Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [179]
There was a grunt, followed by a muffled fart. Jake looked toward these sounds, saw Benny Slightman buried up to the eyes under two blankets, and everything fell into place. He was wearing one of Benny’s undershirts and a pair of Benny’s under-shorts. They were in Benny’s tent. They were on the bluff overlooking the river. The riverbanks out here were stony, Benny had said, no good for rice but plenty good for fishing. If they were just a little bit lucky, they’d be able to catch their own breakfast out of the Devar-Tete Whye. And although Benny knew Jake and Oy would have to return to the Old Fella’s house to be with their dinh and their ka-mates for a day or two, maybe longer, perhaps Jake could come back later on. There was good fishing here, good swimming a little way upstream, and caves where the walls glowed in the dark and the lizards glowed, too. Jake had gone to sleep well satisfied by the prospect of these wonders. He wasn’t crazy about being out here without a gun (he had seen too much and done too much to ever feel entirely comfortable without a gun these days), but he was pretty sure Andy was keeping an eye on them, and he’d allowed himself to sleep deep.
Then the dream. The horrible dream. Susannah in the huge, dirty kitchen of an abandoned castle. Susannah holding up a squirming rat impaled on a meat-fork. Holding it up and laughing while blood ran down the fork’s wooden handle and pooled around her hand.
That was no dream and you know it. You have to tell Roland.
The thought which followed this was somehow even more disturbing: Roland already knows. So does Eddie.
Jake sat with his knees against his chest and his arms linked around his shins, feeling more miserable than at any time since getting a good look at his Final Essay in Ms. Avery’s English Comp class. My Understanding of the Truth, it had been called, and although he understood it a lot better now—understood how much of it must have been called forth by what Roland called the touch—his first reaction had been pure horror. What he felt now wasn’t so much horror as it was…well…
Sadness, he thought.
Yes. They were supposed to be ka-tet, one from many, but now their unity had been lost. Susannah had become another person and Roland didn’t want her to know, not with Wolves on the way both here and in the other world.
Wolves of the Calla, Wolves of New York.
He wanted to be angry, but there seemed no one to be angry at. Susannah had gotten pregnant helping him, after all, and if Roland and Eddie weren’t telling her stuff, it was because they wanted to protect her.
Yeah, right, a resentful voice spoke up. They also want to make sure she’s able to help out when the Wolves come riding out of Thunderclap. It’d be one less gun if she was busy having a miscarriage or a nervous breakdown or something.
He knew that wasn’t fair, but the dream had shaken him badly. The rat was what he kept coming back to; that rat writhing on the meat-fork. Her holding it up. And grinning. Don’t want to forget that. Grinning. He’d touched the thought in her mind at that moment, and the thought had been rat-kebab.
“Christ,” he whispered.
He guessed he understood why Roland wasn’t telling Susannah about Mia—and about the baby, what Mia called the chap—but didn’t the gunslinger understand that something far more important had been lost, and was getting more lost every day this was allowed to go on?
They know better than you, they’re grown-ups.
Jake thought that was bullshit. If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and snorting cocaine until his nose bled? If being a grown-up gave you some sort of special knowledge of the right things to do, how come his mother was sleeping with her masseuse, who had huge biceps and no brains? Why had neither of them noticed, as the spring of 1977 marched toward summer, that