The Waste Lands (Page 68)

“Yes. Sooner, if we must. I don’t want to move in the dark—a speaking ring is an unsafe place to be at night—but if we have to, we have to.” “From the look on your face, big boy, I doubt if those stone circles are very safe any time,” Susannah said.

Eddie put the knife aside again. The dirt Roland had taken out of the shallow hole he’d made for the campfire was piled up by Eddie’s right foot. Now he used the sharp end of the stick to carve a question-mark shape in the dirt. The shape was crisp and clear.

“Okay,” he said, brushing it away. “All done.” “Have something to eat, then,” Susannah said. Eddie tried, but he wasn’t very hungry. When he finally went to sleep, nestled against Susannah’s warmth, his rest was dreamless but very thin. Until the gunslinger shook him awake at four in the morning, he heard the wind racing endlessly over the plain below them, and it seemed to him that he went with it, flying high into the night, away from these cares, while Old Star and Old Mother rode serenely above him, painting his cheeks with frost.

“IT’S TIME,” ROLAND SAID.

Eddie sat up. Susannah sat up beside him, rubbing her palms over her face. As Eddie’s head cleared, his mind was filled with urgency. “Yes. Let’s go, and fast.”

“He’s getting close, isn’t he?”

“Very close.” Eddie got to his feet, grasped Susannah around the waist, and boosted her into her chair.

She was looking at him anxiously. “Do we still have enough time to get there?” Eddie nodded. “Barely.”

Three minutes later they were headed down the Great Road again. It glimmered ahead of them like a ghost. And an hour after that, as the first light of dawn began to touch the sky in the east, a rhythmic sound began far ahead of them. The sound of drums, Roland thought.

Machinery, Eddie thought. Some huge piece of machinery. It’s a heart, Susannah thought. Some huge, diseased, beating heart .. . and it’s in that city, where we have to go.

Two hours later, the sound stopped as suddenly as it had begun. White, featureless clouds had begun to fill the sky above them, first veiling the early sun, then blotting it out. The circle of standing stones lay less than five miles ahead now, gleaming in the shadowless light like the teeth of a fallen monster.

SPAGHETTI WEEK AT THE MAJESTIC!

the battered, dispirited marquee jutting over the corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenues proclaimed.

2 SERGIO LEONE CLASSIX!

A FISTFUL OF $$ PLUS GOOD BAD & UGLY!

99 Cents ALL SHOWS

A gum-chewing cutie with rollers in her blonde hair sat in the box office listening to Led Zep on her transistor and reading one of the tabloids of which Mrs. Shaw was so fond. To her left, in the theater’s remaining display case, there was a poster showing Glint Eastwood. Jake knew he should get moving—three o’clock was almost here— but he paused a moment anyway, staring at the poster behind the dirty, cracked glass. Eastwood was wearing a Mexican serape. A cigar was clamped in his teeth. He had thrown one side of the serape back over his shoulder to free his gun. His eyes were a pale, faded blue. Bombar-dier’s eyes.

It’s not him, Jake thought, but it’s almost him. It’s the eyes, mostly .. . the eyes are almost the same.

“You let me drop,” he said to the man in the old poster, the man who was not Roland. “You let me die. What happens this time?” “Hey, kid,” the blonde ticket-seller called, making Jake start. “You gonna come in or just stand there and talk to yourself?” “Not me,” Jake said. “I’ve already seen those two.” He got moving again, turning left on Markey Avenue. Once again he waited for the feeling of remembering forward to seize him, but it didn’t come. This was just a hot, sunny street lined with sandstone-colored apartment buildings that looked like prison cellblocks to Jake. A few young women were walking along, pushing baby-carriages in pairs and talking desultorily, but the street was otherwise deserted. It was unseasonably hot for May—too hot to stroll.

What am I looking for? What?

From behind him came a burst of raucous male laughter. It was followed by an outraged female shriek: “You give that back\” Jake jumped, thinking the owner of the voice must mean him. “Give it back, Henry! I’m not kidding!”

Jake turned and saw two boys, one at least eighteen and the other a lot younger . . . twelve or thirteen. At the sight of this second boy, Jake’s heart did something that felt like a loop-the-loop in his chest. The lad was wearing green corduroys instead of madras shorts, but the yellow T-shirt was the same, and he had a battered old basketball under one arm. Although his back was to Jake, Jake knew he had found the boy from last night’s dream.

THE GIRL WAS THE gum-chewing cutie from the ticket-booth. The older of the two boys—who looked almost old enough to be called a man— had her newspaper in his hands. She grabbed for it. The newspaper-grabber—he was wearing denims and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up—held it over his head and grinned. “Jump for it, Maryanne! Jump, girl, jump!” She stared at him with angry eyes, her cheeks flushed. “Give it to me!” she said. “Quit fooling around and give it back! Bastard!” “Oooo wisten to dat, Eddie!” the old kid said. “Bad wang-gwidge! Naughty, naughty!” He waved the newspaper just out of the blonde tick-et-seller’s grasp, grinning, and Jake suddenly understood. These two were walking home from school together—although they probably didn’t go to the same one, if he was right about the difference in their ages—and the bigger boy had gone over to the box office, pretending he had something interesting to tell the blonde. Then he had reached through the slot at the bottom and snatched her paper. The big boy’s face was one that Jake had seen before; it was the face of a kid who would think it the height of hilarity to douse a cat’s tail with lighter fluid or feed a bread-ball with a fishhook planted in the middle to a hungry dog. The sort of lad who sat in the back of the room and snapped bra-straps and then said “Who me?” with a big, dumb look of surprise on his face when someone finally complained. There weren’t many lads like him at Piper, but there were a few. Jake supposed there were a few in every school. They dressed better at Piper, but the face was the same. He guessed that in the old days, people would have said it was the face of a boy who was born to be hung. Maryanne jumped for her newspaper, which the old boy in the black pants had rolled into a tube. He pulled it out of her reach just before she could grab it, then whacked her on the head with it, the way you might whack a dog for piddling on the carpet. She was beginning to cry now—mostly from humiliation, Jake guessed. Her face was now so red it was almost glowing. “Keep it, then!” she yelled at him. “I know you can’t read, but you can look at the pictures, at least!”