The gunslinger - Stephen King [35]
For the first time the gunslinger wondered consciously how the boy had come to this place, with dry and man-killing leagues of desert all around it. But he would not make it his concern, not yet, at least. “Make your best guess. Long ago?”
“No. Not long. I haven’t been here long.”
The fire lit in him again. He snatched up the can and drank from it with hands that trembled the smallest bit. A fragment of the cradle song recurred, but this time, instead of his mother’s face, he saw the scarred face of Alice, who had been his jilly in the now-defunct town of Tull. “A week? Two? Three?”
The boy looked at him distractedly. “Yes.”
“Which?”
“A week. Or two.” He looked aside, blushing a little. “Three poops ago, that’s the only way I can measure things now. He didn’t even drink. I thought he might be the ghost of a priest, like in this movie I saw once, only Zorro figured out he wasn’t a priest at all, or a ghost, either. He was just a banker who wanted some land because there was gold on it. Mrs. Shaw took me to see that movie. It was in Times Square.”
None of this made any sense to the gunslinger, so he did not comment on it.
“I was scared,” the boy said. “I’ve been scared almost all the time.” His face quivered like crystal on the edge of the ultimate, destructive high note. “He didn’t even build a fire. He just sat there. I don’t even know if he went to sleep.”
Close! Closer than he had ever been, by the gods! In spite of his extreme dehydration, his hands felt faintly moist; greasy.
“There’s some dried meat,” the boy said.
“All right.” The gunslinger nodded. “Good.”
The boy got up to fetch it, his knees popping slightly. He made a fine straight figure. The desert had not yet sapped him. His arms were thin, but the skin, although tanned, had not dried and cracked. He’s got juice, the gunslinger thought. Mayhap some sand in his craw, as well, or he would have taken one of my guns and shot me right where I lay.
Or perhaps the boy simply hadn’t thought of it.
The gunslinger drank from the can again. Sand in his craw or not, he didn’t come from this place.
Jake came back with a pile of dried jerky on what looked like a sun-scoured breadboard. The meat was tough, stringy, and salty enough to make the cankered lining of the gunslinger’s mouth sing. He ate and drank until he felt logy, and then settled back. The boy ate only a little, picking at the dark strands with an odd delicacy.
The gunslinger regarded him, and the boy looked back at him candidly enough. “Where did you come from, Jake?” he asked finally.
“I don’t know.” The boy frowned. “I did know. I knew when I came here, but it’s all fuzzy now, like a bad dream when you wake up. I have lots of bad dreams. Mrs. Shaw used to say it was because I watched too many horror movies on Channel Eleven.”
“What’s a channel?” A wild idea occurred to him. “Is it like a beam?”
“No—it’s TV.”
“What’s teevee?”
“I—” The boy touched his forehead. “Pictures.”
“Did somebody tote you here? This Mrs. Shaw?”
“No,” the boy said. “I just was here.”
“Who is Mrs. Shaw?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did she call you ’Bama?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re not making any sense,” the gunslinger said flatly.
Quite suddenly the boy was on the verge of tears. “I can’t help it. I was just here. If you asked me about TV and channels yesterday, I bet I still could have remembered! Tomorrow I probably won’t even remember I’m Jake—not unless you tell me, and you won’t be here, will you? You’re going to go away and I’ll starve because you ate up almost all my food. I didn’t ask to be here. I don’t like it. It’s spooky.”
“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. Make do.”
“I didn’t ask to be here,” the boy repeated with bewildered defiance.
The gunslinger ate another piece of the meat, chewing the salt out of it before swallowing. The boy had become part of it, and the gunslinger was convinced he told the truth—he had not asked for it. It was too bad. He himself . . . he had asked for it. But he had not asked for the game to become this dirty. He had