Eddie said: “Check me if I’m wrong on this, sport, because I know almost zilch about baseball west of Yankee Stadium, but shouldn’t that say Kansas City Royals? You know, George Brett and all that?”
Jake nodded. He knew the Royals, and he knew Brett, although he had been a young player in Jake’s when and must have been a fairly old one in Eddie’s.
“Kansas City Athletics, you mean,” Susannah said, sounding bewildered. Roland ignored it all; he was still cruising in his own personal ozone layer.
“Not by ’86, darlin,” Eddie said kindly. “By ’86 the Athletics were in Oakland.” He glanced from the bumper sticker to Jake. “Minor-league team, maybe?” he asked.
“Triple A?”
“The Triple A Royals are still the Royals,” Jake said. “They play in Omaha. Come on, let’s go.”
And although he didn’t know about the others, Jake himself went on with a lighter heart. Maybe it was stupid, but he was relieved. He didn’t believe that this terrible plague was waiting up ahead for his world, because there were no Kansas City Monarchs in his world. Maybe that wasn’t enough information upon which to base a conclusion, but it felt true. And it was an enormous relief to be able to believe that his mother and father weren’t slated to die of a germ people called Captain Trips and be burned in a … a landfill, or something.
Except that wasn’t quite a sure thing, even if this wasn’t the 1986 version of his 1977 world. Because even if this awful plague had happened in a world where there were cars called Takuro Spirits and George Brett played for the K.C.
Monarchs, Roland said the trouble was spreading . . .that things like the superflu were eating through the fabric of existence like battery acid eating its way into a piece of cloth.
The gunslinger had spoken of time’s pool, a phrase which had at first struck Jake as romantic and charming. But suppose the pool was growing stagnant and swampy? And suppose these Bermuda Triangle-type things Roland called thinnies, once great rarities, were becoming the rule rather than the exception?
Suppose—oh, and here was a hideous thought, one guaranteed to keep you lying awake until way past three—all of reality was sagging as the structural weaknesses of the Dark Tower grew? Suppose there came a crash, one level falling down into the next… and the next… and the next… until—
When Eddie grasped his shoulder and squeezed, Jake had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming.
“You’re giving yourself the hoodoos,” Eddie said.
“What do you know about it?” Jake asked. That sounded rude, but he was mad.
From being scared or being seen into? He didn’t know. Didn’t much care, either.
“When it comes to the hoodoos, I’m an old hand,” Eddie said. “I don’t know exactly what’s on your mind, but whatever it is, this would be an excellent time to stop thinking about it.”
That, Jake decided, was probably good advice. They walked across the street together. Toward Gage Park and one of the greatest shocks of Jake’s life.
2
Passing under the wrought-iron arch with gage park written on it in old-fashioned, curlicued letters, they found themselves on a brick path leading through a garden that was half English Formal and half Ecuadorian Jungle. With no one to tend it through the hot Midwestern summer, it had run to riot; with no one to tend it this fall, it had run to seed. A sign just inside the arch proclaimed this to be the Reinisch Rose Garden, and there were roses, all right; roses everywhere. Most had gone over, but some of the wild ones still throve, making Jake think of the rose in the vacant lot at Forty-sixth and Second with a longing so deep it was an ache.
Off to one side as they entered the park was a beautiful old-time carousel, its prancing steeds and racing stallions now still on their posts. The carousel’s very
silence, its flashing lights and steamy calliope music stilled forever, gave Jake a chill. Hung over the neck of one horse, dangling from a rawhide strip, was some kid’s baseball glove. Jake was barely able to look at it.
Beyond the carousel, the foliage grew even thicker, strangling the path until the travellers edged along single-file, like lost children in a fairy-tale wood. Thorns from overgrown and unpruned rosebushes tore at Jake’s clothes. He had somehow gotten into the lead (probably because Roland was still deep inside his own thoughts), and that was why he saw Charlie the Choo-Choo first.
His only thought while approaching the narrow-gauge train-tracks which crossed the path—they were little more than toy tracks, really— was of the gunslinger saying that ka was like a wheel, always rolling around to the same place again. We
‘re haunted by roses and trains, he thought. Why? I don’t know. I guess it’s just another rid—
Then he looked to his left, and “OhgoodnesstoChrist” fell out of his mouth, all in one word. The strength ran out of his legs and he sat down. His voice sounded watery and distant to his own ears. He didn’t quite faint, but the color drained out of the world until the running-to-riot foliage on the west side of the park looked almost as gray as the autumn sky overhead.
“Jake! Jake, what’s wrong!” It was Eddie, and Jake could hear the genuine concern in his voice, but it seemed to be coming over a bad long-distance connection.
From Beirut, say, or maybe Uranus. And he could feel Roland’s steadying hand on his shoulder, but it was as distant as Eddie’s voice.
“Jake!” Susannah. “What’s wrong, honey? What—”
Then she saw, and stopped talking at him. Eddie saw, and also stopped talking at him. Roland’s hand fell away. They all stood looking … except for Jake, who sat looking. He supposed that strength and feeling would come back into his legs eventually and he would get up, but right now they felt like limp macaroni.
The train was parked fifty feet up, by a toy station that mimicked the one across the street. Hanging from its eaves was a sign which read topeka. The train was Charlie the Choo-Choo, cowcatcher and all; a 402 Big Boy Steam Locomotive.
And, Jake knew, if he found enough strength to get up on his feet and go over there, he would find a family of mice nested in the seat where the engineer (whose name had undoubtedly been Bob Something-or-other) had once sat. There would he another family, this one of swallows, nested in the smokestack.
And the dark, oily tears, Jake thought, looking at the tiny train waiting in front of its tiny station with his skin crawling all over his body and his balls hard and his stomach in a knot. At night it cries those dark, oily tears, and they’re rusting the hell out of his fine Stratham headlight. But in your time, Charlie-boy, you pulled your share of kids, right? Around and around Gage Park you went, and the kids laughed, except some of them weren’t really laughing; some of them, the ones who were wise to you, were screaming. The way I’d scream now, if I had the strength.
But his strength was coming back, and when Eddie put a hand under one of his arms and Roland put one under the other, Jake was able to get up. He staggered once, then stood steady.
“Just for the record, I don’t blame you,” Eddie said. His voice was grim; so was his face. “I feel a little like falling over myself. That’s the one in your book; that’s it to the life.”
“So now we know where Miss Beryl Evans got the idea for Charlie the Choo-Choo” Susannah said. “Either she lived here, or sometime before 1942, when the damned thing was published, she visited Topeka—”
“—and saw the kids’ train that goes through Reinisch Rose Garden and around Gage Park,” Jake said. He was getting over his scare now, and he—not just an only child but for most of his life a lonely child—felt a burst of love and gratitude for his friends. They had seen what he had seen, they had understood the source of his fright. Of course—they were ka-tet.
“It won’t answer silly questions, it won’t play silly games,” Roland said musingly.
“Can you go on, Jake?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?” Eddie asked, and when Jake nodded, Eddie pushed Susannah across the tracks. Roland went next. Jake paused a moment, remembering a dream he’d had—he and Oy had been at a train-crossing, and the bumbler had suddenly leaped onto the tracks, barking wildly at the oncoming headlight.
Now Jake bent and scooped Oy up. He looked at the rusting train standing silently in its station, its dark headlamp like a dead eye. “I’m not afraid,” he said in a low voice. “Not afraid of you.”
The headlamp came to life and flashed at him once, brief but glare-bright, emphatic: I know different; I know different, my dear little squint.