Wizard and glass - Stephen King [329]
Eddie’s were low boots with Cuban heels (Maybe in this world you call them Mejis heels, he thought) and pointed toes . . . what, back in his other life, had been known as “street-boppers.” Kids from the midsixties—an era Odetta/Detta/Susannah had just missed—might have called them “Beatle-boots.”
Roland’s, of course, were cowboy boots. Fancy ones—you’d go dancing rather than droving in such as these. Looped stitching, side decorations, narrow, haughty arches. He examined them without picking them up, then looked at his fellow travellers and frowned. They were looking at each other. You would have said three people couldn’t do that, only a pair . . . but you only would have said it if you’d never been part of a ka-tet.
Roland still shared khef with them; he felt the powerful current of their mingled thought, but could not understand it. Because it’s of their world. They come from different whens of that world, but they see something here that’s common to all three of them.
“What is it?” he asked. “What do they mean, these shoes?”
“I don’t think any of us know that, exactly,” Susannah said.
“No,” Jake said. “It’s another riddle.” He looked at the weird, blood-red Oxford shoe in his hands with distaste. “Another goddamned riddle.”
“Tell what you know.” He looked toward the glass palace again. It was perhaps fifteen New York miles away, now, shining in the clear day, delicate as a mirage, but as real as . . . well, as real as shoes. “Please, tell me what you know about these shoes.”
“I got shoes, you got shoes, all God’s chillun got shoes,” Odetta said. “That’s the prevailin opinion, anyway.”
“Well,” Eddie said, “we got em, anyway. And you’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?”
“I guess I am.”
“You, Jake?”
Instead of answering with words, Jake picked up the other Oxford (Roland had no doubt that all the shoes, including Oy’s, would fit perfectly) and clapped them briskly together three times. It meant nothing to Roland, but both Eddie and Susannah reacted violently, looking around, looking especially at the sky, as if expecting a storm born out of this bright autumn sunshine. They ended up looking at the glass palace again . . . and then at each other, in that knowing, round-eyed way that made Roland feel like shaking them both until their teeth rattled. Yet he waited. Sometimes that was all a man could do.
“After you killed Jonas, you looked into the ball,” Eddie said, turning to him.
“Yes.”
“Travelled in the ball.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about that again now; it has nothing to do with these—”
“I think it does,” Eddie said. “You flew inside a pink storm. Inside a pink gale, you could say. Gale is a word you might use for a storm, isn’t it? Especially if you were making up a riddle.”
“Sure,” Jake said. He sounded dreamy, almost like a boy who talks in his sleep. “When does Dorothy fly over the Wizard’s Rainbow? When she’s a Gale.”
“We ain’t in Kansas anymore, sugar,” Susannah said, and then voiced a strange, humorless bark which Roland supposed was a species of laughter. “May look a little like it, but Kansas was never . . . you know, this thin.”
“I don’t understand you,” Roland said. But he felt cold, and his heart was beating too fast. There were thinnies everywhere now, hadn’t he told them that? Worlds melting into one another as the forces of the Tower weakened? As the day when the rose would be plowed under drew nearer?
“You saw things as you flew,” Eddie said. “Before you got to the dark land, the one you called Thunderclap, you saw things. The piano-player, Sheb. Who turned up again later in your life, didn’t he?”
“Yes, in Tull.”
“And the dweller with the red hair?”
“Him, too. He had a bird named Zoltan. But when we met, he and I, we said the normal. ‘Life for you, life for your crop,’ that sort of thing. I thought I heard the same when he flew by me in the pink storm, but he really said something else.”