The Dark Tower - Stephen King [132]
“I asked him if he knew where his name came from. He said yes, of course, from his clan-fam. Each can-toi is given a hume name by his clan-fam at some point in his development; it’s a kind of maturity-marker. Dinky says they get that name the first time they successfully whack off, but that’s just Dinky being Dinky. The fact is we don’t know and it doesn’t matter, but some of the names are pretty hilarious. There’s one fellow who looks like Rondo Hatton, a film actor from the thirties who suffered from acromegaly and got work playing monsters and psychopaths, but his name is Thomas Carlyle. There’s another one named Beowulf and a fellow named Van Gogh Baez.”
Susannah, a Bleecker Street folkie from way back, put her face in her hands to stifle a gust of giggles.
“Anyway, I told him that Trampas was a character from a famous Western novel called The Virginian. Only second banana to the actual hero, true, but Trampas has got the one line from the book everyone remembers: ‘Smile when you say that!’ It tickled our Trampas, and I ended up telling him the whole plot of the book over cups of drug-store coffee.
“We became friends. I’d tell him what was going on in our little community of Breakers, and he’d tell me all sorts of interesting but innocent things about what was going on over on his side of the fence. He also complained about his eczema, which made his head itch terribly. He kept lifting his hat—this little beanie-type of thing, almost like a yarmulke, only made of denim—to scratch underneath. He claimed that was the worst place of all, even worse than down there on your makie-man. And little by little, I realized that every time he lifted his beanie to scratch, I could read his thoughts. Not just the ones on top but all of them. If I was fast—and I learned to be—I could pick and choose, exactly the way you’d pick and choose articles in an encyclopedia by turning the pages. Only it wasn’t really like that; it was more like someone turning a radio on and off during a news broadcast.”
“Holy shit,” Eddie said, and took another graham cracker. He wished mightily for milk to dip them in; graham crackers without milk were almost like Oreos without the white stuff in the middle.
“Imagine turning a radio or a TV on full-blast,” Ted said in his rusty, failing voice, “and then turning it off again…justasquick.” He purposely ran this together, and they all smiled—even Roland. “That’ll give you the idea. Now I’ll tell you what I learned. I suspect you know it already, but I just can’t take the risk that you don’t. It’s too important.
“There is a Tower, lady and gentlemen, as you must know. At one time six beams crisscrossed there, both taking power from it—it’s some kind of unimaginable power-source—and lending support, the way guy-wires support a radio tower. Four of these Beams are now gone, the fourth very recently. The only two remaining are the Beam of the Bear, Way of the Turtle—Shardik’s Beam—and the Beam of the Elephant, Way of the Wolf—some call that one Gan’s Beam.
“I wonder if you can imagine my horror at discovering what I’d actually been doing in The Study. When I’d been scratching that innocent itch. Although I knew all along that it was something important, knew it.
“And there was something worse, something I hadn’t suspected, something that applied only to me. I’d known that I was different in some ways; for one thing, I seemed to be the only Breaker with an ounce of compassion in my makeup. When they’ve got the mean reds, I am, as I told you, the one they come to. Pimli Prentiss, the Master, married Tanya and Joey Rastosovich—insisted on it, wouldn’t hear a word against the idea, kept saying that it was his privilege and his responsibility, he was just like the captain on an old cruise-ship—and of course they let him do it. But afterward, they came to my rooms and Tanya said, ‘You marry us, Ted. Then we’ll really be married.’
“And sometimes I ask myself, ‘Did you think that was all it was? Before you started visiting with Trampas,