by Stephen King
Ten minutes after that, a dark red car rolled almost silently up to the place where King had been struck and Jake killed. It pulled over. Roland opened the door on the passenger side and got in, still wincing against pain that wasn’t there. Oy jumped up between his feet without being asked, lay down with his nose against his flank, and appeared to go to sleep.
“Did you see to your boy?” Mrs. Tassenbaum asked, pulling away.
“Yes. Thankee-sai.”
“I guess I can’t put a marker there,” she said, “but later on I could plant something. Is there something you think he might like?”
Roland looked up, and for the first time since Jake’s death, he smiled. “Yes,” he said. “A rose.”
TWELVE
They rode for almost twenty minutes without speaking. She stopped at a small store over the Bridgton town line and pumped gas: MOBIL, a brand Roland recognized from his wanderings. When she went in to pay, he looked up at los ángeles, running clear and true across the sky. The Path of the Beam, and stronger already, unless that was just his imagination. He supposed it didn’t matter if it was. If the Beam wasn’t stronger now, it soon would be. They had succeeded in saving it, but Roland felt no gladness at the idea.
When Mrs. Tassenbaum came out of the store, she was holding a singlet-style shirt with a picture of a bucka-wagon on it — a real bucka-wagon — and words written in a circle. He could make out HOME, but nothing else. He asked her what the words said.
“BRIDGTON OLD HOME DAYS, JULY 27TH TO JULY 30TH, 1999,” she told him. “It doesn’t really matter what it says as long as it covers your chest. Sooner or later we’ll want to stop, and there’s a saying we have in these parts: ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service.’ Your boots look beat-up and busted down, but I guess they’ll get you through the door of most places. But topless? Huh-uh, no way José. I’ll get you a better shirt later on—one with a collar— and some decent pants, too. Those jeans are so dirty I bet they’d stand up on their own.” She engaged in a brief (but furious) interior debate, then plunged. “You’ve got I’m going to say roughly two billion scars. And that’s just on the part of you I can see.”
Roland did not respond to this. “Do you have money?” he asked.
“I got three hundred dollars when I went back to the house to get my car, and I had thirty or forty with me. Also credit cards, but your late friend said to use cash as long as I could. Until you go on by yourself, if possible. He said there might be folks looking for you. He called them ‘low men.’”
Roland nodded. Yes, there would be low men out there, and after all he and his ka-tet had done to thwart the plans of their master, they’d be twice as eager to have his head. Preferably smoking, and on the end of a stick. Also the head of sai Tassenbaum, if they found out about her.
“What else did Jake tell you?” Roland asked.
“That I must take you to New York City, if you wanted to go there. He said there’s a door there that will take you to a place called Faydag.”
“Was there more?”
“Yes. He said there was another place you might want to go before you used the door.” She gave him a timid little sideways glance. “Is there?”
He considered this, then nodded.
“He also spoke to the dog. It sounded as if he was giving the dog …orders? Instructions?” She looked at him doubtfully. “Could that be?”
Roland thought it could. The woman Jake could only ask. As for Oy … well, it might explain why the bumbler hadn’t stayed by the grave, much as he might have wanted to.
For awhile they traveled in silence. The road they were on led to a much busier one, filled with cars and trucks running at high speed in many lanes. She had to stop at a tollbooth and give money to get on. The toll-taker was a robot with a basket for an arm. Roland thought he might be able to sleep, but he saw Jake’s face when he closed his eyes. Then Eddie’s, with the useless bandage covering his forehead. If this is what comes when I close my eyes, he thought, what will my dreams be like?
He opened his eyes again and watched as she drove down a smooth, paved ramp, slipping into the heavy flow of traffic without a pause. He leaned over and looked up through the window on his side. There were the clouds, los ángeles, traveling above them, in the same direction. They were still on the Path of the Beam.
THIRTEEN
“Mister? Roland?”
She thought he had been dozing with his eyes open. Now he turned to her from where he sat in the passenger bucket seat with his hands in his lap, the good one folded over the mutilated one, hiding it. She thought she had never seen anyone who looked less like he belonged in a Mercedes-Benz. Or any automobile. She also thought she had never seen a man who looked so tired.
But he’s not used up. I don’t think he’s anywhere near used up, although he may think otherwise.
“The animal … Oy?”
“Oy, yes.” The bumbler looked up at the sound of his name, but didn’t repeat it as he might have done only yesterday.
“Is it a dog? It isn’t, exactly, is it?”
“He, not it. And no, he’s not a dog.”
Irene Tassenbaum opened her mouth, then closed it again. This was difficult, because silence in company did not come naturally to her. And she was with a man she found attractive, even in his grief and exhaustion (perhaps to some degree because of those things). A dying boy had asked her to take this man to New York City, and get him to the places he needed to go once they were there. He’d said that his friend knew even less about New York than he did about money, and she believed that was true. But she also believed this man was dangerous. She wanted to ask more questions, but what if he answered them? She understood that the less she knew, the better her chance, once he was gone, of merging into the life she’d been living at quarter to four this afternoon. To merge the way you merged onto the turnpike from a side road. That would be best.
She turned on the radio and found a station playing “Amazing Grace.” The next time she looked at her strange companion, she saw that he was looking out at the darkening sky and weeping. Then she chanced to look down and saw something much odder, something that moved her heart as it had not been moved in fifteen years, when she had miscarried her one and only effort to have a child.
The animal, the not-dog, the Oy … he was crying, too.
FOURTEEN
She got off 95 just over the Massachusetts state line and checked them into a pair of side-by-side rooms in a dump called the Sea Breeze Inn. She hadn’t thought to bring her driving glasses, the ones she called her bug’s-asshole glasses (as in “when I’m wearing these things I can see up a bug’s asshole”), and she didn’t like driving at night, anyway. Bug’s-asshole glasses or not, driving at night fried her nerves, and that was apt to bring on a migraine. With a migraine she would be of no use to either of them, and her Imitrex was sitting uselessly in the medicine cabinet back in East Stoneham.
“Plus,” she told Roland, “if this Tet Corporation you’re looking for is in a business building, you won’t be able to get inside until Monday, anyway.” Probably not true; this was the sort of man who got into places when he wanted. You couldn’t keep him out. She guessed that was part of his attraction to a certain kind of woman.
In any case, he did not object to the motel. No, he would not go out to dinner with her, and so she found the nearest bearable fast-food franchise and brought back a late dinner from KFC. They ate in Roland’s room. Irene fixed Oy a plate without being asked. Oy ate a single piece of the chicken, holding it neatly between his paws, then went into the bathroom and appeared to fall asleep on the mat in front of the tub.
“Why do they call this the Sea Breeze?” Roland asked. Unlike Oy, he was eating some of everything, but he did it with no sign of pleasure. He ate like a man doing work. “I get no smell of the ocean.”
“Well, probably you can when the wind’s in the right quarter and blowing a hurricane,” she said. “It’s what we call poetic license, Roland.”
He nodd
ed, showing unexpected (to her, at least) understanding. “Pretty lies,” he said.
“Yes, I suppose.”
She turned on the television, thinking it would divert him, and was shocked by his reaction (although she told herself that what she felt was amusement). When he told her he couldn’t see it, she had no idea how to take what he was saying; her first thought that it was some sort of oblique and teddibly intellectual criticism of the medium itself. Then she thought he might be speaking (in equally oblique fashion) of his sorrow, his state of mourning. It wasn’t until he told her that he heard voices, yes, but saw only lines which made his eyes water that she realized he was telling her the literal truth: he could not see the pictures on the screen. Not the rerun of Roseanne, not the infomercial for Ab-Flex, not the talking head on the local news. She held on until the story about Stephen King (taken by LifeFlight helicopter to Central Maine General in Lewiston, where an early-evening operation seemed to have saved his right leg—condition listed as fair, more operations ahead, road to recovery expected to be long and uncertain), then turned the TV off.
She bussed up the trash—there was always so much more of it from a KFC meal, somehow—bade Roland an uncertain goodnight (which he returned in a distracted, I’m-not-really-here way that made her nervous and sad), then went to her own room next door. There she watched an hour of an old movie in which Yul Brynner played a robot cowboy that had run amok before turning it off and going into the bathroom to brush her teeth. There she realized that she had—of course, dollink!— forgotten her toothbrush. She did the best she could with her finger, then lay down on the bed in her bra and panties (no nightgown either). She spent an hour like that before realizing that she was listening for sounds from beyond the paper-thin wall, and for one sound in particular: the crash of the gun he had considerately not worn from the car to the motel room. The single loud shot that would mean he had ended his sorrow in the most direct fashion.
When she couldn’t stand the quiet from the other side of the wall any longer she got up, put her clothes back on, and went outside to look at the stars. There, sitting on the curb, she found Roland, with the not-dog at his side. She wanted to ask how he had gotten out of his room without her being aware of it (the walls were so thin and she had been listening so hard), but she didn’t. She asked him what he was doing out here, instead, and found herself unprepared for both his answer and for the utter nakedness of the face he turned to hers. She kept expecting a patina of civilization from him—a nod in the direction of the niceties—but there was none of that. His honesty was terrifying.
“I’m afraid to go to sleep,” he said. “I’m afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me.”
She looked at him steadily in the mixture of light: that which fell from her room and the horrible heartless Halloween glare of the parking-lot arc sodiums. Her heart was beating hard enough to shake her entire chest, but when she spoke her voice sounded calm enough: “Would it help if I lay down with you?”
He considered this, and nodded. “I think it would.”
She took his hand and they went into the room she had rented him. He stripped off his clothes with no sign of embarrassment and she looked, awestruck and afraid, at the scars which lapped and dented his upper body: the red pucker of a knife-slash on one bicep, the milky weal of a burn on another, the white crisscross of lash-marks between and on the shoulderblades, three deep dimples that could only be old bullet-holes. And, of course, there were the missing fingers on his right hand. She was curious but knew she’d never dare ask about those.
She took off her own outer clothes, hesitated, then took off her bra, as well. Her breasts hung down, and there was a dented scar of her own on one, from a lumpectomy instead of a bullet. And so what? She never would have been a Victoria’s Secret model, even in her prime. And even in her prime she’d never mistaken herself for tits and ass attached to a life-support system. Nor had ever let anyone else—including her husband—make the same mistake.
She left her panties on, however. If she had trimmed her bush, maybe she would have taken them off. If she’d known, getting up that morning, that she would be lying down with a strange man in a cheap hotel room while some weird animal snoozed on the bathmat in front of the tub. Of course she would have packed a toothbrush and a tube of Crest, too.
When he put his arms around her, she gasped and stiffened, then relaxed. But very slowly. His hips pressed against her bottom and she felt the considerable weight of his package, but it was apparently only comfort he had in mind; his penis was limp.
He clasped her left breast, and ran his thumb into the hollow of the scar left by the lumpectomy. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Well,” she said (now her voice was no longer even), “according to my doctor, in another five years it would have been cancer. So they cut it out before it could … I don’t know, exactly—metastasizing comes later, if it comes at all.”
“Before it could flower?” he asked.
“Yes. Right. Good.” Her nipple was now as hard as a rock, and surely he must feel that. Oh, this was so weird.
“Why is your heart beating so hard?” he asked. “Do I frighten you?”
“I … yes.”
“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “Killing’s done.” A long pause in the dark. They could hear the faint drone of cars on the turnpike. “For now,” he added.
“Oh,” she said in a small voice. “Good.”
His hand on her breast. His breath on her neck. After some endless time that might have been an hour or only five minutes, his breathing lengthened, and she knew he had gone to sleep. She was pleased and disappointed at the same time. A few minutes later she went to sleep herself, and it was the best rest she’d had in years. If he had bad dreams of his gone friends, he did not disturb her with them. When she woke in the morning it was eight o’clock and he was standing naked at the window, looking out through a slit he’d made in the curtains with one finger.
“Did you sleep?” she asked.
“A little. Will we go on?”
FIFTEEN
They could have been in Manhattan by three o’clock in the afternoon, and the drive into the city on a Sunday would have been far easier than during the Monday morning rush hour, but hotel rooms in New York were expensive and even doubling up would have necessitated breaking out a credit card. They stayed at a Motel 6 in Harwich, Connecticut, instead. She took only a single room and that night he made love to her. Not because he exactly wanted to, she sensed, but because he understood it was what she wanted. Perhaps what she needed.
It was extraordinary, although she could not have said precisely how; despite the feel of all those scars beneath her hands—some rough, some smooth—there was the sense of making love to a dream. And that night she did dream. It was a field filled with roses she dreamed of, and a huge Tower made of slate-black stone standing at the far end. Partway up, red lamps glowed … only she had an idea they weren’t lamps at all, but eyes.
Terrible eyes.
She heard many singing voices, thousands of them, and understood that some were the voices of his lost friends. She awoke with tears on her cheeks and a feeling of loss even though he was still beside her. After today she’d see him no more. And that was for the best. Still, she would have given anything in her life to have him make love to her again, even though she understood it had not been really her he had been making love to; even when he came into her, his thoughts had been far away, with those voices.
Those lost voices.
CHAPTER III:
NEW YORK AGAIN
(ROLAND SHOWS ID)
ONE
On the morning of Monday the 21st of June in the year of ’99, the sun shone down on New York City just as if Jake Chambers did not lie dead in one world and Eddie Dean in another; as if Stephen King did not lie in a Lewiston hospital’s Intensive Care ward, drifting out into the light of consciousness only for brief intervals; as if Susannah Dean did not sit alone with
her grief aboard a train racing on ancient, chancy tracks across the dark wastes of Thunderclap toward the ghost-town of Fedic. There were others who had elected to accompany her on her journey at least that far, but she’d asked them to give her space, and they had complied with her wish. She knew she would feel better if she could cry, but so far she hadn’t been able to do that—a few random tears, like meaningless showers in the desert, was the best she had been able to manage—although she had a terrible feeling that things were worse than she knew.
Fuck, dat ain’t no “feelin,” Detta crowed contemptuously from her place deep inside, as Susannah sat looking out at the dark and rocky wastelands or the occasional ruins of towns and villages that had been abandoned when the world moved on. You havin a jenna-wine intuition, girl! Only question you cain’t answer is whether it be ole long tall and ugly or Young Master Sweetness now visitin wit’ yo man in the clearin.
“Please, no,” she murmured. “Please not either of them, God, I can’t stand another one.”
But God remained deaf to her prayer, Jake remained dead, the Dark Tower remained standing at the end of Can’-Ka No Rey, casting its shadow over a million shouting roses, and in New York the hot summer sun shone down on the just and the unjust alike.
Can you give me hallelujah?
Thankee-sai.
Now somebody yell me a big old God-bomb amen.
TWO
Mrs. Tassenbaum left her car at Sir Speedy-Park on Sixty-third Street (the sign on the sidewalk showed a knight in armor behind the wheel of a Cadillac, his lance sticking jauntily out of the driver’s window), where she and David rented two stalls on a yearly basis. They kept an apartment nearby, and Irene asked Roland if he would like to go there and clean up … although the man actually didn’t look all that bad, she had to admit. She’d bought him a fresh pair of jeans and a white button-up shirt which he had rolled to the elbows; she had also bought a comb and a tube of hair-mousse so strong its molecular makeup was probably closer to Super-Glue than it was to Vitalis. With the unruly mop of gray-flecked hair combed straight back from his brow, she had revealed the spare good looks and angular features of an interesting crossbreed: a mixture of Quaker and Cherokee was what she imagined. The bag of Orizas was once more slung over his shoulder. His gun, the holster wrapped in its shell-belt, was in there, too. He had covered it from enquiring eyes with the Old Home Days tee-shirt.