He actually cried out.
Roland had been about to dip his rude operating instruments in the basin, which held the rest
of the disinfectant. Now he looked at Eddie, concerned. “What is it?”
For a moment Eddie couldn’t reply. His breath was quite literally gone, his lungs as flat as old inner tubes. He was remembering a movie the Dean boys had watched one afternoon on TV in
their apartment, the one in
(Brooklyn)
( the Bronx)
Co-Op City. Henry mostly got to pick what they watched because he was bigger and older.
Eddie didn’t protest too often or too much; he idolized his big brother. (When he did protest too much he was apt to get the old Indian Rope Burn or maybe a Dutch Rub up the back of his neck.)
What Henry liked was Westerns. The sort of movies where, sooner or later, some character had to bite the stick or belt or bullet.
“Roland,” he said. His voice was just a faint wheeze to start with. “Roland, listen.”
“I hear you very well.”
“There was a movie. I told you about movies, right?”
“Stories told in moving pictures.”
“Sometimes Henry and I used to stay in and watch them on TV. Television’s basically a home movie-machine.”
“A shit-machine, some would say,” Tower put in.
Eddie ignored him. “One of the movies we watched was about these Mexican peasants —
folken, if it does ya — who hired some gunslingers to protect them from the bandidos who came every year to raid their village and steal their crops. Does any of this ring a bell?”
Roland looked at him with gravity and what might have been sadness. ‘Yes. Indeed it does.”
“And the name of Tian’s village. I always knew it sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why.
Now I do. The movie was called The Magnificent Seven, and just by the way, Roland, how many of us were in the ditch that day, waiting for the Wolves?”
“Would you boys mind telling us what you’re talking about?” Deepneau asked. But although he asked politely, both Roland and Eddie ignored him, too.
Roland took a moment to cull his memory, then said: ‘You, me, Susannah, Jake, Margaret,
Zalia, and Rosa. There were more — the Tavery twins and Ben Slightman’s boy — but seven
fighters.”
“Yes. And the link I couldn’t quite make was to the movie’s director. When you’re making a movie, you need a director to run things. He’s the dinh.”
Roland nodded.
“The dinh of The Magnificent Seven was a man named John Sturges.”
Roland sat a moment longer, thinking. Then he said: “Ka.”
Eddie burst out laughing. He simply couldn’t help it. Roland always had the answer.
ELEVEN
“In order to catch the pain,” Roland said, “you have to clamp down on the belt at the instant you feel it. Do you understand? The very instant. Pin it with your teeth.”
“Gotcha. Just make it quick.”
“I’ll do the best I can.”
Roland dipped first the pliers and then the knife into the disinfectant. Eddie waited with the
belt in his mouth, lying across his teeth. Yes, once you saw the basic pattern, you couldn’t unsee it, could you? Roland was the hero of the piece, the grizzled old warrior who’d be played by
some grizzled but vital star like Paul Newman or maybe Eastwood in the Hollywood version. He
himself was the young buck, played by the hot young boy star of the moment. Tom Cruise,
Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, someone like that. And here’s a set we all know, a cabin in the
woods, and a situation we’ve seen many times before but still relish, Pulling the Bullet. All that was missing was the ominous sound of drums in the distance. And, Eddie realized, probably the
drums were missing because they’d already been through the Ominous Drums part of the story:
the god-drums. They had turned out to be an amplified version of a Z.Z. Top song being
broadcast through streetcorner speakers in the City of Lud. Their situation was becoming ever
harder to deny: they were characters in someone’s story. This whole world —
I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that I was raised in Brooklyn simply because of some writer’s mistake, something that will eventually be fixed in the second draft. Hey, Pere, I’m with you — I refuse to believe I’m a character. This is my fucking life!
“Go on, Roland,” he said. “Get that thing outta me.”
The gunslinger poured some of the disinfectant from the bowl over Eddie’s shin, then used the
tip of the knife to flick the clot out of the wound. With that done, he lowered the pliers. “Be ready to bite the pain, Eddie,” he murmured, and a moment later Eddie did.
TWELVE
Roland knew what he was doing, had done it before, and the bullet hadn’t gone deep. The whole
thing was over in ninety seconds, but it was the longest minute and a half in Eddie’s life. At last Roland tapped the pliers on one of Eddie’s closed hands. When Eddie managed to unroll his
fingers, the gunslinger dropped a flattened slug into it. “Souvenir,” he said. “Stopped right on the bone. That was the scraping that you heard.”
Eddie looked at the mashed piece of lead, then flicked it across the linoleum floor like a
marble. “Don’t want it,” he said, and wiped his brow.
Tower, ever the collector, picked up the cast-off slug. Deepneau, meanwhile, was examining
the toothmarks in his belt with silent fascination.
“Cal,” Eddie said, getting up on his elbows. ‘You had a book in your case — ”
“I want those books back,” Tower said immediately. “You better be taking care of them, young man.”
“I’m sure they’re in great condition,” Eddie said, telling himself once more to bite his tongue if he had to. Or grab Aaron’s belt and bite that again, if your tongue won’t do.
“They better be, young man; now they’re all I have left.”
“Yes, along with the forty or so in your various safe deposit boxes,” Aaron Deepneau said, completely ignoring the vile look his friend shot him. “The signed Ulysses is probably the best, but there are several gorgeous Shakespeare folios, a complete set of signed Faulkners — ”
“Aaron, would you please be quiet?”
” — and a Huckleberry Finn that you could turn into a Mercedes-Benz sedan any day of the week,” Deepneau finished.
“In any case, one of them was a book called ‘ Salem’s Lot,” Eddie said. “By a man named — ”
“Stephen King,” Tower finished. He gave the slug a final look, then put it on the kitchen table next to the sugarbowl. “I’ve been told he lives close to here. I’ve picked up two copies of Lot and also three copies of his first novel, Carrie. I was hoping to take a trip to Bridgton and get them signed. I suppose now that won’t happen.”
“I don’t understand what makes it so valuable,” Eddie said, and then: “Ouch, Roland, that hurts!”
Roland was checking the makeshift bandage around the wound in Eddie’s leg. “Be still,” he said.
Tower paid no attention to this. Eddie had turned him once more in the direction of his
favorite subject, his obsession, his darling. What Eddie supposed Gollum in the Tolkien books
would have called “his precious.”
“Do you remember what I told you when we were discussing The Hogan, Mr. Dean? Or The Dogan, if you prefer? I said that the value of a rare book — like that of a rare coin or a rare stamp — is created in different ways. Sometimes it’s just an autograph — ”
“Your copy of ‘Salem’s Lot isn’t signed.”
“No, because this particular author is very young and not very well known. He may amount to something one day, or he may not.” Tower shrugged, almost as if to say that was up to ka. “But this particular book . . . well, the first edition was only seventy-five hundred copies, and almost all of them sold in New England.”
“Why? Because the guy who wrote it is from New England?”
“Yes. As so often happens, the book’s value was created entirely by accident. A local chain decided to promote it heavily. They even produced a TV commercial, which is almost unheard-of at the local retail level. And it worked. Bookland of Maine ordered five thousand copies of the first edition — almost seventy per cent — and sold nearly every single one. Also, as with The Hogan, there were misprints in the front matter. Not the title, in this case, but on the flap. You can tell an authentic first of ‘Salem’s Lot by the clipped price — at the last minute, Doubleday decided to raise the price from seven-ninety-five to eight-ninety-five — and by the name of the priest in the flap copy.”
Roland looked up. “What about the name of the priest?”