Stephen King – The Waste Lands

Eddie was looking at him harder than ever. “How do you know this is Mid-World? You

weren’t with us when we came to that marker.”

Jake stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down at his mocca- sins. “Dreamed it,” he said briefly. “You don’t think I booked this trip with my dad’s travel-agent, do you?”

Roland touched Eddie’s shoulder. “Let it alone for now.” Eddie glanced briefly at Roland and nodded.

They stood looking at the bridge a little longer. They’d had time to get used to the city

skyline, but this was something new. It dreamed in the distance, a faint shape sketched

against the blue midmorning sky. Roland could make out four sets of impossibly tall metal

towers—one set at each end of the bridge and two in the middle. Between them, gigantic

cables swooped through the air in long arcs. Between these arcs and the base of the bridge

were many vertical lines—either more cables or metal beams, he could not tell which. But

he also saw gaps, and realized after a long time that the bridge was no longer perfectly

level.

“Yonder bridge is going to be in the river soon, I think,” Roland said.

“Well, maybe,” Eddie said reluctantly, “but it doesn’t really look that bad to me.”

Roland sighed. “Don’t hope for too much, Eddie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie heard the touchiness in his voice, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

“It means that I want you to believe your eyes, Eddie—that’s all. There was a saying when

I was growing up: ‘Only a fool believes he’s dreaming before he wakes up.’ Do you

understand?”

Eddie felt a sarcastic reply on his tongue and banished it after a brief struggle. It was just

that Roland had a way—it was unintentional, he was sure, but that didn’t make it any easier

to deal with—of making him feel like such a kid.

“I guess I do,” he said at last. “It means the same thing as my mother’s favorite saying.”

“And what was that?”

“Hope for the best and expect the worst,” Eddie said sourly.

Roland’s face lightened in a smile. “I think I like your mother’s saying better.”

“But it is still standing!” Eddie burst out. “I agree it’s not in such fantastic shape—probably nobody’s done a really thorough maintenance check on it for a thousand years or so—but it

is still there. The whole city is! Is it so wrong to hope we might find some things that’ll help us there? Or some people that’ll feed us and talk to us, like the old folks back in River

Crossing, instead of shooting at us? Is it so wrong to hope our luck might be turning?”

In the silence which followed, Eddie realized with embarrassment that he had been

making a speech.

“No.” There was a kindness in Roland’s voice—that kindness which always surprised

Eddie when it came. “It’s never wrong to hope.” He looked around at Eddie and the others like a man coming out of a deep dream. “We’re done travelling for today. It’s time we had

our own pala- ver, I think, and it’s going to take awhile.”

The gunslinger left the road and walked into the high grass without looking back. After a

moment, the other three followed.

18

UNTIL THEY MET THE old people in River Crossing, Susannah had seen Roland

strictly in terms of television shows she rarely watched: Cheyenne, The Rifleman, and, of

course, the archetype of them all, Gunsmoke. That was one she had sometimes listened to

on tin- radio with her father before it came on TV (she thought of how foreign the idea of

radio drama would be to Eddie and Jake and smiled—Roland’s was not the only world

which had moved on). She could still remember what the narrator said at the beginning of

every one of those radio playlets: “It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely.”

Until River Crossing, that had summed Roland up perfectly for her. He was not

broad-shouldered, as Marshal Dillon had been, nor anywhere near as tall, and his face

seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild-west lawman, but she had still seen him

as an existential version of that make-believe Kansas peace officer, whose only mission in

life (other than an occasional drink in The Longbranch with his friends Doc and Kitty) had

been to Clean Up Dodge.

Now she understood that Roland had once been much more than a cop riding a Daliesque

range at the end of the world. He had been a diplomat; a mediator; perhaps even a teacher.

Most of all, he had been a soldier of what these people called “the white,” by which she guessed they meant the civilizing forces that kept people from killing each other enough of

the time to allow some sort of progress. In his time he had been more wandering

knight-errant than bounty hunter. And in many ways, this still was his time; the people of

River Crossing had certainly thought so. Why else would they have knelt in the dust to receive his blessing?

In light of this new perception, Susannah could see how cleverly the gunslinger had

managed them since that awful morning in the speaking ring, Each time they had begun a

line of conversation which would lead to the comparing of notes—and what could be more

natural, given the cataclysmic and inexplicable “drawing” each of them had

experienced?— Roland had been there, stepping in quickly and turning the conversation

into other channels so smoothly that none of them (even she, who had spent almost four

years up to her neck in the civil-rights movement) had noticed what he was doing.

Susannah thought she understood why—he had done it in order to give Jake time to heal.

But understanding his motives didn’t change her own feelings—astonishment, amusement,

chagrin—about how neatly he had handled them. She remembered something Andrew, her

chauffeur, had said shortly before Roland had drawn her into this world. Something about

President Kennedy being the last gunslinger of the western world. She had scoffed then,

but now she thought she understood. There was a lot more JFK than Matt Dillon in Roland.

She suspected that Roland possessed little of Kennedy’s imagination, but when it came to

romance . . . dedication . . . charisma . . .

And guile, she thought. Don’t forget guile.

She surprised herself by suddenly bursting into laughter.

Roland had seated himself cross-legged. Now he turned toward her, raising his eyebrows.

“Something funny?”

“Very. Tell me something—how many languages can you speak?”

The gunslinger thought it over. “Five,” he said at last. “I used to speak the Sellian dialects fairly well, but I believe I’ve forgotten every- thing but the curses.”

Susannah laughed again. It was a cheerful, delighted sound. “You a fox, Roland,” she said.

“Indeed you are.”

Jake looked interested. “Say a swear in Strelleran,” he said.

“Sellian,” Roland corrected. He thought a minute, then said some- thing very fast and

greasy—to Eddie it sounded a little as if he was gargling with some very thick liquid.

Week-old coffee, say. Roland grinned as he said it.

Jake grinned back. “What does it mean?”

Roland put an arm around the boy’s shoulders for a moment. “That we have a lot of things

to talk about.”

19

“WE ARE KA-TET,” ROLAND began, “which means a group of people bound together

by fate. The philosophers of my land said a ka-tet could only be broken by death or

treachery. My great teacher, Cort, said that since death and treachery are also spokes on the

wheel of ka, such a binding can never be broken. As the years pass and I see more, I come

more and more to Cort’s way of looking at it.

“Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a

mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture … or part of a picture. It may

take a great many ka-tets to finish one picture. You mustn’t be surprised if you discover

your lives have been touching in ways you haven’t seen until now. For one thing, each of

you three is capable of knowing each other’s thoughts—”

“What?” Eddie cried.

“It’s true. You share your thoughts so naturally that you haven’t even been aware it’s

happening, but it has been. It’s easier for me to see, no doubt, because I am not a full

member of this ka-tet—possibly because I am not from your world—and so cannot take

part completely in the thought-sharing ability. But I can send. Susannah … do you

remember when we were in the circle?”

“Yes. You told me to let the demon go when you told me. But you didn’t say that out loud.”

“Eddie … do you remember when we were in the bear’s clearing, and the mechanical bat