Part four

ALL GOD’S CHILLUN GOT SHOES

Chapter I

KANSAS IN THE MORNING

1

For the first time in

(hours? days?)

the gunslinger fell silent. He sat for a moment looking toward the building to the east of them (with the sun behind it, the glass palace was a black shape surrounded by a gold nimbus) with his forearms propped on his knees. Then he took the waterskin which lay on the pavement beside him, held it over his face, opened his mouth, and upended it.

He drank what happened to go in his mouth-the others could see his adam’s apple working as he lay back in the breakdown lane, still pouring-but drinking didn’t seem to be his primary purpose. Water streamed down his deeply lined forehead and bounced off his closed eyelids. It pooled in the triangular hollow at the base of his throat and ran back from his temples, wetting his hair and turning it darker.

At last he put the waterskin aside and only lay there, eyes closed, arms stretched out high above his head, like a man surrendering in his sleep. Steam rose in delicate tendrils from his wet face.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“Feel better?” Eddie asked.

The gunslinger’s lids rose, disclosing those faded yet somehow alarming blue eyes. “Yes. I do. I don’t understand how that can be, as much as I dreaded this telling… but I do.”

“An ologist-of-the-psyche could probably explain it to you,” Susannah said, “but I doubt you’d listen.” She put her hands in the small of her back, stretched and winced… but the wince was only reflex. The pain and stiffness she’d expected weren’t there, and although there was one small creak near the base other spine, she didn’t get the satisfying series of snaps, crackles, and pops she had expected.

“Tell you one thing,” Eddie said, “this gives a whole new meaning to ‘Get it off your chest.’ How long have we been here, Roland?”

“Just one night.”

“The spirits have done it all in a single night,” Jake said in a dreamy voice. His legs were crossed at the ankles; Oy sat in the diamond shape made by the boy’s bent knees, looking at him with his bright gold-black eyes.

Roland sat up, wiping at his wet cheeks with his neckerchief and looking at Jake sharply. “What is it you say?”

“Not me. A guy named Charles Dickens wrote that. In a story called A Christmas Carol. All in a single night, huh?”

“Does any part of your body say it was longer?”

Jake shook his head. No, he felt pretty much the way he did any morning-better than on some. He had to take a leak, but his back teeth weren’t exactly floating, or anything like that.

“Eddie? Susannah?”

“I feel good,” Susannah said. “Surely not as if I stayed up all night, let alone many of em.”

Eddie said, “It reminds me of the time I spent as a junkie, in a way-”

“Doesn’t everything?” Roland asked dryly.

“Oh, that’s funny,” Eddie said. “A real howl. Next train that goes crazy on us, you can ask it the silly questions. What I meant was that you’d spend so many nights high that you got used to feeling like ten pounds of shit in a nine-pound bag when you got up in the morning-bad head, stuffy nose, thumping heart, glass in the old spine. Take it from your pal Eddie, you can tell just from the way you feel in the morning how good dope is for you. Anyway, you’d get so used to that-/did, anyway-that when you actually took a night off, you’d wake up the next morning and sit there on the edge of the bed, thinking, 'What the flick’s wrong with me? Am I sick? I feel weird. Did I have a stroke in the night?'”

Jake laughed, then clapped a hand over his mouth so violently that it was as if he wanted not just to hold the sound in but call it back. “Sorry,” he said. “That made me think of my dad.”

“One of my people, huh?” Eddie said. “Anyway, I expect to be sore, I expect to be tired, I expect to creak when I walk… but I actually think all I need to put me right is a quick pee in the bushes.”

“And a bite to eat?” Roland asked.

Eddie had been wearing a small smile. Now it faded. “No,” he said. “After that story, I’m not all that hungry. In fact, I’m not hungry at all.”

2

Eddie carried Susannah down the embankment and popped her behind a stand of laurel bushes to do her necessary. Jake was sixty or seventy yards east, in a grove of birches. Roland had said he would use the remedial strip to do his morning necessary, then raised his eyebrows when his New York friends laughed.

Susannah wasn’t laughing when she came out of the bushes. Her face was streaked with tears. Eddie didn’t ask her; he knew. He had been fighting the feeling himself. He took her gently in his arms and she put her face against the side of his neck. They stayed that way for a little while.

“Charyou tree,” she said at last, pronouncing it as Roland had: chair-you tree, with a little upturned vowel at the end.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, thinking that a Charlie by any other name was still a Charlie. As, he supposed, a rose was a rose was a rose. “Come, Reap.”

She raised her head and began to wipe her swimming eyes. “To have gone through all that,” she said, keeping her voice low… and looking once at the turnpike embankment to make sure Roland wasn’t there, looking down at them. “And at fourteen.”

“Yeah. It makes my adventures searching for the elusive dime bag in Tompkins Square look pretty tame. In a way, though, I’m almost relieved.”

“Relieved? Why?”

“Because I thought he was going to tell us that he killed her himself. For his damned Tower.”

Susannah looked squarely into his eyes. “But he thinks that’s what he did. Don’t you understand that?”

3

When they were back together again and there was food actually in sight, all of them decided they could eat a bit, after all. Roland shared out the last of the burritos (Maybe later today we can stop in at the nearest Boing Boing Burgers and see what they’ve got for leftovers, Eddie thought), and they dug in. All of them, that was, except Roland. He picked up his burrito, looked at it, then looked away. Eddie saw an expression of sadness on the gunslinger’s face that made him look both old and lost. It hurt Eddie’s heart, but he couldn’t think what to do about it.

Jake, almost ten years younger, could. He got up, went to Roland, knelt beside him, put his arms around the gunslinger’s neck, and hugged him. “I’m sorry you lost your friend,” he said.

Roland’s face worked, and for a moment Eddie was sure he was going to lose it. A long time between hugs, maybe. Mighty long. Eddie had to look away for a moment. Kansas in the morning, he told himself. A sight you never expected to see. Dig on that for awhile, and let the man be.

When he looked back, Roland had it together again. Jake was sitting beside him, and Oy had his long snout on one of the gunslinger’s boots. Roland had begun to eat his burrito. Slowly, and without much relish… but he was eating.

A cold hand-Susannah’s-crept into Eddie’s. He took it and folded his fingers over it.

“One night,” she marvelled.

“On our body-clocks, at least,” Eddie said. “In our heads…”

“Who knows?” Roland agreed. “But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world.” He smiled. It was unexpected, as always, and as always, it transformed his face into something nearly beautiful. Looking at that, Eddie mused, you could see how a girl might have fallen in love with Roland, once upon a time. Back when he had been long and going on tall but maybe not so ugly; back when the Tower hadn’t yet got its best hold on him.