“Say what you can be sure of,” he said. “No more than that.”

“All right. The Drawers was a place Detta Walker knew about. A place Detta thought about. It’s a slang term, one she picked up from listening to the grownups when they sat out on the porch and drank beer and talked about the old days. It means a place that’s spoiled, or useless, or both. There was something in the Drawers-in the idea of the Drawers-that called to Detta. Don’t ask me what; I might have known once, but I don’t anymore. And don’t want to.

“Detta stole my Aunt Blue’s china plate-the one my folks gave her for a wedding present-and took it to the Drawers-her Drawers-to break it. That place was a gravel-pit filled with trash. A dumping-ground. Later on, she sometimes picked up boys at roadhouses.”

Susannah dropped her head for a moment, her lips pressed tightly together. Then she looked up again and went on.

“White boys. And when they took her back to their cars in the parking lot, she cock-teased them and then ran off. Those parking lots… they were the Drawers, too. It was a dangerous game, but she was young enough, quick enough, and mean enough to play it to the hilt and enjoy it. Later, in New York, she’d go on shoplifting expeditions… you know about that. Both of you. Always to the fancy stores-Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s-and steal trinkets. And when she made up her mind to go on one of those sprees, she’d think: I’m goan to the Drawers today. Goan steal me some shitfum de white folks. Goan steal me sumpin forspecial and den break dot sumbitch.”

She paused, lips trembling, looking into the fire. When she looked around again, Roland and Eddie saw tears standing in her eyes.

“I’m crying, but don’t let that fool you. I remember doing those things, and I remember enjoying them. I guess I’m crying because I know I’d do it all again, if the circumstances were right.”

Roland seemed to have regained some of his old serenity, his weird equilibrium. “We have a proverb in my country, Susannah: ’The wise thief always prospers.”

“I don’t see nothing wise about stealing a bunch of paste jewelry,” she said sharply.

“Were you ever caught?”

“No-”

He spread his hands as if to say, there you have it.

“So for Detta Walker, the Drawers were bad places?” Eddie asked. “Is that right? Because it doesn’t exactly feel right.”

“Bad and good at the same time. They were powerful places, places where she… she reinvented herself; I suppose you could say… hut they were lost places, too. And this is all off the subject of Roland’s ghost-boy, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not,” Roland said. “We had Drawers as well, you see, in my world. It was slang for us, too, and the meanings are very similar.”

“What did it mean to you and your friends?” Eddie asked.

“That varied slightly from place to place and situation to situation. It might mean a trash-midden. It might mean a whorehouse or a place where men came to gamble or chew devil-weed. But the most common’ meaning that I know is also the simplest.”

He looked at them both.

“The Drawers are places of desolation,” he said. “The Drawers are the waste lands.”

15

THIS TIME SUSANNAH THREW more wood on the fire. In the south, Old Mother blazed on brilliantly, not flickering. She knew from her school studies what that meant: it was a planet, not a star. Venus? She wondered. Or is the solar system of which this world is a part as different as everything else?

Again that feeling of unreality-the feeling that all this must surely be a dream-washed over her.

“Go on,” she said. “What happened after the voice warned you about the Drawers and the little boy?”

“I punched my hand into the hole the sand had come from, as I was taught to do if such a thing ever happened to me. What I plucked forth was a jawbone… but not this one. The jawbone I took from the wall of the way station was much larger; from one of the Great Old Ones, I have almost no doubt.”

“What happened to it?” Susannah asked quietly.

“One night I gave it to the boy,” Roland said. The fire painted his cheeks with hot orange highlights and dancing shadows. “As a protection-a kind of talisman. Later I felt it had served its purpose and threw it away.”

“So whose jawbone you got there, Roland?” Eddie asked.

Roland held it up, looked at it long and thoughtfully, and let it drop back. “Later, after Jake… after he died… I caught up with the men I had been chasing.”

“With Walter,” Susannah said.

“Yes. We held palaver; he and I… long palaver. I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up, Walter was dead. A hundred years dead at least, and probably more. There was nothing left of him but bones, which was fitting enough, since we were in a place of bones.”

“Yeah, it must have been a pretty long palaver, all right,” Eddie said dryly.

Susannah frowned slightly at this, but Roland only nodded. “Long and long,” he said, looking into the fire.

“You came to in the morning and reached the Western Sea that very evening,” Eddie said. “That night the lobstrosities came, right?”

Roland nodded again. “Yes. But before I left the place where Walter and I had spoken… or dreamed… or whatever it was we did… I took this from the skull of his skeleton.” He lifted the bone and the orange light again skated off the teeth.

Walter’s jawbone, Eddie thought, and felt a little chill work through him. The jawbone of the man in black. Remember this, Eddie my boy, the next time you get to thinking Roland’s maybe just another one of the guys. He’s been carrying it around with him all this time like some kind of a… a cannibal’s trophy. Jee-sus.

“I remember what I thought when I took it,” Roland said. “I remember very well; it is the only memory I have of that time which hasn’t doubled on me. I thought, ’It was bad luck to throw away what I found when I found the boy. This will replace it.’ Only then I heard Walter’s laughter-his mean, tittery laughter. I heard his voice, too.”

“What did he say?” Susannah asked.

“Too late, gunslinger,” Roland said. “That’s what he said. ‘Too late-your luck will be bad from now until the end of eternity-that is your ka.’”

16

“ALL RIGHT,” EDDIE SAID at last. “I understand the basic paradox. Your, memory is divided-”

“Not divided. Doubled.”

“All right; it’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?” Eddie grasped a twig and made his own little drawing in the sand:

He tapped the line on the left. “This is your memory of the time before you got to the way station-a single track.”

“Yes.”

He tapped the line on the right. “And after you came out on the far side of the mountains in the place of bones… the place where Walter was waiting for you. Also a single track.”

“Yes.”

Now Eddie first indicated the middle area and then drew a rough circle around it.

“That’s what you’ve got to do, Roland-close this double track off. Build a stockade around it in your mind and then forget it. Because it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t change anything, it’s gone, it’s done-”

“But it isn’t.” Roland held up the bone. “If my memories of the boy Jake are false-and I know they are-how can I have this? I took it to replace the one I threw away… but the one I threw away came from the cellar of the way station, and along the track I know is true, / never went down cellar! I never spoke with the demon! I moved on alone, with fresh water and nothing else!”

“Roland, listen to me,” Eddie said earnestly. “If that jawbone you’re holding was the one from the way station, that would be one thing. But isn’t it possible that if you hallucinated that whole thing-the way station, the kid, the Speaking Demon-then maybe you took Walter’s jawbone because-”

“It was no hallucination,” Roland said. He looked at them both with his faded blue bombardier’s eyes and then did something neither expected… something Eddie would have sworn Roland did not know he meant to do himself.