The Waste Lands (Page 2)

This time she laughed up at him. “Roland, this ole gunbelt’s as com’fable as it’s ever gonna be. Now do. you want me to shoot or are we just going to sit and listen to crowmusic from over yonder?”

He felt tension worming sharp little fingers under his skin now, and he supposed Cort had felt much the same at times like this under his gruff, bluff exterior. I le wanted her to be good … needed her to be good. But to show how badly he wanted and needed—that could lead to disaster. “Tell me your lesson again, Susannah.”

She sighed in mock exasperation . . . but as she spoke her smile faded and her dark, beautiful face became solemn. And from her lips he heard the old catechism again, made new in her mouth. He had never expected to hear these words from a woman. How natural they sounded . . . yet how strange and dangerous, as well. ” ‘I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.

” ‘I aim with my eye.

” ‘I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.

” ‘I shoot with my mind.

” ‘I do not kill with my gun—’ “

She broke off and pointed at the mica-shiny stones on the boulder. “I’m not going to kill anything anyhow—they’re just itty bitty rocks.” Her expression—a little haughty, a little naughty—suggested that she expected Roland to be exasperated with her, perhaps even angry. Roland, however, had been where she was now; he had not forgotten that apprentice gunslingers were fractious and high-spirited, nervy and apt to bite exactly at the wrong moment . . . and he had discovered an unexpected capacity in himself. He could teach. More, he liked to teach, and he found himself wondering, from time to time, if that had been true of Cort, as well. He guessed that it had been. Now more crows began to call raucously, these from the forest behind them. Some part of Roland’s mind registered the fact that the new cries were agitated rather than merely quarrelsome; these birds sounded as if they had been scared up and away from whatever they had been feeding on. He had more important things to think about than whatever it was that had scared a bunch of crows, however, so he simply filed the information away and refocused his concentration on Susannah. To do otherwise with a ‘prentice was to ask for a second, less playful bite. And who would be to blame for that? Who but the teacher? For was he not training her to bite? Training both of them to bite? Wasn’t that what a gunslinger was, when you stripped off the few stern lines of ritual and stilled the few iron grace-notes of catechism? Wasn’t he (or she) only a human hawk, trained to bite on command?

“No,” he said. “They’re not rocks.”

She raised her eyebrows a little and began to smile again. Now that she saw he wasn’t going to explode at her as he sometimes did when she was slow or fractious (or at least not yet), her eyes again took on the mocking sun-on-steel glint he associated with Detta Walker. “They ain’t?” The teasing in her voice was still good – nut u red, but he thought it would turn mean if he let it. She was tense, keyed up, her claws already halfway out of their sheaths. “No, they ain’t,” he said, returning her mockery. His own smile began to return, but it was hard and humorless. “Susannah, do you remember the honk mahfahs?” Her smile began to fade.

“The honk mahfahs in Oxford Town?”

Her smile was gone.

“Do you remember what the honk mahfahs did to you and your friends?” “That wasn’t me,” she said. “That was another woman.” Her eyes had taken on a dull, sullen cast. He hated that look, but he also liked it just fine. It was the right look, the one that said the kindling was burning well and soon the bigger logs would start to catch.

“Yes. It was. Like it or not, it was Odetta Susannah Holmes, daugh-ter of Sarah Walker Holmes. Not you as you are, but you as you were. Remember the fire-hoses, Susannah? Remember the gold teeth, how you saw them when they used the hoses on you and your friends in Oxford? How you saw them twinkle when they laughed?” She had told them these things, and many others, over many long nights as the campfire burned low. The gunslinger hadn’t understood everything, but he had listened carefully, just the same. And remem-bered. Pain was a tool, after all. Sometimes it was the best tool.

“What’s wrong with you, Roland? Why you want to go recallin that trash in my mind?”

Now the sullen eyes glinted at him dangerously; they reminded him of Alain’s eyes when good-natured Alain was finally roused. “Yonder stones are those men,” Roland said softly. “The men who locked you in a cell and left you to foul yourself. The men with the clubs and the dogs. The men who called you a nigger cunt.”

He pointed at them, moving his finger from left to right. “There’s the one who pinched your breast and laughed. There’s the one who said he better check and see if you had something stuffed up your ass. There’s the one who called you a chimpanzee in a five-hundred-dollar dress. That’s the one that kept running his billyclub over the spokes of your wheelchair until you thought the sound would send you mad. There’s the one who called your friend Leon pinko-fag. And the one on the end, Susannah, is Jack Mort. “There. Those stones. Those men.”

She was breathing rapidly now, her bosom rising and falling in swift little jerks beneath the gunslinger’s gunbelt with its heavy freight of bul-lets. Her eyes had left him; they were looking at the mica-flecked chips of stone. Behind them and at some distance, a tree splintered and fell over. More crows called in the sky. Deep in the game which was no longer a game, neither of them noticed. “Oh yeah?” she breathed. “That so?”