Song of Susannah - Stephen King [86]
“I’ll do the best I can.”
Roland dipped first the pliers and then the knife into the disinfectant. Eddie waited with the belt in his mouth, lying across his teeth. Yes, once you saw the basic pattern, you couldn’t unsee it, could you? Roland was the hero of the piece, the grizzled old warrior who’d be played by some grizzled but vital star like Paul Newman or maybe Eastwood in the Hollywood version. He himself was the young buck, played by the hot young boy star of the moment. Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, someone like that. And here’s a set we all know, a cabin in the woods, and a situation we’ve seen many times before but still relish, Pulling the Bullet. All that was missing was the ominous sound of drums in the distance. And, Eddie realized, probably the drums were missing because they’d already been through the Ominous Drums part of the story: the god-drums. They had turned out to be an amplified version of a Z.Z. Top song being broadcast through streetcorner speakers in the City of Lud. Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone’s story. This whole world—
I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that I was raised in Brooklyn simply because of some writer’s mistake, something that will eventually be fixed in the second draft. Hey, Pere, I’m with you—I refuse to believe I’m a character. This is my fucking life!
“Go on, Roland,” he said. “Get that thing outta me.”
The gunslinger poured some of the disinfectant from the bowl over Eddie’s shin, then used the tip of the knife to flick the clot out of the wound. With that done, he lowered the pliers. “Be ready to bite the pain, Eddie,” he murmured, and a moment later Eddie did.
* * *
Twelve
Roland knew what he was doing, had done it before, and the bullet hadn’t gone deep. The whole thing was over in ninety seconds, but it was the longest minute and a half in Eddie’s life. At last Roland tapped the pliers on one of Eddie’s closed hands. When Eddie managed to unroll his fingers, the gunslinger dropped a flattened slug into it. “Souvenir,” he said. “Stopped right on the bone. That was the scraping that you heard.”
Eddie looked at the mashed piece of lead, then flicked it across the linoleum floor like a marble. “Don’t want it,” he said, and wiped his brow.
Tower, ever the collector, picked up the cast-off slug. Deepneau, meanwhile, was examining the toothmarks in his belt with silent fascination.
“Cal,” Eddie said, getting up on his elbows. “You had a book in your case—”
“I want those books back,” Tower said immediately. “You better be taking care of them, young man.”
“I’m sure they’re in great condition,” Eddie said, telling himself once more to bite his tongue if he had to. Or grab Aaron’s belt and bite that again, if your tongue won’t do.
“They better be, young man; now they’re all I have left.”
“Yes, along with the forty or so in your various safe deposit boxes,” Aaron Deepneau said, completely ignoring the vile look his friend shot him. “The signed Ulysses is probably the best, but there are several gorgeous Shakespeare folios, a complete set of signed Faulkners—”
“Aaron, would you please be quiet?”
“—and a Huckleberry Finn that you could turn into a Mercedes-Benz sedan any day of the week,” Deepneau finished.
“In any case, one of them was a book called ’Salem’s Lot, ” Eddie said. “By a man named—”
“Stephen King,” Tower finished. He gave the slug a final look, then put it on the kitchen table next to the sugarbowl. “I’ve been told he lives close to here. I’ve picked up two copies of Lot and also three copies of his first novel, Carrie. I was hoping to take a trip to Bridgton and get them signed. I suppose now that won’t happen.”
“I don’t understand what makes it so valuable,” Eddie said, and then: “Ouch, Roland, that hurts!”
Roland was checking the makeshift bandage around the wound in Eddie’s leg. “Be still,” he said.
Tower paid no attention to this. Eddie had turned him once more in the direction of his favorite subject, his obsession, his darling. What Eddie supposed Gollum in the