by Stephen King
Everyone listened to this solemnly, nodding their heads as they ate their Rockets, sucked their Popsicles, or smoked their Kents. Everyone knew that Skipper Brannigan was a fuckin pussy and Jimmie was full of shit, but no one said so. Christ, no. If they didn’t pretend to believe Jimmie Polio’s outrageous lies, no one would pretend to believe theirs.
Tommy Fredericks opted for John Parelli. Georgie Pratt went for Csaba Drabnik, also known around the nabe as The Mad Fuckin Hungarian. Frank Duganelli nominated Larry McCain, even though Larry was in Juvenile Detention; Larry fuckin ruled, Frank said.
By then it was around to Henry Dean. He gave the question the weighty consideration it deserved, then put his arm around his surprised brother’s shoulders. Eddie, he said. My little bro. He’s the man.
They all stared at him, stunned-and none more stunned than Eddie. His jaw had been almost down to his belt-buckle. And then Jimmie Polio said. Come on. Henry, stop fuckin around. This a serious question. Who ’d you want watching your hack if the shit was gonna come down?
I am being serious. Henry had replied.
Why Eddie? Georgie Pratt had asked, echoing the question which had been in Eddie’s own mind. He couldn’t 't fight his way out of a paper bag. A wet one. So why the fuck?
Henry thought some more-not, Eddie was convinced, because he didn’t know why, but because he had to think about how to articulate it. Then he said: Because when Eddie’s in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
The image of Jake returned, one memory stepping on another. Jake scraping steel on flint, flashing sparks at the kindling of their campfire, sparks that fell short and died before they lit.
He could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Move your flint in closer, Roland said, and now there was a third memory, one of Roland at the door they’d come to at the end of the beach, Roland burning with fever, close to death, shaking like a maraca, coughing, his blue bombardier’s eyes fixed on Eddie, Roland saying, Come a little closer, Eddie-come a little closer for your father’s sake!
Because he wanted to grab me, Eddie thought. Faintly, almost as if it were coming through one of those magic doors from some other world, he heard Blaine telling them that the endgame had commenced; if they had been saving their best riddles, now was the time to trot them out. They had an hour.
An hour! Only an hour!
His mind tried to fix on that and Eddie nudged it away. Something was happening inside him (at least he prayed it was), some desperate game of association, and he couldn’t let his mind get fucked up with deadlines and consequences and all that crap; if he did, he’d lose whatever chance he had. It was, in a way, like seeing something in a piece of wood, something you could carve out-a bow, a slingshot, perhaps a key to open some unimaginable door. You couldn’t look too long, though, at least to start with. You’d lose it if you did. It was almost as if you had to carve while your own back was turned.
He could feel Blaine’s engines powering up beneath him. In his mind’s eye he saw the flint flash against the steel, and in his mind’s ear he heard Roland telling Jake to move the flint in closer. And don’t hit it with the steel, Jake; scrape it.
Why am I here? If this isn’t what I want, why does my mind keep coming hack to this place?
Because it’s as close as I can get and still stay out of the hurt-zone. Only a medium-sized hurt, actually, but it made me think of Henry. Being put down by Henry.
Henry said you could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Yes. I always loved him for that. That was great.
And now Eddie saw Roland move Jake’s hands, one holding flint and the other steel, closer to the kindling. Jake was nervous. Eddie could see it; Roland had seen it, too. And in order to ease his nerves, take his mind off the responsibility of lighting the fire, Roland had-
He asked the kid a riddle.
Eddie Dean blew breath into the keyhole of his memory. And this time the tumblers turned.
2
The green dot was closing in on Topeka, and for the first time Jake felt vibration… as if the track beneath them had decayed to a point where Blaine’s compensators could no longer completely handle the problem. With the sense of vibration there at last came a feeling of speed. The walls and ceiling of the Barony Coach were still opaqued, but Jake found he didn’t need to see the countryside blurring past to imagine it. Blaine was rolling full out now, leading his last sonic boom across the waste lands to the place where Mid-World ended, and Jake also found it easy to imagine the transteel piers at the end of the monorail. They would be painted in diagonal stripes of yellow and black. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.
“TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES,” Blaine said complacently. “WOULD YOU TRY ME AGAIN, GUNSLINGER?”
“I think not, Blaine.” Roland sounded exhausted. “I’ve done with you; you’ve beaten me. Jake?”
Jake got to his feet and faced the route-map. In his chest his heartbeat seemed very slow but very hard, each pulse like a fist slamming on a drumhead. Oy crouched between his feet, looking anxiously up into his face.
“Hello, Blaine,” Jake said, and wet his lips.
“HELLO, JAKE OF NEW YORK.” The voice was kindly-the voice, perhaps, of a nice old fellow with a habit of molesting the children he from time to time leads into the bushes. “WOULD YOU TRY ME WITH RIDDLES FROM YOUR BOOK? OUR TIME TOGETHER GROWS SHORT.”
“Yes,” Jake said. “I would try you with these riddles. Give me your understanding of the truth concerning each, Blaine.”
“IT IS FAIRLY SPOKEN, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I WILL DO AS YOU ASK.”
Jake opened the book to the place he had been keeping with his finger. Ten riddles. Eleven, counting Samson’s riddle, which he was saving for last. If Blaine answered them all (as Jake now believed he probably would), Jake would sit down next to Roland, take Oy onto his lap, and wait for the end. There were, after all, other worlds than these.
“Listen, Blaine: In a tunnel of darkness lies a beast of iron. It can only attack when pulled back. What is it?”
“A BULLET.” No hesitation.
“Walk on the living, they don’t even mumble. Walk on the dead, they mutter and grumble. What are they?”
“FALLEN LEAVES.” No hesitation, and if Jake really knew in his heart that the game was lost, why did he feel such despair, such bitterness, such anger?
Because he’s a pain, that’s why. Blaine is a really BIG pain, and I’d like to push his face in it, just once. I think even making him stop is second to that on my wish-list.
Jake turned the page. He was very close to Riddle-De-Dum’s tom-out answer section now; he could feel it under his finger, a kind of jagged lump. Very close to the end of the book. He thought of Aaron Deepneau in the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Aaron Deepneau telling him to come back anytime, play a little chess, and oh just by the way, old fatso made a pretty good cup of coffee. A wave of homesickness so strong it was like dying swept over him. He felt he would have sold his soul for a look at New York; hell, he would have sold it for one deep lung-filling breath of Forty-second Street at rush hour.
He fought it off and went to the next riddle.
“I am emeralds and diamonds, lost by the moon. I am found by the sun and picked up soon. What am I?”
“DEW.”
Still relentless. Still unhesitating.
The green dot grew closer to Topeka, closing the last of the distance on the route-map. One after another, Jake posed his riddles; one after another, Blaine answered them. When Jake turned to the last page, he saw a boxed message from the author or editor or whatever you called someone who put together books like this: We hope you’ve enjoyed the unique combination of imagination and logic known as RIDDLING!
I haven’t, Jake thought. I haven’t enjoyed it one little bit, and I hope you choke. Yet when he looked at the question above the message, he felt a thin thread of hope. It seemed to him that, in this case, at least, they really had sav
ed the best for last.
On the route-map, the green dot was now no more than a finger’s width from Topeka.
“Hurry up, Jake,” Susannah murmured.
“Blaine?”
“YES, JAKE OF NEW YORK.”
“With no wings, I fly. With no eyes, I see. With no arms, I climb. More frightening than any beast, stronger than any foe. I am cunning, ruthless, and tall; in the end, I rule all. What am I?”
The gunslinger had looked up, blue eyes gleaming. Susannah began to turn her expectant face from Jake to the route-map. Yet Blaine’s answer was as prompt as ever: “THE IMAGINATION OF MAN AND WOMAN.”
Jake briefly considered arguing, then thought, Why waste our time? As always, the answer, when it was right, seemed almost self-evident. “Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak true.”
“AND THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE IS ALMOST MINE, I WOT. NINETEEN MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS TO TERMINATION. WOULD YOU SAY MORE, JAKE OF NEW YORK? VISUAL SENSORS INDICATE YOU HAVE COME TO THE END OF YOUR BOOK, WHICH WAS NOT, I MUST SAY, AS GOOD AS I HAD HOPED.”
“Everybody’s a goddam critic,” Susannah said sotto voce. She wiped a tear from the comer of one eye; without looking directly at her, the gunslinger took her free hand. She clasped it tightly.
“Yes, Blaine, I have one more,” Jake said.
“EXCELLENT.”
“Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came sweetness.”
“THIS RIDDLE COMES FROM THE HOLY BOOK KNOWN AS 'OLD TESTAMENT BIBLE OF KING JAMES.'” Blaine sounded amused, and Jake felt the last of his hope slip away. He thought he might cry-not so much out of fear as frustration. “IT WAS MADE BY SAMSON THE STRONG. THE EATER IS A LION; THE SWEETNESS IS HONEY, MADE BY BEES WHICH HIVED IN THE LION’s SKULL. NEXT? YOU STILL HAVE OVER EIGHTEEN MINUTES, JAKE.”
Jake shook his head. He let go of Riddle-De-Dum! and smiled when Oy caught it neatly in his jaws and then stretched his long neck up to Jake, holding it out again. “I’ve told them all. I’m done.”
“SHUCKS, L’IL TRAILHAND, THAT’s A PURE-D SHAME,” Blaine said. Jake found this drawly John Wayne imitation all but unbearable in their current circumstances. “LOOKS LIKE I WIN THAT THAR GOOSE, UNLESS SOMEBODY ELSE CARES TO SPEAK UP. WHAT ABOUT YOU, OY OF MID-WORLD? GOT ANY RIDDLES, MY LITTLE BUMBLER BUDDY?”
“Oy!” the billy-bumbler responded, his voice muffled by the book. Still smiling, Jake took it and sat down next to Roland, who put an arm around him.
“SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK?”
She shook her head, not looking up. She had turned Roland’s hand over in her own, and was gently tracing the healed stumps where his first two fingers had been.
“ROLAND SON OF STEVEN? HAVE YOU REMEMBERED ANY OTHERS FROM THE FAIR-DAY RIDDLINGS OF GILEAD?”
Roland also shook his head… and then Jake saw that Eddie Dean was raising his. There was a peculiar smile on Eddie’s face, a peculiar shine in Eddie’s eyes, and Jake found that hope hadn’t deserted him, after all. It suddenly flowered anew in his mind, red and hot and vivid. Like… well, like a rose. A rose in the full fever of its summer.
“Blaine?” Eddie asked in a low tone. To Jake his voice sounded queerly choked.
“YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.” Unmistakable disdain.
“I have a couple of riddles,” Eddie said. “Just to pass the time between here and Topeka, you understand.” No, Jake realized, Eddie didn’t sound as if he were choking; he sounded as if he were trying to hold back laughter.
“SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”
3
Sitting and listening to Jake run through the last of his riddles, Eddie had mused on Roland’s tale of the Fair-Day goose. From there his mind had returned to Henry, travelling from Point A to Point B through the magic of associative thinking. Or, if you wanted to get Zen about it, via Trans-Bird Airlines: goose to turkey. He and Henry had once had a discussion about getting off heroin. Henry had claimed that going cold turkey wasn’t the only way; there was also, he said, such a thing as going cool turkey. Eddie asked Henry what you called a hype who had just administered a hot shot to himself, and, without missing a beat, Henry had said. You call that baked turkey. How they had laughed… but now, all this long, strange time later, it looked very much as if the joke was going to be on the younger Dean brother, not to mention the younger Dean brother’s new friends. Looked like they were all going to be baked turkey before much longer.
Unless you can yank it out of the zone.
Yes.
Then do it, Eddie. It was Henry’s voice again, that old resident of his head, but now Henry sounded sober and clear-minded. Henry sounded like his friend instead of his enemy, as if all the old conflicts were finally settled, all the old hatchets buried. Do it-make the devil set himself on fire. It’ll hurt a little, maybe, but you’ve hurt worse. Hell, I hurt you worse myself, and you survived. Survived just fine. And you know where to look.
Of course. In their palaver around the campfire Jake had finally managed to light. Roland had asked the kid a riddle to loosen him up, Jake had struck a spark into the kindling, and then they had all sat around the fire, talking. Talking and riddling.
Eddie knew something else, too. Blaine had answered hundreds of riddles as they ran southeast along the Path of the Beam, and the others believed that he had answered every single one of them without hesitation. Eddie had thought much the same… but now, as he cast his mind back over the contest, he realized an interesting thing: Blaine had hesitated.
Once.
He was pissed, too. Like Roland was.
The gunslinger, although often exasperated by Eddie, had shown real anger toward him just a single time after the business of carving the key, when Eddie had almost choked. Roland had tried to cover the depth of that anger-make it seem like nothing but more exasperation-but Eddie had sensed what was underneath. He had lived with Henry Dean for a long time, and was still exquisitely attuned to all the negative emotions. It had hurt him, too-not Roland’s anger itself, exactly, but the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been one of Henry’s favorite weapons.
Why did the dead baby cross the road? Eddie had asked. Because it was stapled to the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!
Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless but not pointless, Roland’s response had been strangely like Blaine’s: don’t care about taste. It’s senseless and unsolvable, and that’s what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.
But as Jake finished riddling Blaine, Eddie realized a wonderful, liberating thing: that word good was up for grabs. Always had been, always would be. Even if the man using it was maybe a thousand years old and could shoot like Buffalo Bill, that word was still up for grabs. Roland himself had admitted he had never been very good at the riddling game. His tutor claimed that Roland thought too deeply; his father thought it was lack of imagination. Whatever the reason, Roland of Gilead had never won a Fair-Day riddling. He had survived all his contemporaries, and that was certainly a prize of sorts, but he had never carried home a prize goose. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, but I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.
Eddie remembered trying to tell Roland that jokes were riddles designed to help you build up that often overlooked talent, but Roland had ignored him. The way, Eddie supposed, a color-blind person would ignore someone’s description of a rainbow.
Eddie thought Blaine also might have trouble thinking around comers.
He realized he could hear Blaine asking the others if they had any more riddles-even asking Oy. He could hear the mockery in Blaine’s voice, could hear it very well. Sure he could. Because he was coming back. Back from that fabled zone. Back to see if he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire. No gun would help this time, but maybe that was all right. Maybe that was all right because-
Because I shoot with my mind. My mind. God help me to shoot this overblown calculator with my mind. Help me shoot it from around the corner.
“Blai
ne?” he said, and then, when the computer had acknowledged him: “I have a couple of riddles.” As he spoke, he discovered a wonderful thing: he was struggling to hold back laughter.
4
“SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”
No time to tell the others to be on their guard, that anything might happen, and from the look of them, no need, either. Eddie forgot about them and turned his mil attention to Blaine.
“What has four wheels and flies?”
“THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID.” Disapproval-and dislike? Yeah, probably-all but oozing out of that voice. “ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME.”
Yes, Eddie thought. And what we all missed-because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland’s past or Jake’s book-is that the contest almost ended right there.
“You didn’t like that one, did you, Blaine?”
“I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID,” Blaine agreed. “PERHAPS THAT’s WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO?”
A smile lit Eddie’s face; he shook his finger at the route-map. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I’ll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.'”
“Hurry up!” Jake whispered at him. “If you can do something, do it!”
“It doesn’t like silly questions,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it.”