by Стивен Кинг
"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 friends, 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 simply 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.
All right. All right, goddammit.
There might only be a moment. That was all the gun-slinger might give him, and Eddie damned well knew it. He glanced at the door and saw the black hands freeze with a gold necklace half in and half out of a purse that already glittered like a pirate's cache of treasure. Although he could not hear it, Eddie sensed that Roland was speaking to the owner of the black hands.
He pulled the knife from the gunslinger's purse and then rolled over the limp, breathing body which lay before the doorway. The eyes were open but blank, rolled up to the whites.
"Watch, Roland!" Eddie screamed. That monotonous, idiotic, never-ending wind blew in his ears. Christ, it was enough to drive anyone bugshit. "Watch very closely! I want to complete your fucking education! I want to show you what happens when you fuck over the Dean brothers!"
He brought the knife down to the gunslinger's throat.
CHAPTER 2
RINGING THE CHANGES
1
August, 1959:
When the intern came outside half an hour later, he found Julio leaning against the ambulance which was still parked in the emergency bay of Sisters of Mercy Hospital on 23rd Street . The heel of one of Julio's pointy-toed boots was hooked over the front fender. He had changed to a pair of glaring pink pants and a blue shirt with his name written in gold stitches over the left pocket: his bowling league outfit. George checked his watch and saw that Julio's team―The Spics of Supremacy―would already be rolling.
"Thought you'd be gone," George Shavers said. He was an intern at Sisters of Mercy. "How're your guys gonna win without the Wonder Hook?"
"They got Miguel Basale to take my place. He ain't steady, but he gets hot sometimes. They'll be okay." Julio paused. "I was curious about how it came out." He was the driver, a Cubano with a sense of humor George wasn't even sure Julio knew he had. He looked around. Neither of the paramedics who rode with them were in sight.
"Where are they?" George asked.
"Who? The fuckin Bobbsey Twins? Where do you think they are? Chasin Minnesota poontang down in the Village. Any idea if she'll pull through?"
"Don't know."
He tried to sound sage and knowing about the unknown, but the fact was that first the resident on duty and then a pair of surgeons had taken the black woman away from him almost faster than you could say hail Mary fulla grace (which had actually been on his lips to say―the black lady really hadn't looked as if she was going to last very long).
"She lost a hell of a lot of blood."
"No shit."
George was one of sixteen interns at Sisters of Mercy, and one of eight assigned to a new program called Emergency Ride. The theory was that an intern riding with a couple of paramedics could sometimes make the difference between life and death in an emergency situation. George knew that most drivers and paras thought that wet-behind-the-ears interns were as likely to kill red-blankets as save them, but George thought maybe it worked.
Sometimes.
Either way it made great PR for the hospital, and although the interns in the program liked to bitch about the extra eight hours (without pay) it entailed each week, George Shavers sort of thought most of them felt the way he did himself―proud, tough, able to take whatever they threw his way.
Then had come the night the T.W.A. Tri-Star crashed at Idlewild. Sixty-five people on board, sixty of them what Julio Estevez referred to as D.R.T.―Dead Right There―and three of the remaining five looking like the sort of thing you might scrape out of the bottom of a coal-furnace … except what you scraped out of the bottom of a coal furnace didn't moan and shriek and beg for someone to give them morphine or kill them, did they? Ifyou can take this, he thought afterward, remembering the severed limbs lyi
ng amid the remains of aluminum flaps and seat-cushions and a ragged chunk of tail with the numbers 17 and a big red letter T and part of a W on it, remembering the eyeball he had seen resting on top of a charred Samsonite suitcase, remembering a child's teddybear with staring shoe-button eyes lying beside a small red sneaker with a child's foot still in it, if you can take this, baby, you can take anything. And he had been taking it just fine. He went right on taking it just fine all the way home. He went on taking it just fine through a late supper that consisted of a Swanson's turkey TV dinner. He went to sleep with no problem at all, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was taking it just fine. Then, in some dead dark hour of the morning he had awakened from a hellish nightmare in which the thing resting on top of the charred Samsonite suitcase had not been a teddybear but his mother's head, and her eyes had opened, and they had been charred; they were the staring expressionless shoebutton eyes of the teddy-bear, and her mouth had opened, revealing the broken fangs which had been her dentures up until the T.W.A. Tri-Star was struck by lightning on its final approach, and she had whispered You couldn't save me, George, we scrimped for you, we saved for you, we went without for you, your dad fixed up the scrape you got into with that girl and you STILL COULDN'T SAVE ME GOD DAMN YOU, and he had awakened screaming, and he was vaguely aware of someone pounding on the wall, but by then he was already pelting into the bathroom, and he barely made it to the kneeling penitential position before the porcelain altar before dinner came up the express elevator. It came special delivery, hot and steaming and still smelling like processed turkey. He knelt there and looked into the bowl, at the chunks of half-digested turkey and the carrots which had lost none of their original flourescent brightness, and this word flashed across his mind in large red letters:
ENOUGH
Correct.
It was:
ENOUGH.
He was going to get out of the sawbones business. He was going to get out because: