by Stephen King
He blinked, then gave her a puzzled look. “Why no, ma’am-I’ve never heard this part of creation called anything but the White Lands.”
The puzzled look was bogus. She was almost sure of it. Old Joe Collins, cheery as Father Christmas in a children’s play, had just lied to her. She wasn’t sure why, and before she could pursue it, Roland asked sharply: “Would you let that go for now?
Would you, for your father’s sake?”
“Yes, Roland,” she said meekly. “Of course.”
Roland turned back to Joe, still holding Susannah on his hip.
“Might take you as long as nine days, I guess,” Joe said, scratching his chin, “for that road can be plenty slippery, especially after Bill packs down the snow, but you can’t get him to stop. He’s got his orders to follow. His programmin, he calls it.”
The old man saw Roland getting ready to speak and raised his hand. “Nay, nay, I’m not drawrin it out to irritate cher, sir or sai or whichever you prefer-it’s just that I’m not much used to cump’ny.
“Once you get down b’low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days a-walkin, but ain’t no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There’s another one of those Positronics huts down there with any number a’ wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like golf-carts, they are. The bat’tries are all dead, natcherly-flat as yer hat-but there’s a gennie there, too,
Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I was down there, for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could charge up one of those wheelies, why that’d cut your time down to four days at most. So here’s what I think: if you had to hoof it the whole way, it might take you as long as nineteen days. If you can go the last leg in one O’Them hummers-that’s what I call em, hummers, for that’s the sound they make when they’re runnin-I should say ten days. Maybe eleven.”
The room fell silent. The wind gusted, throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and Susannah once more marked how it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles and eaves, no doubt.
“Less than three weeks, even if we had to walk,” Roland said. He reached out toward the Polaroid photograph of the dusky stone tower standing against the sunset sky, but did not quite touch it. It was as if, Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. “After all the years and all the miles.”
Not to mention the gallons of spilled blood, Susannah thought, but she would not have said this even if the two of them had been alone. There was no need to; he knew how much blood had been spilled as well as she did. Bvit there was something offkey here. Off-key or downright wrong. And the gunslinger did not seem to know that.
Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. Why would folks call any land Empathica?
And why would this pleasant old man lie about it?
“Tell me something, Joe Collins,” Roland said.
“Aye, gunslinger, if I can.”
“Have you been right up to it? Laid your hand on the stone of it?”
The old man looked at first to see if Roland was joshing him.
When he was sure that wasn’t the case, he looked shocked. “No,”
he said, and for the first time sounded as American as Susannah herself. “That pitcher’s as close as I dared go. The edge of the rosefield. I’m gonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards away.
What the robot’d call five hundred arcs O’The wheel.”
Roland nodded. “And why not?”
“Because I thought to go closer might kill me, but I wouldn’t be able to stop. The voices would draw me on. So I thought then, and so I do think, even today.”
SEVEN
After dinner-surely the finest meal Susannah had had since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly the best in her entire life-the sore on her face burst wide open. It was Joe Collins’s fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only inhabitant of Odd’s Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last thing he would have wanted, surely.
He served chicken, roasted to a turn and especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas (“Only canned, say sorry,” he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank it with childish greed, although both passed on “the teensy piss o’ rum.” Oy had his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then set it on the floor by die stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room, licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while watching the humes with his ears up.
“I couldn’t eat dessert so don’t ask me,” Susannah said when she’d finished cleaning her plate for the second time, sopping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. “I’m not sure I can even get down from this chair.”
“Well, that’s all right,” Joe said, looking disappointed, “maybe later. I’ve got a chocolate pudding and a butterscotch one.”
Roland raised his napkin to muffle a belch and then said, “I could eat a dab of both, I think.”
“Well, come to that, maybe I could, too,” Susannah allowed.
How many eons since she’d tasted butterscotch?
When they were done with the pudding, Susannah offered to help with the cleaning-up but Joe waved her away, saying he’d just put the pots and plates in the dishwasher to rinse and then run “the whole happy bunch of em” later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland went back and forth into the kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessed that the little piss o’ rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one large piss by the end of the meal) might have had something to do with it.
He poured coffee and the three of them (four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room. Outside it was growing dark and the wind was screaming louder than ever. Mordred’s out there someplace, hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought, and once again had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she hadn’t known that, murderous or not, he must still be a child.
“Tell us how you came to be here, Joe,” Roland invited.
Joe grinned. “That’s a hair-raising story,” he said, “but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don’t mind tellin it.” The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. “It’s nice, havin folks to talk to for a little bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says nuffink back.”
He’d started off trying to be a teacher, Joe said, but quickly discovered that life wasn’t for him. He liked the kids-loved them, in fact-but hated all the administrative bullshit and the way the system seemed set up to make sure no square pegs escaped the relentless rounding process. He quit teaching after only three years and went into show business.
“Did you sing or dance?” Roland wanted to know.
“Neither one,” Joe replied. “I gave em the old stand-up.”
“Stand-up?”
“He means he was a comedian,” Susannah said. “He told jokes.”
“Correct!” Joe said brighdy. “Some folks actually thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority.”
He got an agent whose previous enterprise, a discount men’s clothing store, had gone bankrupt. One thing led to another, he said, and one gigled to another, too. Eventually he found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him. He almost never worked the weekends; on die weekends, even the thirdrate clubs wanted to book rock-and-roll bands.
This was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there’d been no shortage of what Joe called “current events material": hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers, moviestars, and, as always, politics-but he said he had been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and Ge
orge Carlin do the current-events shtick if they wanted it; he’d stick to Speaking of my mother-in-law and They say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell you about this Irish girl I met.
During his recitation, an odd (and-to Susannah, at least-rather poignant) thing happened. Joe Collins’s Mid-World accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began to crossfade into an accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American.
She kept expecting to hear bird come out of his mouth as boid, heard-AS hoid, but she guessed that was only because she’d spent so much time with Eddie. She thought Joe Collins was one of those odd natural mimics whose voices are the auditory equivalent of Silly Putty, taking impressions that fade as quickly as diey rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it probably was boid and hoid; in Pittsburgh it would be burrd and hurrd; the Giant Eagle supermarket would become Jaunt Iggle.
Roland stopped him early on to ask if a comic was like a court jester, and the old man laughed heartily. “You got it. Just think of a bunch of people sitting around in a smoky room with drinks in their hands instead of the king and his courtiers.”
Roland nodded, smiling.
“There are advantages to being a funnyman doing onenighters in the Midwest, though,” he said. “If you tank in Dubuque, all that happens is you end up doing twenty minutes instead of forty-five and then it’s on to the next town. There are probably places in Mid-World where they’d cut off your damn head for stinking up the joint.”
At this the gunslinger burst out laughing, a sound that still had the power to startle Susannah (although she was laughing herself). “You say true, Joe.”
In the summer of 1972, Joe had been playing a nightclub called Jango’s in Cleveland, not far from the ghetto. Roland interrupted again, this time wanting to know what a ghetto was.
“In the case of Hauck,” Susannah said, “it means a part of the city where most of the people are black and poor, and the cops have a habit of swinging their billyclubs first and asking questions later.”
“Bing!"Joe exclaimed, and rapped his knuckles on the top of his head. “Couldn’t have said it better myself!”
Again there came that odd, babyish crying sound from the front of the house, but this time the wind was in a relative lull.
Susannah glanced at Roland, but if the gunslinger heard, he gave no sign.
It was the wind, Susannah told herself. What else could it be"?
Mordred, her mind whispered back. Mordred out there, freezing.
Mordred out there dying while we sit in here with our hot coffee.
But she said nothing.
There had been trouble in Hauck for a couple of weeks, Joe said, but he’d been drinking pretty heavily (“Hitting it hard” was how he put it) and hardly realized that the crowd at his second show was about a fifth the size of the one at the first. “Hell, I was on a roll,” he said. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I was knocking myself dead, rolling me in the aisles.”
Then someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the club’s front window (Molotov cocktailnd amp; a term Roland understood)
, and before you could say Take my mother-in-law… please, the place was on fire. Joe had boogied out the back, through the stage door. He’d almost made it to the street when three men
(“all very black, all roughly the size of NBA centers”) grabbed him. Two held; the third punched. Then someone swung a botde. Boom-boom, out go the lights. He had awakened on a grassy hillside near a deserted town called Stone’s Warp, according to the signs in the empty buildings along Main Street. To Joe Collins it had looked like the set of a Western movie after all the actors had gone home.
It was around this time that Susannah decided she did not believe much of sai Collins’s story. It was undoubtedly entertaining, and given Jake’s first entry into Mid-World, after being run over in die street and killed while on his way to school, it was not totally implausible. But she still didn’t believe much of it.
The question was, did it matter?
“You couldn’t call it heaven, because there were no clouds and no choirs of angels,” Joe said, “but I decided it was some sort of an afterlife, just the same.” He had wandered about. He found food, he found a horse (Lippy), and moved on. He had met various roving bands of people, some friendly, some not, some true-threaded, some mutie. Enough so he’d picked up some of the lingo and a little Mid-World history; certainly he knew about the Beams and the Tower. At one point he’d tried to cross the Badlands, he said, but he’d gotten scared and turned back when his skin began to break out in all sorts of sores and weird blemishes.
“I got a boil on my ass, and that was the final touch,” he said.
“Six or eight years ago, this might have been. Me n Lippy said the hell with going any further. That was when I found this place, which is called Westring, and when Stuttering Bill found me.
He’s got a litde doctorin, and he lanced the boil on my bottom.”
Roland wanted to know if Joe had witnessed the passage of the Crimson King as that mad creature made his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower. Joe said he had not, but that six months ago there had been a terrible storm (“a real boilermaker”) that drove him down into his cellar. While he was there the electric lights had failed, genny or no genny, and as he cowered in the dark, a sense had come to him that some terrible creature was close by, and that it might at any moment touch Joe’s mind and follow his thoughts to where he was hiding.
“You know what I felt like?” he asked them.
Roland and Susannah shook their heads. Oy did the same, in perfect imitation.
“Snack-food,” Joe said. “Potential snack-food.”
This part of his story’s true, Susannah thought. He may have changed it around a little, but basically it’s true. And if she had any reason to think that, it was only because the idea of the Crimson King traveling in his own portable storm seemed horribly plausible.
“What did you do?” Roland asked.
“Went to sleep,” he said. “It’s a talent I’ve always had, like doing impressions-although I don’t do famous voices in my act, because they never go over out in the sticks. Not unless you’re Rich Little, at least. Strange but true. I can sleep pretty much on command, so that’s what I did down in the cellar.
When I woke up again the lights were back on and the… the whatever-it-was was gone. I know about the Crimson King, of course, I see folks from time to time still-nomads like you three, for the most part-and they talk about him. Usually they fork the sign of the evil eye and spit between their fingers when they do. You think that was him, huh? You think the Crimson King actually passed by Odd’s Lane on his way to the Tower.” Then, before they had a chance to answer: “Well, why not? Tower Road’s the main throughfare, after all. It goes all the way there.”
You know it was him, Susannah thought. What game are you playing, Joe?
The thin cry that was most definitely not the wind came again. She no longer thought it was Mordred, though. She thought that maybe it was coming from the cellar where Joe had gone to hide from the Crimson King… or so he’d said. Who was down there now? And was he hiding, as Joe had done, or was he a prisoner?
“It hasn’t been a bad life,” Joe was saying. “Not the life I expected, not by any manner or means, but I got a theory-the folks who end up living the lives they expected are more often than not the ones who end up takin sleepin pills or stickin the barrel of a gun in their mouths and pullin the trigger.”
Roland seemed still to be a few turns back, because he said, ’You were a court jester and the customers in these inns were your court.”
Joe smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. Susannah frowned.
Had she seen his teeth before? They had been doing a lot of laughing and she should have seen them, but she couldn’t remember that she actually had. Certainly he didn’t have the mush-mouth sound of someone whose teeth are mosdy gone
(such people had consulted with her father on many occasions, most of them in searc
h of artificial replacements). If she’d had to guess earlier on, she would have said he had teeth but they were down to nothing but pegs and nubbins, and-
And what’s the matter with you, girl? He might be lying about a few things, but he surely didn’t grow afresh set of teeth since you sat down to dinner! You’re letting your imagination run away with you.
Was she? Well, it was possible. And maybe that thin cry was nothing but the sound of the wind in the eaves at the front of the house, after all.
“I’d hear some of your jokes and stories,” Roland said. “As you told them on the road, if it does ya.”
Susannah looked at him closely, wondering if the gunslinger had some ulterior motive for this request, but he seemed genuinely interested. Even before seeing the Polaroid of the Dark Tower tacked to the living room wall (his eyes returned to it constandy as Joe told his story), Roland had been invested by a kind of hectic good cheer that was really not much like him at all. It was almost as if he were ill, edging in and out of delirium.
Joe Collins seemed surprised by the gunslinger’s request, but not at all displeased. “Good God,” he said. “I haven’t done any stand-up in what seems like a thousand years… and considering the way time stretched there for awhile, maybe it has been a thousand. I’m not sure I’d know how to begin.”
Susannah surprised herself by saying, “Try.”
EIGHT
Joe thought about it and then stood up, brushing a few errant crumbs from his shirt. He limped to the center of the room, leaving his crutch leaning against his chair. Oy looked up at him with his ears cocked and his old grin on his chops, as if anticipating the entertainment to come. For a moment Joe looked uncertain. Then he took a deep breath, let it out, and gave them a smile. “Promise you won’t throw no tomatoes if I stink up the joint,” he said. “Remember, it’s been a long time.”
“Not after you took us in and fed us,” Susannah said. “Never in life.”
Roland, always literal, said, “We have no tomatoes, in any case.”