Song of Susannah dt-6 Read online

  “Speaking of Andolini,” Roland said, “I think the time has come for the two of you to go somewhere he isn’t.”

  Tower bristled. Eddie could have predicted it. “Gonow? You must be joking! I have a list of almost a dozen people in the area who collect books—buy, sell, trade. Some know what they’re doing, but others…” He made a clipping gesture, as if shearing an invisible sheep.

  “There’ll be people selling old books out of their barns over in Vermont, too,” Eddie said. “And you want to remember how easy it was for us to find you. It was you who made it easy, Cal.”

  “He’s right,” Aaron said, and when Calvin Tower made no reply, only turned his sulky face down to regard his shoes, Deepneau looked at Eddie again. “But at least Cal and I have driver’s licenses to show, should we be stopped by the local or the state police. I’m guessing neither of you do.”

  “That would be correct,” Eddie said.

  “And I very much doubt if you could show a permit to carry those frighteningly large handguns, either.”

  Eddie glanced down at the big—and incredibly ancient—revolver riding just below his hip, then looked back up at Deepneau, amused. “That would also be correct,” he said.

  “Then be careful. You’ll be leaving East Stoneham, so you’ll probably be okay if you are.”

  “Thanks,” Eddie said, and stuck out his hand. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

  Deepneau shook. “That’s a lovely thing to say, son, but I’m afraid my nights haven’t been especially pleasant just lately, and if things on the medical front don’t take a turn for the better soon, my days aren’t apt to be especially long, either.”

  “They’re going to be longer than you might think,” Eddie said. “I have good reason to believe you’ve got at least another four years in you.”

  Deepneau touched a finger to his lips, then pointed at the sky. “From the mouth of man to the ear of God.”

  Eddie swung to Calvin Tower while Roland shook hands with Deepneau. For a moment Eddie didn’t think the bookstore owner was going to shake with him, but at last he did. Grudgingly.

  “Long days and pleasant nights, sai Tower. You did the right thing.”

  “I was coerced and you know it,” Tower said. “Store gone…property gone…about to be run off the first real vacation I’ve had in ten years…”

  “Microsoft,” Eddie said abruptly. And then: “Lemons.”

  Tower blinked. “Beg pardon?”

  “Lemons,” Eddie repeated, and then he laughed out loud.

  Fourteen

  Toward the end of his mostly useless life, the great sage and eminent junkie Henry Dean had enjoyed two things above all others: getting stoned; getting stoned and talking about how he was going to make a killing in the stock market. In investment matters, he considered himself a regular E. F. Hutton.

  “One thing I would most definitelynot invest in, bro,” Henry told him once when they were up on the roof. Not long before Eddie’s trip to the Bahamas as a cocaine mule, this had been. “One thing I would most apple-solutelynot sink my money into is all this computer shit, Microsoft, Macintosh, Sanyo, Sankyo, Pentium, all that.”

  “Seems pretty popular,” Eddie had ventured. Not that he’d much cared, but what the hell, it was a conversation. “Microsoft, especially. The coming thing.”

  Henry had laughed indulgently and made jacking-off gestures. “My prick, that’s the coming thing.”

  “But—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, people’reflocking to that crap. Driving all the prices up. And when I observe that action, do you know what I see?”

  “No, what?”

  “Lemons!”

  “Lemons?” Eddie had asked. He’d thought he was following Henry, but he guessed he was lost, after all. Of course the sunset had been amazing that evening, and he had been most colossally fucked up.

  “You heard me!” Henry had said, warming to the subject. “Fuckin lemons! Didn’t they teach you anything in school, bro? Lemons are these little animals that live over in Switzerland, or someplace like that. And every now and then—I think it’s every ten years, I’m not sure—they get suicidal and throw themselves over the cliffs.”

  “Oh,” Eddie said, biting hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from bursting into mad cackles. “Thoselemons. I thought you meant the ones you use to make lemonade.”

  “Fuckin wank,” Henry said, but he spoke with the indulgent good nature the great and eminent sometimes reserve for the small and uninformed. “Anyway, mypoint is that all these people who are flockin to invest in Microsoft and Macintosh and, I don’t know, fuckin Nervous Norvus Speed Dial Chips, all they’re gonna do is make Bill Fuckin Gates and Steve Fuckin Jobs-a-rino rich. This computer shit is gonna crash and burn by 1995, all the experts say so, and the people investin in it? Fuckin lemons, throwin themselves over the cliffs and into the fuckin ocean.”

  “Just fuckin lemons,” Eddie agreed, and sprawled back on the still-warm roof so Henry wouldn’t see how close he was to losing it entirely. He was seeing billions of Sunkist lemons trotting toward these high cliffs, all of them wearing red jogging shorts and little white sneakers, like M&Ms in a TV ad.

  “Yeah, but I wish I’d gotten into that fuckin Microsoft in ’82,” Henry said. “Do you realize that shares that were sellin for fifteen bucks back then are now sellin for thirty-five? Oh, man!”

  “Lemons,” Eddie had said dreamily, watching the sunset’s colors begin to fade. At that point he’d had less than a month to live in his world—the one where Co-Op City was in Brooklyn and always had been—and Henry had less than a month to live, period.

  “Yeah,” Henry had said, lying down beside him, “but man, I wish I coulda gotten in back in ’82.”

  Fifteen

  Now, still holding Tower’s hand, he said: “I’m from the future. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know thathe says you are, yes.” Tower jerked his head toward Roland, then tried to pull his hand free. Eddie held on.

  “Listen to me, Cal. If you listen and then act on what I tell you, you can earn what that vacant lot of yours would be worth on the real estate market five, maybe even ten times over.”

  “Big talk from a man who isn’t even wearing socks,” Tower said, and once again tried to pull his hand free. Again Eddie held it. Once he supposed he wouldn’t have been able to do that, but his hands were stronger now. So was his will.

  “Big talk from a man who’s seen the future,” he corrected. “And the future is computers, Cal. The future is Microsoft. Can you remember that?”

  “Ican,” Aaron said. “Microsoft.”

  “Never heard of it,” Tower said.

  “No,” Eddie agreed, “I don’t think it even exists yet. But it will, soon, and it’s going to be huge. Computers, okay? Computers for everybody, or at least that was the plan.Will be the plan. The guy in charge is Bill Gates. Always Bill, never William.”

  It occurred to him briefly that since this world was different from the one in which he and Jake had grown up—the world of Claudia y Inez Bachman instead of Beryl Evans—that maybe the big computer genius herewouldn’t be Gates; could be someone named Chin Ho Fuk, for all Eddie knew. But he also knew that wasn’t likely. This world was very close to his: same cars, same brand names (Coke and Pepsi rather than Nozz-A-La), same people on the currency. He thought he could count on Bill Gates (not to mention Steve Jobs-a-rino) showing up when he was supposed to.

  In one way, he didn’t even care. Calvin Tower was in many respects a total shithead. On the other hand, Tower had stood up to Andolini and Balazar for as long as he had to. He’d held onto the vacant lot. And now Roland had the bill of sale in his pocket. They owed Tower a fair return for what he’d sold them. It had nothing to do with how much or how little they liked the guy, which was probably a good thing for old Cal.

  “This Microsoft stuff,” Eddie said, “you can pick it up for fifteen dollars a share in 1982. By 1987—which is when I sort of went on perman
ent vacation—those shares will be worth thirty-five apiece. That’s a hundred per cent gain. A little more.”

  “Says you,” Tower said, and finally succeeded in pulling his hand free.

  “If he says so,” Roland said, “it’s the truth.”

  “Say thanks,” Eddie said. It occurred to him that he was suggesting that Tower take a fairly big leap based on a stone junkie’s observations, but he thought that in this case he could do that.

  “Come on,” Roland said, and made that twirling gesture with his fingers. “If we’re going to see the writer, let’s go.”

  Eddie slid behind the wheel of Cullum’s car, suddenly sure that he would never see either Tower or Aaron Deepneau again. With the exception of Pere Callahan, none of them would. The partings had begun.

  “Do well,” he said to them. “May ya do well.”

  “And you,” Deepneau said.

  “Yes,” Tower said, and for once he didn’t sound a bit grudging. “Good luck to you both. Long days and happy nights, or whatever it is.”

  There was just room to turn around without backing, and Eddie was glad—he wasn’t quite ready for reverse, at least not yet.

  As Eddie drove back toward the Rocket Road, Roland looked over his shoulder and waved. This was highly unusual behavior for him, and the knowledge must have shown on Eddie’s face.

  “It’s the end-game now,” Roland said. “All I’ve worked for and waited for all the long years. The end is coming. I feel it. Don’t you?”

  Eddie nodded. It was like that point in a piece of music when all the instruments begin rushing toward some inevitable crashing climax.

  “Susannah?” Roland asked.

  “Still alive.”

  “Mia?”

  “Still in control.”

  “The baby?”

  “Still coming.”

  “And Jake? Father Callahan?”

  Eddie stopped at the road, looked both ways, then made his turn.

  “No,” he said. “From them I haven’t heard. What about you?”

  Roland shook his own head. From Jake, somewhere in the future with just an ex-Catholic priest and a billy-bumbler for protection, there was only silence. Roland hoped the boy was all right.

  For the time being, he could do no more.

  STAVE: Commala-me-mine

  You have to walk the line.

  When you finally get the thing you need

  It makes you feel so fine.

  RESPONSE: Commala-come-nine!

  It makes ya feel fine!

  But if you’d have the thing you need

  You have to walk the line.

  10th Stanza: Susannah-Mio, Divided Girl of Mine

  One

  “John Fitzgerald Kennedy died this afternoon at Parkland Memorial Hospital.”

  This voice, this grieving voice: Walter Cronkite’s voice, in a dream.

  “America’s last gunslinger is dead. O Discordia!”

  Two

  As Mia left room 1919 of the New York Plaza—Park (soon to be the Regal U.N. Plaza, a Sombra/North Central project, O Discordia), Susannah fell into a swoon. From a swoon she passed into a savage dream filled with savage news.

  Three

  The next voice is that of Chet Huntley, co-anchor ofThe Huntley-Brinkley Report. It’s also—in some way she cannot understand—the voice of Andrew, her chauffeur.

  “Diem and Nhu are dead,” says that voice. “Now do slip the dogs of war, the tale of woe begins; from here the way to Jericho Hill is paved with blood and sin. Ah, Discordia! Charyou tree! Come, reap!”

  Where am I?

  She looks around and sees a concrete wall packed with a jostling intaglio of names, slogans, and obscene drawings. In the middle, where anyone sitting on the bunk must see it, is this greeting: HELLO NIGGER WELCOME TO OXFORD DON ’ T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE!

  The crotch of her slacks is damp. The underwear beneath is downright soaked, and she remembers why: although the bail bondsman was notified well in advance, the cops held onto them as long as possible, cheerfully ignoring the increasing chorus of pleas for a bathroom break. No toilets in the cells; no sinks; not even a tin bucket. You didn’t need to be a quiz-kid onTwenty-one to figure it out; they weresupposed to piss in their pants, supposed to get in touch with their essential animal natures, and eventually she had,she, Odetta Holmes—

  No,she thinks,I am Susannah. Susannah Dean. I’ve been taken prisoner again, jailed again, but I am still I.

  She hears voices from beyond this wing of jail cells, voices which for her sum up the present. She’s supposed to think they’re coming from a TV out in the jail’s office, she assumes, but it’s got to be a trick. Or some ghoul’s idea of a joke. Why else would Frank McGee be saying President Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, is dead? Why would Dave Garroway from theToday show be saying that the President’s littleboy is dead, that John-John has been killed in a plane crash? What sort of awful lie is that to hear as you sit in a stinking southern jail with your wet underpants clinging to your crotch? Why is “Buffalo” Bob Smith of theHowdy Doody show yelling “Cowabunga, kids, Martin Luther King is dead”? And the kids all screaming back, “Commala-come-Yay!We love the things ya say! Only good nigger’s a dead nigger, so kill a coontoday! ”

  The bail bondsman will be here soon. That’s what she needs to hold onto,that.

  She goes to the bars and grips them. Yes, this is Oxford Town, all right, Oxford all over again, two men dead by the light of the moon, somebody better investigate soon. But she’s going to get out, and she’ll fly away, fly away, fly away home, and not long after that there will be an entirely new world to explore, with a new person to love and a new person tobe. Commala-come-come, the journey’s just begun.

  Oh, but that’s a lie. The journey is almost over. Her heart knows this.

  Down the hall a door opens and footsteps come clicking toward her. She looks in that direction—eagerly, hoping for the bondsman, or a deputy with a ring of keys—but instead it’s a black woman in a pair of stolen shoes. It’s her old self. It’s Odetta Holmes. Didn’t go to Morehouse, but did go to Columbia. And to all those coffee houses down in the Village. And to the Castle on the Abyss, that house, too.

  “Listen to me,” Odetta says. “No one can get you out of this but yourself, girl.”

  “You want to enjoy those legs while you got em, honey!” The voice she hears coming out of her mouth is rough and confrontational on top, scared underneath. The voice of Detta Walker. “You goan lose em fore long! They goan be cut off by the A train! That fabled A train! Man named Jack Mort goan push you off the platform in the Christopher Street station!”

  Odetta looks at her calmly and says, “The A train doesn’t stop there. It’snever stopped there.”

  “What the fuck youtalkin about, bitch?”

  Odetta is not fooled by the angry voice or the profanity. She knows who she’s talking to. And she knows what she’s talking about. The column of truth has a hole in it. These are not the voices of the gramophone but those of our dead friends. There are ghosts in the rooms of ruin. “Go back to the Dogan, Susannah. And remember what I say: only you can save yourself. Only you can lift yourself out of Discordia.”

  Four

  Now it’s the voice of David Brinkley, saying that someone named Stephen King was struck and killed by a minivan while walking near his home in Lovell, a small town in western Maine. King was fifty-two, he says, the author of many novels, most notablyThe Stand, The Shining, and’Salem’s Lot. Ah Discordia, Brinkley says, the world grows darker.

  Five

  Odetta Holmes, the woman Susannah once was, points through the bars of the cell and past her. She says it again: “Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference.”

  Susannah turns to look where the finger is pointing, and is filled with horror at what she sees: The blood! Dear God, theblood! There is a bowl filled with blood, and in it some monstrous dead thing, a
dead baby that’s not human, and has she killed it herself?

  “No!” she screams. “No, I will never!I will NEVER! ”

  “Then the gunslinger will die and the Dark Tower will fall,” says the terrible woman standing in the corridor, the terrible woman who is wearing Trudy Damascus’s shoes.

  “Discordia indeed.”

  Susannah closes her eyes. Can shemake herself swoon? Can she swoon herself right out of this cell, this terrible world?

  She does. She falls forward into the darkness and the soft beeping of machinery and the last voice she hears is that of Walter Cronkite, telling her that Diem and Nhu are dead, astronaut Alan Shepard is dead, Lyndon Johnson is dead, Richard Nixon is dead, Elvis Presley is dead, Rock Hudson is dead, Roland of Gilead is dead, Eddie of New York is dead, Jake of New York is dead, the world is dead, theworlds, the Tower is falling, a trillion universes are merging, and all is Discordia, all is ruin, all is ended.

  Six

  Susannah opened her eyes and looked around wildly, gasping for breath. She almost fell out of the chair in which she was sitting. It was one of those capable of rolling back and forth along the instrument panels filled with knobs and switches and blinking lights. Overhead were the black-and-white TV screens. She was back in the Dogan. Oxford

  (Diem and Nhu are dead)

  had only been a dream. A dream within a dream, if you pleased. This was another, but marginally better.

  Most of the TV screens which had been showing pictures of Calla Bryn Sturgis the last time she’d been here were now broadcasting either snow or test-patterns. On one, however, was the nineteenth-floor corridor of the Plaza—Park Hotel. The camera rolled down it toward the elevators, and Susannah realized that these were Mia’s eyes she was looking through.

  My eyes,she thought. Her anger was thin, but she sensed it could be fed. Wouldhave to be fed, if she was ever to regard the unspeakable thing she’d seen in her dream. The thing in the corner of her Oxford jail cell. The thing in the bowl of blood.