“So what?” Eddie cried—almost shrieked. “So what if I do? I said I’d come back with you!
You got my promise! I mean, you got my fuckin PROMISE! What else do you want? You
want me to swear on my mother’s name? Okay, I swear on my mother’s name! You want
me to swear on my brother Henry’s name? All right, I swear! I swear! I SWEAR!”
Enrico Balazar would have told him, but the gunslinger didn’t need the likes of Balazar to
tell him this one fact of life: Never trust a junkie.
Roland nodded toward the door. “Until after the Tower, at least, that part of your life is
done. After that I don’t care. After that you’re free to go to hell in your own way. Until then
I need you.”
”Oh you fuckin shitass liar,” Eddie said softly. There was no audible emotion in his voice,
but the gunslinger saw the glisten of tears in his eyes. Roland said nothing. “You know
there ain’t gonna be no after, not for me, not for her, or whoever the Christ this third guy is.
Probably not for you, either—you look as fuckin wasted as Henry did at his worst. If we
don’t die on the way to your Tower we’ll sure as shit die when we get there so why are you
lying to me?”
The gunslinger felt a dull species of shame but only repeated: “At least for now, that part
of your life is done.”
“Yeah?” Eddie said. “Well, I got some news for you, Roland. I know what’s gonna happen to your real body when you go through there and inside of her. I know because I saw it
before. I don’t need your guns. I got you by that fabled place where the short hairs grow, my
friend. You can even turn her head the way you turned mine and watch what I do to the rest
of you while you’re nothing but your goddam ka. I’d like to wait until nightfall, and drag you down by the water. Then you could watch the lobsters chow up on the rest of you. But
you might be in too much of a hurry for that.”
Eddie paused. The graty breaking of the waves and the steady hollow conch of the wind
both seemed very loud.
“So I think I’ll just use your knife to cut your throat.”
“And close that door forever?”
“You say that part of my life is done. You don’t just mean smack, either. You mean New
York, America, my time, every- thing. If that’s how it is, I want this part done, too. The scenery sucks and the company stinks. There are times, Roland, when you make Jimmy
Swaggart look almost sane.”
“There are great wonders ahead,” Roland said. “Great adventures. More than that, there is a quest to course upon, and a chance to redeem your honor. There’s something else, too.
You could be a gunslinger. I needn’t be the last after all. It’s in you, Eddie. I see it. I feel it.”
Eddie laughed, although now the tears were coursing down his cheeks. “Oh,
wonderful. Wonderful! Just what I need! My brother Henry. He was a gunslinger. In a place called Viet Nam, that was. It was great for him. You should have seen him when he was on
a serious nod, Roland. He couldn’t find his way to the fuckin bathroom without help. If
there wasn’t any help handy, he just sat there and watched Big Time Wrestling and did it in his fuckin pants. It’s great to be a gunslinger. I can see that. My brother was a doper and
you’re out of your fucking gourd.”
“Perhaps your brother was a man with no clear idea of honor.”
“Maybe not. We didn’t always get a real clear picture of what that was in the Projects. It
was just a word you used after Your if you happened to get caught smoking reefer or lifting
the spinners off some guy’s T-Bird and got ho’ed up in court for it.”
Eddie was crying harder now, but he was laughing, too.
“Your friends, now. This guy you talk about in your sleep, for instance, this dude
Cuthbert—”
The gunslinger started in spite of himself. Not all his long years of training could stay that
start.
“Did they get this stuff you’re talking about like a god- dam Marine recruiting sergeant?
Adventure, quests, honor?”
“They understood honor, yes,” Roland said slowly, thinking of all the vanished others.
“Did it get them any further than gunslinging got my brother?”
The gunslinger said nothing.
“I know you,” Eddie said. “I seen lots of guys like you. “You’re just another kook singing
‘Onward Christian Sol- diers’ with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other. I don’t want no
honor. I just want a chicken dinner and fix. In that order. So I’m telling you: go on through.
You can. But the minute you’re gone, I’m gonna kill the rest of you.”
The gunslinger said nothing.
Eddie smiled crookedly and brushed the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands.
“You want to know what we call this back home?”
“What?”
“A Mexican stand-off.”
For a moment they only looked at each other, and then Roland looked sharply into the
doorway. They had both been partially aware—Roland rather more than Eddie—that there
had been another of those swerves, this time to the left. Here was an array of sparkling
jewelry. Some was under protective glass but because most wasn’t, the gunslinger
supposed it was trumpery stuff . . . what Eddie would have called costume jewelry. The
dark brown hands examined a few things in what seemed an only cursory manner, and then
another salesgirl appeared. There had been some conversation which neither of them really
noticed, and the Lady (some Lady, Eddie thought) asked to see something else. The
salesgirl went away, and that was when Roland’s eyes swung sharply back.
The brown hands reappeared, only now they held a purse. It opened. And suddenly the
hands were scooping things—seemingly, almost certainly, at random—into the purse.
“Well, you’re collecting quite a crew, Roland,” Eddie said, bitterly amused. “First you got your basic white junkie, and then you got your basic black shoplif—”
But Roland was already moving toward the doorway between the worlds, moving swiftly,
not looking at Eddie at all.
“I mean it!” Eddie screamed. “You go through and I’ll cut your throat, I’ll cut your fucking thr—”
Before he could finish, the gunslinger was gone. All that was left of him was his limp,
breathing body lying upon the beach.
For a moment Eddie only stood there, unable to believe that Roland had done it, had really
gone ahead and done this idiotic thing in spite of his promise—his sincere
fucking guarantee, as far as that went—of what the consequences would be.
He stood for a moment, eyes rolling like the eyes of a frightened horse at the onset of a
thunderstorm . . . except of course there was no thunderstorm, except for the one in the
head.
All right. All right, goddammit.
There might only be a moment. That was all the gun-slinger might give him, and Eddie
damned well knew it. He glanced at the door and saw the black hands freeze with a gold necklace half in and half out of a purse that already glittered like a pirate’s cache of treasure.
Although he could not hear it, Eddie sensed that Roland was speaking to the owner of the
black hands.
He pulled the knife from the gunslinger’s purse and then rolled over the limp, breathing
body which lay before the doorway. The eyes were open but blank, rolled up to the whites.
“Watch, Roland!” Eddie screamed. That monotonous, idiotic, never-ending wind blew in
his ears. Christ, it was enough to drive anyone bugshit. “Watch very closely! I want to
complete your fucking education! I want to show you what happens when you fuck over
the Dean brothers!”
He brought the knife down to the gunslinger’s throat.
CHAPTER 2
RINGING THE CHANGES
1
August, 1959:
When the intern came outside half an hour later, he found Julio leaning against the
ambulance which was still parked in the emergency bay of Sisters of Mercy Hospital on
23rd Street. The heel of one of Julio’s pointy-toed boots was hooked over the front fender.
He had changed to a pair of glaring pink pants and a blue shirt with his name written in gold
stitches over the left pocket: his bowling league outfit. George checked his watch and saw
that Julio’s team—The Spies of Supremacy— would already be rolling.
“Thought you’d be gone,” George Shavers said. He was an intern at Sisters of Mercy.
“How’re your guys gonna win without the Wonder Hook?”
“They got Miguel Basale to take my place. He ain’t steady, but he gets hot sometimes.
They’ll be okay.” Julio paused. “I was curious about how it came out.” He was the driver, a Cubano with a sense of humor George wasn’t even sure Julio knew he had. He looked