Eddie held it while the gunslinger carefully wiped the wound clean. It wasn’t wide and
didn’t look deep, but the gunslinger took no chances; he walked slowly down to the water,
soaked the piece of shirting in the salt water, and then came back.
She began to scream as he approached.
“Doan you be touchin me wid dat thing! Doan you betouchin me wid no water from where
them poison things come from! Git it away! Git it away!”
” Hold her head,” Roland said in the same even voice. She was whipping it from side to
side. “I don’t want to take any chances.”
Eddie held it… and squeezed it when she tried to shake free. She saw he meant business
and immediately became still, showing no more fear of the damp rag. It had been only
sham, after all.
She smiled at Roland as he bathed the cut, carefully washing out the last clinging particles
of grit.
“In fact, you look mo than jest tuckered out,” Delta observed. “You look sick, graymeat. I don’t think you ready fo no long trip. I don’t think you ready fo nuthin like dat.”
Eddie examined the chair’s rudimentary controls. It had an emergency hand-brake which
locked both wheels. Delta had worked her right hand over there, had wailed patiently until
she thought Eddie was going fast enough, and then she had yanked the brake, purposely
spilling herself over. Why? To slow them down, that was all. There was no reason lo do
such a thing, but a woman like Delia, Eddie thought, needed no reasons. A woman like
Delia was perfectly willing to do such things out of sheer meanness.
Roland loosened her bonds a bit so the blood could flow more freely, then lied her hand
firmly away from the brake.
“That be all right, Mister Man,” Delia said, offering him a bright smile filled with too many teeth. “That be all right jest the same. There be other ways lo slow you boys down.
All sorts of ways.”
“Let’s go,” the gunslinger said tonelessly.
“You all right, man?” Eddie asked. The gunslinger looked very pale.
“Yes. Let’s go.”
They started up the beach again.
10
The gunslinger insisted on pushing for an hour, andEddie gave way to him reluctantly.
Roland got her through the first sandtrap, but Eddie had to pitch in and help get the
wheelchair out of the second. The gunslinger was gasping for air, sweat standing out on his
forehead in large beads.
Eddie let him go on a little further, and Roland was quite adept at weaving his way around
the places where the sand was loose enough to bog the wheels, but the chair finally became
mired again and Eddie could bear only a few moments of watching Roland struggle to push
it free, gasping, chest heaving, while the witch (for so Eddie had come to think of her)
howled with laughter and actually threw her body back- wards in the chair to make the task
that much more difficult— and then he shouldered the gunslinger aside and heaved the
chair out of the sand with one angry lurching lunge. The chair tottered and now he
saw/sensed her shifting forward as much as the ropes would allow, doing this with a weird
prescience at the exactly proper moment, trying to topple herself again.
Roland threw his weight on the back of the chair next to Eddie’s and it settled back.
Detta looked around and gave them a wink of such ob- scene conspiracy that Eddie felt his
arms crawl up in gooseflesh.
“You almost opsot me agin, boys,” she said. “You want to look out for me, now. I ain’t nuthin but a old crippled lady, so you want to have a care for me now.”
She laughed . . . laughed fit to split.
Although Eddie cared for the woman that was the other part of her—was near to loving her
just on the basis of the brief time he had seen her and spoken with her—he felt his hands
itch to close around her windpipe and choke that laugh, choke it until she could never laugh
again.
She peered around again, saw what he was thinking as if it had been printed on him in red
ink, and laughed all the harder. Her eyes dared him. Go on, graymeat. Go on. You want to
do it? Go on and do it.
In other words, don’t just tip the chair; tip the woman,Eddie thought. Tip her over for good.
That’s what she wants. For Detta, being killed by a white man may be the only real goal she
has in life.
“Come on,” he said, and began pushing again. “We are gonna tour the seacoast, sweet thang, like it or not.” “Fuck you,” she spat.
“Cram it, babe,” Eddie responded pleasantly. The gunslinger walked beside him, head
down.
11
They came to a considerable outcropping of rocks when the sun said it was about eleven
and here they stopped for nearly an hour, taking the shade as the sun climbed toward the
roofpeak of the day. Eddie and the gunslinger ate leftovers from the previous night’s kill.
Eddie offered a portion to Delta, who again refused, telling him she knew what they
wanted to do, and if they wanted to do it, they best to do it with their bare hands and stop
trying to poison her. That, she said, was the coward’s way.
Eddie’s right,the gunslinger mused. This woman has made her own chain of memories. She
knows everything that happened to her last night, even though she was really fast asleep.
She believed they had brought her pieces of meat which smelled of death and putrescence,
had taunted her with it while they themselves ate salted beef and drank some sort of beer
from flasks. She believed they had, every now and then, held pieces of their own untainted
supper out to her, drawing it away at the last moment when she snatched at it with her
teeth—and laughing while they did it, of course. In the world (or at least in the mind) of
Delta Walker, Honk Mahfahs only did two things to brown women: raped them or laughed
at them. Or both at the same time.
It was almost funny. Eddie Dean had last seen beef during his ride in the sky-carriage, and
Roland had seen none since the last of his jerky was eaten, Gods alone knew how long ago.
As far as beer … he cast his mind back.
Tull.
There had been beer in Tull. Beer and beef.
God, it would be good to have a beer. His throat ached and it would be so good to have a
beer to cool that ache. Better even than the astin from Eddie’s world.
They drew off a distance from her.
“Ain’t I good nough cump’ny for white boys like you?” she cawed after them. “Or did you jes maybe want to have a pull on each other one’s little bitty white candle?”
She threw her head back and screamed laughter that frightened the gulls up, crying, from
the rocks where they had been met in convention a quarter of a mile away.
The gunslinger sat with his hands dangling between his knees, thinking. Finally he raised
his head and told Eddie, “I can only understand about one word in every ten she says.”
“I’m way ahead of you,” Eddie replied. “I’m getting at least two in every three. Doesn’t matter. Most of it comes back to honky mahfah.”
Roland nodded. “Do many of the dark-skinned people talk that way where you come from?
Her other didn’t.”
Eddie shook his head and laughed. “No. And I’ll tell you something sort of funny—at least
I think it’s sort of funny, but maybe that’s just because there isn’t all that much to laugh at
out here. It’s not real. It’s not real and she doesn’t even know it-Roland looked at him and
said nothing.
“Remember when you washed off her forehead, how she pretended she was scared of the
water?”
“Yes.”
“You knew she was pretending?”
“Not at first, but quite soon.”
Eddie nodded. “That was an act, and she knew it was an act. But she’s a pretty good actress and she fooled both of us for a few seconds. The way she’s talking is an act, too. But it’s not
as good. It’s so stupid, so goddam hokey!”
“You believe she pretends well only when she knows she’s doing it?”
“Yes. She sounds like a cross between the darkies in this book called Mandingo I read once and Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind. I know you don’t know those names, but
what I mean is she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?”
“It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t have said it half so good.”
”Ain’ t you boys done jerkin on dem candles a yours yet? ” Delta’s voice was growing hoarse and cracked. “Or maybe it’s just you can’t fine em. Dat it?”