Wizard and glass - Stephen King [60]
“I buried my hawk, the first weapon I ever wielded, and perhaps the finest. Then—and this part I’m sure I didn’t tell you before, Jake—I went into the lower town. That summer’s heat broke in storms full of thunder and hail, and in a room above one of the brothels where Cort had been wont to roister, I lay with a woman for the first time.”
He poked a stick thoughtfully into the fire, seemed to become aware of the unconscious symbolism in what he was doing, and threw it away with a lopsided grin. It landed, smoldering, near the tire of an abandoned Dodge Aspen and went out.
“It was good. The sex was good. Not the great thing I and my friends had thought about and whispered about and wondered about, of course—”
“I think store-bought pussy tends to be overrated by the young, sugar,” Susannah said.
“I fell asleep listening to the sots downstairs singing along with the piano and to the sound of hail on the window. I awoke the next morning in . . . well . . . let’s just say I awoke in a way I never would have expected to awake in such a place.”
Jake fed fresh fuel to the fire. It flared up, painting highlights on Roland’s cheeks, brushing crescents of shadow beneath his brows and below his lower lip. And as he talked, Susannah found she could almost see what had happened on that long-ago morning that must have smelled of wet cobblestones and rain-sweetened summer air; what had happened in a whore’s crib above a drinking-dive in the lower town of Gilead, Barony seat of New Canaan, one small mote of land located in the western regions of Mid-World.
One boy, still aching from his battle of the day before and newly educated in the mysteries of sex. One boy, now looking twelve instead of fourteen, his lashes dusting down thick upon his cheeks, the lids shuttering those extraordinary blue eyes; one boy with his hand loosely cupping a whore’s breast, his hawk-scarred wrist lying tanned upon the counterpane. One boy in the final instants of his life’s last good sleep, one boy who will shortly be in motion, who will be falling as a dislodged pebble falls on a steep and broken slope of scree; a falling pebble that strikes another, and another, and another, those pebbles striking yet more, until the whole slope is in motion and the earth shakes with the sound of the landslide.
One boy, one pebble on a slope loose and ready to slide.
A knot exploded in the fire. Somewhere in this dream of Kansas, an animal yipped. Susannah watched sparks swirl up past Roland’s incredibly ancient face and saw in that face the sleeping boy of a summer’s morn, lying in a bawd’s bed. And then she saw the door crash open, ending Gilead’s last troubled dream.
15
The man who strode in, crossing the room to the bed before Roland could open his eyes (and before the woman beside him had even begun to register the sound), was tall, slim, dressed in faded jeans and a dusty shirt of blue chambray. On his head was a dark gray hat with a snakeskin band. Lying low on his hips were two old leather holsters. Jutting from them were the sandalwood grips of the pistols the boy would someday bear to lands of which this scowling man with the furious blue eyes would never dream.
Roland was in motion even before he was able to unseal his eyes, rolling to the left, groping beneath the bed for what was there. He was fast, so fast it was scary, but—and Susannah saw this, too, saw it clearly—the man in the faded jeans was faster yet. He grabbed the boy’s shoulder and yanked, turning him naked out of bed and onto the floor. The boy sprawled there, reaching again for what was beneath the bed, lightning-quick. The man in the jeans stamped down on his fingers before they could grasp.
“Bastard!” the boy gasped. “Oh, you bas—”
But now his eyes were open, he looked up, and saw that the invading bastard was his father.
The whore was sitting up now, her eyes puffy, her face slack and petulant. “Here!” she cried. “Here, here! You can’t just be a-comin in like that, so you can’t! Why, if I was to raise my voice—”
Ignoring her, the man reached beneath