The waste lands - Stephen King [142]
“I’m sure as sure can be. I’ve worn this day and night for over a hundred years, gunslinger. Now you shall wear it, and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower, and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth.” She slipped the chain over his head. The cross dropped into the open neck of his deerskin shirt as if it belonged there. “Go now. We have broken bread, we have held palaver, we have your blessing, and you have ours. Go your course in safety. Stand and be true.” Her voice trembled and broke on the last word.
Roland rose to his feet, then bowed and tapped his throat three times. “Thankee-sai.”
She bowed back, but did not speak. Now there were tears coursing down her cheeks.
“Ready?” Roland asked.
Eddie nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.
“All right,” Roland said. “Let’s go.”
They walked down what remained of the town’s high street, Jake pushing Susannah’s wheelchair. As they passed the last building (TRADE & CHANGE, the faded sign read), he looked back. The old people were still gathered about the stone marker, a forlorn cluster of humanity in the middle of this wide, empty plain. Jake raised his hand. Up to this point he had managed to hold himself in, but when several of the old folks—Si, Bill, and Till among them—raised their own hands in return, Jake burst into tears himself.
Eddie put an arm around his shoulders. “Just keep walking, sport,” he said in an uneasy voice. “That’s the only way to do it.”
“They’re so old!” Jake sobbed. “How can we just leave them like this? It’s not right!”
“It’s ka,” Eddie said without thinking.
“Is it? Well ka suh-suh-sucks!”
“Yeah, hard,” Eddie agreed . . . but he kept walking. So did Jake, and he didn’t look back again. He was afraid they would still be there, standing at the center of their forgotten town, watching until Roland and his friends were out of view. And he would have been right.
14
THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah’s eucalyptus trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.
“I just don’t see why we didn’t stay,” Jake said. “The blind lady invited us, and we didn’t get very far, anyway. I’m still so full I’m practically waddling.”
Eddie smiled. “Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and leisurely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and crapping rabbit-turds. If you’d told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I would have laughed in your face.”
“Is your middle name really Cantor?”
“Yes, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”
“I won’t. Why didn’t we stay, Eddie?”
Eddie sighed. “Because we would have found out they needed firewood.”
“Huh?”
“And after we got the firewood, we would’ve found they also needed fresh meat, because they served us the last of what they had. And we’d be real creeps not to replace what we ate, right? Especially when we’re packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on—oh, not to the front of the town, that’d be dangerous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few days, and what’s a few days, right?”
Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and preoccupied. “I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit,” he said.
“Nope. I’ve just been telling Jake the facts as I see them.”
“So what would have been wrong with that?” Jake asked. “This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It’s not going anywhere, is it?”
“A few days, then a few more, then a few more.” Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly. I’m starting to sound