The gunslinger - Stephen King [32]
“Just me,” he said, unperturbed. “Why do you have to think you’re in the middle of such a mystery?”
The gunslinger lit a smoke without replying.
“I think you’re very close to your man in black,” Brown said. “Is he desperate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you?”
“Not yet,” the gunslinger said. He looked at Brown with a shade of defiance. “I go where I have to go, do what I have to do.”
“That’s good then,” Brown said and turned over and went to sleep.
XIX
The next morning, Brown fed him and sent him on his way. In the daylight he was an amazing figure with his scrawny, sunburnt chest, pencil-like collarbones, and loony shock of red hair. The bird perched on his shoulder.
“The mule?” the gunslinger asked.
“I’ll eat it,” Brown said.
“Okay.”
Brown offered his hand and the gunslinger shook it. The dweller nodded to the southeast. “Walk easy. Long days and pleasant nights.”
“May you have twice the number.”
They nodded at each other and then the man Allie had called Roland walked away, his body festooned with guns and water. He looked back once. Brown was rooting furiously at his little cornbed. The crow was perched on the low roof of his dwelling like a gargoyle.
XX
The fire was down, and the stars had begun to pale off. The wind walked restlessly, told its tale to no one. The gunslinger twitched in his sleep and was still again. He dreamed a thirsty dream. In the darkness the shape of the mountains was invisible. Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out. He found himself thinking more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot. Cort had known black from white.
He stirred again and woke. He blinked at the dead fire with its own shape superimposed over the other, more geometrical one. He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously. It was a secret he had shared with only a few over the years. The girl named Susan, the girl from Mejis, had been one of them.
That, of course, made him think of Cort again. Cort was dead. They were all dead, except for him. The world had moved on.
The gunslinger shouldered his gunna and moved on with it.
The
WAY STATION
CHAPTER TWO
The Way Station
I
A nursery rhyme had been playing itself through his mind all day, the maddening kind of thing that will not let go, that mockingly ignores all commands of the conscious mind to cease and desist. The rhyme was:
The rain in Spain falls on the plain.
There is joy and also pain
but the rain in Spain falls on the plain.
Time’s a sheet, life’s a stain,
All the things we know will change
and all those things remain the same,
but be ye mad or only sane,
the rain in Spain falls on the plain.
We walk in love but fly in chains
And the planes in Spain fall in the rain.
He didn’t know what a plane was in the context of the rhyme’s last couplet, but knew why the rhyme had occurred to him in the first place. There had been the recurring dream of his room in the castle and of his mother, who had sung it to him as he lay solemnly in the tiny bed by the window of many colors. She did not sing it at bedtimes because all small boys born to the High Speech must face the dark alone, but she sang to him at naptimes and he could remember the heavy gray rainlight that shivered into rainbows on the counterpane; he could feel the coolness of the room and the heavy warmth of blankets, love for his mother and her red lips, the haunting melody of the little nonsense lyric, and her voice.
Now it came back maddeningly, like a dog chasing its own tail in his mind as he walked. All his water was gone, and he knew he was very likely a dead man. He had never expected it to come to this, and he was sorry. Since noon he had been watching his feet rather than the way ahead. Out here even the devil-grass had grown stunted and yellow. The hardpan had disintegrated in places to mere rubble. The mountains were not noticeably clearer, although sixteen days had passed since he had left the hut of the last homesteader, a loony-sane young man on the edge of the desert. He had