Song of Susannah - Stephen King [68]
“Roland? What about our—”
“We have our guns, and that’s all the gunna we need,” Roland said, more roughly than he had intended. “Jake has the Choo-Choo book, and I can make another compass should we need one. Otherwise—”
“But—”
“If you’re talkin about your goods, sonny, I c’n ask some questions about em when the time comes,” Cullum said. “But for the time being, I think your friend’s right.”
Eddie knew his friend was right. His friend was almost always right, which was one of the few things Eddie still hated about him. He wanted his gunna, goddammit, and not just for the one clean pair of jeans and the two clean shirts. Nor for extra ammo or the whittling knife, fine as it was. There had been a lock of Susannah’s hair in his leather swag-bag, and it had still carried a faint whiff of her smell. That was what he missed. But done was done.
“John,” he said, “what day is this?”
The man’s bristly gray eyebrows went up. “You serious?” And when Eddie nodded: “Ninth of July. Year of our Lord nineteen-seventy-seven.”
Eddie made a soundless whistling noise through his pursed lips.
Roland, the last stub of the Dromedary cigarette smoldering between his fingers, had gone to the window for a looksee. Nothing behind the house but trees and a few seductive blue winks from what Cullum called “the Keywadin.” But that pillar of black smoke still rose in the sky, as if to remind him that any sense of peace he might feel in these surroundings was only an illusion. They had to get out of here. And no matter how terribly afraid he was for Susannah Dean, now that they were here they had to find Calvin Tower and finish their business with him. And they’d have to do it quickly. Because—
As if reading his mind and finishing his thought, Eddie said: “Roland? It’s speeding up. Time on this side is speeding up.”
“I know.”
“It means that whatever we do, we have to get it right the first time, because in this world you can never come back earlier. There are no do-overs.”
Roland knew that, too.
* * *
Two
“The man we’re looking for is from New York City,” Eddie told John Cullum.
“Ayuh, plenty of those around in the summertime.”
“His name’s Calvin Tower. He’s with a friend of his named Aaron Deepneau.”
Cullum opened the glass case with the baseballs inside, took out one withCarl Yastrzemski written across the sweet spot in that weirdly perfect script of which only professional athletes seem capable (in Eddie’s experience it was the spelling that gave most of them problems), and began to toss it from hand to hand. “Folks from away really pile in once June comes—you know that, don’t ya?”
“I do,” Eddie said, feeling hopeless already. He thought it was possible old Double-Ugly had already gotten to Cal Tower. Maybe the ambush at the store had been Jack’s idea of dessert. “I guess you can’t—”
“If I can’t, I guess I better goddam retire,” Cullum said with some spirit, and tossed the Yaz ball to Eddie, who held it in his right hand and ran the tips of his lefthand fingers over the red stitches. The feel of them raised a wholly unexpected lump in his throat. If a baseball didn’t tell you that you were home, what did? Only this world wasn’t home anymore. John was right, he was a walk-in.
“What do you mean?” Roland asked. Eddie tossed him the ball and Roland caught it without ever taking his eyes off John Cullum.
“I don’t bother with names, but I know most everyone who comes into this town just the same,” he said. “Know em by sight. Same with any other caretaker worth his salt, I s’pose. You want to know who’s in your territory.” Roland nodded at this with perfect understanding. “Tell me what this guy looks like.”
Eddie said, “He stands about five-nine and weighs…oh, I’m gonna say two-thirty.”
“Heavyset, then.”
“Do ya. Also, most of