The Waste Lands (Page 84)

“Tell you what,” Susannah said, “I wouldn’t come out if I saw us. Four people, three of them armed? We probably look like a gang of those old-time outlaws in your stories, Roland—what do you call them?” “Harriers.” His left hand dropped to the sandalwood grip of his remaining revolver and he pulled it a little way out of the holster. “But no harrier ever born carried one of these, and if there are old-timers in yon village, they’ll know it. Let’s go.”

Jake glanced behind them and saw the bumbler lying in the road with his muzzle between his short front paws, watching them closely. “Oy!” Jake called. “Oy!” the bumbler echoed, and scrambled to its feet at once. They started down the shallow knoll toward the town with Oy trot-ting along behind them.

Two BUILDINGS ON THE outskirts had been burned; the rest of the town appeared dusty but intact. They passed an abandoned livery stable on the left, a building that might have been a market on the right, and then they were in the town proper—such as it was. There were perhaps a dozen rickety buildings standing on either side of the road. Alleys ran between some of them. The other road, this one a dirt track mostly overgrown with plains grass, ran northeast to southwest. Susannah looked at its northeast arm and thought: Once there were barges on the river, and somewhere down that road there was a landing, and probably another shacky little town, mostly saloons and cribs, built up around it. That was the last point of trade before the barges went on down to the city. The wagons came through this place going to that place and then back again. How long ago was that?

She didn’t know—but a long time, from the look of this place. Somewhere a rusty hinge squalled monotonously. Somewhere else one shutter clapped lonesomely to and fro in the plains wind. There were hitching rails, most of them broken, in front of the buildings. Once there had been board sidewalks, but now most of the boards were gone and grass grew up through the holes where they had been. The signs on the buildings were faded, but some were still read-able, written in a bastardized form of English which was, she supposed, what Roland called the low speech. FOOD AND GRAIN, one said, and she guessed that might mean feed and grain. On the false front next to it, below a crude drawing of a plains-buffalo lying in the grass, were the words REST EAT DRINK. Under the sign, batwing doors hung crookedly, moving a little in the wind.

“Is that a saloon?” She didn’t know exactly why she was whispering, only that she couldn’t have spoken in a normal tone of voice. It would have been like playing “Clinch Mountain Breakdown” on the banjo at a funeral. “It was,” Roland said. He didn’t whisper, but his voice was low-pitched and thoughtful. Jake was walking close by his side, looking around nervously. Behind them, Oy had closed up his distance to ten yards. He trotted quickly, head swinging from side to side like a pendulum as he examined the buildings. Now Susannah began to feel it: that sensation of being watched. It was exactly as Roland had said it would be, a feeling sunshine had been replaced by shade. “There are people, aren’t there?” she whispered. Roland nodded.

Standing on the northeast corner of the crossroads was a building with another sign she recognized: HOSTEL, it said, and COTTS. Except for a church with a tilted steeple up ahead, it was the tallest building in town—three stories. She glanced up in time to see a white blur, surely a face, draw away from one of the glassless windows. Suddenly she wanted to get out of here. Roland was setting a slow, deliberate pace, however, and she supposed she knew why. Hurrying might give the watchers the impression that they were scared .. . and that they could be taken. All the same—

At the crossroads the intersecting streets widened out, creating a town square which had been overrun by grass and weeds. In the center was an eroded stone marker. Above it, a metal box hung on a sagging length of rusty cable. Roland, with Jake by his side, walked toward the marker. Eddie pushed Susannah’s chair after. Grass whispered in its spokes and the wind tickled a lock of hair against her cheek. Further along the street, the shutter banged and the hinge squealed. She shivered and brushed the hair away. “I wish he’d hurry up,” Eddie said in a low voice. “This place gives me the creeps.”

Susannah nodded. She looked around the square and again she could almost see how it must have been on market-day—the sidewalks thronged with people, a few of them town ladies with their baskets over their arms, most of them waggoners and roughly-dressed bargemen (she did not know why she was so sure of the barges and bargemen, but she was); the wagons passing through the town square, the ones on the unpaved road raising choking clouds of yellow dust as the drivers flogged their carthorses along. She could see those carts, dusty swatches of canvas tied down over bales of cloth on some and pyramids of tarred barrels on others; could see the oxen, double-yoked and straining patiently, flicking their ears at the flies buzzing around their huge heads; could hear voices, and laughter, and the piano in the saloon pounding out a lively tune like “Buffalo Gals” or “Darlin’ Katy.” It’s as if I lived here in another life, she thought. The gunslinger bent over the inscription on the marker. “Great Road,” he read. “Lud, one hundred and sixty wheels.”

(oxen they were oxen)

“Wheels?” Jake asked.

“An old form of measurement.”

“Have you heard of Lud?” Eddie asked.

“Perhaps,” the gunslinger said. “When I was very small.” “It rhymes with crud,” Eddie said. “Maybe not such a good sign.” Jake was examining the east side of the stone. “River Road. It’s written funny, but that’s what it says.”