by Stephen King
“You were taking your walk and this man hit you.”
“Walking… and this man hit me.”
“No one else was here. Not me, not Jake, not the woman.”
“No one else,” King agreed. “Just me and him. Will he say the same?”
“Yar. Very soon you’ll sleep deep. You may feel pain later, but you feel none now.”
“No pain now. Sleep deep.” King’s twisted frame relaxed on the pine needles.
“Yet before you sleep, listen to me once more,” Roland said.
“I’m listening.”
“A woman may come to y-wait. Do’ee dream of love with men?”
“Are you asking if I’m gay? Maybe a latent homosexual?”
King sounded weary but amused.
“I don’t know.” Roland paused. “I think so.”
“The answer is no,” King said. “Sometimes I dream of love with women. A litde less now that I’m older… and probably not at all for awhile, now. That fucking guy really beat me up.”
Not near so bad as he beat up mine, Roland thought bitterly, but he didn’t say this.
“IFee dream only of love with women, it’s a woman that may come to you.”
“Do you say so?” King sounded faintly interested.
“Yes. If she comes, she’ll be fair. She may speak to you about the ease and pleasure of the clearing. She may call herself Morphia, Daughter of Sleep, or Selena, Daughter of the Moon. She may offer you her arm and promise to take you there. You must refuse.”
“I must refuse.”
“Even if you are tempted by her eyes and breasts.”
“Even then,” King agreed.
“Why will you refuse, sai?”
“Because the Song isn’t done.”
At last Roland was satisfied. Mrs. Tassenbaum was kneeling by Jake. The gunslinger ignored both her and the boy and went to the man sitting slumped behind the wheel of the motor-carriage that had done all the damage. This man’s eyes were wide and blank, his mouth slack. A line of drool hung from his beard-stubbly chin.
“Do you hear me, sai?”
The man nodded fearfully. Behind him, both dogs had grown silent. Four bright eyes regarded the gunslinger from between the seats.
“What’s your name?”
“Bryan, do it please you-Bryan Smith.”
No, it didn’t please him at all. Here was yet one more he’d like to strangle. Another car passed on the road, and this time the person behind the wheel honked the horn as he or she passed. Whatever their protection might be, it had begun to grow thin.
“Sai Smith, you hit a man with your car or truckomobile or whatever it is thee calls it.”
Bryan Smith began to tremble all over. “I ain’t never had so much as a parking ticket,” he whined, “and I have to go and run into the most famous man in the state! My dogs ’us fightin-”
“Your lies don’t anger me,” Roland said, “but the fear which brings them forth does. Shut thy mouth.”
Bryan Smith did as told. The color was draining slowly but steadily from his face.
“You were alone when you hit him,” Roland said. “No one here but you and the storyteller. Do you understand?”
“I was alone. Mister, are you a walk-in?”
“Never mind what I am. You checked him and saw that he was still alive.”
“Still alive, good,” Smith said. “I didn’t mean to hurt nobody, honest.”
“He spoke to you. That’s how you knew he was alive.”
“Yes!” Smith smiled. Then he frowned. “What’d he say?”
“You don’t remember. You were excited and scared.”
“Scared and excited. Excited and scared. Yes I was.”
“You drive now. As you drive, you’ll wake up, little by little.
And when you get to a house or a store, you’ll stop and say there’s a man hurt down the road. A man who needs help. Tell it back, and be true.”
“Drive,” he said. His hands caressed the steering wheel as if he longed to be gone immediately. Roland supposed he did.
“Wake up, little by little. When I get to a house or store, tell them Stephen King’s hurt side of the road and he needs help. I know he’s still alive because he talked to me. It was an accident.”
He paused. “It wasn’t my fault. He was walking in the road.” A pause. “Probably.”
Do I care upon whom the blame for this mess falls? Roland asked himself. In truth he did not. King would go on writing either way. And Roland almost hoped he would be blamed, for it was indeed King’s fault; he’d had no business being out here in the first place.
“Drive away now,” he told Bryan Smith. “I don’t want to look at you anymore.”
Smith started the van with a look of profound relief. Roland didn’t bother watching him go. He went to Mrs. Tassenbaum and fell on his knees beside her. Oy sat by Jake’s head, now silent, knowing his howls could no longer be heard by the one for whom he grieved. What the gunslinger feared most had come to pass. While he had been talking to two men he didn’t like, the boy whom he loved more than all odiers-more than he’d loved anyone ever in his life, even Susan Delgado-had passed beyond him for the second time. Jake was dead.
FIVE
“He talked to you,” Roland said. He took Jake in his arms and began to rock him gently back and forth. The ’Rizas clanked in their pouch. Already he could feel Jake’s body growing cool.
“Yes,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“He told me to come back for you ’after the business here is done.’ Those were his exact words. And he said, ’Tell my father I love him.’”
Roland made a sound, choked and miserable, deep in his throat. He was remembering how it had been in Fedic, after they had stepped through the door. Hile, Father, Jake had said.
Roland had taken him in his arms then, too. Only then he had felt the boy’s beating heart. He would give anything to feel it beat again.
“There was more,” she said, “but do we have time for it now, especially when I could tell you later?”
Roland took her point immediately. The story both Bryan Smith and Stephen King knew was a simple one. There was no place in it for a lank, travel-scoured man with a big gun, nor a woman with graying hair; certainly not for a dead boy with a bag of sharp-edged plates slung over his shoulder and a machine-pistol in the waistband of his pants.
The only question was whether or not the woman would come back at all. She was not the first person he had attracted into doing things they might not ordinarily have done, but he knew things might look different to her once she was away from him. Asking for her promise-Do you swear to come back for me, sat? Do you swear on this boy’s stilled heart?-would do no good.
She could mean every word here and then think better of it once she was over the first hill.
Yet when he’d had a chance to take the shopkeeper who owned the truck, he didn’t. Nor had he swapped her for the old man cutting the grass at the writer’s house.
“Later will do,” he said. “For now, hurry on your way. If for some reason you feel you can’t come back here, I’ll not hold it against you.”
“Where would you go on your own?” she asked him.
“Where would you know to go? This isn’t your world. Is it?”
Roland ignored the question. “If there are people still here the first time you come back-peace officers, guards O’The watch, bluebacks, I don’t know-drive past without stopping.
Come back again in half an hour’s time. If they’re still here, drive on again. Keep doing that until they’re gone.”
“Will they notice me going back and forth?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Will they?”
She considered, then almost smiled. “The cops in this part of the world? Probably not.”
He nodded, accepting her judgment. “When you feel it’s safe, stop. You won’t see me, but I’ll see you. I’ll wait until dark. If you’re not here by then, I go.”
>
“I’ll come for you, but I won’t be driving that miserable excuse for a truck when I do,” she said. “I’ll be driving a Mercedes-Benz S600.” She said this with some pride.
Roland had no idea what a Mercedes-Bends was, but he nodded as though he did. “Go. We’ll talk later, after you come back.”
If you come back, he thought.
“I think you may want this,” she said, and slipped his revolver back into its holster.
“Thankee-sai.”
“You’re welcome.”
He watched her go to the old truck (which he thought she’d rather come to like, despite her dismissive words) and haul herself up by the wheel. And as she did, he realized there was something he needed, something that might be in the truck. “Whoa!”
Mrs. Tassenbaum had put her hand on the key in the ignition.
Now she took it off and looked at him inquiringly. Roland settled Jake gently back to the earth beneath which he must soon lie (it was that thought which had caused him to call out)
and got to his feet. He winced and put his hand to his hip, but that was only habit. There was no pain.
“What?” she asked as he approached. “If I don’t go soon-”
It wouldn’t matter if she went at all. ’Yes. I know.”
He looked in the bed of the truck. Along with the careless scatter of tools there was a square shape under a blue tarpaulin.
The edges of the tarp had been folded beneath the object to keep it from blowing away. When Roland pulled the tarp free, he saw eight or ten boxes made of the stiff paper Eddie called
“card-board.” They’d been pushed together to make the square shape. The pictures printed on the card-board told him they were boxes of beer. He wouldn’t have cared if they had been boxes of high explosive.
It was the tarpaulin he wanted.
He stepped back from the truck with it in his arms and said,
“Wow you can go.”
She grasped the key that started the engine once more, but did not immediately turn it. “Sir,” said she, “I am sorry for your loss. I just wanted to tell yovi that. I can see what that boy meant to you.”
Roland Deschain bowed his head and said nothing.
Irene Tassenbaum looked at him for a moment longer, reminded herself that sometimes words were useless things, then started the engine and slammed the door. He watched her drive into the road (her use of the clutch had already grown smooth and sure), making a tight turn so she could drive north, back toward East Stoneham.
Sorry for your loss.
And now he was alone with that loss. Alone with Jake. For a moment Roland stood surveying the litde grove of trees beside the highway, looking at two of the three who had been drawn to this place: a man, unconscious, and a boy dead. Roland’s eyes were dry and hot, throbbing in their sockets, and for a moment he was sure that he had again lost the ability to weep. The idea horrified him. If he was incapable of tears after all of this-after what he’d regained and then lost again-what good was any of it? So it was an immense relief when the tears finally came. They spilled from his eyes, quieting their nearly insane blue glare.
They ran down his dirty cheeks. He cried almost silently, but there was a single sob and Oy heard it. He raised his snout to the corridor of fast-moving clouds and howled a single time at them. Then he too was silent.
SIX
Roland carried Jake deeper into the woods, with Oy padding at his heel. That the bumbler was also weeping no longer surprised Roland; he had seen him cry before. And the days when he had believed Oy’s demonstrations of intelligence (and empathy)
might be no more than mimicry had long since passed. Most of what Roland thovight about on that short walk was a prayer for the dead he had heard Cuthbert speak on their last campaign together, the one that had ended at Jericho Hill. He doubted that Jake needed a prayer to send him on, but the gunslinger needed to keep his mind occupied, because it did not feel strong just now; if it went too far in the wrong direction, it would certainly break. Perhaps later he could indulge in hysteria-or even irina, the healing madness-but not now. He would not break now. He would not let the boy’s death come to nothing.
The hazy green-gold summerglow that lives only in forests
(and old forests, at that, like the one where the Bear Shardik had rampaged), deepened. It fell through the trees in dusky beams, and the place where Roland finally stopped felt more like a church than a clearing. He had gone roughly two hundred paces from the road on a westerly line. Here he set Jake down and looked about. He saw two rusty beer-cans and a few ejected shell-casings, probably the leavings of hunters. He tossed them further into the woods so the place would be clean. Then he looked at Jake, wiping away his tears so he could see as clearly as possible. The boy’s face was as clean as the clearing, Oy had seen to that, but one of Jake’s eyes was still open, giving the boy an evil winky look that must not be allowed. Roland rolled the lid closed wiui a finger, and when it sprang back up again (like a balky windowshade, he thought), he licked the ball of his thumb and rolled the lid shut again. This time it stayed closed.
There was dust and blood on Jake’s shirt. Roland took it off, then took his own off and put it on Jake, moving him like a doll in order to get it on him. The shirt came almost to Jake’s knees, but Roland made no attempt to tuck it in; this way it covered the bloodstains on Jake’s pants.
All of this Oy watched, his gold-ringed eyes bright with tears.
Roland had expected the soil to be soft beneath the thick carpet of needles, and it was. He had a good start on Jake’s grave when he heard die sound of an engine from the roadside.
Other motor-carriages had passed since he’d carried Jake into the woods, but he recognized the dissonant beat of this one.
The man in the blue vehicle had come back. Roland hadn’t been entirely sure he would.
“Stay,” he murmured to the bumbler. “Guard your master.”
But that was wrong. “Stay and guard your friend.”
It wouldn’t have been unusual for Oy to repeat the command (S’ay!was about the best he could manage) in the same low voice, but this time he said nothing. Roland watched him lie down beside Jake’s head, however, and snap a fly out of the air when it came in for a landing on the boy’s nose. Roland nodded, satisfied, then started back the way he had come.
SEVEN
Bryan Smith was out of his motor-carriage and sitting on the rock wall by the time Roland got back in view of him, his cane drawn across his lap. (Roland had no idea if the cane was an affectation or something the man really needed, and didn’t care about this, either.) King had regained some soupy version of consciousness, and the two men were talking.
“Please tell me it’s just sprained,” the writer said in a weak, worried voice.
“Nope! I’d say that leg’s broke in six, maybe seven places.”
Now that he’d had time to settle down and maybe work out a story, Smith sounded not just calm but almost happy.
“Cheer me up, why don’t you,” King said. The visible side of his face was very pale, but the flow of blood from the gash on his temple had slowed almost to a stop. “Have you got a cigarette?”
“Nope,” Smith said in that same weirdly cheerful voice.
“Gave em up.”
Although not particularly strong in the touch, Roland had enough of it to know this wasn’t so. But Smith only had three and didn’t want to share them with this man, who could probably afford enough cigarettes to fill Smith’s entire van with them. Besides, Smith thought-
“Besides, folks who been in a accident ain’t supposed to smoke,” Smith said virtuously.
King nodded. “Hard to breathe, anyway,” he said.
“Trolly bust a rib or two, too. My name’s Bryan Smith. I’m the one who hit you. Sorry.” He held out his hand and-incredibly-King shook it.
“Nothin like this ever happened to me before,” Smith said.
“I ain’t ever had so much as a parkin ticket.”
; King might or might not have known this for the lie it was, but chose not to comment on it; there was something else on his mind. “Mr. Smith-Bryan-was anyone else here?”
In the trees, Roland stiffened.
Smith actually appeared to consider this. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a Mars bar and began to unwrap it.
Then he shook his head. “Just you n me. But I called 911 and Rescue, up to the store. They said someone was real close. Said they’d be here in no time. Don’t you worry.”
“You know who I am.”
“God yeah!” Bryan Smith said, and chuckled. He took a bite of the candy bar and talked through it. “Reckonized you right away. I seen all your movies. My favorite was the one about the Saint Bernard. What was that dog’s name?”
“Cujo,” King said. This was a word Roland knew, one Susan Delgado had sometimes used when they were alone together.
In Mejis, cujo meant “sweet one.”
“Yeah! That was great! Scary as hell! I’m glad that litde boy lived!”
“In the book he died.” Then King closed his eyes and lay back, waiting.
Smith took another bite, a humongous one this time. “I
liked the show they made about the clown, too! Very cool!”
King made no reply. His eyes stayed closed, but Roland thought the rise and fall of the writer’s chest looked deep and steady. That was good.
Then a truck roared toward them and swerved to a stop in front of Smith’s van. The new motor-carriage was about the size of a funeral bucka, but orange instead of black and equipped with flashing lights. Roland was not displeased to see it roll over the tracks of the storekeeper’s truck before coming to a stop.
Roland half-expected a robot to get out of the coach, but it was a man. He reached back inside for a black sawbones’ bag.
Satisfied that everything here would be as well as it could be,
Roland returned to where he had laid Jake, moving with all his old unconscious grace: he cracked not a single twig, surprised not a single bird into flight.
EIGHT
