by Stephen King
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 apparently 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, I don’t talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world has moved on since then.
Roland would have understood.
7
When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHAD- OWS 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 of 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. Steadicam. 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 fr
iends, 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 simple 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.