by Stephen King
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Alain looked at him with sleepwalker’s eyes. They began to clear, but slowly. “I don’t… know, Roland.”
Below them, the thinny hummed and growled and sang. There was a sound, as well: an oozing, sludgy mutter.
“I know,” Cuthbert said. “I know where we’re all going. Back to the Bar K. Come on, let’s get out of here.” He looked pleadingly at Roland. “Please. It’s awful.”
“All right.”
But before he led them back to the path, he stepped to the edge and looked down at the smoky silver ooze below him. “Counting,” he said with a kind of clear defiance. “Counting one thinny.” Then, lowering his voice: “And be damned to you.”
3
Their composure returned as they rode back-the sea-breeze in their faces was wonderfully restorative after the dead and somehow baked smell of the canyon and the thinny.
As they rode up the Drop (on a long diagonal, so as to save the horses a little), Alain said: “What do we do next, Roland? Do you know?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t.”
“Supper would be a start,” Cuthbert said brightly, and tapped the lookout’s hollow skull for emphasis.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” Cuthbert agreed. “And I’ll tell you something, Roland-”
“Will, please. Now that we’re back on the Drop, let me be Will.”
“Aye, fine. I’ll tell you something, Will: we can’t go on counting nets and boats and looms and wheel-irons much longer. We’re running out of things that don’t matter. I believe that looking stupid will become a good deal harder once we move to the horse-breeding side of life as it’s lived in Hambry.”
“Aye,” Roland said. He stopped Rusher and looked back the way they had come. He was momentarily enchanted by the sight of horses, apparently infected with a kind of moon-madness, frolicking and racing across the silvery grass. “But I tell you both again, this is not just about horses. Does Farson need them? Aye, mayhap. So does the Affiliation. Oxen as well. But there are horses everywhere-perhaps not as good as these, I’ll admit, but any port does in a storm, so they say. So, if it’s not horses, what is it? Until we know, or decide we’ll never know, we go on as we are.”
Part of the answer was waiting for them back at the Bar K. It was perched on the hitching rail and flicking its tail saucily. When the pigeon hopped into Roland’s hand, he saw that one of its wings was oddly frayed. Some animal-likely a cat-had crept up on it close enough to pounce, he reckoned.
The note curled against the pigeon’s leg was short, but it explained a good deal of what they hadn’t understood.
I’ll have to see her again, Roland thought after reading it, and felt a surge of gladness. His pulse quickened, and in the cold silver light of the Peddler’s Moon, he smiled.
Chapter IX
CITGO
1
The Peddler’s Moon began to wane; it would take the hottest, fairest part of the summer with it when it went. On an afternoon four days past the full, the old mozo from Mayor’s House (Miguel had been there long before Hart Thorin’s time and would likely be there long after Thorin had gone back to his ranch) showed up at the house Susan shared with her aunt. He was leading a beautiful chestnut mare by a hack'. It was the second of the three promised horses, and Susan recognized Felicia at once. The mare had been one other childhood’s favorites.
Susan embraced Miguel and covered his bearded cheeks with kisses. The old man’s wide grin would have showed every tooth in his head, if he’d had any left to show. “Gracias, gracias, a thousand thanks, old father,” she told him.
“Da nada,” he replied, and handed her the bridle. “It is the Mayor’s earnest gift.”
She watched him away, the smile slowly fading from her lips. Felicia stood docilely beside her, her dark brown coat shining like a dream in the summer sunlight. But this was no dream. It had seemed like one at first- that sense of unreality had been another inducement to walk into the trap, she now understood-but it was no dream. She had been proved honest; now she found herself the recipient of “earnest gifts” from a rich man. The phrase was a sop to conventionality, of course… or a bitter joke, depending on one’s mood and outlook. Felicia was no more a gift than Pylon had been-they were step-by-step fulfillments of the contract into which she had entered. Aunt Cord could express shock, but Susan knew the truth: what lay directly ahead was whoring, pure and simple.
Aunt Cord was in the kitchen window as Susan walked her gift (which was really just returned property, in her view) to the stable. She called out something passing cheery about how the horse was a good thing, that caring for it would give Susan less time for her megrims. Susan felt a hot reply rise to her lips and held it back. There had been a wary truce between the two of them since the shouting match about the shirts, and Susan didn’t want to be the one to break it. There was too much on her mind and heart. She thought that one more argument with her aunt and she might simply snap like a dry twig under a boot. Because often silence is best, her father had told her when, at age ten or so, she had asked him why he was always so quiet. The answer had puzzled her then, but now she understood better.
She stabled Felicia next to Pylon, rubbed her down, fed her. While the mare munched oats, Susan examined her hooves. She didn’t care much for the look of the iron the mare was wearing-that was Seafront for you-and so she took her father’s shoebag from its nail beside the stable door, slung the strap over her head and shoulder so the bag hung on her hip, and walked the two miles to Hockey’s Stable and Fancy Livery. Feeling the leather bag bang against her hip brought back her father in a way so fresh and clear that grief pricked her again and made her feel like crying. She thought he would have been appalled at her current situation, perhaps even disgusted. And he would have liked Will Dearborn, of that she was sure-liked him and approved of him for her. It was the final miserable touch.
2
She had known how to shoe most of her life, and even enjoyed it, when her mood was right; it was dusty, elemental work, with always the possibility of a healthy kick in the slats to relieve the boredom and bring a girl back to reality. But of making shoes she knew nothing, nor wished to. Brian Hookey made them at the forge behind his barn and hostelry, however; Susan easily picked out four new ones of the right size, enjoying the smell of horseflesh and fresh hay as she did. Fresh paint, too. Hockey’s Stable amp; Smithy looked very well, indeed. Glancing up, she saw not so much as a single hole in the barn roof. Times had been good for Hookey, it seemed.
He wrote the new shoes up on a beam, still wearing his blacksmith’s apron and squinting horribly out of one eye at his own figures. When Susan began to speak haltingly to him about payment, he laughed, told her he knew she’d settle her accounts as soon as she could, gods bless her, yes. ’sides, they weren’t any of them going anywhere, were they? Nawp, nawp. All the time gently propelling her through the fragrant smells of hay and horses toward the door. He would not have treated even so small a matter as four iron shoes in such a carefree manner a year ago, but now she was Mayor Thorin’s good friend, and things had changed.
The afternoon sunlight was dazzling after the dimness of Hockey’s barn, and she was momentarily blinded, groping forward toward the street with the leather bag bouncing on her hip and the shoes clashing softly inside. She had just a moment to register a shape looming in the brightness, and then it thumped into her hard enough to rattle her teeth and make Felicia’s new shoes clang. She would have fallen, but for strong hands that quickly reached out and grasped her shoulders. By then her eyes were adjusting and she saw with dismay and amusement that the young man who had almost knocked her sprawling into the dirt was one of Will’s friends- Richard Stockworth.
“Oh, sai, your pardon!” he said, brushing the arms of her dress as if he had knocked her over. “Are you well? Are you quite well?”
“Quite well,” she said, smiling. “Please don’t apologize.” She fe
lt a sudden wild impulse to stand on tiptoe and kiss his mouth and say, Give that to Will and tell him to never mind what I said! Tell him there are a thousand more where that came from! Tell him to come and get every one!
Instead, she fixed on a comic image: this Richard Stockworth smacking Will full on the mouth and saying it was from Susan Delgado. She began to giggle. She put her hands to her mouth, but it did no good. Sai Stockworth smiled back at her… tentatively, cautiously. He probably thinks I’m mad… and I am! I am!
“Good day, Mr. Stockworth,” she said, and passed on before she could embarrass herself further.
“Good day, Susan Delgado,” he called in return.
She looked back once, when she was fifty yards or so farther up the street, but he was already gone. Not into Hockey’s, though; of that she was quite sure. She wondered what Mr. Stockworth had been doing at that end of town to begin with.
Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da’s shoebag, she found out. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even before she unfolded it, she understood that her collision with Mr. Stockworth hadn’t been an accident.
She recognized Will’s handwriting at once from the note in the bouquet.
Susan,
Can you meet me at Citgo this evening or tomorrow evening? Very important. Has to do with what we discussed before. Please.
W.
P.S. Best you bum this note.
She burned it at once, and as she watched the flames first flash up and then die down, she murmured over and over the one word in it which had struck her the hardest: Please.
3
She and Aunt Cord ate a simple, silent evening meal-bread and soup- and when it was done, Susan rode Felicia out to the Drop and watched the sun go down. She would not be meeting him this evening, no. She already owed too much sorrow to impulsive, unthinking behavior. But tomorrow?
Why Citgo?
Has to do with what we discussed before.
Yes, probably. She did not doubt his honor, although she had much come to wonder if he and his friends were who they said they were. He probably did want to see her for some reason which bore on his mission (although how the oilpatch could have anything to do with too many horses on the Drop she did not know), but there was something between them now, something sweet and dangerous. They might start off talking but would likely end up kissing… and kissing would just be the start. Knowing didn’t change feeling, though; she wanted to see him. Needed to see him.
So she sat astride her new horse-another of Hart Thorin’s payments-in-advance on her virginity-and watched the sun swell and turn red in the west. She listened to the faint grumble of the thinny, and for the first time in her sixteen years was truly torn by indecision. All she wanted stood against all she believed of honor, and her mind roared with conflict. Around all, like a rising wind around an unstable house, she felt the idea of ka growing. Yet to give over one’s honor for that reason was so easy, wasn’t it? To excuse the fall of virtue by invoking all-powerful ka. It was soft thinking.
Susan felt as blind as she’d been when leaving the darkness of Brian Hockey’s bam for the brightness of the street. At one point she cried silently in frustration without even being aware of it, and pervading her every effort to think clearly and rationally was her desire to kiss him again, and to feel his hand cupping her breast.
She had never been a religious girl, had little faith in the dim gods of Mid-World, so at the last of it, with the sun gone and the sky above its point of exit going from red to purple, she tried to pray to her father. And an answer came, although whether from him or from her own heart she didn’t know.
Let ka mind itself, the voice in her mind said. It will, anyway; it always does. If ka. should overrule your honor, so it will be; in the meantime, Susan, there’s no one to mind it but yourself. Let ka go and mind the virtue of your promise, hard as that may be.
“All right,” she said. In her current state she discovered that any decision-even one that would cost her another chance to see Will-was a relief. “I’ll honor my promise. Ka can take care of itself.”
In the gathering shadows, she clucked sidemouth to Felicia and turned for home.
4
The next day was Sanday, the traditional cowboys’ day of rest. Roland’s little band took this day off as well. “It’s fair enough that we should,” Cuthbert said, “since we don’t know what the hell we’re doing in the first place.”
On this particular Sanday-their sixth since coming to Hambry- Cuthbert was in the upper market (lower market was cheaper, by and large, but too fishy-smelling for his liking), looking at brightly colored scrapes and trying not to cry. For his mother had a serape, it was a great favorite others, and thinking of how she would ride out sometimes with it flowing back from her shoulders had filled him with homesickness so strong it was savage. “Arthur Heath,” Roland’s ka-mai, missing his mama so badly his eyes were wet! It was a joke worthy of… well, worthy of Cuthbert Allgood.
As he stood so, looking at the serapes and a hanging rack of dolina blankets with his hands clasped behind his back like a patron in an art gallery (and blinking back tears all the while), there came a light tap on his shoulder. He turned, and there was the girl with the blonde hair.
Cuthbert wasn’t surprised that Roland was smitten with her. She was nothing short of breathtaking, even dressed in jeans and a farmshirt. Her hair was tied back with a series of rough rawhide hanks, and she had eyes of the brightest gray Cuthbert had ever seen. Cuthbert thought it was a wonder that Roland had been able to continue with any other aspect of his life at all, even down to the washing of his teeth. Certainly she came with a cure for Cuthbert; sentimental thoughts of his mother disappeared in an instant.
“Sai,” he said. It was all he could manage, at least to start with.
She nodded and held out what the folk of Mejis called a corvette- “little packet” was the literal definition; “little purse” was the practical one. These small leather accessories, big enough for a few coins but not much more, were more often carried by ladies than gentlemen, although that was not a hard-and-fast rule of fashion.
“Ye dropped this, cully,” she said.
“Nay, thankee-sai.” This one well might have been the property of a man-plain black leather, and unadorned by foofraws-but he had never seen it before. Never carried a corvette, for that matter.
“It’s yours,” she said, and her eyes were now so intense that her gaze felt hot on his skin. He should have understood at once, but he had been blinded by her unexpected appearance. Also, he admitted, by her cleverness. You somehow didn’t expect cleverness from a girl this beautiful; beautiful girls did not, as a rule, have to be clever. So far as Bert could tell, all beautiful girls had to do was wake up in the morning. “It is.”
“Oh, aye,” he said, almost snatching the little purse from her. He could feel a foolish grin overspreading his face. “Now that you mention it, sai-”
“Susan.” Her eyes were grave and watchful above her smile. “Let me be Susan to you, I pray.”
“With pleasure. I cry your pardon, Susan, it’s just that my mind and memory, realizing it’s Sanday, have joined hands and gone off on holiday together-eloped, you might say-and left me temporarily without a brain in my head.”
He might well have rattled on like that for another hour (he had before; to that both Roland and Alain could testify), but she stopped him with the easy briskness of an older sister. “I can easily believe ye have no control over yer mind, Mr. Heath-or the tongue hung below it- but perhaps ye’ll take better care of yer purse in the future. Good day.” She was gone before he could get another word out.
5
Bert found Roland where he so often was these days: out on the part of the Drop that was called Town Lookout by many of the locals. It gave a fair view of Hambry, dreaming away its Sanday afternoon in a blue haze, but Cuthbert rather doubted the Hambry view was what drew his oldest friend back here time after time
. He thought that its view of the Delgado house was the more likely reason.
This day Roland was with Alain, neither of them saying a word. Cuthbert had no trouble accepting the idea that some people could go long periods of time without talking to each other, but he did not think he would ever understand it.
He came riding up to them at a gallop, reached inside his shirt, and pulled out the corvette. “From Susan Delgado. She gave it to me in the upper market. She’s beautiful, and she’s also as wily as a snake. I say that with utmost admiration.”
Roland’s face filled with light and life. When Cuthbert tossed him the corvette, he caught it one-handed and pulled the lace-tie with his teeth. Inside, where a travelling man would have kept his few scraps of money, there was a single folded piece of paper. Roland read this quickly, the light going out of his eyes, the smile fading off his mouth.
“What does it say?” Alain asked.
Roland handed it to him and then went back to looking out at the Drop. It wasn’t until he saw the very real desolation in his friend’s eyes that Cuthbert fully realized how far into Roland’s life-and hence into all their lives-Susan Delgado had come.
Alain handed him the note. It was only a single line, two sentences:
It’s best we don’t meet. I’m sorry.
Cuthbert read it twice, as if rereading might change it, then handed it back to Roland. Roland put the note back into the corvette, tied the lace, and then tucked the little purse into his own shirt.
Cuthbert hated silence worse than danger (it was danger, to his mind), but every conversational opening he tried in his mind seemed callow and unfeeling, given the look on his friend’s face. It was as if Roland had been poisoned. Cuthbert was disgusted at the thought of that lovely young girl bumping hips with the long and bony Mayor of Hambry, but the look on Roland’s face now called up stronger emotions. For that he could hate her.
