The Waste Lands (Page 3)

“It is. Now say your lesson, Susannah Dean, and be true.” – This time the words fell from her lips like small chunks of ice. Her right hand trembled lightly on the arm of her wheelchair like an idling engine. ” ‘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.’ “

“Good.”

” ‘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.’ “

“So it has ever been, Susannah Dean.”

” ‘I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.

” ‘I kill with my heart.’ “

“Then KILL them, for your father’s sake!” Roland shouted. “KILL THEM ALL!” Her right hand was a blur between the arm of the chair and the butt of Roland’s sixgun. It was out in a second, her left hand descending, fanning at the hammer in flutters almost as swift and delicate as the wing of a hummingbird. Six flat cracks pealed off across the valley, and five of the six chips of stone set atop the boulder blinked out of existence.

For a moment neither of them spoke—did not even breathe, it seemed—as the echoes rolled back and forth, dimming. Even the crows were silent, at least for the time being.

The gunslinger broke the silence with four toneless yet oddly emphatic words:

“It is very well.”

Susannah looked at the gun in her hand as if she had never seen it before. A tendril of smoke rose from the barrel, perfectly straight in the windless silence. Then, slowly, she returned it to the holster below her bosom. “Good, but not perfect,” she said at last. “I missed one.” “Did you?” He walked over to the boulder and picked up the remaining chip of stone. He glanced at it, then tossed it to her. She caught it with her left; her right stayed near the bolstered gun, he saw with approval. She shot better and more naturally than Eddie, but had not learned this particular lesson as swiftly as Eddie had done. If she had been with them during the shootout at Balazar’s nightclub, she might have. Now, Roland saw, she was at last learning that, too. She looked at the stone and saw the notch, barely a sixteenth of an inch deep, in its upper corner.

“You only clipped it,” Roland said, returning to her, “but in a shooting scrape, sometimes that’s all you wed. If you clip a fellow, throw his aim off …” He paused. “Why an- you looking at me that way?” “You don’t know, do you? You really don’t?” “No. Your mind is often closed to me, Susannah.” There was no defensiveness in his voice, and Susannah shook her head in exasperation. The rapid turn-and-turn-about dance of her person-ality sometimes unnerved him; his seeming inability to say anything other than exactly what was on his mind never failed to do the same to her. He was the most literal man she had ever met.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you why I’m looking at you that way, Roland. Because what you did was a mean trick. You said you wouldn’t slap me, couldn’t slap me, even if I cut up rough . . . but either you lied or you’re very stupid, and I know you ain’t stupid. People don’t always slap with their hands, as every man and woman of my race could testify. We have a little rhyme where I come from: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones—’ ” ” ‘—yet taunts shall never wound me,’ ” Roland finished. “Well, that’s not exactly the way we say it, but I guess it’s close enough. It’s bullshit no matter how you say it. They don’t call what you did a tongue-lashing for nothing. Your words hurt me, Roland—are you gonna stand there and say you didn’t know they would?”

She sat in her chair, looking up at him with bright, stern curiosity, and Roland thought—not for the first time—that the honk mahfahs of Susannah’s land must have been either very brave or very stupid to cross her, wheelchair or no wheelchair. And, having walked among them, he didn’t think bravery was the answer.

“I did not think or care about your hurt,” he said patiently. “I saw you show your teeth and knew you meant to bite, so I put a stick in your jaws. And it worked . . . didn’t it?”

Her expression was now one of hurt astonishment. “You bastardl” Instead of replying, he took the gun from her holster, fumbled the cylinder open with the remaining two fingers on his right hand, and began to reload the chambers with his left hand.

“Of all the high-handed, arrogant—“

“You needed to bite,” he said in that same patient tone. “Had you not, you would have shot all wrong—with your hand and your gun instead of your eye and mind and heart. Was that a trick? Was it arrogant? I think not. I think. Susannah, that you were the one with arrogance in her heart. I think you were the one with a mind to get up to tricks. That doesn’t distress me. Quite the opposite. A gunslinger without teeth is no gunslinger.” “Damn it, I’m not a gunslinger!”

He ignored that; he could afford to. If she was no gunslinger, then he was a billy-bumbler. “If we were playing a game, I might have behaved differently. But this is no game. It …”

His good hand went to his forehead for a moment and paused there, fingers tented just above the left temple. The tips of the fingers, she saw, were trembling minutely.

“Roland, what’s ailing you?” she asked quietly. The hand lowered slowly. He rolled the cylinder back into place and replaced die revolver in the holster she wore. “Nothing.” “Yes there is. I’ve seen it. Eddie has, too. It started almost as soon as we left the beach. It’s something wrong, and it’s getting worse.” “There is nothing wrong,” he repeated.