“Would you want something to eat, sir?”
“Not yet,” the gunslinger said. There was still a sick ache in his head from the sunstroke, and the water sat uneasily in his stomach, as if it did not know where to go. “Who are you?”
“My name is John Chambers. You can call me Jake. I have a friend—well, sort of a friend, she works for us—who calls me ’Bama sometimes, but you can call me Jake.”
The gunslinger sat up, and the sick ache became hard and immediate. He leaned forward and lost a brief struggle with his stomach.
“There’s more,” Jake said. He took the can and walked toward the rear of the stable. He paused and smiled back at the gunslinger uncertainly. The gunslinger nodded at him and then put his head down and propped it with his hands. The boy was well-made, handsome, perhaps ten or eleven. There had been a shadow of fear on his face, but that was all right; the gunslinger would have trusted him far less if the boy hadn’t shown fear.
A strange, thumping hum began at the rear of the stable. The gunslinger raised his head alertly, hands going to the butts of his guns. The sound lasted for perhaps fifteen seconds and then quit. The boy came back with the can—filled now.
The gunslinger drank sparingly again, and this time it was a little better. The ache in his head was fading.
“I didn’t know what to do with you when you fell down,” Jake said. “For a couple of seconds there, I thought you were going to shoot me.”
“Maybe I was. I thought you were somebody else.”
“The priest?”
The gunslinger looked up sharply.
The boy studied him, frowning. “He camped in the yard. I was in the house over there. Or maybe it was a depot. I didn’t like him, so I didn’t come out. He came in the night and went on the next day. I would have hidden from you, but I was sleeping when you came.” He looked darkly over the gunslinger’s head. “I don’t like people. They fuck me up.”
“What did he look like?”
The boy shrugged. “Like a priest. He was wearing black things.”
“A hood and a cassock?”
“What’s a cassock?”
“A robe. Like a dress.”
The boy nodded. “That’s about right.”
The gunslinger leaned forward, and something in his face made the boy recoil a little. “How long ago? Tell me, for your father’s sake.”
“I... I...”
Patiently, the gunslinger said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember time. Every day is the same.”
For the first time the gunslinger wondered consciously how the boy had come to this place, with dry and man-killing leagues of desert all around it. But he would not make it his concern, not yet, at least. “Make your best guess. Long ago?”
“No. Not long. I haven’t been here long.”
The fire lit in him again. He snatched up the can and drank from it with hands that trembled the smallest bit. A fragment of the cradle song recurred, but this time, instead of his mother’s face, he saw the scarred face of Alice, who had been his jilly in the now-defunct town of Tull. “A week? Two? Three?”
The boy looked at him distractedly. “Yes.”
“Which?”
“A week. Or two.” He looked aside, blushing a little. “Three poops ago, that’s the only way I can measure things now. He didn’t even drink. I thought he might be the ghost of a priest, like in this movie I saw once, only Zorro figured out he wasn’t a priest at all, or a ghost, either. He was just a banker who wanted some land because there was gold on it. Mrs. Shaw took me to see that movie. It was in Times Square.”
None of this made any sense to the gunslinger, so he did not comment on it.
“I was scared,” the boy said. “I’ve been scared almost all the time.” His face quivered like crystal on the edge of the ultimate, destructive high note. “He didn’t even build a fire. He just sat there. I don’t even know if he went to sleep.”
