Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). “Claims he invented the Internet! Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who reallydid invent the Internet!” She looked up (Chip’s thumb now
nowhere near the scales, he had an instinct about such things, damned if he didn’t) and
gave Chip a roguish little smile. She lowered her voice into its confidential just-we-two
register. “I ought to, I’ve been sleeping in the same bed with him for almost twenty years!”
Chip gave a hearty laugh, took the sliced turkey off the scale, and put it on a piece of white paper. He was glad to leave the subject of Jet Skis behind, as he had one on order from
Viking Motors (“The Boys with the Toys”) in Oxford himself.
“I know what you mean! That fella Gore, too slick!” Mrs. Tassenbaum was nodding
enthusiastically, and so Chip decided to lay on a little more. Never hurt, by Christ. “His
hair, for instance—how can you trust a man who puts that much goo in his—”
That was when the bell over the door jingled. Chip looked up. Saw. And froze. A
goddamned lot of water had gone under the bridge since That Day, but Wendell “Chip”
McAvoy knew the man who’d caused all the trouble the moment he stepped through the
door. Some faces you simply never forgot. And hadn’t he always known, deep in his
heart’s most secret place, that the man with the terrible blue eyes hadn’t finished his
business and would be back?
Back for him?
That idea broke his paralysis. Chip turned and ran. He got no more than three steps along
the inside of the counter before a shot rang out, loud as thunder in the store—the place was
bigger and fancier than it had been in ’77, thank God for his father’s insistence on
extravagant insurance coverage—and Mrs. Tassenbaum uttered a piercing scream. Three
or four people who had been browsing the aisles turned with expressions of astonishment,
and one of them hit the floor in a dead faint. Chip had time to register that it was Rhoda
Beemer, eldest daughter of one of the two women who’d been killed in here on That Day.
Then it seemed to him that time had folded back on itself and it was Ruth herself lying there with a can of creamed corn rolling free of one relaxing hand. He heard a bullet buzz over
his head like an angry bee and skidded to a stop, hands raised.
“Don’t shoot, mister!” he heard himself bawl in the thin, wavering voice of an old man.
“Take whatever’s in the register but don’t shoot me!”
“Turn around,” said the voice of the man who had turned Chip’s world turtle on That Day,
the man who’d almost gotten him killed (he’d been in the hospital over in Bridgton for two
weeks, by the living Jesus) and had now reappeared like an old monster from some child’s
closet. “The rest of you on the floor, but you turn around, shopkeeper. Turn around and see
me.
“See me very well.”
Three
The man swayed from side to side, and for a moment Roland thought he would faint
instead of turning. Perhaps some survival-oriented part of his brain suggested that fainting
was more likely to get him killed, for the shopkeeper managed to keep his feet anddid
finally turn and face the gunslinger. His dress was eerily similar to what he’d been wearing
the last time Roland was here; it could have been the same black tie and butcher’s apron,
tied up high on his midriff. His hair was still slicked back along his skull, but now it was
wholly white instead of salt-and-pepper. Roland remembered the way blood had dashed
back from the left side of the shopkeeper’s temple as a bullet—one fired by Andolini
himself, for all the gunslinger knew—grooved him. Now there was a grayish knot of
scar-tissue there. Roland guessed the man combed his hair in a way that would display that
mark rather than hide it. He’d either had a fool’s luck that day or been saved by ka. Roland
thought ka the more likely.
Judging from the sick look of recognition in the shopkeeper’s eyes, he thought so, too.
“Do you have a cartomobile, a truckomobile, or a tack-see?” Roland asked, holding the
barrel of his gun on the shopkeeper’s middle.
Jake stepped up beside Roland. “What are you driving?” he asked the shopkeeper. “That’s
what he means.”
“Truck!” the shopkeeper managed. “International Harvester pickup! It’s outside in the
lot!” He reached under his apron so suddenly that Roland came within an ace of shooting
him. The shopkeeper—mercifully—didn’t seem to notice. All of the store’s customers
were now lying prone, including the woman who’d been at the counter. Roland could smell
the meat she had been in the process of trading for, and his stomach rumbled. He was tired,
hungry, overloaded with grief, and there were too many things to think about, too many by
far. His mind couldn’t keep up. Jake would have said he needed to “take a time-out,” but he
didn’t see any time-outs in their immediate future.
The shopkeeper was holding out a set of keys. His fingers were trembling, and the keys
jingled. The late-afternoon sun slanting in the windows struck them and bounced
complicated reflections into the gunslinger’s eyes. First the man in the white apron had
plunged a hand out of sight without asking permission (and not slowly); now this, holding
up a bunch of reflective metal objects as if to blind his adversary. It was as if he weretrying to get killed. But it had been that way on the day of the ambush, too, hadn’t it? The
storekeeper (quicker on his feet then, and without that widower’s hump in his back) had
followed him and Eddie from place to place like a cat who won’t stop getting under your
feet, seemingly oblivious to the bullets flying all around them (just as he’d seemed
oblivious of the one that grooved the side of his head). At one point, Roland remembered,
he had talked about his son, almost like a man in a barbershop making conversation while
he waits his turn to sit under the scissors. A ka-mai, then, and such were often safe from
harm. At least until ka tired of their antics and swatted them out of the world.
“Take the truck, take it and go!” the shopkeeper was telling him. “It’s yours! I’m giving it
to you! Really!”
“If you don’t stop flashing those damned keys in my eyes, sai, what I’ll take is your
breath,” Roland said. There was another clock behind the counter. He had already noticed
that this world was full of clocks, as if the people who lived here thought that by having so many they could cage time. Ten minutes of four, which meant they’d been America-side
for nine minutes already. Time was racing, racing. Somewhere nearby Stephen King was
almost certainly on his afternoon walk, and in desperate danger, although he didn’t know it.
Or had it happened already? They—Roland, anyway—had always assumed that the
writer’s death would hit them hard, like another Beamquake, but maybe not. Maybe the
impact of his death would be more gradual.
“How far from here to Turtleback Lane?” Roland rapped at the storekeeper.
The elderly sai only stared, eyes huge and liquid with terror. Never in his life had Roland
felt more like shooting a man…or at least pistol-whipping him. He looked as foolish as a
goat with its foot stuck in a crevice.
Then the woman lying in front of the meat-counter spoke. She was looking up at Roland
and Jake, her hands clasped together at the small of her back. “That’s in Lovell, mister. It’s about five miles from here.”
One look in her eyes—large and brown, fearful but not panicky—and Roland decided this
was the one he wanted, not the storekeeper. Unless, that was—
He turned to Jake. “Can you drive the shopkeeper’s truck five miles?”
Roland saw the boy wanting to say yes, then realizing he couldn’t afford to risk ultimate
failure by trying to do a thing he—city boy that he was—had never done in his life.
“No,” Jake said. “I don’t think so. What about you?”
Roland had watched Eddie drive John Cullum’s car. It didn’t look that hard…but there
was his hip to consider. Rosa had told him that dry twist moved fast—like a fire driven by
strong winds, she’d said—and now he knew what she’d meant. On the trail into Calla Bryn
Sturgis, the pain in his hip had been no more than an occasional twinge. Now it was as if
the socket had been injected with red-hot lead, then wrapped in strands of barbed wire. The
pain radiated all the way down his leg to the right ankle. He’d watched how Eddie
manipulated the pedals, going back and forth between the one that made the car speed up