fell asleep.
She was still staring at him, eyes wide, nostrils flaring.
“Honky voodoo bullshit,” she whispered.
Eddie lay down, but this time it was a long time before sleep came to claim him, in spite of
his deep tiredness. He would come to the brink, anticipate her screams, and snap back.
Three hours or so later, with the moon now going the other way, he finally dropped off.
Delta did no more screaming that night, either because Roland had frightened her, or
because she wanted to conserve her voice for future alarums and excursions, or—possibly,
just possibly—because Odetta had heard and had exercised the control the gunslinger had
asked of her.
Eddie slept at last but awoke sodden and unrefreshed. He looked toward the chair, hoping
against hope that it would be Odetta, please God let it be Odetta this morning—
“Mawnin, whitebread,” Delta said, and grinned her sharklike grin at him. “Thought you was goan sleep till noon.
You cain’t be doin nuthin like dat, kin you? We got to bus us some miles here, ain’t dat
d’fac of d’matter? Sho! An I think you the one goan have to do most of de bustin, cause dat other fella, one with de voodoo eyes, he lookin mo peaky all de time, I declare he do! Yes!
I doan think he goan be eatin anythin much longer, not even dat fancy smoked meat you
whitebread boys keep fo when you done joikin on each other one’s little bitty white candles.
So let’s go, whitebread! Delta doan want to be d’one keepin you.”
Her lids and her voice both dropped a little; her eyes peeked at him slyly from their
corners.
“Not f’um startin out, leastways.”
Dis goan be a day you ‘member, whitebread,those sly eyes promised. Dis goan be a day you ‘member for a long, long time.
Sho.
14
They made three miles that day, maybe a shade under. Delta’s chair upset twice. Once she
did it herself, working her fingers slowly and unobtrusively over to that handbrake again
and yanking it. The second time Eddie did with no help at all, shoving too hard in one of
those goddamned sandtraps. Thai was near the end of the day, and he simply panicked,
thinking he just wasn’t going lo be able lo gel her out this lime, just wasn’t. So he gave that one last titanic heave with his quiver- ing arms, and of course it had been much too hard,
and over she had gone, like Humpty Dumpty falling off his wall, and he and Roland had to
labor to get her upright again. They finished the job just in time. The rope under her breasts
was now pulled taut across her windpipe. The gunslinger’s effi- cient running slipknot was
choking her to death. Her face had gone a funny blue color, she was on the verge of losing
con- sciousness, but still she went on wheezing her nasty laughter.
Let her be, why don’t you?Eddie nearly said as Roland bent quickly forward to loosen the
knot. Let her choke! I don’t know if she wants to do herself like you said, but I know she
wants to do US . . . so let her go!
Then he remembered Odetta (although their encounter had been so brief and seemed so
long ago that memory was growing dim) and moved forward to help.
The gunslinger pushed him impatiently away with one hand. “Only room for one.”
When the rope was loosened and the Lady gasping harshly for breath (which she expelled
in gusts of her angry laughter), he turned and looked at Eddie critically. “I think we ought to stop for the night.”
“A little further.” He was almost pleading. “I can go a little further.”
“Sho! He be one strong buck He be good fo choppin one mo row cotton and he still have enough lef’ to give yo little bitty white candle one fine suckin-on t’night.”
She still wouldn’t eat, and her face was becoming all stark lines and angles. Her eyes
glittered in deepening sockets.
Roland gave her no notice at all, only studied Eddie closely. At last he nodded. “A little way. Not far, but a little way.”
Twenty minutes later Eddie called it quits himself. His arms felt like Jell-O.
They sat in the shadows of the rocks, listening to the gulls, watching the tide come in,
waiting for the sun to go down and the lobstrosities to come out and begin their
cum- bersome cross-examinations.
Roland told Eddie in a voice too low for Delta to hear that he thought they were out of live
shells. Eddie’s mouth tight- ened down a little but that was all. Roland was pleased.
“So you’ll have to brain one of them yourself,” Roland said. “I’m too weak to handle a rock big enough to do the job . . . and still be sure.”
Eddie was now the one to do the studying.
He had no liking for what he saw.
The gunslinger waved his scrutiny away.
“Never mind,” he said. “Never mind, Eddie. What is, is.”
“Ka,”Eddie said.
The gunslinger nodded and smiled faintly. “Ka.”
“Kaka,” Eddie said, and they looked at each other, and both laughed. Roland looked
startled and perhaps even a little afraid of the rusty sound emerging from his mouth. His
laugh- ter did not last long. When it had stopped he looked distant and melancholy.
“Dat laffin mean you fine’ly managed to joik each other off?” Delta cried over at them in her hoarse, failing voice. “When you goan get down to de pokin? Dat’s what I want to see!
Dat pokin!”
15
Eddie made the kill.
Delta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the
other half.
“Nossuh!” she said, eyes sparking at him. “No SUH! You done put de poison in t’other end.
One you trine to give me.”
Without saying anything, Eddie look the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed,
swallowed.
“Doan mean a thing,” Delia said sulkily. “Leave me alone, graymeat.”
Eddie wouldn’t
He brought her another piece.
“Youtear it in half. Give me whichever you want I’ll eat it, then you eat the rest.”
“Ain’t fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist’ Chahlie. Git away f’um me is what I said, and git away f’um me is what I meant”
16
She did not scream in the night. . . but she was still there the next morning.
17
That day they made only two miles, although Delia made no effort to upset her chair;
Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps
she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing
inexorably together: Eddie’s weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless
days of same- ness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland’s deterio- ratin
g condition.
There were less sandtraps, but that was cold comfort. The ground was becoming grainier,
more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand (in places
bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there), and there were so many large
rocks now jutting from this odd combina- tion of sand and soil that Eddie found himself
detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady’s chair around the
sandtraps. And soon enough, he saw, there would be no beach left at all. The hills, brown
and cheerless things, were drawing steadily closer. Eddie could see the ravines which
curled between them, looking like chops made by an awkward giant wielding a blunt
cleaver. That night, before falling asleep, he heard what sounded like a very large cat
squalling far up in one of them.
The beach had seemed endless, but he was coming to realize it had an end after all.
Somewhere up ahead, those hills were simply going to squeeze it out of existence. The
eroded hills would march down to the sea and then into it, where they might become first a
cape or peninsula of sorts, and then a series of archipelagoes.
That worried him, but Roland’s condition worried him more.
This time the gunslinger seemed not so much to be burn- ingas fading, losing himself,
becoming transparent.
The red lines had appeared again, marching relentlessly up the underside of his right arm
toward the elbow.
For the last two days Eddie had looked constantly ahead, squinting into the distance,
hoping to see the door, the door, the magic door. For the last two days he had waited for
Odetta to reappear.
Neither had appeared.
Before falling asleep that night two terrible thoughts came to him, like some joke with a
double punchline:
What if there was no door?
What if Odetta Holmes was dead?
18
“Rise and shine, mahfah!” Detta screeched him out of unconsciousness. “I think it jes be you and me now, honey-chile. Think yo frien done finally passed on. I think yo frien be