Close! Closer than he had ever been, by the gods! In spite of his extreme dehydration, his hands felt faintly moist; greasy.
“There’s some dried meat,” the boy said.
“All right.” The gunslinger nodded. “Good.”
The boy got up to fetch it, his knees popping slightly. He made a fine straight figure. The desert had not yet sapped him. His arms were thin, but the skin, although tanned, had not dried and cracked.He’s got juice,the gunslinger thought.Mayhap some sand in his craw, as well, or he would have taken one of my guns and shot me right where I lay.
Or perhaps the boy simply hadn’t thought of it.
The gunslinger drank from the can again.Sand in his craw or not, he didn’t come from this place.
Jake came back with a pile of dried jerky on what looked like a sun-scoured breadboard. The meat was tough, stringy, and salty enough to make the cankered lining of the gunslinger’s mouth sing. He ate and drank until he felt logy, and then settled back. The boy ate only a little, picking at the dark strands with an odd delicacy.
The gunslinger regarded him, and the boy looked back at him candidly enough. “Where did you come from, Jake?” he asked finally.
“I don’t know.” The boy frowned. “Ididknow. I knew when I came here, but it’s all fuzzy now, like a bad dream when you wake up. I have lots of bad dreams. Mrs. Shaw used to say it was because I watched too many horror movies on Channel Eleven.”
“What’s a channel?” A wild idea occurred to him. “Is it like a beam?”
“No—it’s TV.”
“What’s teevee?”
“I—” The boy touched his forehead. “Pictures.”
“Did somebody tote you here? This Mrs. Shaw?”
“No,” the boy said. “I justwashere.”
“Who is Mrs. Shaw?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did she call you ’Bama?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re not making any sense,” the gunslinger said flatly.
Quite suddenly the boy was on the verge of tears. “I can’t help it. I was just here. If you asked me about TV and channels yesterday, I bet I still could have remembered! Tomorrow I probably won’t even remember I’m Jake—not unless you tell me, and you won’t be here, will you? You’re going to go away and I’ll starve because you ate up almost all my food. I didn’t ask to be here. I don’t like it. It’s spooky.”
“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. Make do.”
“I didn’t ask to be here,” the boy repeated with bewildered defiance.
The gunslinger ate another piece of the meat, chewing the salt out of it before swallowing. The boy had become part of it, and the gunslinger was convinced he told the truth—he had not asked for it. It was too bad. He himself...hehad asked for it. But he had not asked for the game to become this dirty. He had not asked to turn his guns on the townsfolk of Tull; had not asked to shoot Allie, with her sadly pretty face at the end marked by the secret she had finally asked to be let in on, using that word, that nineteen, like a key in a lock; had not asked to be faced with a choice between duty and flat-out murder. It was not fair to ring in innocent bystanders and make them speak lines they didn’t understand on a strange stage.Allie,he thought,Allie was at least part of this world, in her own self-illusory way. But this boy... this God-damned boy...
“Tell me what you can remember,” he told Jake.
“It’s only a little. It doesn’t seem to make any sense anymore.”
“Tell me. Maybe I can pick up the sense.”
The boy thought about how to begin. He thought about it very hard. “There was a place... the one before this one. A high place with lots of rooms and a patio where you could look at tall buildings and water. There was a statue that stood in the water.”
“A statue in the water?”
“Yes. A lady with a crown and a torch and... I think... a book.”
