The Waste Lands (Page 63)

“My name’s Tom Denby,” he told the cop. “It says so right here on my discount bowling card—right?”

“Right, right,” the cop breathed. He had lost all interest in Jake; he was only interested in the key. The little coins of reflected light bounced and spun on his face.

“And you’re not looking for anybody named Tom Denby, are you?” “No,” the cop said. “Never heard of him.” Now there were at least half a dozen people gathered around the cop, all of them staring with silent wonder at the silver key in Jake’s hand. “So I can go, can’t I?”

“Huh? Oh! Oh, sure—go, for your father’s sake!” “Thanks,” Jake said, but for a moment he wasn’t sure how to go. He was hemmed in by a silent crowd of zombies, and more were joining it all the time. They were only coming to see what the deal was, he realized, but the ones who saw the key just stopped dead and stared.

He got to his feet and backed slowly up the wide bank steps, holding the key out in front of him like a lion-tamer with a chair. When he got to the wide concrete plaza at the top, he stuffed it back into his pants pockets, turned, and fled. He stopped just once on the far side of the plaza, and looked back. The small group of people around the place where he had been standing was coming slowly back to life. They looked around at each other with dazed expressions, then walked on. The cop glanced vacantly to his left, to his right, and then straight up at the sky, as if trying to remember how he had gotten here and what he had been meaning to do. Jake had seen enough. It was time to find a subway station and get his ass over to Brooklyn before anything else weird could happen.

AT QUARTER OF TWO that afternoon he walked slowly up the steps of the subway station and stood on the corner of Castle and Brooklyn Ave-nues, looking at the sandstone towers of Co-Op City. He waited for that feeling of sureness and direction—that feeling that was like being able to remember forward in time—to overtake him. It didn’t come. Nothing came. He was just a kid standing on a hot Brooklyn streetcorner with his short shadow lying at his feet like a tired pet. Well, I’m here . . , now what do I do?

Jake discovered he didn’t have the slightest idea.

ROLAND’S SMALL BAND OF travellers reached the crest of the long, gentle hill they had been climbing and stood looking southeast. For a long time none of them spoke. Susannah opened her mouth twice, then closed it again. For the first time in her life as a woman, she was completely speechless. Before them, an almost endless plain dozed in the long golden light of a summer’s afternoon. The grass was lush, emerald green, and very high. Groves of trees with long, slender trunks and wide, spreading tops dotted the plain. Susannah had once seen similar trees, she thought, in a travelogue film about Australia.

The road they had been following swooped down the far side of the hill and then ran straight as a string into the southeast, a bright white lane cutting through the grass. To the west, some miles off, she could see a herd of large animals grazing peacefully. They looked like buffalo. To the east, the last of the forest made a curved peninsula into the grassland. This incursion was a dark, tangled shape that looked like a forearm with a cocked fist at the end. That was the direction, she realized, in which all the creeks and streams they had encountered had been flowing. They were tributaries of the vast river that emerged from that jutting arm of forest and flowed, placid and dreaming under the summer sun, toward the eastern edge of the world. It was wide, that river—perhaps two miles from bank to bank. And she could see the city.

It lay dead ahead, a misty collection of spires and towers rising above the far edge of the horizon. Those airy ramparts might have been a hundred miles away, or two hundred, or four hundred. The air of this world seemed to be totally clear, and that made judging distances a fool’s game. All she knew for sure was that the sight of those dim towers filled her with silent wonder . . . and a drop, aching homesickness for New York. She thought, I believe I’d do most anything just to see the Manhat-tan skyline from the Triborough Bridge again. Then she had to smile, because that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that she wouldn’t trade Roland’s world for anything. Its silent mystery and empty spaces were intoxicating. And her lover was here. In New York—the New York of her own time, at least—they would have been objects of scorn and anger, the butt of every idiot’s crude, cruel jokes: a black woman of twenty-six and her whitebread lover who was three years younger and who had a tendency to talk like dis and dat when he got excited. Her whitebread lover who had been carrying a heavy monkey on his back only eight months before. Here, there was no one to jeer or laugh. Here, no one was pointing a finger. Here, there were only Roland, Eddie, and herself, the world’s last three gunslingers. She took Eddie’s hand and felt it close over hers, warm and reassuring. Roland pointed. “That must be the Send River,” he said in a low voice. “I never thought to see it in my life . . . wasn’t even sure it was real, like the Guardians.”

“It’s so lovely,” Susannah murmured. She was unable to take her eyes from the vast landscape before her, dreaming richly in the cradle of summer. She found her eyes tracing the shadows of the trees, which trailed across the plain for what seemed miles as the sun sank toward the horizon. “It’s the way our Great Plains must have looked before they were settled—even before the Indians came.” She raised her free hand and pointed toward the place where the Great Road narrowed to a point. “There’s your city,” she said. “Isn’t it?” “Yes.”