by Stephen King
Hulks, the gunslinger thought. Only meaningless hulks poking from sands that once were seas.
And now a railroad.
“We’ll follow it,” he said.
The boy said nothing.
The gunslinger extinguished the light and they slept.
When Roland awoke, the boy was up before him, sitting on one of the rails and watching him sightlessly in the dark.
They followed the rails like blindmen, Roland leading, Jake following. They slipped their feet along one rail always, also like blindmen. The steady rush of the river off to the right was their companion. They did not speak, and this went on for three periods of waking. The gunslinger felt no urge to think coherently, or to plan. His sleep was dreamless.
During the fourth period of waking and walking, they literally stumbled on a handcar.
The gunslinger ran into it chest-high, and the boy, walking on the other side, struck his forehead and went down with a cry.
The gunslinger made a light immediately. “Are you all right?” The words sounded sharp, angry, and he winced at them.
“Yes.” The boy was holding his head gingerly. He shook it once to make sure he had told the truth. They turned to look at what they had run into.
It was a flat square plate of metal that sat mutely on the tracks. There was a seesaw handle in the center of the square. It descended into a connection of cogs. The gunslinger had no immediate sense of the thing’s purpose, but the boy grasped it at once.
“It’s a handcar.”
“What?”
“Handcar,” the boy said impatiently, “like in the old cartoons. Look.”
He pulled himself up and went to the handle. He managed to push it down, but it took all his weight hung over the handle to turn the trick. The handcar moved a foot, with silent timelessness, on the rails.
“Good!” said a faint mechanical voice. It made them both jump. “Good, push ag . . .” The mechanical voice died out.
“It works a little hard,” the boy said, as if apologizing for the thing.
The gunslinger pulled himself up beside Jake and shoved the handle down. The handcar moved forward obediently, then stopped. “Good, push again!” the mechanical voice encouraged.
He had felt a driveshaft turn beneath his feet. The operation pleased him, and so did the mechanical voice (although he intended to listen to that no longer than necessary). Other than the pump at the way station, this was the first machine he’d seen in years that still worked well. But the thing disquieted him, too. It would take them to their destination that much the quicker. He had no doubt whatever that the man in black had meant for them to find this, too.
“Neat, huh?” the boy said, and his voice was full of loathing. The silence was deep. Roland could hear his organs at work inside his body, and the drip of water, and nothing else.
“You stand on one side, I stand on the other,” Jake said. “You’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good. Then I can help. First you push, then I push. We’ll go right along. Get it?”
“I get it,” the gunslinger said. His hands were in helpless, despairing fists.
“But you’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good,” the boy repeated, looking at him.
The gunslinger had a sudden vivid picture of the Great Hall a year or so after the Sowing Night Cotillion. By then it had been nothing but shattered shards in the wake of revolt, civil strife, and invasion. This image was followed by one of Allie, the scarred woman from Tull, pushed and pulled by bullets that were killing her for no reason at all . . . unless reflex was a reason. Next came Cuthbert Allgood’s face, laughing as he went downhill to his death, still blowing that gods-damned horn . . . and then he saw Susan’s face, twisted, made ugly with weeping. All my old friends, the gunslinger thought, and smiled hideously.
“I’ll push,” the gunslinger said.
He began to push, and when the voice began to speak (“Good, push again! Good, push again!”) he sent his hand fumbling along the post upon which the seesaw handle had been balanced. At last he found what he was surely looking for: a button. He pushed it.
“Goodbye, pal!” the mechanical voice said cheerily, and was then blessedly silent for some hours.
III
They rolled on through the dark, faster now, no longer having to feel their way. The mechanical voice spoke up once, suggesting they eat Crisp-A-La, and again to say that nothing satisfied at the end of a hard day like Larchies. Following this second piece of advice, it spoke no more.
Once the awkwardness of a buried age had been run off the handcar, it went smoothly. The boy tried to do his share, and the gunslinger allowed him small shifts, but mostly he pumped by himself, in large and chest-stretching risings and fallings. The underground river was their companion, sometimes closer on their right, sometimes further away. Once it took on huge and thunderous hollowness, as if passing through some great cathedral narthex. Once the sound of it disappeared almost altogether.
The speed and the made wind against their faces seemed to take the place of sight and to drop them once again into a frame of time. The gunslinger estimated they were making anywhere from ten to fifteen miles an hour, always on a shallow, almost imperceptible uphill grade that wore him out deceptively. When they stopped he slept like the stone itself. Their food was almost gone again. Neither of them worried about it.
For the gunslinger, the tenseness of a coming climax was as imperceivable but as real (and accretive) as the fatigue of propelling the handcar. They were close to the end of the beginning . . . or at least he was. He felt like a performer placed on center stage minutes before the rise of the curtain; settled in position with his first line held securely in his mind, he heard the unseen audience rattling programs and settling in their seats. He lived with a tight, tidy ball of unholy anticipation in his belly and welcomed the exercise that let him sleep. And when he did sleep, it was like the dead.
The boy spoke less and less, but at their stopping place one sleep-period not long before they were attacked by the Slow Mutants, he asked the gunslinger almost shyly about his coming of age.
“For I would hear more of that,” he said.
The gunslinger had been leaning with his back against the handle, a cigarette from his dwindling supply of tobacco clamped in his lips. He’d been on the verge of his usual unthinking sleep when the boy asked his question.
“Why would thee sill to know that?” he asked, amused.
The boy’s voice was curiously stubborn, as if hiding embarrassment. “I just would.” And after a pause, he added: “I always wondered about growing up. I bet it’s mostly lies.”
“What you’d hear of wasn’t my growing-up,” the gunslinger said. “I suppose I did the first of that not long after what thee’d hear of—”
“When you fought your teacher,” Jake said remotely. “That’s what I want to hear.”
Roland nodded. Yes, of course, the day he had tried the line; that was a story any boy might want to hear, all right. “My real growing-up didn’t start until after my Da’ sent me away. I finished doing it at one place and another along the way.” He paused. “I saw a not-man hung once.”
“A not-man? I don’t understand.”
“You could feel him but couldn’t see him.”
Jake nodded, seeming to understand. “He was invisible.”
Roland raised his eyebrows. He had never heard the word before. “Do you say so?”
“Yes.”
“Then let it be so. In any case, there were folk who didn’t want me to do it—felt they’d be cursed if I did it, but the fellow had gotten a taste for rape. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes,” Jake said. “And I bet an invisible guy would be good at it, too. How did you catch him?”
“That’s a tale for another day.” Knowing there would be no other days. Both of them knowing there would be no others. “Two years after that, I left a girl in a place called King’s Town, although I didn’t want to—”
Roland felt his face flush with heat in the dark, but when he spoke his voice was even. “That was the last part, I guess. Of my growing-up, I mean. I never knew any of the parts when they happened. Only later did I know that.”
He realized with some unease that he was avoiding what the boy wanted to hear.
“I suppose the coming of age was part of it, at that,” he said, almost grudgingly. “It was formal. Almost stylized; like a dance.” He laughed unpleasantly.
The boy said nothing.
“It was necessary to prove one’s self in battle,” the gunslinger began.
IV
Summer, and hot.
Full Earth had come to the land like a vampire lover that year, killing the land and the crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city of Gilead white and sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them paled to insignificance before the heat that rested over this place of the center. Cattle lolled empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted lustlessly, unmindful of sows and sex and knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and conscription, as they always did; but there was an apathy beneath the empty passion-play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The thread that held the last jewel at the breast of the world was unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in the summer of the coming eclipse.
The boy idled along the upper corridor of this stone place which was home, sensing these things, not understanding. He was also dangerous and empty, waiting to be filled.
It was three years since the hanging of the cook who had always been able to find snacks for hungry boys; Roland had lengthened and filled out both at shoulder and hip. Now, dressed only in faded denim pants, fourteen years old, he had come to look like the man he would become: lean and lank and quick on his feet. He was still unbedded, but two of the younger slatterns of a West-Town merchant had cast eyes on him. He had felt a response and felt it more strongly now. Even in the coolness of the passage, he felt sweat on his body.
Ahead were his mother’s apartments and he approached them incuriously, meaning only to pass them and go upward to the roof, where a thin breeze and the pleasure of his hand awaited.
He had passed the door when a voice called him: “You. Boy.”
It was Marten, the counselor. He was dressed with a suspicious, upsetting casualness—black whipcord trousers almost as tight as leotards, and a white shirt open halfway down his hairless chest. His hair was tousled.
The boy looked at him silently.
“Come in, come in! Don’t stand in the hall! Your mother wants to speak to you.” He was smiling with his mouth, but the lines of his face held a deeper, more sardonic humor. Beneath that—and in his eyes—there was only coldness.
In truth, his mother did not seem to want to see him. She sat in the low-backed chair by the large window in the central parlor of her apartments, the one which overlooked the hot blank stone of the central courtyard. She was dressed in a loose, informal gown that kept slipping from one white shoulder and looked at the boy only once—a quick, glinting rueful smile, like autumn sun on a rill of water. During the interview which followed, she studied her hands rather than her son.
He saw her seldom now, and the phantom of cradle songs
(chussit, chissit, chassit)
had almost faded from his brain. But she was a beloved stranger. He felt an amorphous fear, and an inchoate hatred for Marten, his father’s closest advisor, was born.
“Are you well, Ro’?” she asked him softly. Marten stood beside her, a heavy, disturbing hand near the juncture of her white shoulder and white neck, smiling on them both. His brown eyes were dark to the point of blackness with smiling.
“Yes,” he said.
“Your studies go well? Vannay is pleased? And Cort?” Her mouth quirked at this second name, as if she had tasted something bitter.
“I’m trying,” he said. They both knew he was not flashingly intelligent like Cuthbert, or even quick like Jamie. He was a plodder and a bludgeoner. Even Alain was better at studies.
“And David?” She knew his affection for the hawk.
The boy looked up at Marten, still smiling paternally down on all this. “Past his prime.”
His mother seemed to wince; for a moment Marten’s face seemed to darken, his grip on her shoulder to tighten. Then she looked out into the hot whiteness of the day, and all was as it had been.
It’s a charade, he thought. A game. Who is playing with whom?
“You have a cut on your forehead,” Marten said, still smiling, and pointed a negligent finger at the mark of Cort’s latest
(thank you for this instructive day)
bashing. “Are you going to be a fighter like your father or are you just slow?”
This time she did wince.
“Both,” the boy said. He looked steadily at Marten and smiled painfully. Even in here, it was very hot.
Marten stopped smiling abruptly. “You can go to the roof now, boy. I believe you have business there.”
“My mother has not yet dismissed me, bondsman!”
Marten’s face twisted as if the boy had lashed him with a quirt. The boy heard his mother’s dreadful, woeful gasp. She spoke his name.
But the painful smile remained intact on the boy’s face and he stepped forward. “Will you give me a sign of fealty, bondsman? In the name of my father whom you serve?”
Marten stared at him, rankly unbelieving.
“Go,” Marten said gently. “Go and find your hand.”
Smiling rather horribly, the boy went.
As he closed the door and went back the way he came, he heard his mother wail. It was a banshee sound. And then, unbelievably, the sound of his father’s man striking her and telling her to shut her quack.
To shut her quack!
And then he heard Marten’s laugh.
The boy continued to smile as he went to his test.
V
Jamie had come from the shops, and when he saw the boy crossing the exercise yard, he ran to tell Roland the latest gossip of bloodshed and revolt to the west. But he fell aside, the words all unspoken. They had known each other since the time of infancy, and as boys they had dared each other, cuffed each other, and made a thousand explorations of the walls within which they had both been birthed.
The boy strode past him, staring without seeing, grinning his painful grin. He was walking toward Cort’s cottage, where the shades were drawn to ward off the savage afternoon heat. Cort napped in the afternoon so that he could enjoy to the fullest extent his evening tomcat forays into the mazed and filthy brothels of the lower town.
Jamie knew in a flash of intuition, knew what was to come, and in his fear and ecstasy he was torn between following Roland and going after the others.
Then his hypnotism was broken and he ran toward the main buildings, screaming, “Cuthbert! Alain! Thomas!” His screams sounded puny and thin in the heat. They had known, all of them, in that intuitive way boys have, that Roland would be the first of them to try the line. But this was too soon.
The hideous grin on Roland’s face galvanized him as no news of wars, revolts, and witchcrafts could have done.
This was more than words from a toothless mouth given over fly-specked heads of lettuce.
Roland walked to the cottage of his teacher and kicked the door open. It slammed backward, hit the plain rough plaster of the wall, and rebounded.
He had never been inside before. The entrance opened on an austere kitchen that was cool and brown. A table. Two straight chairs. Two cabinets. A faded linoleum floor, tracke
d in black paths from the cooler set in the floor to the counter where knives hung, and to the table.
Here was a public man’s privacy. The faded refuge of a violent midnight carouser who had loved the boys of three generations roughly, and made some of them into gunslingers.
“Cort!”
He kicked the table, sending it across the room and into the counter. Knives from the wall rack fell in twinkling jackstraws.
There was a thick stirring in the other room, a half-sleep clearing of the throat. The boy did not enter, knowing it was sham, knowing that Cort had awakened immediately in the cottage’s other room and stood with one glittering eye beside the door, waiting to break the intruder’s unwary neck.
“Cort, I want you, bondsman!”
Now he spoke the High Speech, and Cort swung the door open. He was dressed in thin underwear shorts, a squat man with bow legs, runneled with scars from top to toe, thick with twists of muscle. There was a round, bulging belly. The boy knew from experience that it was spring steel. The one good eye glared at him from the bashed and dented hairless head.
The boy saluted formally. “Teach me no more, bondsman. Today I teach you.”
“You are early, puler,” Cort said casually, but he also spoke the High Speech. “Two years early at the very best, I should judge. I will ask only once. Will you cry off?”
The boy only smiled his hideous, painful smile. For Cort, who had seen the smile on a score of bloodied, scarlet-skied fields of honor and dishonor, it was answer enough—perhaps the only answer he would have believed.
“It’s too bad,” the teacher said absently. “You have been a most promising pupil—the best in two dozen years, I should say. It will be sad to see you broken and set upon a blind path. But the world has moved on. Bad times are on horseback.”
The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile softened a little.
“Still, there is the line of blood,” Cort said, “revolt and witchcraft to the west or no. I am your bondsman, boy. I recognize your command and bow to it now—if never again—with all my heart.”
