aren't you? Don't bother answering; after all these years I can read you like a book. I won't go, so you needn't bother asking. I'm just as fine as paint. Onward, Andrew! I intend to buy half of Saks', all of Gimbels, and eat everything at Four Seasons in between."
"Yes, Miz Holmes," he had said, and smiled. It was a forced smile, and forcing it was not easy. That bruise wasn't a day old; it was a week old, at least … and he knew better, anyway, didn't he? He had called her every night at seven o'clock for the last week, because if there was one time when you could catch Miz Holmes in her place, it was when the Huntley-Brinkley Report came on. A regular junkie for her news was Miz Holmes. He had done it every night, that was, except last night. Then he had gone over and wheedled the passkey from Howard. A conviction had been growing on him steadily that she had had just the sort of accident she had described … only instead of getting a bruise or a broken bone, she had died, died alone, and was lying up there dead right now. He had let himself in, heart thumping, feeling like a cat in a dark room criss-crossed with piano wires. Only there had been nothing to be nervous about. There was a butter-dish on the kitchen counter, and although the butter had been covered it had been out long enough to be growing a good crop of mould. He got there at ten minutes of seven and had left by five after. In the course of his quick examination of the apartment, he had glanced into the bathroom. The tub had been dry, the towels neatly―even austerely―arrayed, the room's many grab-handles polished to a bright steel gleam that was unspotted with water.
He knew the accident she had described had not happened.
But Andrew had not believed she was lying, either. She had believed what she had told him.
He looked in the rear-view mirror again and saw her rubbing her temples lightly with the tips of her fingers. He didn't like it. He had seen her do that too many times before one of her disappearances.
3
Andrew left the motor running so she could have the benefit of the heater, then went around to the trunk. He looked at her two suitcases with another wince. They looked as if petulant men with small minds and large bodies had kicked them relentlessly back and forth, damaging the bags in a way they did not quite dare damage Miz Holmes herself―the way they might have damaged him, for instance, if he had been there. It wasn't just that she was a woman; she was a nigger, an uppity northern nigger messing where she had no business messing, and they probably figured a woman like that deserved just what she got. Thing was, she was also a rich nigger. Thing was, she was almost as well-known to the American public as Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King. Thing was, she'd gotten her rich nigger face on the cover of Time magazine and it was a little harder to get away with sticking someone like that in the 'toolies and then saying What? No sir, boss, we sho dint see nobody looked like that down here, did we, boys? Thing was, it was a little harder to work yourself up to hurting a woman who was the only heir to Holmes Dental Industries when there were twelve Holmes plants in the sunny South, one of them just one county over from Oxford Town, Oxford Town.
So they'd done to her suitcases what they didn't dare do to her.
He looked at these mute indications of her stay in Oxford Town with shame and fury and love, emotions as mute as the scars on the luggage that had gone away looking smart and had come back looking dumb and thumped. He looked, temporarily unable to move, and his breath puffed out on the frosty air.
Howard was coming out to help, but Andrew paused a moment longer before grasping the handles of the cases. Whoare you, Miz Holmes? Who are you really? Where do you go sometimes, and what do you do that seems so bad that you have to make up a false history of the missing hours or days even to yourself? And he thought something else in the moment before Howard arrived, something weirdly apt: Where's the rest of you?
You want to quit thinking like that. If anyone around here was going to do any thinking like that it would be Miz Holmes, but she doesn't and so you don't need to, either.
Andrew lifted the bags out of the trunk and handed them to Howard, who asked in a low voice: "Is she all right?"
"I think so," Andrew replied, also pitching his voice low. "Just tired is all. Tired all the way down to her roots."
Howard nodded, took the battered suitcases, and started back inside. He paused only long enough to tip his cap to Odetta Holmes―who was almost invisible behind the smoked glass windows―in a soft and respectful salute.
When he was gone, Andrew took out the collapsed stainless steel scaffolding at the bottom of the trunk and began to unfold it. It was a wheelchair.
Since August 19th, 1959 , some five and a half years before, the part of Odetta Holmes from the knees down had been as missing as those blank hours and days.
4
Before the subway incident, Detta Walker had had only been conscious a few times―those were like coral islands which look isolated to one above them but are, in fact, only nodes in the spine of a long archipelago which is mostly underwater. Odetta suspected Detta not at all, and Detta had no idea that there was such a person as Odetta … but Detta at least had a clear understanding that something was wrong, that someone was fucking with her life. Odetta's imagination novelized all sorts of things which had happened when Detta was in charge of her body; Detta was not so clever. She thought she remembered things, some things, at least, but a lot of the time she didn't.
Detta was at least partially aware of the blanks.
She could remember the china plate. She could remember that. She could remember slipping it into the pocket of her dress, looking over her shoulder all the while to make sure the Blue Woman wasn't there, peeking. She had to make sure because the china plate belonged to the Blue Woman. The china plate was, Detta understood in some vague way, a forspecial. Detta took it for that why. Detta remembered taking it to a place she knew (although she didn't know how she knew) as The Drawers, a smoking trash-littered hole in the earth where she had once seen a burning baby with plastic skin. She remembered putting the plate carefully down on the gravelly ground and then starting to step on it and stopping, remembered taking off her plain cotton panties and putting them into the pocket where the plate had been, and then carefully slipping the first finger of her left hand carefully against the cut in her at the place where Old Stupid God had joined her and all other girls and women imperfectly, but something about that place must be right, because she remembered the jolt, remembered wanting to press, remembered not pressing, remembered how delicious her vagina had been naked, without the cotton panties in the way of it and the world, and she had not pressed, not until her shoe pressed, her black patent leather shoe, not until her shoe pressed down on the plate, then she pressed on the cut with her finger the way she was pressing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate with her foot, she remembered the way the black patent leather shoe covered the delicate blue webbing on the edge of the plate, she remembered the press, yes, she remembered pressing in The Drawers, pressing with finger and foot, remembered the delicious promise of finger and cut, remembered that when the plate snapped with a bitter brittle snap a similar brittle pleasure had skewered upward from that cut into her guts like an arrow, she remembered the cry which had broken from her lips, an unpleasant cawing like the sound of a crow scared up from a cornpatch, she could remember staring dully at the fragments of the plate and then taking the plain white cotton panties slowly out of her dress pocket and putting them on again, step-ins, so she had heard them called in some time unhoused in memory and drifting loose like turves on a flood-tide, step-ins, good, because first you stepped out to do your business and then you stepped back in, first one shiny patent leather shoe and then the other, good, panties were good, she could remember drawing them up her legs so clearly, drawing them past her knees, a scab on the left one almost ready to fall off and leave clean pink new babyskin, yes, she could remember so clearly it might not have been a week ago or yesterday but only one single moment ago, she could remember how the waistband had reached the hem of her party dress, the clear contrast of white cotton against brown skin, like cream, yes, like that, cream from a pitcher caught suspended over coffee, the texture, the panties disappearing under the hem of the dress, except then the dress was burnt orange and the panties were not going up but down but they were still white but not cotton, they were nylon, cheap see-through nylon panties, cheap in more ways than one, and she remembered stepping out of them, she remembered how they glimmered on the floormat of the '46 Dodge DeSoto, yes, how white they were, how cheap they were, not anything dignified like underwear but cheap panties, the girl was cheap and it was good to be cheap, good to be on sale, to be on the block not even like a whore but like a good breedsow; she remembered no round china plate but the round white face of a boy, some surprised drunk fraternity boy, he was no china plate but his face was as round as the Blue Woman's china plate had been, and there was webbing on his cheeks, and this webbing looked as blue as the webbing on the Blue Woman's forspecial china plate had been, but that was only because the neon was red, the neon was garish, in the dark the neon from the roadhouse sign made the spreading blood from the places on his cheeks where she had clawed him look blue, and he had said Why did youwhy did you why did you do, and then he unrolled the window so he could get his face outside to puke and she remembered hearing Dodie Stevens on the jukebox, singing about tan shoes with pink shoelaces and a big Panama with a purple hatband, she remembered the sound of his puking was like gravel in a cement mixer, and his penis, which moments before had been a livid exclamation point rising from the tufted tangle of his pubic hair, was collapsing into a weak white question mark; she remembered the hoarse gravel sounds of his vomiting stopped and then started again and she thought Well I guess he ain't made enough to lay this foundation yet and laughing and pressing her finger (which now came equipped with a long shaped nail) against her vagina which was bare but no longer bare because it was overgrown with its own coarse briared tangle, and there had been the same brittle breaking snap inside her, and it was still as much pain as it was pleasure (but better, far better, than nothing at all), and then he was grabbing blindly for her and saying in a hurt breaking tone Oh you goddamned nigger cunt and she went on laughing just the same, dodging him easily and snatching up her panties and opening the door on her side of the car, feeling the last blind thud of his fingers on the back of her blouse as she ran into a May night that was redolent of early honeysuckle, red-pink neon light stuttering off the gravel of some postwar parking lot, stuffing her panties, her cheap slick nylon panties not into the pocket of her dress but into a purse jumbled with a teenager's cheerful conglomeration of cosmetics, she was running, the light was stuttering, and then she was twenty-three and it was not panties but a rayon scarf, and she was casually slipping it into her purse as she walked along a counter in the Nice Notions section of Macy's―a scarf which sold at that time for $1.99.
Cheap.
Cheap like the white nylon panties.
Cheap.
Like her.
The body she inhabited was that of a woman who had inherited millions, but that was not known and didn't matter―the scarf was white, the edging blue, and there was that same little breaking sense of pleasure as she sat in the back seat of the taxi, and, oblivious of the driver, held the scarf in one hand, looking at it fixedly, while her other hand crept up under her tweed skirt and beneath the leg-band of her white panties, and that one long dark finger took care of the business that needed to be taken care of in a single merciless stroke.
So sometimes she wondered, in a distracted sort of way, where she was when she wasn't here, but mostly her needs were too sudden and pressing for any extended contemplation, and she simply fulfilled what needed to be fulfilled, did what needed to be done.
Roland would have understood.
5
Odetta could have taken a limo everywhere, even in 1959―although her father was still alive and she was not as fabulously rich as she would become when he died in 1962, the money held in trust for her had become hers on her twenty-fifth birthday, and she could do pretty much as she liked. But she cared very little for a phrase one of the conservative columnists had coined a year or two before―the phrase was "limosine liberal,'' and she was young enough not to want to be seen as one even if she really was one. Not young enough (or stupid enough!) to believe that a few pairs of faded jeans and the khaki shirts she habitually wore in any real way changed her essential status, or riding the bus or the subway when she could have used the car (but she had been self-involved enough not to see Andrew's hurt and deep puzzlement; he liked her and thought it must be some sort of personal rejection), but young enough to still believe that gesture could sometimes overcome (or at least overset) truth.
On the night of August 19th, 1959 , she paid for the gesture with half her legs … and half her mind.
6
Odetta had been first tugged, then pulled, and finally caught up in the swell which would eventually turn into a tidal wave. In 1957, when she became involved, the thing which eventually became known as the Movement had no name. She knew some of the background, knew the struggle for equality had gone on not since the Emancipation Proclamation but almost since the first boatload of slaves had been brought to America (to Georgia, in fact, the colony the British founded to get rid of their criminals and debtors), but for Odetta it always seemed to begin in the same place, with the same three words: I'm not movin.
The place had been a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the words had been spoken by a black woman named Rosa Lee Parks, and the place from which Rosa Lee Parks was not movin was from the front of the city bus to the back of the city bus, which was, of course, the Jim Crow part of the city bus. Much later, Odetta would sing "We Shall Not Be Moved" with the rest of them, and it always made her think of Rosa Lee Parks, and she never sang it without a sense of shame. It was so easy to sing we with your arms linked to the arms of a whole crowd; that was easy even for a woman with no legs. So easy to sing we, so easy to be we. There had been no we on that bus, that bus that must have stank of ancient leather and years of cigar and cigarette smoke, that bus with the curved ad cards saying things like LUCKY STRIKE L.S.M.F.T. and ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE and DRINK OVALTINE! YOU'LL SEE WHAT WE MEAN! and CHESTERFIELD , TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES, no we under the disbelieving gazes of the motorman, the white passengers among whom she sat, the equally disbelieving stares of the blacks at the back.
No we.
No marching thousands.
Only Rosa Lee Parks starting a tidal wave with three words: I'm not movin.
Odetta would think If I could do something like that―if I could be that brave—I think I could be happy for the rest of my life. But that sort of courage is not in me.
She had read of the Parks incident, but with little interest at first. That came little by little. It was hard to say exactly when or how her imagination had been caught and fired by that at first almost soundless racequake which had begun to shake the south.
A year or so later a young man she was dating more or less regularly began taking her down to the Village, where some of the young (and mostly white) folk-singers who performed there had added some new and startling songs to their repetoire―suddenly, in addition to all those old wheezes about how John Henry had taken his hammer and outraced the new steam-hammer (killing himself in the process, lawd, lawd) and how Bar'bry Allen had cruelly rejected her lovesick young suitor (and ended up dying of shame, lawd, lawd), there were songs about how it felt to be down and out and ignored in the city, how it felt to be turned away from a job you could do because your skin was the wrong color, how it felt to be taken into a jail cell and whipped by Mr. Charlie because your skin was dark and you had dared, lawd, lawd, to sit in the white folks' section of the lunch-counter at an F.W. Woolworths' in Montgomery, Alabama.
Absurdly or not, it was only then that she had become curious about her own parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. She would never read Roots― she was in another world and time long before that book was written, perhaps even thought of, by Alex Haley, but it was at this absurdly late time in her life when it first dawned upon her that not so many generations back her progenitors had been taken in chains by white men. Surely the fact had occurred to her before, but only as a piece of information with no real temperature gradient, like an equation, never as something which bore intimately upon her own life.
Odetta totted up what she knew, and was appalled by the smallness of the sum. She knew her mother had been born in Odetta , Arkansas , the town for which she (the only child) had been named. She knew her father had been a small-town dentist who had invented and patented a capping process which had lain dormant and unremarked for ten years and which had then, suddenly, made him a moderately wealthy man. She knew that he had developed a number of other dental processes during the ten years before and the four years after the influx of wealth, most of them either orthodontic or cosmetic in nature, and that, shortly after moving to New York with his wife and daughter (who had been born four years after the original patent had been secured), he had founded a company called Holmes Dental Industries, which was now to teeth what Squibb was to antibiotics.
But when she asked him what life had been like during all the years between―the years when she hadn't been there, and the years when she had, her father wouldn't tell her. He would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn't tell her anything. He closed that part of himself off to her. Once her ma, Alice―he called her ma or sometimes Allie if he'd had a few or was feeling good―said, "Tell her about the time those men shot at you when you drove the Ford through the covered bridge, Dan," and he gave Odetta's ma such a gray and forbidding look that her ma, always something of a sparrow, had shrunk back in her seat and said no more.
Odetta had tried her mother once or twice alone after that night, but to no avail. If she had tried before, she might have gotten something, but because he wouldn't speak, she wouldn't speak either―and to him, she realized, the past―those relatives, those red dirt roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless windows ungraced by a single simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harassment, those neighbor children who went dressed in smocks which had begun life as flour sacks―all of that was for him buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps. He would not speak, perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South. All else was hidden beneath that impervious outer cover. His past was so well-protected that there had been no gap to slide through, no way past that perfect capped barrier and into the throat of revelation.
Detta knew things, but Detta didn't know Odetta and Odetta didn't know Detta, and so the teeth lay as smooth and closed as a redan gate there, also.
She had some of her mother's shyness in her as well as her father's unblinking (if unspoken) toughness, and the only time she had dared pursue him further on the subject, to suggest that what he was denying her was a deserved trust fund never promised and apparenily never to mature, had been one night in his library. He had shaken his Wall Street Journal carefully, closed it, folded it, and laid it aside on the deal table beside the standing lamp. He had removed his rimless steel spectacles and had laid them on top of the paper. Then he had looked at her, a thin black man, thin almost to the point of emaciation, tightly kinked gray hair now drawing rapidly away from the deepening hollows of his temples where tender clocksprings of veins pulsed steadily, and he had said only, Idon't talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world had moved on since then.
Roland would have understood.
7
When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS written upon it, he saw things he did not understand at all―but he understood they didn't matter.
It was Eddie Dean's world, but beyond that it was only a confusion of lights, people and objects―more objects than he had ever seen in his life. Lady-things, from the look of them, and apparently for sale. Some under glass, some arranged in tempting piles and displays. None it mattered any more than the movement as that world flowed past the edges of the doorway before them. The doorway was the Lady's eyes. He was looking through them just as he had looked through Eddie's eyes when Eddie had moved up the aisle of the sky-carriage.
Eddie, on the other hand, was thunderstruck. The revolver in his hand trembled and dropped a little. The gunslinger could have taken it from him easily but did not. He only stood quietly. It was a trick he had learned a long time ago.
Now the view through the doorway made one of those turns the gunslinger found so dizzying―but Eddie found this same abrupt swoop oddly comforting. Roland had never seen a movie. Eddie had seen thousands, and what he was looking at was like one of those moving point-of-view shots they did in ones like Halloween and The Shining. He even knew what they called the gadget they did it with. Steadi-Cam. That was it.
"Star Wars, too," he muttered. "Death Star. That fuckin crack, remember?"
Roland looked at him and said nothing.
Hands―dark brown hands―entered what Roland saw as a doorway and what Eddie was already starting to think of as some sort of magic movie screen … a movie screen which, under the right circumstances, you might be able to walk into the way that guy had just walked out of the screen and into the real world in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Bitchin movie.
Eddie hadn't realized how bitchin until just now.
Except that movie hadn't been made yet on the other side of the door he was looking through. It was New York, okay―somehow the very sound of the taxi-cab horns, as mute and faint as they were―proclaimed that―and it was some New York department store he had been in at one time or another, but it was … was …
"It's older," he muttered.
"Before your when?" the gunslinger asked.
Eddie looked at him and laughed shortly. "Yeah. If you want to put it that way, yeah."
"Hello, Miss Walker ," a tentative voice said. The view in the doorway rose so suddenly that even Eddie was a bit dizzied and he saw a saleswoman who obviously knew the owner of the black hands―knew her and either didn't like her or feared her. Or both. "Help you today?"
"This one." The owner of the black hands held up a white scarf with a bright blue edge. "Don't bother to wrap it up, babe, just stick it in a bag."
"Cash or ch―"
"Cash, it's always cash, isn't it?"
"Yes, that's fine, Miss Walker."
"I'm so glad you approve, dear."
There was a little grimace on the salesgirl's face―Eddie just caught it as she turned away. Maybe it was something as simple as being talked to that way by a woman the salesgirl considered an "uppity nigger" (again it was more his experience in movie theaters than any knowledge of history or even life on the streets as he had lived it that caused this thought, because this was like watching a movie either set or made in the '60s, something like that one with Sidney Steiger and Rod Poitier, In the Heat of the Night ), but it could also be something even simpler: Roland's Lady of the Shadows was, black or white, one rude bitch.
And it didn't really matter, did it? None of it made a damned bit of difference. He cared about one thing and one thing only and that was getting the fuck out.
That was New York , he could almost smell New York .
And New York meant smack.
He could almost smell that, too.
Except there was a hitch, wasn't there?
One big motherfucker of a hitch.
8
Roland watched Eddie carefully, and although he could have killed him six times over at almost any time he wanted, he had elected to remain still and silent and let Eddie work the situation out for himself. Eddie was a lot of things, and a lot of them were not nice (as a fellow who had consciously let a child drop to his death, the gunslinger knew the difference between nice and not quite well), but one thing Eddie wasn't was stupid.
He was a smart kid.
He would figure it out.
So he did.
He looked back at Roland, smiled without showing his teeth, twirled the gunslinger's revolver once on his finger, clumsily, burlesquing a show-shooter's fancy coda, and then he held it out to Roland, butt first.
"This thing might as well be a piece of shit for all the good it can do me, isn't that right?"
You can talk bright when you want to, Roland thought. Why do you so often choose to talk stupid, Eddie? Is it because you think that's the way they talked in the place where your brother went with his guns?
"Isn't that right?" Eddie repeated.
Roland nodded.
"If I had plugged you, what would have happened to that door?"
"I don't know. I suppose the only way to find out would be to try it and see."
"Well, what do you think would happen?"
"I think it would disappear."
Eddie nodded. That was what he thought, too. Poof! Gone like magic! Now ya see it, my friends, now ya don't. It was really no different than what would happen if the projectionist in a movie-theater were to draw a six-shooter and plug the projector, was it?
If you shot the projector, the movie stopped.
Eddie didn't want the picture to stop.
Eddie wanted his money's worth.
"You can go through by yourself," Eddie said slowly.
"Yes."
"Sort of."
"Yes."
"You wind up in her head. Like you wound up in mine.''
"Yes."
"So you can hitchhike into my world, but that's all."
Roland said nothing. Hitchhike was one of the words Eddie sometimes used that he didn't exactly understand … but he caught the drift.
"But you could go through in your body. Like at Balazar's." He was talking out loud but really talking to himself. "Except you'd need me for that, wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
"Then take me with you."
The gunslinger opened his mouth, but Eddie was already rushing on.
"Not now, I don't mean now," he said. "I know it would cause a riot or some goddam thing if we just … popped out over there." He laughed rather wildly. "Like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, except without any hat, sure I did. We'll wait until she's alone, and―"
"No."
"I'll come back with you," Eddie said. "I swear it, Roland. I mean, I know you got a job to do, and I know I'm a part of it. I know you saved my ass at Customs, but I think I saved yours at Balazar's―now what do you think?"
"I think you did," Roland said. He remembered the way Eddie had risen up from behind the desk, regardless of the risk, and felt an instant of doubt.
But only an instant.
"So? Peter pays Paul. One hand washes the other. All I want to do is go back for a few hours. Grab some take-out chicken, maybe a box of Dunkin Donuts." Eddie nodded toward the doorway, where things had begun to move again. "So what do you say?"
"No," the gunslinger said, but for a moment he was hardly thinking about Eddie. That movement up the aisle―the Lady, whoever she was, wasn't moving the way an ordinary person moved―wasn't moving, for instance, the way Eddie had moved when Roland looked through his eyes, or (now that he stopped to think of it, which he never had before, any more than he had ever stopped and really noticed the constant presence of his own nose in the lower range of his peripheral vision) the way he moved himself. When one walked, vision became a mild pendulum: left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, the world rocking back and forth so mildly and gently that after awhile―shortly after you began to walk, he supposed―you simply ignored it. There was none of that pendulum movement in the Lady's walk―she simply moved smoothly up the aisle, as if riding along tracks. Ironically, Eddie had had this same perception … only to Eddie it had looked like a SteadiCam shot. He had found this perception comforting because it was familiar.
To Roland it was alien … but then Eddie was breaking in, his voice shrill.
"Well why not? Just why the fuck not?"
"Because you don't want chicken," the gunslinger said. "I know what you call the things you want, Eddie. You want to 'fix.' You want to 'score.' "
"So what?" Eddie cried―almost shrieked. "So what if I do? I said I'd come back with you! You got my promise! I mean, you got my fuckin PROMISE! What else do you want? You want me to swear on my mother's name? Okay, I swear on my mother's name! You want me to swear on my brother Henry's name? All right, I swear! I swear! I SWEAR!"
Enrico Balazar would have told him, but the gunslinger didn't need the likes of Balazar to tell him this one fact of life: Never trust a junkie.
Roland nodded toward the door. "Until after the Tower, at least, that part of your life is done. After that I don't care. After that you're free to go to hell in your own way. Until then I need you."
''Oh you fuckin shitass liar,'' Eddie said softly. There was no audible emotion in his voice, but the gunslinger saw the glisten of tears in his eyes. Roland said nothing. "You know there ain't gonna be no after, not for me, not for her, or whoever the Christ this third guy is. Probably not for you, either―you look as fuckin wasted as Henry did at his worst. If we don't die on the way to your Tower we'll sure as shit die when we get there so why are you lying to me?"
The gunslinger felt a dull species of shame but only repeated: "At least for now, that part of your life is done."
"Yeah?" Eddie said. "Well, I got some news for you, Roland. I know what's gonna happen to your real body when you go through there and inside of her. I know because I saw it before. I don't need your guns. I got you by that fabled place where the short hairs grow, my friend. You can even turn her head the way you turned mine and watch what I do to the rest of you while you're nothing but your goddam ka. I'd like to wait until nightfall, and drag you down by the water. Then you could watch the lobsters chow up on the rest of you. But you might be in too much of a hurry for that."
Eddie paused. The graty breaking of the waves and the steady hollow conch of the wind both seemed very loud.
"So I think I'll just use your knife to cut your throat."
"And close that door forever?"
"You say that part of my life is done. You don't just mean smack, either. You mean New York , America , my time, everything. If that's how it is, I want this part done, too. The scenery sucks and the company stinks. There are times, Roland, when you make Jimmy Swaggart look almost sane."
"There are great wonders ahead," Roland said. "Great adventures. More than that, there is a quest to course upon, and a chance to redeem your honor. There's something else, too. You could be a gunslinger. I needn't be the last after all. It's in you, Eddie. I see it. I feel it."
Eddie laughed, although now the tears were coursing down his cheeks. "Oh, wonderful. Wonderful! Just what I need! My brother Henry. He was a gunslinger. In a place called Viet Nam , that was. It was great for him. You should have seen him when he was on a serious nod, Roland. He couldn't find his way to the fuckin bathroom without help. If there wasn't any help handy, he just sat there and watched Big Time Wrestling and did it in his fuckin pants. It's great to be a gunslinger. I can see that. My brother was a doper and you're out of your fucking gourd."
"Perhaps your brother was a man with no clear idea of honor."
"Maybe not. We didn't always get a real clear picture of what that was in the Projects. It was just a word you used after Your if you happened to get caught smoking reefer or lifting the spinners off some guy's T-Bird and got ho'ed up in court for it."
Eddie was crying harder now, but he was laughing, too.
"Your friends, now. This guy you talk about in your sleep, for instance, this dude Cuthbert―"
The gunslinger started in spite of himself. Not all his long years of training could stay that start.
"Did they get this stuff you're talking about like a goddam Marine recruiting sergeant? Adventure, quests, honor?"
"They understood honor, yes," Roland said slowly, thinking of all the vanished others.
"Did it get them any further than gunslinging got my brother?"
The gunslinger said nothing.
"I know you," Eddie said. "I seen lots of guys like you. "You're just another kook singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers' with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other. I don't want no honor. I just want a chicken dinner and fix. In that order. So I'm telling you: go on through. You can. But the minute you're gone, I'm gonna kill the rest of you."
The gunslinger said nothing.
Eddie smiled crookedly and brushed the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands. "You want to know what we call this back home?"
"What?"
"A Mexican stand-off."
For a moment they only looked at each other, and then Roland looked sharply into the doorway. They had both been partially aware―Roland rather more than Eddie―that there had been another of those swerves, this time to the left. Here was an array of sparkling jewelry. Some was under protective glass but because most wasn't, the gunslinger supposed it was trumpery stuff … what Eddie would have called costume jewelry. The dark brown hands examined a few things in what seemed an only cursory manner, and then another salesgirl appeared. There had been some conversation which neither of them really noticed, and the Lady (some Lady, Eddie thought) asked to see something else. The salesgirl went away, and that was when Roland's eyes swung sharply back.
The brown hands reappeared, only now they held a purse. It opened. And suddenly the hands were scooping things―seemingly, almost certainly, at random―into the purse.
"Well, you're collecting quite a crew, Roland," Eddie said, bitterly amused. "First you got your basic white junkie, and then you got your basic black shoplif―"
But Roland was already moving toward the doorway between the worlds, moving swiftly, not looking at Eddie at all.
"I mean it!" Eddie screamed. "You go through and I'll cut your throat, I'll cut your fucking thr―"
Before he could finish, the gunslinger was gone. All that was left of him was his limp, breathing body lying upon the beach.
For a moment Eddie only stood there, unable to believe that Roland had done it, had really gone ahead and done this idiotic thing in spite of his promise―his sincere fucking guarantee, as far as that went―of what the consequences would be.
He stood for a moment, eyes rolling like the eyes of a frightened horse at the onset of a thunderstorm … except of course there was no thunderstorm, except for the one in the head.
All right. All right, goddammit.
There might only be a moment. That was all the gun-slinger might give him, and Eddie damned well knew it. He glanced at the door and saw the black hands freeze with a gold necklace half in and half out of a purse that already glittered like a pirate's cache of treasure. Although he could not hear it, Eddie sensed that Roland was speaking to the owner of the black hands.
He pulled the knife from the gunslinger's purse and then rolled over the limp, breathing body which lay before the doorway. The eyes were open but blank, rolled up to the whites.
"Watch, Roland!" Eddie screamed. That monotonous, idiotic, never-ending wind blew in his ears. Christ, it was enough to drive anyone bugshit. "Watch very closely! I want to complete your fucking education! I want to show you what happens when you fuck over the Dean brothers!"
He brought the knife down to the gunslinger's throat.
CHAPTER 2
RINGING THE CHANGES
1
August, 1959:
When the intern came outside half an hour later, he found Julio leaning against the ambulance which was still parked in the emergency bay of Sisters of Mercy Hospital on 23rd Street . The heel of one of Julio's pointy-toed boots was hooked over the front fender. He had changed to a pair of glaring pink pants and a blue shirt with his name written in gold stitches over the left pocket: his bowling league outfit. George checked his watch and saw that Julio's team―The Spics of Supremacy―would already be rolling.
"Thought you'd be gone," George Shavers said. He was an intern at Sisters of Mercy. "How're your guys gonna win without the Wonder Hook?"
"They got Miguel Basale to take my place. He ain't steady, but he gets hot sometimes. They'll be okay." Julio paused. "I was curious about how it came out." He was the driver, a Cubano with a sense of humor George wasn't even sure Julio knew he had. He looked around. Neither of the paramedics who rode with them were in sight.
"Where are they?" George asked.
"Who? The fuckin Bobbsey Twins? Where do you think they are? Chasin Minnesota poontang down in the Village. Any idea if she'll pull through?"
"Don't know."
He tried to sound sage and knowing about the unknown, but the fact was that first the resident on duty and then a pair of surgeons had taken the black woman away from him almost faster than you could say hail Mary fulla grace (which had actually been on his lips to say―the black lady really hadn't looked as if she was going to last very long).
"She lost a hell of a lot of blood."
"No shit."
George was one of sixteen interns at Sisters of Mercy, and one of eight assigned to a new program called Emergency Ride. The theory was that an intern riding with a couple of paramedics could sometimes make the difference between life and death in an emergency situation. George knew that most drivers and paras thought that wet-behind-the-ears interns were as likely to kill red-blankets as save them, but George thought maybe it worked.
Sometimes.
Either way it made great PR for the hospital, and although the interns in the program liked to bitch about the extra eight hours (without pay) it entailed each week, George Shavers sort of thought most of them felt the way he did himself―proud, tough, able to take whatever they threw his way.
Then had come the night the T.W.A. Tri-Star crashed at Idlewild. Sixty-five people on board, sixty of them what Julio Estevez referred to as D.R.T.―Dead Right There―and three of the remaining five looking like the sort of thing you might scrape out of the bottom of a coal-furnace … except what you scraped out of the bottom of a coal furnace didn't moan and shriek and beg for someone to give them morphine or kill them, did they? Ifyou can take this, he thought afterward, remembering the severed limbs lying amid the remains of aluminum flaps and seat-cushions and a ragged chunk of tail with the numbers 17 and a big red letter T and part of a W on it, remembering the eyeball he had seen resting on top of a charred Samsonite suitcase, remembering a child's teddybear with staring shoe-button eyes lying beside a small red sneaker with a child's foot still in it, if you can take this, baby, you can take anything. And he had been taking it just fine. He went right on taking it just fine all the way home. He went on taking it just fine through a late supper that consisted of a Swanson's turkey TV dinner. He went to sleep with no problem at all, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was taking it just fine. Then, in some dead dark hour of the morning he had awakened from a hellish nightmare in which the thing resting on top of the charred Samsonite suitcase had not been a teddybear but his mother's head, and her eyes had opened, and they had been charred; they were the staring expressionless shoebutton eyes of the teddy-bear, and her mouth had opened, revealing the broken fangs which had been her dentures up until the T.W.A. Tri-Star was struck by lightning on its final approach, and she had whispered You couldn't save me, George, we scrimped for you, we saved for you, we went without for you, your dad fixed up the scrape you got into with that girl and you STILL COULDN'T SAVE ME GOD DAMN YOU, and he had awakened screaming, and he was vaguely aware of someone pounding on the wall, but by then he was already pelting into the bathroom, and he barely made it to the kneeling penitential position before the porcelain altar before dinner came up the express elevator. It came special delivery, hot and steaming and still smelling like processed turkey. He knelt there and looked into the bowl, at the chunks of half-digested turkey and the carrots which had lost none of their original flourescent brightness, and this word flashed across his mind in large red letters:
ENOUGH
Correct.
It was:
ENOUGH.
He was going to get out of the sawbones business. He was going to get out because:
ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH.
He was going to get out because Popeye's motto was That's all I can stands and I can't stand nummore, and Popeye was as right as rain.
He had flushed the toilet and gone back to bed and fell asleep almost instantly and awoke to discover he still wanted to be a doctor, and that was a goddam good thing to know for sure, maybe worth the whole program, whether you called it Emergency Ride or Bucket of Blood or Name That Tune.
He still wanted to be a doctor.
He knew a lady who did needlework. He paid her ten dollars he couldn't afford to make him a small, old-fashioned-looking sampler. It said:
IF YOU CAN TAKE THIS, YOU CAN TAKE ANYTHING.
Yes. Correct.
The messy business in the subway happened four weeks later.
2
"That lady was some fuckin weird, you know it?" Julio said.
George breathed an interior sigh of relief. If Julio hadn't opened the subject, George supposed he wouldn't have had the sack. He was an intern, and someday he was going to be a full-fledged doc, he really believed that now, but Julio was a vet, and you didn't want to say something stupid in front of a vet. He would only laugh and say Hell, I seen that shit a thousand times, kid. Get y'selfa towel and wipe off whatever it is behind your ears, cause it's wet and drippin down the sides of your face.
But apparently Julio hadn't seen it a thousand times, and that was good, because George wanted to talk about it.
"She was weird, all right. It was like she was two people.''
He was amazed to see that now Julio was the one who looked relieved, and he was struck with sudden shame. Julio Estavez, who was going to do no more than pilot a limo with a couple of pulsing red lights on top for the rest of his life, had just shown more courage than he had been able to show.
"You got it, doc. Hunnert per cent." He pulled out a pack of Chesterfields and stuck one in the corner of his mouth.
"Those things are gonna kill you, my man," George said.
Julio nodded and offered the pack.
They smoked in silence for awhile. The paras were maybe chasing tail like Julio had said … or maybe they'd just had enough. George had been scared, all right, no joke about that. But he also knew he had been the one who saved the woman, not the paras, and he knew Julio knew it too. Maybe that was really why Julio had waited. The old black woman had helped, and the white kid who had dialed the cops while everyone else (except the old black woman) had just stood around watching like it was some goddam movie or TV show or something, part of a Peter Gunn episode, maybe, but in the end it had all come down to George Shavers, one scared cat doing his duty the best way he could.
The woman had been waiting for the train Duke Ellington held in such high regard―that fabled A-train. Just been a pretty young black woman in jeans and a khaki shirt waiting for the fabled A-Train so she could go uptown someplace.
Someone had pushed her.
George Shavers didn't have the slightest idea if the police had caught the slug who had done it—that wasn't his business. His business was the woman who had tumbled screaming into the tube of the tunnel in front of that fabled A-train. It had been a miracle that she had missed the third rail; the fabled third rail that would have done to her what the State of New York did to the bad guys up at Sing-Sing who got a free ride on that fabled A-train the cons called Old Sparky.
Oboy, the miracles of electricity.
She tried to crawl out of the way but there hadn't been quite enough time and that fabled A-train had come into the station screeching and squalling and puking up sparks because the motorman had seen her but it was too late, too late for him and too late for her. The steel wheels of that fabled A-train had cut the living legs off her from just above the knees down. And while everyone else (except for the white kid who had dialed the cops) had only stood there pulling their puds (or pushing their pudenda, George supposed), the elderly black woman had jumped down, dislocating one hip in the process (she would later be given a Medal of Bravery by the Mayor), and had used the doorag on her head to cinch a tourniquet around one of the young woman's squirting thighs. The young white guy was screaming for an ambulance on one side of the station and the old black chick was screaming for someone to give her a help, to give her a tie-off for God's sake, anything, anything at all, and finally some elderly white business type had reluctantly surrendered his belt, and the elderly black chick looked up at him and spoke the words which became the headline of the New York Daily News the next day, the words which made her an authentic American apple-pie heroine: "Thank you, bro." Then she had noosed the belt around the young woman's left leg halfway between the young woman's crotch and where her left knee had been until that fabled A-train had come along.
George had heard someone say to someone else that the young black woman's last words before passing out had been "WHO WAS THAT MAHFAH? I GONE HUNT HIM DOWN AND KILL HIS ASS!"
There was no way to punch holes far enough up for the elderly black woman to notch the belt, so she simply held on like grim old death until Julio, George, and the paras arrived.
George remembered the yellow line, how his mother had told him he must never, never, never go past the yellow line while he was waiting for a train (fabled or otherwise), the stench of oil and electricity when he hopped down onto the cinders, remembered how hot it had been. The heat seemed to be baking off him, off the elderly black woman, off the young black woman, off the train, the tunnel, the unseen sky above and hell itself beneath. He remembered thinking incoherently If they put a blood-pressure cuff on me now I'd go off the dial and then he went cool and yelled for his bag, and when one of the paras tried to jump down with it he told the para to fuck off, and the para had looked startled, as if he was really seeing George Shavers for the first time, and he had fucked off.
George tied off as many veins and arteries as he could tie off, and when her heart started to be-bop he had shot her full of Digitalin. Whole blood arrived. Cops brought it. Want to bring her up, doc? one of them had asked and George had told him not yet, and he got out the needle and stuck the juice to her like she was a junkie in dire need of a fix.
Then he let them take her up.
Then they had taken her back.
On the way she had awakened.
Then the weirdness started.
3
George gave her a shot of Demerol when the paras loaded her into the ambulance―she had begun to stir and cry out weakly. He gave her a boost hefty enough for him to be confident she would remain quiet until they got to Sisters of Mercy. He was ninety per cent sure she would still be with them when they got there, and that was one for the good guys.
Her eyes began to flutter while they were still six blocks from the hospital, however. She uttered a thick moan.
"We can shoot her up again, doc," one of the paras said.
George was hardly aware this was the first time a paramedic had deigned to call him anything other than George or, worse, Georgie. "Are you nuts? I'd just as soon not confuse D.O.A. and O.D. if it's all the same to you."
The paramedic drew back.
George looked back at the young black woman and saw the eyes returning his gaze were awake and aware.
"What has happened to me?" she asked.
George remembered the man who had told another man about what the woman had supposedly said (how she was going to hunt the motherfucker down and kill his ass, etc., etc.). That man had been white. George decided now it had been pure invention, inspired either by that odd human urge to make naturally dramatic situations even more dramatic, or just race prejudice. This was a cultured, intelligent woman.
"You've had an accident," he said. "You were―"
Her eyes slipped shut and he thought she was going to sleep again. Good. Let someone else tell her she had lost her legs. Someone who made more than $7,600 a year. He had shifted a little to the left, wanting to check her b.p. again, when she opened her eyes once more. When she did, George Shavers was looking at a different woman.
"Fuckah cut off mah laigs. I felt 'em go. Dis d'amblance?"
"Y-Y-Yes," George said. Suddenly he needed something to drink. Not necessarily alcohol. Just something wet. His voice was dry. This was like watching Spencer Tracy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, only for real.
"Dey get dat honkey mahfah?"
"No," George said, thinking The guy got it right, goddam, the guy did actually get it right.
He was vaguely aware that the paramedics, who had been hovering (perhaps hoping he would do something wrong) were now backing off.
"Good. Honky fuzz jus be lettin him off anyway. I be gittin him. I be cuttin his cock off. Sumbitch! I tell you what I goan do t'dat sumbitch! I tell you one thing, you sumbitch honky! I goan tell you … tell …"
Her eyes fluttered again and George had thought Yes, go to sleep, please go to sleep, I don't get paid for this, I don't understand this, they told us about shock but nobody mentioned schizophrenia as one of the—
The eyes opened. The first woman was there.
"What sort of accident was it?" she asked. "I remember coming out of the I—"
"Eye?" he said stupidly.
She smiled a little. It was a painful smile. "The Hungry I. It's a coffee house."
"Oh. Yeah. Right."
The other one, hurt or not, had made him feel dirty and a little ill. This one made him feel like a knight in an Arthurian tale, a knight who has successfully rescued the Lady Fair from the jaws of the dragon.
"I remember walking down the stairs to the platform, and after that―"
''Someone pushed you. "It sounded stupid, but what was wrong with that? It was stupid.
"Pushed me in front of the train?"
"Yes."
"Have I lost my legs?"
George tried to swallow and couldn't. There seemed to be nothing in his throat to grease the machinery.
"Not all of them," he said inanely, and her eyes closed.
Let it be a faint, he thought then, please let it be a f―
They opened, blazing. One hand came up and slashed five slits through the air within an inch of his face—any closer and he would have been in the E.R. getting his cheek stitched up instead of smoking Chesties with Julio Estavez.
"YOU AIN'T NUTHIN BUT A BUNCH A HONKY SONSA BITCHES!" she screamed. Her face was monstrous, her eyes full of hell's own light. It wasn't even the face of a human being. "GOAN KILL EVERY MAHFAHIN HONKY I SEE! GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN CUT OFF THEIR BALLS AND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES! GOAN―"
It was crazy. She talked like a cartoon black woman, Butterfly McQueen gone Loony Tunes. She―or it―also seemed superhuman. This screaming, writhing thing could not have just undergone impromptu surgery by subway train half an hour ago. She bit. She clawed out at him again and again. Snot spat from her nose. Spit flew from her lips. Filth poured from her mouth.
"Shoot her up, doc!" one of the paras yelled. His face was pale. "Fa crissakes shoot her up!" The para reached toward the supply case. George shoved his hand aside.
"Fuck off, chickenshit."
George looked back at his patient and saw the calm, cultured eyes of the other one looking at him.
"Will I live?" she asked in a conversational tea-room voice. He thought, She is unaware of her lapses. Totally unaware. And, after a moment: So is the other one, for that matter.
"I―" He gulped, rubbed at his galloping heart through his tunic, and then ordered himself to get control of this. He had saved her life. Her mental problems were not his concern.
"Are you all right?" she asked him, and the genuine concern in her voice made him smile a little―her asking him.
"Yes, ma'am."
"To which question are you responding?"
For a moment he didn't understand, then did. "Both," he said, and took her hand. She squeezed it, and he looked into her shining lucent eyes and thought A man could fall in love, and that was when her hand turned into a claw and she was telling him he was a honky mahfah, and she wadn't just goan take his balls, she was goan chew on those mahfahs.
He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman―the first woman.
"Please," she said. "I don't want to die. Pl―" Then she went out for good, and that was good. For all of them.
4
"So whatchoo t'ink?" Julio asked.
"About who's gonna be in the Series?" George squashed the butt under the heel of his loafer. "White Sox. I got 'em in the pool."
"Whatchoo t'ink about that lady?"
"I think she might be schizophrenic," George said slowly.
"Yeah, I know that. I mean, whass gonna happen to her?"
"I don't know."
"She needs help, man. Who gonna give it?"
"Well, I already gave her one," George said, but his face felt hot, as if he were blushing.
Julio looked at him. "If you already gave her all the help you can give her, you shoulda let her die, doc."
George looked at Julio for a moment, but found he couldn't stand what he saw in Julio's eyes―not accusation but sadness.
So he walked away.
He had places to go.
5
The Time of the Drawing:
In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in control, but Detta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do best was steal. It didn't matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than it mattered that she often threw it away later.
The taking was what mattered.
When the gunslinger entered her head in Macy's, Detta screamed in a combination of fury and horror and terror, her hands freezing on the junk jewelry she was scooping into her purse.
She screamed because when Roland came into her mind, when he came forward, she for a moment sensed the other, as if a door had been swung open inside of her head.
And she screamed because the invading raping presence was a honky.
She could not see but nonetheless sensed his whiteness.
People looked around. A floorwalker saw the screaming woman in the wheelchair with her purse open, saw one hand frozen in the act of stuffing costume jewelry into a purse that looked (even from a distance of thirty feet) worth three times the stuff she was stealing.
The floorwalker yelled, "Hey Jimmy!" and Jimmy Halvorsen, one of Macy's house detectives, looked around and saw what was happening. He started toward the black woman in the wheelchair on a dead run. He couldn't help running―he had been a city cop for eighteen years and it was built into his system―but he was already thinking it was gonna be a shit bust. Little kids, cripples, nuns; they were always a shit bust. Busting them was like kicking a drunk. They cried a little in front of the judge and then took a walk. It was hard to convince judges that cripples could also be slime.
But he ran just the same.
6
Roland was momentarily horrified by the snakepit of hate and revulsion in which he found himself … and then he heard the woman screaming, saw the big man with the potato-sack belly running toward her/him, saw people looking, and took control.
Suddenly he was the woman with the dusky hands. He sensed some strange duality inside her, but couldn't think about it now.
He turned the chair and began to shove it forward. The aisle rolled past him/her. People dived away to either side. The purse was lost, spilling Detta's credentials and stolen treasure in a wide trail along the floor. The man with the heavy gut skidded on bogus gold chains and lipstick tubes and then fell on his ass.
7
Shit! Halvorsen thought furiously, and for a moment one hand clawed under his sport-coat where there was a .38 in a clamshell holster. Then sanity reasserted itself. This was no drug bust or armed robbery; this was a crippled black lady in a wheelchair. She was rolling it like it was some punk's drag-racer, but a crippled black lady was all she was just the same. What was he going to do, shoot her? That would be great, wouldn't it? And where was she going to go? There was nothing at the end of the aisle but two dressing rooms.
He picked himself up, massaging his aching ass, and began after her again, limping a little now.
The wheelchair flashed into one of the dressing rooms. The door slammed, just clearing the push-handles on the back.
Got you now, bitch, Jimmy thought. And I'm going to give you one hell of a scare. I don't care if you got five orphan children and only a year to live. I'm not gonna hurt you, but oh babe I'm gonna shake your dice.
He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left shoulder, and it was empty.
No black woman.
No wheelchair.
No nothing.
He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.
"Other one!" the floorwalker yelled. "Other one!"
Before Jimmy could move, the floorwalker had busted open the door of the other dressing room. A woman in a linen skirt and a Playtex Living Bra screamed piercingly and crossed her arms over her chest. She was very white and very definitely not crippled.
"Pardon me," the floorwalker said, feeling hot crimson flood his face.
"Get out of here, you pervert!" the woman in the linen skirt and the bra cried.
"Yes, ma'am," the floorwalker said, and closed the door.
At Macy's, the customer was always right.
He looked at Halvorsen.
Halvorsen looked back.
"What is this shit?" Halvorsen asked. "Did she go in there or not?"
"Yeah, she did."
"So where is she?"
The floorwalker could only shake his head. "Let's go back and pick up the mess."
"You pick up the mess," Jimmy Halvorsen said. "I feel like I just broke my ass in nine pieces." He paused. "To tell you the truth, me fine bucko, I also feel extremely confused."
8
The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done what he had promised, it would be gone.
But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.
1
August, 1959:
When the intern came outside half an hour later, he found Julio leaning against the ambulance which was still parked in the emergency bay of Sisters of Mercy Hospital on 23rd Street . The heel of one of Julio's pointy-toed boots was hooked over the front fender. He had changed to a pair of glaring pink pants and a blue shirt with his name written in gold stitches over the left pocket: his bowling league outfit. George checked his watch and saw that Julio's team―The Spics of Supremacy―would already be rolling.
"Thought you'd be gone," George Shavers said. He was an intern at Sisters of Mercy. "How're your guys gonna win without the Wonder Hook?"
"They got Miguel Basale to take my place. He ain't steady, but he gets hot sometimes. They'll be okay." Julio paused. "I was curious about how it came out." He was the driver, a Cubano with a sense of humor George wasn't even sure Julio knew he had. He looked around. Neither of the paramedics who rode with them were in sight.
"Where are they?" George asked.
"Who? The fuckin Bobbsey Twins? Where do you think they are? Chasin Minnesota poontang down in the Village. Any idea if she'll pull through?"
"Don't know."
He tried to sound sage and knowing about the unknown, but the fact was that first the resident on duty and then a pair of surgeons had taken the black woman away from him almost faster than you could say hail Mary fulla grace (which had actually been on his lips to say―the black lady really hadn't looked as if she was going to last very long).
"She lost a hell of a lot of blood."
"No shit."
George was one of sixteen interns at Sisters of Mercy, and one of eight assigned to a new program called Emergency Ride. The theory was that an intern riding with a couple of paramedics could sometimes make the difference between life and death in an emergency situation. George knew that most drivers and paras thought that wet-behind-the-ears interns were as likely to kill red-blankets as save them, but George thought maybe it worked.
Sometimes.
Either way it made great PR for the hospital, and although the interns in the program liked to bitch about the extra eight hours (without pay) it entailed each week, George Shavers sort of thought most of them felt the way he did himself―proud, tough, able to take whatever they threw his way.
Then had come the night the T.W.A. Tri-Star crashed at Idlewild. Sixty-five people on board, sixty of them what Julio Estevez referred to as D.R.T.―Dead Right There―and three of the remaining five looking like the sort of thing you might scrape out of the bottom of a coal-furnace … except what you scraped out of the bottom of a coal furnace didn't moan and shriek and beg for someone to give them morphine or kill them, did they? Ifyou can take this, he thought afterward, remembering the severed limbs lying amid the remains of aluminum flaps and seat-cushions and a ragged chunk of tail with the numbers 17 and a big red letter T and part of a W on it, remembering the eyeball he had seen resting on top of a charred Samsonite suitcase, remembering a child's teddybear with staring shoe-button eyes lying beside a small red sneaker with a child's foot still in it, if you can take this, baby, you can take anything. And he had been taking it just fine. He went right on taking it just fine all the way home. He went on taking it just fine through a late supper that consisted of a Swanson's turkey TV dinner. He went to sleep with no problem at all, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was taking it just fine. Then, in some dead dark hour of the morning he had awakened from a hellish nightmare in which the thing resting on top of the charred Samsonite suitcase had not been a teddybear but his mother's head, and her eyes had opened, and they had been charred; they were the staring expressionless shoebutton eyes of the teddy-bear, and her mouth had opened, revealing the broken fangs which had been her dentures up until the T.W.A. Tri-Star was struck by lightning on its final approach, and she had whispered You couldn't save me, George, we scrimped for you, we saved for you, we went without for you, your dad fixed up the scrape you got into with that girl and you STILL COULDN'T SAVE ME GOD DAMN YOU, and he had awakened screaming, and he was vaguely aware of someone pounding on the wall, but by then he was already pelting into the bathroom, and he barely made it to the kneeling penitential position before the porcelain altar before dinner came up the express elevator. It came special delivery, hot and steaming and still smelling like processed turkey. He knelt there and looked into the bowl, at the chunks of half-digested turkey and the carrots which had lost none of their original flourescent brightness, and this word flashed across his mind in large red letters:
ENOUGH
Correct.
It was:
ENOUGH.
He was going to get out of the sawbones business. He was going to get out because:
ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH.
He was going to get out because Popeye's motto was That's all I can stands and I can't stand nummore, and Popeye was as right as rain.
He had flushed the toilet and gone back to bed and fell asleep almost instantly and awoke to discover he still wanted to be a doctor, and that was a goddam good thing to know for sure, maybe worth the whole program, whether you called it Emergency Ride or Bucket of Blood or Name That Tune.
He still wanted to be a doctor.
He knew a lady who did needlework. He paid her ten dollars he couldn't afford to make him a small, old-fashioned-looking sampler. It said:
IF YOU CAN TAKE THIS, YOU CAN TAKE ANYTHING.
Yes. Correct.
The messy business in the subway happened four weeks later.
2
"That lady was some fuckin weird, you know it?" Julio said.
George breathed an interior sigh of relief. If Julio hadn't opened the subject, George supposed he wouldn't have had the sack. He was an intern, and someday he was going to be a full-fledged doc, he really believed that now, but Julio was a vet, and you didn't want to say something stupid in front of a vet. He would only laugh and say Hell, I seen that shit a thousand times, kid. Get y'selfa towel and wipe off whatever it is behind your ears, cause it's wet and drippin down the sides of your face.
But apparently Julio hadn't seen it a thousand times, and that was good, because George wanted to talk about it.
"She was weird, all right. It was like she was two people.''
He was amazed to see that now Julio was the one who looked relieved, and he was struck with sudden shame. Julio Estavez, who was going to do no more than pilot a limo with a couple of pulsing red lights on top for the rest of his life, had just shown more courage than he had been able to show.
"You got it, doc. Hunnert per cent." He pulled out a pack of Chesterfields and stuck one in the corner of his mouth.
"Those things are gonna kill you, my man," George said.
Julio nodded and offered the pack.
They smoked in silence for awhile. The paras were maybe chasing tail like Julio had said … or maybe they'd just had enough. George had been scared, all right, no joke about that. But he also knew he had been the one who saved the woman, not the paras, and he knew Julio knew it too. Maybe that was really why Julio had waited. The old black woman had helped, and the white kid who had dialed the cops while everyone else (except the old black woman) had just stood around watching like it was some goddam movie or TV show or something, part of a Peter Gunn episode, maybe, but in the end it had all come down to George Shavers, one scared cat doing his duty the best way he could.
The woman had been waiting for the train Duke Ellington held in such high regard―that fabled A-train. Just been a pretty young black woman in jeans and a khaki shirt waiting for the fabled A-Train so she could go uptown someplace.
Someone had pushed her.
George Shavers didn't have the slightest idea if the police had caught the slug who had done it—that wasn't his business. His business was the woman who had tumbled screaming into the tube of the tunnel in front of that fabled A-train. It had been a miracle that she had missed the third rail; the fabled third rail that would have done to her what the State of New York did to the bad guys up at Sing-Sing who got a free ride on that fabled A-train the cons called Old Sparky.
Oboy, the miracles of electricity.
She tried to crawl out of the way but there hadn't been quite enough time and that fabled A-train had come into the station screeching and squalling and puking up sparks because the motorman had seen her but it was too late, too late for him and too late for her. The steel wheels of that fabled A-train had cut the living legs off her from just above the knees down. And while everyone else (except for the white kid who had dialed the cops) had only stood there pulling their puds (or pushing their pudenda, George supposed), the elderly black woman had jumped down, dislocating one hip in the process (she would later be given a Medal of Bravery by the Mayor), and had used the doorag on her head to cinch a tourniquet around one of the young woman's squirting thighs. The young white guy was screaming for an ambulance on one side of the station and the old black chick was screaming for someone to give her a help, to give her a tie-off for God's sake, anything, anything at all, and finally some elderly white business type had reluctantly surrendered his belt, and the elderly black chick looked up at him and spoke the words which became the headline of the New York Daily News the next day, the words which made her an authentic American apple-pie heroine: "Thank you, bro." Then she had noosed the belt around the young woman's left leg halfway between the young woman's crotch and where her left knee had been until that fabled A-train had come along.
George had heard someone say to someone else that the young black woman's last words before passing out had been "WHO WAS THAT MAHFAH? I GONE HUNT HIM DOWN AND KILL HIS ASS!"
There was no way to punch holes far enough up for the elderly black woman to notch the belt, so she simply held on like grim old death until Julio, George, and the paras arrived.
George remembered the yellow line, how his mother had told him he must never, never, never go past the yellow line while he was waiting for a train (fabled or otherwise), the stench of oil and electricity when he hopped down onto the cinders, remembered how hot it had been. The heat seemed to be baking off him, off the elderly black woman, off the young black woman, off the train, the tunnel, the unseen sky above and hell itself beneath. He remembered thinking incoherently If they put a blood-pressure cuff on me now I'd go off the dial and then he went cool and yelled for his bag, and when one of the paras tried to jump down with it he told the para to fuck off, and the para had looked startled, as if he was really seeing George Shavers for the first time, and he had fucked off.
George tied off as many veins and arteries as he could tie off, and when her heart started to be-bop he had shot her full of Digitalin. Whole blood arrived. Cops brought it. Want to bring her up, doc? one of them had asked and George had told him not yet, and he got out the needle and stuck the juice to her like she was a junkie in dire need of a fix.
Then he let them take her up.
Then they had taken her back.
On the way she had awakened.
Then the weirdness started.
3
George gave her a shot of Demerol when the paras loaded her into the ambulance―she had begun to stir and cry out weakly. He gave her a boost hefty enough for him to be confident she would remain quiet until they got to Sisters of Mercy. He was ninety per cent sure she would still be with them when they got there, and that was one for the good guys.
Her eyes began to flutter while they were still six blocks from the hospital, however. She uttered a thick moan.
"We can shoot her up again, doc," one of the paras said.
George was hardly aware this was the first time a paramedic had deigned to call him anything other than George or, worse, Georgie. "Are you nuts? I'd just as soon not confuse D.O.A. and O.D. if it's all the same to you."
The paramedic drew back.
George looked back at the young black woman and saw the eyes returning his gaze were awake and aware.
"What has happened to me?" she asked.
George remembered the man who had told another man about what the woman had supposedly said (how she was going to hunt the motherfucker down and kill his ass, etc., etc.). That man had been white. George decided now it had been pure invention, inspired either by that odd human urge to make naturally dramatic situations even more dramatic, or just race prejudice. This was a cultured, intelligent woman.
"You've had an accident," he said. "You were―"
Her eyes slipped shut and he thought she was going to sleep again. Good. Let someone else tell her she had lost her legs. Someone who made more than $7,600 a year. He had shifted a little to the left, wanting to check her b.p. again, when she opened her eyes once more. When she did, George Shavers was looking at a different woman.
"Fuckah cut off mah laigs. I felt 'em go. Dis d'amblance?"
"Y-Y-Yes," George said. Suddenly he needed something to drink. Not necessarily alcohol. Just something wet. His voice was dry. This was like watching Spencer Tracy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, only for real.
"Dey get dat honkey mahfah?"
"No," George said, thinking The guy got it right, goddam, the guy did actually get it right.
He was vaguely aware that the paramedics, who had been hovering (perhaps hoping he would do something wrong) were now backing off.
"Good. Honky fuzz jus be lettin him off anyway. I be gittin him. I be cuttin his cock off. Sumbitch! I tell you what I goan do t'dat sumbitch! I tell you one thing, you sumbitch honky! I goan tell you … tell …"
Her eyes fluttered again and George had thought Yes, go to sleep, please go to sleep, I don't get paid for this, I don't understand this, they told us about shock but nobody mentioned schizophrenia as one of the—
The eyes opened. The first woman was there.
"What sort of accident was it?" she asked. "I remember coming out of the I—"
"Eye?" he said stupidly.
She smiled a little. It was a painful smile. "The Hungry I. It's a coffee house."
"Oh. Yeah. Right."
The other one, hurt or not, had made him feel dirty and a little ill. This one made him feel like a knight in an Arthurian tale, a knight who has successfully rescued the Lady Fair from the jaws of the dragon.
"I remember walking down the stairs to the platform, and after that―"
''Someone pushed you. "It sounded stupid, but what was wrong with that? It was stupid.
"Pushed me in front of the train?"
"Yes."
"Have I lost my legs?"
George tried to swallow and couldn't. There seemed to be nothing in his throat to grease the machinery.
"Not all of them," he said inanely, and her eyes closed.
Let it be a faint, he thought then, please let it be a f―
They opened, blazing. One hand came up and slashed five slits through the air within an inch of his face—any closer and he would have been in the E.R. getting his cheek stitched up instead of smoking Chesties with Julio Estavez.
"YOU AIN'T NUTHIN BUT A BUNCH A HONKY SONSA BITCHES!" she screamed. Her face was monstrous, her eyes full of hell's own light. It wasn't even the face of a human being. "GOAN KILL EVERY MAHFAHIN HONKY I SEE! GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN CUT OFF THEIR BALLS AND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES! GOAN―"
It was crazy. She talked like a cartoon black woman, Butterfly McQueen gone Loony Tunes. She―or it―also seemed superhuman. This screaming, writhing thing could not have just undergone impromptu surgery by subway train half an hour ago. She bit. She clawed out at him again and again. Snot spat from her nose. Spit flew from her lips. Filth poured from her mouth.
"Shoot her up, doc!" one of the paras yelled. His face was pale. "Fa crissakes shoot her up!" The para reached toward the supply case. George shoved his hand aside.
"Fuck off, chickenshit."
George looked back at his patient and saw the calm, cultured eyes of the other one looking at him.
"Will I live?" she asked in a conversational tea-room voice. He thought, She is unaware of her lapses. Totally unaware. And, after a moment: So is the other one, for that matter.
"I―" He gulped, rubbed at his galloping heart through his tunic, and then ordered himself to get control of this. He had saved her life. Her mental problems were not his concern.
"Are you all right?" she asked him, and the genuine concern in her voice made him smile a little―her asking him.
"Yes, ma'am."
"To which question are you responding?"
For a moment he didn't understand, then did. "Both," he said, and took her hand. She squeezed it, and he looked into her shining lucent eyes and thought A man could fall in love, and that was when her hand turned into a claw and she was telling him he was a honky mahfah, and she wadn't just goan take his balls, she was goan chew on those mahfahs.
He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman―the first woman.
"Please," she said. "I don't want to die. Pl―" Then she went out for good, and that was good. For all of them.
4
"So whatchoo t'ink?" Julio asked.
"About who's gonna be in the Series?" George squashed the butt under the heel of his loafer. "White Sox. I got 'em in the pool."
"Whatchoo t'ink about that lady?"
"I think she might be schizophrenic," George said slowly.
"Yeah, I know that. I mean, whass gonna happen to her?"
"I don't know."
"She needs help, man. Who gonna give it?"
"Well, I already gave her one," George said, but his face felt hot, as if he were blushing.
Julio looked at him. "If you already gave her all the help you can give her, you shoulda let her die, doc."
George looked at Julio for a moment, but found he couldn't stand what he saw in Julio's eyes―not accusation but sadness.
So he walked away.
He had places to go.
5
The Time of the Drawing:
In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in control, but Detta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do best was steal. It didn't matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than it mattered that she often threw it away later.
The taking was what mattered.
When the gunslinger entered her head in Macy's, Detta screamed in a combination of fury and horror and terror, her hands freezing on the junk jewelry she was scooping into her purse.
She screamed because when Roland came into her mind, when he came forward, she for a moment sensed the other, as if a door had been swung open inside of her head.
And she screamed because the invading raping presence was a honky.
She could not see but nonetheless sensed his whiteness.
People looked around. A floorwalker saw the screaming woman in the wheelchair with her purse open, saw one hand frozen in the act of stuffing costume jewelry into a purse that looked (even from a distance of thirty feet) worth three times the stuff she was stealing.
The floorwalker yelled, "Hey Jimmy!" and Jimmy Halvorsen, one of Macy's house detectives, looked around and saw what was happening. He started toward the black woman in the wheelchair on a dead run. He couldn't help running―he had been a city cop for eighteen years and it was built into his system―but he was already thinking it was gonna be a shit bust. Little kids, cripples, nuns; they were always a shit bust. Busting them was like kicking a drunk. They cried a little in front of the judge and then took a walk. It was hard to convince judges that cripples could also be slime.
But he ran just the same.
6
Roland was momentarily horrified by the snakepit of hate and revulsion in which he found himself … and then he heard the woman screaming, saw the big man with the potato-sack belly running toward her/him, saw people looking, and took control.
Suddenly he was the woman with the dusky hands. He sensed some strange duality inside her, but couldn't think about it now.
He turned the chair and began to shove it forward. The aisle rolled past him/her. People dived away to either side. The purse was lost, spilling Detta's credentials and stolen treasure in a wide trail along the floor. The man with the heavy gut skidded on bogus gold chains and lipstick tubes and then fell on his ass.
7
Shit! Halvorsen thought furiously, and for a moment one hand clawed under his sport-coat where there was a .38 in a clamshell holster. Then sanity reasserted itself. This was no drug bust or armed robbery; this was a crippled black lady in a wheelchair. She was rolling it like it was some punk's drag-racer, but a crippled black lady was all she was just the same. What was he going to do, shoot her? That would be great, wouldn't it? And where was she going to go? There was nothing at the end of the aisle but two dressing rooms.
He picked himself up, massaging his aching ass, and began after her again, limping a little now.
The wheelchair flashed into one of the dressing rooms. The door slammed, just clearing the push-handles on the back.
Got you now, bitch, Jimmy thought. And I'm going to give you one hell of a scare. I don't care if you got five orphan children and only a year to live. I'm not gonna hurt you, but oh babe I'm gonna shake your dice.
He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left shoulder, and it was empty.
No black woman.
No wheelchair.
No nothing.
He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.
"Other one!" the floorwalker yelled. "Other one!"
Before Jimmy could move, the floorwalker had busted open the door of the other dressing room. A woman in a linen skirt and a Playtex Living Bra screamed piercingly and crossed her arms over her chest. She was very white and very definitely not crippled.
"Pardon me," the floorwalker said, feeling hot crimson flood his face.
"Get out of here, you pervert!" the woman in the linen skirt and the bra cried.
"Yes, ma'am," the floorwalker said, and closed the door.
At Macy's, the customer was always right.
He looked at Halvorsen.
Halvorsen looked back.
"What is this shit?" Halvorsen asked. "Did she go in there or not?"
"Yeah, she did."
"So where is she?"
The floorwalker could only shake his head. "Let's go back and pick up the mess."
"You pick up the mess," Jimmy Halvorsen said. "I feel like I just broke my ass in nine pieces." He paused. "To tell you the truth, me fine bucko, I also feel extremely confused."
8
The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done what he had promised, it would be gone.
But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.
CHAPTER 3
ODETTA ON THE OTHER SIDE
1
Not long after, Roland would think: Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing business—monkey-business, you may call it if you like—by a stranger inside her head, shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding herself suddenly in an entirely different world …I think any other woman, under those circumstances, would have most certainly have asked "Where am I?" before all else.
Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, "What exactly are you planning to do with that knife, young man?"
2
Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.
"Yes," Roland said. "What are you planning to do with it?"
"I don't know," Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. "Cut bait, I guess. Sure doesn't look like I came here to fish, does it?"
He threw the knife toward the Lady's chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the sand to its hilt.
Then the Lady turned her head and began, "I wonder if you could please explain where you've taken m―"
She stopped. She had said Iwonder if you before her head had gotten around far enough to see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life—if she had moved, for instance, someone must have moved her. But there was no one behind her.
No one at all.
She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and alarmed, and now she asked. "Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o'clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?"
"Who am I?" she asked, the gunslinger thought. The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question―"Who am I?"―even now I don't think she knows she asked it.
Or when.
Because she had asked before.
Even before she had asked who they were, she had asked who she was.
3
Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to Roland's face.
"How come she doesn't know?"
"I can't say. Shock, I suppose."
"Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy's? You telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listening to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliff's left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?"
Roland didn't answer.
More dazed than ever, the Lady said, "Who is Christa McAuliff? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?"
Now it was Eddie's turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were they?
The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can't you see she's in shock?
Iknow what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn't wipe out my memory banks.
Speaking of shock, he'd gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had been kneeling over Roland's inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the throat … but the truth was Eddie couldn't have used the knife anyway―not then, anyway. He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy's rushed forward―he was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much more mundane: a white door. The words ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME, PLEASE were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy's, all right. Macy's for sure.
One black hand flew out and slammed the door open while the male voice (a cop voice if Eddie had ever heard one, and he had heard many in his time) behind yelled for her to quit it, that was no way out, she was only making things a helluva lot worse for herself, and Eddie caught a bare glimpse of the black woman in the wheelchair in the mirror to the left, and he remembered thinking Jesus, he's got her, all right, but she sure don't look happy about it.
Then the view pivoted and Eddie was looking at himself. The view rushed toward the viewer and he wanted to put up the hand holding the knife to shield his eyes because all at once the sensation of looking through two sets of eyes was too much, too crazy, it was going to drive him crazy if he didn't shut it out, but it all happened too fast for him to have time.
The wheelchair came through the door. It was a tight fit; Eddie heard its hubs squeal on the sides. At the same moment he heard another sound: a thick tearing sound that made him think of some word
(placental)
that he couldn't quite think of because he didn't know he knew it. Then the woman was rolling toward him on the hard-packed sand, and she no longer looked mad as hell―hardly looked like the woman Eddie had glimpsed in the mirror at all, for that matter, but he supposed that wasn't surprising; when you all at once went from a changing-room at Macy's to the seashore of a godforsaken world where some of the lobsters were the size of small Collie dogs, it left you feeling a little winded. That was a subject on which Eddie Dean felt he could personally give testimony.
She rolled about four feet before stopping, and only went that far because of the slope and the gritty pack of the sand. Her hands were no longer pumping the wheels, as they must have been doing (when you wake up with sore shoulders tomorrow you can blame them on Sir Roland, lady, Eddie thought sourly). Instead they went to the arms of the chair and gripped them as she regarded the two men.
Behind her, the doorway had already disappeared. Disappeared? That was not quite right. It seemed to fold in on itself, like a piece of film run backward. This began to happen just as the store dick came slamming through the other, more mundane door―the one between the store and the dressing room. He was coming hard, expecting the shoplifter would have locked the door, and Eddie thought he was going to take one hell of a splat against the far wall, but Eddie was never going to see it happen or not happen. Before the shrinking space where the door between that world and this disappeared entirely, Eddie saw everything on that side freeze solid.
The movie had become a still photograph.
All that remained now were the dual tracks of the wheel-chair, starting in sandy nowhere and running four feet to where it and its occupant now sat.
"Won't somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?" the woman in the wheelchair asked―almost pleaded.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing, Dorothy," Eddie said. "You ain't in Kansas anymore."
The woman's eyes brimmed with tears. Eddie could see her trying to hold them in but it was no good. She began to sob.
Furious (and disgusted with himself as well), Eddie turned on the gunslinger, who had staggered to his feet. Roland moved, but not toward the weeping Lady. Instead he went to pick up his knife.
"Tell her!" Eddie shouted. "You brought her, so go on and tell her, man!" And after a moment he added in a lower tone, "And then tell me how come she doesn't remember herself."
4
Roland did not respond. Not at once. He bent, pinched the hilt of the knife between the two remaining fingers of his right hand, transferred it carefully to his left, and slipped it into the scabbard at the side of one gunbelt. He was still trying to grapple with what he had sensed in the Lady's mind. Unlike Eddie, she had fought him, fought him like a cat, from the moment he came forward until they rolled through the door. The fight had begun the moment she sensed him. There had been no lapse, because there had been no surprise. He had experienced it but didn't in the least understand it. No surprise at the invading stranger in her mind, only the instant rage, terror, and the commencement of a battle to shake him free. She hadn't come close to winning that battle―could not, he suspected―but that hadn't kept her from trying like hell. He had felt a woman insane with fear and anger and hate.
He had sensed only darkness in her―this was a mind entombed in a cave-in.
Except―
Except that in the moment they burst through the doorway and separated, he had wished―wished desperately― that he could tarry a moment longer. One moment would have told so much. Because the woman before them now wasn't the woman in whose mind he had been. Being in Eddie's mind had been like being in a room with jittery, sweating walls. Being in the Lady's had been like lying naked in the dark while venomous snakes crawled all over you.
Until the end.
She had changed at the end.
And there had been something else, something he believed was vitally important, but he either could not understand it or remember it. Something like
(a glance)
the doorway itself, only in her mind. Something about
(you broke the forspecial it was you)
some sudden burst of understanding. As at studies, when you finally saw―
"Oh, fuck you," Eddie said disgustedly. "You're nothing but a goddam machine."
He strode past Roland, went to the woman, knelt beside her, and when she put her arms around him, panic-tight, like the arms of a drowning swimmer, he did not draw away but put his own arms around her and hugged her back.
"It's okay," he said. "I mean, it's not great, but it's okay."
"Where are we?" she wept. "Iwas sitting home watching TV so I could hear if my friends got out ofOxfordalive and now I'm here and I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE HERE IS!"
"Well, neither do I," Eddie said, holding her tighter, beginning to rock her a little, "but I guess we're in it together. I'm from where you're from, little old New York City , and I've been through the same thing―well, a little different, but same principle―and you're gonna be just fine." As an afterthought he added: "As long as you like lobster."
She hugged him and wept and Eddie held her and rocked her and Roland thought, Eddie will be all right now. His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.
But he felt a pang: a deep reproachful hurt in his heart. He was capable of shooting―with his left hand, anyway―of killing, of going on and on, slamming with brutal relentlessness through miles and years, even dimensions, it seemed, in search of the Tower. He was capable of survival, sometimes even of protection―he had saved the boy Jake from a slow death at the way station, and from sexual consumption by the Oracle at the foot of the mountains―but in the end, he had let Jake die. Nor had this been by accident; he had committed a conscious act of damnation. He watched the two of them, watched Eddie hug her; assure her it was going to be all right. He could not have done that, and now the rue in his heart was joined by stealthy fear.
Ifyou have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell's own price in the end, but what if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, actually storm theDarkTowerand win it? If there is naught but darkness in your heart, what could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one's object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one's object as a monster …
To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?
He thought of Allie, and of the girl who had once waited for him at the window, thought of the tears he had shed over Cuthbert's lifeless corpse. Oh, then he had loved. Yes. Then.
I do want to love! he cried, but although Eddie was also crying a little now with the woman in the wheelchair, the gunslinger's eyes remained as dry as the desert he had crossed to reach this sunless sea.
5
He would answer Eddie's question later. He would do that because he thought Eddie would do well to be on guard. The reason she didn't remember was simple. She wasn't one woman but two.
And one of them was dangerous.
6
Eddie told her what he could, glossing over the shoot-out but being truthful about everything else.
When he was done, she remained perfectly silent for some time, her hands clasped together on her lap.
Little streamlets coursed down from the shallowing mountains, petering out some miles to the east. It was from these that Roland and Eddie had drawn their water as they hiked north. At first Eddie had gotten it because Roland was too weak. Later they had taken turns, always having to go a little further and search a little longer before finding a stream. They grew steadily more listless as the mountains slumped, but the water hadn't made them sick.
So far.
Roland had gone yesterday, and although that made today Eddie's turn, the gunslinger had gone again, shouldering the hide water-skins and walking off without a word. Eddie found this queerly discreet. He didn't want to be touched by the gesture―by anything about Roland, for that matter―and found he was, a little, just the same.
She listened attentively to Eddie, not speaking at all, her eyes fixed on his. At one moment Eddie would guess she was five years older than he, at another he would guess fifteen. There was one thing he didn't have to guess about: he was falling in love with her.
When he had finished, she sat for a moment without saying anything, now not looking at him but beyond him, looking at the waves which would, at nightfall, bring the lobsters and with their alien, lawyerly questions. He had been particularly careful to describe them. Better for her to be a little scared now than a lot scared when they came out to play. He supposed she wouldn't want to eat them, not after hearing what they had done to Roland's hand and foot, not after she got a good close look at them. But eventually hunger would win out over did-a-chick and dum-a-chum.
Her eyes were far and distant.
"Odetta?" he asked after perhaps five minutes had gone by. She had told him her name. Odetta Holmes. He thought it was a gorgeous name.
She looked back at him, startled out of her revery. She smiled a little. She said one word.
"No."
He only looked at her, able to think of no suitable reply. He thought he had never understood until that moment how illimitable a simple negative could be.
"I don't understand," he said finally. "What are you no-ing?"
"All this." Odetta swept an arm (she had, he'd noticed, very strong arms―smooth but very strong), indicating the sea, the sky, the beach, the scruffy foothills where the gunslinger was now presumably searching for water (or maybe getting eaten alive by some new and interesting monster, something Eddie didn't really care to think about). Indicating, in short, this entire world.
"I understand how you feel. I had a pretty good case of the unrealities myself at first."
But had he? Looking back, it seemed he had simply accepted, perhaps because he was sick, shaking himself apart in his need for junk.
"You get over it."
"No," she said again. "I believe one of two things has happened, and no matter which one it is, I am still in Oxford , Mississippi . None of this is real."
She went on. If her voice had been louder (or perhaps if he had not been falling in love) it would almost have been a lecture. As it was, it sounded more like lyric than lecture.
Except, he had to keep reminding himself, bullshit's what it really is, and you have to convince her of that. For her sake.
"I may have sustained a head injury," she said. "They are notorious swingers of axe-handles and billy-clubs in Oxford Town ."
OxfordTown.
That produced a faint chord of recognition far back in Eddie's mind. She said the words in a kind of rhythm that he for some reason associated with Henry … Henry and wet diapers. Why? What? Didn't matter now.
"You're trying to tell me you think this is all some sort of dream you're having while you're unconscious?"
"Or in a coma," she said. "And you needn't look at me as though you thought it was preposterous, because it isn't. Look here."
She parted her hair carefully on the left, and Eddie could see she wore it to one side not just because she liked the style. The old wound beneath the fall of her hair was scarred and ugly, not brown but a grayish-white.
"I guess you've had a lot of hard luck in your time," he said.
She shrugged impatiently. "A lot of hard luck and a lot of soft living," she said. "Maybe it all balances out. I only showed you because I was in a coma for three weeks when I was five. I dreamed a lot then. I can't remember what the dreams were, but I remember my mamma said they knew I wasn't going to die just as long as I kept talking and it seemed like I kept talking all the time, although she said they couldn't make out one word in a dozen. I do remember that the dreams were very vivid."
She paused, looking around.
"As vivid as this place seems to be. And you, Eddie."
When she said his name his arms prickled. Oh, he had it, all right. Had it bad.
"And him." She shivered. "He seems the most vivid of all."
"We ought to. I mean, we are real, no matter what you think."
She gave him a kind smile. It was utterly without belief.
"How did that happen?" he asked. "That thing on your head?"
"It doesn't matter. I'm just making the point that what has happened once might very well happen again."
"No, but I'm curious."
"I was struck by a brick. It was our first trip north. We came to the town of Elizabeth , New Jersey . We came in the Jim Crow car."
"What's that?"
She looked at him unbelievingly, almost scornfully. "Where have you been living, Eddie? In a bomb-shelter?"
"I'm from a different time," he said. "Could I ask how old you are, Odetta?"
"Old enough to vote and not old enough for Social Security."
"Well, I guess that puts me in my place."
"But gently, I hope," she said, and smiled that radiant smile which made his arms prickle.
"I'm twenty-three," he said, "but I was born in 1964―the year you were living in when Roland took you."
"That's rubbish."
"No. I was living in 1987 when he took me."
"Well," she said after a moment. "That certainly adds a great deal to your argument for this as reality, Eddie."
"The Jim Crow car … was it where the black people had to stay?"
"The Negros," she said. "Calling a Negro a black is a trifle rude, don't you think?"
"You'll all be calling yourselves that by 1980 or so," Eddie said. "When I was a kid, calling a black kid a Negro was apt to get you in a fight. It was almost like calling him a nigger."
She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then shook her head again.
"Tell me about the brick, then."
"My mother's youngest sister was going to be married," Odetta said. "Her name was Sophia, but my mother always called her Sister Blue because it was the color she always fancied. 'Or at least she fancied to fancy it,' was how my mother put it. So I always called her Aunt Blue, even before I met her. It was the most lovely wedding. There was a reception afterward. I remember all the presents."
She laughed.
"Presents always look so wonderful to a child, don't they, Eddie?"
He smiled. "Yeah, you got that right. You never forget presents. Not what you got, not what somebody else got, either."
"My father had begun to make money by then, but all I knew is that we were getting ahead. That's what my mother always called it and once, when I told her a little girl I played with had asked if my daddy was rich, my mother told me that was what I was supposed to say if any of my other chums ever asked me that question. That we were getting ahead.
"So they were able to give Aunt Blue a lovely china set, and I remember.…"
Her voice faltered. One hand rose to her temple and rubbed absently, as if a headache were beginning there.
"Remember what, Odetta?"
"I remember my mother gave her a forspecial."
"What?"
"I'm sorry. I've got a headache. It's got my tongue tangled. I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you all this, anyway."
"Do you mind?"
"No. I don't mind. I meant to say mother gave her a special plate. It was white, with delicate blue tracework woven all around the rim." Odetta smiled a little. Eddie didn't think it was an entirely comfortable smile. Something about this memory disturbed her, and the way its immediacy seemed to have taken precedence over the extremely strange situation she had found herself in, a situation which should be claiming all or most of her attention, disturbed him.
"I can see that plate as clearly as I can see you now, Eddie. My mother gave it to Aunt Blue and she cried and cried over it. I think she'd seen a plate like that once when she and my mother were children, only of course their parents could never have afforded such a thing. There was none of them who got any thing forspecial as kids. After the reception Aunt Blue and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. They went on the train." She looked at Eddie.
"In the Jim Crow car," he said.
"That's right! In the Crow car! In those days that's what Negros rode in and where they ate. That's what we're trying to change in Oxford Town ."
She looked at him, almost surely expecting him to insist she was here, but he was caught in the webwork of his own memory again: wet diapers and those words. Oxford Town . Only suddenly other words came, just a single line, but he could remember Henry singing it over and over until his mother asked if he couldn't please stop so she could hear Walter Cronkite.
Somebody better investigate soon. Those were the words. Sung over and over by Henry in a nasal monotone. He tried for more but couldn't get it, and was that any real surprise? He could have been no more than three at the time. Somebody better investigate soon. The words gave him a chill.
"Eddie, are you all right?"
"Yes. Why?"
"You shivered."
He smiled. "Donald Duck must have walked over my grave."
She laughed. "Anyway, at least I didn't spoil the wedding. It happened when we were walking back to the railway station. We stayed the night with a friend of Aunt Blue's, and in the morning my father called a taxi. The taxi came almost right away, but when the driver saw we were colored, he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. Aunt Blue's friend had already gone ahead to the depot with our luggage―there was a lot of it, because we were going to spend a week in New York . I remember my father saying he couldn't wait to see my face light up when the clock in Central Park struck the hour and all the animals danced.
"My father said we might as well walk to the station. My mother agreed just as fast as lickety-split, saying that was a fine idea, it wasn't but a mile and it would be nice to stretch our legs after three days on one train just behind us and half a day on another one just ahead of us. My father said yes, and it was gorgeous weather besides, but I think I knew even at five that he was mad and she was embarrassed and both of them were afraid to call another taxi-cab because the same thing might happen again.
"So we went walking down the street. I was on the inside because my mother was afraid of me getting too close to the traffic. I remember wondering if my daddy meant my face would actually start to glow or something when I saw that clock in Central Park, and if that might not hurt, and that was when the brick came down on my head. Everything went dark for a while. Then the dreams started. Vivid dreams."
She smiled.
"Like this dream, Eddie."
"Did the brick fall, or did someone bomb you?"
"They never found anyone. The police (my mother told me this long after, when I was sixteen or so) found the place where they thought the brick had been, but there were other bricks missing and more were loose. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room in an apartment building that had been condemned. But of course there were lots of people staying there just the same. Especially at night."
"Sure," Eddie said.
"No one saw anyone leaving the building, so it went down as an accident. My mother said she thought it had been, but I think she was lying. She didn't even bother trying to tell me what my father thought. They were both still smarting over how the cab-driver had taken one look at us and driven off. It was that more than anything else that made them believe someone had been up there, just looking out, and saw us coming, and decided to drop a brick on the niggers.
"Will your lobster-creatures come out soon?"
"No," Eddie said. "Not until dusk. So one of your ideas is that all of this is a coma-dream like the ones you had when you got bopped by the brick. Only this time you think it was a billy-club or something."
"Yes."
"What's the other one?"
Odetta's face and voice were calm enough, but her head was filled with an ugly skein of images which all added up to Oxford Town , Oxford Town . How did the song go? Two men killed by the light of the moon,/Somebody better investigate soon. Not quite right, but it was close. Close.
"I may have gone insane," she said.
7
The first words which came into Eddie's mind were If you think you've gone insane, Odetta, you're nuts.
Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprofitable line of argument to take.
Instead he remained silent for a time, sitting by her wheelchair, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his wrists.
"Were you really a heroin addict?"
"Am," he said. "It's like being an alcoholic, or 'basing. It's not a thing you ever get over. I used to hear that and go 'Yeah, yeah, right, right,' in my head, you know, but now I understand. I still want it, and I guess part of me will always want it, but the physical part has passed."
"What's 'basing?" she asked.
"Something that hasn't been invented yet in your when. It's something you do with cocaine, only it's like turning TNT into an A-bomb."
"You did it?"
"Christ, no. Heroin was my thing. I told you."
"You don't seem like an addict," she said.
Eddie actually was fairly spiffy … if, that was, one ignored the gamy smell arising from his body and clothes (he could rinse himself and did, could rinse his clothes and did, but lacking soap, he could not really wash either). His hair had been short when Roland stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big joke that had turned out to be), and was a still a respectable length. He shaved every morning, using the keen edge of Roland's knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing confidence. He'd been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for 'Nam, and it hadn't been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into "mowing the stubble." When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few others―foot-powder after showering; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one you took care of with a needle.
"Too clean-cut?" he asked her, grinning.
"Too white," she said shortly, and then was quiet for a moment, looking sternly out at the sea. Eddie was quiet, too. If there was a comeback to something like that, he didn't know what it was.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That was very unkind, very unfair, and very unlike me."
"It's all right."
"It's not. It's like a white person saying something like 'Jeez, I never would have guessed you were a nigger' to someone with a very light skin."
"You like to think of yourself as more fair-minded," Eddie said.
"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common, I should think, but yes―I like to think of myself as more fair-minded. So please accept my apology, Eddie."
"On one condition."
"What's that?" she was smiling a little again. That was good. He liked it when he was able to make her smile.
"Give this a fair chance. That's the condition."
"Give what a fair chance?" She sounded slightly amused. Eddie might have bristled at that tone in someone else's voice, might have felt he was getting boned, but with her it was different. With her it was all right. He supposed with her just about anything would have been.
"That there's a third alternative. That this really is happening. I mean …" Eddie cleared his throat. "I'm not very good at this philosophical shit, or, you know, metamorphosis or whatever the hell you call it―"
"Do you mean metaphysics?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I think so. But I know you can't go around disbelieving what your senses tell you. Why, if your idea about this all being a dream is right―"
"I didn't say a dream―"
"Whatever you said, that's what it comes down to, isn't it? A false reality?"
If there had been something faintly condescending in her voice a moment ago, it was gone now. "Philosophy and metaphysics may not be your bag, Eddie, but you must have been a hell of a debater in school."
"I was never in debate. That was for gays and hags and wimps. Like chess club. What do you mean, my bag? What's a bag?"
"Just something you like. What do you mean, gays? What are gays?"
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. "Homos. Fags. Never mind. We could swap slang all day. It's not getting us anyplace. What I'm trying to say is that if it's all a dream, it could be mine, not yours. You could be a figment of my imagination."
Her smile faltered. "You … nobody bopped you."
"Nobody bopped you, either."
Now her smile was entirely gone. "No one that I remember," she corrected with some sharpness.
"Me either!" he said. "You told me they're rough in Oxford . Well, those Customs guys weren't exactly cheery joy when they couldn't find the dope they were after. One of them could have head-bopped me with the butt of his gun. I could be lying in a Bellevue ward right now, dreaming you and Roland while they write their reports, explaining how, while they were interrogating me, I became violent and had to be subdued."
"It's not the same."
"Why? Because you're this intelligent socially active black lady with no legs and I'm just a hype from Co-Op City ?" He said it with a grin, meaning it as an amiable jape, but she flared at him.
"I wish you would stop calling me black!"
He sighed. "Okay, but it's gonna take getting used to."
"You should have been on the debate club anyway."
"Fuck," he said, and the turn of her eyes made him realize again that the difference between them was much wider than color; they were speaking to each other from separate islands. The water between was time. Never mind. The word had gotten her attention. "I don't want to debate you. I want to wake you up to the fact that you are awake, that's all."
"I might be able to at least operate provisionally according to the dictates of your third alternative as long as this … this situation … continued to go on, except for one thing: There's a fundamental difference between what happened to you and what happened to me. So fundamental, so large, that you haven't seen it."
"Then show it to me."
"There is no discontinuity in your consciousness. There is a very large one in mine."
"I don't understand."
"I mean you can account for all of your time," Odetta said. "Your story follows from point to point: the airplane, the incursion by that … that … by him―
She nodded toward the foothills with clear distaste.
"The stashing of the drugs, the officers who took you into custody, all the rest. It's a fantastic story, it has no missing links.
"As for myself, I arrived back from Oxford , was met by Andrew, my driver, and brought back to my building. I bathed and I wanted sleep―I was getting a very bad headache, and sleep is the only medicine that's any good for the really bad ones. But it was close on midnight , and I thought I would watch the news first. Some of us had been released, but a good many more were still in the jug when we left. I wanted to find out if their cases had been resolved.
"I dried off and put on my robe and went into the living room. I turned on the TV news. The newscaster started talking about a speech Krushchev had just made about the American advisors in Viet Nam . He said, 'We have a film report from―' and then he was gone and I was rolling down this beach. You say you saw me in some sort of magic doorway which is now gone, and that I was in Macy's, and that I was stealing. All of this is preposterous enough, but even if it was so, I could find something better to steal than costume jewelry. I don't wear jewelry."
"You better look at your hands again, Odetta," Eddie said quietly.
For a very long time she looked from the "diamond" on her left pinky, too large and vulgar to be anything but paste, to the large opal on the third finger of her right hand, which was too large and vulgar to be anything but real.
"None of this is happening," she repeated firmly.
"You sound like a broken record!" He was genuinely angry for the first time. "Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that 'none of this is happening' shit. You have to wise up, 'Detta."
"Don't call me that! I hate that!" she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.
"Sorry. Jesus! I didn't know."
"I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!"
"But your memories don't stop in Oxford ," he said softly.
"W-What?" Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.
"If you got whacked in Oxford , how come your memories don't stop there?"
"There isn't always a lot of logic to things like this." She was rubbing her temples again. "And now, if it's all the same to you, Eddie, I'd just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It's quite bad."
"I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy's, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don't do things like that, but you also told me you don't wear jewelry. You told me that even though you'd looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn't see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them."
"I don't want to talk about it!" she shouted. "My head hurts!"
"All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn't in Oxford ."
"Leave me alone," she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
"I wish I could help you," Eddie said, "but to do that, I guess I'd have to be real."
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
"Sit down." Eddie took the bags. "You look all in."
"I am. I'm getting sick again."
Eddie looked at the gunslinger's flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. "I hoped it wouldn't happen, but I'm not that surprised, man. You didn't bat for the cycle. Balazar didn't have enough Keflex."
"I don't understand you."
"If you don't take a penicillin drug long enough, you don't kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We'll need more, but at least there's a door to go to. In the meantime you'll just have to take it easy." But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta's missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn't see how.
"I have to tell you something about Odetta."
"That's her name?"
"Uh-huh."
"It's very lovely," the gunslinger said.
"Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn't so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn't think she's here."
"I know. And she doesn't like me much, does she?"
No, Eddie thought, but that doesn't keep her from think-ing you're one booger of a hallucination. He didn't say it, only nodded.
"The reasons are almost the same," the gunslinger said. "She's not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.''
Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror … that snarling face … the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn't been Odetta at all.
Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse―almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.
The rings had been there.
Same rings.
But that doesn't necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and delicate.
"No," the gunslinger continued. "She is not." His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.
"Her hands―"
"Listen," the gunslinger said, "and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it―mine because I'm getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her."
Eddie said nothing.
"She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here."
Now Eddie could say nothing.
"There was something else, something strange, but either I didn't understand it or I did and it's slipped away. It seemed important."
Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheel-chair, standing alone at the end of its short track from nowhere. Then he looked back at Eddie.
"I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard. Do you understand that?"
"Yes." Eddie's lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood―or had, at least, a moviegoer's understanding of the sort of thing the gunslinger was speaking of―but he didn't have the breath to explain, not yet. He felt as if Roland had kicked all his breath out of him.
"Good. Because the woman I entered on the other side of the door was as deadly as those lobster-things that come out at night."
1
Not long after, Roland would think: Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing business—monkey-business, you may call it if you like—by a stranger inside her head, shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding herself suddenly in an entirely different world …I think any other woman, under those circumstances, would have most certainly have asked "Where am I?" before all else.
Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, "What exactly are you planning to do with that knife, young man?"
2
Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.
"Yes," Roland said. "What are you planning to do with it?"
"I don't know," Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. "Cut bait, I guess. Sure doesn't look like I came here to fish, does it?"
He threw the knife toward the Lady's chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the sand to its hilt.
Then the Lady turned her head and began, "I wonder if you could please explain where you've taken m―"
She stopped. She had said Iwonder if you before her head had gotten around far enough to see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life—if she had moved, for instance, someone must have moved her. But there was no one behind her.
No one at all.
She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and alarmed, and now she asked. "Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o'clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?"
"Who am I?" she asked, the gunslinger thought. The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question―"Who am I?"―even now I don't think she knows she asked it.
Or when.
Because she had asked before.
Even before she had asked who they were, she had asked who she was.
3
Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to Roland's face.
"How come she doesn't know?"
"I can't say. Shock, I suppose."
"Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy's? You telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listening to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliff's left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?"
Roland didn't answer.
More dazed than ever, the Lady said, "Who is Christa McAuliff? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?"
Now it was Eddie's turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were they?
The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can't you see she's in shock?
Iknow what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn't wipe out my memory banks.
Speaking of shock, he'd gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had been kneeling over Roland's inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the throat … but the truth was Eddie couldn't have used the knife anyway―not then, anyway. He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy's rushed forward―he was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much more mundane: a white door. The words ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME, PLEASE were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy's, all right. Macy's for sure.
One black hand flew out and slammed the door open while the male voice (a cop voice if Eddie had ever heard one, and he had heard many in his time) behind yelled for her to quit it, that was no way out, she was only making things a helluva lot worse for herself, and Eddie caught a bare glimpse of the black woman in the wheelchair in the mirror to the left, and he remembered thinking Jesus, he's got her, all right, but she sure don't look happy about it.
Then the view pivoted and Eddie was looking at himself. The view rushed toward the viewer and he wanted to put up the hand holding the knife to shield his eyes because all at once the sensation of looking through two sets of eyes was too much, too crazy, it was going to drive him crazy if he didn't shut it out, but it all happened too fast for him to have time.
The wheelchair came through the door. It was a tight fit; Eddie heard its hubs squeal on the sides. At the same moment he heard another sound: a thick tearing sound that made him think of some word
(placental)
that he couldn't quite think of because he didn't know he knew it. Then the woman was rolling toward him on the hard-packed sand, and she no longer looked mad as hell―hardly looked like the woman Eddie had glimpsed in the mirror at all, for that matter, but he supposed that wasn't surprising; when you all at once went from a changing-room at Macy's to the seashore of a godforsaken world where some of the lobsters were the size of small Collie dogs, it left you feeling a little winded. That was a subject on which Eddie Dean felt he could personally give testimony.
She rolled about four feet before stopping, and only went that far because of the slope and the gritty pack of the sand. Her hands were no longer pumping the wheels, as they must have been doing (when you wake up with sore shoulders tomorrow you can blame them on Sir Roland, lady, Eddie thought sourly). Instead they went to the arms of the chair and gripped them as she regarded the two men.
Behind her, the doorway had already disappeared. Disappeared? That was not quite right. It seemed to fold in on itself, like a piece of film run backward. This began to happen just as the store dick came slamming through the other, more mundane door―the one between the store and the dressing room. He was coming hard, expecting the shoplifter would have locked the door, and Eddie thought he was going to take one hell of a splat against the far wall, but Eddie was never going to see it happen or not happen. Before the shrinking space where the door between that world and this disappeared entirely, Eddie saw everything on that side freeze solid.
The movie had become a still photograph.
All that remained now were the dual tracks of the wheel-chair, starting in sandy nowhere and running four feet to where it and its occupant now sat.
"Won't somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?" the woman in the wheelchair asked―almost pleaded.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing, Dorothy," Eddie said. "You ain't in Kansas anymore."
The woman's eyes brimmed with tears. Eddie could see her trying to hold them in but it was no good. She began to sob.
Furious (and disgusted with himself as well), Eddie turned on the gunslinger, who had staggered to his feet. Roland moved, but not toward the weeping Lady. Instead he went to pick up his knife.
"Tell her!" Eddie shouted. "You brought her, so go on and tell her, man!" And after a moment he added in a lower tone, "And then tell me how come she doesn't remember herself."
4
Roland did not respond. Not at once. He bent, pinched the hilt of the knife between the two remaining fingers of his right hand, transferred it carefully to his left, and slipped it into the scabbard at the side of one gunbelt. He was still trying to grapple with what he had sensed in the Lady's mind. Unlike Eddie, she had fought him, fought him like a cat, from the moment he came forward until they rolled through the door. The fight had begun the moment she sensed him. There had been no lapse, because there had been no surprise. He had experienced it but didn't in the least understand it. No surprise at the invading stranger in her mind, only the instant rage, terror, and the commencement of a battle to shake him free. She hadn't come close to winning that battle―could not, he suspected―but that hadn't kept her from trying like hell. He had felt a woman insane with fear and anger and hate.
He had sensed only darkness in her―this was a mind entombed in a cave-in.
Except―
Except that in the moment they burst through the doorway and separated, he had wished―wished desperately― that he could tarry a moment longer. One moment would have told so much. Because the woman before them now wasn't the woman in whose mind he had been. Being in Eddie's mind had been like being in a room with jittery, sweating walls. Being in the Lady's had been like lying naked in the dark while venomous snakes crawled all over you.
Until the end.
She had changed at the end.
And there had been something else, something he believed was vitally important, but he either could not understand it or remember it. Something like
(a glance)
the doorway itself, only in her mind. Something about
(you broke the forspecial it was you)
some sudden burst of understanding. As at studies, when you finally saw―
"Oh, fuck you," Eddie said disgustedly. "You're nothing but a goddam machine."
He strode past Roland, went to the woman, knelt beside her, and when she put her arms around him, panic-tight, like the arms of a drowning swimmer, he did not draw away but put his own arms around her and hugged her back.
"It's okay," he said. "I mean, it's not great, but it's okay."
"Where are we?" she wept. "Iwas sitting home watching TV so I could hear if my friends got out ofOxfordalive and now I'm here and I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE HERE IS!"
"Well, neither do I," Eddie said, holding her tighter, beginning to rock her a little, "but I guess we're in it together. I'm from where you're from, little old New York City , and I've been through the same thing―well, a little different, but same principle―and you're gonna be just fine." As an afterthought he added: "As long as you like lobster."
She hugged him and wept and Eddie held her and rocked her and Roland thought, Eddie will be all right now. His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.
But he felt a pang: a deep reproachful hurt in his heart. He was capable of shooting―with his left hand, anyway―of killing, of going on and on, slamming with brutal relentlessness through miles and years, even dimensions, it seemed, in search of the Tower. He was capable of survival, sometimes even of protection―he had saved the boy Jake from a slow death at the way station, and from sexual consumption by the Oracle at the foot of the mountains―but in the end, he had let Jake die. Nor had this been by accident; he had committed a conscious act of damnation. He watched the two of them, watched Eddie hug her; assure her it was going to be all right. He could not have done that, and now the rue in his heart was joined by stealthy fear.
Ifyou have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell's own price in the end, but what if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, actually storm theDarkTowerand win it? If there is naught but darkness in your heart, what could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one's object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one's object as a monster …
To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?
He thought of Allie, and of the girl who had once waited for him at the window, thought of the tears he had shed over Cuthbert's lifeless corpse. Oh, then he had loved. Yes. Then.
I do want to love! he cried, but although Eddie was also crying a little now with the woman in the wheelchair, the gunslinger's eyes remained as dry as the desert he had crossed to reach this sunless sea.
5
He would answer Eddie's question later. He would do that because he thought Eddie would do well to be on guard. The reason she didn't remember was simple. She wasn't one woman but two.
And one of them was dangerous.
6
Eddie told her what he could, glossing over the shoot-out but being truthful about everything else.
When he was done, she remained perfectly silent for some time, her hands clasped together on her lap.
Little streamlets coursed down from the shallowing mountains, petering out some miles to the east. It was from these that Roland and Eddie had drawn their water as they hiked north. At first Eddie had gotten it because Roland was too weak. Later they had taken turns, always having to go a little further and search a little longer before finding a stream. They grew steadily more listless as the mountains slumped, but the water hadn't made them sick.
So far.
Roland had gone yesterday, and although that made today Eddie's turn, the gunslinger had gone again, shouldering the hide water-skins and walking off without a word. Eddie found this queerly discreet. He didn't want to be touched by the gesture―by anything about Roland, for that matter―and found he was, a little, just the same.
She listened attentively to Eddie, not speaking at all, her eyes fixed on his. At one moment Eddie would guess she was five years older than he, at another he would guess fifteen. There was one thing he didn't have to guess about: he was falling in love with her.
When he had finished, she sat for a moment without saying anything, now not looking at him but beyond him, looking at the waves which would, at nightfall, bring the lobsters and with their alien, lawyerly questions. He had been particularly careful to describe them. Better for her to be a little scared now than a lot scared when they came out to play. He supposed she wouldn't want to eat them, not after hearing what they had done to Roland's hand and foot, not after she got a good close look at them. But eventually hunger would win out over did-a-chick and dum-a-chum.
Her eyes were far and distant.
"Odetta?" he asked after perhaps five minutes had gone by. She had told him her name. Odetta Holmes. He thought it was a gorgeous name.
She looked back at him, startled out of her revery. She smiled a little. She said one word.
"No."
He only looked at her, able to think of no suitable reply. He thought he had never understood until that moment how illimitable a simple negative could be.
"I don't understand," he said finally. "What are you no-ing?"
"All this." Odetta swept an arm (she had, he'd noticed, very strong arms―smooth but very strong), indicating the sea, the sky, the beach, the scruffy foothills where the gunslinger was now presumably searching for water (or maybe getting eaten alive by some new and interesting monster, something Eddie didn't really care to think about). Indicating, in short, this entire world.
"I understand how you feel. I had a pretty good case of the unrealities myself at first."
But had he? Looking back, it seemed he had simply accepted, perhaps because he was sick, shaking himself apart in his need for junk.
"You get over it."
"No," she said again. "I believe one of two things has happened, and no matter which one it is, I am still in Oxford , Mississippi . None of this is real."
She went on. If her voice had been louder (or perhaps if he had not been falling in love) it would almost have been a lecture. As it was, it sounded more like lyric than lecture.
Except, he had to keep reminding himself, bullshit's what it really is, and you have to convince her of that. For her sake.
"I may have sustained a head injury," she said. "They are notorious swingers of axe-handles and billy-clubs in Oxford Town ."
OxfordTown.
That produced a faint chord of recognition far back in Eddie's mind. She said the words in a kind of rhythm that he for some reason associated with Henry … Henry and wet diapers. Why? What? Didn't matter now.
"You're trying to tell me you think this is all some sort of dream you're having while you're unconscious?"
"Or in a coma," she said. "And you needn't look at me as though you thought it was preposterous, because it isn't. Look here."
She parted her hair carefully on the left, and Eddie could see she wore it to one side not just because she liked the style. The old wound beneath the fall of her hair was scarred and ugly, not brown but a grayish-white.
"I guess you've had a lot of hard luck in your time," he said.
She shrugged impatiently. "A lot of hard luck and a lot of soft living," she said. "Maybe it all balances out. I only showed you because I was in a coma for three weeks when I was five. I dreamed a lot then. I can't remember what the dreams were, but I remember my mamma said they knew I wasn't going to die just as long as I kept talking and it seemed like I kept talking all the time, although she said they couldn't make out one word in a dozen. I do remember that the dreams were very vivid."
She paused, looking around.
"As vivid as this place seems to be. And you, Eddie."
When she said his name his arms prickled. Oh, he had it, all right. Had it bad.
"And him." She shivered. "He seems the most vivid of all."
"We ought to. I mean, we are real, no matter what you think."
She gave him a kind smile. It was utterly without belief.
"How did that happen?" he asked. "That thing on your head?"
"It doesn't matter. I'm just making the point that what has happened once might very well happen again."
"No, but I'm curious."
"I was struck by a brick. It was our first trip north. We came to the town of Elizabeth , New Jersey . We came in the Jim Crow car."
"What's that?"
She looked at him unbelievingly, almost scornfully. "Where have you been living, Eddie? In a bomb-shelter?"
"I'm from a different time," he said. "Could I ask how old you are, Odetta?"
"Old enough to vote and not old enough for Social Security."
"Well, I guess that puts me in my place."
"But gently, I hope," she said, and smiled that radiant smile which made his arms prickle.
"I'm twenty-three," he said, "but I was born in 1964―the year you were living in when Roland took you."
"That's rubbish."
"No. I was living in 1987 when he took me."
"Well," she said after a moment. "That certainly adds a great deal to your argument for this as reality, Eddie."
"The Jim Crow car … was it where the black people had to stay?"
"The Negros," she said. "Calling a Negro a black is a trifle rude, don't you think?"
"You'll all be calling yourselves that by 1980 or so," Eddie said. "When I was a kid, calling a black kid a Negro was apt to get you in a fight. It was almost like calling him a nigger."
She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then shook her head again.
"Tell me about the brick, then."
"My mother's youngest sister was going to be married," Odetta said. "Her name was Sophia, but my mother always called her Sister Blue because it was the color she always fancied. 'Or at least she fancied to fancy it,' was how my mother put it. So I always called her Aunt Blue, even before I met her. It was the most lovely wedding. There was a reception afterward. I remember all the presents."
She laughed.
"Presents always look so wonderful to a child, don't they, Eddie?"
He smiled. "Yeah, you got that right. You never forget presents. Not what you got, not what somebody else got, either."
"My father had begun to make money by then, but all I knew is that we were getting ahead. That's what my mother always called it and once, when I told her a little girl I played with had asked if my daddy was rich, my mother told me that was what I was supposed to say if any of my other chums ever asked me that question. That we were getting ahead.
"So they were able to give Aunt Blue a lovely china set, and I remember.…"
Her voice faltered. One hand rose to her temple and rubbed absently, as if a headache were beginning there.
"Remember what, Odetta?"
"I remember my mother gave her a forspecial."
"What?"
"I'm sorry. I've got a headache. It's got my tongue tangled. I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you all this, anyway."
"Do you mind?"
"No. I don't mind. I meant to say mother gave her a special plate. It was white, with delicate blue tracework woven all around the rim." Odetta smiled a little. Eddie didn't think it was an entirely comfortable smile. Something about this memory disturbed her, and the way its immediacy seemed to have taken precedence over the extremely strange situation she had found herself in, a situation which should be claiming all or most of her attention, disturbed him.
"I can see that plate as clearly as I can see you now, Eddie. My mother gave it to Aunt Blue and she cried and cried over it. I think she'd seen a plate like that once when she and my mother were children, only of course their parents could never have afforded such a thing. There was none of them who got any thing forspecial as kids. After the reception Aunt Blue and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. They went on the train." She looked at Eddie.
"In the Jim Crow car," he said.
"That's right! In the Crow car! In those days that's what Negros rode in and where they ate. That's what we're trying to change in Oxford Town ."
She looked at him, almost surely expecting him to insist she was here, but he was caught in the webwork of his own memory again: wet diapers and those words. Oxford Town . Only suddenly other words came, just a single line, but he could remember Henry singing it over and over until his mother asked if he couldn't please stop so she could hear Walter Cronkite.
Somebody better investigate soon. Those were the words. Sung over and over by Henry in a nasal monotone. He tried for more but couldn't get it, and was that any real surprise? He could have been no more than three at the time. Somebody better investigate soon. The words gave him a chill.
"Eddie, are you all right?"
"Yes. Why?"
"You shivered."
He smiled. "Donald Duck must have walked over my grave."
She laughed. "Anyway, at least I didn't spoil the wedding. It happened when we were walking back to the railway station. We stayed the night with a friend of Aunt Blue's, and in the morning my father called a taxi. The taxi came almost right away, but when the driver saw we were colored, he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. Aunt Blue's friend had already gone ahead to the depot with our luggage―there was a lot of it, because we were going to spend a week in New York . I remember my father saying he couldn't wait to see my face light up when the clock in Central Park struck the hour and all the animals danced.
"My father said we might as well walk to the station. My mother agreed just as fast as lickety-split, saying that was a fine idea, it wasn't but a mile and it would be nice to stretch our legs after three days on one train just behind us and half a day on another one just ahead of us. My father said yes, and it was gorgeous weather besides, but I think I knew even at five that he was mad and she was embarrassed and both of them were afraid to call another taxi-cab because the same thing might happen again.
"So we went walking down the street. I was on the inside because my mother was afraid of me getting too close to the traffic. I remember wondering if my daddy meant my face would actually start to glow or something when I saw that clock in Central Park, and if that might not hurt, and that was when the brick came down on my head. Everything went dark for a while. Then the dreams started. Vivid dreams."
She smiled.
"Like this dream, Eddie."
"Did the brick fall, or did someone bomb you?"
"They never found anyone. The police (my mother told me this long after, when I was sixteen or so) found the place where they thought the brick had been, but there were other bricks missing and more were loose. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room in an apartment building that had been condemned. But of course there were lots of people staying there just the same. Especially at night."
"Sure," Eddie said.
"No one saw anyone leaving the building, so it went down as an accident. My mother said she thought it had been, but I think she was lying. She didn't even bother trying to tell me what my father thought. They were both still smarting over how the cab-driver had taken one look at us and driven off. It was that more than anything else that made them believe someone had been up there, just looking out, and saw us coming, and decided to drop a brick on the niggers.
"Will your lobster-creatures come out soon?"
"No," Eddie said. "Not until dusk. So one of your ideas is that all of this is a coma-dream like the ones you had when you got bopped by the brick. Only this time you think it was a billy-club or something."
"Yes."
"What's the other one?"
Odetta's face and voice were calm enough, but her head was filled with an ugly skein of images which all added up to Oxford Town , Oxford Town . How did the song go? Two men killed by the light of the moon,/Somebody better investigate soon. Not quite right, but it was close. Close.
"I may have gone insane," she said.
7
The first words which came into Eddie's mind were If you think you've gone insane, Odetta, you're nuts.
Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprofitable line of argument to take.
Instead he remained silent for a time, sitting by her wheelchair, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his wrists.
"Were you really a heroin addict?"
"Am," he said. "It's like being an alcoholic, or 'basing. It's not a thing you ever get over. I used to hear that and go 'Yeah, yeah, right, right,' in my head, you know, but now I understand. I still want it, and I guess part of me will always want it, but the physical part has passed."
"What's 'basing?" she asked.
"Something that hasn't been invented yet in your when. It's something you do with cocaine, only it's like turning TNT into an A-bomb."
"You did it?"
"Christ, no. Heroin was my thing. I told you."
"You don't seem like an addict," she said.
Eddie actually was fairly spiffy … if, that was, one ignored the gamy smell arising from his body and clothes (he could rinse himself and did, could rinse his clothes and did, but lacking soap, he could not really wash either). His hair had been short when Roland stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big joke that had turned out to be), and was a still a respectable length. He shaved every morning, using the keen edge of Roland's knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing confidence. He'd been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for 'Nam, and it hadn't been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into "mowing the stubble." When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few others―foot-powder after showering; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one you took care of with a needle.
"Too clean-cut?" he asked her, grinning.
"Too white," she said shortly, and then was quiet for a moment, looking sternly out at the sea. Eddie was quiet, too. If there was a comeback to something like that, he didn't know what it was.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That was very unkind, very unfair, and very unlike me."
"It's all right."
"It's not. It's like a white person saying something like 'Jeez, I never would have guessed you were a nigger' to someone with a very light skin."
"You like to think of yourself as more fair-minded," Eddie said.
"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common, I should think, but yes―I like to think of myself as more fair-minded. So please accept my apology, Eddie."
"On one condition."
"What's that?" she was smiling a little again. That was good. He liked it when he was able to make her smile.
"Give this a fair chance. That's the condition."
"Give what a fair chance?" She sounded slightly amused. Eddie might have bristled at that tone in someone else's voice, might have felt he was getting boned, but with her it was different. With her it was all right. He supposed with her just about anything would have been.
"That there's a third alternative. That this really is happening. I mean …" Eddie cleared his throat. "I'm not very good at this philosophical shit, or, you know, metamorphosis or whatever the hell you call it―"
"Do you mean metaphysics?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I think so. But I know you can't go around disbelieving what your senses tell you. Why, if your idea about this all being a dream is right―"
"I didn't say a dream―"
"Whatever you said, that's what it comes down to, isn't it? A false reality?"
If there had been something faintly condescending in her voice a moment ago, it was gone now. "Philosophy and metaphysics may not be your bag, Eddie, but you must have been a hell of a debater in school."
"I was never in debate. That was for gays and hags and wimps. Like chess club. What do you mean, my bag? What's a bag?"
"Just something you like. What do you mean, gays? What are gays?"
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. "Homos. Fags. Never mind. We could swap slang all day. It's not getting us anyplace. What I'm trying to say is that if it's all a dream, it could be mine, not yours. You could be a figment of my imagination."
Her smile faltered. "You … nobody bopped you."
"Nobody bopped you, either."
Now her smile was entirely gone. "No one that I remember," she corrected with some sharpness.
"Me either!" he said. "You told me they're rough in Oxford . Well, those Customs guys weren't exactly cheery joy when they couldn't find the dope they were after. One of them could have head-bopped me with the butt of his gun. I could be lying in a Bellevue ward right now, dreaming you and Roland while they write their reports, explaining how, while they were interrogating me, I became violent and had to be subdued."
"It's not the same."
"Why? Because you're this intelligent socially active black lady with no legs and I'm just a hype from Co-Op City ?" He said it with a grin, meaning it as an amiable jape, but she flared at him.
"I wish you would stop calling me black!"
He sighed. "Okay, but it's gonna take getting used to."
"You should have been on the debate club anyway."
"Fuck," he said, and the turn of her eyes made him realize again that the difference between them was much wider than color; they were speaking to each other from separate islands. The water between was time. Never mind. The word had gotten her attention. "I don't want to debate you. I want to wake you up to the fact that you are awake, that's all."
"I might be able to at least operate provisionally according to the dictates of your third alternative as long as this … this situation … continued to go on, except for one thing: There's a fundamental difference between what happened to you and what happened to me. So fundamental, so large, that you haven't seen it."
"Then show it to me."
"There is no discontinuity in your consciousness. There is a very large one in mine."
"I don't understand."
"I mean you can account for all of your time," Odetta said. "Your story follows from point to point: the airplane, the incursion by that … that … by him―
She nodded toward the foothills with clear distaste.
"The stashing of the drugs, the officers who took you into custody, all the rest. It's a fantastic story, it has no missing links.
"As for myself, I arrived back from Oxford , was met by Andrew, my driver, and brought back to my building. I bathed and I wanted sleep―I was getting a very bad headache, and sleep is the only medicine that's any good for the really bad ones. But it was close on midnight , and I thought I would watch the news first. Some of us had been released, but a good many more were still in the jug when we left. I wanted to find out if their cases had been resolved.
"I dried off and put on my robe and went into the living room. I turned on the TV news. The newscaster started talking about a speech Krushchev had just made about the American advisors in Viet Nam . He said, 'We have a film report from―' and then he was gone and I was rolling down this beach. You say you saw me in some sort of magic doorway which is now gone, and that I was in Macy's, and that I was stealing. All of this is preposterous enough, but even if it was so, I could find something better to steal than costume jewelry. I don't wear jewelry."
"You better look at your hands again, Odetta," Eddie said quietly.
For a very long time she looked from the "diamond" on her left pinky, too large and vulgar to be anything but paste, to the large opal on the third finger of her right hand, which was too large and vulgar to be anything but real.
"None of this is happening," she repeated firmly.
"You sound like a broken record!" He was genuinely angry for the first time. "Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that 'none of this is happening' shit. You have to wise up, 'Detta."
"Don't call me that! I hate that!" she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.
"Sorry. Jesus! I didn't know."
"I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!"
"But your memories don't stop in Oxford ," he said softly.
"W-What?" Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.
"If you got whacked in Oxford , how come your memories don't stop there?"
"There isn't always a lot of logic to things like this." She was rubbing her temples again. "And now, if it's all the same to you, Eddie, I'd just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It's quite bad."
"I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy's, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don't do things like that, but you also told me you don't wear jewelry. You told me that even though you'd looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn't see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them."
"I don't want to talk about it!" she shouted. "My head hurts!"
"All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn't in Oxford ."
"Leave me alone," she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
"I wish I could help you," Eddie said, "but to do that, I guess I'd have to be real."
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
"Sit down." Eddie took the bags. "You look all in."
"I am. I'm getting sick again."
Eddie looked at the gunslinger's flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. "I hoped it wouldn't happen, but I'm not that surprised, man. You didn't bat for the cycle. Balazar didn't have enough Keflex."
"I don't understand you."
"If you don't take a penicillin drug long enough, you don't kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We'll need more, but at least there's a door to go to. In the meantime you'll just have to take it easy." But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta's missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn't see how.
"I have to tell you something about Odetta."
"That's her name?"
"Uh-huh."
"It's very lovely," the gunslinger said.
"Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn't so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn't think she's here."
"I know. And she doesn't like me much, does she?"
No, Eddie thought, but that doesn't keep her from think-ing you're one booger of a hallucination. He didn't say it, only nodded.
"The reasons are almost the same," the gunslinger said. "She's not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.''
Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror … that snarling face … the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn't been Odetta at all.
Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse―almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.
The rings had been there.
Same rings.
But that doesn't necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long-fingered and delicate.
"No," the gunslinger continued. "She is not." His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.
"Her hands―"
"Listen," the gunslinger said, "and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it―mine because I'm getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her."
Eddie said nothing.
"She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here."
Now Eddie could say nothing.
"There was something else, something strange, but either I didn't understand it or I did and it's slipped away. It seemed important."
Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheel-chair, standing alone at the end of its short track from nowhere. Then he looked back at Eddie.
"I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard. Do you understand that?"
"Yes." Eddie's lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood―or had, at least, a moviegoer's understanding of the sort of thing the gunslinger was speaking of―but he didn't have the breath to explain, not yet. He felt as if Roland had kicked all his breath out of him.
"Good. Because the woman I entered on the other side of the door was as deadly as those lobster-things that come out at night."
CHAPTER 4
DETTA ON THE OTHER SIDE
1
You must be on your guard, the gunslinger said, and Eddie had agreed, but the gunslinger knew Eddie didn't know what he was talking about; the whole back half of Eddie's mind, where survival is or isn't, didn't get the message.
The gunslinger saw this.
It was a good thing for Eddie he did.
2
In the middle of the night, Detta Walker's eyes sprang open. They were full of starlight and clear intelligence.
She remembered everything: how she had fought them, how they had tied her into her chair, how they had taunted her, calling her niggerbitch, niggerbitch.
She remembered monsters coming out of the waves, and she remembered how one of the men―the older―had killed one of them. The younger had built a fire and cooked it and then had offered her smoking monster-meat on a stick, grinning. She remembered spitting at his face, remembered his grin turning into an angry honky scowl. He had hit her upside the face, and told her Well, that's all right, you'll come around, niggerbitch. Wait and see if you don't. Then he and the Really Bad Man―had laughed and the Really Bad Man had brought out a haunch of beef which he spitted and slowly cooked over the fire on the beach of this alien place to which they had brought her.
The smell of the slowly roasting beef had been seductive, but she had made no sign. Even when the younger one had waved a chunk of it near her face, chanting Bite for it, niggerbitch, go on and bite for it, she had sat like stone, holding herself in.
Then she had slept, and now she was awake, and the ropes they had tied her with were gone. She was no longer in her chair but lying on one blanket and under another, far above the high-tide line, where the lobster-things still wandered and questioned and snatched the odd unfortunate gull out of the air.
She looked to her left and saw nothing.
She looked to her right and saw two sleeping men wrapped in two piles of blankets. The younger one was closer, and the Really Bad Man had taken off his gunbelts and laid them by him.
The guns were still in them.
You made a bad mistake, mahfah, Detta thought, and rolled to her right. The gritty crunch and squeak of her body on the sand was inaudible under the wind, the waves, the questioning creatures. She crawled slowly along the sand (like one of the lobstrosities herself), her eyes glittering.
She reached the gunbelts and pulled one of the guns.
It was very heavy, the grip smooth and somehow independently deadly in her hand. The heaviness didn't bother her. She had strong arms, did Detta Walker.
She crawled a little further.
The younger man was no more than a snoring rock, but the Really Bad Man stirred a little in his sleep and she froze with a snarl tattooed on her face until he quieted again.
He be one sneaky sumbitch. You check, Detta. You check, be sho.
She found the worn chamber release, tried to shove it forward, got nothing, and pulled it instead. The chamber swung open.
Loaded! Fucker be loaded! You goan do this young cocka-de-walk first, and dat Really Bad Man be wakin up and you goan give him one big grin―smile honeychile so I kin see where you is―and den you goan clean his clock somethin righteous.
She swung the chamber back, started to pull the hammer … and then waited.
When the wind kicked up a gust, she pulled the hammer to full cock.
Detta pointed Roland's gun at Eddie's temple.
3
The gunslinger watched all this from one half-open eye. The fever was back, but not bad yet, not so bad that he must mistrust himself. So he waited, that one half-open eye the finger on the trigger of his body, the body which had always been his revolver when there was no revolver at hand.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
Of course click.
When he and Eddie had come back with the waterskins from their palaver, Odetta Holmes had been deeply asleep in her wheelchair, slumped to one side. They had made her the best bed they could on the sand and carried her gently from her wheelchair to the spread blankets. Eddie had been sure she would awake, but Roland knew better.
He had killed, Eddie had built a fire, and they had eaten, saving a portion aside for Odetta in the morning.
Then they had talked, and Eddie had said something which burst upon Roland like a sudden flare of lightning. It was too bright and too brief to be total understanding, but he saw much, the way one may discern the lay of the land in a single lucky stroke of lightning.
He could have told Eddie then, but did not. He understood that he must be Eddie's Cort, and when one of Cort's pupils was left hurt and bleeding by some unexpected blow, Cort's response had always been the same: A child doesn't understand a hammer until he's mashed his finger at a nail. Get up and stop whining, maggot! You have forgotten the face of your father!
So Eddie had fallen asleep, even though Roland had told him he must be on his guard, and when Roland was sure they both slept (he had waited longer for the Lady, who could, he thought, be sly), he had reloaded his guns with spent casings, unstrapped them (that caused a pang), and put them by Eddie.
Then he waited.
One hour; two; three.
Halfway through the fourth hour, as his tired and feverish body tried to drowse, he sensed rather than saw the Lady come awake and came fully awake himself.
He watched her roll over. He watched her turn her hands into claws and pull herself along the sand to where his gun-belts lay. He watched her take one of them out, come closer to Eddie, and then pause, her head cocking, her nostrils swelling and contracting, doing more than smelling the air; tasting it.
Yes. This was the woman he had brought across.
When she glanced toward the gunslinger he did more than feign sleep, because she would have sensed sham; he went to sleep. When he sensed her gaze shift away he awoke and opened that single eye again. He saw her begin to raise the gun―she did this with less effort than Eddie had shown the first time Roland saw him do the same thing―and point it toward Eddie's head. Then she paused, her face filled with an inexpressible cunning.
In that moment she reminded him of Marten.
She fiddled with the cylinder, getting it wrong at first, then swinging it open. She looked at the heads of the shells. Roland tensed, waiting first to see if she would know the firing pins had already been struck, waiting next to see if she would turn the gun, look into the other end of the cylinder, and see there was only emptiness there instead of lead (he had thought of loading the guns with cartridges which had already misfired, but only briefly; Cort had taught them that every gun is ultimately ruled by Old Man Splitfoot, and a cartridge which misfires once may not do so a second time). If she did that, he would spring at once.
But she swung the cylinder back in, began to cock the hammer … and then paused again. Paused for the wind to mask the single low click.
He thought: Here is another. God, she's evil, this one, and she's legless, but she's a gunslinger as surely as Eddie is one.
He waited with her.
The wind gusted.
She pulled the hammer to full cock and placed it half an inch from Eddie's temple. With a grin that was a ghoul's grimace, she pulled the trigger.
Click.
He waited.
She pulled it again. And again. And again.
Click-Click-Click.
"MahFAH!" she screamed, and reversed the gun with liquid grace.
Roland coiled but did not leap. A child doesn't understand a hammer until he's mashed his finger at a nail.
If she kills him, she kills you.
Doesn't matter, the voice of Cort answered inexorably.
Eddie stirred. And his reflexes were not bad; he moved fast enough to avoid being driven unconscious or killed. Instead of coming down on the vulnerable temple, the heavy gun-butt cracked the side of his jaw.
"What … Jesus!"
"MAHFAH! HONKY MAHFUH!" Detta screamed, and Roland saw her raise the gun a second time. And even though she was legless and Eddie was rolling away, it was as much as he dared. If Eddie hadn't learned the lesson now, he never would. The next time the gunslinger told Eddie to be on his guard, Eddie would be, and besides―the bitch was quick. It would not be wise to depend further than this on either Eddie's quickness or the Lady's infirmity.
He uncoiled, flying over Eddie and knocking her backward, ending up on top of her.
"You want it, mahfah?" she screamed at him, simultaneously rolling her crotch against his groin and raising the arm which still held the gun above his head. "You want it? I goan give you what you want, sho!"
"Eddie!" he shouted again, not just yelling now but commanding. For a moment Eddie just went on squalling there, eyes wide, blood dripping from his jaw (it had already begun to swell), staring, eyes wide. Move, can't you move? he thought, or is it that you don't want to? His strength was fading now, and the next time she brought that heavy gunbutt down she was going to break his arm with it … that was if he got his arm up in time. If he didn't, she was going to break his head with it.
Then Eddie moved. He caught the gun on the downswing and she shrieked, turning toward him, biting at him like a vampire, cursing him in a gutter patois so darkly southern that even Eddie couldn't understand it; to Roland it sounded as if the woman had suddenly begun to speak in a foreign language. But Eddie was able to yank the gun out of her hand and with the impending bludgeon gone, Roland was able to pin her.
She did not quit even then but continued to buck and heave and curse, sweat standing out all over her dark face.
Eddie stared, mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish. He touched tentatively at his jaw, winced, pulled his fingers back, examined them and the blood on them.
She was screaming that she would kill them both; they could try and rape her but she would kill them with her cunt, they would see, that was one bad son of a bitching cave with teeth around the entrance and if they wanted to try and explore it they would find out.
"What in the hell―" Eddie said stupidly.
"One of my gunbelts," the gunslinger panted harshly at him. "Get it. I'm going to roll her over on top of me and you're going to grab her arms and tie her hands behind her."
"You ain't NEVAH!" Detta shrieked, and sunfished her legless body with such sudden force that she almost bucked Roland off. He felt her trying to bring the remainder of her right thigh up again and again, wanting to drive it into his balls.
"I … I … she …"
"Move, God curse your father's face!" Roland roared, and at last Eddie moved.
4
They almost lost control of her twice during the tying and binding. But Eddie was at last able to slip-knot one of Roland's gunbelts around her wrists when Roland―using all his force―finally brought them together behind her (all the time drawing back from her lunging bites like a mongoose from a snake; the bites he avoided but before Eddie had finished, the gunslinger was drenched with spittle) and then Eddie dragged her off, holding the short leash of the makeshift slip-knot to do it. He did not want to hurt this thrashing screaming cursing thing. It was uglier than the lobstrosities by far because of the greater intelligence which informed it, but he knew it could also be beautiful. He did not want to harm the other person the vessel held somewhere inside it (like a live dove deep inside one of the secret compartments in a magician's magic box).
Odetta Holmes was somewhere inside that screaming screeching thing.
5
Although his last mount―a mule―had died too long ago to remember, the gunslinger still had a piece of its tether-rope (which, in turn, had once been a fine gunslinger's lariat). They used this to bind her in her wheelchair, as she had imagined (or falsely remembered, and in the end they both came to the same thing, didn't they?) they had done already. Then they drew away from her.
If not for the crawling lobster-things, Eddie would have gone down to the water and washed his hands.
"I feel like I'm going to vomit," he said in a voice that jig-jagged up and down the scale like the voice of an adolescent boy.
"Why don't you go on and eat each other's COCKS?" the struggling thing in the chair screeched. "Why don't you jus go on and do dat if you fraid of a black woman's cunny? You just go on! Sho! Suck on yo each one's candles! Do it while you got a chance, causeDetta Walker goan get outen dis chair and cut dem skinny ole white candles off and feed em to those walkm buzzsaws down there!"
"She's the woman I was in. Do you believe me now?"
"I believed you before," Eddie said. "I told you that."
"You believed you believed. You believed on the top of your mind. Do you believe it all the way down now? All the way to the bottom?"
Eddie looked at the shrieking, convulsing thing in the chair and then looked away, white except for the slash on his jaw, which was still dripping a little. That side of his face was beginning to look a little like a balloon.
"Yes, "he said. "God, yes."
"This woman is a monster."
Eddie began to cry.
The gunslinger wanted to comfort him, could not commit such a sacrilege (he remembered Jake too well), and walked off into the dark with his new fever burning and aching inside him.
6
Much earlier on that night, while Odetta still slept, Eddie said he thought he might understand what was wrong with her. Might. The gunslinger asked what he meant.
"She could be a schizophrenic."
Roland only shook his head. Eddie explained what he understood of schizophrenia, gleanings from such films as The Three Faces of Eve and various TV programs (mostly the soap operas he and Henry had often watched while stoned). Roland had nodded. Yes. The disease Eddie described sounded about right. A woman with two faces, one light and one dark. A face like the one the man in black had shown him on the fifth Tarot card.
"And they don't know―these schizophrenes―that they have another?"
"No," Eddie said. "But …" He trailed off, moodily watching the lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl.
"But what?"
"I'm no shrink," Eddie said, "so I don't really know―"
"Shrink? What is a shrink?"
Eddie tapped his temple. "A head-doctor. A doctor for your mind. They're really called psychiatrists."
Roland nodded. He liked shrink better. Because this Lady's mind was too large. Twice as large as it needed to be.
"But I think schizos almost always know something is wrong with them," Eddie said. "Because there are blanks. Maybe I'm wrong, but I always got the idea that they were usually two people who thought they had partial amnesia, because of the blank spaces in their memories when the other personality was in control. She … she says she remembers everything. She really thinks she remembers everything."
"I thought you said she didn't believe any of this was happening."
"Yeah," Eddie said, "but forget that for now. I'm trying to say that, no matter what she believes, what she remembers goes right from her living room where she was sitting in her bathrobe watching the midnight news to here, with no break at all. She doesn't have any sense that some other person took over between then and when you grabbed her in Macy's. Hell, that might have been the next day or even weeks later. I know it was still winter, because most of the shoppers in that store were wearing coats―"
The gunslinger nodded. Eddie's perceptions were sharpening. That was good. He had missed the boots and scarves, the gloves sticking out of coat pockets, but it was still a start.
"―but otherwise it's impossible to tell how long Odetta was that other woman because she doesn't know. I think she's in a situation she's never been in before, and her way of protecting both sides is this story about getting cracked over the head."
Roland nodded.
"And the rings. Seeing those really shook her up. She tried not to show it, but it showed, all right."
Roland asked: "If these two women don't know they exist in the same body, and if they don't even suspect that something may be wrong, if each has her own separate chain of memories, partly real but partly made up to fit the times the other is there, what are we to do with her? How are we even to live with her?"
Eddie had shrugged. "Don't ask me. It's your problem. You're the one who says you need her. Hell, you risked your neck to bring her here.'' Eddie thought about this for a minute, remembered squatting over Roland's body with Roland's knife held just above the gunslinger's throat, and laughed abruptly and without humor. LITERALLY risked your neck, man, he thought.
A silence fell between them. Odetta had by then been breathing quietly. As the gunslinger was about to reiterate his warning for Eddie to be on guard and announce (loud enough for the Lady to hear, if she was only shamming) that he was going to turn in, Eddie said the thing which lighted Roland's mind in a single sudden glare, the thing which made him understand at least part of what he needed so badly to know.
At the end, when they came through.
She had changed at the end.
And he had seen something, some thing―
"Tell you what," Eddie said, moodily stirring the remains of the fire with a split claw from this night's kill, "when you brought her through, I felt like I was a schizo."
"Why?"
Eddie thought, then shrugged. It was too hard to explain, or maybe he was just too tired. "It's not important."
"Why?"
Eddie looked at Roland, saw he was asking a serious question for a serious reason―or thought he was―and took a minute to think back. "It's really hard to describe, man. It was looking in that door. That's what freaked me out. When you see someone move in that door, it's like you're moving with them. You know what I'm talking about."
Roland nodded.
"Well, I watched it like it was a movie―never mind, it's not important―until the very end. Then you turned her toward this side of the doorway and for the first time I was looking at myself. It was like …" He groped and could find nothing. "I dunno. It should have been like looking in a mirror, I guess, but it wasn't, because … because it was like looking at another person. It was like being turned inside out. Like being in two places at the same time. Shit, I don't know."
But the gunslinger was thunderstruck. That was what he had sensed as they came through; that was what had happened to her, no, not just her, them: for a moment Detta and Odetta had looked at each other, not the way one would look at her reflection in a mirror but as separate people; the mirror became a windowpane and for a moment Odetta had seen Detta and Detta had seen Odetta and had been equally horror-struck.
They each know, the gunslinger thought grimly. They may not have known before, but they do now. They can try to hide it from themselves, but for a moment they saw, they knew, and that knowing must still be there.
"Roland?"
"What?"
"Just wanted to make sure you hadn't gone to sleep with your eyes open. Because for a minute you looked like you were, you know, long ago and far away."
"If so, I'm back now," the gunslinger said. "I'm going to turn in. Remember what I said, Eddie: be on your guard."
"I'll watch," Eddie said, but Roland knew that, sick or not, he would have to be the one to do the watching tonight.
Everything else had followed from that.
7
Following the ruckus Eddie and Detta Walker eventually went to sleep again (she did not so much fall asleep as drop into an exhausted state of unconsciousness in her chair, lolling to one side against the restraining ropes).
The gunslinger, however, lay wakeful.
Iwill have to bring the two of them to battle, he thought, but he didn't need one of Eddie's "shrinks" to tell him that such a battle might be to the death. Ifthe bright one, Odetta, were to win that battle, all might yet be well. If the dark one were to win it, all would surely be lost with her.
Yet he sensed that what really needed doing was not killing but joining. He had already recognized much that would be of value to him―them― in Detta Walker's gutter toughness, and he wanted her―but he wanted her under control. There was a long way to go. Detta thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called Honk Mafahs. That was only dangerous delusion, but there would be real monsters along the way―the lobstrosities were not the first, nor would they be the last. The fight-until-you-drop woman he had entered and who had come out of hiding again tonight might come in very handy in a fight against such monsters, if she could be tempered by Odetta Holmes's calm humanity―especially now, with him short two fingers, almost out of bullets, and growing more fever.
But that is a step ahead. I think if I can make them acknowledge each other, that would bring them into confrontation. How may it be done?
He lay awake all that long night, thinking, and although he felt the fever in him grow, he found no answer to his question.
8
Eddie woke up shortly before daybreak, saw the gunslinger sitting near the ashes of last night's fire with his blanket wrapped around him Indian-fashion, and joined him.
"How do you feel?" Eddie asked in a low voice. The Lady still slept in her crisscrossing of ropes, although she occasionally jerked and muttered and moaned.
"All right."
Eddie gave him an appraising glance. "You don't look all right."
"Thank you, Eddie," the gunslinger said dryly.
"You're shivering."
"It will pass."
The Lady jerked and moaned again―this time a word that was almost understandable. It might have been Oxford.
"God, I hate to see her tied up like that," Eddie murmured. "Like a goddam calf in a barn."
"She'll wake soon. Mayhap we can unloose her when she does."
It was the closest either of them came to saying out loud that when the Lady in the chair opened her eyes, the calm, if slightly puzzled gaze of Odetta Holmes might greet them.
Fifteen minutes later, as the first sunrays struck over the hills, those eyes did open―but what the men saw was not the calm gaze of Odetta Holmes but the mad glare of Detta Walker.
"How many times you done rape me while I was buzzed out?" she asked. "My cunt feel all slick an tallowy, like somebody done been at it with a couple them little bitty white candles you graymeat mahfahs call cocks."
Roland sighed.
"Let's get going," he said, and gained his feet with a grimace.
"I ain't goan nowhere wit choo, mahfah," Detta spat.
"Oh yes you are," Eddie said. "Dreadfully sorry, my dear."
"Where you think I'm goan?"
"Well,'' Eddie said,' 'what was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we're going to go right on ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it's likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I'm an optimist. I'm still hoping for the stainless steel cookware."
"I ain't goan."
"You're going, all right," Eddie said, and walked behind her chair. She began struggling again, but the gunslinger had made these knots, and her struggles only drew them tighter. Soon enough she saw this and ceased. She was full of poison but far from stupid. But she looked back over her shoulder at Eddie with a grin which made him recoil a little. It seemed to him the most evil expression he had ever seen on a human face.
"Well, maybe I be goan on a little way," she said, "but maybe not s'far's you think, white boy. And sure-God not s'fast's you think."
"What do you mean?"
That leering, over-the-shoulder grin again.
"You find out, white boy." Her eyes, mad but cogent, shifted briefly to the gunslinger. "You bofe be findin dat out."
Eddie wrapped his hands around the bicycle grips at the ends of the push-handles on the back of her wheelchair and they began north again, now leaving not only footprints but the twin tracks of the Lady's chair as they moved up the seemingly endless beach.
9
The day was a nightmare.
It was hard to calculate distance travelled when you were moving along a landscape which varied so little, but Eddie knew their progress had slowed to a crawl.
And he knew who was responsible.
Oh yeah.
You bofe befindin dat out, Detta had said, and they hadn't been on the move more than half an hour before the finding out began.
Pushing.
That was the first thing. Pushing the wheelchair up a beach of fine sand would have been as impossible as driving a car through deep unplowed snow. This beach, with its gritty, marly surface, made moving the chair possible but far from easy. It would roll along smoothly enough for awhile, crunching over shells and popping little pebbles to either side of its hard rubber tires … and then it would hit a dip where finer sand had drifted, and Eddie would have to shove, grunting, to get it and its solid unhelpful passenger through it. The sand sucked greedily at the wheels. You had to simultaneously push and throw your weight against the handles of the chair in a downward direction, or it and its bound occupant would tumble over face-first onto the beach.
Detta would cackle as he tried to move her without upending her. "You havin a good time back dere, honey-chile?" she asked each time the chair ran into one of these drybogs.
When the gunslinger moved over to help, Eddie motioned him away. "You'll get your chance," he said. "We'll switch off."But I think my turns are going to be a hell of a lot longer than his, a voice in his head spoke up. The way he looks, he's going to have his hands full just keeping himself moving before much longer, let alone moving the woman inthis chair. No sir, Eddie, I'm afraid this Bud's for you. It's God's revenge, you know it? All those years you spent as a junkie, and guess what? You're finally the pusher!
He uttered a short out-of-breath laugh.
"What's so funny, white boy?" Detta asked, and although Eddie thought she meant to sound sarcastic, it came out sounding just a tiny bit angry.
Ain't supposed to be any laughs in this for me, he thought. None at all. Not as far as she's concerned.
"You wouldn’t understand, babe. Just let it lie."
"I be lettin you lie before this be all over," she said. "Be lettin you and yo bad-ass buddy there lie in pieces all ovah dis beach. Sho. Meantime you better save yo breaf to do yo pushin with. You already sound like you gettin a little sho't winded."
"Well, you talk for both of us, then," Eddie panted. "You never seem to run out of wind."
"I goan break wind, graymeat! Goan break it ovah yo dead face!"
"Promises, promises." Eddie shoved the chair out of the sand and onto relatively easier going―for awhile, at least The sun was not yet fully up, but he had already worked up a sweat.
This is going to be an amusing and informative day, he thought. I can see that already.
Stopping.
That was the next thing.
They had struck a firm stretch of beach. Eddie pushed the chair along faster, thinking vaguely that if he could keep this bit of extra speed, he might be able to drive right through the next sandtrap he happened to strike on pure impetus.
All at once the chair stopped. Stopped dead. The crossbar on the back hit Eddie's chest with a thump. He grunted. Roland looked around, but not even the gunslinger's cat-quick reflexes could stop the Lady's chair from going over exactly as it had threatened to do in each of the sandtraps. It went and Detta went with it, tied and helpless but cackling wildly. She still was when Roland and Eddie finally managed to right the chair again. Some of the ropes had drawn so tight they must be cutting cruelly into her flesh, cutting off the circulation to her extremities; her forehead was slashed and blood trickled into her eyebrows. She went on cackling just the same.
The men were both gasping, out of breath, by the time the chair was on its wheels again. The combined weight of it and the woman in it must have totaled two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it chair. It occurred to Eddie that if the gunslinger had snatched Detta from his own when, 1987, the chair might have weighed as much as sixty pounds less.
Detta giggled, snorted, blinked blood out of her eyes.
"Looky here, you boys done opsot me," she said.
"Call your lawyer," Eddie muttered. "Sue us."
"An got yoselfs all tuckered out gittin me back on top agin. Must have taken you ten minutes, too."
The gunslinger took a piece of his shirt―enough of it was gone now so the rest didn't much matter―and reached forward with his left hand to mop the blood away from the cut on her forehead. She snapped at him, and from the savage click those teeth made when they came together, Eddie thought that, if Roland had been only one instant slower in drawing back, Detta Walker would have evened up the number of fingers on his hands for him again.
She cackled and stared at him with meanly merry eyes, but the gunslinger saw fear hidden far back in those eyes. She was afraid of him. Afraid because he was The Really Bad Man.
Why was he The Really Bad Man? Maybe because, on some deeper level, she sensed what he knew about her.
"Almos' got you, graymeat," she said. "Almos' got you that time." And cackled, witchlike.
"Hold her head," the gunslinger said evenly. "She bites like a weasel."
Eddie held it while the gunslinger carefully wiped the wound clean. It wasn't wide and didn't look deep, but the gunslinger took no chances; he walked slowly down to the water, soaked the piece of shirting in the salt water, and then came back.
She began to scream as he approached.
"Doan you be touchin me wid dat thing! Doan you be touchin me wid no water from where them poison things come from! Git it away! Git it away!"
" Hold her head,'' Roland said in the same even voice. She was whipping it from side to side. "I don't want to take any chances."
Eddie held it … and squeezed it when she tried to shake free. She saw he meant business and immediately became still, showing no more fear of the damp rag. It had been only sham, after all.
She smiled at Roland as he bathed the cut, carefully washing out the last clinging particles of grit.
"In fact, you look mo than jest tuckered out," Detta observed. "You look sick, graymeat. I don't think you ready fo no long trip. I don't think you ready fo nuthin like dat."
Eddie examined the chair's rudimentary controls. It had an emergency hand-brake which locked both wheels. Detta had worked her right hand over there, had waited patiently until she thought Eddie was going fast enough, and then she had yanked the brake, purposely spilling herself over. Why? To slow them down, that was all. There was no reason to do such a thing, but a woman like Detta, Eddie thought, needed no reasons. A woman like Detta was perfectly willing to do such things out of sheer meanness.
Roland loosened her bonds a bit so the blood could flow more freely, then tied her hand firmly away from the brake.
"That be all right, Mister Man," Detta said, offering him a bright smile filled with too many teeth. "That be all right jest the same. There be other ways to slow you boys down. All sorts of ways."
"Let's go," the gunslinger said tonelessly.
"You all right, man?" Eddie asked. The gunslinger looked very pale.
"Yes. Let's go."
They started up the beach again.
10
The gunslinger insisted on pushing for an hour, and Eddie gave way to him reluctantly. Roland got her through the first sandtrap, but Eddie had to pitch in and help get the wheelchair out of the second. The gunslinger was gasping for air, sweat standing out on his forehead in large beads.
Eddie let him go on a little further, and Roland was quite adept at weaving his way around the places where the sand was loose enough to bog the wheels, but the chair finally became mired again and Eddie could bear only a few moments of watching Roland struggle to push it free, gasping, chest heaving, while the witch (for so Eddie had come to think of her) howled with laughter and actually threw her body backwards in the chair to make the task that much more difficult—and then he shouldered the gunslinger aside and heaved the chair out of the sand with one angry lurching lunge. The chair tottered and now he saw/sensed her shifting forward as much as the ropes would allow, doing this with a weird prescience at the exactly proper moment, trying to topple herself again.
Roland threw his weight on the back of the chair next to Eddie's and it settled back.
Detta looked around and gave them a wink of such obscene conspiracy that Eddie felt his arms crawl up in gooseflesh.
"You almost opsot me agin, boys," she said. "You want to look out for me, now. I ain't nuthin but a old crippled lady, so you want to have a care for me now."
She laughed … laughed fit to split.
Although Eddie cared for the woman that was the other part of her—was near to loving her just on the basis of the brief time he had seen her and spoken with her—he felt his hands itch to close around her windpipe and choke that laugh, choke it until she could never laugh again.
She peered around again, saw what he was thinking as if it had been printed on him in red ink, and laughed all the harder. Her eyes dared him. Go on, graymeat. Go on. You want to do it? Go on and do it.
In other words, don't just tip the chair; tip the woman, Eddie thought. Tip her over for good. That's what she wants. For Detta, being killed by a white man may be the only real goal she has in life.
"Come on," he said, and began pushing again. "We are gonna tour the seacoast, sweet thang, like it or not."
"Fuck you," she spat.
"Cram it, babe," Eddie responded pleasantly.
The gunslinger walked beside him, head down.
11
They came to a considerable outcropping of rocks when the sun said it was about eleven and here they stopped for nearly an hour, taking the shade as the sun climbed toward the roofpeak of the day. Eddie and the gunslinger ate leftovers from the previous night's kill. Eddie offered a portion to Detta, who again refused, telling him she knew what they wanted to do, and if they wanted to do it, they best to do it with their bare hands and stop trying to poison her. That, she said, was the coward's way.
Eddie's right, the gunslinger mused. This woman has made her own chain of memories. She knows everything that happened to her last night, even though she was really fast asleep.
She believed they had brought her pieces of meat which smelled of death and putrescence, had taunted her with it while they themselves ate salted beef and drank some sort of beer from flasks. She believed they had, every now and then, held pieces of their own untainted supper out to her, drawing it away at the last moment when she snatched at it with her teeth—and laughing while they did it, of course. In the world (or at least in the mind) of Detta Walker, Honk Mahfahs only did two things to brown women: raped them or laughed at them. Or both at the same time.
It was almost funny. Eddie Dean had last seen beef during his ride in the sky-carriage, and Roland had seen none since the last of his jerky was eaten, Gods alone knew how long ago. As far as beer … he cast his mind back.
Tull.
There had been beer in Tull. Beer and beef.
God, it would be good to have a beer. His throat ached and it would be so good to have a beer to cool that ache. Better even than the astin from Eddie's world.
They drew off a distance from her.
"Ain't I good nough cump'ny for white boys like you?" she cawed after them. "Or did you jes maybe want to have a pull on each other one's little bitty white candle?"
She threw her head back and screamed laughter that frightened the gulls up, crying, from the rocks where they had been met in convention a quarter of a mile away.
The gunslinger sat with his hands dangling between his knees, thinking. Finally he raised his head and told Eddie, "I can only understand about one word in every ten she says."
"I'm way ahead of you," Eddie replied. "I'm getting at least two in every three. Doesn't matter. Most of it comes back to honky mahfah."
Roland nodded. "Do many of the dark-skinned people talk that way where you come from? Her other didn't."
Eddie shook his head and laughed. "No. And I'll tell you something sort of funny—at least I think it's sort of funny, but maybe that's just because there isn't all that much to laugh at out here. It's not real. It's not real and she doesn't even know it."
Roland looked at him and said nothing.
"Remember when you washed off her forehead, how she pretended she was scared of the water?"
"Yes."
"You knew she was pretending?"
"Not at first, but quite soon."
Eddie nodded. "That was an act, and she knew it was an act. But she's a pretty good actress and she fooled both of us for a few seconds. The way she's talking is an act, too. But it's not as good. It's so stupid, so goddam hokey!"
"You believe she pretends well only when she knows she's doing it?"
"Yes. She sounds like a cross between the darkies in this book called Mandingo I read once and Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind. I know you don't know those names, but what I mean is she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?"
"It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all."
"Yeah. I couldn't have said it half so good."
''Ain't you boys done jerkin on dem candles a yours yet? " Detta's voice was growing hoarse and cracked. "Or maybe it's just you can't fine em. Dat it?"
"Come on." The gunslinger got slowly to his feet. He swayed for a moment, saw Eddie looking at him, and smiled. "I'll be all right."
"For how long?"
"As long as I have to be," the gunslinger answered, and the serenity in his voice chilled Eddie's heart.
12
That night the gunslinger used his last sure live cartridge to make their kill. He would start systematically testing the ones he believed to be duds tomorrow night, but he believed it was pretty much as Eddie had said: They were down to beating the damned things to death.
It was like the other nights: the fire, the cooking, the shelling, the eating—eating which was now slow and unenthusiastic. We're just gassing up, Eddie thought. They offered food to Detta, who screamed and laughed and cursed and asked how long they was goan take her for a fool, and then she began throwing her body wildly from one side to the other, never minding how her bonds grew steadily tighter, only trying to upset the chair to one side or the other so they would have to pick her up again before they could eat.
Just before she could manage the trick, Eddie grabbed her and Roland braced the wheels on either sides with rocks.
"I'll loosen the ropes a bit if you'll be still," Roland told her.
"Suck shit out my ass, mahfah!"
"I don't understand if that means yes or no."
She looked at him, eyes narrowed, suspecting some buried barb of satire in that calm voice (Eddie also wondered, but couldn't tell if there was or not), and after a moment she said sulkily, "I be still. Too damn hungry to kick up much dickens. You boys goan give me some real food or you jes goan starve me to death? Dat yo plan? You too chickenshit to choke me and I ain't nev' goan eat no poison, so dat must be you plan. Starve me out. Well, we see, sho. We goan see. Sho we are."
She offered them her bone-chilling sickle of a grin again.
Not long after she fell asleep.
Eddie touched the side of Roland's face. Roland glanced at him but did not pull away from the touch.
"I'm all right."
"Yeah, you're Jim-dandy. Well, I tell you what, Jim, we didn't get along very far today."
"I know." There was also the matter of having used the last live shell, but that was knowledge Eddie could do without, at least tonight. Eddie wasn't sick, but he was exhausted. Too exhausted for more bad news.
No, he's not sick, not yet, but if he goes too long without rest, gets tired enough, he'll get sick.
In a way, Eddie already was; both of them were. Cold-sores had developed at the corners of Eddie's mouth, and there was scaly patches on his skin. The gunslinger could feel his teeth loosening up in their sockets, and the flesh between his toes had begun to crack open and bleed, as had that between his remaining fingers. They were eating, but they were eating the same thing, day in and day out. They could go on that way for a time, but in the end they would die as surely as if they had starved.
What we have is Shipmate's Disease on dry land, Roland thought. Simple as that. How funny. We need fruit. We need greens.
Eddie nodded toward the Lady. "She's going to go right on making it tough."
"Unless the other one inside her comes back."
"That would be nice, but we can't count on it," Eddie said. He took a piece of blackened claw and began to scrawl aimless patterns in the dirt. "Any idea how far the next door might be?"
Roland shook his head.
"I only ask because if the distance between Number Two and Number Three is the same as the distance between Number One and Number Two, we could be in deep shit."
"We're in deep shit right now."
"Neck deep," Eddie agreed moodily. "I just keep wondering how long I can tread water."
Roland clapped him on the shoulder, a gesture of affection so rare it made Eddie blink.
"There's one thing that Lady doesn't know," he said.
"Oh? What's that?"
"We Honk Mahfahs can tread water a long time."
Eddie laughed at that, laughed hard, smothering his laughter against his arm so he wouldn't wake Detta up. He'd had enough of her for one day, please and thank you.
The gunslinger looked at him, smiling. "I'm going to turn in," he said. "Be—"
"—on my guard. Yeah. I will."
13
Screaming was next.
Eddie fell asleep the moment his head touched the bunched bundle of his shirt, and it seemed only five minutes later when Detta began screaming.
He was awake at once, ready for anything, some King Lobster arisen from the deep to take revenge for its slain children or a horror down from the hills. It seemed he was awake at once, anyway, but the gunslinger was already on his feet, a gun in his left hand.
When she saw they were both awake, Detta promptly quit screaming.
"Jes thought I'd see if you boys on yo toes," she said. "Might be woofs. Looks likely enough country for 'em. Wanted to make sho if I saw me a woof creepin up, I could get you on yo feet in time." But there was no fear in her eyes; they glinted with mean amusement.
"Christ," Eddie said groggily. The moon was up but barely risen; they had been asleep less than two hours.
The gunslinger holstered his gun.
"Don't do it again," he said to the Lady in the wheelchair.
"What you goan do if I do? Rape me?"
"If we were going to rape you, you would be one well-raped woman by now," the gunslinger said evenly. "Don't do it again."
He lay down again, pulling his blanket over him.
Christ, dear Christ, Eddie thought, what a mess this is, what a fucking … and that was as far as the thought went before trailing off into exhausted sleep again and then she was splintering the air with fresh shrieks, shrieking like a firebell, and Eddie was up again, his body flaming with adrenaline, hands clenched, and then she was laughing, her voice hoarse and raspy.
Eddie glanced up and saw the moon had advanced less than ten degrees since she had awakened them the first time.
She means to keep on doing it, he thought wearily. She means to stay awake and watch us, and when she's sure we're getting down into deep sleep, that place where you recharge, she's going to open her mouth and start bellowing again. She'll do it and do it and do it until she doesn't have any voice left to bellow with.
Her laughter stopped abruptly. Roland was advancing on her, a dark shape in the moonlight.
"You jes stay away from me, graymeat," Detta said, but there was a quiver of nerves in her voice. "You ain't goan do nothing to me."
Roland stood before her and for a moment Eddie was sure, completely sure, that the gunslinger had reached the end of his patience and would simply swat her like a fly. Instead, astoundingly, he dropped to one knee before her like a suitor about to propose marriage.
"Listen," he said, and Eddie could scarcely credit the silky quality of Roland's voice. He could see much the same deep surprise on Detta's face, only there fear was joined to it. "Listen to me, Odetta."
"Who you callin O-Detta? Dat ain my name."
"Shut up, bitch," the gunslinger said in a growl, and then, reverting to that same silken voice: "If you hear me, and if you can control her at all—"
"Why you talkin at me dat way? Why you talkin like you was talkin to somebody else? You quit dat honky jive! You jes quit it now, you hear me?"
"—keep her shut up. I can gag her, but I don't want to do that. A hard gag is a dangerous business. People choke."
"YOU QUIT IT YOU HONKY BULLSHIT VOODOO MAHFAH!"
"Odetta." His voice was a whisper, like the onset of rain.
She fell silent, staring at him with huge eyes. Eddie had never in his life seen such hate and fear combined in human eyes.
"I don't think this bitch would care if she did die on a hard gag. She wants to die, but maybe even more, she wants you to die. But you haven't died, not so far, and I don't think Detta is brand-new in your life. She feels too at home in you, so maybe you can hear what I'm saying, and maybe you can keep some control over her even if you can't come out yet.
"Don't let her wake us up a third time, Odetta.
"I don't want to gag her.
"But if I have to, I will."
He got up, left without looking back, rolled himself into his blanket again, and promptly fell asleep.
She was still staring at him, eyes wide, nostrils flaring.
"Honky voodoo bullshit," she whispered.
Eddie lay down, but this time it was a long time before sleep came to claim him, in spite of his deep tiredness. He would come to the brink, anticipate her screams, and snap back.
Three hours or so later, with the moon now going the other way, he finally dropped off.
Detta did no more screaming that night, either because Roland had frightened her, or because she wanted to conserve her voice for future alarums and excursions, or—possibly, just possibly—because Odetta had heard and had exercised the control the gunslinger had asked of her.
Eddie slept at last but awoke sodden and unrefreshed. He looked toward the chair, hoping against hope that it would be Odetta, please God let it be Odetta this morning—
"Mawnin, whitebread," Detta said, and grinned her sharklike grin at him. "Thought you was goan sleep till noon . You cain't be doin nuthin like dat, kin you? We got to bus us some miles here, ain't dat d'fac of d'matter? Sho! An I think you the one goan have to do most of de bustin, cause dat other fella, one with de voodoo eyes, he lookin mo peaky all de time, I declare he do! Yes! I doan think he goan be eatin anythin much longer, not even dat fancy smoked meat you whitebread boys keep fo when you done joikin on each other one's little bitty white candles. So let's go, whitebread! Detta doan want to be d'one keepin you."
Her lids and her voice both dropped a little; her eyes peeked at him slyly from their corners.
"Not f'um startin out, leastways."
Dis goan be a day you 'member, whitebread, those sly eyes promised. Dis goan be a day you 'member for a long, long time.
Sho.
14
They made three miles that day, maybe a shade under. Detta's chair upset twice. Once she did it herself, working her fingers slowly and unobtrusively over to that handbrake again and yanking it. The second time Eddie did with no help at all, shoving too hard in one of those goddamned sandtraps. That was near the end of the day, and he simply panicked, thinking he just wasn't going to be able to get her out this time, just wasn't. So he gave that one last titanic heave with his quivering arms, and of course it had been much too hard, and over she had gone, like Humpty Dumpty falling off his wall, and he and Roland had to labor to get her upright again. They finished the job just in time. The rope under her breasts was now pulled taut across her windpipe. The gunslinger's efficient running slipknot was choking her to death. Her face had gone a funny blue color, she was on the verge of losing consciousness, but still she went on wheezing her nasty laughter.
Let her be, why don't you? Eddie nearly said as Roland bent quickly forward to loosen the knot. Let her choke! I don't know if she wants to do herself like you said, but I know she wants to do US …so let her go!
Then he remembered Odetta (although their encounter had been so brief and seemed so long ago that memory was growing dim) and moved forward to help.
The gunslinger pushed him impatiently away with one hand. "Only room for one."
When the rope was loosened and the Lady gasping harshly for breath (which she expelled in gusts of her angry laughter), he turned and looked at Eddie critically. "I think we ought to stop for the night."
"A little further." He was almost pleading. "I can go a little further."
"Sho! He be one strong buck. He be good fo choppin one mo row cotton and he still have enough lef’ to give yo little bitty white candle one fine suckin-on t'night."
She still wouldn't eat, and her face was becoming all stark lines and angles. Her eyes glittered in deepening sockets.
Roland gave her no notice at all, only studied Eddie closely. At last he nodded. "A little way. Not far, but a little way."
Twenty minutes later Eddie called it quits himself. His arms felt like Jell-O.
They sat in the shadows of the rocks, listening to the gulls, watching the tide come in, waiting for the sun to go down and the lobstrosities to come out and begin their cumbersome cross-examinations.
Roland told Eddie in a voice too low for Detta to hear that he thought they were out of live shells. Eddie's mouth tightened down a little but that was all. Roland was pleased.
"So you'll have to brain one of them yourself," Roland said. "I'm too weak to handle a rock big enough to do the job … and still be sure."
Eddie was now the one to do the studying.
He had no liking for what he saw.
The gunslinger waved his scrutiny away.
"Never mind," he said. "Never mind, Eddie. What is, is."
"Ka," Eddie said.
The gunslinger nodded and smiled faintly. "Ka."
"Kaka," Eddie said, and they looked at each other, and both laughed. Roland looked startled and perhaps even a little afraid of the rusty sound emerging from his mouth. His laughter did not last long. When it had stopped he looked distant and melancholy.
"Dat laffin mean you fine'ly managed to joik each other off?" Detta cried over at them in her hoarse, failing voice. "When you goan get down to de pokin? Dat's what I want to see! Dat pokin!"
15
Eddie made the kill.
Detta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the other half.
"Nossuh!" she said, eyes sparking at him. "No SUH! You done put de poison in t'other end. One you trine to give me."
Without saying anything, Eddie look the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.
"Doan mean a thing," Detta said sulkily. "Leave me alone, graymeat."
Eddie wouldn't
He brought her another piece.
"You tear it in half. Give me whichever you want I'll eat it, then you eat the rest."
"Ain’t fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist' Chahlie. Git away f'um me is what I said, and git away f'um me is what I meant"
16
She did not scream in the night … but she was still there the next morning.
17
That day they made only two miles, although Detta made no effort to upset her chair; Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing inexorably together: Eddie's weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless days of sameness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland's deteriorating condition.
There were less sandtraps, but that was cold comfort. The ground was becoming grainier, more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand (in places bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there), and there were so many large rocks now jutting from this odd combination of sand and soil that Eddie found himself detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady's chair around the sandtraps. And soon enough, he saw, there would be no beach left at all. The hills, brown and cheerless things, were drawing steadily closer. Eddie could see the ravines which curled between them, looking like chops made by an awkward giant wielding a blunt cleaver. That night, before falling asleep, he heard what sounded like a very large cat squalling far up in one of them.
The beach had seemed endless, but he was coming to realize it had an end after all. Somewhere up ahead, those hills were simply going to squeeze it out of existence. The eroded hills would march down to the sea and then into it, where they might become first a cape or peninsula of sorts, and then a series of archipelagoes.
That worried him, but Roland's condition worried him more.
This time the gunslinger seemed not so much to be burning as fading, losing himself, becoming transparent.
The red lines had appeared again, marching relentlessly up the underside of his right arm toward the elbow.
For the last two days Eddie had looked constantly ahead, squinting into the distance, hoping to see the door, the door, the magic door. For the last two days he had waited for Odetta to reappear.
Neither had appeared.
Before falling asleep that night two terrible thoughts came to him, like some joke with a double punchline:
What if there was no door?
What if Odetta Holmes was dead?
18
"Rise and shine, mahfah!" Detta screeched him out of unconsciousness. "I think it jes be you and me now, honey-chile. Think yo frien done finally passed on. I think yo frien be pokin the devil down in hell."
Eddie looked at the rolled huddled shape of Roland and for one terrible moment he thought the bitch was right. Then the gunslinger stirred, moaned furrily, and pawed himself into a sitting position.
"Well looky yere!" Detta had screamed so much that now there were moments when her voice disappeared almost entirely, becoming no more than a weird whisper, like winter wind under a door. "I thought you was dead, Mister Man!"
Roland was getting slowly to his feet. He still looked to Eddie like a man using the rungs of an invisible ladder to make it. Eddie felt an angry sort of pity, and this was a familiar emotion, oddly nostalgic. After a moment he understood. It was like when he and Henry used to watch the fights on TV, and one fighter would hurt the other, hurt him terribly, again and again, and the crowd would be screaming for blood, and Henry would be screaming for blood, but Eddie only sat there, feeling that angry pity, that dumb disgust; he'd sat there sending thought-waves at the referee: Stop it, man, are you fucking blind? He's dying out there! DYING! Stop the fucking fight!
There was no way to stop this one.
Roland looked at her from his haunted feverish eyes. "A lot of people have thought that, Detta." He looked at Eddie. "You ready?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Are you?"
"Yes."
"Can you?"
"Yes."
They went on.
Around ten o'clock Detta began rubbing her temples with her fingers.
"Stop," she said. "I feel sick. Feel like I goan throw up."
"Probably that big meal you ate last night," Eddie said, and went on pushing. "You should have skipped dessert. I told you that chocolate layer cake was heavy."
"I goan throw up! I—"
"Stop, Eddie!" the gunslinger said.
Eddie stopped.
The woman in the chair suddenly twisted galvanically, as if an electric shock had run through her. Her eyes popped wide open, glaring at nothing.
"IBROKE YO PLATE YOU STINKIN OLE BLUE LADY!" she screamed. "IBROKE IT AND I'M FUCKIN GLAD ID―"
She suddenly slumped forward in her chair. If not for the ropes, she would have fallen out of it.
Christ, she's dead, she's had a stroke and she's dead, Eddie thought. He started around the chair, remembered how sly and tricksy she could be, and stopped as suddenly as he had started. He looked at Roland. Roland looked back at him evenly, his eyes giving away not a thing.
Then she moaned. Her eyes opened.
Her eyes.
Odetta's eyes.
"Dear God, I've fainted again, haven't I?" she said. "I'm sorry you had to tie me in. My stupid legs! I think I could sit up a little if you—"
That was when Roland's own legs slowly came unhinged and he swooned some thirty miles south of the place where the Western Sea 's beach came to an end.
1
You must be on your guard, the gunslinger said, and Eddie had agreed, but the gunslinger knew Eddie didn't know what he was talking about; the whole back half of Eddie's mind, where survival is or isn't, didn't get the message.
The gunslinger saw this.
It was a good thing for Eddie he did.
2
In the middle of the night, Detta Walker's eyes sprang open. They were full of starlight and clear intelligence.
She remembered everything: how she had fought them, how they had tied her into her chair, how they had taunted her, calling her niggerbitch, niggerbitch.
She remembered monsters coming out of the waves, and she remembered how one of the men―the older―had killed one of them. The younger had built a fire and cooked it and then had offered her smoking monster-meat on a stick, grinning. She remembered spitting at his face, remembered his grin turning into an angry honky scowl. He had hit her upside the face, and told her Well, that's all right, you'll come around, niggerbitch. Wait and see if you don't. Then he and the Really Bad Man―had laughed and the Really Bad Man had brought out a haunch of beef which he spitted and slowly cooked over the fire on the beach of this alien place to which they had brought her.
The smell of the slowly roasting beef had been seductive, but she had made no sign. Even when the younger one had waved a chunk of it near her face, chanting Bite for it, niggerbitch, go on and bite for it, she had sat like stone, holding herself in.
Then she had slept, and now she was awake, and the ropes they had tied her with were gone. She was no longer in her chair but lying on one blanket and under another, far above the high-tide line, where the lobster-things still wandered and questioned and snatched the odd unfortunate gull out of the air.
She looked to her left and saw nothing.
She looked to her right and saw two sleeping men wrapped in two piles of blankets. The younger one was closer, and the Really Bad Man had taken off his gunbelts and laid them by him.
The guns were still in them.
You made a bad mistake, mahfah, Detta thought, and rolled to her right. The gritty crunch and squeak of her body on the sand was inaudible under the wind, the waves, the questioning creatures. She crawled slowly along the sand (like one of the lobstrosities herself), her eyes glittering.
She reached the gunbelts and pulled one of the guns.
It was very heavy, the grip smooth and somehow independently deadly in her hand. The heaviness didn't bother her. She had strong arms, did Detta Walker.
She crawled a little further.
The younger man was no more than a snoring rock, but the Really Bad Man stirred a little in his sleep and she froze with a snarl tattooed on her face until he quieted again.
He be one sneaky sumbitch. You check, Detta. You check, be sho.
She found the worn chamber release, tried to shove it forward, got nothing, and pulled it instead. The chamber swung open.
Loaded! Fucker be loaded! You goan do this young cocka-de-walk first, and dat Really Bad Man be wakin up and you goan give him one big grin―smile honeychile so I kin see where you is―and den you goan clean his clock somethin righteous.
She swung the chamber back, started to pull the hammer … and then waited.
When the wind kicked up a gust, she pulled the hammer to full cock.
Detta pointed Roland's gun at Eddie's temple.
3
The gunslinger watched all this from one half-open eye. The fever was back, but not bad yet, not so bad that he must mistrust himself. So he waited, that one half-open eye the finger on the trigger of his body, the body which had always been his revolver when there was no revolver at hand.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
Of course click.
When he and Eddie had come back with the waterskins from their palaver, Odetta Holmes had been deeply asleep in her wheelchair, slumped to one side. They had made her the best bed they could on the sand and carried her gently from her wheelchair to the spread blankets. Eddie had been sure she would awake, but Roland knew better.
He had killed, Eddie had built a fire, and they had eaten, saving a portion aside for Odetta in the morning.
Then they had talked, and Eddie had said something which burst upon Roland like a sudden flare of lightning. It was too bright and too brief to be total understanding, but he saw much, the way one may discern the lay of the land in a single lucky stroke of lightning.
He could have told Eddie then, but did not. He understood that he must be Eddie's Cort, and when one of Cort's pupils was left hurt and bleeding by some unexpected blow, Cort's response had always been the same: A child doesn't understand a hammer until he's mashed his finger at a nail. Get up and stop whining, maggot! You have forgotten the face of your father!
So Eddie had fallen asleep, even though Roland had told him he must be on his guard, and when Roland was sure they both slept (he had waited longer for the Lady, who could, he thought, be sly), he had reloaded his guns with spent casings, unstrapped them (that caused a pang), and put them by Eddie.
Then he waited.
One hour; two; three.
Halfway through the fourth hour, as his tired and feverish body tried to drowse, he sensed rather than saw the Lady come awake and came fully awake himself.
He watched her roll over. He watched her turn her hands into claws and pull herself along the sand to where his gun-belts lay. He watched her take one of them out, come closer to Eddie, and then pause, her head cocking, her nostrils swelling and contracting, doing more than smelling the air; tasting it.
Yes. This was the woman he had brought across.
When she glanced toward the gunslinger he did more than feign sleep, because she would have sensed sham; he went to sleep. When he sensed her gaze shift away he awoke and opened that single eye again. He saw her begin to raise the gun―she did this with less effort than Eddie had shown the first time Roland saw him do the same thing―and point it toward Eddie's head. Then she paused, her face filled with an inexpressible cunning.
In that moment she reminded him of Marten.
She fiddled with the cylinder, getting it wrong at first, then swinging it open. She looked at the heads of the shells. Roland tensed, waiting first to see if she would know the firing pins had already been struck, waiting next to see if she would turn the gun, look into the other end of the cylinder, and see there was only emptiness there instead of lead (he had thought of loading the guns with cartridges which had already misfired, but only briefly; Cort had taught them that every gun is ultimately ruled by Old Man Splitfoot, and a cartridge which misfires once may not do so a second time). If she did that, he would spring at once.
But she swung the cylinder back in, began to cock the hammer … and then paused again. Paused for the wind to mask the single low click.
He thought: Here is another. God, she's evil, this one, and she's legless, but she's a gunslinger as surely as Eddie is one.
He waited with her.
The wind gusted.
She pulled the hammer to full cock and placed it half an inch from Eddie's temple. With a grin that was a ghoul's grimace, she pulled the trigger.
Click.
He waited.
She pulled it again. And again. And again.
Click-Click-Click.
"MahFAH!" she screamed, and reversed the gun with liquid grace.
Roland coiled but did not leap. A child doesn't understand a hammer until he's mashed his finger at a nail.
If she kills him, she kills you.
Doesn't matter, the voice of Cort answered inexorably.
Eddie stirred. And his reflexes were not bad; he moved fast enough to avoid being driven unconscious or killed. Instead of coming down on the vulnerable temple, the heavy gun-butt cracked the side of his jaw.
"What … Jesus!"
"MAHFAH! HONKY MAHFUH!" Detta screamed, and Roland saw her raise the gun a second time. And even though she was legless and Eddie was rolling away, it was as much as he dared. If Eddie hadn't learned the lesson now, he never would. The next time the gunslinger told Eddie to be on his guard, Eddie would be, and besides―the bitch was quick. It would not be wise to depend further than this on either Eddie's quickness or the Lady's infirmity.
He uncoiled, flying over Eddie and knocking her backward, ending up on top of her.
"You want it, mahfah?" she screamed at him, simultaneously rolling her crotch against his groin and raising the arm which still held the gun above his head. "You want it? I goan give you what you want, sho!"
"Eddie!" he shouted again, not just yelling now but commanding. For a moment Eddie just went on squalling there, eyes wide, blood dripping from his jaw (it had already begun to swell), staring, eyes wide. Move, can't you move? he thought, or is it that you don't want to? His strength was fading now, and the next time she brought that heavy gunbutt down she was going to break his arm with it … that was if he got his arm up in time. If he didn't, she was going to break his head with it.
Then Eddie moved. He caught the gun on the downswing and she shrieked, turning toward him, biting at him like a vampire, cursing him in a gutter patois so darkly southern that even Eddie couldn't understand it; to Roland it sounded as if the woman had suddenly begun to speak in a foreign language. But Eddie was able to yank the gun out of her hand and with the impending bludgeon gone, Roland was able to pin her.
She did not quit even then but continued to buck and heave and curse, sweat standing out all over her dark face.
Eddie stared, mouth opening and closing like the mouth of a fish. He touched tentatively at his jaw, winced, pulled his fingers back, examined them and the blood on them.
She was screaming that she would kill them both; they could try and rape her but she would kill them with her cunt, they would see, that was one bad son of a bitching cave with teeth around the entrance and if they wanted to try and explore it they would find out.
"What in the hell―" Eddie said stupidly.
"One of my gunbelts," the gunslinger panted harshly at him. "Get it. I'm going to roll her over on top of me and you're going to grab her arms and tie her hands behind her."
"You ain't NEVAH!" Detta shrieked, and sunfished her legless body with such sudden force that she almost bucked Roland off. He felt her trying to bring the remainder of her right thigh up again and again, wanting to drive it into his balls.
"I … I … she …"
"Move, God curse your father's face!" Roland roared, and at last Eddie moved.
4
They almost lost control of her twice during the tying and binding. But Eddie was at last able to slip-knot one of Roland's gunbelts around her wrists when Roland―using all his force―finally brought them together behind her (all the time drawing back from her lunging bites like a mongoose from a snake; the bites he avoided but before Eddie had finished, the gunslinger was drenched with spittle) and then Eddie dragged her off, holding the short leash of the makeshift slip-knot to do it. He did not want to hurt this thrashing screaming cursing thing. It was uglier than the lobstrosities by far because of the greater intelligence which informed it, but he knew it could also be beautiful. He did not want to harm the other person the vessel held somewhere inside it (like a live dove deep inside one of the secret compartments in a magician's magic box).
Odetta Holmes was somewhere inside that screaming screeching thing.
5
Although his last mount―a mule―had died too long ago to remember, the gunslinger still had a piece of its tether-rope (which, in turn, had once been a fine gunslinger's lariat). They used this to bind her in her wheelchair, as she had imagined (or falsely remembered, and in the end they both came to the same thing, didn't they?) they had done already. Then they drew away from her.
If not for the crawling lobster-things, Eddie would have gone down to the water and washed his hands.
"I feel like I'm going to vomit," he said in a voice that jig-jagged up and down the scale like the voice of an adolescent boy.
"Why don't you go on and eat each other's COCKS?" the struggling thing in the chair screeched. "Why don't you jus go on and do dat if you fraid of a black woman's cunny? You just go on! Sho! Suck on yo each one's candles! Do it while you got a chance, causeDetta Walker goan get outen dis chair and cut dem skinny ole white candles off and feed em to those walkm buzzsaws down there!"
"She's the woman I was in. Do you believe me now?"
"I believed you before," Eddie said. "I told you that."
"You believed you believed. You believed on the top of your mind. Do you believe it all the way down now? All the way to the bottom?"
Eddie looked at the shrieking, convulsing thing in the chair and then looked away, white except for the slash on his jaw, which was still dripping a little. That side of his face was beginning to look a little like a balloon.
"Yes, "he said. "God, yes."
"This woman is a monster."
Eddie began to cry.
The gunslinger wanted to comfort him, could not commit such a sacrilege (he remembered Jake too well), and walked off into the dark with his new fever burning and aching inside him.
6
Much earlier on that night, while Odetta still slept, Eddie said he thought he might understand what was wrong with her. Might. The gunslinger asked what he meant.
"She could be a schizophrenic."
Roland only shook his head. Eddie explained what he understood of schizophrenia, gleanings from such films as The Three Faces of Eve and various TV programs (mostly the soap operas he and Henry had often watched while stoned). Roland had nodded. Yes. The disease Eddie described sounded about right. A woman with two faces, one light and one dark. A face like the one the man in black had shown him on the fifth Tarot card.
"And they don't know―these schizophrenes―that they have another?"
"No," Eddie said. "But …" He trailed off, moodily watching the lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl.
"But what?"
"I'm no shrink," Eddie said, "so I don't really know―"
"Shrink? What is a shrink?"
Eddie tapped his temple. "A head-doctor. A doctor for your mind. They're really called psychiatrists."
Roland nodded. He liked shrink better. Because this Lady's mind was too large. Twice as large as it needed to be.
"But I think schizos almost always know something is wrong with them," Eddie said. "Because there are blanks. Maybe I'm wrong, but I always got the idea that they were usually two people who thought they had partial amnesia, because of the blank spaces in their memories when the other personality was in control. She … she says she remembers everything. She really thinks she remembers everything."
"I thought you said she didn't believe any of this was happening."
"Yeah," Eddie said, "but forget that for now. I'm trying to say that, no matter what she believes, what she remembers goes right from her living room where she was sitting in her bathrobe watching the midnight news to here, with no break at all. She doesn't have any sense that some other person took over between then and when you grabbed her in Macy's. Hell, that might have been the next day or even weeks later. I know it was still winter, because most of the shoppers in that store were wearing coats―"
The gunslinger nodded. Eddie's perceptions were sharpening. That was good. He had missed the boots and scarves, the gloves sticking out of coat pockets, but it was still a start.
"―but otherwise it's impossible to tell how long Odetta was that other woman because she doesn't know. I think she's in a situation she's never been in before, and her way of protecting both sides is this story about getting cracked over the head."
Roland nodded.
"And the rings. Seeing those really shook her up. She tried not to show it, but it showed, all right."
Roland asked: "If these two women don't know they exist in the same body, and if they don't even suspect that something may be wrong, if each has her own separate chain of memories, partly real but partly made up to fit the times the other is there, what are we to do with her? How are we even to live with her?"
Eddie had shrugged. "Don't ask me. It's your problem. You're the one who says you need her. Hell, you risked your neck to bring her here.'' Eddie thought about this for a minute, remembered squatting over Roland's body with Roland's knife held just above the gunslinger's throat, and laughed abruptly and without humor. LITERALLY risked your neck, man, he thought.
A silence fell between them. Odetta had by then been breathing quietly. As the gunslinger was about to reiterate his warning for Eddie to be on guard and announce (loud enough for the Lady to hear, if she was only shamming) that he was going to turn in, Eddie said the thing which lighted Roland's mind in a single sudden glare, the thing which made him understand at least part of what he needed so badly to know.
At the end, when they came through.
She had changed at the end.
And he had seen something, some thing―
"Tell you what," Eddie said, moodily stirring the remains of the fire with a split claw from this night's kill, "when you brought her through, I felt like I was a schizo."
"Why?"
Eddie thought, then shrugged. It was too hard to explain, or maybe he was just too tired. "It's not important."
"Why?"
Eddie looked at Roland, saw he was asking a serious question for a serious reason―or thought he was―and took a minute to think back. "It's really hard to describe, man. It was looking in that door. That's what freaked me out. When you see someone move in that door, it's like you're moving with them. You know what I'm talking about."
Roland nodded.
"Well, I watched it like it was a movie―never mind, it's not important―until the very end. Then you turned her toward this side of the doorway and for the first time I was looking at myself. It was like …" He groped and could find nothing. "I dunno. It should have been like looking in a mirror, I guess, but it wasn't, because … because it was like looking at another person. It was like being turned inside out. Like being in two places at the same time. Shit, I don't know."
But the gunslinger was thunderstruck. That was what he had sensed as they came through; that was what had happened to her, no, not just her, them: for a moment Detta and Odetta had looked at each other, not the way one would look at her reflection in a mirror but as separate people; the mirror became a windowpane and for a moment Odetta had seen Detta and Detta had seen Odetta and had been equally horror-struck.
They each know, the gunslinger thought grimly. They may not have known before, but they do now. They can try to hide it from themselves, but for a moment they saw, they knew, and that knowing must still be there.
"Roland?"
"What?"
"Just wanted to make sure you hadn't gone to sleep with your eyes open. Because for a minute you looked like you were, you know, long ago and far away."
"If so, I'm back now," the gunslinger said. "I'm going to turn in. Remember what I said, Eddie: be on your guard."
"I'll watch," Eddie said, but Roland knew that, sick or not, he would have to be the one to do the watching tonight.
Everything else had followed from that.
7
Following the ruckus Eddie and Detta Walker eventually went to sleep again (she did not so much fall asleep as drop into an exhausted state of unconsciousness in her chair, lolling to one side against the restraining ropes).
The gunslinger, however, lay wakeful.
Iwill have to bring the two of them to battle, he thought, but he didn't need one of Eddie's "shrinks" to tell him that such a battle might be to the death. Ifthe bright one, Odetta, were to win that battle, all might yet be well. If the dark one were to win it, all would surely be lost with her.
Yet he sensed that what really needed doing was not killing but joining. He had already recognized much that would be of value to him―them― in Detta Walker's gutter toughness, and he wanted her―but he wanted her under control. There was a long way to go. Detta thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called Honk Mafahs. That was only dangerous delusion, but there would be real monsters along the way―the lobstrosities were not the first, nor would they be the last. The fight-until-you-drop woman he had entered and who had come out of hiding again tonight might come in very handy in a fight against such monsters, if she could be tempered by Odetta Holmes's calm humanity―especially now, with him short two fingers, almost out of bullets, and growing more fever.
But that is a step ahead. I think if I can make them acknowledge each other, that would bring them into confrontation. How may it be done?
He lay awake all that long night, thinking, and although he felt the fever in him grow, he found no answer to his question.
8
Eddie woke up shortly before daybreak, saw the gunslinger sitting near the ashes of last night's fire with his blanket wrapped around him Indian-fashion, and joined him.
"How do you feel?" Eddie asked in a low voice. The Lady still slept in her crisscrossing of ropes, although she occasionally jerked and muttered and moaned.
"All right."
Eddie gave him an appraising glance. "You don't look all right."
"Thank you, Eddie," the gunslinger said dryly.
"You're shivering."
"It will pass."
The Lady jerked and moaned again―this time a word that was almost understandable. It might have been Oxford.
"God, I hate to see her tied up like that," Eddie murmured. "Like a goddam calf in a barn."
"She'll wake soon. Mayhap we can unloose her when she does."
It was the closest either of them came to saying out loud that when the Lady in the chair opened her eyes, the calm, if slightly puzzled gaze of Odetta Holmes might greet them.
Fifteen minutes later, as the first sunrays struck over the hills, those eyes did open―but what the men saw was not the calm gaze of Odetta Holmes but the mad glare of Detta Walker.
"How many times you done rape me while I was buzzed out?" she asked. "My cunt feel all slick an tallowy, like somebody done been at it with a couple them little bitty white candles you graymeat mahfahs call cocks."
Roland sighed.
"Let's get going," he said, and gained his feet with a grimace.
"I ain't goan nowhere wit choo, mahfah," Detta spat.
"Oh yes you are," Eddie said. "Dreadfully sorry, my dear."
"Where you think I'm goan?"
"Well,'' Eddie said,' 'what was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we're going to go right on ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it's likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I'm an optimist. I'm still hoping for the stainless steel cookware."
"I ain't goan."
"You're going, all right," Eddie said, and walked behind her chair. She began struggling again, but the gunslinger had made these knots, and her struggles only drew them tighter. Soon enough she saw this and ceased. She was full of poison but far from stupid. But she looked back over her shoulder at Eddie with a grin which made him recoil a little. It seemed to him the most evil expression he had ever seen on a human face.
"Well, maybe I be goan on a little way," she said, "but maybe not s'far's you think, white boy. And sure-God not s'fast's you think."
"What do you mean?"
That leering, over-the-shoulder grin again.
"You find out, white boy." Her eyes, mad but cogent, shifted briefly to the gunslinger. "You bofe be findin dat out."
Eddie wrapped his hands around the bicycle grips at the ends of the push-handles on the back of her wheelchair and they began north again, now leaving not only footprints but the twin tracks of the Lady's chair as they moved up the seemingly endless beach.
9
The day was a nightmare.
It was hard to calculate distance travelled when you were moving along a landscape which varied so little, but Eddie knew their progress had slowed to a crawl.
And he knew who was responsible.
Oh yeah.
You bofe befindin dat out, Detta had said, and they hadn't been on the move more than half an hour before the finding out began.
Pushing.
That was the first thing. Pushing the wheelchair up a beach of fine sand would have been as impossible as driving a car through deep unplowed snow. This beach, with its gritty, marly surface, made moving the chair possible but far from easy. It would roll along smoothly enough for awhile, crunching over shells and popping little pebbles to either side of its hard rubber tires … and then it would hit a dip where finer sand had drifted, and Eddie would have to shove, grunting, to get it and its solid unhelpful passenger through it. The sand sucked greedily at the wheels. You had to simultaneously push and throw your weight against the handles of the chair in a downward direction, or it and its bound occupant would tumble over face-first onto the beach.
Detta would cackle as he tried to move her without upending her. "You havin a good time back dere, honey-chile?" she asked each time the chair ran into one of these drybogs.
When the gunslinger moved over to help, Eddie motioned him away. "You'll get your chance," he said. "We'll switch off."But I think my turns are going to be a hell of a lot longer than his, a voice in his head spoke up. The way he looks, he's going to have his hands full just keeping himself moving before much longer, let alone moving the woman inthis chair. No sir, Eddie, I'm afraid this Bud's for you. It's God's revenge, you know it? All those years you spent as a junkie, and guess what? You're finally the pusher!
He uttered a short out-of-breath laugh.
"What's so funny, white boy?" Detta asked, and although Eddie thought she meant to sound sarcastic, it came out sounding just a tiny bit angry.
Ain't supposed to be any laughs in this for me, he thought. None at all. Not as far as she's concerned.
"You wouldn’t understand, babe. Just let it lie."
"I be lettin you lie before this be all over," she said. "Be lettin you and yo bad-ass buddy there lie in pieces all ovah dis beach. Sho. Meantime you better save yo breaf to do yo pushin with. You already sound like you gettin a little sho't winded."
"Well, you talk for both of us, then," Eddie panted. "You never seem to run out of wind."
"I goan break wind, graymeat! Goan break it ovah yo dead face!"
"Promises, promises." Eddie shoved the chair out of the sand and onto relatively easier going―for awhile, at least The sun was not yet fully up, but he had already worked up a sweat.
This is going to be an amusing and informative day, he thought. I can see that already.
Stopping.
That was the next thing.
They had struck a firm stretch of beach. Eddie pushed the chair along faster, thinking vaguely that if he could keep this bit of extra speed, he might be able to drive right through the next sandtrap he happened to strike on pure impetus.
All at once the chair stopped. Stopped dead. The crossbar on the back hit Eddie's chest with a thump. He grunted. Roland looked around, but not even the gunslinger's cat-quick reflexes could stop the Lady's chair from going over exactly as it had threatened to do in each of the sandtraps. It went and Detta went with it, tied and helpless but cackling wildly. She still was when Roland and Eddie finally managed to right the chair again. Some of the ropes had drawn so tight they must be cutting cruelly into her flesh, cutting off the circulation to her extremities; her forehead was slashed and blood trickled into her eyebrows. She went on cackling just the same.
The men were both gasping, out of breath, by the time the chair was on its wheels again. The combined weight of it and the woman in it must have totaled two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it chair. It occurred to Eddie that if the gunslinger had snatched Detta from his own when, 1987, the chair might have weighed as much as sixty pounds less.
Detta giggled, snorted, blinked blood out of her eyes.
"Looky here, you boys done opsot me," she said.
"Call your lawyer," Eddie muttered. "Sue us."
"An got yoselfs all tuckered out gittin me back on top agin. Must have taken you ten minutes, too."
The gunslinger took a piece of his shirt―enough of it was gone now so the rest didn't much matter―and reached forward with his left hand to mop the blood away from the cut on her forehead. She snapped at him, and from the savage click those teeth made when they came together, Eddie thought that, if Roland had been only one instant slower in drawing back, Detta Walker would have evened up the number of fingers on his hands for him again.
She cackled and stared at him with meanly merry eyes, but the gunslinger saw fear hidden far back in those eyes. She was afraid of him. Afraid because he was The Really Bad Man.
Why was he The Really Bad Man? Maybe because, on some deeper level, she sensed what he knew about her.
"Almos' got you, graymeat," she said. "Almos' got you that time." And cackled, witchlike.
"Hold her head," the gunslinger said evenly. "She bites like a weasel."
Eddie held it while the gunslinger carefully wiped the wound clean. It wasn't wide and didn't look deep, but the gunslinger took no chances; he walked slowly down to the water, soaked the piece of shirting in the salt water, and then came back.
She began to scream as he approached.
"Doan you be touchin me wid dat thing! Doan you be touchin me wid no water from where them poison things come from! Git it away! Git it away!"
" Hold her head,'' Roland said in the same even voice. She was whipping it from side to side. "I don't want to take any chances."
Eddie held it … and squeezed it when she tried to shake free. She saw he meant business and immediately became still, showing no more fear of the damp rag. It had been only sham, after all.
She smiled at Roland as he bathed the cut, carefully washing out the last clinging particles of grit.
"In fact, you look mo than jest tuckered out," Detta observed. "You look sick, graymeat. I don't think you ready fo no long trip. I don't think you ready fo nuthin like dat."
Eddie examined the chair's rudimentary controls. It had an emergency hand-brake which locked both wheels. Detta had worked her right hand over there, had waited patiently until she thought Eddie was going fast enough, and then she had yanked the brake, purposely spilling herself over. Why? To slow them down, that was all. There was no reason to do such a thing, but a woman like Detta, Eddie thought, needed no reasons. A woman like Detta was perfectly willing to do such things out of sheer meanness.
Roland loosened her bonds a bit so the blood could flow more freely, then tied her hand firmly away from the brake.
"That be all right, Mister Man," Detta said, offering him a bright smile filled with too many teeth. "That be all right jest the same. There be other ways to slow you boys down. All sorts of ways."
"Let's go," the gunslinger said tonelessly.
"You all right, man?" Eddie asked. The gunslinger looked very pale.
"Yes. Let's go."
They started up the beach again.
10
The gunslinger insisted on pushing for an hour, and Eddie gave way to him reluctantly. Roland got her through the first sandtrap, but Eddie had to pitch in and help get the wheelchair out of the second. The gunslinger was gasping for air, sweat standing out on his forehead in large beads.
Eddie let him go on a little further, and Roland was quite adept at weaving his way around the places where the sand was loose enough to bog the wheels, but the chair finally became mired again and Eddie could bear only a few moments of watching Roland struggle to push it free, gasping, chest heaving, while the witch (for so Eddie had come to think of her) howled with laughter and actually threw her body backwards in the chair to make the task that much more difficult—and then he shouldered the gunslinger aside and heaved the chair out of the sand with one angry lurching lunge. The chair tottered and now he saw/sensed her shifting forward as much as the ropes would allow, doing this with a weird prescience at the exactly proper moment, trying to topple herself again.
Roland threw his weight on the back of the chair next to Eddie's and it settled back.
Detta looked around and gave them a wink of such obscene conspiracy that Eddie felt his arms crawl up in gooseflesh.
"You almost opsot me agin, boys," she said. "You want to look out for me, now. I ain't nuthin but a old crippled lady, so you want to have a care for me now."
She laughed … laughed fit to split.
Although Eddie cared for the woman that was the other part of her—was near to loving her just on the basis of the brief time he had seen her and spoken with her—he felt his hands itch to close around her windpipe and choke that laugh, choke it until she could never laugh again.
She peered around again, saw what he was thinking as if it had been printed on him in red ink, and laughed all the harder. Her eyes dared him. Go on, graymeat. Go on. You want to do it? Go on and do it.
In other words, don't just tip the chair; tip the woman, Eddie thought. Tip her over for good. That's what she wants. For Detta, being killed by a white man may be the only real goal she has in life.
"Come on," he said, and began pushing again. "We are gonna tour the seacoast, sweet thang, like it or not."
"Fuck you," she spat.
"Cram it, babe," Eddie responded pleasantly.
The gunslinger walked beside him, head down.
11
They came to a considerable outcropping of rocks when the sun said it was about eleven and here they stopped for nearly an hour, taking the shade as the sun climbed toward the roofpeak of the day. Eddie and the gunslinger ate leftovers from the previous night's kill. Eddie offered a portion to Detta, who again refused, telling him she knew what they wanted to do, and if they wanted to do it, they best to do it with their bare hands and stop trying to poison her. That, she said, was the coward's way.
Eddie's right, the gunslinger mused. This woman has made her own chain of memories. She knows everything that happened to her last night, even though she was really fast asleep.
She believed they had brought her pieces of meat which smelled of death and putrescence, had taunted her with it while they themselves ate salted beef and drank some sort of beer from flasks. She believed they had, every now and then, held pieces of their own untainted supper out to her, drawing it away at the last moment when she snatched at it with her teeth—and laughing while they did it, of course. In the world (or at least in the mind) of Detta Walker, Honk Mahfahs only did two things to brown women: raped them or laughed at them. Or both at the same time.
It was almost funny. Eddie Dean had last seen beef during his ride in the sky-carriage, and Roland had seen none since the last of his jerky was eaten, Gods alone knew how long ago. As far as beer … he cast his mind back.
Tull.
There had been beer in Tull. Beer and beef.
God, it would be good to have a beer. His throat ached and it would be so good to have a beer to cool that ache. Better even than the astin from Eddie's world.
They drew off a distance from her.
"Ain't I good nough cump'ny for white boys like you?" she cawed after them. "Or did you jes maybe want to have a pull on each other one's little bitty white candle?"
She threw her head back and screamed laughter that frightened the gulls up, crying, from the rocks where they had been met in convention a quarter of a mile away.
The gunslinger sat with his hands dangling between his knees, thinking. Finally he raised his head and told Eddie, "I can only understand about one word in every ten she says."
"I'm way ahead of you," Eddie replied. "I'm getting at least two in every three. Doesn't matter. Most of it comes back to honky mahfah."
Roland nodded. "Do many of the dark-skinned people talk that way where you come from? Her other didn't."
Eddie shook his head and laughed. "No. And I'll tell you something sort of funny—at least I think it's sort of funny, but maybe that's just because there isn't all that much to laugh at out here. It's not real. It's not real and she doesn't even know it."
Roland looked at him and said nothing.
"Remember when you washed off her forehead, how she pretended she was scared of the water?"
"Yes."
"You knew she was pretending?"
"Not at first, but quite soon."
Eddie nodded. "That was an act, and she knew it was an act. But she's a pretty good actress and she fooled both of us for a few seconds. The way she's talking is an act, too. But it's not as good. It's so stupid, so goddam hokey!"
"You believe she pretends well only when she knows she's doing it?"
"Yes. She sounds like a cross between the darkies in this book called Mandingo I read once and Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind. I know you don't know those names, but what I mean is she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?"
"It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all."
"Yeah. I couldn't have said it half so good."
''Ain't you boys done jerkin on dem candles a yours yet? " Detta's voice was growing hoarse and cracked. "Or maybe it's just you can't fine em. Dat it?"
"Come on." The gunslinger got slowly to his feet. He swayed for a moment, saw Eddie looking at him, and smiled. "I'll be all right."
"For how long?"
"As long as I have to be," the gunslinger answered, and the serenity in his voice chilled Eddie's heart.
12
That night the gunslinger used his last sure live cartridge to make their kill. He would start systematically testing the ones he believed to be duds tomorrow night, but he believed it was pretty much as Eddie had said: They were down to beating the damned things to death.
It was like the other nights: the fire, the cooking, the shelling, the eating—eating which was now slow and unenthusiastic. We're just gassing up, Eddie thought. They offered food to Detta, who screamed and laughed and cursed and asked how long they was goan take her for a fool, and then she began throwing her body wildly from one side to the other, never minding how her bonds grew steadily tighter, only trying to upset the chair to one side or the other so they would have to pick her up again before they could eat.
Just before she could manage the trick, Eddie grabbed her and Roland braced the wheels on either sides with rocks.
"I'll loosen the ropes a bit if you'll be still," Roland told her.
"Suck shit out my ass, mahfah!"
"I don't understand if that means yes or no."
She looked at him, eyes narrowed, suspecting some buried barb of satire in that calm voice (Eddie also wondered, but couldn't tell if there was or not), and after a moment she said sulkily, "I be still. Too damn hungry to kick up much dickens. You boys goan give me some real food or you jes goan starve me to death? Dat yo plan? You too chickenshit to choke me and I ain't nev' goan eat no poison, so dat must be you plan. Starve me out. Well, we see, sho. We goan see. Sho we are."
She offered them her bone-chilling sickle of a grin again.
Not long after she fell asleep.
Eddie touched the side of Roland's face. Roland glanced at him but did not pull away from the touch.
"I'm all right."
"Yeah, you're Jim-dandy. Well, I tell you what, Jim, we didn't get along very far today."
"I know." There was also the matter of having used the last live shell, but that was knowledge Eddie could do without, at least tonight. Eddie wasn't sick, but he was exhausted. Too exhausted for more bad news.
No, he's not sick, not yet, but if he goes too long without rest, gets tired enough, he'll get sick.
In a way, Eddie already was; both of them were. Cold-sores had developed at the corners of Eddie's mouth, and there was scaly patches on his skin. The gunslinger could feel his teeth loosening up in their sockets, and the flesh between his toes had begun to crack open and bleed, as had that between his remaining fingers. They were eating, but they were eating the same thing, day in and day out. They could go on that way for a time, but in the end they would die as surely as if they had starved.
What we have is Shipmate's Disease on dry land, Roland thought. Simple as that. How funny. We need fruit. We need greens.
Eddie nodded toward the Lady. "She's going to go right on making it tough."
"Unless the other one inside her comes back."
"That would be nice, but we can't count on it," Eddie said. He took a piece of blackened claw and began to scrawl aimless patterns in the dirt. "Any idea how far the next door might be?"
Roland shook his head.
"I only ask because if the distance between Number Two and Number Three is the same as the distance between Number One and Number Two, we could be in deep shit."
"We're in deep shit right now."
"Neck deep," Eddie agreed moodily. "I just keep wondering how long I can tread water."
Roland clapped him on the shoulder, a gesture of affection so rare it made Eddie blink.
"There's one thing that Lady doesn't know," he said.
"Oh? What's that?"
"We Honk Mahfahs can tread water a long time."
Eddie laughed at that, laughed hard, smothering his laughter against his arm so he wouldn't wake Detta up. He'd had enough of her for one day, please and thank you.
The gunslinger looked at him, smiling. "I'm going to turn in," he said. "Be—"
"—on my guard. Yeah. I will."
13
Screaming was next.
Eddie fell asleep the moment his head touched the bunched bundle of his shirt, and it seemed only five minutes later when Detta began screaming.
He was awake at once, ready for anything, some King Lobster arisen from the deep to take revenge for its slain children or a horror down from the hills. It seemed he was awake at once, anyway, but the gunslinger was already on his feet, a gun in his left hand.
When she saw they were both awake, Detta promptly quit screaming.
"Jes thought I'd see if you boys on yo toes," she said. "Might be woofs. Looks likely enough country for 'em. Wanted to make sho if I saw me a woof creepin up, I could get you on yo feet in time." But there was no fear in her eyes; they glinted with mean amusement.
"Christ," Eddie said groggily. The moon was up but barely risen; they had been asleep less than two hours.
The gunslinger holstered his gun.
"Don't do it again," he said to the Lady in the wheelchair.
"What you goan do if I do? Rape me?"
"If we were going to rape you, you would be one well-raped woman by now," the gunslinger said evenly. "Don't do it again."
He lay down again, pulling his blanket over him.
Christ, dear Christ, Eddie thought, what a mess this is, what a fucking … and that was as far as the thought went before trailing off into exhausted sleep again and then she was splintering the air with fresh shrieks, shrieking like a firebell, and Eddie was up again, his body flaming with adrenaline, hands clenched, and then she was laughing, her voice hoarse and raspy.
Eddie glanced up and saw the moon had advanced less than ten degrees since she had awakened them the first time.
She means to keep on doing it, he thought wearily. She means to stay awake and watch us, and when she's sure we're getting down into deep sleep, that place where you recharge, she's going to open her mouth and start bellowing again. She'll do it and do it and do it until she doesn't have any voice left to bellow with.
Her laughter stopped abruptly. Roland was advancing on her, a dark shape in the moonlight.
"You jes stay away from me, graymeat," Detta said, but there was a quiver of nerves in her voice. "You ain't goan do nothing to me."
Roland stood before her and for a moment Eddie was sure, completely sure, that the gunslinger had reached the end of his patience and would simply swat her like a fly. Instead, astoundingly, he dropped to one knee before her like a suitor about to propose marriage.
"Listen," he said, and Eddie could scarcely credit the silky quality of Roland's voice. He could see much the same deep surprise on Detta's face, only there fear was joined to it. "Listen to me, Odetta."
"Who you callin O-Detta? Dat ain my name."
"Shut up, bitch," the gunslinger said in a growl, and then, reverting to that same silken voice: "If you hear me, and if you can control her at all—"
"Why you talkin at me dat way? Why you talkin like you was talkin to somebody else? You quit dat honky jive! You jes quit it now, you hear me?"
"—keep her shut up. I can gag her, but I don't want to do that. A hard gag is a dangerous business. People choke."
"YOU QUIT IT YOU HONKY BULLSHIT VOODOO MAHFAH!"
"Odetta." His voice was a whisper, like the onset of rain.
She fell silent, staring at him with huge eyes. Eddie had never in his life seen such hate and fear combined in human eyes.
"I don't think this bitch would care if she did die on a hard gag. She wants to die, but maybe even more, she wants you to die. But you haven't died, not so far, and I don't think Detta is brand-new in your life. She feels too at home in you, so maybe you can hear what I'm saying, and maybe you can keep some control over her even if you can't come out yet.
"Don't let her wake us up a third time, Odetta.
"I don't want to gag her.
"But if I have to, I will."
He got up, left without looking back, rolled himself into his blanket again, and promptly fell asleep.
She was still staring at him, eyes wide, nostrils flaring.
"Honky voodoo bullshit," she whispered.
Eddie lay down, but this time it was a long time before sleep came to claim him, in spite of his deep tiredness. He would come to the brink, anticipate her screams, and snap back.
Three hours or so later, with the moon now going the other way, he finally dropped off.
Detta did no more screaming that night, either because Roland had frightened her, or because she wanted to conserve her voice for future alarums and excursions, or—possibly, just possibly—because Odetta had heard and had exercised the control the gunslinger had asked of her.
Eddie slept at last but awoke sodden and unrefreshed. He looked toward the chair, hoping against hope that it would be Odetta, please God let it be Odetta this morning—
"Mawnin, whitebread," Detta said, and grinned her sharklike grin at him. "Thought you was goan sleep till noon . You cain't be doin nuthin like dat, kin you? We got to bus us some miles here, ain't dat d'fac of d'matter? Sho! An I think you the one goan have to do most of de bustin, cause dat other fella, one with de voodoo eyes, he lookin mo peaky all de time, I declare he do! Yes! I doan think he goan be eatin anythin much longer, not even dat fancy smoked meat you whitebread boys keep fo when you done joikin on each other one's little bitty white candles. So let's go, whitebread! Detta doan want to be d'one keepin you."
Her lids and her voice both dropped a little; her eyes peeked at him slyly from their corners.
"Not f'um startin out, leastways."
Dis goan be a day you 'member, whitebread, those sly eyes promised. Dis goan be a day you 'member for a long, long time.
Sho.
14
They made three miles that day, maybe a shade under. Detta's chair upset twice. Once she did it herself, working her fingers slowly and unobtrusively over to that handbrake again and yanking it. The second time Eddie did with no help at all, shoving too hard in one of those goddamned sandtraps. That was near the end of the day, and he simply panicked, thinking he just wasn't going to be able to get her out this time, just wasn't. So he gave that one last titanic heave with his quivering arms, and of course it had been much too hard, and over she had gone, like Humpty Dumpty falling off his wall, and he and Roland had to labor to get her upright again. They finished the job just in time. The rope under her breasts was now pulled taut across her windpipe. The gunslinger's efficient running slipknot was choking her to death. Her face had gone a funny blue color, she was on the verge of losing consciousness, but still she went on wheezing her nasty laughter.
Let her be, why don't you? Eddie nearly said as Roland bent quickly forward to loosen the knot. Let her choke! I don't know if she wants to do herself like you said, but I know she wants to do US …so let her go!
Then he remembered Odetta (although their encounter had been so brief and seemed so long ago that memory was growing dim) and moved forward to help.
The gunslinger pushed him impatiently away with one hand. "Only room for one."
When the rope was loosened and the Lady gasping harshly for breath (which she expelled in gusts of her angry laughter), he turned and looked at Eddie critically. "I think we ought to stop for the night."
"A little further." He was almost pleading. "I can go a little further."
"Sho! He be one strong buck. He be good fo choppin one mo row cotton and he still have enough lef’ to give yo little bitty white candle one fine suckin-on t'night."
She still wouldn't eat, and her face was becoming all stark lines and angles. Her eyes glittered in deepening sockets.
Roland gave her no notice at all, only studied Eddie closely. At last he nodded. "A little way. Not far, but a little way."
Twenty minutes later Eddie called it quits himself. His arms felt like Jell-O.
They sat in the shadows of the rocks, listening to the gulls, watching the tide come in, waiting for the sun to go down and the lobstrosities to come out and begin their cumbersome cross-examinations.
Roland told Eddie in a voice too low for Detta to hear that he thought they were out of live shells. Eddie's mouth tightened down a little but that was all. Roland was pleased.
"So you'll have to brain one of them yourself," Roland said. "I'm too weak to handle a rock big enough to do the job … and still be sure."
Eddie was now the one to do the studying.
He had no liking for what he saw.
The gunslinger waved his scrutiny away.
"Never mind," he said. "Never mind, Eddie. What is, is."
"Ka," Eddie said.
The gunslinger nodded and smiled faintly. "Ka."
"Kaka," Eddie said, and they looked at each other, and both laughed. Roland looked startled and perhaps even a little afraid of the rusty sound emerging from his mouth. His laughter did not last long. When it had stopped he looked distant and melancholy.
"Dat laffin mean you fine'ly managed to joik each other off?" Detta cried over at them in her hoarse, failing voice. "When you goan get down to de pokin? Dat's what I want to see! Dat pokin!"
15
Eddie made the kill.
Detta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the other half.
"Nossuh!" she said, eyes sparking at him. "No SUH! You done put de poison in t'other end. One you trine to give me."
Without saying anything, Eddie look the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.
"Doan mean a thing," Detta said sulkily. "Leave me alone, graymeat."
Eddie wouldn't
He brought her another piece.
"You tear it in half. Give me whichever you want I'll eat it, then you eat the rest."
"Ain’t fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist' Chahlie. Git away f'um me is what I said, and git away f'um me is what I meant"
16
She did not scream in the night … but she was still there the next morning.
17
That day they made only two miles, although Detta made no effort to upset her chair; Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing inexorably together: Eddie's weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless days of sameness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland's deteriorating condition.
There were less sandtraps, but that was cold comfort. The ground was becoming grainier, more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand (in places bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there), and there were so many large rocks now jutting from this odd combination of sand and soil that Eddie found himself detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady's chair around the sandtraps. And soon enough, he saw, there would be no beach left at all. The hills, brown and cheerless things, were drawing steadily closer. Eddie could see the ravines which curled between them, looking like chops made by an awkward giant wielding a blunt cleaver. That night, before falling asleep, he heard what sounded like a very large cat squalling far up in one of them.
The beach had seemed endless, but he was coming to realize it had an end after all. Somewhere up ahead, those hills were simply going to squeeze it out of existence. The eroded hills would march down to the sea and then into it, where they might become first a cape or peninsula of sorts, and then a series of archipelagoes.
That worried him, but Roland's condition worried him more.
This time the gunslinger seemed not so much to be burning as fading, losing himself, becoming transparent.
The red lines had appeared again, marching relentlessly up the underside of his right arm toward the elbow.
For the last two days Eddie had looked constantly ahead, squinting into the distance, hoping to see the door, the door, the magic door. For the last two days he had waited for Odetta to reappear.
Neither had appeared.
Before falling asleep that night two terrible thoughts came to him, like some joke with a double punchline:
What if there was no door?
What if Odetta Holmes was dead?
18
"Rise and shine, mahfah!" Detta screeched him out of unconsciousness. "I think it jes be you and me now, honey-chile. Think yo frien done finally passed on. I think yo frien be pokin the devil down in hell."
Eddie looked at the rolled huddled shape of Roland and for one terrible moment he thought the bitch was right. Then the gunslinger stirred, moaned furrily, and pawed himself into a sitting position.
"Well looky yere!" Detta had screamed so much that now there were moments when her voice disappeared almost entirely, becoming no more than a weird whisper, like winter wind under a door. "I thought you was dead, Mister Man!"
Roland was getting slowly to his feet. He still looked to Eddie like a man using the rungs of an invisible ladder to make it. Eddie felt an angry sort of pity, and this was a familiar emotion, oddly nostalgic. After a moment he understood. It was like when he and Henry used to watch the fights on TV, and one fighter would hurt the other, hurt him terribly, again and again, and the crowd would be screaming for blood, and Henry would be screaming for blood, but Eddie only sat there, feeling that angry pity, that dumb disgust; he'd sat there sending thought-waves at the referee: Stop it, man, are you fucking blind? He's dying out there! DYING! Stop the fucking fight!
There was no way to stop this one.
Roland looked at her from his haunted feverish eyes. "A lot of people have thought that, Detta." He looked at Eddie. "You ready?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Are you?"
"Yes."
"Can you?"
"Yes."
They went on.
Around ten o'clock Detta began rubbing her temples with her fingers.
"Stop," she said. "I feel sick. Feel like I goan throw up."
"Probably that big meal you ate last night," Eddie said, and went on pushing. "You should have skipped dessert. I told you that chocolate layer cake was heavy."
"I goan throw up! I—"
"Stop, Eddie!" the gunslinger said.
Eddie stopped.
The woman in the chair suddenly twisted galvanically, as if an electric shock had run through her. Her eyes popped wide open, glaring at nothing.
"IBROKE YO PLATE YOU STINKIN OLE BLUE LADY!" she screamed. "IBROKE IT AND I'M FUCKIN GLAD ID―"
She suddenly slumped forward in her chair. If not for the ropes, she would have fallen out of it.
Christ, she's dead, she's had a stroke and she's dead, Eddie thought. He started around the chair, remembered how sly and tricksy she could be, and stopped as suddenly as he had started. He looked at Roland. Roland looked back at him evenly, his eyes giving away not a thing.
Then she moaned. Her eyes opened.
Her eyes.
Odetta's eyes.
"Dear God, I've fainted again, haven't I?" she said. "I'm sorry you had to tie me in. My stupid legs! I think I could sit up a little if you—"
That was when Roland's own legs slowly came unhinged and he swooned some thirty miles south of the place where the Western Sea 's beach came to an end.
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