The Drawing of the Three (30 page)

“Well looky yere!” Detta had screamed so much that now there were moments when her voice disappeared almost entirely, becoming no more than a weird whisper, like winter wind under a door. “I thought you was dead, Mister Man!”

Roland was getting slowly to his feet. He still looked to Eddie like
a man using the rungs of an invisible ladder to make it. Eddie felt an angry sort of pity, and this was a familiar emotion, oddly nostalgic. After a moment he understood. It was like when he and Henry used to watch the fights on TV, and one fighter would hurt the other, hurt him terribly, again and again, and the crowd would be screaming for blood, and
Henry
would be screaming for blood, but Eddie only sat there, feeling that angry pity, that dumb disgust; he’d sat there sending thought-waves at the referee:
Stop it, man, are you fucking blind? He’s
dying
out there! DYING! Stop the fucking fight!

There was no way to stop this one.

Roland looked at her from his haunted feverish eyes. “A lot of people have thought that, Detta.” He looked at Eddie. “You ready?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Are
you?
”

“Yes.”

“
Can
you?”

“Yes.”

They went on.

Around ten o’clock Detta began rubbing her temples with her fingers.

“Stop,” she said. “I feel sick. Feel like I goan throw up.”

“Probably that big meal you ate last night,” Eddie said, and went on pushing. “You should have skipped dessert. I told you that chocolate layer cake was heavy.”

“I goan throw up! I—”

“Stop, Eddie!” the gunslinger said.

Eddie stopped.

The woman in the chair suddenly twisted galvanically, as if an electric shock had run through her. Her eyes popped wide open, glaring at nothing.

“I BROKE YO PLATE YOU STINKIN OLE BLUE LADY!”
she screamed.
“I BROKE IT AND I’M FUCKIN GLAD I D—”

She suddenly slumped forward in her chair. If not for the ropes, she would have fallen out of it.

Christ, she’s dead, she’s had a stroke and she’s dead,
Eddie thought. He started around the chair, remembered how sly and tricksy she could be, and stopped as suddenly as he had started. He looked at Roland. Roland looked back at him evenly, his eyes giving away not a thing.

Then she moaned. Her eyes opened.

Her
eyes.

Odetta’s
eyes.

“Dear God, I’ve fainted again, haven’t I?” she said. “I’m sorry you had to tie me in. My stupid legs! I think I could sit up a little if you—”

That was when Roland’s own legs slowly came unhinged and he swooned some thirty miles south of the place where the Western Sea’s beach came to an end.

To Eddie Dean, he and the Lady no longer seemed to be trudging or even walking up what remained of the beach. They seemed to be
flying.

Odetta Holmes still neither liked nor trusted Roland; that was clear. But she recognized how desperate his condition had become, and responded to that. Now, instead of pushing a dead clump of steel and rubber to which a human body just happened to be attached, Eddie felt almost as if he were pushing a glider.

Go with her. Before, I was watching out for you and that was important. Now I’ll only slow you down.

He came to realize how right the gunslinger was almost at once. Eddie pushed the chair; Odetta pumped it.

One of the gunslinger’s revolvers was stuck in the waistband of Eddie’s pants.

Do you remember when I told you to be on your guard and you weren’t?

Yes.

I’m telling you again:
Be on your guard.
Every moment. If her
other
comes back, don’t wait even a second. Brain her.

What if I kill her?

Then it’s the end. But if
she
kills
you,
that’s the end, too. And if she comes back she’ll try. She’ll try.

Eddie hadn’t wanted to leave him. It wasn’t just that cat-scream in
the night (although he kept thinking about it); it was simply that Roland had become his only touchstone in this world. He and Odetta didn’t belong here.

Still, he realized that the gunslinger had been right.

“Do you want to rest?” he asked Odetta. “There’s more food. A little.”

“Not yet,” she answered, although her voice sounded tired. “Soon.”

“All right, but at least stop pumping. You’re weak. Your . . . your stomach, you know.”

“All right.” She turned, her face gleaming with sweat, and favored him with a smile that both weakened and strengthened him. He could have died for such a smile . . . and thought he would, if circumstances demanded.

He hoped to Christ circumstances wouldn’t, but it surely wasn’t out of the question. Time had become something so crucial it screamed.

She put her hands in her lap and he went on pushing. The tracks the chair left behind were now dimmer; the beach had become steadily firmer, but it was also littered with rubble that could cause an accident. You wouldn’t have to help one happen at the speed they were going. A really bad accident might hurt Odetta and that would be bad; such an accident could also wreck the chair, and that would be bad for them and probably worse for the gunslinger, who would almost surely die alone. And if Roland died, they would be trapped in this world forever.

With Roland too sick and weak to walk, Eddie had been forced to face one simple fact: there were three people here, and two of them were cripples.

So what hope, what chance was there?

The chair.

The chair was the hope, the whole hope, and nothing
but
the hope.

So help them God.

The gunslinger had regained consciousness shortly after Eddie dragged him into the shade of a rock outcropping. His face, where it was not ashy, was a hectic red. His chest rose and fell rapidly. His right arm was a network of twisting red lines.

“Feed her,” he croaked at Eddie.

“You—”

“Never mind
me.
I’ll be all right. Feed her. She’ll eat now, I think. And you’ll need her strength.”

“Roland, what if she’s just
pretending
to be—”

The gunslinger gestured impatiently.

“She’s not pretending to be anything, except alone in her body. I know it and you do, too. It’s in her face. Feed her, for the sake of your father, and while she eats, come back to me. Every minute counts now. Every
second.
”

Eddie got up, and the gunslinger pulled him back with his left hand. Sick or not, his strength was still there.

“And say nothing about the
other.
Whatever she tells you, however she explains,
don’t contradict her.
”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just know it’s wrong. Now do as I say and don’t waste any more time!”

Odetta had been sitting in her chair, looking out at the sea with an expression of mild and bemused amazement. When Eddie offered her the chunks of lobster left over from the previous night, she smiled ruefully. “I would if I could,” she said, “but you know what happens.”

Eddie, who had no idea what she was talking about, could only shrug and say, “It wouldn’t hurt to try again, Odetta. You need to eat, you know. We’ve got to go as fast as we can.”

She laughed a little and touched his hand. He felt something like an electric charge jump from her to him. And it was her; Odetta. He knew it as well as Roland did.

“I love you, Eddie. You have tried so hard. Been so patient. So has
he—
” She nodded toward the place where the gunslinger lay propped against the rocks, watching. “—but he is a hard man to love.”

“Yeah. Don’t I know it.”

“I’ll try one more time.

“For you.”

She smiled and he felt all the world move for her, because of her, and he thought
Please God, I have never had much, so please don’t take her away from me again. Please.

She took the chunks of lobster-meat, wrinkled her nose in a rueful comic expression, and looked up at him.

“Must I?”

“Just give it a shot,” he said.

“I never ate scallops again,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“I thought I told you.”

“You might have,” he said, and gave a little nervous laugh. What the gunslinger had said about not letting her know about the
other
loomed very large inside his mind just then.

“We had them for dinner one night when I was ten or eleven. I hated the way they tasted, like little rubber balls, and later I vomited them up. I never ate them again. But . . .” She sighed. “As you say, I’ll ‘give it a shot.’ ”

She put a piece in her mouth like a child taking a spoonful of medicine she knows will taste nasty. She chewed slowly at first, then more rapidly. She swallowed. Took another piece. Chewed, swallowed. Another. Now she was nearly
wolfing
it.

“Whoa, slow down!” Eddie said.

“It must be another
kind!
That’s it, of
course
it is!” She looked at Eddie shiningly. “We’ve moved further up the beach and the species has changed! I’m no longer allergic, it seems! It doesn’t taste
nasty,
like it did before . . . and I
did
try to keep it down, didn’t I?” She looked at him nakedly. “I tried
very
hard.”

“Yeah.” To himself he sounded like a radio broadcasting a very distant signal.
She thinks she’s been eating every day and then
up-chucking everything. She thinks that’s why she’s so weak. Christ Almighty.
“Yeah, you tried like hell.”

“It tastes—” These words were hard to pick up because her mouth was full. “It tastes so
good!
” She laughed. The sound was delicate and lovely. “It’s going to stay down! I’m going to take nourishment! I know it! I
feel
it!”

“Just don’t overdo it,” he cautioned, and gave her one of the water-skins. “You’re not used to it. All that—” He swallowed and there was an audible (audible to him, at least) click in his throat. “All that throwing up.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I need to talk to Roland for a few minutes.”

“All right.”

But before he could go she grasped his hand again.

“Thank you, Eddie. Thank you for being so patient. And thank
him.
” She paused gravely. “Thank him, and don’t tell him that he scares me.”

“I won’t,” Eddie had said, and went back to the gunslinger.

Even when she wasn’t pushing, Odetta was a help. She navigated with the prescience of a woman who has spent a long time weaving a wheelchair through a world that would not acknowledge handicapped people such as she for years to come.

“Left,” she’d call, and Eddie would gee to the left, gliding past a rock snarling out of the pasty grit like a decayed fang. On his own, he might have seen it . . . or maybe not.

“Right,” she called, and Eddie hawed right, barely missing one of the increasingly rare sandtraps.

They finally stopped and Eddie lay down, breathing hard.

“Sleep,” Odetta said. “An hour. I’ll wake you.”

Eddie looked at her.

“I’m not lying. I observed your friend’s condition, Eddie—”

“He’s not exactly my friend, you kn—”

“—and I know how important time is. I won’t let you sleep longer than an hour out of a misguided sense of mercy. I can tell the sun quite well. You won’t do that man any good by wearing yourself out, will you?”

“No,” he said, thinking:
But you don’t understand. If I sleep and Detta Walker comes back—

“Sleep, Eddie,” she said, and since Eddie was too weary (and too much in love) to do other than trust her, he did. He slept and she woke him when she said she would and she was still Odetta, and they went on, and now she was pumping again, helping. They raced up the diminishing beach toward the door Eddie kept frantically looking for and kept not seeing.

When he left Odetta eating her first meal in days and went back to the gunslinger, Roland seemed a little better.

“Hunker down,” he said to Eddie.

Eddie hunkered.

“Leave me the skin that’s half full. All I need. Take her to the door.”

“What if I don’t—”

“Find it? You’ll find it. The first two were there; this one will be, too. If you get there before sundown tonight, wait for dark and then kill double. You’ll need to leave her food and make sure she’s sheltered as well as she can be. If you don’t reach it tonight, kill triple. Here.”

He handed over one of his guns.

Eddie took it with respect, surprised as before by how heavy it was.

“I thought the shells were all losers.”

“Probably are. But I’ve loaded with the ones I believe were wetted least—three from the buckle side of the left belt, three from the buckle side of the right. One may fire. Two, if you’re lucky. Don’t try them on the crawlies.” His eyes considered Eddie briefly. “There may be other things out there.”

“You heard it too, didn’t you?”

“If you mean something yowling in the hills, yes. If you mean the Bugger-Man, as your eyes say, no. I heard a wildcat in the brakes, that’s all, maybe with a voice four times the size of its body. It may be nothing you can’t drive off with a stick. But there’s her to think about. If her
other
comes back, you may have to—”

“I won’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking!”

“You may have to wing her. You understand?”

Eddie gave a reluctant nod. Goddam shells probably wouldn’t fire anyway, so there was no sense getting his panties in a bunch about it.

“When you get to the door, leave her. Shelter her as well as you can, and come back to me with the chair.”

“And the gun?”

The gunslinger’s eyes blazed so brightly that Eddie snapped his head back, as if Roland had thrust a flaming torch in his face. “Gods, yes! Leave her with a loaded gun, when her
other
might come back at any time? Are you insane?”

“The shells—”

“
Fuck
the shells!” the gunslinger cried, and a freak drop in the wind allowed the words to carry. Odetta turned her head, looked at them for a long moment, then looked back toward the sea. “Leave it with her not!”

Eddie kept his voice low in case the wind should drop again. “What if something comes down from the brakes while I’m on my way back here? Some kind of cat four times bigger than its voice, instead of the other way around? Something you can’t drive off with a stick?”

“Give her a pile of stones,” the gunslinger said.

“
Stones!
Jesus wept! Man, you are such a fucking shit!”

“I am
thinking,
” the gunslinger said. “Something you seem unable to do. I gave you the gun so you could protect her from the sort of danger you’re talking about for half of the trip you must make. Would it please you if I took the gun back? Then perhaps you could
die
for her. Would
that
please you? Very romantic . . . except then, instead of just her, all three of us would go down.”

“Very logical. You’re still a fucking shit, however.”

“Go or stay. Stop calling me names.”

“You forgot something,” Eddie said furiously.

“What was that?”

“You forgot to tell me to grow up. That’s what Henry always used to say. ‘Oh grow up, kid.’ ”

The gunslinger had smiled, a weary, oddly beautiful smile. “I think you
have
grown up. Will you go or stay?”

“I’ll go,” Eddie said. “What are you going to eat? She scarfed the left-overs.”

“The fucking shit will find a way. The fucking shit has been finding one for years.”

Eddie looked away. “I . . . I guess I’m sorry I called you that, Roland. It’s been—” He laughed suddenly, shrilly. “It’s been a very trying day.”

Roland smiled again. “Yes,” he said. “It has.”

They made the best time of the entire trek that day, but there was still no door in sight when the sun began to spill its gold track across the ocean. Although she told him she was perfectly capable of going on for another half an hour, he called a halt and helped her out of the chair. He carried her to an even patch of ground that looked fairly smooth, got the cushions from the back of the chair and the seat, and eased them under her.

“Lord, it feels so good to stretch out,” she sighed. “But . . .” Her
brow clouded. “I keep thinking of that man back there, Roland, all by himself, and I can’t really enjoy it. Eddie, who is he?
What
is he?” And, almost as an afterthought: “And why does he
shout
so much?”

“Just his nature, I guess,” Eddie said, and abruptly went off to gather rocks. Roland hardly ever shouted. He guessed some of it was this morning—
FUCK the shells!
—but that the rest of it was false memory: the time she
thought
she had been Odetta.

He killed triple, as the gunslinger had instructed, and was so intent on the last that he skipped back from a fourth which had been closing in on his right with only an instant to spare. He saw the way its claws clicked on the empty place which had been occupied by his foot and leg a moment before, and thought of the gunslinger’s missing fingers.