The gunslinger - Stephen King [12]
Zoltan shifted restlessly, seemed about to speak, subsided.
“Will I tell you about it?” the gunslinger asked. “Ordinarily I’m not much of a talker, but . . .”
“Sometimes talking helps. I’ll listen.”
The gunslinger searched for words to begin and found none. “I have to pass water,” he said.
Brown nodded. “Pass it in the corn, please.”
“Sure.”
He went up the stairs and out into the dark. The stars glittered overhead. The wind pulsed. His urine arched out over the powdery cornfield in a wavering stream. The man in black had drawn him here. It wasn’t beyond possibility that Brown was the man in black. He might be . . .
The gunslinger shut these useless and upsetting thoughts away. The only contingency he had not learned how to bear was the possibility of his own madness. He went back inside.
“Have you decided if I’m an enchantment yet?” Brown asked, amused.
The gunslinger paused on the tiny landing, startled. Then he came down slowly and sat. “The thought crossed my mind. Are you?”
“If I am, I don’t know it.”
This wasn’t a terribly helpful answer, but the gunslinger decided to let it pass. “I started to tell you about Tull.”
“Is it growing?”
“It’s dead,” the gunslinger said. “I killed it.” He thought of adding: And now I’m going to kill you, if for no other reason than I don’t want to have to sleep with one eye open. But had he come to such behavior? If so, why bother to go on at all? Why, if he had become what he pursued?
Brown said, “I don’t want nothing from you, gunslinger, except to still be here when you move on. I won’t beg for my life, but that don’t mean I don’t want it yet awhile longer.”
The gunslinger closed his eyes. His mind whirled.
“Tell me what you are,” he said thickly.
“Just a man. One who means you no harm. And I’m still willing to listen if you’re willing to talk.”
To this the gunslinger made no reply.
“I guess you won’t feel right about it unless I invite you,” Brown said, “and so I do. Will you tell me about Tull?”
The gunslinger was surprised to find that this time the words were there. He began to speak in flat bursts that slowly spread into an even, slightly toneless narrative. He found himself oddly excited. He talked deep into the night. Brown did not interrupt at all. Neither did the bird.
V
He’d bought the mule in Pricetown, and when he reached Tull, it was still fresh. The sun had set an hour earlier, but the gunslinger had continued traveling, guided by the town glow in the sky, then by the uncannily clear notes of a honky-tonk piano playing “Hey Jude.” The road widened as it took on tributaries. Here and there were overhead sparklights, all of them long dead.
The forests were long gone now, replaced by the monotonous flat prairie country: endless, desolate fields gone to timothy and low shrubs; eerie, deserted estates guarded by brooding, shadowed mansions where demons undeniably walked; leering, empty shanties where the people had either moved on or had been moved along; an occasional dweller’s hovel, given away by a single flickering point of light in the dark, or by sullen, inbred clan-fams toiling silently in the fields by day. Corn was the main crop, but there were beans and also some pokeberries. An occasional scrawny cow stared at him lumpishly from between peeled alder poles. Coaches had passed him four times, twice coming and twice going, nearly empty as they came up on him from behind and bypassed him and his mule, fuller as they headed back toward the forests of the north. Now and then a farmer passed with his feet up on the splashboard of his bucka, careful not to look at the man with the guns.
It was ugly country. It had showered twice since he had left Pricetown, grudgingly both times. Even the timothy looked yellow and dispirited. Pass-on-by country. He had seen no sign of the man in black. Perhaps he had taken a coach.
The road made a bend, and beyond it the gunslinger clucked the mule to a stop and looked down at Tull. It was at the floor of a circular, bowl-shaped hollow, a shoddy jewel in a cheap setting. There were a number of lights, most of them