“Spanked again,” Eddie said, grinning.
‘Tanked!” Oy said, eyeing Eddie severely.
“Explain this to me,” Roland said in his softest voice. “I would hear. I would share your khef. And I would share it now.”
2
They told him a story almost every American child of the twentieth century knew, about a Kansas farmgirl named Dorothy Gale who had been carried away by a cyclone and deposited, along with her dog, in the Land of Oz. There was no 1-70 in Oz, but there was a yellow brick road which served much the same purpose, and there were witches, both good and bad. There was a ka-tet comprised of Dorothy, Toto, and three friends she met along the way: the Cowardly Lion, the
Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. They each had
(bird and bear and hare and fish)
a fondest wish, and it was with Dorothy’s that Roland’s new friends (and Roland himself, for that matter) identified the most strongly: she wanted to find her way home again.
“The Munchkins told her that she had to follow the yellow brick road to Oz,” Jake said, “and so she went. She met the others along the way, sort of like you met us, Roland—”
“Although you don’t look much like Judy Garland,” Eddie put in.
“—and eventually they got there. To Oz, the Emerald Palace, and the guy who lived in the Emerald Palace.” He looked toward the glass palace ahead of them, greener and greener in the strengthening light, and then back to Roland.
“Yes, I understand. And was this fellow, Oz, a powerful dinh? A Baron? Perhaps a King?”
Again, the three of them exchanged a glance from which Roland was excluded.
“That’s complicated,” Jake said. “He was sort of a humbug—”
“A bumhug? What’s that?”
“Humbug, ” Jake said, laughing. “A faker. All talk, no action. But maybe the important thing is that the Wizard actually came from—”
“Wizard?” Roland asked sharply. He grasped Jake’s shoulder with his diminished right hand. “Why do you call him so?”
“Because that was his title, sug,” Susannah said. “The Wizard of Oz.” She lifted Roland’s hand gently but firmly from Jake’s shoulder. “Let him tell it, now. He don’t need you to squeeze it out of him.”
“Did I hurt you? Jake, I cry your pardon.”
“Nah, I’m fine,” Jake said. “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, Dorothy and her friends had a lot of adventures before finding out the Wizard was a, you know, a bumhug.” Jake giggled at this with his hands clapped to his forehead and pushing back his hair, like a child of five. “He couldn’t give the Lion courage, the Scarecrow a brain, or the Tin Woodman a heart. Worst of all, he couldn’t send Dorothy back to Kansas. The Wizard had a balloon, but he went without her. I don’t think he meant to, but he did.”
“It seems to me, from your telling of the tale,” Roland said, speaking very slowly,
“that Dorothy’s friends had the things they wanted all along.”
“That’s the moral of the story,” Eddie said. “Maybe what makes it a great story.
But Dorothy was stuck in Oz, you see. Then Glinda showed up. Glinda the Good.
And, as a present for smooshing one of the bad witches under her house and melting another one, Glinda told Dorothy how to use the ruby slippers. The ones Glinda gave her.”
Eddie raised the red Cuban-heeled street-boppers which had been left for him on the dotted white line of 1-70.
“Glinda told Dorothy to click the heels of the ruby slippers together three times.
That would take her back to Kansas, she said. And it did.” “And that’s the end of the tale?”
“Well,” Jake said, “it was so popular that the guy who wrote it went ahead and wrote about a thousand more Oz stories—”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Everything but Glinda’s Guide to Firm Thighs.”
“—and there was this crazy remake called The Wiz, starring black people—”
“Really?” Susannah asked. She looked bemused. “What a peculiar concept.”
“—but the only one that really matters is the first one, I think,” Jake finished.
Roland hunkered and put his hands into the boots which had been left for him. He lifted them, looked at them, put them down again. “Are we supposed to put them on, do you think? Here and now?”
His three friends from New York looked at each other doubtfully. At last Susannah spoke for them—fed him the khef which he could feel but not quite share on his own.
“Best not to right now, maybe. Too many bad-ass spirits here.” “Takuro spirits,”
Eddie murmured, mostly to himself. Then: “Look, let’s just take em along. If we’re supposed to put em on, I think we’ll know when the time comes. In the meantime, I think we ought to beware of bumhugs bearing gifts.”
It cracked Jake up, as Eddie had known it would; sometimes a word or an image got into your funny bone like a virus and just lived there awhile. Tomorrow the word “bumhug” might mean nothing to the kid; for the rest of today, however, he was going to laugh every time he heard it. Eddie intended to use it a lot, especially when ole Jake wasn’t expecting it.
They picked up the red shoes which had been left for them in the east-bound lanes (Jake took Oy’s) and moved on again toward the shimmering glass castle.
Oz, Roland thought. He searched his memory, but he didn’t think it was a name he
had ever heard before, or a word of the High Speech that had come in disguise, as char had come disguised as Charlie. Yet it had a sound that belonged in this business; a sound more of his world than of Jake’s, Susannah’s, and Eddie’s, from whence the tale had come.
3
Jake kept expecting the Green Palace to begin looking normal as they drew closer to it, the way the attractions in Disney World began to look normal as you drew close to them—not ordinary, necessarily, but normal, things which were as much a part of the world as the comer bus stop or mailbox or park bench, stuff you could touch, stuff you could write fuck piper on, if you took a notion.
But that didn’t happen, wasn’t going to happen, and as they neared the Green Palace, Jake realized something else: it was the most beautiful, radiant thing he had ever seen in his life. Not trusting it—and he did not— didn’t change the fact. It was like a drawing in a fairy-tale book, one so good it had become real, somehow.
And, like the thinny, it hummed … except that this sound was far fainter, and not unpleasant.
Pale green walls rose to battlements that jutted and towers that soared, seeming almost to touch the clouds floating over the Kansas plains. These towers were topped with needles of a darker, emerald green; it was from these that the red pennants nickered. Upon each pennant the symbol of the open eye
had been traced in yellow.
It’s the mark of the Crimson King, Jake thought. It’s really his sigul, not John Farson ‘s. He didn’t know how he knew this (how could he, when Alabama’s Crimson Tide was the only Crimson anything he knew?), but he did.
“So beautiful,” Susannah murmured, and when Jake glanced at her, he thought she was almost crying. “But not nice, somehow. Not right. Maybe not downright bad, the way the thinny is, but.. .”
“But not nice,” Eddie said. “Yeah. That works. Not a red light, maybe, but a bright yellow one just the same.” He rubbed the side of his face (a gesture he had picked up from Roland without even realizing it) and looked puzzled. “It feels almost not
serious—a practical joke.”
“I doubt it’s a joke,” Roland said. “Do you think it’s a copy of the place where Dorothy and her ka-tet met the false wizard?”
Again, the three erstwhile New Yorkers seemed to exchange a single glance of consultation. When it was over, Eddie spoke for all of them. “Yeah. Yeah, probably. It’s not the same as the one in the movie, but if this thing came out of our minds, it wouldn’t be. Because we see the one from L. Frank Baum’s book, too. Both from the illustrations in the book. . .”
“And the ones from our imaginations,” Jake said.
“But that’s it,” Susannah said. “I’d say we’re definitely off to see the Wizard.”
“You bet,” Eddie said. “Because-because-because-because- because—”
“Because of the wonderful things he does!” Jake and Susannah finished in unison, then laughed, delighted with each other, while Roland frowned at them, feeling puzzled and looking left out.
“But I have to tell you guys,” Eddie said, “that it’s only gonna take about one more wonderful thing to send me around to the dark side of the Psycho Moon. Most likely for good.”
4
As they drew closer, they could see Interstate 70 stretching away into the pale green depths of the castle’s slightly rounded outer wall; it floated there like an optical illusion. Closer yet, and they could hear the pennants snapping in the breeze and see their own ripply reflections, like drowned folk who somehow walk at the bottoms of watery tropical graves.