The Dark Tower - Stephen King [207]
Do I care upon whom the blame for this mess falls? Roland asked himself. In truth he did not. King would go on writing either way. And Roland almost hoped he would be blamed, for it was indeed King’s fault; he’d had no business being out here in the first place.
“Drive away now,” he told Bryan Smith. “I don’t want to look at you anymore.”
Smith started the van with a look of profound relief. Roland didn’t bother watching him go. He went to Mrs. Tassenbaum and fell on his knees beside her. Oy sat by Jake’s head, now silent, knowing his howls could no longer be heard by the one for whom he grieved. What the gunslinger feared most had come to pass. While he had been talking to two men he didn’t like, the boy whom he loved more than all others—more than he’d loved anyone ever in his life, even Susan Delgado—had passed beyond him for the second time. Jake was dead.
Five
“He talked to you,” Roland said. He took Jake in his arms and began to rock him gently back and forth. The ’Rizas clanked in their pouch. Already he could feel Jake’s body growing cool.
“Yes,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“He told me to come back for you ‘after the business here is done.’ Those were his exact words. And he said, ‘Tell my father I love him.’ ”
Roland made a sound, choked and miserable, deep in his throat. He was remembering how it had been in Fedic, after they had stepped through the door. Hile, Father, Jake had said. Roland had taken him in his arms then, too. Only then he had felt the boy’s beating heart. He would give anything to feel it beat again.
“There was more,” she said, “but do we have time for it now, especially when I could tell you later?”
Roland took her point immediately. The story both Bryan Smith and Stephen King knew was a simple one. There was no place in it for a lank, travel-scoured man with a big gun, nor a woman with graying hair; certainly not for a dead boy with a bag of sharp-edged plates slung over his shoulder and a machine-pistol in the waistband of his pants.
The only question was whether or not the woman would come back at all. She was not the first person he had attracted into doing things they might not ordinarily have done, but he knew things might look different to her once she was away from him. Asking for her promise—Do you swear to come back for me, sai? Do you swear on this boy’s stilled heart?—would do no good. She could mean every word here and then think better of it once she was over the first hill.
Yet when he’d had a chance to take the shopkeeper who owned the truck, he didn’t. Nor had he swapped her for the old man cutting the grass at the writer’s house.
“Later will do,” he said. “For now, hurry on your way. If for some reason you feel you can’t come back here, I’ll not hold it against you.”
“Where would you go on your own?” she asked him. “Where would you know to go? This isn’t your world. Is it?”
Roland ignored the question. “If there are people still here the first time you come back—peace officers, guards o’ the watch, bluebacks, I don’t know—drive past without stopping. Come back again in half an hour’s time. If they’re still here, drive on again. Keep doing that until they’re gone.”
“Will they notice me going back and forth?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Will they?”
She considered, then almost smiled. “The cops in this part of the world? Probably not.”
He nodded, accepting her judgment. “When you feel it’s safe, stop. You won’t see me, but I’ll see you. I’ll wait until dark. If you’re not here by then, I go.”
“I’ll come for you, but I won’t be driving that miserable excuse for a truck when I do,” she said. “I’ll be driving a Mercedes-Benz S600.” She said this with some pride.
Roland had no idea what a Mercedes-Bends was, but he nodded as though he did. “Go. We’ll talk later, after you come back.”
If you come back, he thought.
“I think you may want this,” she said, and slipped his revolver back into its