The gunslinger looked at him, smiling. "I'm going to turn in," he said. "Be--"
"--on my guard. Yeah. I will."
13
Screaming was next.
Eddie fell asleep the moment his head touched the bunched bundle of his shirt, and it seemed only five minutes later when Detta began screaming.
He was awake at once, ready for anything, some King Lobster arisen from the deep to take revenge for its slain children or a horror down from the hills. It seemed he was awake at once, anyway, but the gunslinger was already on his feet, a gun in his left hand.
When she saw they were both awake, Detta promptly quit screaming.
"Jes thought I'd see if you boys on yo toes," she said. "Might be woofs. Looks likely enough country for 'em. Wanted to make sho if I saw me a woof creepin up, I could get you on yo feet in time." But there was no fear in her eyes; they glinted with mean amusement.
"Christ," Eddie said groggily. The moon was up but barely risen; they had been asleep less than two hours.
The gunslinger holstered his gun.
"Don't do it again," he said to the Lady in the wheelchair.
"What you goan do if I do? Rape me?"
"If we were going to rape you, you would be one well-raped woman by now," the gunslinger said evenly. "Don't do it again."
He lay down again, pulling his blanket over him.
Christ, dear Christ, Eddie thought, what a mess this is, what a fucking . . . and that was as far as the thought went before trailing off into exhausted sleep again and then she was splintering the air with fresh shrieks, shrieking like a firebell, and Eddie was up again, his body flaming with adrenaline, hands clenched, and then she was laughing, her voice hoarse and raspy.
Eddie glanced up and saw the moon had advanced less than ten degrees since she had awakened them the first time.
She means to keep on doing it, he thought wearily. She means to stay awake and watch us, and when she's sure we're getting down into deep sleep, that place where you recharge, she's going to open her mouth and start bellowing again. She'll do it and do it and do it until she doesn't have any voice left to bellow with.
Her laughter stopped abruptly. Roland was advancing on her, a dark shape in the moonlight.
"You jes stay away from me, graymeat," Detta said, but there was a quiver of nerves in her voice. "You ain't goan do nothing to me."
Roland stood before her and for a moment Eddie was sure, completely sure, that the gunslinger had reached the end of his patience and would simply swat her like a fly. Instead, astoundingly, he dropped to one knee before her like a suitor about to propose marriage.
"Listen," he said, and Eddie could scarcely credit the silky quality of Roland's voice. He could see much the same deep surprise on Detta's face, only there fear was joined to it. "Listen to me, Odetta."
"Who you callin O-Detta? Dat ain my name."
"Shut up, bitch," the gunslinger said in a growl, and then, reverting to that same silken voice: "If you hear me, and if you can control her at all--"
"Why you talkin at me dat way? Why you talkin like you was talkin to somebody else? You quit dat honky jive! You jes quit it now, you hear me?"
"--keep her shut up. I can gag her, but I don't want to do that. A hard gag is a dangerous business. People choke."
"YOU QUIT IT YOU HONKY BULLSHIT VOODOO MAHFAH!"
"Odetta." His voice was a whisper, like the onset of rain.
She fell silent, staring at him with huge eyes. Eddie had never in his life seen such hate and fear combined in human eyes.
"I don't think this bitch would care if she did die on a hard gag. She wants to die, but maybe even more, she wants you to die. But you haven't died, not so far, and I don't think Detta is brand-new in your life. She feels too at home in you, so maybe you can hear what I'm saying, and maybe you can keep some control over her even if you can't come out yet.
"Don't let her wake us up a third time, Odetta.
"I don't want to gag her.
"But if I have to, I will."
He got up, left without looking back, rolled himself into his blanket again, and promptly fell asleep.
She was still staring at him, eyes wide, nostrils flaring.
"Honky voodoo bullshit," she whispered.
Eddie lay down, but this time it was a long time before sleep came to claim him, in spite of his deep tiredness. He would come to the brink, anticipate her screams, and snap back.
Three hours or so later, with the moon now going the other way, he finally dropped off.
Detta did no more screaming that night, either because Roland had frightened her, or because she wanted to conserve her voice for future alarums and excursions, or--possibly, just possibly--because Odetta had heard and had exercised the control the gunslinger had asked of her.
Eddie slept at last but awoke sodden and unrefreshed. He looked toward the chair, hoping against hope that it would be Odetta, please God let it be Odetta this morning--
"Mawnin, whitebread," Detta said, and grinned her sharklike grin at him. "Thought you was goan sleep till noon. You cain't be doin nuthin like dat, kin you? We got to bus us some miles here, ain't dat d'fac of d'matter? Sho! An I think you the one goan have to do most of de bustin, cause dat other fella, one with de voodoo eyes, he lookin mo peaky all de time, I declare he do! Yes! I doan think he goan be eatin anythin much longer, not even dat fancy smoked meat you whitebread boys keep fo when you done joikin on each other one's little bitty white candles. So let's go, whitebread! Detta doan want to be d'one keepin you."
Her lids and her voice both dropped a little; her eyes peeked at him slyly from their corners.
"Not f'um startin out, leastways."
Dis goan be a day you 'member, whitebread, those sly eyes promised. Dis goan be a day you 'member for a long, long time.
Sho.
14
They made three miles that day, maybe a shade under. Detta's chair upset twice. Once she did it herself, working her fingers slowly and unobtrusively over to that handbrake again and yanking it. The second time Eddie did with no help at all, shoving too hard in one of those goddamned sand traps. That was near the end of the day, and he simply panicked, thinking he just wasn't going to be able to get her out this time, just wasn't. So he gave that one last titanic heave with his quivering arms, and of course it had been much too hard, and over she had gone, like Humpty-Dumpty falling off his wall, and he and Roland had to labor to get her upright again. They finished the job just in time. The rope under her breasts was now pulled taut across her windpipe. The gunslinger's efficient running slipknot was choking her to death. Her face had gone a funny blue color, she was on the verge of losing consciousness, but still she went on wheezing her nasty laughter.
Let her be, why don't you? Eddie nearly said as Roland bent quickly forward to loosen the knot. Let her choke! I don't know if she wants to do herself like you said, but I know she wants to do US . . . so let her go!
Then he remembered Odetta (although their encounter had been so brief and seemed so long ago that memory was growing dim) and moved forward to help.
The gunslinger pushed him impatiently away with one hand. "Only room for one."
When the rope was loosened and the Lady gasping harshly for breath (which she expelled in gusts of her angry laughter), he turned and looked at Eddie critically. "I think we ought to stop for the night."
"A little further." He was almost pleading. "I can go a little further."
"Sho! He be one strong buck He be good fo choppin one mo row cotton and he still have enough lef' to give yo little bitty white candle one fine suckin-on t'night."
She still wouldn't eat, and her face was becoming all stark lines and angles. Her eyes glittered in deepening sockets.
Roland gave her no notice at all, only studied Eddie closely. At last he nodded. "A little way. Not far, but a little way."
Twenty minutes later Eddie called it quits himself. His arms felt like Jell-O.
They sat in the sh
adows of the rocks, listening to the gulls, watching the tide come in, waiting for the sun to go down and the lobstrosities to come out and begin their cumbersome cross-examinations.
Roland told Eddie in a voice too low for Detta to hear that he thought they were out of live shells. Eddie's mouth tightened down a little but that was all. Roland was pleased.
"So you'll have to brain one of them yourself," Roland said. "I'm too weak to handle a rock big enough to do the job . . . and still be sure."
Eddie was now the one to do the studying.
He had no liking for what he saw.
The gunslinger waved his scrutiny away.
"Never mind," he said. "Never mind, Eddie. What is, is."
"Ka," Eddie said.
The gunslinger nodded and smiled faintly. "Ka."
"Kaka," Eddie said, and they looked at each other, and both laughed. Roland looked startled and perhaps even a little afraid of the rusty sound emerging from his mouth. His laughter did not last long. When it had stopped he looked distant and melancholy.
"Dat laffin mean you fine'ly managed to joik each other off?" Detta cried over at them in her hoarse, failing voice. "When you goan get down to de pokin? Dat's what I want to see! Dat pokin!"
15
Eddie made the kill.
Detta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the other half.
"Nossuh!" she said, eyes sparking at him. "No SUH! You done put de poison in t'other end. One you trine to give me."
Without saying anything, Eddie took the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.
"Doan mean a thing," Detta said sulkily. "Leave me alone, graymeat."
Eddie wouldn't.
He brought her another piece.
"You tear it in half. Give me whichever you want. I'll eat it, then you eat the rest."
"Ain't fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist' Chahlie. Git away f'um me is what I said, and git away f'um me is what I meant."
16
She did not scream in the night . . . but she was still there the next morning.
17
That day they made only two miles, although Detta made no effort to upset her chair; Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing inexorably together: Eddie's weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless days of sameness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland's deteriorating condition.
There were fewer sandtraps, but that was cold comfort. The ground was becoming grainier, more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand (in places bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there), and there were so many large rocks now jutting from this odd combination of sand and soil that Eddie found himself detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady's chair around the sandtraps. And soon enough, he saw, there would be no beach left at all. The hills, brown and cheerless things, were drawing steadily closer. Eddie could see the ravines which curled between them, looking like chops made by an awkward giant wielding a blunt cleaver. That night, before falling asleep, he heard what sounded like a very large cat squalling far up in one of them.
The beach had seemed endless, but he was coming to realize it had an end after all. Somewhere up ahead, those hills were simply going to squeeze it out of existence. The eroded hills would march down to the sea and then into it, where they might become first a cape or peninsula of sorts, and then a series of archipelagoes.
That worried him, but Roland's condition worried him more.
This time the gunslinger seemed not so much to be burning as fading, losing himself, becoming transparent.
The red lines had appeared again, marching relentlessly up the underside of his right arm toward the elbow.
For the last two days Eddie had looked constantly ahead, squinting into the distance, hoping to see the door, the door, the magic door. For the last two days he had waited for Odetta to reappear.
Neither had appeared.
Before falling asleep that night two terrible thoughts came to him, like some joke with a double punchline:
What if there was no door?
What if Odetta Holmes was dead?
18
"Rise and shine, mahfah!" Detta screeched him out of unconsciousness. "I think it jes be you and me now, honeychile. Think yo frien done finally passed on. I think yo frien be pokin the devil down in hell."
Eddie looked at the rolled huddled shape of Roland and for one terrible moment he thought the bitch was right. Then the gunslinger stirred, moaned furrily, and pawed himself into a sitting position.
"Well looky yere!" Detta had screamed so much that now there were moments when her voice disappeared almost entirely, becoming no more than a weird whisper, like winter wind under a door. "I thought you was dead, Mister Man!"
Roland was getting slowly to his feet. He still looked to Eddie like a man using the rungs of an invisible ladder to make it. Eddie felt an angry sort of pity, and this was a familiar emotion, oddly nostalgic. After a moment he understood. It was like when he and Henry used to watch the fights on TV, and one fighter would hurt the other, hurt him terribly, again and again, and the crowd would be screaming for blood, and Henry would be screaming for blood, but Eddie only sat there, feeling that angry pity, that dumb disgust; he'd sat there sending thought-waves at the referee: Stop it, man, are you fucking blind? He's dying out there! DYING! Stop the fucking fight!
There was no way to stop this one.
Roland looked at her from his haunted feverish eyes. "A lot of people have thought that, Detta." He looked at Eddie. "You ready?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Are you?"
"Yes."
"Can you?"
"Yes."
They went on.
Around ten o'clock Detta began rubbing her temples with her fingers.
"Stop," she said. "I feel sick. Feel like I goan throw up."
"Probably that big meal you ate last night," Eddie said, and went on pushing. "You should have skipped dessert. I told you that chocolate layer cake was heavy."
"I goan throw up! I--"
"Stop, Eddie!" the gunslinger said.
Eddie stopped.
The woman in the chair suddenly twisted galvanically, as if an electric shock had run through her. Her eyes popped wide open, glaring at nothing.
"I BROKE YO PLATE YOU STINKIN OLE BLUE LADY!" she screamed. "I BROKE IT AND I'M FUCKIN GLAD I D--"
She suddenly slumped forward in her chair. If not for the ropes, she would have fallen out of it.
Christ, she's dead, she's had a stroke and she's dead, Eddie thought. He started around the chair, remembered how sly and tricksy she could be, and stopped as suddenly as he had started. He looked at Roland. Roland looked back at him evenly, his eyes giving away not a thing.
Then she moaned. Her eyes opened.
Her eyes.
Odetta's eyes.
"Dear God, I've fainted again, haven't I?" she said. "I'm sorry you had to tie me in. My stupid legs! I think I could sit up a little if you--"
That was when Roland's own legs slowly came unhinged and he swooned some thirty miles south of the place where the Western Sea's beach came to an end.
RESHUFFLE
reshuffle
1
To Eddie Dean, he and the Lady no longer seemed to be trudging or even walking up what remained of the beach. They seemed to be flying.
Odetta Holmes still neither liked nor trusted Roland; that was clear. But she recognized how desperate his condition had become, and responded to that. Now, instead of pushing a dead clump of steel and rubber to which a human body just happened to be attached, Eddie felt almost as if he were pushing a glider.
Go with her. Before, I was watching out for you and that was important. Now I'll only slow you down.
He came to realize how right the gunslinger was almost at once. Eddie pushed
the chair; Odetta pumped it.
One of the gunslinger's revolvers was stuck in the waistband of Eddie's pants.
Do you remember when I told you to be on your guard and you weren't?
Yes.
I'm telling you again: Be on your guard. Every moment. If her other comes back, don't wait even a second. Brain her.
What if I kill her?
Then it's the end. But if she kills you, that's the end, too. And if she comes back she'll try. She'll try.
Eddie hadn't wanted to leave him. It wasn't just that cat-scream in the night (although he kept thinking about it); it was simply that Roland had become his only touchstone in this world. He and Odetta didn't belong here.
Still, he realized that the gunslinger had been right.
"Do you want to rest?" he asked Odetta. "There's more food. A little."
"Not yet," she answered, although her voice sounded tired. "Soon."
"All right, but at least stop pumping. You're weak. Your . . . your stomach, you know."
"All right." She turned, her face gleaming with sweat, and favored him with a smile that both weakened and strengthened him. He could have died for such a smile . . . and thought he would, if circumstances demanded.
He hoped to Christ circumstances wouldn't, but it surely wasn't out of the question. Time had become something so crucial it screamed.
She put her hands in her lap and he went on pushing. The tracks the chair left behind were now dimmer; the beach had become steadily firmer, but it was also littered with rubble that could cause an accident. You wouldn't have to help one happen at the speed they were going. A really bad accident might hurt Odetta and that would be bad; such an accident could also wreck the chair, and that would be bad for them and probably worse for the gunslinger, who would almost surely die alone. And if Roland died, they would be trapped in this world forever.
With Roland too sick and weak to walk, Eddie had been forced to face one simple fact: there were three people here, and two of them were cripples.
So what hope, what chance was there?
The chair.
The chair was the hope, the whole hope, and nothing but the hope.
So help them God.