14

   They made three miles that day, maybe a shade under. Detta's chair upset twice. Once she did it herself, working her fingers slowly and unobtrusively over to that handbrake again and yanking it. The second time Eddie did with no help at all, shoving too hard in one of those goddamned sandtraps. That was near the end of the day, and he simply panicked, thinking he just wasn't going to be able to get her out this time, just wasn't. So he gave that one last titanic heave with his quivering arms, and of course it had been much too hard, and over she had gone, like Humpty Dumpty falling off his wall, and he and Roland had to labor to get her upright again. They finished the job just in time. The rope under her breasts was now pulled taut across her windpipe. The gunslinger's efficient running slipknot was choking her to death. Her face had gone a funny blue color, she was on the verge of losing consciousness, but still she went on wheezing her nasty laughter.
   Let her be, why don't you? Eddie nearly said as Roland bent quickly forward to loosen the knot. Let her choke! I don't know if she wants to do herself like you said, but I know she wants to do US …so let her go!
   Then he remembered Odetta (although their encounter had been so brief and seemed so long ago that memory was growing dim) and moved forward to help.
   The gunslinger pushed him impatiently away with one hand. "Only room for one."
   When the rope was loosened and the Lady gasping harshly for breath (which she expelled in gusts of her angry laughter), he turned and looked at Eddie critically. "I think we ought to stop for the night."
   "A little further." He was almost pleading. "I can go a little further."
   "Sho! He be one strong buck. He be good fo choppin one mo row cotton and he still have enough lef’ to give yo little bitty white candle one fine suckin-on t'night."


   She still wouldn't eat, and her face was becoming all stark lines and angles. Her eyes glittered in deepening sockets.
   Roland gave her no notice at all, only studied Eddie closely. At last he nodded. "A little way. Not far, but a little way."
   Twenty minutes later Eddie called it quits himself. His arms felt like Jell-O.
   They sat in the shadows of the rocks, listening to the gulls, watching the tide come in, waiting for the sun to go down and the lobstrosities to come out and begin their cumbersome cross-examinations.
   Roland told Eddie in a voice too low for Detta to hear that he thought they were out of live shells. Eddie's mouth tightened down a little but that was all. Roland was pleased.
   "So you'll have to brain one of them yourself," Roland said. "I'm too weak to handle a rock big enough to do the job … and still be sure."
   Eddie was now the one to do the studying.
   He had no liking for what he saw.
   The gunslinger waved his scrutiny away.
   "Never mind," he said. "Never mind, Eddie. What is, is."
   "Ka," Eddie said.
   The gunslinger nodded and smiled faintly. "Ka."
   "Kaka," Eddie said, and they looked at each other, and both laughed. Roland looked startled and perhaps even a little afraid of the rusty sound emerging from his mouth. His laughter did not last long. When it had stopped he looked distant and melancholy.
   "Dat laffin mean you fine'ly managed to joik each other off?" Detta cried over at them in her hoarse, failing voice. "When you goan get down to de pokin? Dat's what I want to see! Dat pokin!"

15

   Eddie made the kill.
   Detta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the other half.
   "Nossuh!" she said, eyes sparking at him. "No SUH! You done put de poison in t'other end. One you trine to give me."
   Without saying anything, Eddie look the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.
   "Doan mean a thing," Detta said sulkily. "Leave me alone, graymeat."
   Eddie wouldn't
   He brought her another piece.
   "You tear it in half. Give me whichever you want I'll eat it, then you eat the rest."
   "Ain’t fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist' Chahlie. Git away f'um me is what I said, and git away f'um me is what I meant"

16

   She did not scream in the night … but she was still there the next morning.

17

   That day they made only two miles, although Detta made no effort to upset her chair; Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing inexorably together: Eddie's weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless days of sameness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland's deteriorating condition.
   There were less sandtraps, but that was cold comfort. The ground was becoming grainier, more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand (in places bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there), and there were so many large rocks now jutting from this odd combination of sand and soil that Eddie found himself detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady's chair around the sandtraps. And soon enough, he saw, there would be no beach left at all. The hills, brown and cheerless things, were drawing steadily closer. Eddie could see the ravines which curled between them, looking like chops made by an awkward giant wielding a blunt cleaver. That night, before falling asleep, he heard what sounded like a very large cat squalling far up in one of them.
   The beach had seemed endless, but he was coming to realize it had an end after all. Somewhere up ahead, those hills were simply going to squeeze it out of existence. The eroded hills would march down to the sea and then into it, where they might become first a cape or peninsula of sorts, and then a series of archipelagoes.
   That worried him, but Roland's condition worried him more.
   This time the gunslinger seemed not so much to be burning as fading, losing himself, becoming transparent.
   The red lines had appeared again, marching relentlessly up the underside of his right arm toward the elbow.
   For the last two days Eddie had looked constantly ahead, squinting into the distance, hoping to see the door, the door, the magic door. For the last two days he had waited for Odetta to reappear.
   Neither had appeared.
   Before falling asleep that night two terrible thoughts came to him, like some joke with a double punchline:
   What if there was no door?
   What if Odetta Holmes was dead?

18

   "Rise and shine, mahfah!" Detta screeched him out of unconsciousness. "I think it jes be you and me now, honey-chile. Think yo frien done finally passed on. I think yo frien be pokin the devil down in hell."
   Eddie looked at the rolled huddled shape of Roland and for one terrible moment he thought the bitch was right. Then the gunslinger stirred, moaned furrily, and pawed himself into a sitting position.
   "Well looky yere!" Detta had screamed so much that now there were moments when her voice disappeared almost entirely, becoming no more than a weird whisper, like winter wind under a door. "I thought you was dead, Mister Man!"
   Roland was getting slowly to his feet. He still looked to Eddie like a man using the rungs of an invisible ladder to make it. Eddie felt an angry sort of pity, and this was a familiar emotion, oddly nostalgic. After a moment he understood. It was like when he and Henry used to watch the fights on TV, and one fighter would hurt the other, hurt him terribly, again and again, and the crowd would be screaming for blood, and Henry would be screaming for blood, but Eddie only sat there, feeling that angry pity, that dumb disgust; he'd sat there sending thought-waves at the referee: Stop it, man, are you fucking blind? He's dying out there! DYING! Stop the fucking fight!
   There was no way to stop this one.
   Roland looked at her from his haunted feverish eyes. "A lot of people have thought that, Detta." He looked at Eddie. "You ready?"
   "Yeah, I guess so. Are you?"
   "Yes."
   "Can you?"
   "Yes."
   They went on.
   Around ten o'clock Detta began rubbing her temples with her fingers.
   "Stop," she said. "I feel sick. Feel like I goan throw up."
   "Probably that big meal you ate last night," Eddie said, and went on pushing. "You should have skipped dessert. I told you that chocolate layer cake was heavy."
   "I goan throw up! I—"
   "Stop, Eddie!" the gunslinger said.
   Eddie stopped.
   The woman in the chair suddenly twisted galvanically, as if an electric shock had run through her. Her eyes popped wide open, glaring at nothing.
   "IBROKE YO PLATE YOU STINKIN OLE BLUE LADY!" she screamed. "IBROKE IT AND I'M FUCKIN GLAD ID―"
   She suddenly slumped forward in her chair. If not for the ropes, she would have fallen out of it.
   Christ, she's dead, she's had a stroke and she's dead, Eddie thought. He started around the chair, remembered how sly and tricksy she could be, and stopped as suddenly as he had started. He looked at Roland. Roland looked back at him evenly, his eyes giving away not a thing.
   Then she moaned. Her eyes opened.
   Her eyes.
   Odetta's eyes.
   "Dear God, I've fainted again, haven't I?" she said. "I'm sorry you had to tie me in. My stupid legs! I think I could sit up a little if you—"
   That was when Roland's own legs slowly came unhinged and he swooned some thirty miles south of the place where the Western Sea 's beach came to an end.

RE-SHUFFLE

1

   To Eddie Dean, he and the Lady no longer seemed to be trudging or even walking up what remained of the beach. They seemed to be flying.
   Odetta Holmes still neither liked nor trusted Roland; that was clear. But she recognized how desperate his condition had become, and responded to that. Now, instead of pushing a dead clump of steel and rubber to which a human body just happened to be attached, Eddie felt almost as if he were pushing a glider.
   Go with her. Before, I was watching out for you and that was important. Now I'll only slow you down.
   He came to realize how right the gunslinger was almost at once. Eddie pushed the chair; Odetta pumped it.
   One of the gunslinger's revolvers was stuck in the waistband of Eddie's pants.
   Do you remember when I told you to be on your guard and you weren't?
   Yes.
   I'm telling you again: Be on your guard. Every moment. If her other comes back, don't wait even a second. Brain her.
   What if I kill her?
   Then it's the end. But if she kills you, that's the end, too. And if she comes back she'll try. She'll try.
   Eddie hadn't wanted to leave him. It wasn't just that cat-scream in the night (although he kept thinking about it); it was simply that Roland had become his only touchstone in this world. He and Odetta didn't belong here.
   Still, he realized that the gunslinger had been right.
   "Do you want to rest?" he asked Odetta. "There's more food. A little."
   "Not yet," she answered, although her voice sounded tired. "Soon."
   "All right, but at least stop pumping. You're weak. Your … your stomach, you know."
   "All right." She turned, her face gleaming with sweat, and favored him with a smile that both weakened and strengthened him. He could have died for such a smile … and thought he would, if circumstances demanded.
   He hoped to Christ circumstances wouldn't, but it surely wasn't out of the question. Time had become something so crucial it screamed.
   She put her hands in her lap and he went on pushing. The tracks the chair left behind were now dimmer; the beach had become steadily firmer, but it was also littered with rubble that could cause an accident. You wouldn't have to help one happen at the speed they were going. A really bad accident might hurt Odetta and that would be bad; such an accident could also wreck the chair, and that would be bad for them and probably worse for the gunslinger, who would almost surely die alone. And if Roland died, they would be trapped in this world forever.
   With Roland too sick and weak to walk, Eddie had been forced to face one simple fact: there were three people here, and two of them were cripples.
   So what hope, what chance was there?
   The chair.
   The chair was the hope, the whole hope, and nothing but the hope.
   So help them God.

2

   The gunslinger had regained consciousness shortly after Eddie dragged him into the shade of a rock outcropping. His face, where it was not ashy, was a hectic red. His chest rose and fell rapidly. His right arm was a network of twisting red lines.
   "Feed her," he croaked at Eddie.
   "You—"
   "Never mind me. I'll be all right. Feed her. She'll eat now, I think. And you'll need her strength."
   "Roland, what if she's just pretending to be—"
   The gunslinger gestured impatiently.
   "She's not pretending to be anything, except alone in her body. I know it and you do, too. It's in her face. Feed her, for the sake of your father, and while she eats, come back to me. Every minute counts now. Every second."
   Eddie got up, and the gunslinger pulled him back with his left hand. Sick or not, his strength was still there.
   "And say nothing about the other. Whatever she tells you, however she explains, don't contradict her."
   "Why?"
   "I don't know. I just know it's wrong. Now do as I say and don't waste any more time!"
   Odetta had been sitting in her chair, looking out at the sea with an expression of mild and bemused amazement. When Eddie offered her the chunks of lobster left over from the previous night, she smiled ruefully. "I would if I could," she said, "but you know what happens."
   Eddie, who had no idea what she was talking about, could only shrug and say, "It wouldn't hurt to try again, Odetta. You need to eat, you know. We've got to go as fast as we can."
   She laughed a little and touched his hand. He felt something like an electric charge jump from her to him. And it was her; Odetta. He knew it as well as Roland did.
   "I love you, Eddie. You have tried so hard. Been so patient. So has he—" She nodded toward the place where the gunslinger lay propped against the rocks, watching. "—but he is a hard man to love."
   "Yeah. Don't I know it."
   "I'll try one more time.
   "For you."
   She smiled and he felt all the world move for her, because of her, and he thought Please God, I have never had much, so please don't take her away from me again. Please.
   She took the chunks of lobster-meat, wrinkled her nose in a rueful comic expression, and looked up at him.
   "Must I?"
   "Just give it a shot," he said.
   "I never ate scallops again," she said.
   "Pardon?"
   "I thought I told you."
   "You might have," he said, and gave a little nervous laugh. What the gunslinger had said about not letting her know about the other loomed very large inside his mind just then.
   "We had them for dinner one night when I was ten or eleven. I hated the way they tasted, like little rubber balls, and later I vomited them up. I never ate them again. But …" She sighed. "As you say, I'll 'give it a shot.'"
   She put a piece in her mouth like a child taking a spoonful of medicine she knows will taste nasty. She chewed slowly at first, then more rapidly. She swallowed. Took another piece. Chewed, swallowed. Another. Now she was nearly wolfing it.
   "Whoa, slow down!" Eddie said.
   "It must be another kind! That's it, of course it is!" She looked at Eddie shiningly. "We've moved further up the beach and the species has changed! I'm no longer allergic, it seems! It doesn't taste nasty, like it did before … and I did try to keep it down, didn't I?" She looked at him nakedly. "I tried very hard."
   "Yeah." To himself he sounded like a radio broadcasting a very distant signal. She thinks she's been eating every day and then upchucking everything. She thinks that's why she's so weak. Christ Almighty. "Yeah, you tried like hell."
   "It tastes—" These words were hard to pick up because her mouth was full. "It tastes so good!" She laughed. The sound was delicate and lovely. "It's going to stay down! I'm going to take nourishment! I know it! I feel it!"
   "Just don't overdo it," he cautioned, and gave her one of the water-skins. "You're not used to it. All that—" He swallowed and there was an audible (audible to him, at least) click in his throat. "All that throwing up."
   "Yes. Yes."
   "I need to talk to Roland for a few minutes."
   "All right."
   But before he could go she grasped his hand again.
   "Thank you, Eddie. Thank you for being so patient. And thank him." She paused gravely. "Thank him, and don't tell him that he scares me."
   "I won't," Eddie had said, and went back to the gunslinger.

3

   Even when she wasn't pushing, Odetta was a help. She navigated with the prescience of a woman who has spent a long time weaving a wheelchair through a world that would not acknowledge handicapped people such as she for years to come.
   "Left," she'd call, and Eddie would gee to the left, gliding past a rock snarling out of the pasty grit like a decayed fang. On his own, he might have seen it … or maybe not.
   "Right," she called, and Eddie hawed right, barely missing one of the increasingly rare sandtraps.
   They finally stopped and Eddie lay down, breathing hard.
   "Sleep," Odetta said. "An hour. I'll wake you."
   Eddie looked at her.
   "I'm not lying. I observed your friend's condition, Eddie―"
   "He's not exactly my friend, you kn—"
   "—and I know how important time is. I won't let you sleep longer than an hour out of a misguided sense of mercy. I can tell the sun quite well. You won't do that man any good by wearing yourself out, will you?"
   "No," he said, thinking: But you don't understand. If I sleep and DettaWalker comes back—
   "Sleep, Eddie," she said, and since Eddie was too weary (and too much in love) to do other than trust her, he did. He slept and she woke him when she said she would and she was still Odetta, and they went on, and now she was pumping again, helping. They raced up the diminishing beach toward the door Eddie kept frantically looking for and kept not seeing.

4

   When he left Odetta eating her first meal in days and went back to the gunslinger, Roland seemed a little better.
   "Hunker down," he said to Eddie.
   Eddie hunkered.
   "Leave me the skin that's half full. All I need. Take her to the door."
   "What if I don't—"
   "Find it? You'll find it. The first two were there; this one will be, too. If you get there before sundown tonight, wait for dark and then kill double. You'll need to leave her food and make sure she's sheltered as well as she can be. If you don't reach it tonight, kill triple. Here."
   He handed over one of his guns.
   Eddie took it with respect, surprised as before by how heavy it was.
   "I thought the shells were all losers."
   "Probably are. But I've loaded with the ones I believe were wetted least—three from the buckle side of the left belt, three from the buckle side of the right. One may fire. Two, if you're lucky. Don't try them on the crawlies." His eyes considered Eddie briefly. "There may be other things out there."
   "You heard it too, didn't you?"
   "If you mean something yowling in the hills, yes. If you mean the Bugger-Man, as your eyes say, no. I heard a wildcat in the brakes, that's all, maybe with a voice four times the size of its body. It may be nothing you can't drive off with a stick. But there's her to think about. If her other comes back, you may have to—"
   "I won't kill her, if that's what you're thinking!"
   "You may have to wing her. You understand?"
   Eddie gave a reluctant nod. Goddam shells probably wouldn't fire anyway, so there was no sense getting his panties in a bunch about it.
   "When you get to the door, leave her. Shelter her as well as you can, and come back to me with the chair."
   "And the gun?"
   The gunslinger's eyes blazed so brightly that Eddie snapped his head back, as if Roland had thrust a flaming torch in his face. "Gods, yes! Leave her with a loaded gun, when her other might come back at any time? Are you insane?"
   "The shells—"
   "Fuck the shells!" the gunslinger cried, and a freak drop in the wind allowed the words to carry. Odetta turned her head, looked at them for a long moment, then looked back toward the sea. "Leave it with her not!"
   Eddie kept his voice low in case the wind should drop again. "What if something comes down from the brakes while I'm on my way back here? Some kind of cat four times bigger than its voice, instead of the other way around? Something you can't drive off with a stick?"
   "Give her a pile of stones," the gunslinger said.
   "Stones! Jesus wept! Man, you are such a fucking shit!"
   "I am thinking," the gunslinger said. "Something you seem unable to do. I gave you the gun so you could protect her from the sort of danger you're talking about for half of the trip you must make. Would it please you if I took the gun back? Then perhaps you could die for her. Would that please you? Very romantic … except then, instead of just her, all three of us would go down."
   "Very logical. You're still a fucking shit, however."
   "Go or stay. Stop calling me names."
   "You forgot something," Eddie said furiously.
   "What was that?"
   "You forgot to tell me to grow up. That's what Henry always used to say. 'Oh grow up, kid.' "
   The gunslinger had smiled, a weary, oddly beautiful smile. "I think you have grown up. Will you go or stay?"
   "I'll go," Eddie said. "What are you going to eat? She scarfed the leftovers."
   "The fucking shit will find a way. The fucking shit has been finding one for years."
   Eddie looked away. "I … I guess I'm sorry I called you that, Roland. It's been—" He laughed suddenly, shrilly. "It's been a very trying day."
   Roland smiled again. "Yes," he said. "It has."

5

   They made the best time of the entire trek that day, but there was still no door in sight when the sun began to spill its gold track across the ocean. Although she told him she was perfectly capable of going on for another half an hour, he called a halt and helped her out of the chair. He carried her to an even patch of ground that looked fairly smooth, got the cushions from the back of the chair and the seat, and eased them under her.
   "Lord, it feels so good to stretch out," she sighed. "But …" Her brow clouded. "I keep thinking of that man back there, Roland, all by himself, and I can't really enjoy it. Eddie, who is he? What is he?" And, almost as an afterthought: "And why does he shout so much?"
   "Just his nature, I guess," Eddie said, and abruptly went off to gather rocks. Roland hardly ever shouted. He guessed some of it was this morning—FUCK the shells!— but that the rest of it was false memory: the time she thought she had been Odetta.
   He killed triple, as the gunslinger had instructed, and was so intent on the last that he skipped back from a fourth which had been closing in on his right with only an instant to spare. He saw the way its claws clicked on the empty place which had been occupied by his foot and leg a moment before, and thought of the gunslinger's missing fingers.
   He cooked over a dry wood fire—the encroaching hills and increasing vegetation made the search for good fuel quicker and easier, that was one thing—while the last of the daylight faded from the western sky.
   "Look, Eddie!" she cried, pointing up.
   He looked, and saw a single star gleaming on the breast of the night.
   "Isn't it beautiful?"
   "Yes," he said, and suddenly, for no reason, his eyes filled with tears. Just where had he been all of his goddamned life? Where had he been, what had he been doing, who had been with him while he did it, and why did he suddenly feel so grimy and abysmally beshitted?
   Her lifted face was terrible in its beauty, irrefutable in this light, but the beauty was unknown to its possessor, who only looked at the star with wide wondering eyes, and laughed softly.
   "Star light, star bright," she said, and stopped. She looked at him. "Do you know it, Eddie?"
   "Yeah." Eddie kept his head down. His voice sounded clear enough, but if he looked up she would see he was weeping.
   "Then help me. But you have to look."
   "Okay."
   He wiped the tears into the palm of one hand and looked up at the star with her.
   "Star light—" she looked at him and he joined her. "Star bright—"
   Her hand reached out, groping, and he clasped it, one the delicious brown of light chocolate, the other the delicious white of a dove's breast.
   "First star I see tonight," they spoke solemnly in unison, boy and girl for this now, not man and woman as they would be later, when the dark was full and she called to ask him if he was asleep and he said no and she asked if he would hold her because she was cold; "Wish I may, wish I might—"
   They looked at each other, and he saw that tears were streaming down her cheeks. His own came again, and he let them fall in her sight. This was not a shame but an inexpressible relief.
   They smiled at each other.
   "Have the wish I wish tonight," Eddie said, and thought: Please, always you.
   "Have the wish I wish tonight," she echoed, and thought If I must die in this odd place, please let it not be too hard and let this good young man be with me.
   "I'm sorry I cried," she said, wiping her eyes. "I don't usually, but it's been—"
   "A very trying day," he finished for her.
   "Yes. And you need to eat, Eddie."
   "You do, too."
   "I just hope it doesn't make me sick again."
   He smiled at her.
   "I don't think it will."