“I guess I’ll live.” He looks at Roland expressionlessly.”You’ll never know how close it was a couple of times,though. Once I took one of your guns and put it against myhead.
Cocked it, held it there for awhile, and then took it away.Eased the hammer down and
shoved it back in your holster. Another night I had a convulsion. I think that was the
secondnight, but I’m not sure.” He shakes his head and says some- thing the gunslinger
both does and doesn’t understand.”Michigan seems like a dream to me now.”
Although his voice is down to that husky murmur againand he knows he shouldn’t be
talking at all, the gunslinger hasto know one thing. “What stopped you from pulling
thetrigger?”
“Well, this is the only pair of pants I’ve got,” Eddie says.”At the last second I thought that if I pulled the trigger and itwas one of those dud shells, I’d never get up the guts to do
itagain . . . and once you shit your pants, you gotta wash ’emright away or live with the stink
forever. Henry told me that.He said he learned it in Nam. And since it was nighttime
andLester the Lobster was out, not to mention all his friends—”
But the gunslinger is laughing, laughing hard, althoughonly an occasional cracked sound actually escapes his lips.Smiling a little himself, Eddie says: “I think maybe you onlygot
your sense of humor shot off up to the elbow in that war.”He gets up, meaning to go up the
slope to where there will befuel for a fire, Roland supposes.
“Wait,” he whispers, and Eddie looks at him. “Why,really?”
“I guess because you needed me. If I’d killed myself, youwould have died. Later on, after
you’re really on your feetagain, I may, like, re-examine my options.” He looks aroundand
sighs deeply.
“There may be a Disney land or Cony Island somewherein your world, Roland, but what
I’ve seen of it so far reallydoesn’t interest me much.”
He starts away, pauses, and looks back again at Roland.His face is somber, although some
of the sickly pallor has leftit. The shakes have become no more than occasional tremors.
“Sometimes you really don’t understand me, do you?”
“No,” the gunslinger whispers. “Sometimes I don’t.”
“Then I’ll elucidate. There are people who need people toneed them. The reason you don’t
understand is because you’renot one of those people. You’d use me and then toss me
awaylike a paper bag if that’s what it came down to. God fuckedyou, my friend. You’re just
smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you’d go ahead and
do itanyway. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. If I was lyingon the beach there and
screaming for help, you’d walk over meif I was between you and your goddam Tower. Isn’t
that prettyclose to the truth?”
Roland says nothing, only watches Eddie.
“But not everyone is like that. There are people who need people to need them. Like the
Barbara Streisand song. Corny,but true. It’s just another way of being hooked through
thebag.”
Eddie gazes at him.
“But when it comes to that, you’re clean, aren’t you?”
Roland watches him.
“Except for your Tower.” Eddie utters a short laugh.”You’re a Tower junkie, Roland.”
“Which war was it?” Roland whispers.
“What?”
“The one where you got your sense of nobility and pur- pose shot off?”
Eddie recoils as if Roland has reached out and slappedhim.
“I’m gonna go get some water,” he says shortly. “Keep aneye on the creepy crawlers. We came a long way today, but Istill don’t know if they talk to each other or not.”
He turns away then, but not before Roland has seen thelast red rays of sunset reflected on
his wet cheeks.
Roland turns back to the beach and watches. The lobstrosities crawl and question, question
and crawl, but bothactivities seem aimless; they have some intelligence, but not enough to
pass on information to others of their kind.
God doesn’t always dish it in your face,Roland thinks.Most times, but not always.
Eddie returns with wood.
“Well?” he asks. “What do you think?”
“We’re all right,” the gunslinger croaks, and Eddie startsto say something but the
gunslinger is tired now and lies backand looks at the first stars peeking through the canopy
ofviolet sky and
shuffle
in the three days that followed, the gunslinger progressed steadily back to health. The red
lines creeping up his arms firstreversed their direction, then faded, then disappeared. On
the next day he sometimes walked and sometimes let Eddie draghim. On the day following
he didn’t need to be dragged at all; every hour or two they simply sat for a period of time
until thewatery feeling went out of his legs. It was during these restsand in those times after
dinner had been eaten but before thefire had burned all the way down and they went to
sleep thatthe gunslinger heard about Henry and Eddie. He rememberedwondering what
had happened to make their brothering sodifficult, but after Eddie had begun, haltingly and
with thatsort of resentful anger that proceeds from deep pain, the gun- slinger could have
stopped him, could have told him: Don’tbother, Eddie. I understand everything.
Except that wouldn’t have helped Eddie. Eddie wasn’ttalking to help Henry because Henry
was dead. He was talk- ing to bury Henry for good. And to remind himself thatalthough
Henry was dead, he, Eddie, wasn’t.
So the gunslinger listened and said nothing.
The gist was simple: Eddie believed he had stolen hisbrother’s life. Henry also believed
this. Henry might havebelieved it on his own or he might have believed it because he so frequently heard their mother lecturing Eddie on howmuch both she and Henry had
sacrificed for him, so Eddiecould be as safe as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so
hecould be happy, as happy as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so he wouldn’t end up like his poor sister that he didn’teven hardly remember but she had been so beautiful,
God love her. She was with the angels, and that was undoubtedly awonderful place to be,
but she didn’t want Eddie to be with theangels just yet, run over in the road by some crazy
drunkendriver like his sister or cut up by some crazy junkie kid for thetwenty-five cents in
his pocket and left with his guts runningout all over the sidewalk, and because she didn’t
think Eddie wanted to be with the angels yet, he just better listen to whathis big brother said and do what his big brother said to do and always remember that Henry was making a
love-sacrifice.
Eddie told the gunslinger he doubted if his mother knewsome of the things they had
done—filching comic books fromthe candy store on Rincon Avenue or smoking
cigarettesbehind the Bonded Electroplate Factory on Cohoes Street.
Once they saw a Chevrolet with the keys in it and although Henry barely knew how to
drive—he was sixteenthen, Eddie eight—he had crammed his brother into the carand said
they were going to New York City. Eddie was scared,crying, Henry scared too and mad at
Eddie, telling him to shutup, telling him to stop being such a fuckin baby, he had tenbucks
and Eddie had three or four, they could go to the movies all fuckin day and then catch a
Pelham train and be backbefore their mother had time to put supper on the table andwonder
where they were. But Eddie kept crying and near theQueensboro Bridge they saw a police
car on a side street andalthough Eddie was pretty sure the cop in it hadn’t even beenlooking
their way, he said Yeah when Henry asked him in a harsh, quavering voice if Eddie thought
that bull had seenthem. Henry turned white and pulled over so fast that he had almost
amputated a fire hydrant. He was running down theblock while Eddie, now in a panic
himself, was still strugglingwith the unfamiliar doorhandle. Henry stopped, came back,and
hauled Eddie out of the car. He also slapped him twice.Then they had walked—well,
actually they slunk— all the wayback to Brooklyn. It took them most of the day, and when
theirmother asked them why they looked so hot and sweaty andtired out, Henry said it was
because he’d spent most of the dayteaching Eddie how to go one-on-one on the basketball
courtat the playground around the block. Then some big kids cameand they had to run.
Their mother kissed Henry and beamed atEddie. She asked him if he didn’t have the bestest
big brotherin the world. Eddie agreed with her. This was honest agree- ment, too. He
thought he did.
“He was as scared as I was that day,” Eddie told Roland as they sat and watched the last of the day dwindle from the water,where soon the only light would be that reflected from
thestars. “Scareder, really, because he thought that cop saw us andI knew he didn’t. That’s
why he ran. But he came back. That’sthe important part. He came back.”