“Are you making this up?”
“I guess I must be,” the boy said hopelessly. “There were things to ride in on the streets. Big ones and little ones. The big ones were blue and white. The little ones were yellow. A lot of yellow ones. I walked to school. There were cement paths beside the streets. Windows to look in and more statues wearing clothes. The statues sold the clothes. I know it sounds crazy, but the statues sold the clothes.”
The gunslinger shook his head and looked for a lie on the boy’s face. He saw none.
“I walked to school,” the boy repeated doggedly. “And I had a”—his eyes tilted closed and his lips moved gropingly—“a brown... book... bag. I carried a lunch. And I wore”—the groping again, agonized groping—“a tie.”
“A cravat?”
“I don’t know.” The boy’s fingers made a slow, unconscious clinching motion at his throat, one the gunslinger associated with hanging. “I don’t know. It’s just all gone.” And he looked away.
“May I put you to sleep?” the gunslinger asked.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“I can make you sleepy, and I can make you remember.”
Doubtfully, Jake asked, “How could you do that?”
“With this.”
The gunslinger removed one of the shells from his gunbelt and twirled it in his fingers. The movement was dexterous, as flowing as oil. The shell cartwheeled effortlessly from thumb and index to index and second, to second and ring, to ring and pinky. It popped out of sight and reappeared; seemed to float briefly, then reversed. The shell walked across the gunslinger’s fingers. The fingers themselves marched as his feet had marched on his last miles to this place. The boy watched, his initial doubt first replaced with plain delight, then by raptness, then by dawning blankness as he opened. His eyes slipped shut. The shell danced back and forth. Jake’s eyes opened again, caught the steady, limpid movement between the gunslinger’s fingers a little while longer, and then they closed once more. The gunslinger continued the howken, but Jake’s eyes did not open again. The boy breathed with slow and steady calmness. Did this have to be part of it? Yes. It did. There was a certain cold beauty to it, like the lacy frettings that fringe hard blue ice-packs. He once more seemed to hear his mother singing, not the nonsense about the rain in Spain this time, but sweeter nonsense, coming from a great distance as he rocked on the rim of sleep:Baby-bunting, baby dear, baby bring your basket here.
Not for the first time the gunslinger tasted the smooth, loden taste of soul-sickness. The shell in his fingers, manipulated with such unknown grace, was suddenly horrific, the spoor of a monster. He dropped it into his palm, made a fist, and squeezed it with painful force. Had it exploded, in that moment he would have rejoiced at the destruction of his talented hand, for its only true talent was murder. There had always been murder in the world, but telling himself so was no comfort. There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower. Ah, the Tower stood somewhere in the middle of things (so they did say), rearing its black-gray bulk to the sky, and in his desert-scoured ears, the gunslinger heard the faint sweet sound of his mother’s voice:Chussit, chissit, chassit, bring enough to fill your basket.
He brushed the song, and the sweetness of the song, aside. “Where are you?” he asked.
III
Jake Chambers—sometimes ’Bama—is going downstairs with his bookbag. There is Earth Science, there is Geography, there is a notepad, a pencil, a lunch his mother’s cook, Mrs. Greta Shaw, has made for him in the chrome-and-Formica kitchen where a fan whirrs eternally, sucking up alien odors. In his lunch sack he has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich; a bologna, lettuce, and onion sandwich; and four Oreo cookies. His parents do not hate him, but they do seem to have overlooked him. They have abdicated and left him to Mrs. Greta Shaw, to nannies, to a tutor in the summer and The Piper School (which is Private and Nice, and most of all, White) the rest of the time. None of these people have ever pretended to be more than what they are—professional people, the best in their fields. None have folded him to a particularly warm bosom as usually happens in the historical romance novels his mother reads and which Jake has dipped into, looking for the “hot parts.” Hysterical novels, his father sometimes calls them, and sometimes “bodice-rippers.”You should talk,his mother says with infinite scorn from behind some closed door where Jake listens. His father works for The Network, and Jake could pick him out of a line-up of skinny men with crewcuts. Probably.
Jake does not know that he hates all the professional people but Mrs. Shaw. People have always bewildered him. His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way, often goes to bed with sick friends. His father sometimes talks about people at The Network who are doing “too much Coca-Cola.” This statement is always accompanied by a humorless grin and a quick little sniff of the thumbnail.
Now he is on the street, Jake Chambers is on the street, he has “hit the bricks.” He is clean and well-mannered, comely, sensitive. He bowls once a week at Mid-Town Lanes. He has no friends, only acquaintances. He has never bothered to think about this, but it hurts him. He does not know or understand that a long association with professional people has caused him to take on many of their traits. Mrs. Greta Shaw (better than the rest of them, but gosh, is that ever a consolation prize) makes very professional sandwiches. She quarters them and cuts off the breadcrusts so that when he eats in the gym period four he looks like he ought to be at a cocktail party with a drink in his other hand instead of a sports novel or a Clay Blaisdell Western from the school library. His father makes a great deal of money because he is a master of “the kill”—that is, placing a stronger show on his Network against a weaker show on a rival Network. His father smokes four packs of cigarettes a day. His father does not cough, but he has a hard grin, and he’s not averse to the occasional shot of the old Coca-Cola.
Down the street. His mother leaves cab fare, but he walks every day it doesn’t rain, swinging his bookbag (and sometimes his bowling bag, although mostly he leaves it in his locker), a small boy who looks very American with his blond hair and blue eyes. Girls have already begun to notice him (with their mothers’ approval), and he does not shy away with skittish little-boy arrogance. He talks to them with unknowing professionalism and puzzles them away. He likes geography and bowling in the afternoon. His father owns stock in a company that makes automatic pin-setting machinery, but Mid-Town Lanes does not use his father’s brand. He does not think he has thought about this, but he has.
Walking down the street, he passes Bloomie’s, where the models stand dressed in fur coats, in six-button Edwardian suits, some in nothing at all; some are “bare-naked.” These models—thesemannequins—are perfectly professional, and he hates all professionalism. He is too young to have learned to hate himself yet, but that seed is already there; given time, it will grow, and bear bitter fruit.
He comes to the corner and stands with his bookbag at his side. Traffic roars by—grunting blue-and-white busses, yellow taxis, Volkswagens, a large truck. He is just a boy, but not average, and he sees the man who kills him out of the corner of his eye. It is the man in black, and he doesn’t see the face, only the swirling robe, the outstretched hands, and the hard, professional grin. He falls into the street with his arms outstretched, not letting go of the bookbag which contains Mrs. Greta Shaw’s extremely professional lunch. There is a brief glance through a polarized windshield at the horrified face of a businessman wearing a dark-blue hat in the band of which is a small, jaunty feather. Somewhere a radio is blasting rock and roll. An old woman on the far curb screams—she is wearing a black hat with a net. Nothing jaunty about that black net; it is like a mourner’s veil. Jake feels nothing but surprise and his usual sense of headlong bewilderment—is this how it ends? Before he’s bowled better than two-seventy? He lands hard in the street and looks at an asphalt-sealed crack some two inches from his eyes. The bookbag is jolted from his hand. He is wondering if he has skinned his knees when the car belonging to the businessman wearing the blue hat with the jaunty feather passes over him. It is a big blue 1976 Cadillac with whitewall Firestone tires. The car is almost exactly the same color as the businessman’s hat. It breaks Jake’s back, mushes his guts to gravy, and sends blood from his mouth in a high-pressure jet. He turns his head and sees the Cadillac’s flaming taillights and smoke spurting from beneath its locked rear wheels. The car has also run over his bookbag and left a wide black tread on it. He turns his head the other way and sees a large gray Ford screaming to a stop inches from his body. A black fellow who has been selling pretzels and sodas from a pushcart is coming toward him on the run. Blood runs from Jake’s nose, ears, eyes, rectum. His genitals have been squashed. He wonders irritably how badly he has skinned his knees. He wonders if he’ll be late for school. Now the driver of the Cadillac is running toward him, babbling. Somewhere a terrible, calm voice, the voice of doom, says: “I am a priest. Let me through. An Act of Contrition...”
He sees the black robe and knows sudden horror. It is him, the man in black. Jake turns his face away with the last of his strength. Somewhere a radio is playing a song by the rock group Kiss. He sees his own hand trailing on the pavement, small, white, shapely. He has never bitten his nails.
Looking at his hand, Jake dies.
IV
The gunslinger hunkered in frowning thought. He was tired and his body ached and the thoughts came with aggravating slowness. Across from him the amazing boy slept with his hands folded in his lap, still breathing calmly. He had told his tale without much emotion, although his voice had trembled near the end, when he had come to the part about the “priest” and the “Act of Contrition.” He had not, of course, told the gunslinger about his family and his own sense of bewildered dichotomy, but that had seeped through anyway—enough for the gunslinger to make out its shape. The fact that there had never been such a city as the boy described (unless it was the mythic city of Lud) was not the most upsetting part of the story, but it was disturbing. It was all disturbing. The gunslinger was afraid of the implications.
“Jake?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Do you want to remember this when you wake up, or forget it?”
“Forget it,” the boy said promptly. “When the blood came out of my mouth I could taste my own shit.”
“All right. You’re going to sleep, understand? Real sleep now. Go ahead and lie over, if it do please ya.”
