Calla Bryn Sturgis
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 23 Feb 2005 00:10:42 -0800
--------
1
Tian was blessed (although few farmers would use such a word) with
three patches: River Field, where his family had grown rice since time
out of mind; Roadside Field, where ka-Jaffords had grown sharproot,
pumpkin, and corn for those same long years and generations; and Son of
a Bitch, a thankless tract which mostly grew rocks and blisters and
busted hopes. Tian wasn't the first Jaffords determined to make
something of the twenty acres behind the home place; his gran-pere,
pefectly sane in all other respects, had been convinced there was gold
there. Tian's mother had been equally positive it would grow porin, a
spice of great worth. Tian's insanity was madrigal. Of course
madrigal would grow in Son of a Bitch. Must grow there. He had gotten
hold of a thousand seeds (and a dear penny they had cost him) which
were now hidden beneath the floorboards of his bedroom. All that
remained before planting next year was to break ground in Son of a
Bitch. This was a chore easier spoken of than accomplished.
Tian was blessed with livestock, including three mules, but a man would
be mad to try using a mule out in Son of a Bitch; the beast unlucky
enough to draw such duty would likely be lying legbroke or stung to
death by noon of the first day. One of Tian's uncles had almost met
this latter fate some years before. He had come running back to the
home place, screaming at the top of his lungs and pursued by huge mutie
wasps with stingers the size of nails.
They had found the nest (well, Andy had found it; Andy wasn't
bothered by wasps no matter how big they were) and burned it with
kerosene, but there might be others. Then there were the holes. You
couldn't burn holes, could you? No. And Son of a Bitch sat on what
the old folks called "loose ground." It was consequently possessed of
almost as many holes as rocks, not to mention at least one cave that
puffed out draughts of nasty, decay-smelling air. Who knew what
boggarts might lurk down its dark throat?
As for the holes, the worst of them weren't out where a man (or a
mule) could see them. Not at all, sir. Never think so, thankee-sai. The
leg-breakers were always concealed in innocent-seeming nestles of weeds
and high grass. Your mule would step in, there would come a bitter
crack like a snapping branch, and then the damned thing would be lying
there on the ground, teeth bared, eyes rolling, braying its agony at
the sky. Until you put it out of its misery, that was, and stock was
valuable in Calla Bryn Sturgis, even stock that wasn't precisely
threaded.
Tian therefore plowed with his sister in the traces. No reason not to.
Tia was roont, hence good for little else. She was a big girl--the
roont ones often grew to prodigious size--and she was willing, Man
Jesus love her. The Old Fella had made her a Jesus-tree, what he called
a crucifix, and she wore it everywhere. It swung back and forth now,
thumping against her sweating skin as she pulled.
The plow was attached to her shoulders by a rawhide harness. Behind
her, alternately guiding the plow by its old ironwood handles and his
sister by the hame-traces, Tian grunted and yanked and pushed when the
blade of the plow dropped down and verged on becoming stuck. It was the
end of Full Earth but as hot as midsummer here in Son of a Bitch;
Tia's overalls were dark and damp and stuck to her long and meaty
thighs. Each time Tian tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes,
sweat flew out of the mop in a spray.
"Gee, ye bitch!" he cried. "Yon rock's a plow-breaker, are ye blind?"
Not blind; not deaf, either; just stupid. Roont. She heaved to the
left, and hard. Behind her, Tian stumbled forward with a neck-snapping
jerk and barked his shin on another rock, one he hadn't seen and the
plow had, for a wonder, missed. As he felt the first warm trickles of
blood running down to his ankle, he wondered (and not for the first
time) what madness it was that always got the Jaffordses out here. In
his deepest heart he had an idea that madrigal would sow no more than
the porin had before it, although you could grow devil-grass; yep, he
could have bloomed all twenty acres with that shit, had he wanted. The
trick was to keep it out, and it was always New Earth's first chore.
It--
The plow rocked to the right and then jerked forward, almost pulling
his arms out of their sockets. "Arr!" he cried. "Go easy, girl! I
can't grow em back if you pull em out, can I?"
Tia turned her broad, sweaty, empty face up to a sky full of
low-hanging clouds and honked laughter. Man Jesus, but she even sounded
like a donkey. Yet it was laughter, human laughter. Tian wondered, as
he sometimes couldn't help doing, if that laughter meant anything.
Did she understand some of what he was saying, or did she only respond
to his tone of voice? Did any of the roont ones--
"Good day, sai," said a loud and almost completely toneless voice from
behind him. The owner of the voice ignored Tian's scream of surprise.
"Pleasant days, and may they be long upon the earth. I am here from a
goodish wander and at your service."
Tian whirled around, saw Andy standing there--all twelve feet of
him--and was then almost jerked flat as his sister took another of her
lurching steps forward. The plow's hame-traces were pulled from his
hands and flew around his throat with an audible snap. Tia, unaware of
this potential disaster, took another sturdy step forward. When she
did, Tian's wind was cut off. He gave a whooping, gagging gasp and
clawed at the straps. All of this Andy watched with his usual large and
meaningless smile.
Tia jerked forward again and Tian was pulled off his feet. He landed on
a rock that dug savagely into the cleft of his buttocks, but at least
he could breathe again. For the moment, anyway. Damned unlucky field!
Always had been! Always would be!
Tian snatched hold of the leather strap before it could pull tight
around his throat again and yelled, "Hold, ye bitch! Whoa up if you
don't want me to twist yer great and useless tits right off the front
of yer!"
Tia halted agreeably enough and looked back to see what was what. Her
smile broadened. She lifted one heavily muscled arm--it glowed with
sweat--and pointed. "Andy!" she said. "Andy's come!"
"I ain't blind," Tian said and got to his feet, rubbing his bottom.
Was that part of him also bleeding? He had an idea it was.
"Good day, sai," Andy said to her, and tapped his metal throat three
times with his three metal fingers. "Long days and pleasant nights."
Although Tia had surely heard the standard response to this--And may
you have twice the number--a thousand times or more, all she could do
was once more raise her broad idiot's face to the sky and utter her
donkey laugh. Tian felt a surprising moment of pain, not in his arms or
throat or outraged ass but in his heart. He vaguely remembered her as a
little girl: as pretty and quick as a dragonfly, as smart as ever you
could wish. Then--
But before he could finish the thought, a premonition came. Except that
was too fine a word for it. In fact, it was time. Overtime. Yet he felt
a sinking in his heart. The news would come while I'm out here, too,
he thought. Out in this godforsaken patch where nothing is well and all
luck is bad.
"Andy," he said.
"Yes!" Andy said, smiling. "Andy, your friend! Back from a goodish
wander and at your service. Would you like your horoscope, sai Tian? It
is Full Earth. The moon is red, what is called the Huntress Moon in
Mid-World that was. A friend will call! Business affairs prosper! You
will have two ideas, one good and one bad--"
"The bad one was coming out here to turn this field," Tian said. "Never
mind my goddam horoscope, Andy. Why are you here?"
Andy's smile probably could not become troubled--he was a robot,
after all, the last one in Calla Bryn Sturgis or for miles and wheels
around--but to Tian it seemed to grow troubled, just the same. The
robot looked like a young child's stick-figure of an adult,
impossibly tall and impossibly thin. His legs and arms were silvery.
His head was a stainless steel barrel with electric eyes. His body, no
more than a cylinder seven feet high, was gold. Stamped in the
middle--what would have been a man's chest--was this legend:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH LaMERK INDUSTRIES
PRESENTS
ANDY
Design: MESSENGER (Many Other Functions)
Serial # DNF 34821 V 63
Why or how this silly thing had survived when all the rest of the
robots were gone--gone for generations--Tian neither knew nor cared.
You were apt to see him anywhere in the Calla (he would not venture
beyond its borders) striding on his impossibly long silver legs,
looking everywhere, occasionally clicking to himself as he stored (or
perhaps purged--who knew?) information. He sang songs, passed on gossip
and rumor from one end of town to the other--a tireless walker was Andy
the robot--and seemed to enjoy the giving of horoscopes above all
things, although there was general agreement in the village that they
meant little.
He had one other function, however, and that meant much.
"Why are ye here, ye bag of bolts and beams? Answer me! Is it the
Wolves? Are they coming from Thunderclap?"
Tian stood there looking up into Andy's stupid smiling metal face,
the sweat growing cold on his skin, praying with all his might that the
foolish thing would say no, then offer to tell his horoscope again, or
perhaps to sing "The Green Corn A-Dayo," all twenty or thirty verses.
But all Andy said, still smiling, was: "Yes, sai."
"Christ and the Man Jesus," Tian said (he'd gotten an idea from the
Old Fella that those were two names for the same thing, but had never
bothered pursuing the question). "How long?"
"One moon of days before they arrive," Andy replied, still smiling.
"From full to full?"
"Yes, sai."
Thirty days, then. Thirty days to the Wolves. And there was no sense
hoping Andy was wrong. No one kenned how the robot could know they were
coming out of Thunderclap so far in advance of their arrival, but he
did know. And he was never wrong.
"Fuck you for your bad news!" Tian cried, and was furious at the waver
he heard in his own voice. "What use are you?"
"I'm sorry that the news is bad," Andy said. His guts clicked
audibly, his eyes flashed a brighter blue, and he took a step backward.
"Would you not like me to tell your horoscope? This is the end of Wide
Earth, a time particularly propitious for finishing old business and
meeting new people--"
"And fuck your false prophecy, too!!" Tian bent, picked up a clod of
earth, and threw it at the robot. A pebble buried in the clod clanged
off Andy's metal hide. Tia gasped, then began to cry. Andy backed off
another step, his shadow trailing out spider-long in Son of a Bitch
field. But his hateful, stupid smile remained.
"What about a song? I have learned an amusing one from the Manni far
north of town; it is called 'In Time of Loss, Make God Your Boss.'
" From somewhere deep in Andy's guts came the wavering honk of a
pitch-pipe, followed by a ripple of piano keys. "It goes--"
Sweat rolling down his cheeks and sticking his itchy balls to his
thighs. Tia blatting her stupid face at the sky. And this idiotic,
bad-news-bearing robot getting ready to sing him some sort of Manni
hymn.
"Be quiet, Andy." He spoke reasonably enough, but through clamped
teeth.
"Sai," the robot agreed, then fell mercifully silent.
Tian went to his bawling sister, put his arm around her, smelled the
large (but not entirely unpleasant) work-smell of her. He sighed, then
began to stroke her trembling arm.
"Quit it, ye great bawling cunt," he said. The words might have been
ugly but the tone was kind in the extreme, and it was tone she
responded to. She began to quiet. Her brother stood with the flare of
her hip pushing into him just below his ribcage (she was a full foot
taller), and any passing stranger would likely have stopped to look at
them, amazed by the similarity of face and the great dissimilarity of
size. The resemblance, at least, was honestly come by: they were twins.
He soothed his sister with a mixture of endearments and profanities--in
the years since she had come back roont from the west, the two modes of
expression were much the same to Tian Jaffords--and at last she ceased
her weeping. And when a rustie flew across the sky, doing loops and
giving out the usual series of ugly blats, she pointed and laughed.
A feeling was rising in Tian, one so foreign to his nature that he
didn't even recognize it. "Ain't right," he said. "Nossir. By the
Man Jesus and all the gods that be, it ain't." He looked to the west,
where the hills rolled away into a rising membranous darkness that
might have been clouds but wasn't. It was the borderland between
Mid-World and End-World. The edge of Thunderclap.
"Ain't right what they do to us."
"Sure you wouldn't like to hear your horoscope, sai? I see many
bright coins and a beautiful dark lady."
"The dark ladies will have to do without me," Tian said, and began
pulling the harness off his sister's broad shoulders. "I'm married,
as I'm sure ye very well know."
"Many a married man has had his jilly," Andy observed. To Tian he
sounded almost smug.
"Not those who love their wives." Tian shouldered the harness (he'd
made it himself, there being a marked shortage of tack for human beings
in most livery barns) and turned toward the home place. "And not
farmers, in any case. Show me a farmer who can afford a jilly and
I'll kiss your shiny ass. Go on, Tia."
"Home place?" she asked.
"That's right."
"Lunch at home place?" She looked at him in a muddled, hopeful way.
"Taters?" A pause. "Gravy?"
"Shore," Tian said. "Why the hell not?"
Tia let out a whoop and began running toward the house. There was
something almost awe-inspiring about her when she ran. As their father
had once observed, not long before the brain-storm that carried him
off, "Bright or dim, that's a lot of meat in motion."
Tian walked slowly after her, head down, watching for the holes which
his sister seemed to avoid without even looking, as if some strange
deep part of her had mapped the location of each one. That strange new
feeling kept growing and growing. He knew about anger--any farmer
who'd ever lost cows to the milk-sick or watched a summer hailstorm
beat his corn flat knew plenty about anger--but this was deeper. This
was rage, and it was a new thing. He walked slowly, head down, fists
clenched. He wasn't aware of Andy following along behind him until
the robot said, "There's other news, sai. Northwest of town, along
the path of the Beam, strangers from Out-World--"
"Bugger the Beam, bugger the strangers, and bugger your good self,"
Tian said. "Let me be, Andy."
Andy stood where he was for a moment, surrounded by the rocks and weeds
and useless knobs of Son of a Bitch, that thankless tract of Jaffrey
land. Relays inside him clicked. His eyes flashed. And he decided to go
and talk to the Old Fella. The Old Fella never told him to bugger his
good self. The Old Fella was always willing to hear his horoscope.
And he was always interested in strangers.
Andy started toward town and Our Lady of Serenity.
2
Zalia Jaffords didn't see her husband and sister-in-law come back
from Son of a Bitch; didn't hear Tia plunging her head repeatedly
into the rain-barrel outside the barn and then blowing moisture off her
lips like a horse. Zalia was on the south side of the house, hanging
out wash and keeping an eye on the children. She wasn't aware that
Tian was back until she saw him looking out the kitchen window at her.
She was surprised to see him there at all and much more than surprised
at the look of him. His face was ashy pale except for two bright blots
of color high up on his cheeks and a third glaring in the center of his
forehead like a brand.
She dropped the few pins she was still holding back into her clothes
basket and started for the house.
"Where goin, Ma?" Heddon called, and "Where goin, Maw-Maw?" Hedda
echoed.
"Never mind," she said. "Just keep a eye on your ka-babbies."
"Why-yyy?" Hedda whined. She had that whine down to a science. One of
these days she would draw it out a little too long and her mother would
clout her over the hills and far away.
"Because ye're the oldest," she said.
"But--"
"Shut your mouth, Hedda Jaffords."
"We'll watch em, Ma," Heddon said. Always agreeable was her Heddon;
probably not quite so bright as his sister, but bright wasn't
everything. Far from it. "Want us to finish hanging the wash?"
"Hed-donnnn..." From his sister. That irritating whine again. But she
had no time for them. She just took one glance at the others: Lyman and
Lia, who were five, and Aaron, who was two. Aaron sat naked in the
dirt, happily chunking two stones together. He was the rare singleton,
and how the women of the village envied her on account of him! Because
Aaron would always be safe. The others, however, Heddon and
Hedda...Lyman and Lia...
She suddenly understood what it might mean, him back at the house in
the middle of the day like this. She prayed to the gods it wasn't so,
but when she came into the kitchen and saw the way he was looking out
at the kiddies, she feared it was.
"Tell me it isn't the Wolves," she said in a dry and frantic voice.
"Say it's not."
"It is," Tian replied. "Thirty days, Andy says--moon to moon. And on
that Andy's never--"
Before he could go on, Zalia Jaffords clapped her hands to her temples
and voiced a shriek. In the side yard, Hedda jumped up. In another
moment she would have been running for the house, but Heddon held her
back.
"They won't take any as young as Lymon and Lia, will they?" she asked
him. "Hedda or Heddon, maybe, but surely not the babbies? Not my little
ones? Why, they won't see their sixth for another half-year!"
"The Wolves have taken em as young as three, and you know it," Tian
said. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed. That feeling
inside him continued to grow--the feeling that was deeper than mere
anger.
She looked at him, tears spilling down her face.
"Mayhap it's time to say no." Tian spoke in a voice he hardly
recognized as his own.
"How can we?" she whispered. "Oh, T, how in the name of all the gods
can we?"
"Dunno," he said. "But come here, woman, I beg you."
She came, throwing one last glance over her shoulder at the five
children in the back yard--as if to make sure they were still all
there, that no Wolves had taken them yet--and then crossed the living
room. Gran-pere sat in his corner chair by the dead fire, head bent
over, dozing and drizzling from his folded, toothless mouth.
>From this room the barn was visible. Tian drew his wife to the window
and pointed. "There," he said. "Do you mark em, woman? Do you see em
very well?"
Of course she did. Tian's sister, six and a half feet tall, now
standing with the straps of her overalls lowered and her big breasts
sparkling with water as she splashed them from the rain-barrel.
Standing in the barn doorway was Zalman, Zalia's very own brother.
Almost seven feet tall he was, big as Lord Perth and as empty of face
as the girl. A strapping young man watching a strapping young woman
with her breasts out on show like that might well have been sporting a
bulge in his pants, but there was none in Zally's. Nor ever would be.
He was roont.
She turned back to T. They looked at each other, a man and woman not
roont, but only because of dumb luck. So far as either of them knew, it
could just as easily have been Zal and Tia standing in here and
watching Tian and Zalia out by the barn, grown large of body and empty
of head.
"Of course I see," she told him. "Does ye think I'm blind?"
"Don't it sometimes make you wish you was?" he asked. "To see em so?"
Zalia made no reply.
"Not right, woman. Not right. Never has been."
"But since time out of mind--"
"Bugger time out of mind, too!" Tian cried. "They's children! Our
children!"
"Would you have the Wolves burn the Calla to the ground, then? Leave us
all with our throats cut? That or worse? For it's happened in other
places. You know it has."
He knew, all right. And who would put matters right, if not the men of
Calla Bryn Sturgis? Certainly there were no authorities, not so much as
a sheriff, either high or low, in these parts. They were on their own.
Even long ago, when the Inner Baronies had glowed with light and
culture, they would have seen precious little sign of that bright-life
out here. These were the borderlands, and life here had always been
strange. Then the Wolves had begun coming and life had grown far
stranger. How long ago had it begun? How many generations? Tian
didn't know, but he thought "time out of mind" was too long. The
Wolves had been raiding into the borderland villages when Gran-pere was
young, certainly--Gran-pere's own twin had been snatched as the two
of them sat in the dust, playing at jacks. "Dey tuk eem cos he closah
to de rud," Gran-pere had told them (many times). "Eef Ah come out of
dee house firs' da' day, Ah be closah to de rud an dey take me, God
is good!" Then he would kiss the wooden cross the Old Fella had given
him, hold it skyward, and cackle.
Yet Gran-pere's own Gran-pere had told him that in his day--which
would have been five or perhaps even six generations back, if Tian's
calculations were right--that there had been no Wolves sweeping out of
Thunderclap on their horrible gray horses. Once Tian had asked the old
man, And did all but a few of the babbies come in twos back then? Did
yer Old Fella ever say? Gran-pere had considered this long, then had
shaken his head. No, he couldn't remember that his Gran-pere had ever
said about that, one way or the other.
Zalia was looking at him anxiously. "Ye're in no mood to think of
such things, I wot, after spending your morning in that rocky patch."
"My frame of mind won't change when they come or who they'll take,"
Tian said.
"Ye'll not do something foolish, T, will you? Something foolish and
all on your own?"
"No," he said.
No hesitation. He's already begun to lay plans, she thought, and
allowed herself a thin gleam of hope. Surely there was nothing Tian
could do against the Wolves--nothing any of them could do--but he was
far from stupid. In a farming village where most men could think no
further than hoeing the next row or planting their stiffies on Saturday
night, Tian was something of an anomaly. He could write his name; he
could write words which said I LOVE YOU ZALLIE (and had won her by so
doing, even though she couldn't read them there in the dirt); he
could add the numbers and also call them back from big to small, which
he said was even more difficult. Was it possible...?
Part of her didn't want to complete that thought. And yet, when she
turned her mother's heart and mind to Hedda and Heddon, Lia and
Lyman, part of her wanted to hope. "What, then?"
"I'm going to call a meeting at the Town Gathering Hall," he said.
"I'll send the feather. "
"Willl they come?"
"When they hear this news, every man in the Calla will turn up. We'll
talk it over. Mayhap they'll want to fight this time. Mayhap
they'll want to fight for their babbies."
>From behind them, a cracked old voice said, "Ye foolish killin."
Tian and Zalia turned, hand in hand, to look at the old man. Killin was
a harsh word, but Tian judged the old man was looking at them--at
him--kindly enough.
"Why d'ye say so, Gran-pere?" he asked.
"Men'd go forrad from such a meetin as ye plan on and burn down
hat' countryside, were dey in drink," the old man said. "Men sober--"
He shook his head. "Ye'll never move such."
"I think this time you might be wrong, Grand-pere," Tian said, and
Zalia felt cold terror squeeze her heart. He believed it. He really
did.
3
There would have been less grumbling if he'd given them at least one
night's notice, but Tian wouldn't do that. One moon of days before
they arrive, Andy had said, and that was all the horoscope Tian
Jaffords needed. They didn't have the luxury of even a single fallow
night. And when he sent Heddon and Hedda with the feather, they did
come. He'd known they would. It had been over twenty years since the
Wolves last came calling to Calla Bryn Sturgis, and times had been
good. If they were allowed to reap this time, the crop would be a large
one.
The Calla's Gathering Hall was an adobe at the end of the village
high street, beyond Took's General Store and cater-corner from the
town pavillion, which was now dusty and dark with the end of summer.
Soon enough the ladies of the town would begin decorating it for Reap,
but they'd never made a lot of Reaping Night in the Calla. The
children always enjoyed seeing the stuffy-guys thrown on the fire, of
course, and the bolder fellows would steal their share of kisses as the
night itself approached, but that was about it. Your fripperies and
festivals might do for Mid-World and In-World, but this was neither.
Out here they had more serious things to worry about than Reaping Day
Fairs.
Things like the Wolves.
Some of the men--from the well-to-do farms to the east and the three
ranches to the south--came on horses. Eisenhart of the Lazy B even
brought his rifle and wore crisscrossed ammunition bandoliers. (Tian
Jaffords doubted if the bullets were any good, or that the ancient
rifle would fire even if some of them were.) A delegation of the Manni
folk came crammed into a buckboard drawn by a pair of mutie
geldings--one with three eyes, the other with a pylon of raw pink flesh
poking out of its back. Most of the Calla's menfolk came on donkeys
and burros, dressed in their white pants and long colorful shirts. They
knocked their dusty sombreros back on the tugstrings with callused
thumbs as they stepped into the Gathering Hall, looking uneasily at
each other. The benches were of plain pine. With no womenfolk and none
of the roont ones, the men filled less than thirty of the ninety
benches. There was some talk, but no laughter at all.
Tian stood out front with the feather now in his hands, watching the
sun as it sank toward the horizon, its gold steadily deepening to a
color that was like infected blood. When it touched the hills, he took
one more look up the high street. It was empty except for three or four
roont fellas sitting on the steps of Took's. All of them huge and
good for nothing more than yanking rocks out of the ground. He saw no
more men, no more approaching donkeys. He took a deep breath, let it
out, then drew in another and looked up at the deepening sky.
"Man Jesus, I don't believe in you," he said. "But if you're there,
help me now. Tell God thankee."
Then he went inside and closed the Gathering Hall doors a little harder
than was strictly necessary. The talk stopped. A hundred and forty men,
most of them farmers, watched him walk to the front of the hall, the
wide legs of his white pants swishing, his shor'-boots clacking on
the hardwood floor. He had expected to be terrified by this point,
perhaps even to find himself speechless. He was a farmer, not a stage
performer or a politician. Then he thought of his children, and when he
looked up at the men, he found he had no trouble meeting their eyes.
The feather in his hands did not tremble. When he spoke, his words
followed each other easily, naturally, and coherently. They might not
do as he hoped they would--Gran-pere might be right about that--but he
saw they were willing enough to listen. And wasn't that the necessary
first step?
"You all know who I am," he said as he stood there with his hands
clasped around the reddish feather's ancient stalk. "Tian Jaffords,
son of Alan Jaffords, husband of Zalia Hoonik that was. She and I have
five, two pairs and a singleton."
Low murmurs at that, most probably having to do with how lucky Tian and
Zalia were, how lucky with their Aaron. Tian waited for the voices to
die away.
"I've lived in the Calla all my life. I've shared your khef and you
have shared mine. Now hear what I say, I beg you."
"We say thankee-sai," they murmured. It was little more than a stock
response, yet Tian was encouraged.
"The Wolves are coming," he said. "I have this news from Andy. Thirty
days from moon to moon and then they're here."
More low murmurs. Tian heard dismay and outrage, but no surprise. When
it came to spreading news, Andy was extremely efficient.
"Even those of us who can read and write a little have almost no paper
to write on," Tian said, "so I cannot tell ye with any real certainty
when last they came. There are no records, ye ken, just one mouth to
another. I know I was well-breeched, so it's longer than twenty
years--"
"It's twenty-four," said a voice in the back of the room.
"Nay, twenty-three," said a voice closer to the front, and Reuben
Caverra stood up. He was a plump man with a round, cheerful face. The
cheer was gone from it now, however, and it showed only distress. "They
took Ruth, my sissy: hear me, I beg."
A murmur--really no more than a vocalized sigh of agreement--came from
the men sitting crammed together on the benches. They could have spread
out, but had chosen shoulder-to-shoulder instead. Sometimes there was
comfort in discomfort, Tian reckoned.
Reuben said, "We were playing under the big pine in the front yard when
they came. I made a mark on that tree each year after. Even after they
brung her back, I went on with em. It's twenty-three marks and
twenty-three years." With that he sat down.
"Twenty-three or twenty-four, makes no difference," Tian said. "Those
who were babbies--or kiddies--when the Wolves came last time have grown
up since and had kiddies of their own. There's a fine crop here for
those bastards. A fine crop of children." He paused, giving them a
chance to think of the next idea for themselves before speaking it
aloud. "If we let it happen," he said at last. "If we let the Wolves
take our children into Thunderclap and then send them back to us
roont."
"What the hell else can we do?" cried a man sitting on one of the
middle benches. "They's not human!" At this there was a general (and
miserable) mumble of agreement.
One of the Manni stood up, pulling his dark blue cloak tight against
his bony shoulders. He looked around at the others with baleful eyes.
They weren't mad, those eyes, but to Tian they looked a long league
from reasonable. "Hear me, I beg," he said.
"We say thankee-sai." Respectful but reserved. To see a Manni up close
was a rare thing, and here were eight, all in a bunch. Tian was
delighted they had come. If anything would underline the deadly
seriousness of this business, the appearance of the Manni would do it.
The Gathering Hall door opened and one more man slipped inside. None of
them, including Tian, noticed. They were watching the Manni.
"Hear what the Book says: When the Angel of Death passed over Aegypt,
he killed the firstborn in every house where the blood of a sacrificial
lamb hadn't been daubed on the doorposts. So says the Book."
"Praise the Book," said the rest of the Manni.
"Perhaps we should do likewise," the Manni spokesman went on. His voice
was calm, but a pulse beat wildly in his forehead. "Perhaps we should
turn these next thirty days into a festival of joy for the wee ones,
and then put them to sleep, and let their blood out upon the earth. Let
the Wolves take their corpses into the West, should they desire."
"You're insane," Benito Cash said, indignant and at the same time
almost laughing. "You and all your kind. We ain't gonna kill our
babbies!"
"Would the ones that come back not be better off dead?" the Manni
responded. "Great useless hulks! Scooped-out shells!"
"Aye, and what about their brothers and sisters?" asked Vaughn
Eisenhart. "For the Wolves only take one out of every two, as ye very
well know."
A second Manni rose, this one with a silky-white beard flowing down
over his breast. The first one sat down. The old man looked around at
the others, then at Tian. "You hold the feather, young fella--may I
speak?"
Tian nodded for him to go ahead. This wasn't a bad start at all. Let
them fully explore the box they were in, explore it all the way to the
corners. He was confident they'd see there were only two
alternatives, in the end: let the Wolves take one of every pair under
the age of puberty, as they always had, or stand and fight. But to see
that, they needed to understand that all other ways out were dead ends.
The old man spoke patiently. Sorrowfully, even. "To take those who
would have been left behind as well as those who'd come back to us
spoiled forever...aye, it's a terrible thing to consider. But
think'ee this, sais: if the Wolves were to come and find us
childless, they might leave us alone ever after."
"Aye, so they might," one of the smallhold farmers rumbled--Tian
believed his name was Jorge Estrada. "And so they might not. Manni-sai,
would you really kill a whole town's children for what might be?"
A strong rumble of agreement ran through the crowd. Another
smallholder, Garrett Strong, rose to his feet. His pug-dog's face was
truculent. His thumbs were hung in his belt. "Better we all kill
ourselves," he said. "Babbies and grown-ups alike."
The Manni didn't look outraged at this. Nor did any of the other
blue-cloaks around him. "It's an option," the old man said. "We would
speak of it if others would." He sat down.
"Not me," Garrett Strong said. "It'd be like cuttin off your damn
head to save shaving, hear me I beg."
There was laughter and a few cries of Hear you very well. Garrett sat
back down, looking a little less tense, and put his head together with
Vaughn Eisenhart. One of the other ranchers, Diego Adams, was listening
in, his black eyes intent.
Another smallholder rose--Bucky Javier. He had bright little blue eyes
in a small head that seemed to slope back from his goatee'd chin.
"What if we left for awhile?" he asked. "What if we took our children
and went back east? All the way to the Big River, mayhap?"
There was a moment of considering silence at this bold idea. The Big
River was almost all the way back to Mid-World...where, according to
Andy, a great palace of green glass had lately appeared and even more
lately disappeared again. Tian was about to respond himself when Eben
Took, the storekeeper's son, did it for him. Tian was relieved. He
hoped to be silent as long as possible. When they were talked out,
he'd tell them what was left.
"Are ye mad?" Eben asked. "Wolves'd come in, see us gone, and burn
all to the ground--farms and ranches, crops and stores, root and
branch. What would we come back to?"
"And what if they came after us?" Jorge Estrada chimed in. "Do'ee
think we'd be hard to follow, for such as the Wolves? They'd burn
us out as Took says, ride our backtrail, and take the kiddies anyway!"
Louder agreement. The stomp of shor'-boots on the plain pine
floorboards. And a few cries of Hear him, hear him!
"Besides," Neil Faraday said, standing and holding his vast and filthy
sombrero in front of him, "they never steal all our children." He spoke
in a frightened let's-be-reasonable tone that set Tian's teeth on
edge. It was this counsel he feared above all others. Its deadly-false
call to reason.
One of the Manni, this one younger and beardless, uttered a sharp and
contemptuous laugh. "Ah, one saved out of every two! And that make it
all right, does it? God bless thee!" He might have said more, but
White-Beard clamped a gnarled hand on the young man's arm. That
worthy said no more, but he didn't lower his head submissively,
either. His eyes were hot, his lips a thin white line.
"I don't mean it's right," Neil said. He had begun to spin his
sombrero in a way that made Tian feel a little dizzy. "But we have to
face the realities, don't we? Aye. And they don't take em all. Why
my daughter, Georgina, she's just as apt and canny--"
"Yar, and yer son George is a great empty-headed galoot," Ben Slightman
said. Slightman was Eisenhart's foreman, and he did not suffer fools
lightly. "I seen him settin on the steps in front of Tooky's when I
rode downstreet. Seen him very well. Him and some others equally
empty-brained."
"But--"
"I know," Slightman said. "You have a daughter who's as apt as an ant
and canny as the day is long. I give you every joy of her. I'm just
pointin out, like, that if not for the Wolves, you'd mayhap have a
son just as apt and canny. Nor would he eat a peck a day, winter and
summer, to no good end for ye, not even a brace o' grandbabbies."
Cries of Hear him and Say thankee as Ben Slightman sat down.
"They always leave us enough to go on with, don't they?" asked a
smallhold farmer whose place was just west of Tian's, near the edge
of the Calla. His name was Louis Haycox, and he spoke in a musing,
bitter tone of voice. Below his moustache, his lips curved in a smile
that didn't have much humor in it. "We won't kill our children," he
said, looking at the Manni. "All God's grace to ye, gentlemen, but I
don't believe even you could do so, came it right down to the
killin-floor. Or not all of ye. We can't pull up bag and baggage and
go east--or in any other direction--because we leave our farms behind.
They'd burn us out, all right, and come after the children just the
same. They need em, gods know why.
"It always comes back to the same thing: we're farmers, most of us.
Strong when our hands are in the soil, weak when they ain't. I got
two kiddies of my own, four years old, and I love em both well. Should
hate to lose either. But I'd give one to keep the other. And my
farm." Murmurs of agreement met this. "What other choice do we have? I
say this: it would be the world's worst mistake to anger the Wolves.
Unless, of course, we can stand against them. If t'were possible,
I'd stand. But I just don't see how it is."
Tian felt his heart shrivel with each of Haycox's words. How much of
his thunder had the man stolen? Gods and the Man Jesus!
Wayne Overholser got to his feet. He was Calla Bryn Sturgis's most
successful farmer, and had a vast sloping belly to prove it. "Hear me,
I beg."
"We say thankee-sai," they murmured.
"Tell you what we're going to do," he said, looking around. "What we
always done, that's what. Do any of you want to talk about standing
against the Wolves? Are any of you that mad? With what? Spears and
rocks and a few bows? Maybe four rusty old soft-calibers like that?" He
jerked a thumb toward Eisenhart's rifle.
"Don't be making fun of my shooting-iron, son," Eisenhart said, but
he was smiling ruefully.
"They'll come and they'll take the children," Overholser said,
looking around. "Some of the children. Then they'll leave us alone
again for a generation or even longer. So it is, so it has been, and I
say leave it alone."
Disapproving rumbles rose at this, but Overholser waited them out.
"Twenty-three years or twenty-four, it don't matter," he said when
they were quiet again. "Either way it's a long time. A long time of
peace. Could be you've forgotten a few things, folks. One is that
children are like any other crop. God always sends more. I know that
sounds hard. But it's how we've lived and how we have to go on."
Tian didn't wait for any of the stock responses. If they went any
further down this road, any chance he might have to turn them would be
lost. He raised the opopanax feather and said, "Hear what I say! Would
ye hear, I beg!"
"Thankee-sai," they responded. Overholser was looking at Tian
distrustfully.
And you're right to look at me so, the farmer thought. For I've had
enough of such soft and cowardly common sense, so I have.
"Wayne Overholser is a smart man and a successful man," Tian said, "and
I hate to speak against his position for those reasons. And for
another, as well: he's old enough to be my Da'."
"'Ware he ain't your Da'," Garrett Strong's only
farmhand--Rossiter, his name was--called out, and there was general
laughter. Even Overholser smiled at this jest.
"Son, if ye truly hate to speak agin me, don't ye do it," he said. He
continued to smile, but only with his mouth.
"I must, though," Tian said. He began to walk slowly back and forth in
front of the benches. In his hands, the rusty-red plume of the opopanax
feather swayed. Tian raised his voice slightly so they'd understand
he was no longer speaking just to Overholser.
"I must because sai Overholser is old enough to be my Da'. His
children are grown, ye ken, and so far as I know there were only two to
begin with, one girl and one boy." He paused, then shot the killer.
"Born two years apart." Both singletons, in other words. Both safe from
the Wolves. The crowd murmured.
Overholser flushed a bright and dangerous red. "That's a rotten
goddamned thing to say! My get has nothing to do with this whether
single or double! Give me that feather, Jaffords. I got a few things to
say."
But the boots began to thump down on the boards, slowly at first, then
picking up speed until they rattled like hail. Overholser looked around
angrily, now so red he was nearly purple.
"I'd speak!" he shouted. "Would'ee not hear me, I beg?"
Cries of No, no and Not now and Jaffords has the feather and Sit and
listen came in response. Tian had an idea sai Overholser was
learning--and remarkably late in the game--that there was often a
deep-running resentment of a village's richest and most successful.
Those less fortunate or less canny might tug their hats off when the
rich folk passed in their buckboards or lowcoaches, they might send
thank-you delegations when the rich folk loaned their hired hands to
help with a house- or barn-raising, the well-to-do might be cheered at
Year End Gathering for helping to buy the piano that now sat in the
pavillion's musica. Yet the men of the Calla tromped their
shor'-boots to drown Overholser out with a certain savage
satisfaction. Even those who undoubtedly supported what he'd said
(Neil Faraday, for one) were tromping hard enough to break a sweat.
Overholser, unused to being balked in such a way--flabbergasted, in
fact--tried one more time. "I'd have the feather, do ye, I beg!"
"No," Tian said. "In your time, but not now."
There were actual cheers at this, mostly from the smallest of the
smallhold farmers and some of their hands. The Manni did not join in.
They were now drawn so tightly together that they looked like a dark
blue inkstain in the middle of the hall. They were clearly bewildered
by this turn. Vaughn Eisenhart and Diego Adams, meanwhile, moved to
flank Overholser and speak low to him.
You've got a chance, Tian thought. Better make the most of it.
He raised the feather and they quieted.
"Everyone will have a chance to speak," he said. "As for me, I say
this: we can't go on this way, simply bowing our necks and standing
quiet when the Wolves come and take our children. They--"
"They always return them," a hand named Farren Posella said timidly.
"They return husks!" Tian cried, and there were a few cries of Hear
him. Not enough, however, Tian judged. Not enough by far. Not yet. The
bulk of his work was yet to do.
He lowered his voice again--he did not want to harangue them.
Overholser had tried that and gotten nowhere, a thousand acres or not.
"They return husks. And what of us? What is this doing to us? Some
might say nothing, that the Wolves have always been a part of our life
in Calla Bryn Sturgis, like the occasional cyclone or earthshake. Yet
that is not true. They've been coming for six generations, at most.
But the Calla's been here a thousand years and more."
The old Manni with the bony shoulders and baleful eyes half-rose. "He
says true, folken. There were farmers here--and Manni-folk among
em--when the darkness in Thunderclap hadn't yet come, let alone the
Wolves."
They received this with looks of wonder. Their awe seemed to satisfy
the old man, who nodded and sat back down.
"So the Wolves are almost a new thing," Tian said. "Six times have they
come over mayhap a hundred and twenty or a hundred and forty years. Who
can say? For as ye ken, time has softened, somehow."
A low rumble. A few nods.
"In any case, once a generation," Tian went on. He was aware that a
hostile contingent was coalescing around Overholser, Eisenhart, and
Adams. These men he would not move even if he were gifted with the
tongue of an angel. Well, he could do without them, maybe. If he caught
the rest. "Once a generation they come, and how many children do they
take? Twelve? Eighteen? Maybe as many as thirty?
"Sai Overholser may not have babbies this time, but I do--not one set
of twins but two. Heddon and Hedda, Lyman and Lia. I love all four, but
in a month of days, two of them will be taken away. And when those two
come back, they'll be roont. Whatever spark there is that makes a
complete human being, it'll be out forever."
Hear him, hear him swept through the room like a sigh.
"How many of you have twins with no hair except that which grows on
their heads?" Tian demanded. "Raise yer hands!"
Six men raised their hands. Then eight. A dozen. Every time Tian began
to think they were done, another reluctant hand went up. In the end, he
counted twenty-two hands. He could see that Overholser was dismayed by
such a large count. Diego Adams had his hand raised, and Tian was
pleased to see he'd moved away a little bit from Overholser and
Eisenhart. Three of the Manni had their hands up. Jorge Estrada. Louis
Haycox. Many others he knew, which was not surprising, really; he knew
these men. Probably all of them except for a few wandering fellows
working smallhold farms for short wages and hot dinners.
"Each time they come and take our children, they take a little more of
of our hearts and our souls," Tian said.
"Oh come on, now, son," Eisenhart said. "That's laying it on a bit
th--"
"Shut up, Rancher," a voice said. It was shocking in its anger and
contempt. "He's got the feather. Let him speak out to the end."
Eisenhart whirled around, as if to mark who had spoken to him so. Only
bland faces looked back.
"Thankee sai," Tian said evenly. "I've almost come to the end. I keep
thinking of trees. Strong trees. You can strip the leaves of a strong
tree and it will live. Cut its bark with many names and it will live to
grow its skin over them again. You can even take from the heartwood and
it will live. But if you take of the heartwood again and again and
again, year after year, there will come a time when even the strongest
tree must die. I've seen it happen on my farm, and it's an ugly
thing. They die from the inside out. You can see it in the leaves as
they turn yellow from the trunk to the tips of the branches. And
that's what the Wolves are doing to this little village of ours. What
they're doing to our Calla."
"Hear him!" cried Freddy Rosario from the next farm over. "Hear him
very well!" Freddy had twins of his own, although they were still on
the tit and so probably safe.
"You say that if we stand and fight, they'll kill us all and burn the
Calla from west-border to east."
"Yes," Overholser said. "So I do say. Nor am I the only one." And from
all around him came rumbles of agreement.
"Yet each time we simply stand by with our heads lowered and our hands
open while the Wolves take what's dearer to us than any crop or house
or barn, they scoop a little more of the heart's wood from the tree
that is this village!" Tian spoke strongly, now standing still with the
feather raised high in one hand. "If we don't stand and fight soon,
we'll be dead, anyway! This is what I say, Tian Jaffords, son of
Alan! If we don't stand and fight soon, we'll be roont ourselves!"
Loud cries of Hear him! Exuberant stomping of shor'-boots. Even some
applause.
George Telford, another rancher, whispered briefly to Eisenhart and
Overholser. They listened, then nodded. Telford rose. He was
silver-haired, tanned, and handsome in the weatherbeaten way women
seemed to like.
"Had your say, son?" he asked kindly, as one might ask a child if he
had played enough for one afternoon and was ready for his nap.
"Yar, reckon," Tian said. He suddenly felt dispirited. Telford wasn't
a rancher on a scale with Vaughn Eisenhart, but he had a silver tongue.
Tian had an idea he was going to lose this, after all.
"May I have the feather, then?"
Tian thought of holding onto it, but what good would it do? He'd said
his best. He had an idea it wouldn't be good enough--not once Telford
got finished shredding his arguments with that smooth voice of his--but
he'd tried. Perhaps he and Zalia should pack up the kids and go out
east themselves. Moon to moon before the Wolves came, according to
Andy. A person could get a hell of a head start on trouble in thirty
days.
He passed the feather.
"We all appreciate young sai Jaffords's passion, and certainly no one
doubts his courage," George Telford was saying. He spoke with the
feather held against the left side of his chest, over his heart. His
eyes roved the audience, seeming to make eye contact--friendly eye
contact--with each man. "But we have to think of the kiddies who would
be left as well as those who would be taken, don't we? In fact, we
have to protect all the kiddies, whether they be twins, triplets, or
singletons like sai Jaffords's Aaron."
Telford turned to Tian now.
"What will you tell your children as the Wolves shoot their mother and
mayhap set their gran-pere on fire with one of their light-sticks? What
can you say to make the sound of those shrieks all right? To sweeten
the smell of burning skin and burning crops? That it's souls we're
a-saving? Or the heart's wood of some make-believe tree?"
He paused, giving Tian a chance to reply, but Tian had no reply to
make. He'd almost had them...but he'd left Telford out of his
reckoning. Smooth-voiced sonofabitch Telford, who was also far past the
age when he needed to be concerned about the Wolves calling into his
dooryard on their great gray horses.
Telford nodded, as if Tian's silence was no more than he expected,
and turned back to the benches. "When the Wolves come," he said,
"they'll come with fire-hurling weapons--the light-sticks, ye
ken--and guns, and flying metal things. I misremember the name of
those--"
"The drones," someone called.
"The sneetches," called someone else.
"Stealthies!" called a third.
Telford was nodding and smiling gently. A teacher with good pupils.
"Whatever they are, they fly through the air, seeking their targets,
and when they lock on, they put forth whirling blades as sharp as
razors. They can strip a man from top to toe in five seconds, leaving
nothing around him but a circle of blood and hair. So my own gran-pere
told me, and I have no reason not to believe it."
"Hear him, hear him well!" the men on the benches shouted. Their eyes
had grown huge and frightened.
"The Wolves themselves are terrible fearsome, so 'tis said," Telford
went on, moving smoothly from one campfire story to the next. "They
look sommat' like men, and yet they are not men but something bigger
and far more awful. And those they serve in far Thunderclap are more
terrible by far. Vampires, I've heard. Broken-helm undead ronin.
Warriors of the Scarlet Eye."
The men muttered. Even Tian felt a cold scamper of rat's paws up his
back at the mention of the Eye.
"So I've been told," Telford went on, "and while I don't believe it
all, I believe much. Never mind Thunderclap, though. Let's stick to
the Wolves. The Wolves are our problem, and problem enough. Especially
when they come armed to the teeth!" He shook his head, smiling grimly.
"What would we do? Perhaps we could knock them from their greathorses
with hoes, sai Jaffords? D'ee think?"
Derisive laughter greeted this.
"We have no weapons that can stand against them," Telford said. He was
now dry and businesslike, a man stating the bottom line. "Even if we
had such, we're farmers and ranchers and stockmen, not fighters.
We--"
"Stop that talk, Telford. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
Shocked gasps greeted this chilly pronouncement. There were cracking
backs and necks as men turned to see who had spoken. Slowly, then, as
if to give them exactly what they wanted, a white-haired figure in a
long black coat and a turned-around collar rose slowly from the bench
at the very back of the room. The scar on his forehead--it was in the
shape of a cross--was very bright in the light of the kerosene lamps.
It was the fellow who had slipped in unnoticed while the Manni elder
was going on about Aegypt and sacrificial lambs and the Angel of Death.
It was the Old Fella.
Telford recovered himself with relative speed, but when he spoke, Tian
thought he still looked shocked. "Beg pardon, Pere Callahan, but I have
the feather--"
"To hell with your heathen feather and to hell with your cowardly
counsel," Pere Callahan said. He stepped into the aisle and began to
hobble down the center aisle, stepping with the grim gait of arthritis.
He wasn't as old as the Manni elder, nor nearly so old as Tian's
gran-pere (who claimed he was the oldest person not only here but in
Calla Lockwood to the south), and yet he seemed somehow older than
both. Older than the ages. Some of this no doubt had to do with the
haunted eyes that looked out at the world from below the scar on his
foreheard (according to Zalia, it had been self-inflicted). More had to
do with the sound of him. Although he had been here long and
long--enough years to build his strange Man Jesus church and convert
half the Calla to his way of spiritual thinking--not even a stranger
would have been fooled into believing Pere Callahan was from here. His
alienness was in his flat and nasal speech and in the often obscure
slang he used ('street-jive," he called it). He had undoubtedly come
from one of those other worlds the Manni were always babbling about,
although he never spoke of it and Calla Bryn Sturgis was now his home.
He had been here since long before Tian Jaffords was born--since town
elders like Wayne Overholser and Vaughn Eisenhart had worn short
pants--and no one disputed his right to speak, with or without the
feather.
Younger than Tian's gran-pere he might be, but Pere Callahan was
still the Old Fella.
4
Now he surveyed the men of Call Bryn Sturgis, not even glancing at
George Telford. The feather sagged in Telford's hand. He sat down on
the first bench, still holding it.
Callahan began with one of his slang-terms, but they were farmers and
no one needed to ask for an explanation.
"This is chickenshit."
He surveyed them longer. Most would not return his look. After a
moment, even Eisenhart and Adams dropped their eyes. Overholser kept
his head up, but under the Old Fella's dry and bitter gaze, the
rancher looked petulant rather than defiant.
"Chickenshit," the man in the black coat and turned-around collar
repeated. A small gold cross gleamed below the notch in the backwards
collar. On his forehead, that other cross--the one he'd supposedly
carved in his flesh with his own thumbnail in partial penance for some
awful sin--glared under the lamps like a tattoo.
"This young man isn't one of my flock, but he's right, and I think
you all know it. You know it in your hearts. Even you, Mr. Overholser.
And you, George Telford."
"Know no such thing," Telford said, but his voice was weak and stripped
of its former persuasive charm.
"All your lies will cross your eyes, that's what my mother would have
told you." Callahan offered Telford a thin smile Tian wouldn't have
wanted it pointed in his direction. And then Callahan did turn to him.
"I never heard it put better than you put it tonight, boy.
Thankee-sai."
Tian raised a feeble hand and managed an even more feeble smile. He
felt like a character in a silly festival play, saved at the last
moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.
"I know a bit about cowardice," Callahan said, turning to the men on
the benches. "I have personal experience, you might say. I know how one
cowardly decision leads to another...and another...and another...until
it's too late to turn around, too late to change. Mr. Telford, I
assure you the tree of which young Mr. Jaffords spoke is not
make-believe. The Calla is in dire danger. Your souls are in danger."
"Hail Mary, full of grace," said someone on the left side of the room,
"the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, J--"
"Bag it," Callahan snapped. "Save it for Sunday." His eyes, blue sparks
in their deep hollows, studied them. "For this night, never mind God
and Mary and the Man Jesus. Never mind the sneetches and light-sticks
of the Wolves, either. You must fight. You're the men of the Calla,
are you not? Then act like men. Stop behaving like dogs crawling on
their bellies to lick the boots of a cruel master."
Overholser went dark red at that, and began to stand. Diego Adams
grabbed his arm and spoke in his ear. For a moment Overholser remained
as he was, frozen in a kind of crouch, and then he sat back down. Adams
stood up.
"Sounds good, padrone," Adams said in his heavy accent. "Sounds brave.
Yet there are still a few questions, mayhap. Haycox asked one of em.
How can ranchers and farmers stand against armed killers out of the
west?"
"By hiring armed killers of our own," Callahan replied.
There was a moment of utter, amazed silence. It was almost as if the
Old Fella had lapsed into another language. At last Diego Adams
said--cautiously, "I don't understand."
"Of course you don't," the Old Fella said. "So listen and gain
wisdom. Rancher Adams and all of you, listen and gain wisdom. Not six
days' ride northeast of us, and bound southwest along the Path of the
Beam, come three gunslingers and one 'prentice." He smiled at their
amazement--their utter and complete amazement. Then he turned to Tian.
"The 'prentice isn't much older than your Heddon and Hedda, but
he's already as quick as a snake and as deadly as a scorpion. The
others are quicker and deadlier by far. You want hard calibers?
They're at hand. I set my watch and warrant on it."
This time Overholser made it all the way to his feet. His face burned
as if with a fever. His great pod of a belly trembled. "What
children's goodnight story is this?" he asked. "If there ever were
such men, they passed out of existence with Gilead. And Gilead has been
dust in the wind for a thousand years."
There were no mutterings of support or dispute. No mutterings of any
kind. The crowd was still frozen, caught in the reverberation of that
one mythic word: gunslingers.
"You're wrong," Callahan said, "but we don't need to fight over it.
We can go and see for ourselves. A small party will do, I think.
Jaffords here...myself...and what about you, Overholser? Want to come?"
"There ain't no gunslingers!" Overholser roared.
Behind him, Jorge Estrada stood up. "Pere Callahan, God's grace on
you--"
"--and you, Jorge."
"--but even if there were gunslingers, how could three stand against
forty or sixty? And not forty or sixty normal men, but forty or sixty
Wolves?"
"Hear him, he speaks sense!" Eben Took, the storekeeper's son, called
out.
"And why would they fight for us?" Estrada continued. "We make it from
year to year, but not much more. What could we offer them, beyond a few
hot meals? And what man agrees to die for his dinner?"
"Hear him, hear him!" Telford, Overholser, and Eisenhart cried in
unison. Others stamped rhythmically up and down on the boards.
The Old Fella waited until the stomping had quit, and then said: "I
have books in the Rectory. Half a dozen."
Although most of them knew this, the thought of books--all that
paper--still provoked a general sigh of wonder.
"According to one of them, gunslingers were forbidden to take reward.
Supposedly because they descend from the line of Arthur Eld."
"The Eld! The Eld!" the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into
the air with the first and fourth fingers raised. Hook em horns, the
Old Fella thought. Go, Texas. He managed to stifle a laugh, but not the
smile that rose on his lips.
"Are ye speaking of hardcases who wander the land, doing good deeds?"
Telford asked in a gently mocking voice. "Surely you're too old for
such tales, Pere."
"Not hardcases," Callahan said patiently, "gunslingers."
"How do you know, Pere?" Tian heard himself ask. "And how can three men
stand against the Wolves?"
One of the gunslingers was actually a woman, but Callahan saw no need
to muddy the waters further (although an impish part of him wanted to,
just the same). "I know because I know," he said. "As for how three may
stand against many--three and an apprentice, actually--that's a
question for their dinh. We'll ask him. And they wouldn't be
fighting just for their dinners, you know. Not at all."
"What else, then?" Bucky Javier asked.
Callahan knew they were there because he had seen them. He had seen
them because the thing under the church floor had awakened. They would
want the thing under the floor, and that was good because the Old
Fella, who had once run from a town called Jerusalem's Lot in another
world, wanted to be rid of it. If he wasn't rid of it soon, it would
kill him.
Ka had come to Calla Bryn Sturgis. Ka like a wind.
"In time, Mr. Javier," Callahan said. "All in good time, sai."
Meantime, a whisper had begun in the Gathering Hall. It slipped along
the benches like from mouth to mouth, a breeze of hope and fear.
Gunslingers.
Gunslingers to the east, come out of Mid-World.
And it was true, God help them. Arthur Eld's last deadly children,
moving toward Calla Bryn Sturgis along the Path of the Beam. Ka like a
wind.
"Time to be men," Pere Callahan told them. Beneath the scar on his
forehead, his eyes burned like lamps. Yet his tone was not without
compassion. "Time to stand up, gentlemen. Time to stand and be true."
Dark Tower V
by Stephen King
Prologue: Calla Bryn Sturgis
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 23 Feb 2005 04:27:23 -0800
--------
Part 1: ToDash -- Chapter I: The Face on the Water
ONE
Time is a face on the water. This was a proverb from the long-ago, in
far-off Mejis. Eddie Dean had never been there.
Except he had, in a way. Roland had carried all four of his
companions-Eddie, Susannah, Jake, Oy-to Mejis one night, storying
long as they camped on 1-70, the Kansas Turnpike in a Kansas that never
was. That night he had told them the story of Susan Delgado, his first
love. Perhaps his only love. And how he had lost her.
The saying might have been true when Roland had been a boy not much
older than Jake Chambers, but Eddie thought it was even truer now, as
the world wound down like the mainspring in an ancient watch. Roland
had told them that even such basic things as the points of the compass
could no longer be trusted in Mid-World; what was dead west today might
be southwest tomorrow, crazy as that might seem. And time had likewise
begun to soften. There were days Eddie could have sworn were forty
hours long, some of them followed by nights (like the one on which
Roland had taken them to Mejis) that seemed even longer. Then there
would come an afternoon when it seemed you could almost see darkness
bloom as night rushed over the horizon to meet you. Eddie wondered if
time had gotten lost.
They had ridden (and riddled) out of a city called Lud on Blaine the
Mono. Blaine is a pain, Jake had said on several occasions, but he-or
it-turned out to be quite a bit more than just a pain; Blaine the
Mono had been utterly mad. Eddie killed it with illogic ("Somethin
you're just naturally good at, sugar," Susannah told him), and they had
detrained in a Topeka which wasn't quite part of the world from which
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake had come. Which was good, really, because
this world-one in which the Kansas City pro baseball team was called
The Monarchs, Coca-Cola was called Nozz-A-La, and the big Japanese
car-maker was Takuro rather than Honda- had been overwhelmed by some
sort of plague which had killed damn near everyone. So stick that in
your Takuro Spirit and drive it, Eddie thought.
The passage of time had seemed clear enough to him through all of this.
During much of it he'd been scared shitless- he guessed all of them
had been, except maybe for Roland-but yes, it had seemed real and
clear. He'd not had that feeling of time slipping out of his grasp even
when they'd been walking up 1-70 with bullets in their ears, looking at
the frozen traffic and listening to the warble of what Roland called a
thinny.
But after their confrontation in the glass palace with Jake's old
friend the Tick-Tock Man and Roland's old friend (Flagg... or Marten...
or-just perhaps-Maerlyn), time had changed.
Not right away, though. We traveled in that damned pink ball... saw
Roland kill his mother by mistake... and when we came back...
Yes, that was when it had happened. They had awakened in a clearing
perhaps thirty miles from the Green Palace. They had still been able to
see it, but all of them had understood that it was in another world.
Someone-or some force-had carried them over or through the thinny
and back to the Path of the Beam. Whoever or whatever it had been, it
had actually been considerate enough to pack them each a lunch,
complete with Nozz-A-La sodas and rather more familiar packages of
Keebler cookies.
Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the
being Roland had just missed killing in the Palace: "Renounce the
Tower. This is your last warning." Ridiculous, really. Roland would no
more renounce the Tower than he'd kill Jake's pet billy-bumbler and
then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would renounce
Roland's Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the
end.
We got some daylight left, Eddie had said on the day they'd found
Flagg's warning note. You want to use it, or what?
Yes, Roland of Gilead had replied. Let's use it.
And so they had, following the Path of the Beam through endless open
fields that were divided from each other by belts of straggly, annoying
underbrush. There had been no sign of people. Skies had remained low
and cloudy day after day and night after night. Because they followed
the Path of the Beam, the clouds directly above them sometimes roiled
and broke open, revealing patches of blue, but never for long. One
night they opened long enough to disclose a full moon with a face
clearly visible on it: the nasty, complicitous squint-and-grin of the
Peddler. That made it late summer by Roland's reckoning, but to Eddie
it looked like half-past no time at all, the grass mostly listless or
outright dead, the trees (what few there were) bare, the bushes scrubby
and brown. There was little game, and for the first time in
weeks-since leaving the forest ruled by Shardik, the cyborg
bear-they sometimes went to bed with their bellies not quite full.
Yet none of that, Eddie thought, was quite as annoying as the sense of
having lost hold of time itself: no hours, no days, no weeks, no
seasons, for God's sake. The moon might have told Roland it was the end
of summer, but the world around them looked like the first week of
November, dozing sleepily toward winter.
Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created
by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time
seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual
boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening,
time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney
Island. Weird but true.
Had everything stopped happening? Eddie considered (and with nothing to
do but push Susannah's wheelchair through one boring field after
another, there was plenty of time for consideration). The only
peculiarity he could think of since returning from the Wizard's Glass
was what Jake called the Mystery Number, and that probably meant
nothing. They'd needed to solve a mathematical riddle in the Cradle of
Lud in order to gain access to Blaine, and Susannah had suggested the
Mystery Number was a holdover from that. Eddie was far from sure she
was right, but hey, it was a theory.
And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery
Number, indeed. After some thought, Susannah had pointed out it was
prime, at least, like the numbers that had opened the gate between them
and Blaine the Mono. Eddie had added that it was the only one that came
between eighteen and twenty every time you counted. Jake had laughed at
that and told him to stop being a jerk. Eddie, who had been sitting
close to the campfire and carving a rabbit (when it was done, it would
join the cat and dog already in his pack), told Jake to quit making fun
of his only real talent.
TWO
They might have been back on the Path of the Beam five or six weeks
when they came to a pair of ancient double ruts that had surely once
been a road. It didn't follow the Path of the Beam exactly, but Roland
swung them onto it anyway. It bore closely enough to the Beam for their
purposes, he said. Eddie thought being on a road again might refocus
things, help them to shake that maddening
becalmed-in-the-Horse-Latitudes feeling, but it didn't. The road
carried them up and across a rising series of fields like steps. They
finally topped a long north-south ridge. On the far side, their road
descended into a dark wood. Almost a fairy-tale wood, Eddie thought as
they passed into its shadows. Susannah shot a small deer on their
second day in the forest (or maybe it was the third day... or the
fourth), and the meat was delicious after a steady diet of vegetarian
gunslinger burritos, but there were no ores or trolls in the deep
glades, and no elves-Keebler or otherwise. No more deer, either.
"I keep lookin for the candy house," Eddie said. They'd been winding
their way through the great old trees for several days by then. Or
maybe it had been as long as a week. All he knew for sure was that they
were still reasonably close to the Path of the Beam. They could see it
in the sky... and they could feel it.
"What candy house is this?" Roland asked. "Is it another tale? If so,
I'd hear."
Of course he would. The man was a glutton for stories, especially those
that led off with a "Once upon a time when everyone lived in the
forest." But the way he listened was a little odd. A little off. Eddie
had mentioned this to Susannah once, and she'd nailed it with a single
stroke, as she often did. Susannah had a poet's almost uncanny ability
to put feelings into words, freezing them in place.
"That's 'cause he doesn't listen all big-eyed like a kid at bedtime,"
she said. "That's just how you want him to listen, honey-bunch."
"And how does he listen?"
"Like an anthropologist," she had replied promptly. "Like an
anthropologist tryin to figure out some strange culture by their myths
and legends."
She was right. And if Roland's way of listening made Eddie
uncomfortable, it was probably because in his heart, Eddie felt that if
anyone should be listening like scientists, it should be him and Suze
and Jake. Because they came from a far more sophisticated where and
when. Didn't they?
Whether they did or didn't, the four had discovered a great number of
stories that were common to both worlds. Roland knew a tale called
"Diana's Dream" that was eerily close to "The Lady or the Tiger," which
all three exiled New Yorkers had read in school. The tale of Lord Perth
was similar to the Bible story of David and Goliath. Roland had heard
many tales of the Man Jesus, who died on the cross to redeem the sins
of the world, and told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake that Jesus had His
fair share of followers in Mid-World. There were also songs common to
both worlds. "Careless Love" was one. "Hey Jude" was another, although
in Roland's world, the first line of this song was "Hey Jude, I see
you, lad."
Eddie passed at least an hour telling Roland the story of Hansel and
Gretel, turning the wicked child-eating witch into Rhea of the Coos
almost without thinking of it. When he got to the part about her trying
to fatten the children up, he broke off and asked Roland: "Do you know
this one? A version of this one?"
"No," Roland said, "but it's a fair tale. Tell it to the end, please."
Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after,
and the gunslinger nodded. "No one ever does live happily ever after,
but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don't we?"
"Yeah," Jake said.
Oy was trotting at the boy's heel, looking up at Jake with the usual
expression of calm adoration in his gold-ringed eyes. "Yeah," the
bumbler said, copying the boy's rather glum inflection exactly.
Eddie threw an arm around Jake's shoulders. "Too bad you're over here
instead of back in New York," he said. "If you were back in the Apple,
Jakey-boy, you'd probably have your own child psychiatrist by now.
You'd be working on these issues about your parents. Getting to the
heart of your unresolved conflicts. Maybe getting some good drugs, too.
Ritalin, stuff like that."
"On the whole, I'd rather be here," Jake said, and looked down at Oy.
"Yeah," Eddie said. "I don't blame you."
"Such stories are called 'fairy tales,' " Roland mused.
"Yeah," Eddie replied.
"There were no fairies in this one, though."
"No," Eddie agreed. "That's more like a category name than anything
else. In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories... your
science fiction stories... your Westerns... your fairy tales. Get it?"
"Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one
story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?"
"I guess that's close enough," Susannah said.
"Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked.
"Sometimes at supper, I guess," Eddie said, "but when it comes to
entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don't
let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds
kinda boring when you put it that way."
"How many of these fairy tales would you say there are?"
With no hesitation-and certainly no collusion-Eddie, Susannah, and
Jake all said the same word at exactly the same time: "Nineteen!" And a
moment later, Oy repeated it in his hoarse voice: "Nineteen!"
They looked at each other and laughed, because "nineteen" had become a
kind of jokey catchword among them, replacing "bumhug," which Jake and
Eddie had pretty much worn out. Yet the laughter had a tinge of
uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a
trifle weird. Eddie had found himself carving it on the side of his
most recent wooden animal, like a brand: Hey there, Pard, welcome to
our spread! We call it the Bar-Nineteen. Both Susannah and Jake had
confessed to bringing wood for the evening fire in armloads of nineteen
pieces. Neither of them could say why; it just felt right to do it that
way, somehow.
Then there was the morning Roland had stopped them at the edge of the
wood through which they were now traveling. He had pointed at the sky,
where one particularly ancient tree had reared its hoary branches. The
shape those branches made against the sky was the number nineteen.
Clearly nineteen. They had all seen it, but Roland had seen it first.
Yet Roland, who believed in omens and portents as routinely as Eddie
had once believed in lightbulbs and Double-A batteries, had a tendency
to dismiss his ka-tet's odd and sudden infatuation with the number.
They had grown close, he said, as close as any ka-tet could, and so
their thoughts, habits, and little obsessions had a tendency to spread
among them all, like a cold. He believed that Jake was facilitating
this to a certain degree.
"You've got the touch, Jake," he said. "I'm not sure that it's as
strong in you as it was in my old friend Alain, but by the gods I
believe it may be."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Jake had replied, frowning in
puzzlement. Eddie did-sort of-and guessed that Jake would know, in
time. If time ever began passing in a normal way again, that was.
And on the day Jake brought the muffin-balls, it did.
THREE
They had stopped for lunch (more uninteresting vegetarian burritos, the
deer meat now gone and the Keebler cookies little more than a sweet
memory) when Eddie noticed that Jake was gone and asked the gunslinger
if he knew where the kid had gotten off to.
"Peeled off about half a wheel back," Roland said, and pointed along
the road with the two remaining fingers of his right hand. "He's all
right. If he wasn't, we'd all feel it." Roland looked at his burrito,
then took an unenthusiastic bite.
Eddie opened his mouth to say something else, but Susannah got there
first. "Here he is now. Hi there, sugar, what you got?"
Jake's arms were full of round things the size of tennis balls. Only
these balls would never bounce true; they had little horns sticking up
from them. When the kid got closer, Eddie could smell them, and the
smell was wonderful-like fresh-baked bread.
"I think these might be good to eat," Jake said. "They smell like the
fresh sourdough bread my mother and Mrs. Shaw-the housekeeper-got
at Zabar's." He looked at Susannah and Eddie, smiling a little. "Do you
guys know Zabar's?"
"I sure do," Susannah said. "Best of everything, mmm-hmmm. And they do
smell fine. You didn't eat any yet, did you?"
"No way." He looked questioningly at Roland.
The gunslinger ended the suspense by taking one, plucking off the
horns, and biting into what was left. "Muffin-balls," he said. "I
haven't seen any in gods know how long. They're wonderful." His blue
eyes were gleaming. "Don't want to eat the horns; they're not poison
but they're sour. We can fry them, if there's a little deerfat left.
That way they taste almost like meat."
"Sounds like a good idea," Eddie said. "Knock yourself out. As for me,
I think I'll skip the mushroom muff-divers, or whatever they are."
"They're not mushrooms at all," Roland said. "More like a kind of
ground berry."
Susannah took one, nibbled, then helped herself to a bigger bite. "You
don't want to skip these, sweetheart," she said. "My Daddy's friend,
Pop Mose, would have said 'These are prime.' " She took another of the
muffin-balls from Jake and ran a thumb over its silky surface.
"Maybe," he said, "but there was this book I read for a report back in
high school-I think it was called We Have Always Lived in the
Castle-where this nutty chick poisoned her whole family with things
like that." He bent toward Jake, raising his eyebrows and stretching
the corners of his mouth in what he hoped was a creepy smile. "Poisoned
her whole family and they died in AG-o-ny!"
Eddie fell off the log on which he had been sitting and began to roll
around on the needles and fallen leaves, making horrible faces and
choking sounds. Oy ran around him, yipping Eddie's name in a series of
high-pitched barks.
"Quit it," Roland said. "Where did you find these, Jake?"
"Back there," he said. "In a clearing I spotted from the path. It's
full of these things. Also, if you guys are hungry for meat... I know I
am... there's all kinds of sign. A lot of the scat's fresh." His eyes
searched Roland's face. "Very... fresh... scat." He spoke slowly, as if
to someone who wasn't fluent in the language.
A little smile played at the corners of Roland's mouth. "Speak quiet
but speak plain," he said. "What worries you, Jake?"
When Jake replied, his lips barely made the shapes of the words. "Men
watching me while I picked the muffin-balls." He paused, then added:
"They're watching us now."
Susannah took one of the muffin-balls, admired it, then dipped her face
as if to smell it like a flower. "Back the way we came? To the right of
the road?"
"Yes," Jake said.
Eddie raised a curled fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough, and
said: "How many?"
"I think four."
"Five," Roland said. "Possibly as many as six. One's a woman. Another a
boy not much older than Jake."
Jake looked at him, startled. Eddie said, "How long have they been
there?"
"Since yesterday," Roland said. "Cut in behind us from almost dead
east."
"And you didn't tell us?" Susannah asked. She spoke rather sternly, not
bothering to cover her mouth and obscure the shapes of the words.
Roland looked at her with the barest twinkle in his eye. "I was curious
as to which of you would smell them out first. Actually, I had my money
on you, Susannah."
She gave him a cool look and said nothing. Eddie thought there was more
than a little Detta Walker in that look, and was glad not to be on the
receiving end.
"What do we do about them?" Jake asked.
"For now, nothing," the gunslinger said.
Jake clearly didn't like this. "What if they're like Tick-Tock's katet?
Gasher and Hoots and those guys?"
"They're not."
"How do you know?'
"Because they would have set on us already and they'd be fly-food."
There seemed no good reply to that, and they took to the road again. It
wound through deep shadows, finding its way among trees that were
centuries old. Before they had been walking twenty minutes, Eddie heard
the sound of their pursuers (or shadowers): snapping twigs, rustling
underbrush, once even a low voice. Slewfeet, in Roland's terminology.
Eddie was disgusted with himself for remaining unaware of them for so
long. He also wondered what yon cullies did for a living. If it was
tracking and trapping, they weren't very good at it.
Eddie Dean had become a part of Mid-World in many ways, some so subde
he wasn't consciously aware of them, but he still thought of distances
in miles instead of wheels. He guessed they'd come about fifteen from
the spot where Jake rejoined them with his muffin-balls and his news
when Roland called it a day. They stopped in the middle of the road, as
they always did since entering the forest; that way the embers of their
campfire stood little chance of setting the woods on fire.
Eddie and Susannah gathered a nice selection of fallen branches while
Roland and Jake made a little camp and set about cutting up Jake's
trove of muffin-balls. Susannah rolled her wheelchair effortlessly over
the duff under the ancient trees, piling her selections in her lap.
Eddie walked nearby, humming under his breath.
"Lookit over to your left, sugar," Susannah said. He did, and saw a
distant orange blink. A fire. "Not very good, are they?" he asked. "No.
Truth is, I feel a little sorry for em."
"Any idea what they're up to?"
"Unh-unh, but I think Roland's right-they'll tell us when they're
ready. Either that or decide we're not what they want and just sort of
fade away. Come on, let's go back."
"Just a second." He picked up one more branch, hesitated, then took yet
another. Then it was right. "Okay," he said.
As they headed back, he counted the sticks he'd picked up, then the
ones in Susannah's lap. The total came to nineteen in each case.
"Suze," he said, and when she glanced over at him: "Time's started up
again."
She didn't ask him what he meant, only nodded.
FOUR
Eddie's resolution about not eating the muffin-balls didn't last long;
they just smelled too damned good sizzling in the lump of deerfat
Roland (thrifty, murderous soul that he was) had saved away in his
scuffed old purse. Eddie took his share on one of the ancient plates
they'd found in Shardik's woods and gobbled them.
"These are as good as lobster," he said, then remembered the monsters
on the beach that had eaten Roland's fingers. "As good as Nathan's
hotdogs is what I meant to say. And I'm sorry for teasing you, Jake."
"Don't worry about it," Jake said, smiling. "You never tease hard."
"One thing you should be aware of," Roland said. He was smiling-he
smiled more these days, quite a lot more-but his eyes were serious.
"All of you. Muffin-balls sometimes bring very lively dreams."
"You mean they make you stoned?" Jake asked, rather uneasily. He was
thinking of his father. Elmer Chambers had enjoyed many of the weirder
things in life.
"Stoned? I'm not sure I-"
"Buzzed. High. Seeing things. Like when you took the mescaline and went
into the stone circle where that thing almost... you know, almost hurt
me."
Roland paused for a moment, remembering. There had been a kind of
succubus imprisoned in that ring of stones. Left to its own devices,
she undoubtedly would have initiated Jake Chambers sexually, then
fucked him to death. As matters turned out, Roland had made it speak.
To punish him, it had sent him a vision of Susan Delgado.
"Roland?" Jake was looking at him anxiously.
"Don't concern yourself, Jake. There are mushrooms that do what you're
thinking of-change consciousness, heighten it-but not muffin-balls.
These are berries, just good to eat. If your dreams are particularly
vivid, just remind yourself you are dreaming."
Eddie thought this a very odd little speech. For one thing, it wasn't
like Roland to be so tenderly solicitous of their mental health. Not
like him to waste words, either.
Things have started again and he knows it, too, Eddie thought. There
was a little time-out there, but now the clock's running again. Game
on, as they say.
"We going to set a watch, Roland?" Eddie asked.
"Not by my warrant," the gunslinger said comfortably, and began rolling
himself a smoke.
"You really don't think they're dangerous, do you?" Susannah said, and
raised her eyes to the woods, where the individual trees were now
losing themselves in the general gloom of evening. The little spark of
campfire they'd noticed earlier was now gone, but the people following
them were still there. Susannah felt them. When she looked down at Oy
and saw him gazing in the same direction, she wasn't surprised.
"I think that may be their problem," Roland said.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Eddie asked, but Roland would say no
more. He simply lay in the road with a rolled-up piece of deerskin
beneath his neck, looking up at the dark sky and smoking.
Later, Roland's ka-tet slept. They posted no watch and were
undisturbed.
FIVE
The dreams, when they came, were not dreams at all. They all knew this
except perhaps for Susannah, who in a very real sense was not there at
all that night.
My God, I'm back in New York, Eddie thought. And, on the heels of this:
Really back in New York. This is really happening.
It was. He was in New York. On Second Avenue.
That was when Jake and Oy came around the corner from Fifty-fourth
Street. "Hey, Eddie," Jake said, grinning. "Welcome home."
Game on, Eddie thought. Game on.
Correspondent:: thunderchiefup@hotmail.com
Date: 23 Feb 2005 05:16:17 -0800
--------
Chapter II: New York Groove
ONE
Jake fell asleep looking into pure darkness-no stars in that cloudy
night sky, no moon. As he drifted off, he had a sensation of falling
that he recognized with dismay: in his previous life as a so-called
normal child he'd often had dreams of falling, especially around exam
time, but these had ceased since his violent rebirth into Mid-World.
Then the falling feeling was gone. He heard a brief chiming melody that
was somehow too beautiful: three notes and you wanted it to stop, a
dozen and you thought it would kill you if it didn't. Each chime seemed
to make his bones vibrate. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it? he thought, for
although the chiming melody was nothing like the sinister warble of the
thinny, somehow it was.
It was.
Then, just when he truly believed he could bear it no longer, the
terrible, gorgeous tune stopped. The darkness behind his closed eyes
suddenly lit up a brilliant dark red.
He opened them cautiously on strong sunlight.
And gaped.
At New York.
Taxis bustled past, gleaming bright yellow in the sunshine. A young
black man wearing Walkman earphones strolled by Jake, bopping his
sandaled feet a little bit to the music and going "Cha-da-ba,
cha-da-fcow!" under his breath. A jackhammer battered Jake's eardrums.
Chunks of cement dropped into a dumptruck with a crash that echoed from
one cliff-face of buildings to another. The world was a-din with
racket. He had gotten used to the deep silences of Mid-World without
even realizing it. No, more. Had come to love them. Still, this noise
and bustle had its attractions, and Jake couldn't deny it. Back in the
New York groove. He felt a little grin stretch his lips.
"Ake! Ake!" cried a low, rather distressed voice. Jake looked down and
saw Oy sitting on the sidewalk with his tail curled neatly around him.
The billy-bumbler wasn't wearing little red booties and Jake wasn't
wearing the red Oxfords (thank God), but this was still very like their
visit to Roland's Gilead, which they had reached by traveling in the
pink Wizard's Glass. The glass ball that had caused so much trouble and
woe.
No glass this time... he'd just gone to sleep. But this was no dream.
It was more intense than any dream he'd ever had, and more textured.
Also...
Also, people kept detouring around him and Oy as they stood to the left
of a midtown saloon called Kansas City Blues. While Jake was making
this observation, a woman actually stepped over Oy, hitching up her
straight black skirt a bit at the knee in order to do so. Her
preoccupied face {I'm just one more New Yorker minding my business, so
don't screw with mewss what that face said to Jake) never changed.
They don't see us, but somehow they sense us. And if they can sense us,
we must really be here.
The first logical question was Why? Jake considered this for a moment,
then decided to table it. He had an idea the answer would come.
Meantime, why not enjoy New York while he had it?
"Come on, Oy," he said, and walked around the corner. The
billy-bumbler, clearly no city boy, walked so close to him that
Jake could feel his breath feathering against his ankle.
Second Avenue, he thought. Then: My God-
Before he could finish the thought, he saw Eddie Dean standing outside
of the Barcelona Luggage store, looking dazed and more than a little
out of place in old jeans, a deerskin shirt, and deerskin moccasins.
His hair was clean, but it hung to his shoulders in a way that
suggested no professional had seen to it in quite some time. Jake
realized he himself didn't look much better; he was also wearing a
deerskin shirt and, on his lower half, the battered remains of the
Dockers he'd had on the day he left home for good, setting sail for
Brooklyn, Dutch Hill, and another world.
Good thing no one can see us, Jake thought, then decided that wasn't
true. If people could see them, they'd probably get rich on spare
change before noon. The thought made him grin. "Hey, Eddie," he said.
"Welcome home."
Eddie nodded, looking bemused. "See you brought your friend."
Jake reached down and gave Oy an affectionate pat. "He's my version of
the American Express Card. I don't go home without him."
Jake was about to go on-he felt witty, bubbly, full of amusing things
to say-when someone came around the corner, passed them without
looking (as everyone else had), and changed everything. It was a kid
wearing Dockers that looked like Jake's because they were Jake's. Not
the pair he had on now, but they were his, all right. So were the
sneakers. They were the ones Jake had lost in Dutch Hill. The
plaster-man who guarded the door between the worlds had torn them right
off his feet.
The boy who had just passed them was John Chambers, it was him, only
this version looked soft and innocent and painfully young. How did you
survive? he asked his own retreating back. How did you survive the
mental stress of losing your mind, and running away from home, and that
horrible house in Brooklyn ? Most of all, how did you survive the
doorkeeper? You must be tougher than you look.
Eddie did a doubletake so comical that Jake laughed in spite of his own
shocked surprise. It made him think of those comic-book panels where
Archie or Jughead is trying to look in two directions at the same time.
He looked down and saw a similar expression on Oy's face. Somehow
that made the whole thing even funnier.
"What the fuck?" Eddie asked.
"Instant replay," Jake said, and laughed harder. It came out sounding
goofy as shit, but he didn't care. He felt goofy. "It's like when we
watched Roland in the Great Hall of Gilead, only this is New York and
it's May 31st, 1977! It's the day I took French Leave from Piper!
Instant replay, baby!"
"French-?" Eddie began, but Jake didn't give him a chance to finish.
He was struck by another realization. Except struck was too mild a
word. He was buried by it, like a man who just happens to be on the
beach when a tidal wave rolls in. His face blazed so brightly that
Eddie actually took a step back.
"The rose!" he whispered. He felt too weak in the diaphragm to speak
any louder, and his throat was as dry as a sandstorm. "Eddie, the
rose!"
"What about it?"
"This is the day I see it!" He reached out and touched Eddie's forearm
with a trembling hand. "I go to the bookstore... then to the vacant
lot. I think there used to be a delicatessen-"
Eddie was nodding and beginning to look excited himself. "Tom and
Jerry's Artistic Deli, corner of Second and Forty-sixth-"
"The deli's gone but the rose is there! That me walking down the street
is going to see it, and we can see it, too!"
At that, Eddie's own eyes blazed. "Come on, then," he said. "We don't
want to lose you. Him. Whoever the fuck."
"Don't worry," Jake said. "I know where he's going."
TWO
The Jake ahead of them-New York Jake, spring-of-1977 Jake- walked
slowly, looking everywhere, clearly digging the day. Mid-World Jake
remembered exactly how that boy had felt: the sudden relief when the
arguing voices in his mind
(I died!) (I didn't!)
had finally stopped their squabbling. Back by the board fence that had
been, where the two businessmen had been playing tic-tac-toe with a
Mark Cross pen. And, of course, there had been the relief of being away
from the Piper School and the insanity of his Final Essay for Ms.
Avery's English class. The Final Essay counted a full twenty-five per
cent toward each student's final grade, Ms. Avery had made that
perfectly clear, and Jake's had been gibberish. The fact that his
teacher had later given him an A+ on it didn't change that, only made
it clear that it wasn't just him; the whole world was losing its shit,
going nineteen.
Being out from under all that-even for a little while-had been
great. Of course he was digging the day.
Only the day's not quite right, Jake thought-the Jake walking along
behind his old self. Something about it...
He looked around but couldn't figure it out. Late May, bright summer
sun, lots of strollers and window-shoppers on Second Avenue, plenty of
taxis, the occasional long black limo; nothing wrong with any of this.
Except there was.
Everything was wrong with it.
THREE
Eddie felt the kid twitch his sleeve. "What's wrong with this picture?"
Jake asked.
Eddie looked around. In spite of his own adjustment problems (his
involved coming back to a New York that was clearly a few years behind
his when), he knew what Jake meant. Something was wrong.
He looked down at the sidewalk, suddenly sure he wouldn't have a
shadow. They'd lost their shadows like the kids in one of the
stories... one of the nineteen fairy tales... or was it maybe something
newer, like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe or Peter Pan? One of
what might be called the Modern Nineteen?
Didn't matter in any case, because their shadows were there.
Shouldn't be, though, Eddie thought. Shouldn't be able to see our
shadows when it's this dark.
Stupid thought. It wasn't dark. It was morning, for Christ's sake, a
bright May morning, sunshine winking off the chrome of passing cars and
the windows of the stores on the east side of Second Avenue brightly
enough to make you squint your eyes. Yet still it seemed somehow dark
to Eddie, as if all this were nothing but fragile surface, like the
canvas backdrop of a stage set. "At rise we see the Forest of Arden."
Or a Castle in Denmark. Or the Kitchen of Willy Loman's House. In this
case we see Second Avenue, midtown New York.
Yes, like that. Only behind this canvas you wouldn't find the workshop
and storage areas of backstage but only a great bulging darkness. Some
vast dead universe where Roland's Tower had already fallen.
Please let me be wrong, Eddie thought. Please let this just be a case
of culture shock or the plain old heebie-jeebies.
He didn't think it was.
"How'd we get here?" he asked Jake. "There was no door..." He trailed
off, and then asked with some hope: "Maybe it is a dream?"
"No," Jake said. "It's more like when we traveled in the Wizard's
Glass. Except this time there was no ball." A thought struck him. "Did
you hear music, though? Chimes? Just before you wound up here?"
Eddie nodded. "It was sort of overwhelming. Made my eyes water."
"Right," Jake said. "Exactly."
Oy sniffed a fire hydrant. Eddie and Jake paused to let the little guy
lift his leg and add his own notice to what was undoubtedly an already
crowded bulletin board. Ahead of them, that other Jake-Kid
Seventy-seven-was still walking slowly and gawking everywhere. To
Eddie he looked like a tourist from Michigan. He even craned up to see
the tops of the buildings, and Eddie had an idea that if the New York
Board of Cynicism caught you doing that, they took away your
Bloomingdale's charge card. Not that he was complaining; it made the
kid easy to follow.
And just as Eddie was thinking that, Kid Seventy-seven disappeared.
"Where'd you go? Christ, where'd you go?"
"Relax," Jake said. (At his ankle, Oy added his two cents' worth:
"Ax!") The kid was grinning. "I just went into the bookstore. The...
um... Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, it's called."
"Where you got Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book?"
"Right."
Eddie loved the mystified, dazzled grin Jake was wearing. It lit up his
whole face. "Remember how excited Roland got when I told him the
owner's name?"
Eddie did. The owner of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind was a
fellow named Calvin Tower.
"Hurry up," Jake said. "I want to watch."
Eddie didn't have to be asked twice. He wanted to watch, too.
FOUR
Jake stopped in the doorway to the bookstore. His smile didn't fade,
exactly, but it faltered.
"What is it?" Eddie asked. "What's wrong?"
"Dunno. Something's different, I think. It's just... so much has
happened since I was here..."
He was looking at the chalkboard in the window, which Eddie thought was
actually a very clever way of selling books. It looked like the sort of
thing you saw in diners, or maybe the fish markets.
TODAY'S SPECIALS
>From Mississippi! Pan-Fried William Faulkner
Hardcovers Market Price Vintage Library Paperbacks 75c each
>From Maine! Chilled Stephen King
Hardcovers Market Price
Book Club Bargains
Paperbacks 75c each
>From California! Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler
Hardcovers Market Price
Paperbacks 7 for $5.00
Eddie looked beyond this and saw that other Jake-the one without the
tan or the look of hard clarity in his eyes- standing at a small
display table. Kiddie books. Probably both the Nineteen Fairy Tales and
the Modern Nineteen.
Quit it, he told himself. That's obsessive-compulsive crap and you know
it.
Maybe, but good old Jake Seventy-seven was about to make a purchase
from that table which had gone on to change-and very likely to
save-their lives. He'd worry about the number nineteen later. Or not
at all, if he could manage it.
"Come on," he told Jake. "Let's go in."
The boy hung back.
"What's the matter?" Eddie asked. "Tower won't be able to see us, if
that's what you're worried about."
" Tower won't be able to," Jake said, "but what if he can?" He pointed
at his other self, the one who had yet to meet Gasher and Tick-Tock and
the old people of River Crossing. The one who had yet to meet Blaine
the Mono and Rhea of the Coos.
Jake was looking at Eddie with a kind of haunted curiosity. "What if I
see myself?"
Eddie supposed that might really happen. Hell, anything might happen.
But that didn't change what he felt in his heart. "I think we're
supposed to go in, Jake."
"Yeah..." It came out in a long sigh. "I do, too."
FIVE
They went in and they weren't seen and Eddie was relieved to count
twenty-one books on the display table that had attracted the boy's
notice. Except, of course, when Jake picked up the two he
wanted-Charlie the Choo-Choo and the riddle book-that left
nineteen.
"Find something, son?" a mild voice inquired. It was a fat fellow in an
open-throated white shirt. Behind him, at a counter that looked as if
it might have been filched from a turn-of-the-century soda fountain, a
trio of old guys were drinking coffee and nibbling pastries. A
chessboard with a game in progress sat on the marble counter.
"The guy sitting on the end is Aaron Deepneau," Jake whispered. "He's
going to explain the riddle about Samson to me."
"Shh!" Eddie said. He wanted to hear the conversation between Calvin
Tower and Kid Seventy-seven. All of a sudden that seemed very
important... only why was it so fucking dark in here?
Except it's not dark at all. The east side of the street gets plenty of
sun at this hour, and with the door open, this place is getting all of
it. How can you say it's dark ?
Because it somehow was. The sunlight-the contrast of the
sunlight-only made it worse. The fact that you couldn't exactly see
that darkness made it worse still... and Eddie realized a terrible
thing: these people were in danger. Tower, Deepneau, Kid Seventy-seven.
Probably him and Mid-World Jake and Oy, as well.
All of them.
SIX
Jake watched his other, younger self take a step back from the bookshop
owner, his eyes widening in surprise. Because his name is Tower, Jake
thought. That's what surprised me. Not because of Roland's Tower,
though- I didn't know about that yet-but because of the picture I
put on the last page of my Final Essay.
He had pasted a photo of the Leaning Tower of Pisa on the last page,
then had scribbled all over it with a black Crayola, darkening it as
best he could.
Tower asked him his name. Seventy-seven Jake told him and Tower joked
around with him a little. It was good joking-around, the kind you got
from adults who really didn't mind kids.
"Good handle, pard," Tower was saying. "Sounds like the footloose hero
in a Western novel-the guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans
up the town, and then travels on. Something by Wayne D. Overholser,
maybe..."
Jake took a step closer to his old self (part of him was thinking what
a wonderful sketch all this would make on Saturday Night Live), and his
eyes widened slightly. "Eddie!" He was still whispering, although he
knew the people in the bookstore couldn't-
Except maybe on some level they could. He remembered the lady back on
Fifty-fourth Street, twitching her skirt up at the knee so she could
step over Oy. And now Calvin Tower's eyes shifted slightly in his
direction before going back to the other version of him.
"Might be good not to attract unnecessary attention," Eddie muttered in
his ear.
"I know," Jake said, "but look at Charlie the Choo-Choo, Eddie!"
Eddie did, and for a moment saw nothing-except for Charlie himself,
of course: Charlie with his headlight eye and not-quite-trustworthy
cowcatcher grin. Then Eddie's eyebrows went up.
"I thought Charlie the Choo-Choo was written by a lady named Beryl
Evans," he whispered.
Jake nodded. "I did, too."
"Then who's this-" Eddie took another look. "Who's this Claudia y
Inez Bachman?"
"I have no idea," Jake said. "I never heard of her in my life."
SEVEN
One of the old men at the counter came sauntering toward them. Eddie
and Jake drew away. As they stepped back, Eddie's spine gave a cold
little wrench. Jake was very pale, and Oy was giving out a series of
low, distressed whines. Something was wrong here, all right. In a way
they had lost their shadows. Eddie just didn't know how.
Kid Seventy-seven had taken out his wallet and was paying for the two
books. There was some more talk and good-natured laughter, then he
headed for the door. When Eddie started after him, Mid-World Jake
grabbed his arm. "No, not yet-I come back in."
"I don't care if you alphabetize the whole place," Eddie said. "Let's
wait out on the sidewalk."
Jake thought about this, biting his lip, then nodded. They headed for
the door, then stopped and moved aside as the other Jake returned. The
riddle book was open. Calvin Tower had lumbered over to the chessboard
on the counter. He looked around with an amiable smile.
"Change your mind about that cup of coffee, O Hyperborean Wanderer?"
"No, I wanted to ask you-"
"This is the part about Samson's Riddle," Mid-World Jake said. "I don't
think it matters. Although the Deepneau guy sings a pretty good song,
if you want to hear it."
"I'll pass," Eddie said. "Come on."
They went out. And although things on Second Avenue were still
wrong-that sense of endless dark behind the scenes, behind the very
sky-it was somehow better than in The Manhattan Restaurant of the
Mind. At least there was fresh air.
"Tell you what," Jake said. "Let's go down to Second and Forty-sixth
right now." He jerked his head toward the version of him listening to
Aaron Deepneau sing. "I'll catch up with us."
Eddie considered it, then shook his head.
Jake's face fell a little. "Don't you want to see the rose?"
"You bet your ass I do," Eddie said. "I'm wild to see it."
"Then-"
"I don't feel like we're done here yet. I don't know why, but I don't."
Jake-the Kid Seventy-seven version of him-had left the door open
when he went back inside, and now Eddie moved into it. Aaron Deepneau
was telling Jake a riddle they would later try on Blaine the Mono: What
can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks. Mid-World Jake,
meanwhile, was once more looking at the notice-board in the bookstore
window
(Pan-Fried William Faulkner, Hard-Boiled Raymond Chandler). He wore a
frown of the kind that expresses doubt and anxiety rather than ill
temper.
"That sign's different, too," he said.
"How?"
"I can't remember."
"Is it important?"
Jake turned to him. The eyes below the furrowed brow were haunted. "I
don't know. It's another riddle. I hate riddles!"
Eddie sympathized. When is a Beryl not a Beryl? "When it's a Claudia,"
he said.
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Better step back, Jake, or you're going to run into
yourself."
Jake gave the oncoming version of John Chambers a startled glance, then
did as Eddie suggested. And when Kid Seventy-seven started on down
Second Avenue with his new books in his left hand, Mid-World Jake gave
Eddie a tired smile. "I do remember one thing," he said. "When I left
this bookstore, I was sure I'd never come here again. But I did."
"Considering that we're more ghosts than people, I'd say that's
debatable." Eddie gave the back of Jake's neck a friendly scruff. "And
if you have forgotten something important, Roland might be able to help
you remember. He's good at that."
Jake grinned at this, relieved. He knew from personal experience that
the gunslinger really was good at helping people remember. Roland's
friend Alain might have been the one with the strongest ability to
touch other minds, and his friend Cuthbert had gotten all the sense of
humor in that particular ka-tet, but Roland had developed over the
years into one hell of a hypnotist. He could have made a fortune in Las
Vegas.
"Can we follow me now?" Jake asked. "Check out the rose?" He looked up
and down Second Avenue-a street that was somehow bright and dark at
the same time-with a kind of unhappy perplexity. "Things are probably
better there. The rose makes everything better."
Eddie was about to say okay when a dark gray Lincoln Town Car pulled up
in front of Calvin Tower's bookshop. It parked by the yellow curb in
front of a fire hydrant with absolutely no hesitation. The front doors
opened, and when Eddie saw who was getting out from behind the wheel,
he seized Jake's shoulder.
"Ow!"Jake said. "Man, that hurts!"
Eddie paid no attention. In fact the hand on Jake's shoulder clamped
down even tighter.
"Christ," Eddie whispered. "Dear Jesus Christ, what's this? What in
hell is this?"
EIGHT
Jake watched Eddie go past pale to ashy gray. His eyes were bulging
from their sockets. Not without difficulty, Jake pried the clamping
hand off his shoulder. Eddie made as if to point with that hand, but
didn't seem to have the strength. It fell against the side of his leg
with a little thump.
The man who had gotten out on the passenger side of the Town Car walked
around to the sidewalk while the driver opened the rear curbside door.
Even to Jake their moves looked practiced, almost like steps in a
dance. The man who got out of the back seat was wearing an expensive
suit, but that didn't change the fact that he was basically a dumpy
little guy with a potbelly and black hair going gray around the edges.
Dandrufjy black hair, from the look of his suit's shoulders.
To Jake, the day suddenly felt darker than ever. He looked up to see if
the sun had gone behind a cloud. It hadn't, but it almost seemed to him
that there was a black corona forming around its brilliant circle, like
a ring of mascara around a startled eye.
Half a block farther downtown, the 1977 version of him was glancing in
the window of a restaurant, and Jake could remember the name of it:
Chew Chew Mama's. Not far beyond it was Tower of Power Records, where
he would think Towers are selling cheap today. If that version of him
had looked back, he would have seen the gray Town Car... but he hadn't.
Kid Seventy-seven's mind was fixed firmly on the future.
"It's Balazar," Eddie said.
"What?"
Eddie was pointing at the dumpy guy, who had paused to adjust his Sulka
tie. The other two now stood flanking him. They looked simultaneously
relaxed and watchful.
"Enrico Balazar. And looking much younger. God, he's almost
middle-aged!"
"It's 1977," Jake reminded him. Then, as the penny dropped: "That's the
guy you and Roland killed?" Eddie had told Jake the story of the
shoot-out at Balazar's club in 1987, leaving out the gorier parts. The
part, for instance, where Kevin Blake had lobbed the head of Eddie's
brother into Balazar's office in an effort to flush Eddie and Roland
into the open. Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie.
"Yeah," Eddie said. "The guy Roland and I killed. And the one who was
driving, that's Jack Andolini. Old Double-Ugly, people used to call
him, although never to his face. He went through one of those doors
with me just before the shooting started."
"Roland killed him, too. Didn't he?"
Eddie nodded. It was simpler than trying to explain how Jack Andolini
had happened to the blind and faceless beneath the tearing claws and
ripping jaws of the lobstrosities on the beach.
"The other bodyguard's George Biondi. Big Nose. I killed him myself.
Will kill him. Ten years from now." Eddie looked as if he might faint
at any second.
"Eddie, are you okay?"
"I guess so. I guess I have to be." They had drawn away from the
bookshop's doorway. Oy was still crouched at Jake's ankle. Down Second
Avenue, Jake's other, earlier self had disappeared. I'm running by
now, Jake thought. Maybe jumping over the UPS guy's dolly. Sprinting
all-out for the delicatessen, because I'm sure that's the way back to
Mid-World. The way back to him.
Balazar peered at his reflection in the window beside the today's
specials display-board, gave the wings of hair above his ears one last
little fluff with the tips of his fingers, then stepped through the
open door. Andolini and Biondi followed.
"Hard guys," Jake said.
"The hardest," Eddie agreed.
"From Brooklyn."
"Well, yeah."
"Why are hard guys from Brooklyn visiting a used-book store in
Manhattan?"
"I think that's what we're here to find out. Jake, did I hurt your
shoulder?"
"I'm okay. But I don't really want to go back in there."
"Neither do I. So let's go."
They went back into The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.
NINE
Oy was still at Jake's heel and still whining. Jake wasn't crazy about
the sound, but he understood it. The smell of fear in the bookstore was
palpable. Deepneau sat beside the chessboard, gazing unhappily at
Calvin Tower and the newcomers, who didn't look much like bibliophiles
in search of the elusive signed first edition. The other two old guys
at the counter were drinking the last of their coffee in big gulps,
with the air of fellows who have just remembered important appointments
elsewhere.
Cowards, Jake thought with a contempt he didn't recognize as a
relatively new thing in his life. Lowbellies. Being old forgives some
of it, but not all of it.
"We just have a couple of things to discuss, Mr. Toren," Balazar was
saying. He spoke in a low, calm, reasonable voice, without even a trace
of accent. "Please, if we could step back into your office-"
"We don't have business," Tower said. His eyes kept drifting to
Andolini. Jake supposed he knew why. Jack Andolini looked the
ax-wielding psycho in a horror movie. "Come July fifteenth, we might
have business. Might. So we could talk after the Fourth. I guess. If
you wanted to." He smiled to show he was being reasonable. "But now?
Gee, I just don't see the point. It's not even June yet. And for your
information my name's not-"
"He doesn't see the point," Balazar said. He looked at Andolini; looked
at the one with the big nose; raised his hands to his shoulders, then
dropped them. What's wrong with this world of ours? the gesture said.
"Jack? George? This man took a check from me-the amount before the
decimal point was a one followed by five zeroes-and now he says he
doesn't see the point of talking to me."
"Unbelievable," Biondi said. Andolini said nothing. He simply looked at
Calvin Tower, muddy brown eyes peering out from beneath the unlovely
bulge of his skull like mean little animals peering out of a cave. With
a face like that, Jake supposed, you didn't have to talk much to get
your point across. The point being intimidation.
"I want to talk to you," Balazar said. He spoke in a patient,
reasonable tone of voice, but his eyes were fixed on Tower's face with
a terrible intensity. "Why? Because my employers in this matter want me
to talk to you. That's good enough for me. And do you know what? I
think you can afford five minutes of chitchat for your hundred grand.
Don't you?"
"The hundred thousand is gone," Tower said bleakly. "As I'm sure you
and whoever hired you must know."
"That's of no concern to me," Balazar said. "Why would it be? It was
your money. What concerns me is whether or not you're going to take us
out back. If not, we'll have to have our conversation right here, in
front of the whole world."
The whole world now consisted of Aaron Deepneau, one billy-bumbler, and
a couple of expatriate New Yorkers none of the men in the bookstore
could see. Deepneau's counter-buddies had run like the lowbellies they
were.
Tower made one last try. "I don't have anyone to mind the store.
Lunch-hour is coming up, and we often have quite a few browsers
during-"
"This place doesn't do fifty dollars a day," Andolini said, "and we all
know it, Mr. Toren. If you're really worried you're going to miss a big
sale, let him run the cash register for a few minutes."
For one horrible second, Jake thought the one Eddie had called "Old
Double-Ugly" meant none other than John "Jake" Chambers. Then he
realized Andolini was pointing past him, at Deepneau.
Tower gave in. Or Toren. "Aaron?" he asked. "Do you mind?"
"Not if you don't," Deepneau said. He looked troubled. "Sure you want
to talk with these guys?"
Biondi gave him a look. Jake thought Deepneau stood up under it
remarkably well. In a weird way, he felt proud of the old guy.
"Yeah," Tower said. "Yeah, it's fine."
"Don't worry, he won't lose his butthole virginity on our account,"
Biondi said, and laughed.
"Watch your mouth, you're in a place of scholarship," Balazar said, but
Jake thought he smiled a little. "Come on, Toren. Just a little chat."
"That's not my name! I had it legally changed on-"
"Whatever," Balazar said soothingly. He actually patted Tower's arm.
Jake was still trying to get used to the idea that all this... all this
melodrama. . . had happened after he'd left the store with his two new
books (new to him, anyway) and resumed his journey. That it had all
happened behind his back.
"A squarehead's always a squarehead, right, boss?" Biondi asked
jovially. "Just a Dutchman. Don't matter what he calls himself."
Balazar said, "If I want you to talk, George, I'll tell you what I want
you to say. Have you got that?"
"Okay," Biondi said. Then, perhaps after deciding that didn't sound
quite enthusiastic enough: "Yeah! Sure."
"Good." Balazar, now holding the arm he had patted, guided Tower toward
the back of the shop. Books were piled helter-skelter here; the air was
heavy with the scent of a million musty pages. There was a door marked
employees only. Tower produced a ring of keys, and they jingled
slightly as he picked through them.
"His hands are shaking," Jake murmured.
Eddie nodded. "Mine would be, too."
Tower found the key he wanted, turned it in the lock, opened the door.
He took another look at the three men who had come to visit him-hard
guys from Brooklyn-then led them into the back room. The door closed
behind them, and Jake heard the sound of a bolt being shot across. He
doubted Tower himself had done that.
Jake looked up into the convex anti-shoplifting mirror mounted in the
corner of the shop, saw Deepneau pick up the telephone beside the cash
register, consider it, then put it down again.