The Dark Tower - Stephen King [360]
What if he doesn’t recognize her?
What if when he turns he sees nothing but a homeless black lady in an electric cart whose battery will soon be as flat as a sat-on hat, a black lady with no money, no clothes, no address (not in this where and when, say thankee sai) and no legs? A homeless black lady with no connection to him? Or what if he does know her, somewhere far back in his mind, yet still denies her as completely as Peter denied Jesus, because remembering is just too hurtful?
Worse still, what if he turns to her and she sees the burned-out, fucked-up, empty-eyed stare of the longtime junkie? What if, what if, and here comes the snow that will soon turn the whole world white.
Stop thy grizzling and go to him, Roland tells her. You didn’t face Blaine and the taheen of Blue Heaven and the thing under Castle Discordia just to turn tail and run now, did you? Surely you’ve got a moit more guts than that.
But she isn’t sure she really does until she sees her hand rise to the throttle. Before she can twist it, however, the gunslinger’s voice speaks to her again, this time sounding wearily amused.
Perhaps there’s something you want to get rid of first, Susannah?
She looks down and sees Roland’s weapon stuck through her crossbelt, like a Mexican bandido’s pistola, or a pirate’s cutlass. She pulls it free, amazed at how good it feels in her hand…how brutally right. Parting from this, she thinks, will be like parting from a lover. And she doesn’t have to, does she? The question is, what does she love more? The man or the gun? All other choices will flow from this one.
On impulse she rolls the cylinder and sees that the rounds inside look old, their casings dull.
These’ll never fire, she thinks…and, without knowing why, or precisely what it means: These are wets.
She sights up the barrel and is queerly saddened—but not surprised—to find that the barrel lets through no light. It’s plugged. Has been for decades, from the look of it. This gun will never fire again. There is no choice to be made, after all. This gun is over.
Susannah, still holding the revolver with the sandalwood grips in one hand, twists the throttle with the other. The little electric cart—the one she named Ho Fat III, although that is already fading in her mind—rolls soundlessly forward. It passes a green trash barrel with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE! stenciled on the side. She tosses Roland’s revolver into this litter barrel. Doing it hurts her heart, but she never hesitates. It’s heavy, and sinks into the crumpled fast-food wrappers, advertising circulars, and discarded newspapers like a stone into water. She is still enough of a gunslinger to bitterly regret throwing away such a storied weapon (even if the final trip between worlds has spoiled it), but she’s already become enough of the woman who’s waiting for her up ahead not to pause or look back once the job is done.
Before she can reach the man with the paper cup, he turns. He is indeed wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!, but she barely registers that. It’s him: that’s what she registers. It’s Edward Cantor Dean. And then even that becomes secondary, because what she sees in his eyes is all she has feared. It’s total puzzlement. He doesn’t know her.
Then, tentatively, he smiles, and it is the smile she remembers, the one she always loved. Also he’s clean, she knows it at once. She sees it in his face. Mostly in his eyes. The carolers from Harlem sing, and he holds out the cup of hot chocolate.
“Thank God,” he says. “I’d just about decided I’d have to drink this myself. That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That…well…” He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. “Listen, you are here for me, aren’t you? Please tell me I’m not making an utter ass of myself. Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”
“You’re not,” she says. “Making an ass of yourself, I mean.” She’s remembering Jake’s story about the voices he heard arguing in his mind, one yelling that he was dead, the other that he