The Waste Lands (44 page)

Now it was Roland’s turn to be surprised. “Are you sure? I did not come to take what belongs to you and yours, Old Mother.”

“I’m sure as sure can be. I’ve worn this day and night for over a hundred years, gunslinger. Now you shall wear it, and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower, and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth.” She slipped the chain over his head. The cross dropped into the open neck of his deerskin shirt as if it belonged there. “Go now. We have broken bread, we have held palaver, we have your blessing, and you have ours. Go your course in safety. Stand and be true.” Her voice trembled and broke on the last word.

Roland rose to his feet, then bowed and tapped his throat three times. “Thankee-sai.”

She bowed back, but did not speak. Now there were tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Ready?” Roland asked.

Eddie nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

“All right,” Roland said. “Let’s go.”

They walked down what remained of the town’s high street, Jake pushing Susannah’s wheelchair. As they passed the last building (TRADE & CHANGE, the faded sign read), he looked back. The old people were still gathered about the stone marker, a forlorn cluster of humanity in the middle of this wide, empty plain. Jake raised his hand. Up to this point he had managed to hold himself in, but when several of the old folks—Si, Bill, and Till among them—raised their own hands in return, Jake burst into tears himself.

Eddie put an arm around his shoulders. “Just keep walking, sport,” he said in an uneasy voice. “That’s the only way to do it.”

“They’re so old!” Jake sobbed. “How can we just leave them like this? It’s not right!”

“It’s
ka
,” Eddie said without thinking.

“Is it? Well
ka
suh-suh-
sucks
!”

“Yeah, hard,” Eddie agreed . . . but he kept walking. So did Jake, and he didn’t look back again. He was afraid they would still be there, standing at the center of their forgotten town, watching until Roland and his friends were out of view. And he would have been right.

THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah’s eucalyptus trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.

“I just don’t see why we didn’t stay,” Jake said. “The blind lady invited us, and we didn’t get very far, anyway. I’m still so full I’m practically waddling.”

Eddie smiled. “Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and leisurely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and crapping rabbit-turds. If you’d told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I would have laughed in your face.”

“Is your middle name really Cantor?”

“Yes, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”

“I won’t. Why
didn’t
we stay, Eddie?”

Eddie sighed. “Because we would have found out they needed firewood.”

“Huh?”

“And after we got the firewood, we would’ve found they
also
needed fresh meat, because they served us the last of what they had. And we’d be real creeps not to replace what we ate, right? Especially when we’re packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on-oh, not to the
front
of the town, that’d be dangerous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few days, and what’s a few days, right?”

Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and preoccupied. “I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit,” he said.

“Nope. I’ve just been telling Jake the facts as I see them.”

“So what
would
have been wrong with that?” Jake asked. “This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It’s not going anywhere, is it?”

“A few days, then a few more, then a few more.” Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly.
I’m starting to sound just like him
, he thought. And yet he knew that he was only speaking the truth. “Maybe we’d see that their spring is getting silted up, and it wouldn’t be polite to go until we’d dug it out for them. But why stop there when we could take another couple of weeks and build a jackleg waterwheel, right? They’re old, and have no more foot.” He glanced at Roland, and his voice was tinged with reproach. “I tell you what—when I think of Bill and Till there stalking a herd of wild buffalo, I get the shivers.”

“They’ve been doing it a long time,” Roland said, “and I imagine they could show us a thing or two. They’ll manage. Meantime, let’s get that wood-it’s going to be a chilly night.”

But Jake wasn’t done with it yet. He was looking closely—almost sternly—at Eddie. “You’re saying we could never do enough for them, aren’t you?”

Eddie stuck out his lower lip and blew hair off his forehead. “Not exactly. I’m saying it would never be any easier to leave than it was today. Harder, maybe, but no easier.”

“It
still
doesn’t seem right.”

They reached the place that would become, once the fire was lit, just another campsite on the road to the Dark Tower. Susannah had eased herself out of her chair and was lying on her back with her hands behind her head, looking up at the stars. Now she sat up and began to arrange the wood in the way Roland had shown her months ago.

“Right is what all this is about,” Roland said. “But if you look too long at the small rights, Jake-the ones that lie close at hand- it’s easy to lose sight of the big ones that stand farther off. Things are out of joint—going wrong and getting worse. We see it all around us, but the answers are still ahead. While we were helping the twenty or thirty people left in River Crossing, twenty or thirty thousand more might be suffering or dying somewhere else. And if there is any place in the universe where these things can be set right, it’s at the Dark Tower.”

“Why? How?” Jake asked. “What
is
this Tower, anyway?”

Roland squatted beside the fire Susannah had built, produced his flint and steel, and began to flash sparks into the kindling. Soon small flames were growing amid the twigs and dried handfuls of grass. “I can’t answer those questions,” he said. “I wish I could.”

That, Eddie thought, was an exceedingly clever reply. Roland had said I
can’t answer
. . . but that wasn’t the same thing as
I don’t know
. Far from it.

SUPPER CONSISTED OF WATER and greens. They were all still recovering from the heavy meal they’d eaten in River Crossing; even Oy refused the scraps Jake offered him after the first one or two.

“How come you wouldn’t talk back there?” Jake scolded the bumbler. “You made me look like an idiot!”

“Id-yit!” Oy said, and put his muzzle on Jake’s ankle.

“He’s talking better all the time,” Roland remarked. “He’s even starting to sound like you, Jake.”

“Ake,” Oy agreed, not lifting his muzzle. Jake was fascinated by the gold rings in Oy’s eyes; in the flickering light of the fire, they seemed to revolve slowly.

“But he wouldn’t talk to the old people.”

“Bumblers are choosy about that sort of thing,” Roland said. “They’re odd creatures. If I had to guess, I’d say this one was driven away by its own pack.”

“Why do you think so?”

Roland pointed at Oy’s flank. Jake had cleaned off the blood (Oy hadn’t enjoyed this, but had stood for it) and the bite was healing, although the bumbler still limped a little. “I’d bet an eagle that’s the bite of another bumbler.”

“But why would his own pack—”

“Maybe they got tired of his chatter,” Eddie said. He had lain down beside Susannah and put an arm about her shoulders.

“Maybe they did,” Roland said, “especially if he was the only one of them who was still trying to talk. The others might have decided he was too bright-or too uppity-for their taste. Animals don’t know as much about jealousy as people, but they’re not ignorant of it, either.”

The object of this discussion closed his eyes and appeared to go to sleep . . . but Jake noticed his ears began twitching when the talk resumed.

“How bright
are
they?” Jake asked.

Roland shrugged. “The old groom I told you about—the one who said a good bumbler is good tuck—swore he had one in his youth that could add. He said it told sums either by scratching on the stable floor or pushing stones together with its muzzle.” He grinned. It lit his whole face, chasing away the gloomy shadows which had lain there ever since they left River Crossing. “Of course, grooms and fishermen are born to live. ”

A companionable silence fell among them, and Jake could feel drowsiness stealing over him. He thought he would sleep soon, and that was fine by him. Then the drums began, coming out of the southeast in rhythmic pulses, and he sat back up. They listened without speaking.

“That’s a rock and roll backbeat,” Eddie said suddenly. “I know it is. Take away the guitars and that’s what you’ve got left. In fact, it sounds quite a lot like Z.Z. Top.”

“Z.Z.
who?
” Susannah asked.

Eddie grinned. “They didn’t exist in your when,” he said. “I mean, they probably did, but in ’63 they would have been just a bunch of kids going to school down in Texas.” He listened. “I’ll be goddamned if that doesn’t sound just like the backbeat to something like ‘Sharp-Dressed Man’ or ‘Velcro Fly.’ ”

“ ‘Velcro Fly’?” Jake said. “That’s a stupid name for a song.”

“Pretty funny, though,” Eddie said. “You missed it by ten years or so, sport.”

“We’d better roll over,” Roland said. “Morning comes early.”

“I can’t sleep with that shit going on,” Eddie said. He hesitated, then said something which had been on his mind ever since the morning when they had pulled Jake, whitefaced and shrieking, through the doorway and into this world. “Don’t you think it’s about time we exchanged stories, Roland? We might find out we know more than we think.”

“Yes, it’s almost time for that. But not in the dark.” Roland rolled onto his side, pulled up a blanket, and appeared to go to sleep.

“Jesus,” Eddie said. “Just like that.” He blew a disgusted little whistle between his teeth.

“He’s right,” Susannah said. “Come on, Eddie—go to sleep.”

He grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. “Yes, Mummy.”

Five minutes later he and Susannah were dead to the world, drums or no drums. Jake found that his own sleepiness had stolen away, however. He lay looking up at the strange stars and listening to that steady, rhythmic throbbing coming out of the darkness. Maybe it was the Pubes, boogying madly to a song called “Velcro Fly” while they worked themselves into a sacrificial killing frenzy.

He thought of Blaine the Mono, a train so fast that it travelled across the huge, haunted world trailing a sonic boom behind it, and that led him naturally enough to thoughts of Charlie the Choo-Choo, who had been retired to a forgotten siding when the new Burlington Zephyr arrived, rendering him obsolete. He thought of the expression on Charlie’s face, the one that was supposed to be cheery and pleasant but somehow wasn’t: He thought about The Mid-World Railway Company, and the empty lands between St. Louis and Topeka. He thought about how Charlie had been all ready to go when Mr. Martin needed him, and how Charlie could blow his own whistle and feed his own firebox. He wondered again if Engineer Bob had sabotaged the Burlington Zephyr in order to give his beloved Charlie a second chance.

At last—and as suddenly as it had begun—the rhythmic drumming stopped, and Jake drifted off to sleep.

HE DREAMED, BUT NOT of the plaster-man.

He dreamed instead that he was standing on a stretch of blacktop highway somewhere in the Big Empty of western Missouri. Oy was with him. Railroad warning signals—white X-shapes with red lights in their centers—flanked the road. The lights were flashing and bells were ringing.

Now a humming noise began to rise out of the southeast getting steadily louder. It sounded like lightning in a bottle.

Here it comes
, he told Oy.

Ums!
Oy agreed.

And suddenly a vast pink shape two wheels long was slicing across the plain toward them. It was low and bullet-shaped, and when Jake saw it, a terrible fear filled his heart. The two big windows flashing in the sun at the front of the train looked like eyes.

Don’t ask it silly questions,
Jake told Oy.
It won’t play silly games. It’s just an awful choo-choo train, and its name is Blaine the Pain.

Suddenly Oy leaped onto the tracks and crouched there with his ears flattened back. His golden eyes were blazing. His teeth were bared in a desperate snarl.

No
! Jake screamed.
No, Oy
!

But Oy paid no attention. The pink bullet was bearing down on the tiny, defiant shape of the billy-bumbler now, and that humming seemed to be crawling all over Jake’s skin, making his nose bleed and shattering the fillings in his teeth.

He leaped for Oy, Blaine the Mono (or was it Charlie the Choo-Choo?) bore down on them, and he woke up suddenly, shivering, bathed in sweat. The night seemed to be pressing down upon him like a physical weight. He rolled over and felt frantically for Oy. For a terrible moment he thought the bumbler was gone, and then his fingers found the silky fur. Oy uttered a squeak and looked at him with sleepy curiosity.

“That’s all right,” Jake whispered in a dry voice. “There’s no train. It was just a dream. Go back to sleep, boy.”

“Oy,” the bumbler agreed, and closed his eyes again.