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 hearbird come out of his mouth asboid, heard ashoid, 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
impressions that fade as quickly as they rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it
probablywas boid andhoid ; in Pittsburgh it would beburrd andhurrd ; the Giant Eagle
supermarket would becomeJaunt 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.
Itwasthe wind, Susannah told herself.What else couldit be?
Mordred,her mind whispered back.Mordred out there, freezing. Mordred out there dying
while we sit in here with our hot coffee.
But she said nothing.
There had been trouble in Hauck for a couple of weeks, Joe said, but he’d been drinking
pretty heavily (“Hitting it hard” was how he put it) and hardly realized that the crowd at his second show was about a fifth the size of the one at the first. “Hell, I was on a roll,” he said.
“I don’t know about anyone else, but I was knockingmyself dead, rolling me in the aisles.”
Then someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the club’s front window (Molotov
cocktailwas a term Roland understood), and before you could sayTake my
mother-in-law…please, the place was on fire. Joe had boogied out the back, through the
stage door. He’d almost made it to the street when three men (“all very black, all roughly
the size of NBA centers”) grabbed him. Two held; the third punched. Then someone swung
a bottle. Boom-boom, out go the lights. He had awakened on a grassy hillside near a
deserted town called Stone’s Warp, according to the signs in the empty buildings along
Main Street. To Joe Collins it had looked like the set of a Western movie after all the actors
had gone home.
It was around this time that Susannah decided she did not believe much of sai Collins’s
story. It was undoubtedly entertaining, and given Jake’s first entry into Mid-World, after
being run over in the street and killed while on his way to school, it was not totally
implausible. But she still didn’t believe much of it. The question was, did it matter?
“You couldn’t call it heaven, because there were no clouds and no choirs of angels,” Joe
said, “but I decided it was some sort of an afterlife, just the same.” He had wandered about.
He found food, he found a horse (Lippy), and moved on. He had met various roving bands
of people, some friendly, some not, some true-threaded, some mutie. Enough so he’d
picked up some of the lingo and a little Mid-World history; certainly he knew about the
Beams and the Tower. At one point he’d tried to cross the Badlands, he said, but he’d
gotten scared and turned back when his skin began to break out in all sorts of sores and
weird blemishes.
“I got a boil on my ass, and that was the final touch,” he said. “Six or eight years ago, this might have been. Me n Lippy said the hell with going any further. That was when I found
this place, which is called Westring, and when Stuttering Bill found me. He’s got a little
doctorin, and he lanced the boil on my bottom.”
Roland wanted to know if Joe had witnessed the passage of the Crimson King as that mad
creature made his final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower. Joe said he had not, but that six
months ago there had been a terrible storm (“a real boilermaker”) that drove him down into
his cellar. While he was there the electric lights had failed, genny or no genny, and as he
cowered in the dark, a sense had come to him that some terrible creature was close by, and
that it might at any moment touch Joe’s mind and follow his thoughts to where he was
hiding.
“You know what I felt like?” he asked them.
Roland and Susannah shook their heads. Oy did the same, in perfect imitation.
“Snack-food,” Joe said. “Potential snack-food.”
This part of his story’s true,Susannah thought.He may have changed it around a little, but
basically it’s true . And if she had any reason to think that, it was only because the idea of the Crimson King traveling in his own portable storm seemed horribly plausible.
“What did you do?” Roland asked.
“Went to sleep,” he said. “It’s a talent I’ve always had, like doing impressions—although
I don’t do famous voices in my act, because they never go over out in the sticks. Not unless
you’re Rich Little, at least. Strange but true. I can sleep pretty much on command, so that’s what I did down in the cellar. When I woke up again the lights were back on and the…the
whatever-it-was was gone. I know about the Crimson King, of course, I see folks from time
to time still—nomads like you three, for the most part—and they talk about him. Usually they fork the sign of the evil eye and spit between their fingers when they do. You think
that was him, huh? You think the Crimson King actually passed by Odd’s Lane on his way
to the Tower.” Then, before they had a chance to answer: “Well, why not? Tower Road’s
the main throughfare, after all. It goes all the way there.”
You know it was him,Susannah thought.What game are you playing, Joe?
The thin cry that was most definitely not the wind came again. She no longer thought it
was Mordred, though. She thought that maybe it was coming from the cellar where Joe had
gone to hide from the Crimson King…or so he’d said. Who was down there now? And was
he hiding, as Joe had done, or was he a prisoner?
“It hasn’t been a bad life,” Joe was saying. “Not the life I expected, not by any manner or
means, but I got a theory—the folks who end up living the lives they expected are more
often than not the ones who end up takin sleepin pills or stickin the barrel of a gun in their mouths and pullin the trigger.”
Roland seemed still to be a few turns back, because he said, “You were a court jester and
the customers in these inns were your court.”
Joe smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. Susannah frowned. Had she seen his teeth before?
They had been doing a lot of laughing and sheshould have seen them, but she couldn’t
remember that she actually had. Certainly he didn’t have the mush-mouth sound of
someone whose teeth are mostly gone (such people had consulted with her father on many
occasions, most of them in search of artificial replacements). If she’d had to guess earlier
on, she would have said hehad teeth but they were down to nothing but pegs and nubbins,
and—
And what’s the matter with you, girl? He might be lying about a few things, but he surely
didn’t grow a fresh set of teeth since you sat down to dinner! You’re letting your
imagination run away with you.