The Road to The Dark Tower (44 page)

He knows his limitations. When Roland needs someone to drive the truck in Maine, he doesn’t bluff his way into doing something beyond his capabilities.

Roland doesn’t plan for Jake to die a third time when they rescue Stephen King from the wayward minivan. If ka demands a sacrifice, the gunslinger intends it be him who dies. His body fails him, though, and Jake takes his place, a gunslinger to the end, acting on instinct. He seizes King and shields him with his own body. He urges Roland to attend to King rather than him, since it is King they came to save. “This is dying—I know what it is because I’ve done it before,” he tells Roland, who is trying to convince himself Jake’s injuries are slight.

Jake dies while Roland is attending to King, but not before he passes important instructions to Oy and to Irene Tassenbaum. Roland once told him, “You needn’t die happy but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end and ka is always served.” With Oy at his side, Roland buries Jake in a shallow grave at the side of the road and asks Irene to plant wild roses nearby. “This is Jake, you gods, who lived well and died as ka would have it. Each man owes a death.
⁸
This is Jake. Give him peace.”

Death is not the end for Jake, though. Susannah encounters him in another New York, where he is Jake Toren, younger brother to Eddie. Both of them have been dreaming of a woman named Susannah who will join them in Central Park, where they begin their new lives together.

The first is young, dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN. [DT1]

When Roland first encounters Eddie Dean aboard a flight from the Bahamas to New York, a pound of cocaine strapped under each arm, the young man is nearing bottom. He’s smuggling the drugs to finance his heroin habit and that of his older brother, Henry.

He has black hair, hazel, almost green eyes and long fingers. In a movie, some “hot young star” like Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez or Rob Lowe
¹⁰
would play him. He grew up in the projects, and his street accent becomes more pronounced when he’s angry, as if he were speaking through his nose instead of his mouth.

Eddie is the first member to join Roland’s ka-tet, and the first to leave
it. He was born in February 1964, which would make him twenty-three in 1987.
¹¹
He lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his brother in Co-Op City, which, in Eddie’s reality, is in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx. Both of his parents are dead, but when his mother was still alive she frequently reminded Eddie that he was responsible for his older brother’s lack of opportunity in life. Henry believes this, too, but perhaps only because his mother said it so often.

A drunk driver killed Henry and Eddie’s sister
¹²
while she was watching a game of hopscotch on the sidewalk when Eddie was two and she was six. Since their mother worked during the day, Henry—eight years older than Eddie—was given the responsibility of making sure nothing similar happened to his brother.

His tarot card is the Prisoner, a name Roland often calls him during their early days. The card depicts a young man with a whip-wielding baboon on his back whose disturbingly human fingers are buried so deeply in the man’s neck that their tips disappear in flesh. The face of the ridden man seems to writhe in wordless terror.

The baboon represents his addiction, but it also represents his brother, Henry, who pulled Eddie down into the muck of drugs and laziness with him. Eddie became a convenient excuse for his brother’s failures in life. Henry couldn’t play school sports, not because he was scrawny and uncoordinated but because he had to look after Eddie. His grades were too low to earn scholarships, not because he wasn’t smart but because he spent so much time keeping Eddie safe. Without a scholarship, Henry couldn’t go to college and was sent to Vietnam, coming back minus a knee and hooked on morphine, none of which was his fault.

Believing his mother and brother sacrificed everything so he could be happy robbed Eddie of what little self-esteem he’d been able to develop. “As for me, I don’t matter much,” thirteen-year-old Eddie tells Jake in a dream when instructing the boy on how to find the doorway to Mid-World. “I’m supposed to guide you, that’s all.” [DT3]

Henry is responsible for Eddie’s descent into a life of crime. Stealing comic books escalates into grand theft auto when Henry steals a car and drives into Manhattan. Scared and crying, Eddie lies about seeing a cop and convinces Henry to abandon the car. Henry runs off at first, but comes back for Eddie. He explains their late return home by telling their mother
he’d been teaching Eddie to play basketball. Didn’t Eddie have the best big brother in the world?

When Henry does teach Eddie basketball, Eddie quickly becomes better than his brother, as he is with most things, in spite of being much younger. He hides his superiority because if he shows Henry up, Henry would punch him hard on the arm, supposedly as a joke but actually as a warning. Eddie also hides his skill because he adores his big brother. His decision to not excel past his brother is a severe limitation, because Henry isn’t much good at anything.
¹³

During a conversation about who they’d like to have at their side if they got into a brawl, Henry surprises everyone by saying that he’d want Eddie, “Because when Eddie’s in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.”

Eddie catches his brother snorting heroin after he returns from Vietnam, shortly after their mother died. Following a huge fight, Henry threatens to leave, then guilts Eddie into begging him to stay. After all, Henry was injured in the war and got hooked on pain meds because he’d had to look after Eddie after school.

Before long, Eddie is snorting heroin, too. Eddie manages his habit better than his brother, of course. Their positions reverse and Eddie must look after his brother. Henry’s addiction worsens, leading to shooting up, another confrontation, another guilt trip resulting in Eddie’s needle habit and ultimately his trip to the Bahamas. Once Henry started shooting, Eddie knew his brother wouldn’t survive six months without him—he’d end up in jail or a psych ward.

Eddie lingers under his brother’s shadow even after Henry dies. “All you have to do to hurt him is to say his brother’s name. It’s like poking an open sore with a stick.” [DT2] He protects his brother’s memory to Roland, telling the gunslinger that though Henry was always scared, he always came back. Roland believes it would have been better for Eddie if Henry hadn’t come back. “People like Henry always came back because they knew how to use trust. It was the only thing Henry did know how to use. First they changed trust into need, then they changed need into a drug and once that was done they pushed it.”

Roland sees deep steel in Eddie from the very first. He proved his mettle in the Bahamas when he stood up to the man who wanted to stiff him
in the drugs-for-cash transaction. He impresses the gunslinger by entering the gun battle with Balazar’s men naked. A compliment from Roland makes him feel like king of the world. He learns quickly, naturally and easily. His facility with the gun reminds him of stories of reincarnation, an intuition possibly due to the cyclical nature of Roland’s existence. He’s lived through these experiences countless times with Roland and may have some recollection of skills he learned on previous iterations.

What stops Eddie from killing himself while going cold turkey after Roland draws him to Mid-World is the fact that Roland is deathly ill and needs him. When Odetta is brought through, confused and afraid, Roland thinks, “His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.” Eddie falls in love with her and the integrated person who becomes Susannah Dean. He hasn’t had a girlfriend since he started using heroin.

“I think I started loving you because you were everything Roland took me away from—in New York, I mean—but it’s a lot more than that now, because I don’t want to go back anymore.” No matter how much Susannah might love him, he’s sure he would always love her more. He sees it as his job to make it as good as possible as long as he can. He doesn’t believe ka is a friend to him and Susannah and that it will end badly between them. He tells her, “It’s good to make someone glad. I didn’t use to know that.”

Roland recognizes him as Cuthbert’s twin, saying he’s sure Eddie will die talking, as Bert did.
¹⁴
Eddie surpasses Cuthbert in many ways. Roland reflects, “If I underestimate him . . . I’m apt to come away with a bloody paw. And if I let him down, or do something that looks to him like a double-cross, he’ll probably try to kill me.” [DT3]

For all his strength and skill as a gunslinger, Eddie’s dominant characteristic is the speed at which he runs his mouth. Roland, who thinks of Eddie as ka’s fool, sometimes feels like shaking him until his nose bleeds and his teeth fall out. He possesses Cuthbert’s annoying sense of the ridiculous, which enables him to defeat Blaine the Mono with his unique weapon of illogic. Arguing comes as naturally to him as breathing. He is sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of reservoirs of courage and heart and occasionally has deep flashes of intuition.

Never really maturing past the man-boy stage, he is analogous to Horst Buchholz’s character in
The Magnificent Seven
. Roland thinks that
no one can laugh as fully as Eddie Dean when amused. The Eddie Dean Special is something funny and stinging at the same time. Roland often uses his loquaciousness to advantage by having Eddie act as his mouthpiece.

Eddie respects Roland’s skills and talents but understands the addiction that drives the gunslinger as only another addict could. Eventually, he comes to think of Roland as his father but he hates it when Roland relies on ka, calling it “ka-ka.” Even so, Roland’s quest becomes his own. If Roland were to die on their journey, Eddie would continue with the others, for having dreamt of the Tower and the field of roses, the compulsion to reach the Tower claims him, too.

Eddie shoulders more responsibility as time goes by. He deals with Andolini in Tower’s storage room like a hardcase, and he negotiates with Tower, although with less finesse than Roland. He is patient with the Calla-folken but not with anyone who seems likely to cross him.

Pimli Prentiss, the headmaster of Algul Siento, shoots Eddie in the head in the aftermath of the assault on Blue Heaven. He lingers for fourteen hours, mortally injured but unwilling to let go. At the end, he tells Susannah to wait for him, tells Jake and Oy to protect Roland and tells Roland that this new life was better. His final words to Roland are “Thank you, father.”

In 1987, in another world, Eddie Cantor Dean becomes Eddie Toren from White Plains. For months he’s been dreaming of Susannah, whom he loves already, although he doesn’t understand how or why this can possibly be. Voices told him and his younger brother, Jake, to meet her in Central Park when she comes through from End-World. He extends his hand to her, a familiar, well-loved hand, in the hopes that now ka will be on their side.

I am three women . . . I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you saved. [DT2]

When Odetta Holmes was five years old, she was struck in the head by a brick while her family was up north for her aunt’s wedding. They were
walking to the train station after a taxi driver refused to pick them up because they were black. Odetta was on the inside of the sidewalk, to keep her from getting too close to the traffic. The police never found out if the brick was dropped deliberately or if it fell by accident. She was in a coma for three weeks, and after she recovered she suffered periodic blackout spells that were the earliest manifestations of a mental schism. The brick may have caused this mental illness, though Odetta may have already been predisposed to it and ka just helped out.

Her tarot card is the Lady of Shadows, she of two faces, symbolized by Janus.

An only child—more or less—Odetta is the daughter of a small-town dentist who became wealthy after patenting several dental processes. After her mother died, Odetta took care of her father until he died of a heart attack in 1962, leaving her heir to a fortune worth $8 to $10 million. She grows up to be a pleasant, socially gracious, refined and cultured young woman. She may not have been educated at Morehouse—a reference to Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
—but she has a college degree from Columbia.

In the late 1950s, she is inspired to become a civil rights activist by Rosa Parks, but also by her memory of the prejudiced taxi driver. In Oxford, Mississippi, where she allows her friends to call her “Det,” the police aim fire hoses at her group and she’s put in jail. Occasionally resentful of her treatment at the hands of white people, she knows that hate will only hinder her work. “Man of Constant Sorrow” is the avatar of songs that inspires her to the movement.

Though she tells Eddie on the beach by the Western Sea that she has never been with a white man before, she in fact had a white lover named Daryl while at Oxford. All her life she works to gain self-respect, despite the barely suspected saboteur lurking in her mind. She thinks of herself as Negro and is offended by Eddie’s use of the word “black.” Her parents never spoke of their difficult past in the South, even when she became interested in her own background. Her father told her, “I don’t talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world had moved on since then.”