The Waste Lands (Page 67)

The gunslinger looked around and saw Susannah, a dark silhouette against the fading aquamarine sky, but he didn’t see Eddie. “Where is he?” he asked.

“Down the road apiece. You leave him alone now, Roland—you’ve done enough.” Roland nodded, bent over the firepit, and struck at a piece of flint with a worn steel bar. Soon the kindling he had gathered was blazing. He added small sticks, one by one, and waited for Eddie to return.

HALF A MILE BACK the way they had come, Eddie sat cross-legged in the middle of the Great Road with his unfinished key in one hand, watching the sky. He glanced down the road, saw the spark of the fire, and knew exactly what Roland was doing . . . and why. Then he turned his gaze to the sky again. He had never felt so lonely or so afraid.

The sky was huge—he could not remember ever seeing so much uninterrupted space, so much pure emptiness. It made him feel very small, and he supposed there was nothing at all wrong with that. In the scheme of things, he was very small. The boy was close now. He thought he knew where Jake was and what he was about to do, and it filled him with silent wonder. Susannah had come from 1963. Eddie had come from 1987. Between them . . . Jake. Trying to come over. Trying to be born.

I met him, Eddie thought. I must have met him, and I think I remember. . . sort of. It was just before Henry went into the Army, right? He was taking courses at Brooklyn Vocational Institute, and he was heav-ily into black—black jeans, black motorcycle boots with steel caps, black T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Henry’s James Dean look. Smoking Area Chic. I used to think that, but I never said it out loud, because I didn’t want him pissed at me. He realized that what he had been waiting for had happened while he was thinking: Old Star had come out. In fifteen minutes, maybe less, it would be joined by a whole galaxy of alien jewelry, but for now it gleamed alone in the ungathered darkness.

Eddie slowly held up the key until Old Star gleamed within its wide central notch. And then he recited the old formula of his world, the one his mother had taught him as she knelt beside him at the bedroom window, both of them looking out at the evening star which rode the oncoming darkness above the rooftops and fire-escapes of Brooklyn: “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight; wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.” Old Star glowed in the notch of the key, a diamond caught in ash. “Help me find some guts,” Eddie said. “That’s my wish. Help me find the guts to try and finish this damned thing.”

He sat there a moment longer, then got to his feet and walked slowly back to camp. He sat down as close to the fire as he could get, took the gunslinger’s knife without a word to either him or Susannah, and began to work. Tiny, curling slivers of wood rolled up from the s-shape at the end of the key. Eddie worked fast, turning the key this way and that, occasionally closing his eyes and letting his thumb slip along the mild curves. He tried not to think about what might happen if the shape were to go wrong—that would freeze him for sure. Roland and Susannah sat behind him, watching silently. At last Eddie put the knife aside. His face was running with sweat. “This kid of yours,” he said. “This Jake. He must be a gutty brat.”

“He was brave under the mountains,” Roland said. “He was afraid, but never gave an inch.”

“I wish I could be that way.”

Roland shrugged. “At Balazar’s you fought well even though they had taken your clothes. It’s very hard for a man to fight naked, but you did it.” Eddie tried to remember the shootout in the nightclub, but it was just a blur in his mind—smoke, noise, and light shining through one wall in confused, intersecting rays. He thought that wall had been torn apart by automatic-weapons fire, but couldn’t remember for sure.

He held the key up so its notches were sharply outlined against the flames. He held it that way for a long time, looking mostly at the s-shape. It looked exactly as he remembered it from his dream and from the momentary vision he had seen in the fire . . . but it didn’t feel exactly right. Almost, but not quite. That’s just Henry again. That’s just all those years of never being quite good enough. You did it, buddy—it’s just that the Henry inside doesn’t want to admit it.

He dropped the key onto the square of hide and folded the edges carefully around it. “I’m done. I don’t know if it’s right or not, but I guess it’s as right as I can make it.” He felt oddly empty now that he no longer had the key to work on—purposeless and directionless.

“Do you want something to eat, Eddie?” Susannah asked quietly. There’s your purpose, he thought. There’s your direction. Sitting right over there, with her hands folded in her lap. All the purpose and direction you’ll ever—

But now something else rose in his mind—it came all at once. Not a dream . . . not a vision …

No, not either of those. It’s a memory. It’s happening again—you’re remembering forward in time.

“I have to do something else first,” he said, and got up. On the far side of the fire, Roland had stacked some odd lots of scavenged wood. Eddie hunted through them and found a dry stick about two feet long and four inches or so through the middle. He took it, returning to his place by the fire, and picked up Roland’s knife again. This time he worked faster because he was simply sharpening the stick, turning it into something that looked like a small tent-peg.

“Can we get moving before daybreak?” he asked the gunslinger. “I think we should get to that circle as soon as we can.”