Stephen King – The Waste Lands

home afterwards. These punches were supposedly Henry’s little jokes—”Two for

flinching!” Henry would cry cheerily, and then whap-whap! Into Eddie’s bicep with one

knuckle extended—but they didn’t feel like jokes. They felt like warnings. They felt like

Henry’s way of saying You better not fake me out and make me look stupid when you drive

for the basket, bro; you better remember that I’m Watching Out for You.

The same was true with reading . . . baseball . . . Ring-a-Levio . . . math . . . even jump-rope, which was a girl’s game. That he was better at these things, or could be better, was a secret

that had to be kept at all costs. Because Eddie was the younger brother. Because Henry was

Watching Out for him. But the most important part of the underneath reason was also the

simplest: these things had to be kept secret because Henry was Eddie’s big brother, and

Eddie adored him.

4

Two DAYS AGO, WHILE Susannah was skinning out a rabbit and Roland was starting

supper, Eddie had been in the forest just south of camp. He had seen a funny spur of wood

jutting out of a fresh stump. A weird, feeling—he supposed it was the one people called

deja vu—swept over him, and he found himself staring fixedly at the spur, which looked

like a badly shaped doorknob. He was distantly aware that his mouth had gone dry.

After several seconds, he realized he was looking at the spur sticking out of the stump but

thinking about the courtyard behind the building where he and Henry had lived—thinking

about the feel of the warm cement under his ass and the whopping smells of garbage from

the dumpster around the corner in the alley. In this memory he had a chunk of wood in his

left hand and a paring knife from the drawer by the sink in his right. The chunk of wood

jutting from the stump had called up the memory of that brief period when he had fallen

violently in love with wood-carving. It was just that the memory was buried so deep he

hadn’t realized, at first, what it was.

What he had loved most about carving was the seeing part, which happened even before

you began. Sometimes you saw a car or a truck. Sometimes a dog or cat. Once, he

remembered, it had been the face of an idol—one of the spooky Easter Island monoliths he

had seen in an issue of National Geographic at school. That had turned out to be a good one.

The game was to find out how much of that thing you could get out of the wood without

breaking it. You could never get it all, but if you were very careful, you could sometimes

get quite a lot.

There was something inside the boss on the side of the stump. He thought he might be able

to release quite a lot of it with Roland’s knife— it was the sharpest, handiest tool he had

ever used.

Something inside the wood, waiting patiently for someone—someone like him!—to come along and let it out. To set it free.

Oh lookit the sissy! Whatcha makin today, sissy? A dollhouse? A pisspot for your

itty-bitty teeny peenie? A slingshot, so you can pretend to hunt rabbits, just like the big

boys? Awwww . . . ain’t that CUTE?

He felt a burst of shame, a sense of wrongness; that strong sense of secrets that must be

kept at any cost, and then he remembered—again— that Henry Dean, who had in his later

years become the great sage and eminent junkie, was dead. This realization had still not

lost its power to surprise; it kept hitting him in different ways, sometimes with sorrow,

sometimes with guilt, sometimes with anger. On this day, two days before the great bear

came charging out of the green corridors of the woods, it had hit him in the most surprising

way of all. He had felt relief, and a soaring joy.

He was free.

Eddie had borrowed Roland’s knife. He used it to cut carefully around the jutting boss of

wood, then brought it back and sat beneath a tree with it, turning it this way and that. He

was not looking at it; he was looking into it.

Susannah had finished with her rabbit. The meat went into the pot over the fire; the skin

she stretched between two sticks, tying it with hanks of rawhide from Roland’s purse. Later

on, after the evening meal, Eddie would begin scraping it clean. She used her hands and

arms, slipping effortlessly over to where Eddie was sitting with his back propped against

the tall old pine. At the campfire, Roland was crumbling some arcane—and no doubt

delicious—woods-herb into the pot. “What’s doing, Eddie?”

Eddie had found himself restraining an absurd urge to hide the boss of wood behind his

back. “Nothing,” he said. “Thought I might, you know, curve something.” He paused, then added: “I’m not very good, though.” He sounded as if he might be trying to reassure her of this fact.

She had looked at him, puzzled. For a moment she seemed on the verge of saying

something, then simply shrugged and left him alone. She had no idea why Eddie seemed

ashamed to be passing a little time in whittling—her father had done it all the time—but if

it was something that needed to be talked about, she supposed Eddie would get to it in his

own time.

He knew the guilty feelings were stupid and pointless, but he also knew he felt more

comfortable doing this work when Roland and Susan- nah were out of camp.Old habits, it

seemed, sometimes died hard. Beating heroin was child’s play compared to beating your

childhood.

When they were away, hunting or shooting or keeping Roland’s peculiar form of school,

Eddie found himself able to turn to his piece of wood with surprising skill and increasing

pleasure. The shape was in there, all right; he had been right about that. It was a simple one, and Roland’s knife was setting it free with an eerie ease. Eddie thought he was going to get

almost all of it, and that meant the slingshot might actually turn out to be a practical

weapon. Not much compared to Roland’s big revolvers, maybe, but something he had

made himself, just the same. His. And this idea pleased him very much.

When the first crows rose in the air, cawing affrightedly, he did not hear. He was already

thinking—hoping—that he might see a tree with a bow trapped in it before too long.

5

HE HEARD THE BEAR approaching before Roland and Susannah did, but not much

before—he was lost in that high daze of concentration which accompanies the creative

impulse at its sweetest and most powerful. He had suppressed these impulses for most of

his life, and now this one held him wholly in its grip. Eddie was a willing prisoner.

He was pulled from his daze not by the sound of falling trees but by the rapid thunder of

a .45 from the south. He looked up, smiling, and brushed hair from his forehead with a

sawdusty hand. In that moment, sitting with his back against a tall pine in the clearing

which had become home, his face crisscrossed with opposing beams of green-gold forest

light, he looked handsome indeed—a young man with unruly dark hair which constantly

tried to spill across his high forehead, a young man with a strong, mobile mouth and hazel

eyes.

For a moment his eyes shifted to Roland’s other gun, hanging by its belt from a nearby

branch, and he found himself wondering how long it had been since Roland had gone

anywhere without at least one of his fabulous weapons hanging by his side. That question

led to two others.

How old was he, this man who had plucked Eddie and Susannah from their world and their

whens? And, more important, what was wrong with him?

Susannah had promised to broach that subject … if she shot well and didn’t get Roland’s

back hair up, that was. Eddie didn’t think Roland would tell her—not at first—but it was

time to let old long tall and ugly know that they knew something was wrong.

“There’ll be water if God wills it,” Eddie said. He turned back to his carving with a little smile playing on his lips. They had both begun to pick up Roland’s little sayings . . . and he

theirs. It was almost as if they were halves of die same—

Then a tree fell close by in the forest, and Eddie was on his feet in a second, the half-carved

slingshot in one hand, Roland’s knife in the other. He stared across the clearing in the

direction of die sound, heart thumping, all his senses finally alert. Something was coming.

Now he could hear it, trampling its heedless way through the underbrush, and he marvelled