Eddie knew something else, too. Blaine had answered hundreds of riddles as they ran southeast along the Path of the Beam, and the others believed that he had answered every single one of them without hesitation. Eddie had thought much the same . . . but now, as he cast his mind back over the contest, he realized an interesting thing: Blaine had hesitated.
Once.
He was pissed, too. Like Roland was.
The gunslinger, although often exasperated by Eddie, had shown real anger toward him just a single time after the business of carving the key, when Eddie had almost choked. Roland had tried to cover the depth of that anger—make it seem like nothing but more exasperation—but Eddie had sensed what was underneath. He had lived with Henry Dean for a long time, and was still exquisitely attuned to all the negative emotions. It had hurt him, too—not Roland’s anger itself, exactly, but the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been one of Henry’s favorite weapons.
Why did the dead baby cross the road? Eddie had asked. Because it was stapled to the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!
Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless but not pointless, Roland’s response had been strangely like Blaine’s: / don’t care about taste. It’s senseless and unsolvable, and that’s what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.
But as Jake finished riddling Blaine, Eddie realized a wonderful, liberating thing: that word good was up for grabs. Always had been, always would be. Even if the man using it was maybe a thousand years old and could shoot like Buffalo Bill, that word was still up for grabs. Roland himself had admitted he had never been very good at the riddling game. His tutor claimed that Roland thought too deeply; his father thought it was lack of imagination. Whatever the reason, Roland of Gilead had never won a Fair-Day riddling. He had survived all his contemporaries, and that was certainly a prize of sorts, but he had never carried home a prize goose. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, but I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.
Eddie remembered trying to tell Roland that jokes were riddles designed to help you build up that often overlooked talent, but Roland had ignored him. The way, Eddie supposed, a color-blind person would ignore someone’s description of a rainbow.
Eddie thought Blaine also might have trouble thinking around comers.
He realized he could hear Blaine asking the others if they had any more riddles—even asking Oy. He could hear the mockery in Blaine’s voice, could hear it very well. Sure he could. Because he was coming back. Back from that fabled zone. Back to see if he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire. No gun would help this time, but maybe that was all right. Maybe that was all right
because—
Because I shoot with my mind. My mind. God help me to shoot this overblown calculator with my mind. Help me shoot it from around the corner.
“Blaine?” he said, and then, when the computer had acknowledged him: “I have a couple of riddles.” As he spoke, he discovered a wonderful thing: he was struggling to hold back laughter.
4
“SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”
No time to tell the others to be on their guard, that anything might happen, and from the look of them, no need, either. Eddie forgot about them and turned his mil attention to Blaine.
“What has four wheels and flies?”
“THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID.”
Disapproval—and dislike? Yeah, probably—all but oozing out of that voice.
“ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT
REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME.”
Yes, Eddie thought. And what we all missed—because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland’s past or Jake’s book—is that the contest almost ended right there.
“You didn’t like that one, did you, Blaine?”
“I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID,” Blaine agreed. “PERHAPS THAT’S
WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW
YORK, IS IT NOT SO?”
A smile lit Eddie’s face; he shook his finger at the route-map. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, ‘You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I’ll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.’ ”
“Hurry up!” Jake whispered at him. “If you can do something, do it!”
“It doesn’t like silly questions,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get?
Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it.”
Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake’s Final Essay, found it, posed it.
“Blaine: when is a door not a door?”
Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had followed Susannah’s opening riddle, but it was still there—Eddie heard it. “WHEN IT’S A JAR, OF COURSE” Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. “THIRTEEN
MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION,
EDDIE OF NEW YORK-WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES
IN YOUR MOUTH?”
Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.
“Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you’ll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren’t quite up to your standards of logic.”
“YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me? Don’t make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it.”
Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. “You’re making him angry,”
Little Blaine mourned. “Oh, you’re making him so angry.”
“Get lost, squirt,” Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, Eddie said:
“Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn’t fall off, too?”
“THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER.” On the last word Blaine’s voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.
Roland’s eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. “What do you say, Blaine?
I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?”
“NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT—”
“Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle.”
“IT’S NOT A RIDDLE!” Blaine almost bleated. “IT’S A JOKE, SOMETHING
FOR STUPID CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!”
“Answer now or I declare the contest over and our ka-tet the winner,” Roland said.
He spoke in the dryly confident tone of authority Eddie had first heard in the town of River Crossing. “You must answer, for it is stupidity you complain of, not transgression of the rules, which we agreed upon mutually.”
Another of those clicking sounds, but this time it was much louder— so loud, in fact, that Eddie winced. Oy flattened his ears against his skull. It was followed by the longest pause yet; three seconds, at least. Then:
“THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE
MORE ON.” Blaine sounded sulky. “MORE PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. TO
EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL
SOILED.”
Eddie held up his right hand. He rubbed the thumb and forefinger together.
“WHAT DOES THAT SIGNIFY, FOOLISH CREATURE?”
“It’s the world’s smallest violin, playing ‘My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You,’ ”
Eddie said. Jake fell into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “But never mind the cheap New York humor; back to the contest. Why do police lieutenants wear belts?”
The lights in the Barony Coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out of the comer of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsy.
“Blaine? Answer.”
“Answer,” Roland agreed. “Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold you to your promise.”
Something touched Eddie’s elbow. He looked down and saw Susannah’s small and shapely hand. He took it, squeezed it, smiled at her. He hoped the smile was more confident than the man making it felt. They were going to win the contest—he was almost sure of that—but he had no idea what Blaine would do if and when they did.