The room fell silent. The wind gusted,throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and Susannah once more markedhow it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles and eaves, nodoubt.
“Less than three weeks, even if we had towalk,” Roland said. He reached out toward the Polaroid photograph of the duskystone tower standing against the sunset sky, but did not quite touch it. It wasas if, Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. “After all the years andall the miles.”
Not to mention the gallons of spilledblood, Susannah thought, but she would not have said this even if the twoof them had been alone. There was no need to; he knew how much blood had beenspilled as well as she did. But there was something off-key here. Off-key ordownright wrong. And the gunslinger did not seem to know that.
Sympathy was to respect the feelings ofanother. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. Why would folkscall any land Empathica?
And why would this pleasant old man lieabout it?
“Tell me something, Joe Collins,” Rolandsaid.
“Aye, gunslinger, if I can.”
“Have you been right up to it? Laidyour hand on the stone of it?”
The old man looked at first to see ifRoland was joshing him. When he was sure that wasn’t the case, he lookedshocked. “No,” he said, and for the first time sounded as American as Susannahherself. “That pitcher’s as close as I dared go. The edge of the rosefield. I’mgonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards away. What the robot’d call fivehundred arcs o’ the wheel.”
Roland nodded. “And why not?”
“Because I thought to go closer might killme, but I wouldn’t be able to stop. The voices would draw me on. So I thoughtthen, and so I do think, even today.”
Seven
After dinner—surely the finest mealSusannah had had since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly thebest in her entire life—the sore on her face burst wide open. It was JoeCollins’s fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold againstthe only inhabitant of Odd’s Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was thelast thing he would have wanted, surely.
He served chicken, roasted to a turn andespecially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashedpotatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas(“Only canned, say sorry,” he told them), and a dish of little boiled onionsbathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drankit with childish greed, although both passed on “the teensy piss o’ rum.” Oyhad his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and thenset it on the floor by the stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in thedoorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room, lickinghis chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while watchingthe humes with his ears up.
“I couldn’t eat dessert so don’t ask me,”Susannah said when she’d finished cleaning her plate for the second time,sop-ping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. “I’m not sure I caneven get down from this chair.”
“Well, that’s all right,” Joe said, lookingdisappointed, “maybe later. I’ve got a chocolate pudding and a butterscotchone.”
Roland raised his napkin to muffle a belchand then said, “I could eat a dab of both, I think.”
“Well, come to that, maybe I could, too,”Susannah allowed. How many eons since she’d tasted butterscotch?
When they were done with the pudding,Susannah offered to help with the cleaning-up but Joe waved her away, sayinghe’d just put the pots and plates in the dishwasher to rinse and then run “thewhole happy bunch of em” later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland wentback and forth into the kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessedthat the little piss o’ rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one largepiss by the end of the meal) might have had something to do with it.
He poured coffee and the three of them(four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room. Outside it was growing darkand the wind was screaming louder than ever. Mordred’s out there someplace,hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought, and onceagain had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she hadn’t knownthat, murderous or not, he must still be a child.
“Tell us how you came to be here, Joe,”Roland invited.
Joe grinned. “That’s a hair-raising story,”he said, “but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don’t mind tellin it.”The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. “It’s nice, havin folks to talk to for alittle bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says nuffink back.”
He’d started off trying to be a teacher,Joe said, but quickly discovered that life wasn’t for him. He liked thekids—loved them, in fact—but hated all the administrative bullshitand the way the system seemed set up to make sure no square pegs escaped therelentless rounding process. He quit teaching after only three years and wentinto show business.
“Did you sing or dance?” Roland wanted toknow.
“Neither one,” Joe replied. “I gave em theold stand-up.”
“Stand-up?”
“He means he was a comedian,” Susannahsaid. “He told jokes.”
“Correct!” Joe said brightly. “Some folksactually thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority.”
He got an agent whose previous enterprise,a discount men’s clothing store, had gone bankrupt. One thing led to another,he said, and one gig led to another, too. Eventually he found himselfworking second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a batteredbut reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him.He almost never worked the weekends; on the weekends, even the third-rate clubswanted to book rock-and-roll bands.
This was in the late sixties and earlyseventies, and there’d been no shortage of what Joe called “current eventsmaterial”: hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers, movie-stars,and, as always, politics—but he said he had been more of a traditionaljoke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George Carlin do the current-eventsshtick if they wanted it; he’d stick to Speaking of my mother-in-law andThey say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell you about this Irishgirl I met.
During his recitation, an odd (and—toSusannah, at least—rather poignant) thing happened. Joe Collins’sMid-World accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began to cross-fadeinto an accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American. She kept expectingto hear bird come out of his mouth as boid, heard as hoid,but she guessed that was only because she’d spent so much time with Eddie. Shethought Joe Collins was one of those odd natural mimics whose voices are theauditory equivalent of Silly Putty, taking impressions that fade as quickly asthey rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it probably was boidand hoid; in Pittsburgh it would be burrd and hurrd; theGiant Eagle supermarket would become Jaunt Iggle.
Roland stopped him early on to ask if acomic was like a court jester, and the old man laughed heartily. “You got it.Just think of a bunch of people sitting around in a smoky room with drinks intheir hands instead of the king and his courtiers.”
Roland nodded, smiling.
“There are advantages to being a funnymandoing one-nighters in the Midwest, though,” he said. “If you tank in Dubuque,all that happens is you end up doing twenty minutes instead of forty-five andthen it’s on to the next town. There are probably places in Mid-World wherethey’d cut off your damn head for stinking up the joint.”
At this the gunslinger burst out laughing,a sound that still had the power to startle Susannah (although she was laughingherself). “You say true, Joe.”