Jake laid over, looking small and peaceful and harmless. The gunslinger did not believe he was harmless. There was a deadly feeling about him, the stink of yet another trap. He didn’t like the feeling, but he liked the boy. He liked him a great deal.
“Jake?”
“Shhh. I’m sleeping. I want to sleep.”
“Yes. And when you wake up you won’t remember any of this.”
“Kay. Good.”
The gunslinger watched him for a brief time, thinking of his own boyhood, which usually seemed to have happened to another person—to a person who had leaped through some fabulous lens of time to become someone else—but which now seemed poignantly close. It was very hot in the stable of the way station, and he carefully drank some more water. He got up and walked to the back of the building, pausing to look into one of the horse stalls. There was a small pile of white hay in the corner, and a neatly folded blanket, but there was no smell of horse. There was no smell of anything in the stable. The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing. The air was perfectly neutral.
At the back of the stable was a small, dark room with a stainless steel machine in the center. It was untouched by rust or rot. It looked like a butter churn. At the left, a chrome pipe jutted from it, terminating over a drain in the floor. The gunslinger had seen pumps like it in other dry places, but never one so big. He could not contemplate how deep they (some long-gone they) must have drilled before they struck water, secret and forever black under the desert.
Why hadn’t they removed the pump when the way station had been abandoned?
Demons, perhaps.
He shuddered abruptly, an abrupt twisting of his back. Heatflesh poked out on his skin, then receded. He went to the control switch and pushed the ON button. The machine began to hum. After perhaps half a minute, a stream of cool, clear water belched from the pipe and went down the drain to be recirculated. Perhaps three gallons flowed out of the pipe before the pump shut itself down with a final click. It was a thing as alien to this place and time as true love, and yet as concrete as a Judgment, a silent reminder of the time when the world had not yet moved on. It probably ran on an atomic slug, as there was no electricity within a thousand miles of here and even dry batteries would have lost their charge long ago. It had been made by a company called North Central Positronics. The gunslinger didn’t like it.
He went back and sat down beside the boy, who had put one hand under his cheek. Nice-looking boy. The gunslinger drank some more water and crossed his legs so he was sitting Indian fashion. The boy, like the squatter on the edge of the desert who kept the bird (Zoltan, the gunslinger remembered abruptly, the bird’s name was Zoltan), had lost his sense of time, but the fact that the man in black was closer seemed beyond doubt. Not for the first time, the gunslinger wondered if the man in black was letting him catch up for some reason of his own. Perhaps the gunslinger was playing into his hands. He tried to imagine what the confrontation might be like, and could not.
He was very hot, but no longer felt sick. The nursery rhyme occurred to him again, but this time instead of his mother, he thought of Cort—Cort, an ageless engine of a man, his face stitched with the scars of bricks and bullets and blunt instruments. The scars of war and instruction in the arts of war. He wondered if Cort had ever had a love to match those monumental scars. He doubted it. He thought of Susan, and his mother, and of Marten, that incomplete enchanter.
The gunslinger was not a man to dwell on the past; only a shadowy conception of the future and of his own emotional make-up saved him from being a man without imagination, a dangerous dullard. His present run of thought therefore rather amazed him. Each name called up others—Cuthbert, Alain, the old man Jonas with his quavery voice; and again Susan, the lovely girl at the window. Such thoughts always came back to Susan, and the great rolling plain known as the Drop, and fishermen casting their nets in the bays on the edge of the Clean Sea.
The piano player in Tull (also dead, all dead in Tull, and by his hand) had known those places, although he and the gunslinger had only spoken of them that once. Sheb had been fond of the old songs, had once played them in a saloon called the Traveller’s Rest, and the gunslinger hummed one tunelessly under his breath:
Love o love o careless love
See what careless love has done.
The gunslinger laughed, bemused.I am the last of that green and warm-hued world.And for all his nostalgia, he felt no self-pity. The world had moved on mercilessly, but his legs were still strong, and the man in black was closer. The gunslinger nodded out.
V
When he awoke, it was almost dark and the boy was gone.
The gunslinger got up, hearing his joints pop, and went to the stable door. There was a small flame dancing in darkness on the porch of the inn. He walked toward it, his shadow long and black and trailing in the reddish-ochre light of sunset.
Jake was sitting by a kerosene lamp. “The oil was in a drum,” he said, “but I was scared to burn it in the house. Everything’s so dry—”
“You did just right.” The gunslinger sat down, seeing but not thinking about the dust of years that puffed up around his rump. He thought it something of a wonder that the porch didn’t simply collapse beneath their combined weight. The flame from the lamp shadowed the boy’s face with delicate tones. The gunslinger produced his poke and rolled a cigarette.
“We have to palaver,” he said.
Jake nodded, smiling a little at the word.
“I guess you know I’m on the prod for that man you saw.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“I don’t know. I have to make him tell me something. I may have to make him take me someplace.”
“Where?”
“To find a tower,” the gunslinger said. He held his cigarette over the chimney of the lamp and drew on it; the smoke drifted away on the rising night breeze. Jake watched it. His face showed neither fear nor curiosity, certainly not enthusiasm.
“So I’m going on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to come with me. How much of that meat is left?”
