Stephen King – The Waste Lands

“You don’t know, do you? You really don’t?”

“No. Your mind is often closed to me, Susannah.”

There was no defensiveness in his voice, and Susannah shook her head in exasperation.

The rapid turn-and-turn-about dance of her person- ality sometimes unnerved him; his

seeming inability to say anything other than exactly what was on his mind never failed to

do the same to her. He was the most literal man she had ever met.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you why I’m looking at you that way, Roland. Because what you did was a mean trick. You said you wouldn’t slap me, couldn’t slap me, even if I cut up

rough . . . but either you lied or you’re very stupid, and I know you ain’t stupid. People don’t always slap with their hands, as every man and woman of my race could testify. We have a

little rhyme where I come from: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones—’ ”

” ‘—yet taunts shall never wound me,’ ” Roland finished.

“Well, that’s not exactly the way we say it, but I guess it’s close enough. It’s bullshit no matter how you say it. They don’t call what you did a tongue-lashing for nothing. Your

words hurt me, Roland—are you gonna stand there and say you didn’t know they would?”

She sat in her chair, looking up at him with bright, stern curiosity, and Roland

thought—not for the first time—that the honk mahfahs of Susannah’s land must have been

either very brave or very stupid to cross her, wheelchair or no wheelchair. And, having

walked among them, he didn’t think bravery was the answer.

“I did not think or care about your hurt,” he said patiently. “I saw you show your teeth and knew you meant to bite, so I put a stick in your jaws. And it worked . . . didn’t it?”

Her expression was now one of hurt astonishment. “You bastardl”

Instead of replying, he took the gun from her holster, fumbled the cylinder open with the

remaining two fingers on his right hand, and began to reload the chambers with his left

hand.

“Of all the high-handed, arrogant—”

“You needed to bite,” he said in that same patient tone. “Had you not, you would have shot all wrong—with your hand and your gun instead of your eye and mind and heart. Was that

a trick? Was it arrogant? I think not. I think. Susannah, that you were the one with

arrogance in her heart. I think you were the one with a mind to get up to tricks. That doesn’t

distress me. Quite the opposite. A gunslinger without teeth is no gunslinger.”

“Damn it, I’m not a gunslinger!”

He ignored that; he could afford to. If she was no gunslinger, then he was a billy-bumbler.

“If we were playing a game, I might have behaved differently. But this is no game. It …”

His good hand went to his forehead for a moment and paused there, fingers tented just

above the left temple. The tips of the fingers, she saw, were trembling minutely.

“Roland, what’s ailing you?” she asked quietly.

The hand lowered slowly. He rolled the cylinder back into place and replaced die revolver in the holster she wore. “Nothing.”

“Yes there is. I’ve seen it. Eddie has, too. It started almost as soon as we left the beach. It’s something wrong, and it’s getting worse.”

“There is nothing wrong,” he repeated.

She put her hands out and took his. Her anger was gone, at least for the time being. She

looked earnestly up into his eyes. “Eddie and I . . . this isn’t our world, Roland. Without you, we’d die here. We’d have your guns, and we can shoot them, you’ve taught us to do that

well enough, but we’d die just the same. We … we depend on you. So tell me what’s wrong.

Let me try to help. Let us try to help.”

He had never been a man who understood himself deeply or cared to; the concept of

self-consciousness (let alone self-analysis) was alien to him. His way was to act—to

quickly consult his own interior, utterly mysterious workings, and then act. Of them all, he

had been the most perfectly made, a man whose deeply romantic core was encased in a

brutally simple box which consisted of instinct and pragmatism. He took one of those quick

looks inside now and decided to tell her everything. There was something wrong with him,

oh yes. Yes indeed. Something wrong with his mind, something as simple as his nature and

as strange as the weird, wandering life into which that nature had impelled him.

He opened his mouth to say I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Susannah, and I’ll do it in just three

words. I’m going insane. But before he could begin, another tree fell in the forest—it went

with a huge, grinding crash. This treefall was closer, and this time they were not deeply

engaged in a test of wills masquerading as a lesson. Both heard it, both heard the agitated

cawing of the crows which followed it, and both registered the fact that the tree had fallen

close to their camp.

Susannah had looked in the direction of the sound but now her eyes, wide and dismayed,

returned to the gunslinger’s face. “Eddie!” she said.

A cry rose from the deep green fastness of the woods in back of them—a vast cry of rage.

Another tree went, and then another. They fell in what sounded like a hail of mortar-fin-,

Dry wood, the gunslinger thought. Dead trees.

“Eddie!” This time she screamed it. “Whatever it is, it’s near Eddie!” Her hands flew to the wheels of her chair and began the laborious job of turning it around.

“No time for that.” Roland seized her under her arms and pulled her free. He had carried her before when the going was too rough for her wheelchair—both men had—but she was

still amazed by his uncanny, ruthless speed. At one moment she was in her wheelchair, an

item which had been purchased in New York City’s finest medical supply house in the fall

of 1962. At the next she was balanced precariously on Roland’s shoulders like a

cheerleader, her muscular thighs gripping the sides of his neck, his palms over his head and

pressing into the small of her back. He began to run with her, his sprung boots slapping the needle-strewn earth between the ruts left by her wheelchair.

“Odetta!” he cried, reverting in this moment of stress to the name by which he had first known her. “Don’t lose the gun! For your father’s sake!”

He was sprinting between the trees now. Shadow-lace and bright chains of sun-dapple ran

across them in moving mosaics as Roland length- ened his stride. They were going

downhill now. Susannah raised her left hand to ward off a branch that wanted to slap her

from the gunslinger’s shoulders. At the same moment she dropped her right hand to the butt

of his ancient revolver, cradling it.

A mile, she thought. How long to run a mile? How long with him going flat-out like this?

Not long, if he can keep his feet on these slippery needles . . . but maybe too long. Let him

be all right, Lord—let my Eddie be all right.

As if in answer, she heard the unseen beast loose its cry again. That vast voice was like

thunder. Like doom.

2

HE WAS THE LARGEST creature in the forest which had once been known as the Great

West Woods, and he was the oldest. Many of the huge old elms which Roland had noticed

in the valley below had been little more than twigs sprouting from the ground when the

bear came out of the dim unknown reaches of Out-World like a brutal, wandering king.

Once, the Old People had lived in the West Woods (it was their leavings which Roland had

found from time to time during the last weeks), and they had gone in fear of the colossal,

undying bear. They had tried to kill him when they first discovered they were not alone in

the new territory to which they had come, but although their arrows enraged him, they did

no serious damage. And he was not confused about the source of his torment, as were the

other beasts of the forest— even the predatory bushcats which denned and littered in the

sandhills to the west. No; he knew where the arrows came from, this bear. Knew. And for

every arrow which found its mark in the flesh below his shaggy pelt, he took three, four,

perhaps as many as half a dozen of the Old People. Children if he could get them; women if

he could not. Their warriors he disdained, and this was the final humiliation.

Eventually, as his real nature became clear to them, their efforts to kill him ceased. He was,