back the revolver’s ancient hammer. The wind hadfallen with the break of the day and the
ebb of the tide, and theclick of the hammer as Eddie brought it to full cock was veryclear.
“You just try me.”
“I think I will,” the gunslinger said.
” I’llshoot you!” Eddie screamed.
“Ka,”the gunslinger replied stolidly, and turned to thedoor. He was reaching for the knob, but his heart was waiting:waiting to see if he would live or die.
Ka.
CHAPTER 1
DETTA AND ODETTA
Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfectschizophrenic—if there was such a
person—would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one
unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life.
Adler should have met Delta Walker and Odetta Holmes.
1
“—last gunslinger,” Andrew said.
He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andrew alwaystalked and Odetta usually just let
it flow over her mind the wayyou let warm water flow over your hair and face in the
shower.But this did more than catch her attention; it snagged it, as ifon a thorn.
“I beg pardon?”
“Oh, it was just some column in the paper,” Andrew said.”I dunno who wrote it. I didn’t notice. One of those politicalfellas. Prob’ly you’d know, Miz Holmes. I loved him, and
Icried the night he was elected—”
She smiled, touched in spite of herself. Andrew said hisceaseless chatter was something he
couldn’t stop, wasn’tresponsible for, that it was just the Irish in him coming out,and most of
it was nothing—duckings and chirrupings aboutrelatives and friends she would never meet,
half-baked politi- cal opinions, weird scientific commentary gleaned from anynumber of
weird sources (among other things, Andrew was a firm believer in flying saucers, which he
called you-foes)— but this touched her because she had also cried the night he waselected.
“But I didn’t cry when that son of a bitch—pardon my French, Miz Holmes—when that
son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn’t cried since, and it’s been—what, twomonths?”
Three months and two days,she thought.
“Something like that, I guess.”
Andrew nodded. “Then I read this column—in The Daily News,it mighta been—yesterday,
about how Johnson’s prob- ably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won’t be the same.
Theguy said America had seen the passage of the world’s last gunslinger.”
“I don’t think John Kennedy was that at all,” Odetta said,and if her voice was sharper than the one Andrew was accus- tomed to hearing (which it must have been, because she sawhis
eyes give a startled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince), it was
because she felt herselftouched by this, too. It was absurd, but it was also a fact. Therewas
something about that phrase— America has seen the pas- sage of the world’s last
gunslinger—that rang deeply in hermind. It was ugly, it was untrue—John Kennedy had
been apeacemaker, not a leather-slapping Billy the Kid type, that wasmore in the
Goldwater line—but it had also for some reasongiven her goosebumps.
“Well, the guy said there would be no shortage of shootersin the world,” Andrew went on, regarding her nervously in therear-view mirror. “He mentioned Jack Ruby for one, and
Castro, and this fellow in Haiti—”
“Duvalier,” she said. “Poppa Doc.”
“Yeah, him, and Diem—”
“The Diem brothers are dead.”
“Well, he said Jack Kennedy was different, that’s all. Hesaid he would draw, but only if
someone weaker needed him todraw, and only if there was nothing else to do. He
saidKennedy was savvy enough to know that sometimes talkingdon’t do no good. He said
Kennedy knew if it’s foaming at the mouth you have to shoot it.”
His eyes continued to regard her apprehensively.
“Besides, it was just some column I read.”
The limo was gliding up Fifth Avenue now, headedtoward Central Park West, the Cadillac
emblem on the end ofthe hood cutting the frigid February air.
“Yes,” Odetta said mildly, and Andrew’s eyes relaxed atrifle. “I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand.”
You are a liar;a voice spoke up in her mind. This was avoice she heard quite often. She had
even named it. It was thevoice of The Goad. You understand perfectly and agree
com- pletely. Lie to Andrew if you feel it necessary, but for God’s sake don’t lie to yourself, woman.
Yet part of her protested, horrified. In a world which hadbecome a nuclear powder keg
upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake—perhaps one of
suicidalproportions—to believe there was a difference between goodshooters and bad
shooters. There were too many shaky hands holding lighters near too many fuses. This was
no world for gunslingers. If there had ever been a time for them, it hadpassed.
Hadn’t it?
She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed at her temples. Shecould feel one of her headaches
coming on. Sometimes theythreatened, like an ominous buildup of thunderheads on a
hotsummer afternoon, and then blew away… as those uglysummer brews sometimes
simply slipped away in one direc- tion or another, to stomp their thunders and lightnings
intothe ground of some other place.
She thought, however, that this time the storm was goingto happen. It would come
complete with thunder, lightning,and hail the size of golf-balls.
The streetlights marching up Fifth Avenue seemed muchtoo bright.
“So how was Oxford, Miz Holmes?” Andrew askedtentatively.
“Humid. February or not, it was very humid.” Shepaused, telling herself she wouldn’t say the words that werecrowding up her throat like bile, that she would swallow themback
down. To say them would be needlessly brutal. Andrew’stalk of the world’s last gunslinger
had been just more of theman’s endless prattling. But on top of everything else it wasjust a
bit too much and it came out anyway, what she had nobusiness saying. Her voice sounded
as calm and as resolute asever, she supposed, but she was not fooled: she knew a blurtwhen
she heard one. “The bail bondsman came very prompt- ly,of course; he had been notified in
advance. They held ontous as long as they could nevertheless, and I held on as long as I
could, but I guess they won that one, because I ended upwetting myself.” She saw
Andrew’s eyes wince away again andshe wanted to stop and couldn’t stop. “It’s what they
want toteach you, you see. Partly because it frightens you, I suppose,and a frightened
person may not come down to their preciousSouthland and bother them again. But I think
most of them—even the dumb ones and they are by all means not all dumb—know the
change will come in the end no matter what they do,and so they take the chance to degrade
you while they still can.To teach you you can be degraded. You can swear before God,
Christ, and the whole company of Saints that you will not,will not, w illnotsoil yourself, but if they hold onto you longenough of course you do. The lesson is that you’re just ananimal
in a cage, no more than that, no better than that. Justan animal in a cage. So I wet myself. I
can still smell driedurine and that damned holding cell. They think we are des- cended from
the monkeys, you know. And that’s exactly what Ismell like to myself right now.
“A monkey.”
She saw Andrew’s eyes in the rear-view mirror and wassorry for the way his eyes looked.
Sometimes your urine wasn’tthe only thing you couldn’t hold.
“I’m sorry, Miz Holmes.”
“No,” she said, rubbing at her temples again. “I am theone who is sorry. It’s been a trying three days, Andrew.”
“I should think so,” he said in a shocked old-maidishvoice that made her laugh in spite of herself. But most of herwasn’t laughing. She thought she had known what she wasgetting
into, that she had fully anticipated how bad it couldget. She had been wrong.
A trying three days.Well, that was one way to put it.Another might be that her three days
in Oxford, Mississippihad been a short season in hell. But there were some things
youcouldn’t say. Some things you would die before saying . . . unless you were called upon
to testify to them before theThrone of God the Father Almighty, where, she supposed,even
the truths that caused the hellish thunderstorms in that strange gray jelly between your ears
(the scientists said thatgray jelly was nerveless, and if that wasn’t a hoot and a half shedidn’t know what was) must be admitted.
“I just want to get home and bathe, bathe, bathe, andsleep, sleep, sleep. Then I reckon I
will be as right as rain.”
“Why, sure! That’s just what you’re going to be!” Andrewwanted to apologize for something, and this was as close as hecould come. And beyond this he didn’t want to risk
furtherconversation. So the two of them rode in unaccustomed silence to the gray Victorian
block of apartments on the corner ofFifth and Central Park South, a very exclusive gray
Victorianblock of apartments, and she supposed that made her a block- buster, and she knew