“Shall I help you with the hawk?” Cuthbert asked.
“Yes,” the gunslinger said. “That would be lovely, Bert.”
And later, when darkness had come and the rushing thundershowers with it; while huge, phantom caissons rolled across the sky and lightning washed the crooked streets of the lower town in blue fire; while horses stood at hitching rails with their heads down and their tails drooping, the gunslinger took a woman and lay with her.
It was quick and good. When it was over and they lay side by side without speaking, it began to hail with a brief, rattling ferocity. Downstairs and far away, someone was playing “Hey Jude” ragtime. The gunslinger’s mind turned reflectively inward. It was in that hail-splattered silence, just before sleep overtook him, that he first thought that he might also be the last.
IX
The gunslinger didn’t tell the boy all of this, but perhaps most of it came through anyway. He had already realized that this was an extremely perceptive boy, not so different from Alain, who was strong in that half-empathy, half-telepathy they called the touch.
“You asleep?” the gunslinger asked.
“No.”
“Did you understand what I told you?”
“Understand it?” the boy asked with surprising scorn. “Understand it? Are you kidding?”
“No.” But the gunslinger felt defensive. He had never told anyone about his coming of age before, because he felt ambivalent about it. Of course, the hawk had been a perfectly acceptable weapon, yet it had been a trick, too. And a betrayal. The first of many.And tell me—am I really preparing to throw this boy at the man in black?
“I understood it, all right,” the boy said. “It was a game, wasn’t it? Do grown men always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?”
“You don’t know everything,” the gunslinger said, trying to hold his slow anger. “You’re just a boy.”
“Sure. But I know what I am to you.”
“And what is that?” the gunslinger asked, tightly.
“A poker chip.”
The gunslinger felt an urge to find a rock and brain the boy. Instead, he spoke calmly.
“Go to sleep. Boys need their sleep.”
And in his mind he heard Marten’s echo:Go and find your hand.
He sat stiffly in the darkness, stunned with horror and terrified (for the first time in his existence) of the self-loathing that might come afterward.
X
During the next period of waking, the railway angled closer to the underground river, and they came upon the Slow Mutants.
Jake saw the first one and screamed aloud.
The gunslinger’s head, which had been fixed straight forward as he pumped the handcar, jerked to the right. There was a rotten jack-o’-lantern greenness below them, pulsating faintly. For the first time he became aware of odor—faint, unpleasant, wet.
The greenness was a face—what might be called a face by one of charitable bent. Above the flattened nose was an insectile node of eyes, peering at them expressionlessly. The gunslinger felt an atavistic crawl in his intestines and privates. He stepped up the rhythm of arms and handcar handle slightly.
The glowing face faded.
“What the hell wasthat?” the boy asked, crawling to him. “What—” The words stopped dumb in his throat as they came upon and then passed a group of three faintly glowing forms, standing between the rails and the invisible river, watching them, motionless.
“They’re Slow Mutants,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t think they’ll bother us. They’re probably just as frightened of us as we are of—”
One of the forms broke free and shambled toward them. The face was that of a starving idiot. The faint naked body had been transformed into a knotted mess of tentacular limbs and suckers.
The boy screamed again and crowded against the gunslinger’s leg like a frightened dog.
