The Dark Tower - Stephen King [301]
You know it was him, Susannah thought. What game are you playing, Joe?
The thin cry that was most definitely not the wind came again. She no longer thought it was Mordred, though. She thought that maybe it was coming from the cellar where Joe had gone to hide from the Crimson King…or so he’d said. Who was down there now? And was he hiding, as Joe had done, or was he a prisoner?
“It hasn’t been a bad life,” Joe was saying. “Not the life I expected, not by any manner or means, but I got a theory—the folks who end up living the lives they expected are more often than not the ones who end up takin sleepin pills or stickin the barrel of a gun in their mouths and pullin the trigger.”
Roland seemed still to be a few turns back, because he said, “You were a court jester and the customers in these inns were your court.”
Joe smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. Susannah frowned. Had she seen his teeth before? They had been doing a lot of laughing and she should have seen them, but she couldn’t remember that she actually had. Certainly he didn’t have the mush-mouth sound of someone whose teeth are mostly gone (such people had consulted with her father on many occasions, most of them in search of artificial replacements). If she’d had to guess earlier on, she would have said he had teeth but they were down to nothing but pegs and nubbins, and—
And what’s the matter with you, girl? He might be lying about a few things, but he surely didn’t grow a fresh set of teeth since you sat down to dinner! You’re letting your imagination run away with you.
Was she? Well, it was possible. And maybe that thin cry was nothing but the sound of the wind in the eaves at the front of the house, after all.
“I’d hear some of your jokes and stories,” Roland said. “As you told them on the road, if it does ya.”
Susannah looked at him closely, wondering if the gunslinger had some ulterior motive for this request, but he seemed genuinely interested. Even before seeing the Polaroid of the Dark Tower tacked to the living room wall (his eyes returned to it constantly as Joe told his story), Roland had been invested by a kind of hectic good cheer that was really not much like him at all. It was almost as if he were ill, edging in and out of delirium.
Joe Collins seemed surprised by the gunslinger’s request, but not at all displeased. “Good God,” he said. “I haven’t done any stand-up in what seems like a thousand years…and considering the way time stretched there for awhile, maybe it has been a thousand. I’m not sure I’d know how to begin.”
Susannah surprised herself by saying, “Try.”
Eight
Joe thought about it and then stood up, brushing a few errant crumbs from his shirt. He limped to the center of the room, leaving his crutch leaning against his chair. Oy looked up at him with his ears cocked and his old grin on his chops, as if anticipating the entertainment to come. For a moment Joe looked uncertain. Then he took a deep breath, let it out, and gave them a smile. “Promise you won’t throw no tomatoes if I stink up the joint,” he said. “Remember, it’s been a long time.”
“Not after you took us in and fed us,” Susannah said. “Never in life.”
Roland, always literal, said, “We have no tomatoes, in any case.”
“Right, right. Although there are some canned ones in the pantry…forget I said that!”
Susannah smiled. So did Roland.
Encouraged, Joe said: “Okay, let’s go back to that magical place called Jango’s in that magical city some folks call the mistake on the lake. Cleveland, Ohio, in other words. Second show. The one I never got to finish,