“Gorry,” Cullum said. “Walk-ins! Walk-ins in my house! I can’t hardly believe it!”
“Where’s Dewey Evans?” Eddie asked. ‘You don’t have a Dewey Evans ball.”
“Pardon?” Cullum asked. It came out paaa-aaadon.
“Maybe they don’t call him that yet,” Eddie said, almost to himself. “Dwight Evans? Right fielder?”
“Oh.” Cullum nodded. “Well, I only have the best in that cabinet, don’t you know.”
“Dewey fills the bill, believe me,” Eddie said. “Maybe he’s not worthy of being in the John Cullum Hall of Fame yet, but wait a few years. Wait until ’86. And by the way, John, as a fan of the game, I want to say two words to you, okay?”
“Sure,” Cullum said. It came out exactly as the word was said in the Calla: SHO-ah.
Roland, meanwhile, had taken a drag from his smoke. He blew it out and looked at the
cigarette, frowning.
“The words are Roger Clemens, ” Eddie said. “Remember that name.”
“Clemens,” John Cullum said, but dubiously. Faintly, from the far side of Keywadin Pond, came the sound of more sirens. “Roger Clemens, ayuh, I’ll remember. Who is he?”
“You’re gonna want him in here, leave it at that,” Eddie said, tapping the case. “Maybe on the same shelf with the Babe.”
Cullum’s eyes gleamed. “Tell me somethin, son. Have the Red Sox won it all yet? Have they
— ”
“This isn’t a smoke, it’s nothing but murky air,” Roland said. He gave Cullum a reproachful look that was so un-Roland that it made Eddie grin. “No taste to speak of at all. People here actually smoke these?”
Cullum took the cigarette from Roland’s fingers, broke the Filter off the end, and gave it back to him. “Try it now,” he said, and returned his attention to Eddie. “So? I got you out of a jam on t’other side of the water. Seems like you owe me one. Have they ever won the Series? At least up to your time?”
Eddie’s grin faded and he looked at the old man seriously. “I’ll tell you if you really want me to, John. But do ya?”
John considered, puffing his pipe. Then he said, “I s’pose not. Knowin’d spoil it.”
“Tell you one thing,” Eddie said cheerfully. The pills John had given him were kicking in and he felt cheerful. A little bit, anyway. “You don’t want to die before 1986. That one’s gonna be a corker.”
“Ayuh?”
“Say absolutely true.” Then Eddie turned to the gunslinger. “What are we going to do about our gunna, Roland?”
Roland hadn’t even thought about it until this moment. All their few worldly possessions, from
Eddie’s fine new whittling knife, purchased in Took’s Store, to Roland’s ancient grow-bag, given to him by his father far on the other side of time’s horizon, had been left behind when they came through the door. When they had been blown through the door. The gunslinger assumed their gunna had been left lying in the dirt in front of the East Stoneham store, although he couldn’t remember for sure; he’d been too fiercely focused on getting Eddie and himself to safety before the fellow with the long-sighted rifle blew their heads off. It hurt to think of all those companions of the long trek burned up in the fire that had undoubtedly claimed the store by now. It hurt even worse to think of them in the hands of Jack Andolini. Roland had a brief but vivid picture of his grow-bag hanging on Andolini’s belt like a ‘backy-pouch (or an enemy’s scalp) and winced.
“Roland? What about our — ”
“We have our guns, and that’s all the gunna we need,” Roland said, more roughly than he had intended. “Jake has the Choo-Choo book, and I can make another compass should we need one.
Otherwise — ”
“But — ”
“If you’re talkin about your goods, sonny, I c’n ask some questions about em when the time comes,” Cullum said. “But for the time being, I think your friend’s right.”
Eddie knew his friend was right. His friend was almost always right, which was one of the few things Eddie still hated about him. He wanted his gunna, goddammit, and not just for the one
clean pair of jeans and the two clean shirts.
Nor for extra ammo or the whittling knife, fine as it was. There had been a lock of Susannah’s
hair in his leather swag-bag, and it had still carried a faint whiff of her smell. That was what he missed. But done was done.
“John,” he said, “what day is this?”
The man’s bristly gray eyebrows went up. “You serious?” And when Eddie nodded: “Ninth of July. Year of our Lord nineteen-seventy-seven.”
Eddie made a soundless whistling noise through his pursed lips.
Roland, the last stub of the Dromedary cigarette smoldering between his fingers, had gone to
the window for a looksee. Nothing behind the house but trees and a few seductive blue winks
from what Cullum called “the Keywadin.” But that pillar of black smoke still rose in the sky, as if to remind him that any sense of peace he might feel in these surroundings was only an illusion.
They had to get out of here. And no matter how terribly afraid he was for Susannah Dean, now
that they were here they had to find Calvin Tower and finish their business with him. And they’d have to do it quickly. Because —
As if reading his mind and finishing his thought, Eddie said: “Roland? It’s speeding up. Time on this side is speeding up.”
“I know.”
“It means that whatever we do, we have to get it right the first time, because in this world you can never come back earlier. There are no do-overs.”
Roland knew that, too.
TWO
“The man we’re looking for is from New York City,” Eddie told John Cullum.
“Ayuh, plenty of those around in the summertime.”
“His name’s Calvin Tower. He’s with a friend of his named Aaron Deepneau.”
Cullum opened the glass case with the baseballs inside, took out one with Carl
Yastrzemski written across the sweet spot in that weirdly perfect script of which only professional athletes seem capable (in Eddie’s experience it was the spelling that gave most of them problems), and began to toss it from hand to hand. “Folks from away really pile in once June comes — you know that, don’t ya?”
“I do,” Eddie said, feeling hopeless already. He thought it was possible old Double-Ugly had already gotten to Cal Tower. Maybe the ambush at the store had been Jack’s idea of dessert. “I guess you can’t — ”
“If I can’t, I guess I better goddam retire,” Cullum said with some spirit, and tossed the Yaz ball to Eddie, who held it in his right hand and ran the tips of his lefthand fingers
over the red stitches. The feel of them raised a wholly unexpected lump in his throat. If a
baseball didn’t tell you that you were home, what did? Only this world wasn’t home anymore.
John was right, he was a walk-in.
“What do you mean?” Roland asked. Eddie tossed him the ball and Roland caught it without ever taking his eyes off John Cullum.
“I don’t bother with names, but I know most everyone who comes into this town just the
same,” he said. “Know em by sight. Same with any other caretaker worth his salt, I s’pose. You want to know who’s in your territory.” Roland nodded at this with perfect understanding. “Tell me what this guy looks like.”
Eddie said, “He stands about five-nine and weighs . . . oh, I’m gonna say two-thirty.”
“Heavyset, then.”
“Do ya. Also, most of his hair’s gone on the sides of his forehead.” Eddie raised his hands to his own head and pushed his hair back, exposing the temples (one of them still oozing blood
from his near-fatal passage through the Unfound Door). He winced a little at the pain this
provoked in his upper left arm, but there the bleeding had already stopped. Eddie was more
worried about the round he’d taken in the leg. Right now Cullum’s Percodan was dealing with the pain, but if the bullet was still in there — and Eddie thought it might be — it would eventually have to come out.
“How old is he?” Cullum asked.
Eddie looked at Roland, who only shook his head. Had Roland ever actually seen Tower? At
this particular moment, Eddie couldn’t remember. He thought not.
“I think in his fifties.”
“He’s the book collector, ain’t he?” Cullum asked, then laughed at Eddie’s expression of surprise. “Told you, I keep a weather eye out on the summah folk. You never know when one’s gonna turn out to be a deadbeat. Maybe an outright thief. Or, eight or nine years ago, we had this woman from New Jersey who turned out to be a firebug.” Cullum shook his head. “Looked like a small-town librarian, the sort of lady who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and she was lightin up