shuffle
KA-BLAM!
Roland opens his eyes on a billion stars wheelingthrough the blackness, then closes them
again.
He doesn’t know what’s going on but he thinks every- thing’s okay. The deck’s still moving,
the cards still
shuffle
More of the sweet, tasty chunks of meat. He feels better.Eddie looks better, too. But he
also looks worried.
“They’re getting closer,” he says. “They may be ugly, butthey ain’t completely stupid.
They know what I been doing.Somehow they know, and they don’t dig it. Every night
theyget a little closer. It might be smart to move on when daybreakcomes, if you can. Or it
might be the last daybreak we ever see.”
“What?” This is not exactly a whisper but a husk some- where between a whisper and real speech.
“Them,”Eddie says, and gestures toward the beach.”Dad-a-chack, dum-a-chum,and all
that shit. I think they’re like us, Roland—all for eating, but not too big on gettingeaten.”
Suddenly, in an utter blast of horror, Roland realizes whatthe whitish-pink chunks of meat
Eddie has been feeding himhave been. He cannot speak; revulsion robs him of what
littlevoice he has managed to get back. But Eddie sees everything hewants to say on his
face.
“What did you think I was doing?” he nearly snarls.”Calling Red Lobster for take-out?”
“They’re poison,” Roland whispers. “That’s why—”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re hors de combat. What I’m tryingto keep from you being, Roland my friend, is h’ors d’oeuvres as well. As far as poison goes, rattlesnakes are poison, but peopleeat them. Rattlesnake tastes real good. Like chicken. I readthat somewhere. They
looked like lobsters to me, so I decidedto take a chance. What else were we gonna eat? Dirt?
I shot oneof the fuckers and cooked the living Christ out of it. Therewasn’t anything else.
And actually, they taste pretty good. Ibeen shooting one a night just after the sun starts to
go down. They’re not real lively until it gets completely dark. I neversaw you turning the
stuff down.”
Eddie smiles.
“I like to think maybe I got one of the ones that ate Jack. Ilike to think I’m eating that dink.
It, like, eases my mind, youknow?”
“One of them ate part of me, too,” the gunslinger husksout. “Two fingers, one toe.”
“That’s also cool,” Eddie keeps smiling. His face is pal- lid, sharklike . . . but some of that ill look has gone now, andthe smell of shit and death which has hung around him like
ashroud seems to be going away.
“Fuck yourself,” the gunslinger husks.
“Roland shows a flash of spirit!” Eddie cries. “Maybe youain’t gonna die after all! Dahling!
I think that’s mahvellous!”
“Live,” Roland says. The husk has become a whisperagain. The fishhooks are returning to his throat.
“Yeah?” Eddie looks at him, then nods and answers hisown question. “Yeah. I think you mean to. Once I thought you were going and once I thought you were gone. Now itlooks
like you’re going to get better. The antibiotics are help ing, I guess, but mostly I think you’re hauling yourself up.What for? Why the fuck do you keep trying so hard to keepalive
on this scuzzy beach?”
Tower,he mouths, because now he can’t even manage ahusk.
“You and your fucking Tower,” Eddie says, starts to turnaway, and then turns back,
surprised, as Roland’s hand clampson his arm like a manacle.
They look into each others’ eyes and Eddie says, “Allright. All right!”
North,the gunslinger mouths. North, I told you. Has hetold him that? He thinks so, but it’s lost. Lost in the shuffle.
“How do you know?” Eddie screams at him in sudden frustration. He raises his fists as if to strike Roland, thenlowers them.
I just know—so why do you waste my time and energyasking me foolish questions?he
wants to reply, but before hecan, the cards
shuffle
being dragged along, bounced and bumped, his headlolling helplessly from one side to the
other, bound to somekind of a weird travois by his own gunbelts, and he can hear Eddie
Dean singing a song which is so weirdly familiar he atfirst believes this must be a delirium
dream:
“Heyy Jude . . . don’t make it bad . . . take a saaad song . . . and make it better . . .”
Where did you hear that?he wants to ask. Did you hear me singing it, Eddie? And where are we?
But before he can ask anything
shuffle
Cort would bash the kid’s head in if he saw that contrap- tion,Roland thinks, looking at
the travois upon which he hasspent the day, and laughs. It isn’t much of a laugh. It
soundslike one of those waves dropping its load of stones on thebeach. He doesn’t know
how far they have come, but it’s farenough for Eddie to be totally bushed. He’s sitting on a
rock inthe lengthening light with one of the gunslinger’s revolvers inhis lap and a half-full
water-skin to one side. There’s a smallbulge in his shirt pocket. These are the bullets from
the back of the gunbelts—the diminishing supply of “good” bullets.Eddie has tied these up in a piece of his own shirt. The mainreason the supply of “good” bullets is diminishing so fast isbecause one of every four or five has also turned out to be a dud.
Eddie, who has been nearly dozing, now looks up. “What are you laughing about?” he asks.
The gunslinger waves a dismissive hand and shakes hishead. Because he’s wrong, he
realizes. Cort wouldn’t bashEddie for the travois, even though it was an odd,
lame-lookingthing. Roland thinks it might even be possible that Cort might grunt some
word of compliment—such a rarity that the boy to whom it happened hardly ever knew
how to respond; he wasleft gaping like a fish just pulled from a cook’s barrel.
The main supports were two cottonwood branches ofapproximately the same length and
thickness. A blowdown,the gunslinger presumed. He had used smaller branches as
supports, attaching them to the support poles with a crazy conglomeration of stuff:
gunbelts, the glue-string that had held the devil-powder to his chest, even the rawhide
thongfrom the gunslinger’s hat and his, Eddie’s, own sneaker laces.He had laid the
gunslinger’s bedroll over the supports.
Cort would not have struck him because, sick as he was,Eddie had at least done more than
squat on his hunkers and bewail his fate. He had made something. Had tried.
And Cort might have offered one of his abrupt, almostgrudging compliments because,
crazy as the thing looked, itworked.The long tracks stretching back down the beach to
apoint where they seemed to come together at the rim of pers- pective proved that.
“You see any of them?” Eddie asks. The sun is goingdown, beating an orange path across
the water, and so thegunslinger reckons he has been out better than six hours thistime. He
feels stronger. He sits up and looks down to the water.
Neither the beach nor the land sweeping to the western slopeof the mountains have
changed much; he can see small varia- tions of landscape and detritus (a dead seagull, for
instance,lying in a little heap of blowing feathers on the sand abouttwenty yards to the left
and thirty or so closer to the water), butthese aside, they might as well be right where they
started.
“No,” the gunslinger says. Then: “Yes. There’s one.”
He points. Eddie squints, then nods. As the sun sinkslower and the orange track begins to
look more and more like blood, the first of the lobstrosities come tumbling out of thewaves
and begin crawling up the beach.
Two of them race clumsily toward the dead gull. The winner pounces on it, rips it open,
and begins to stuff the rotting remains into its maw. “Did-a-chick?” it asks.
“Dum-a-chum?”responds the loser. “Dod-a—”
KA-BLAM!
Roland’s gun puts an end to the second creature’s ques- tions. Eddie walks down to it and grabs it by the back, keepinga wary eye on its fellow as he does so. The other offers
notrouble, however; it is busy with the gull. Eddie brings his killback. It is still twitching,
raising and lowering its claws, butsoon enough it stops moving. The tail arches one final
time,then simply drops instead of flexing downward. The boxers’ claws hang limp.
“Dinnah will soon be served, mawster,” Eddie says. “Youhave your choice: filet of
creepy-crawler or filet of creepy-crawler. Which strikes your fancy, mawster?”
“I don’t understand you,” the gunslinger said.
“Sure you do,” Eddie said. “You just don’t have any senseof humor. What happened to it?”
“Shot off in one war or another, I guess.”
Eddie smiles at that. “You look and sound a little morealive tonight, Roland.”
“I am, I think.”
“Well, maybe you could even walk for awhile tomorrow.I’ll tell you very frankly, my
friend, dragging you is the pitsand the shits.”
“I’ll try.”
“You do that.”
“You look a little better, too,” Roland ventures. His voice cracks on the last two words like the voice of a young boy. If don’t stop talking soon,he thought, I won’t be able to talk at all again.