The Waste Lands (12 page)

“You got my wheelchair pretty muddy, white boy,” Susannah said. “It’s all goan be in my repote.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Next carwash we come to, I’ll push you through myself. I’ll even Turtle-wax the goddamn thing. Okay?”

She smiled. “You got a date, handsome.”

Eddie had one of Roland’s waterskins cinched around his waist. He tapped it. “Okay?”

“Yes,” Roland said. “Not too much now; a little more for all of us before we set out again. That way no one takes a cramp.”

“Roland, Eagle Scout of Oz,” Eddie said, and giggled as he unslung the waterskin.

“What is this Oz?”

“A make-believe place in a movie,” Susannah said.

“Oz was a lot more than that. My brother Henry used to read me the stories once in a while. I’ll tell you one some night, Roland.”

“That would be fine,” the gunslinger replied seriously. “I am hungry to know more of your world.”

“Oz isn’t our world, though. Like Susannah said, it’s a make-believe place—”

Roland handed them chunks of meat which had been wrapped in broad leaves of some sort. “The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of. I would hear of this Oz.”

“Okay, that’s a date, too. Suze can tell you the one about Dorothy and Toto and the Tin Woodman, and I’ll tell you all the rest.” He bit into his piece of meat and rolled his eyes approvingly. It had taken the flavor of the leaves in which it had been rolled, and was delicious. Eddie wolfed his ration, stomach gurgling busily all the while. Now that he was getting his breath back, he felt good—great, in fact. His body was growing a solid sheath of muscle, and every part of it felt at peace with every other part.

Don’t worry, he
thought
. Everything will be arguing again by tonight. I think he’s gonna push on until I’m ready to drop in my tracks.

Susannah ate more delicately, chasing every second or third bite with a little sip of water, turning the meat in her hands, eating from the outside in. “Finish what you started last night,” she invited Roland. “You said you thought you understood these conflicting memories of yours.”

Roland nodded. “Yes. I think both memories are true. One is a little truer than the other, but that does not
negate
the truth of that other.”

“Makes no sense to me,” Eddie said. “Either this boy Jake was at the way station or he wasn’t, Roland.”

“It is a paradox—something that is and isn’t at the same time. Until it’s resolved, I will continue divided. That’s bad enough, but the basic split is widening. I can feel that happening. It is . . . unspeakable.”

“What do you think caused it?” Susannah asked.

“I told you the boy was pushed in front of a car.
Pushed.
Now, who do we know who liked to push people in front of things?”

Understanding dawned in her face. “Jack Mort. Do you mean he was the one who pushed this boy into the street?”

“Yes.”

“But you said the man in black did it,” Eddie objected. “Your buddy Walter. You said that the boy
saw
him—a man who looked like a priest. Didn’t the kid even hear him say he was? ‘Let me through, I’m a priest,’ something like that?”

“Oh, Walter was there. They were
both
there, and they both pushed Jake.”

“Somebody bring the Thorazine and the straitjacket,” Eddie called. “Roland just went over the high side.”

Roland paid no attention to this; he was coming to understand that Eddie’s jokes and clowning were his way of dealing with stress. Cuthbert had not been much different . . . as Susannah was, in her way, not so different from Alain. “What exasperates me about all of this,” he said, “is that I should have
known
. I was
in
Jack Mort, after all, and I had access to his thoughts, just as I had access to yours, Eddie, and yours, Susannah. I
saw
Jake while was in Mort. I saw him through Mort’s eyes,
and I knew Mort planned
to
push him.
Not only that; I
stopped
him from doing it. All I had to do was enter his body. Not that he knew that was what it was; he was concentrating so hard on what he planned to do that he actually thought I was a fly landing on his neck.”

Eddie began to understand. “If Jake wasn’t pushed into the street, he never died. And if he never died, he never came into this world. And if he never came into this world, you never met him at the way station. Right?”

“Right. The thought even crossed my mind that if Jack Mort meant to kill the boy, I would have to stand aside and let him do it. To avoid creating the very paradox that is tearing me apart. But I couldn’t do that. I . . I . . .”

“You couldn’t kill this kid twice, could you?” Eddie asked softly. “Every time I just about make up my mind that you’re as mechanical as that bear, you surprise me with something that actually seems human. Goddam”

“Quit it, Eddie,” Susannah said.

Eddie took a look at the gunslinger’s slightly lowered face and grimaced. “Sorry, Roland. My mother used to say that my mouth had a bad habit of running away with my mind.”

“It’s all right. I had a friend who was the same way”

“Cuthbert?”

Roland nodded. He looked at his diminished right hand for a long moment, then clenched it into a painful fist, sighed, and looked up at them again. Somewhere, deeper in the forest, a lark sang sweetly.

“Here is what I believe. If I had not entered Jack Mort when I did, he
still
wouldn’t have pushed Jake that day. Not then. Why not?
Ka-tet
. Simply that. For the first time since the last of the friends with whom I set forth on this quest died, I have found myself once again at the center of
ka-tet.
”

“Quartet?” Eddie asked doubtfully.

The gunslinger shook his head. “
Ka—
the word you think of as ‘destiny,’ Eddie, although the actual meaning is much more complex and hard to define, as is almost always the case with words of the High Speech. And
tet
, which means a group of people with the same interests and goals. We three are a
tet
, for instance.
Ka-tet
is the place where many lives are joined by fate.”

“Like in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
,” Susannah murmured.

“What’s that?” Roland asked.

“A story about some people who die together when the bridge they’re crossing collapses. It’s famous in our world.”

Roland nodded his understanding. “In this case,
ka-tet
bound Jake, Walter, Jack Mort, and me. There was no trap, as I first suspected when I realized who Jack Mort meant to be his next victim, because
ka-tet
cannot be changed or bent to the will of any one person. But
ka-tet
can be
seen, known
, and
understood
. Walter saw, and Walter knew.” The gunslinger struck his thigh with his fist and exclaimed bitterly, “How he must have been laughing inside when I finally caught up to him!”

“Let’s go back to what would have happened if you hadn’t messed up Jack Mort’s plans on the day he was following Jake,” Eddie said. “You’re saying that if
you
hadn’t stopped Mort, someone or something else would have. Is that right?”

“Yes—because it wasn’t the
right
day for Jake to die. It was
close
to the right day, but not
the
right day. I felt that, too. Perhaps, just before he did it, Mort would have seen someone watching him. Or a perfect stranger would have intervened. Or—”

“Or a cop,” Susannah said. “He might have seen a cop in the wrong place and at the wrong time.”

“Yes. The exact reason—the agent of
ka-tet—
doesn’t matter. I know from firsthand experience that Mort was as wily as an old fox. If he sensed any slightest thing wrong, he would have called it off and waited for another day.

“I know something else, as well. He hunted in disguise. On the day he dropped the brick on Detta Holmes’s head, he was wearing a knitted cap and an old sweater several sizes too big for him. He wanted to look like a wine-bibber, because he pushed the brick from a building where a large number of sots kept their dens. You see?”

They nodded.

“On the day, years later, when he pushed you in front of the train, Susannah, he was dressed as a construction worker. He was wearing a big yellow helmet he thought of as a ‘hardhat’ and a fake moustache. On the day when he actually
would
have pushed Jake into traffic, causing his death,
he would have been dressed as a priest.
”

“Jesus,” Susannah nearly whispered. “The man who pushed him in New York was Jack Mort, and the man he saw at the way station was this fella you were chasing—Walter.”

“Yes.”

“And the little boy thought they were the same man because they were both wearing the same kind of black robe?”

Roland nodded. “There was even a physical resemblance between Walter and Jack Mort. Not as if they were brothers, I don’t mean that, but both were tall men with dark hair and very pale complexions. And given the fact that Jake was dying when he got his only good look at Mort and was in a strange place and scared almost witless when he got his only good look at Walter, I think his mistake was both understandable and forgivable. If there’s a horse’s ass in this picture, it’s me, for not realizing the truth sooner.”

“Would Mort have known he was being used?” Eddie asked. Thinking back to his own experiences and wild thoughts when Roland had invaded his mind, he didn’t see how Mort could not know . . . but Roland was shaking his head.

“Walter would have been extremely subtle. Mort would have thought the priest disguise his own idea . . . or so I believe. He would not have recognized the voice of an intruder—of Walter—whispering deep within his mind, telling him what to do.” “Jack Mort,” Eddie marvelled. “It was Jack Mort all the time.”

“Yes . . . with assistance from Walter. And so I ended up saving Jake’s life after all. When I made Mort jump from the subway platform in front of the train, I changed everything.”

Susannah asked, “If this Walter was able to enter our world—through his own private door, maybe—whenever he wanted, couldn’t he have used someone else to push your little boy? If. he could suggest to Mort that he dress up like a priest, then he could make somebody else do it . . . What, Eddie? Why are you shaking your head?”

“Because I don’t think Walter would want that to happen. What Walter wanted is what
is
happening . . . for Roland to be losing his mind, bit by bit. Isn’t that right?”

The gunslinger nodded.

“Walter couldn’t have done it that way even if he
had
wanted to,” Eddie added, “because he was dead long before Roland found the doors on the beach. When Roland went through that last one and into Jack Mort’s head, ole Walt’s messin-around days were done.”

Susannah thought about this, then nodded her head. “I see . . .
I think
. This time-travel business is some confusing shit, isn’t it?”

Roland began to pick up his goods and strap them back into place. “Time we were moving on.”

Eddie stood up and shrugged into his pack. “You can take comfort from one thing, at least,” he told Roland. “You—or this
ka-tet
business—were able to save the kid after all.”

Roland had been knotting the harness-strings at his chest. Now he looked up, and the blazing clarity of his eyes made Eddie flinch backward. “Have I?” he asked harshly. “Have I really? I’m going insane an inch at a time, trying to live with two versions of the same reality. I had hoped at first that one or the other would begin to fade away, but that’s not happening. In fact, the exact opposite is happening: those two realities are growing louder and louder in my head, clamoring at each other like opposing factions which must soon go to war. So tell me this, Eddie: How do you suppose
Jake
feels?
How do you suppose it feels to know you are dead in one world and alive in another?
”

The lark sang again, but none of them noticed. Eddie stared into the faded blue eyes blazing out of Roland’s pale face and could not think of a thing to say.

THEY CAMPED ABOUT FIFTEEN miles due east of the dead bear that night, slept the sleep of the completely exhausted (even Roland slept the night through, although his dreams were nightmare carnival-rides), and were up the next morning at sunrise. Eddie kindled a small fire without speaking, and glanced at Susannah as a pistol-shot rang out in the woods nearby.

“Breakfast,” she said.

Roland returned three minutes later with a hide slung over one shoulder. On it lay the freshly gutted corpse of a rabbit. Susannah cooked it. They ate and moved on.

Eddie kept trying to imagine what it would be like to have a memory of your own death. On that one he kept coming up short.

SHORTLY AFTER NOON THEY entered an area where most of the trees had been pulled over and the bushes mashed flat—it looked as though a cyclone had touched down here many years before, creating a wide and dismal alley of destruction.

“We’re close to the place we want to find,” Roland said. “He pulled down everything to clear the sightlines. Our friend the bear wanted no surprises. He was big, but not complacent.”

“Has it left
us
any surprises?” Eddie asked.

“He may have done so.” Roland smiled a little and touched Eddie on the shoulder. “But there’s this—they’ll be
old
surprises.”

Their progress through this zone of destruction was slow. Most of the fallen trees were very old—many had almost rejoined the soil from which they had sprung—but they still made enough of a tangle to create a formidable obstacle course. It would have been difficult enough if all three of them had been able-bodied; with Susannah strapped to the gunslinger’s back in her harness, it became an exercise in aggravation and endurance.

The flattened trees and jumbles of underbrush served to obscure the bear’s backtrail, and that also worked to slow their speed. Until midday they had followed claw-marks as clear as trail-blazes on the trees. Here, however, near its starting point, the bear’s rage had not been full-blown, and these handy signs of its passage disappeared. Roland moved slowly, looking for droppings in the bushes and tufts of hair on the tree-trunks over which the bear had climbed. It took all afternoon to cross three miles of this decayed jumble.