Darktower 2 - The Drawing of the Three Page 17

  Roland says nothing, only watches Eddie.

  “But not everyone is like that. There are people who need people to need them. Like the Barbara Streisand song. Corny, but true. It’s just another way of being hooked through the bag.”

  Eddie gazes at him.

  “But when it comes to that, you’re clean, aren’t you?”

  Roland watches him.

  “Except for your Tower.” Eddie utters a short laugh. “You’re a Tower junkie, Roland.”

  “Which war was it?” Roland whispers.

  “What?”

  “The one where you got your sense of nobility and pur­pose shot off?”

  Eddie recoils as if Roland has reached out and slapped him.

  “I’m gonna go get some water,” he says shortly. “Keep an eye on the creepy crawlers. We came a long way today, but I still don’t know if they talk to each other or not.”

  He turns away then, but not before Roland has seen the last red rays of sunset reflected on his wet cheeks.

  Roland turns back to the beach and watches. The lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl, but both activities seem aimless; they have some intelligence, but not enough to pass on information to others of their kind.

  God doesn’t always dish it in your face, Roland thinks. Most times, but not always.

  Eddie returns with wood.

  “Well?” he asks. “What do you think?”

  “We’re all right,” the gunslinger croaks, and Eddie starts to say something but the gunslinger is tired now and lies back and looks at the first stars peeking through the canopy of violet sky and

  shuffle

  in the three days that followed, the gunslinger progressed steadily back to health. The red lines creeping up his arms first reversed their direction, then faded, then disappeared. On the next day he sometimes walked and sometimes let Eddie drag him. On the day following he didn’t need to be dragged at all; every hour or two they simply sat for a period of time until the watery feeling went out of his legs. It was during these rests and in those times after dinner had been eaten but before the fire had burned all the way down and they went to sleep that the gunslinger heard about Henry and Eddie. He remembered wondering what had happened to make their brothering so difficult, but after Eddie had begun, haltingly and with that sort of resentful anger that proceeds from deep pain, the gun­slinger could have stopped him, could have told him: Don’t bother, Eddie. I understand everything.

  Except that wouldn’t have helped Eddie. Eddie wasn’t talking to help Henry because Henry was dead. He was talk­ing to bury Henry for good. And to remind himself that although Henry was dead, he, Eddie, wasn’t.

  So the gunslinger listened and said nothing.

  The gist was simple: Eddie believed he had stolen his brother’s life. Henry also believed this. Henry might have believed it on his own or he might have believed it because he so frequently heard their mother lecturing Eddie on how much both she and Henry had sacrificed for him, so Eddie could be as safe as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so he could be happy, as happy as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so he wouldn’t end up like his poor sister that he didn’t even hardly remember but she had been so beautiful, God love her. She was with the angels, and that was undoubtedly a wonderful place to be, but she didn’t want Eddie to be with the angels just yet, run over in the road by some crazy drunken driver like his sister or cut up by some crazy junkie kid for the twenty-five cents in his pocket and left with his guts running out all over the sidewalk, and because she didn’t think Eddie wanted to be with the angels yet, he just better listen to what his big brother said and do what his big brother said to do and always remember that Henry was making a love-sacrifice.

  Eddie told the gunslinger he doubted if his mother knew some of the things they had done—filching comic books from the candy store on Rincon Avenue or smoking cigarettes behind the Bonded Electroplate Factory on Cohoes Street.

  Once they saw a Chevrolet with the keys in it and although Henry barely knew how to drive—he was sixteen then, Eddie eight—he had crammed his brother into the car and said they were going to New York City. Eddie was scared, crying, Henry scared too and mad at Eddie, telling him to shut up, telling him to stop being such a fuckin baby, he had ten bucks and Eddie had three or four, they could go to the movies all fuckin day and then catch a Pelham train and be back before their mother had time to put supper on the table and wonder where they were. But Eddie kept crying and near the Queensboro Bridge they saw a police car on a side street and although Eddie was pretty sure the cop in it hadn’t even been looking their way, he said Yeah when Henry asked him in a harsh, quavering voice if Eddie thought that bull had seen them. Henry turned white and pulled over so fast that he had almost amputated a fire hydrant. He was running down the block while Eddie, now in a panic himself, was still struggling with the unfamiliar doorhandle. Henry stopped, came back, and hauled Eddie out of the car. He also slapped him twice. Then they had walked—well, actually they slunk—all the way back to Brooklyn. It took them most of the day, and when their mother asked them why they looked so hot and sweaty and tired out, Henry said it was because he’d spent most of the day teaching Eddie how to go one-on-one on the basketball court at the playground around the block. Then some big kids came and they had to run. Their mother kissed Henry and beamed at Eddie. She asked him if he didn’t have the bestest big brother in the world. Eddie agreed with her. This was honest agree­ment, too. He thought he did.

  “He was as scared as I was that day,” Eddie told Roland as they sat and watched the last of the day dwindle from the water, where soon the only light would be that reflected from the stars. “Scareder, really, because he thought that cop saw us and I knew he didn’t. That’s why he ran. But he came back. That’s the important part. He came back.”

  Roland said nothing.

  “You see that, don’t you?” Eddie was looking at Roland with harsh, questioning eyes.

  “I see.”

  “He was always scared, but he always came back.”

  Roland thought it would have been better for Eddie, maybe better for both of them in the long run, if Henry had just kept showing his heels that day… or on one of the others. But people like Henry never did. People like Henry always came back, because people like Henry knew how to use trust. It was the only thing people like Henry did know how to use. First they changed trust into need, then they changed need into a drug, and once that was done, they—what was Eddie’s word for it?—push. Yes. They pushed it.

  “I think I’ll turn in,” the gunslinger said.

  The next day Eddie went on, but Roland already knew it all. Henry hadn’t played sports in high school because Henry couldn’t stay after for practice. Henry had to take care of Eddie. The fact that Henry was scrawny and uncoordinated and didn’t much care for sports in the first place had nothing to do with it, of course; Henry would have made a wonderful base­ball pitcher or one of those basketball jumpers, their mother assured them both time and again. Henry’s grades were bad and he needed to repeat a number of subjects—but that wasn’t because Henry was stupid; Eddie and Mrs. Dean both knew Henry was just as smart as lickety-split. But Henry had to spend the time he should have spent studying or doing home­work taking care of Eddie (the fact that this usually took place in the Dean living room, with both boys sprawled on the sofa watching TV or wrestling around on the floor somehow seemed not to matter). The bad grades meant Henry hadn’t been able to be accepted into anything but NYU, and they couldn’t afford it because the bad grades precluded any schol­arships, and then Henry got drafted and then it was Viet Nam, where Henry got most of his knee blown off, and the pain was bad, and the drug they gave him for it had a heavy morphine base, and when he was better they weaned him from the drug, only they didn’t do such a good job because when Henry got back to New York there was still a monkey on his back, a hungry monkey waiting to be fed, and after a month or two he had gone out to see a man, and it had been ab
out four months later, less than a month after their mother died, when Eddie first saw his brother snorting some white powder off a mirror. Eddie assumed it was coke. Turned out it was heroin. And if you traced it all the way back, whose fault was it?

  Roland said nothing, but heard the voice of Cort in his mind: Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.

  When he discovered the truth, Eddie had been shocked, then angry. Henry had responded not by promising to quit snorting but by telling Eddie he didn’t blame him for being mad, he knew Nam had turned him into a worthless shitbag, he was weak, he would leave, that was the best thing, Eddie was right, the last thing he needed was a filthy junkie around, messing up the place. He just hoped Eddie wouldn’t blame him too much. He had gotten weak, he admitted it; something in Nam had made him weak, had rotted him out the same way the moisture rotted the laces of your sneakers and the elastic of your underwear. There was also something in Nam that apparently rotted out your heart, Henry told him tearily. He just hoped that Eddie would remember all the years he had tried to be strong.

  For Eddie.

  For Mom.

  So Henry tried to leave. And Eddie, of course, couldn’t let him. Eddie was consumed with guilt. Eddie had seen the scarred horror that had once been an unmarked leg, a knee that was now more Teflon than bone. They had a screaming match in the hall, Henry standing there in an old pair of khakis with his packed duffle bag in one hand and purple rings under his eyes, Eddie wearing nothing but a pair of yellowing jockey shorts, Henry saying you don’t need me around, Eddie, I’m poison to you and I know it, and Eddie yelling back You ain’t going nowhere, get your ass back inside, and that’s how it went until Mrs. McGursky came out of her place and yelled Go or stay, it’s nothing to me, but you better decide one way or the other pretty quick or I’m calling the police. Mrs. McGursky seemed about to add a few more admonishments, but just then she saw that Eddie was wearing nothing but a pair of skivvies. She added: And you’re not decent, Eddie Dean! before pop­ping back inside. It was like watching a Jack-in-the-box in reverse. Eddie looked at Henry. Henry looked at Eddie. Look like Angel-Baby done put on a few pounds, Henry said in a low voice, and then they were howling with laughter, holding onto each other and pounding each other and Henry came back inside and about two weeks later Eddie was snorting the stuff too and he couldn’t understand why the hell he had made such a big deal out of it, after all, it was only snorting, shit, it got you off, and as Henry (who Eddie would eventually come to think of as the great sage and eminent junkie) said, in a world that was clearly going to hell head-first, what was so low about getting high?

  Time passed. Eddie didn’t say how much. The gunslinger didn’t ask. He guessed that Eddie knew there were a thousand excuses for getting high but no reasons, and that he had kept his habit pretty well under control. And that Henry had also managed to keep his under control. Not as well as Eddie, but enough to keep from coming completely unravelled. Because whether or not Eddie understood the truth (down deep Roland believed Eddie did), Henry must have: their positions had reversed themselves. Now Eddie held Henry’s hand crossing streets.

  The day came when Eddie caught Henry not snorting but skin-popping. There had been another hysterical argument, an almost exact repeat of the first one, except it had been in Henry’s bedroom. It ended in almost exactly the same way, with Henry weeping and offering that implacable, inarguable defense that was utter surrender, utter admission: Eddie was right, he wasn’t fit to live, not fit to eat garbage from the gutter. He would go. Eddie would never have to see him again. He just hoped he would remember all the …

  It faded into a drone that wasn’t much different from the rocky sound of the breaking waves as they trudged up the beach. Roland knew the story and said nothing. It was Eddie who didn’t know the story, an Eddie who was really clear­headed for the first time in maybe ten years or more. Eddie wasn’t telling the story to Roland; Eddie was finally telling the story to himself.

  That was all right. So far as the gunslinger could see, time was something they had a lot of. Talk was one way to fill it.

  Eddie said he was haunted by Henry’s knee, the twisted scar tissue up and down his leg (of course that was all healed now, Henry barely even limped… except when he and Eddie were quarrelling; then the limp always seemed to get worse); he was haunted by all the things Henry had given up for him, and haunted by something much more pragmatic: Henry wouldn’t last out on the streets. He would be like a rabbit let loose in a jungle filled with tigers. On his own, Henry would wind up in jail or Bellevue before a week was out.

  So he begged, and Henry finally did him the favor of consenting to stick around, and six months after that Eddie also had a golden arm. From that moment things had begun to move in the steady and inevitable downward spiral which had ended with Eddie’s trip to the Bahamas and Roland’s sudden intervention in his life.

  Another man, less pragmatic and more introspective than Roland, might have asked (to himself, if not right out loud), Why this one? Why this man to start? Why a man who seems to promise weakness or strangeness or even outright doom?

  Not only did the gunslinger never ask the question; it never even formulated itself in his mind. Cuthbert would have asked; Cuthbert had questioned everything, had been poi­soned with questions, had died with one in his mouth. Now they were gone, all gone. Cort’s last gunslingers, the thirteen survivors of a beginning class that had numbered fifty-six, were all dead. All dead but Roland. He was the last gunslinger, going steadily on in a world that had grown stale and sterile and empty.

  Thirteen, he remembered Cort saying on the day before the Presentation Ceremonies. This is an evil number. And on the following day, for the first time in thirty years, Cort had not been present at the Ceremonies. His final crop of pupils had gone to his cottage to first kneel at his feet, presenting defenseless necks, then to rise and receive his congratulatory kiss and to allow him to load their guns for the first time. Nine weeks later, Cort was dead. Of poison, some said. Two years after his death, the final bloody civil war had begun. The red slaughter had reached the last bastion of civilization, light, and sanity, and had taken away what all of them had assumed was so strong with the casual ease of a wave taking a child’s castle of sand.

  So he was the last, and perhaps he had survived because the dark romance in his nature was overset by his practicality and simplicity. He understood that only three things mattered: mortality, ka, and the Tower.

  Those were enough things to think about.

  Eddie finished his tale around four o’clock on the third day of their northward journey up the featureless beach. The beach itself never seemed to change. If a sign of progress was wanted, it could only be obtained by looking left, to the east. There the jagged peaks of the mountains had begun to soften and slump a bit. It was possible that if they went north far enough, the mountains would become rolling hills.

  With his story told, Eddie lapsed into silence and they walked without speaking for a half an hour or longer. Eddie kept stealing little glances at him. Roland knew Eddie wasn’t aware that he was picking these glances up; he was still too much in himself. Roland also knew what Eddie was waiting for: a response. Some kind of response. Any kind. Twice Eddie opened his mouth only to close it again. Finally he asked what the gunslinger had known he would ask.

  “So? What do you think?”

  “I think you’re here.”

  Eddie stopped, fisted hands planted on his hips. “That’s all? That’s it?”

  “That’s all I know,” the gunslinger replied. His missing fingers and toe throbbed and itched. He wished for some of the astin from Eddie’s world.

  “You don’t have any opinion on what the hell it all means?”

  The gunslinger might have held up his subtracted right hand and said, Think about what this means, you silly idiot, but it no more crossed his mind to say this than it had to ask why it was Eddie, out of all the people in all the universes that
might exist. “It’s ka,” he said, facing Eddie patiently.

  “What’s ka?” Eddie’s voice was truculent. “I never heard of it. Except if you say it twice you come out with the baby word for shit.”

  “I don’t know about that,” the gunslinger said. “Here it means duty, or destiny, or, in the vulgate, a place you must go.”

  Eddie managed to look dismayed, disgusted, and amused all at the same time. “Then say it twice, Roland, because words like that sound like shit to this kid.”

  The gunslinger shrugged. “I don’t discuss philosophy. I don’t study history. All I know is what’s past is past, and what’s ahead is ahead. The second is ka, and takes care of itself.”

  “Yeah?” Eddie looked northward. “Well all I see ahead is about nine billion miles of this same fucking beach. If that’s what’s ahead, ka and kaka are the same thing. We might have enough good shells to pop five or six more of those lobster dudes, but then we’re going to be down to chucking rocks at them. So where are we going?”

  Roland did wonder briefly if this was a question Eddie had ever thought to ask his brother, but to ask such a question would only be an invitation to a lot of meaningless argument. So he only cocked a thumb northward and said, “There. To begin with.”

  Eddie looked and saw nothing but the same reach of shell-and rock-studded gray shingle. He looked back at Roland, about to scoff, saw the serene certainty on his face, and looked again. He squinted. He shielded the right side of his face from the westering sun with his right hand. He wanted desperately to see something, anything, shit, even a mirage would do, but there was nothing.