by Stephen King
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 with 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 the 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.
“Prolly 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 little 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
Would it surprise you, after all we’ve seen together and all the secrets we’ve learned, to know that at quarter past five that afternoon, Mrs. Tassenbaum pulled Chip McAvoy’s old truck into the driveway of a house we’ve already visited? Probably not, because ka is a wheel, and all it knows how to do is roll. When last we visited here, in 1977, both it and the boathouse on the shore of Keywadin Pond were white with green trim. The Tassenbaums, who bought the place in ’94, had painted it an entirely pleasing shade of cream (no trim; to Irene Tassenbaum’s way of thinking, trim is for folks who can’t make up their minds). They have also put a sign reading SUNSET COTTAGE on a post at the head of the driveway, and as far as Uncle Sam’s concerned it’s part of their mailing address, but to the local folk, this house at the south end of Keywadin Pond will always be the old John Cullum place.
She parked the truck beside her dark red Benz and went inside, mentally rehearsing what she’d tell David about why she had the local shopkeeper’s pickup, but Sunset Cottage hummed with the peculiar silence only empty places have; she picked up on it immediately. She had come back to a lot of empty places— apartments at the beginning, bigger and bigger houses as time went by—over the years. Not because David was out drinking or womanizing, good Lord forbid. No, he and his friends had usually been out in one garage or another, one basement workshop or another, drinking cheap wine and discount beer from the Beverage Barn, creating the Internet plus all the software necessary to support it and make it user-friendly. The profits, although most would not believe it, had only been a side-effect. The silence to which their wives so often came home was another. After awhile all that humming silence kind of got to you, made you mad, even, but not today. Today she was delighted the house was just hers.
Are you going to sleep with Marshal Dillon, if he wants you?
It wasn’t a question she even had to think about. The answer was yes, she would sleep with him if he wanted her: sideways, backward, doggy-style, or straight-up fuck, if that was his pleasure. He wouldn’t—even if he hadn’t been grieving for his young
(sai? son?)
friend, he wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with her, she with her wrinkles, she with her hair going gray at the roots, she with the spare tire which her designer clothes could not quite conceal.
The very idea was ludicrous.
But yes. If he wanted her, she would.
She looked on the fridge and there, under one of the magnets that dotted it (WE ARE POSITRONICS, BUILDING THE FUTURE ONE CIRCUIT AT A TIME, this one said) was a brief note.
Ree—
You wanted me to relax, so I’m relaxing (dammit!). I.e. gone fishin’ with Sonny Emerson, t’other end of the lake, ayuh, ayuh. Will be back by 7 unless the bugs are too bad. If I bring you a bass, will you cook & clean?
D.
PS: Something going on at the store big enuf to rate 3 police cars. WALKINS, maybe???? If you hear, fill me in.
She’d told him she was going to the store this afternoon— eggs and milk that she’d of course never gotten—and he had nodded. Yes dear, yes dear. But his note held no hint of worry, no sense that he even remembered what she’d said. Well, what else did she expect? When it came to David, info entered ear A, info exited ear B. Welcome to GeniusWorld.
She turned the note over, plucked a pen from a teacup filled with them, hesitated, then wrote:
David,
Something has happened, and I have to be gone for awhile. 2 days at least, I think maybe 3 or 4. Please don’t worry about me and don’t call anyone. ESPECIALLY NOT POLICE. It’s a stray cat thing.
Would he understand that? She thought he would if he remembered how they’d met. At the Santa Monica ASPCA, that had been, among the stacked rows of kennels in back: love blooms as the mongrels yap. It sounded like James Joyce to her, by God. He had brought in a stray dog he’d found on a suburban street near the apartment where he was staying with half a dozen egghead friends. She’d been looking for a kitten to liven up what was an essentially friendless life. He’d had all his hair then. As for her, she’d thought women who dyed theirs mildly amusing. Time was a thief, and one of the first things it took was your sense of humor.
She hesitated, then added
Love you,
Ree
Was that true any longer? Well, let it stand, either way. Crossing out what you’d written in ink always looked ugly. She put the note back on the fridge with the same magnet to hold it in place.
She got the keys to the Mercedes out of the basket by the door, then remembered the rowboat, still tied up at the little stub of dock behind the store. It would be all right there. But then she thought of something else, something the boy had told her. He doesn’t know about money.
She went into the pantry, where they always kept a slim roll of fifties (there were places out here in the boondocks where she would be willing to swear they’d never even heard of MasterCard) and took three. She started away, shrugged, went back, and took the other three, as well. Why not? She was living dangerously today.
On her way out, she paused again to look at the note. And then, for absolutely no reason she could understand, she took the Positronics magnet away and replaced it with an orange slice. Then she left.
Never mind the future. For the time being, she had enough to keep her occupied in the present.
NINE
The emergency bucka was gone, bearing the writer to the nearest hospital or infirmary, Roland assumed. Peace officers had come just as it left, and they spent perhaps half an hour talking with Bryan Smith. The gunslinger could hear the palaver from where he was, just over the first rise. The bluebacks’ questions were clear and calm, Smith’s answers little more than mumbles. Roland saw no reason to stop working. If the blues came back here and found him, he would deal with them. Just incapacitate them, unless they made that impossible; gods knew there had been enough killing. But he would bury his dead, one way or another.
He would bury his dead.
The lovely green-gold light of the clearing deepened. Mosquitoes found him but he did not stop what he was doing in order to slap them, merely let them drink their fill and then lumber off, heavy with their freight of blood. He heard engines starting as he finished hand-digging the grave, the smooth roar of two cars and the more uneven sound of Smith’s van-mobile. He had heard the voices of only two peace officers, which meant that, unless there had been a third blueback with nothing to say, they were allowing Smith to drive away by himself. Roland thought this rather odd, but—like the question of whether or not King was paralyzed—it was none of his matter or mind. All that mattered was this; all that mattered was seeing to his own.
He made three trips to collect stones, because a grave dug by hand must necessarily be a shallow one and animals, even in such a tame world as this, are always hungry. He stacked the stones at the head of the hole, a scar lined with earth so rich it could have been black satin. Oy lay by Jake’s head, watching the gunslinger come and go, saying nothing. He’d always been different from his kind as they were since the world had moved on; Roland had even speculated that it was Oy’s extraordinary chattiness that had caused the others in his tet to expel him, and not gently, either. When they’d come upon this fellow, not too far from the town of River Crossing, he’d been scrawny to the point of starvation, and with a half-healed bite-mark on one flank. The bumbler had loved Jake from the first: “That’s as clear as Earth needs,” Cort might have said (or Roland’s own father, for that matter). And it was to Jake the bumbler had talked the most. Roland had an idea that Oy might fall mostly silent now that the boy was dead, and this thought was another way of defining what was lost.
He remembered the boy standing before the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis in the torchlight, his face young and fair, as if he would live forever. I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld, the ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine, he had said, and oh, aye, for here he was in the Ninety and Nine, with his grave all dug, clean and ready for him.
Roland began to weep again. He put his hands over his face and rocked back and forth on his knees, smelling the sweet aromatic needles and wishing he had cried off before ka, that old and patient demon, had taught him the real price of his quest. He would have given anything to change what had happened, anything to close this hole with nothing in it, but this was the world where time ran just one way.
TEN
When he had gained control of himself again, he wrapped Jake carefully in the blue tarpaulin, fashioning a kind of hood around the still, pale face. He would close that face away for good before refilling the grave, but not until.
“Oy?” he asked. “Will you say goodbye?”
Oy looked at Roland, and for a moment the gunslinger wasn’t sure he understood. Then the bumbler extended his neck and caressed the boy’s cheek a last time with his tongue. “I, Ake,” he said: Bye, Jake or I ache, it came to the same.
The gunslinger gathered the boy up (how light he was, this boy who had jumped from the barn loft with Benny Slightman, and stood against the vampires with Pere Callahan, how curiously light; as if the growing weight of him had departed with his life) and lowered him into the hole. A crumble of dirt spilled down one cheek and Roland wiped it away. That done, he closed his eyes again and thought. Then, at last—haltingly— he began. He knew that any translation into the language of this place would be clumsy, but he did the best he could. If Jake’s spirit-man lingered near, it was this language that he would understand.
“Time flies, knells call, life passes, so hear my prayer.
“Birth is nothing but death begun, so hear my prayer.
“Death is speechless, so hear my speech.”
The words drifted away into the haze of green and gold. Roland let them, then set upon the rest. He spoke more quickly now.
“This is Jake, who served his ka and his tet. Say true.
“May the forgiving glance of S’mana heal his heart. Say please.
“May the arms of Gan raise him from the darkness of this earth. Say please.
“Surround him, Gan, with light.
“Fill him, Chloe, with strength.
“If he is thirsty, give him water in the clearing.
“If he is hungry, give him food in the clearing.
“May his life on this earth and the pain of his passing
become as a dream to his waking soul, and let his eyes fall upon every lovely sight; let him find the friends that were lost to him, and let every one whose name he calls call his in return.
“This is Jake, who lived well, loved his own, and died as ka would have it.
“Each man owes a death. This is Jake. Give him peace.”
He knelt a moment longer with his hands clasped between his knees, thinking he had not understood the true power of sorrow, nor the pain of regret, until this moment.
I cannot bear to let him go.
But once again, that cruel paradox: if he didn’t, the sacrifice was in vain.
Roland opened his eyes and said, “Goodbye, Jake. I love you, dear.”
Then he closed the blue hood around the boy’s face against the rain of earth that must follow.
ELEVEN
When the grave was filled and the rocks placed over it, Roland walked back to the clearing by the road and examined the tale the various tracks told, simply because there was nothing else to do. When that meaningless task was finished, he sat down on a fallen log. Oy had stayed by the grave, and Roland had an idea he might bide there. He would call the bumbler when Mrs. Tassenbaum returned, but knew Oy might not come; if he didn’t, it meant that Oy had decided to join his friend in the clearing. The bumbler would simply stand watch by Jake’s grave until starvation (or some predator) took him. The idea deepened Roland’s sorrow, but he would bide by Oy’s decision.
Ten minutes later the bumbler came out of the woods on his own and sat down by Roland’s left boot. “Good boy,” Roland said, and stroked the bumbler’s head. Oy had decided to live. It was a small thing, but it was a good thing.
