by Stephen King
Detta would cackle as he tried to move her without upending her. “You havin a good time back dere, honeychile?” she asked each time the chair ran into one of these dry bogs.
When the gunslinger moved over to help, Eddie motioned him away. “You’ll get your chance,” he said. “We’ll switch off.” But I think my turns are going to be a hell of a lot longer than his, a voice in his head spoke up. The way he looks, he’s going to have his hands full just keeping himself moving before much longer, let alone moving the woman in this chair. No sir, Eddie, I’m afraid this Bud’s for you. It’s God’s revenge, you know it? All those years you spent as a junkie, and guess what? You’re finally the pusher!
He uttered a short out-of-breath laugh.
“What’s so funny, white boy?” Detta asked, and although Eddie thought she meant to sound sarcastic, it came out sounding just a tiny bit angry.
Ain’t supposed to be any laughs in this for me, he thought. None at all. Not as far as she’s concerned.
“You wouldn’t understand, babe. Just let it lie.”
“I be lettin you lie before this be all over,” she said. “Be lettin you and yo bad-ass buddy there lie in pieces all ovah dis beach. Sho. Meantime you better save yo breaf to do yo pushin with. You already sound like you gettin a little sho’t winded.”
“Well, you talk for both of us, then,” Eddie panted. “You never seem to run out of wind.”
“I goan break wind, graymeat! Goan break it ovah yo dead face!”
“Promises, promises.” Eddie shoved the chair out of the sand and onto relatively easier going—for awhile, at least. The sun was not yet fully up, but he had already worked up a sweat.
This is going to be an amusing and informative day, he thought. I can see that already.
Stopping.
That was the next thing.
They had struck a firm stretch of beach. Eddie pushed the chair along faster, thinking vaguely that if he could keep this bit of extra speed, he might be able to drive right through the next sandtrap he happened to strike on pure impetus.
All at once the chair stopped. Stopped dead. The crossbar on the back hit Eddie’s chest with a thump. He grunted. Roland looked around, but not even the gunslinger’s cat-quick reflexes could stop the Lady’s chair from going over exactly as it had threatened to do in each of the sandtraps. It went and Detta went with it, tied and helpless but cackling wildly. She still was when Roland and Eddie finally managed to right the chair again. Some of the ropes had drawn so tight they must be cutting cruelly into her flesh, cutting off the circulation to her extremities; her forehead was slashed and blood trickled into her eyebrows. She went on cackling just the same.
The men were both gasping, out of breath, by the time the chair was on its wheels again. The combined weight of it and the woman in it must have totaled two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it chair. It occurred to Eddie that if the gunslinger had snatched Detta from his own when, 1987, the chair might have weighed as much as sixty pounds less.
Detta giggled, snorted, blinked blood out of her eyes.
“Looky here, you boys done opsot me,” she said.
“Call your lawyer,” Eddie muttered. “Sue us.”
“An got yoselfs all tuckered out gittin me back on top agin. Must have taken you ten minutes, too.”
The gunslinger took a piece of his shirt—enough of it was gone now so the rest didn’t much matter—and reached forward with his left hand to mop the blood away from the cut on her forehead. She snapped at him, and from the savage click those teeth made when they came together, Eddie thought that, if Roland had been only one instant slower in drawing back, Detta Walker would have evened up the number of fingers on his hands for him again.
She cackled and stared at him with meanly merry eyes, but the gunslinger saw fear hidden far back in those eyes. She was afraid of him. Afraid because he was The Really Bad Man.
Why was he The Really Bad Man? Maybe because, on some deeper level, she sensed what he knew about her.
“Almos’ got you, graymeat,” she said. “Almos’ got you that time.” And cackled, witchlike.
“Hold her head,” the gunslinger said evenly. “She bites like a weasel.”
Eddie held it while the gunslinger carefully wiped the wound clean. It wasn’t wide and didn’t look deep, but the gunslinger took no chances; he walked slowly down to the water, soaked the piece of shirting in the salt water, and then came back.
She began to scream as he approached.
“Doan you be touchin me wid dat thing! Doan you be touchin me wid no water from where them poison things come from! Git it away! Git it away!”
“Hold her head,” Roland said in the same even voice. She was whipping it from side to side. “I don’t want to take any chances.”
Eddie held it . . . and squeezed it when she tried to shake free. She saw he meant business and immediately became still, showing no more fear of the damp rag. It had been only sham, after all.
She smiled at Roland as he bathed the cut, carefully washing out the last clinging particles of grit.
“In fact, you look mo than jest tuckered out,” Detta observed. “You look sick, graymeat. I don’t think you ready fo no long trip. I don’t think you ready fo nuthin like dat.”
Eddie examined the chair’s rudimentary controls. It had an emergency hand-brake which locked both wheels. Detta had worked her right hand over there, had waited patiently until she thought Eddie was going fast enough, and then she had yanked the brake, purposely spilling herself over. Why? To slow them down, that was all. There was no reason to do such a thing, but a woman like Detta, Eddie thought, needed no reasons. A woman like Detta was perfectly willing to do such things out of sheer meanness.
Roland loosened her bonds a bit so the blood could flow more freely, then tied her hand firmly away from the brake.
“That be all right, Mister Man,” Detta said, offering him a bright smile filled with too many teeth. “That be all right jest the same. There be other ways to slow you boys down. All sorts of ways.”
“Let’s go,” the gunslinger said tonelessly.
“You all right, man?” Eddie asked. The gunslinger looked very pale.
“Yes. Let’s go.”
They started up the beach again.
10
The gunslinger insisted on pushing for an hour, and Eddie gave way to him reluctantly. Roland got her through the first sandtrap, but Eddie had to pitch in and help get the wheelchair out of the second. The gunslinger was gasping for air, sweat standing out on his forehead in large beads.
Eddie let him go on a little further, and Roland was quite adept at weaving his way around the places where the sand was loose enough to bog the wheels, but the chair finally became mired again and Eddie could bear only a few moments of watching Roland struggle to push it free, gasping, chest heaving, while the witch (for so Eddie had come to think of her) howled with laughter and actually threw her body backwards in the chair to make the task that much more difficult—and then he shouldered the gunslinger aside and heaved the chair out of the sand with one angry lurching lunge. The chair tottered and now he saw/sensed her shifting forward as much as the ropes would allow, doing this with a weird prescience at the exactly proper moment, trying to topple herself again.
Roland threw his weight on the back of the chair next to Eddie’s and it settled back.
Detta looked around and gave them a wink of such obscene conspiracy that Eddie felt his arms crawl up in gooseflesh.
“You almost opsot me agin, boys,” she said. “You want to look out for me, now. I ain’t nuthin but a old crippled lady, so you want to have a care for me now.”
She laughed . . . laughed fit to split.
Although Eddie cared for the woman that was the other part of her—was near to loving her just on the basis of the brief time he had seen her and spoken with her—he felt his hands itch to close around her windpipe and choke that laugh, choke it until she could never laugh again.
She peered around again, saw what he was thinking as if it had been printed on him in red ink, and laughed all the harder. Her eyes dared him. Go on, graymeat. Go on. You want to do it? Go on and do it.
In other words, don’t just tip the chair; tip the woman, Eddie thought. Tip her over for good. That’s what she wants. For Detta, being killed by a white man may be the only real goal she has in life.
“Come on,” he said, and began pushing again. “We are gonna tour the seacoast, sweet thang, like it or not.”
“Fuck you,” she spat.
“Cram it, babe,” Eddie responded pleasantly.
The gunslinger walked beside him, head down.
11
They came to a considerable outcropping of rocks when the sun said it was about eleven and here they stopped for nearly an hour, taking the shade as the sun climbed toward the roofpeak of the day. Eddie and the gunslinger ate leftovers from the previous night’s kill. Eddie offered a portion to Detta, who again refused, telling him she knew what they wanted to do, and if they wanted to do it, they best to do it with their bare hands and stop trying to poison her. That, she said, was the coward’s way.
Eddie’s right, the gunslinger mused. This woman has made her own chain of memories. She knows everything that happened to her last night, even though she was really fast asleep.
She believed they had brought her pieces of meat which smelled of death and putrescence, had taunted her with it while they themselves ate salted beef and drank some sort of beer from flasks. She believed they had, every now and then, held pieces of their own untainted supper out to her, drawing it away at the last moment when she snatched at it with her teeth—and laughing while they did it, of course. In the world (or at least in the mind) of Detta Walker, Honk Mahfahs only did two things to brown women: raped them or laughed at them. Or both at the same time.
It was almost funny. Eddie Dean had last seen beef during his ride in the sky-carriage, and Roland had seen none since the last of his jerky was eaten, Gods alone knew how long ago. As far as beer . . . he cast his mind back.
Tull.
There had been beer in Tull. Beer and beef.
God, it would be good to have a beer. His throat ached and it would be so good to have a beer to cool that ache. Better even than the astin from Eddie’s world.
They drew off a distance from her.
“Ain’t I good nough cump’ny for white boys like you?” she cawed after them. “Or did you jes maybe want to have a pull on each other one’s little bitty white candle?”
She threw her head back and screamed laughter that frightened the gulls up, crying, from the rocks where they had been met in convention a quarter of a mile away.
The gunslinger sat with his hands dangling between his knees, thinking. Finally he raised his head and told Eddie, “I can only understand about one word in every ten she says.”
“I’m way ahead of you,” Eddie replied. “I’m getting at least two in every three. Doesn’t matter. Most of it comes back to honky mahfah.”
Roland nodded. “Do many of the dark-skinned people talk that way where you come from? Her other didn’t.”
Eddie shook his head and laughed. “No. And I’ll tell you something sort of funny—at least I think it’s sort of funny, but maybe that’s just because there isn’t all that much to laugh at out here. It’s not real. It’s not real and she doesn’t even know it.”
Roland looked at him and said nothing.
“Remember when you washed off her forehead, how she pretended she was scared of the water?”
“Yes.”
“You knew she was pretending?”
“Not at first, but quite soon.”
Eddie nodded. “That was an act, and she knew it was an act. But she’s a pretty good actress and she fooled both of us for a few seconds. The way she’s talking is an act, too. But it’s not as good. It’s so stupid, so goddam hokey!”
“You believe she pretends well only when she knows she’s doing it?”
“Yes. She sounds like a cross between the darkies in this book called Mandingo I read once and Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind. I know you don’t know those names, but what I mean is she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?”
“It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t have said it half so good.”
“Ain’t you boys done jerkin on dem candles a yours yet?” Detta’s voice was growing hoarse and cracked. “Or maybe it’s just you can’t fine em. Dat it?”
“Come on.” The gunslinger got slowly to his feet. He swayed for a moment, saw Eddie looking at him, and smiled. “I’ll be all right.”
“For how long?”
“As long as I have to be,” the gunslinger answered, and the serenity in his voice chilled Eddie’s heart.
12
That night the gunslinger used his last sure live cartridge to make their kill. He would start systematically testing the ones he believed to be duds tomorrow night, but he believed it was pretty much as Eddie had said: They were down to beating the damned things to death.
It was like the other nights: the fire, the cooking, the shelling, the eating—eating which was now slow and unenthusiastic. We’re just gassing up, Eddie thought. They offered food to Detta, who screamed and laughed and cursed and asked how long they was goan take her for a fool, and then she began throwing her body wildly from one side to the other, never minding how her bonds grew steadily tighter, only trying to upset the chair to one side or the other so they would have to pick her up again before they could eat.
Just before she could manage the trick, Eddie grabbed her and Roland braced the wheels on either sides with rocks.
“I’ll loosen the ropes a bit if you’ll be still,” Roland told her.
“Suck shit out my ass, mahfah!”
“I don’t understand if that means yes or no.”
She looked at him, eyes narrowed, suspecting some buried barb of satire in that calm voice (Eddie also wondered, but couldn’t tell if there was or not), and after a moment she said sulkily, “I be still. Too damn hungry to kick up much dickens. You boys goan give me some real food or you jes goan starve me to death? Dat yo plan? You too chickenshit to choke me and I ain’t nev’ goan eat no poison, so dat must be you plan. Starve me out. Well, we see, sho. We goan see. Sho we are.”
She offered them her bone-chilling sickle of a grin again.
Not long after she fell asleep.
Eddie touched the side of Roland’s face. Roland glanced at him but did not pull away from the touch.
“I’m all right.”
“Yeah, you’re Jim-dandy. Well, I tell you what, Jim, we didn’t get along very far today.”
“I know.” There was also the matter of having used the last live shell, but that was knowledge Eddie could do without, at least tonight. Eddie wasn’t sick, but he was exhausted. Too exhausted for more bad news.
No, he’s not sick, not yet, but if he goes too long without rest, gets tired enough, he’ll get sick.
In a way, Eddie already was; both of them were. Cold-sores had developed at the corners of Eddie’s mouth, and there were scaly patches on his skin. The gunslinger could feel his teeth loosening up in their sockets, and the flesh between his toes had begun to crack open and bleed, as had that between his remaining fingers. They were eating, but they were eating the same thing, day in and day out. They could go on that way for a time, but in the end they would die as surely as if they had starved.
What we have is Shipmate’s Disease on dry land, Roland thought. Simple as that. How funny. We need fruit. We need greens.
Eddie nodded toward the Lady. “She’s going to go right on making it tough.”
“Unless the other one inside her comes back.”
“That would be nice, but we can’t count on it,” Eddie said. He took a piece of blackened claw and began to scrawl aimless patterns in the dirt. “Any idea how far the next door might be?�
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Roland shook his head.
“I only ask because if the distance between Number Two and Number Three is the same as the distance between Number One and Number Two, we could be in deep shit.”
“We’re in deep shit right now.”
“Neck deep,” Eddie agreed moodily. “I just keep wondering how long I can tread water.”
Roland clapped him on the shoulder, a gesture of affection so rare it made Eddie blink.
“There’s one thing that Lady doesn’t know,” he said.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“We Honk Mahfahs can tread water a long time.”
Eddie laughed at that, laughed hard, smothering his laughter against his arm so he wouldn’t wake Detta up. He’d had enough of her for one day, please and thank you.
The gunslinger looked at him, smiling. “I’m going to turn in,” he said. “Be—”
“—on my guard. Yeah. I will.”
13
Screaming was next.
Eddie fell asleep the moment his head touched the bunched bundle of his shirt, and it seemed only five minutes later when Detta began screaming.
He was awake at once, ready for anything, some King Lobster arisen from the deep to take revenge for its slain children or a horror down from the hills. It seemed he was awake at once, anyway, but the gunslinger was already on his feet, a gun in his left hand.
When she saw they were both awake, Detta promptly quit screaming.
