by Stephen King
“Well, no, not exactly,” Joe said. “It’s the freezer that makes em, beauty; that thing on the front just drops em into your drink.”
This struck her funny, and she laughed. She looked down, saw Oy looking up at her with his old fiendish grin, and that made her laugh harder than ever. Mod cons aside, the smell of the kitchen was wonderfully nostalgic: sugar and spice and everything nice.
Roland was looking up at the fluorescent lights and Collins nodded. “Yar, yar, I got all the ’lectric,” he said. “Hot-air furnace, too, ain’t it nice? And nobody ever sends me a bill! The genny’s in a shed round to t’other side. It’s a Honda, and quiet as Sunday morning! Even when you get right up on top of its little shed, you don’t hear nuffink but mmmmmm. Stuttering Bill changes the propane tank and does the maintenance when it needs maintaining, which hasn’t been but twice in all the time I’ve been here. Nawp, Joey’s lyin, he’ll soon be dyin. Three times, it’s been. Three in all.”
“Who’s Stuttering Bill?” Susannah asked, just as Roland was asking “How long have you been here?”
Joe Collins laughed. “One at a time, me foine new friends, one at a time!” He had set his stick aside to struggle out of his coat, put his weight on his bad leg, made a low snarling sound, and nearly fell over. Would have fallen over, had Roland not steadied him.
“Thankee, thankee, thankee,” Joe said. “Although I tell you what, it wouldn’t have been the first time I wound up with my nose on that lernoleum! But, as you saved me a tumble, it’s your question I’ll answer first. I’ve been here, Odd Joe of Odd’s Lane, just about seb’nteen years. The only reason I can’t tell you bang-on is that for awhile there, time got pretty goddam funny, if you know what I mean.”
“We do,” Susannah said. “Believe me, we do.”
Collins was now divesting himself of a sweater, and beneath it was another. Susannah’s first impression had been of a stout old man who stopped just short of fat. Now she saw that a lot of what she’d taken for fat was nothing but padding. He wasn’t as desperately scrawny as his old horse, but he was a long shout from stout.
“Now Stuttering Bill,” the old man continued, removing the second sweater, “he be a robot. Cleans the house as well as keepin my generator runnin…and a-course he’s the one that does the plowin. When I first come here, he only stuttered once in awhile; now it’s every second or third word. What I’ll do when he finally runs down I dunno.” To Susannah’s ear, he sounded singularly unworried about it.
“Maybe he’ll get better, now that the Beam’s working right again,” she said.
“He might last a little longer, but I doubt like hell that he’ll get any better,” Joe said. “Machines don’t heal the way living things do.” He’d finally reached his thermal undershirt, and here the stripdown stopped. Susannah was grateful. Looking at the somehow ghastly barrel of the horse’s ribs, so close beneath the short gray fur, had been enough. She had no wish to see the master’s, as well.
“Off with yer coats and your leggings,” Joe said. “I’ll get yez eggnog or whatever else ye’d like in a minute or two, but first I’d show yer my livin room, for it’s my pride, so it is.”
Six
There was a rag rug on the living room floor that would have looked at home in Gramma Holmes’s house, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a table beside it. The table was heaped with magazines, paperback books, a pair of spectacles, and a brown bottle containing God knew what sort of medicine. There was a television, although Susannah couldn’t imagine what old Joe might possibly watch on it (Eddie and Jake would have recognized the VCR sitting on the shelf beneath). But what took all of Susannah’s attention—and Roland’s, as well—was the photograph on one of the walls. It had been thumbtacked there slightly askew, in a casual fashion that seemed (to Susannah, at least) almost sacrilegious.
It was a photograph of the Dark Tower.
Her breath deserted her. She worked her way over to it, barely feeling the knots and nubbles of the rag rug beneath her palms, then raised her arms. “Roland, pick me up!”
He did, and she saw that his face had gone dead pale except for two hard balls of color burning in his thin cheeks. His eyes were blazing. The Tower stood against the darkening sky with sunset painting the hills behind it orange, the slitted windows rising in their eternal spiral. From some of those windows there spilled a dim and eldritch glow. She could see balconies jutting out from the dark stone sides at every two or three stories, and the squat doors that opened onto them, all shut. Locked as well, she had no doubt. Before the Tower was the field of roses, Can’-Ka No Rey, dim but still lovely in the shadows. Most of the roses were closed against the coming dark but a few still peeped out like sleepy eyes.
“Joe!” she said. Her voice was little more than a whisper. She felt faint, and it seemed she could hear singing voices, far and wee. “Oh, Joe! This picture…!”
“Aye, mum,” he said, clearly pleased by her reaction. “It’s a good ’un, ain’t it? Which is why I pinned it up. I’ve got others, but this is the best. Right at sunset, so the shadow seems to lie forever back along the Path of the Beam. Which in a way it does, as I’m sure ye both must know.”
Roland’s breathing in her right ear was rapid and ragged, as if he’d just run a race, but Susannah barely noticed. For it was not just the subject of the picture that had filled her with awe.
“This is a Polaroid!”
“Well…yar,” he said, sounding puzzled at the level of her excitement. “I suppose Stuttering Bill could have brung me a Kodak if I’d ast for one, but how would I ever have gotten the fillum developed? And by the time I thought of a video camera—for the gadget under the TV’d play such things—I was too old to go back, and yonder nag ’uz too old to carry me. Yet I would if I could, for it’s lovely there, a place of warm-hearted ghosts. I heard the singing voices of friends long gone; my Ma and Pa, too. I allus—”
A paralysis had seized Roland. She felt it in the stillness of his muscles. Then it broke and he turned from the picture so fast that it made Susannah dizzy. “You’ve been there?” he asked. “You’ve been to the Dark Tower?”
“Indeed I have,” said the old man. “For who else do ye think took that pitcher? Ansel Fuckin Adams?”
“When did you take it?”
“That’s from my last trip,” he said. “Two year ago, in the summer—although that’s lower land, ye must know, and if the snow ever comes to it, I’ve never seen it.”
“How long from here?”
Joe closed his bad eye and calculated. It didn’t take him long, but to Roland and Susannah it seemed long, very long indeed. Outside, the wind gusted. The old horse whinnied as if in protest at the sound. Beyond the frost-rimmed window, the falling snow was beginning to twist and dance.
“Well,” he said, “ye’re on the downslope now, and Stuttering Bill keeps Tower Road plowed for as far as ye’d go; what else does the old whatchamacallit have to do with his time? O’ course ye’ll want to wait here until this new nor’east jeezer blows itself out—”
“How long once we’re on the move?” Roland asked.
“Rarin t’go, ain’tcha? Aye, hot n rarin, and why not, for if you’ve come from In-World ye must have been many long years gettin this far. Hate to think how many, so I do. I’m gonna say it’d take you six days to get out of the White Lands, maybe seven—”
“Do you call these lands Empathica?” Susannah asked.
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. But there was something off-key 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 the 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, sop-ping 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 brightly. “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 gig led 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 the weekends, even the third-rate 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, movie-stars, and, as always, politics—but he said he had been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George 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 cross-fade 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 impression
s that fade as quickly as they 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 one-nighters 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?