calf had receded a little bit, but the leg was stiff and numb, hard to control.
“Let’s go to your place,” Roland said. “There’s a man we need to find. With the blessing, you may be able to help us do that.”
He may be able to help us in more ways than that, Eddie thought, and followed them back into the sunlight, gimping along on his bad leg with his teeth gritted.
At that moment, Eddie thought he would have slain a saint in exchange for a dozen aspirin
tablets.
STAVE: Commala-loaf-leaven!
They go to hell or up to heaven!
When the guns are shot and the fire’s hot,
You got to poke em in the oven.
RESPONSE: Commala-come-seven!
Salt and yow ‘for leaven!
Heat em up and knock em down
And poke em in the oven.
8th STANZA
A GAME OF TOSS
A Game of Toss
ONE
In the winter of 1984-85, when Eddie’s heroin use was quietly sneaking across the border from
the Land of Recreational Drugs and into the Kingdom of Really Bad Habits, Henry Dean met a
girl and fell briefly in love. Eddie thought Sylvia Goldover was a Skank El Supremo (smelly armpits and dragon breath wafting out from between a pair of Mick Jagger lips), but kept his
mouth shut because Henry thought she was beautiful, and Eddie didn’t want to hurt Henry’s feelings. That winter the young lovers spent a lot of time either walking on the windswept beach at Coney Island or going to the movies in Times Square, where they would sit in the back row
and wank each other off once the popcorn and the extra-large box of Goobers were gone.
Eddie was philosophic about the new person in Henry’s life; if Henry could work his way past
that awful breath and actually tangle tongues with Sylvia Goldover, more power to him. Eddie
himself spent a lot of those mostly gray three months alone and stoned in the Dean family
apartment. He didn’t mind; liked it, in fact. If Henry had been there, he would have insisted on TV and would have ragged Eddie constantly about his story-tapes. (“Oh boy! Eddie’s gonna
wissen to his wittle sto-wy about the elves and the ogs and the cute wittle midgets! ” ) Always calling the ores the ogs, and always calling the Ents “the scawwy walking twees. ” Henry thought made-up shit was queer. Eddie had sometimes tried to tell him there was nothing more made-up
than the crud they showed on afternoon TV, but Henry wasn’t having any of that; Henry could
tell you all about the evil twins on General Hospital and the equally evil stepmother on The Guiding Light.
In many ways, Henry Dean’s great love affair — which ended when Sylvia Goldover stole
ninety bucks out of his wallet, left a note saying I’m sorry, Henry in its place, and took off for points unknown with her old boyfriend — was a relief to Eddie. He’d sit on the sofa in the living room, put on the tapes of John Gielgud reading Tolkien’s Rings trilogy, skin-pop along the inside of his right arm, and nod off to the Forests of Mirkwood or the Mines of Moria along with Frodo and Sam.
He’d loved the hobbits, thought he could have cheerfully spent the rest of his life in Hobbiton, where the worst drug going was tobacco and big brothers did not spend entire days ragging on
little brothers, and John Cullum’s little cottage in the woods returned him to those days and that dark-toned story with surprising force. Because the cottage had a hobbit-hole feel about it. The furniture in the living room was small but perfect: a sofa and two overstuffed chairs with those white doilies on the arms and where the back of your head would rest. The gold-framed black-and-white photograph on one wall had to be Cullum’s folks, and the one opposite it had to be his grandparents. There was a framed Certificate of Thanks from the East Stoneham Volunteer Fire
Department. There was a parakeet in a cage, twittering amiably, and a cat on the hearth. She
raised her head when they came in, gazed greenly at the strangers for a moment, then appeared to go back to sleep. There was a standing ashtray beside what had to be Cullum’s easy chair, and in
it were two pipes, one a corncob and the other a briar. There was an old-fashioned Emerson record-player/radio (the radio of the type featuring a multi-band dial and a large knurled tuning knob) but no television. The room smelled pleasantly of tobacco and potpourri. As fabulously
neat as it was, a single glance was enough to tell you that the man who lived here wasn’t married.
John Cullum’s parlor was a modest ode to the joys of bachelorhood.
“How’s your leg?” John asked. ” ‘Pears to have stopped bleeding, at least, but you got a pretty good hitch in your gitalong.”
Eddie laughed. “It hurts like a son of a bitch, but I can walk on it, so I guess that makes me lucky.”
“Bathroom’s in there, if you want to wash up,” Cullum said, and pointed.
“Think I better,” Eddie said.
The washing-up was painful but also a relief. The wound in his leg was deep, but seemed to
have totally missed the bone. The one in his arm was even less of a problem; the bullet had gone right through, praise God, and there was hydrogen peroxide in Cullum’s medicine cabinet. Eddie
poured it into the hole, teeth bared at the pain, and then went ahead and used the stuff on both his leg and the laceration in his scalp before he could lose his courage. He tried to remember if
Frodo and Sam had had to face anything even close to the horrors of hydrogen peroxide, and
couldn’t come up with anything. Well, of course they’d had elves to heal them, hadn’t they?
“I got somethin might help out,” Cullum said when Eddie re-appeared. The old guy
disappeared into the next room and returned with a brown prescription bottle. There were three
pills inside it. He tipped them into Eddie’s palm and said, “This is from when I fell down on the ice last winter and busted my goddam collarbone. Percodan, it’s called. I dunno if there’s any
good left in em or not, but — ”
Eddie brightened. “Percodan, huh?” he asked, and tossed the pills into his mouth before John Cullum could answer.
“Don’t you want some water with those, son?”
“Nope,” Eddie said, chewing enthusiastically. “Neat’s a treat.”
A glass case full of baseballs stood on a table beside the fireplace, and Eddie wandered over to look at it. “Oh my God,” he said, “you’ve got a signed Mel Parnell ball! And a Lefty Grove! Holy shit!”
“Those ain’t nothing,” Cullum said, picking up the briar pipe. “Look up on’t’ top shelf.” He took a sack of Prince Albert tobacco from the drawer of an endtable and began to fill his pipe. As he did so, he caught Roland watching him. “Do ya smoke?”
Roland nodded. From his shirt pocket he took a single bit of leaf. “P’raps I might roll one.”
“Oh, I can do ya better than that,” Cullum said, and left the room again. The room beyond was a study not much bigger than a closet. Although the Dickens desk in it was small, Cullum had to sidle his way around it.
“Holy shit,” Eddie said, seeing the baseball Cullum must have meant. “Autographed by the Babe!”
“Ayuh,” Cullum said. “Not when he was a Yankee, either, I got no use for baseballs autographed by Yankees. That ‘us signed when Ruth was still wearing a Red Sox . . .” He broke off. “Here they are, knew I had em. Might be stale, but it’s a lot staler where there’s none, my mother used to say. Here you go, mister. My nephew left em. He ain’t hardly old enough to
smoke, anyway.”
Cullum handed the gunslinger a package of cigarettes, three-quarters full. Roland turned them thoughtfully over in his hand, then pointed to the brand name. “I see a picture of a dromedary, but that isn’t what this says, is it?”
Cullum smiled at Roland with a kind of cautious wonder. “No,” he said. “That word’s Camel.
It means about the same.”
“Ah,” Roland said, and tried to look as if he understood. He took one of the cigarettes out, studied the filter, then put the tobacco end in his mouth.
“No, turn it around,” Cullum said.
“Say true?”
“Ayuh.”
“Jesus, Roland! He’s got a Bobby Doerr . . . two Ted Williams balls . . . a Johnny Pesky . . . a Frank Malzone . . .”
“Those names don’t mean anything to you, do they?” John Cullum asked Roland.
“No,” Roland said. “My friend . . . thank you.” He took a light from the match sai Cullum offered. “My friend hasn’t been on this side very much for quite awhile. I think he misses it.”