Chapter II

SHOES IN THE ROAD

1

They reached the shoes at mid-morning. Beyond them, clearer now, stood the glass palace. It glimmered a delicate green shade, like the reflection of a lily pad in still water. There were shining gates in front of it; red pennons snapped from its towers in a light breeze.

The shoes were also red.

Susannah’s impression that there were six pairs was understandable but wrong-there were actually four pairs and one quartet. This latter- four dark red booties made of supple leather-was undoubtedly meant for the four-footed member of their ka-tet. Roland picked one of them up and felt inside it. He didn’t know how many bumblers had worn shoes in the history of the world, but he was willing to guess that none had ever been gifted with a set of silk-lined leather booties.

“Bally, Gucci, eat your heart out,” Eddie said. “This is great stuff.”

Susannah’s were easiest to pick out, and not just because of the feminine, sparkly swoops on the sides. They weren’t really shoes at all-they had been made to fit over the stumps of her legs, which ended just above the knees.

“Now look at this,” she marvelled, holding one up so the sun could flash on the rhinestones with which the shoes were decorated… if they were rhinestones. She had a crazy notion that maybe they were diamond chips. “Cappies. After four years of gettin along in what my friend Cynthia calls 'circumstances of reduced leg-room,' I finally got myself a pair of cappies. Think of that.”

“Cappies,” Eddie mused. “Is that what they call em?”

“That’s what they call em, sugar.”

Jake’s were bright red Oxfords-except for the color, they would have looked perfectly at home in the well-bred classrooms of The Piper School. He flexed one, then turned it over. The sole was bright and unmarked. There was no manufacturer’s stamp, nor had he really expected one. His father had maybe a dozen pairs of fine handmade shoes. Jake knew them when he saw them.

Eddie’s were low boots with Cuban heels {Maybe in this world you call them Mejis heels, he thought) and pointed toes… what, back in his other life, had been known as “street-boppers.” Kids from the mid-sixties-an era Odetta/Detta/Susannah had just missed-might have called them “Beatle-boots.”

Roland’s, of course, were cowboy boots. Fancy ones-you’d go dancing rather than droving in such as these. Looped stitching, side decorations, narrow, haughty arches. He examined them without picking them up, then looked at his fellow travellers and frowned. They were looking at each other. You would have said three people couldn’t do that, only a pair… but you only would have said it if you’d never been part of a ka-tet.

Roland still shared khef with them; he felt the powerful current of their mingled thought, but could not understand it. Because it’s of their world. They come from different whens of that world, but they see something here that’s common to all three of them.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do they mean, these shoes?”

“I don’t think any of us know that, exactly,” Susannah said.

“No,” Jake said. “It’s another riddle.” He looked at the weird, blood red Oxford shoe in his hands with distaste. “Another goddamned riddle.”

“Tell what you know.” He looked toward the glass palace again. It was perhaps fifteen New York miles away, now, shining in the clear day, delicate as a mirage, but as real as… well, as real as shoes. “Please, tell me what you know about these shoes.”

“I got shoes, you got shoes, all God’s chillun got shoes,” Odetta said. “That’s the prevailin opinion, anyway.”

“Well,” Eddie said, “we got em, anyway. And you’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am.”

“You, Jake?”

Instead of answering with words, Jake picked up the other Oxford (Roland had no doubt that all the shoes, including Oy’s, would fit perfectly) and clapped them briskly together three times. It meant nothing to Roland, but both Eddie and Susannah reacted violently, looking around, looking especially at the sky, as if expecting a storm born out of this bright autumn sunshine. I hey ended up looking at the glass palace again… and then at each other, in that knowing, round-eyed way that made Roland feel like shaking them both until their teeth rattled. Yet he waited. Sometimes that was all a man could do.

“After you killed Jonas, you looked into the ball,” Eddie said, turning to him.

“Yes.”

“Travelled in the ball.”

“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about that again now; it has nothing to do with these-”

“I think it does,” Eddie said. “You flew inside a pink storm. Inside a pink gale, you could say. Gale is a word you might use for a storm, isn’t it? Especially if you were making up a riddle.”

“Sure,” Jake said. He sounded dreamy, almost like a boy who talks in his sleep. “When does Dorothy fly over the Wizard’s Rainbow? When she’s a Gale.”

“We ain’t in Kansas anymore, sugar,” Susannah said, and then voiced a strange, humorless bark which Roland supposed was a species of laughter. “May look a little like it, but Kansas was never… you know, this thin:'

“I don’t understand you,” Roland said. But he felt cold, and his heart was beating too fast. There were thinnies everywhere now, hadn’t he told them that? Worlds melting into one another as the forces of the Tower weakened? As the day when the rose would be plowed under drew nearer?

“You saw things as you flew,” Eddie said. “Before you got to the dark land, the one you called Thunderclap, you saw things. The piano-player, Sheb. Who turned up again later in your life, didn’t he?”

“Yes, in Tull.”

“And the dweller with the red hair?”

“Him, too. He had a bird named Zoltan. But when we met, he and I, we said the normal. 'Life for you, life for your crop,' that sort of thing. I thought I heard the same when he flew by me in the pink storm, but he really said something else.” He glanced at Susannah. “I saw your wheel-chair, too. The old one.”

“And you saw the witch.”

“Yes. I-”

In a creaky chortle that reminded Roland unnervingly of Rhea, Jake Chambers cried: “I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!”

Roland stared at him, trying not to gape.

“Only in the movie, the witch wasn’t riding a broom,” Jake said. “She was on her bike, the one with the basket on the back.”

“Yeah, no reap-charms, either,” Eddie said. “Would have been a nice touch, though. I tell you, Jake, when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about the way she laughed.”

“It was the monkeys that gave me the creeps,” Susannah said. “The flying monkeys. I’d get thinkin about em, and then have to crawl into bed with my mom and dad. They’d still be arguin 'bout whose bright idea it was to take me to that show in the foist place when I fell asleep between em.”

“I wasn’t worried about clapping the heels together,” Jake said. “Not a bit.” It was Susannah and Eddie he was speaking to; for the time being, it was as if Roland wasn’t even there. “I wasn’t wearing them, after all.”

“True,” Susannah said, sounding severe, “but you know what my daddy always used to say?”

“No, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out,” Eddie said.

She gave Eddie a brief, severe look, then turned her attention back to Jake.” 'Never whistle for the wind unless you want it to blow,'” she said. “And it’s good advice, no matter what Young Mister Foolish here may think.”

“Spanked again,” Eddie said, grinning.

“Tanked!” Oy said, eyeing Eddie severely.

“Explain this to me,” Roland said in his softest voice. “I would hear. I would share your khef. And I would share it now.”