Bryan Smith did as told. The color was draining slowly but steadily from his face.
"You were alone when you hit him," Roland said. "No one here but you and the storyteller. Do you understand?"
"I was alone. Mister, are you a walk-in?"
"Never mind what I am. You checked him and saw that he was still alive."
"Still alive, good," Smith said. "I didn't mean to hurt nobody, honest."
"He spoke to you. That's how you knew he was alive."
"Yes!" Smith smiled. Then he frowned. "What'd he say?"
"You don't remember. You were excited and scared."
"Scared and excited. Excited and scared. Yes I was."
"You drive now. As you drive, you'll wake up, little by little.
And when you get to a house or a store, you'll stop and say there's a man hurt down the road. A man who needs help. Tell it back, and be true."
"Drive," he said. His hands caressed the steering wheel as if he longed to be gone immediately. Roland supposed he did.
"Wake up, little by little. When I get to a house or store, tell them Stephen King's hurt side of the road and he needs help. I know he's still alive because he talked to me. It was an accident."
He paused. "It wasn't my fault. He was walking in the road." A pause. "Probably."
Do I care upon whom the blame for this mess falls? Roland asked himself. In truth he did not. King would go on writing either way. And Roland almost hoped he would be blamed, for it was indeed King's fault; he'd had no business being out here in the first place.
"Drive away now," he told Bryan Smith. "I don't want to look at you anymore."
Smith started the van with a look of profound relief. Roland didn't bother watching him go. He went to Mrs. Tassenbaum and fell on his knees beside her. Oy sat by Jake's head, now silent, knowing his howls could no longer be heard by the one for whom he grieved. What the gunslinger feared most had come to pass. While he had been talking to two men he didn't like, the boy whom he loved more than all odiers-more than he'd loved anyone ever in his life, even Susan Delgado-had passed beyond him for the second time. Jake was dead.
FIVE
"He talked to you," Roland said. He took Jake in his arms and began to rock him gently back and forth. The 'Rizas clanked in their pouch. Already he could feel Jake's body growing cool.
"Yes," she said.
"What did he say?"
"He told me to come back for you 'after the business here is done.' Those were his exact words. And he said, 'Tell my father I love him.'"
Roland made a sound, choked and miserable, deep in his throat. He was remembering how it had been in Fedic, after they had stepped through the door. Hile, Father, Jake had said.
Roland had taken him in his arms then, too. Only then he had felt the boy's beating heart. He would give anything to feel it beat again.
"There was more," she said, "but do we have time for it now, especially when I could tell you later?"
Roland took her point immediately. The story both Bryan Smith and Stephen King knew was a simple one. There was no place in it for a lank, travel-scoured man with a big gun, nor a woman with graying hair; certainly not for a dead boy with a bag of sharp-edged plates slung over his shoulder and a machine-pistol in the waistband of his pants.
The only question was whether or not the woman would come back at all. She was not the first person he had attracted into doing things they might not ordinarily have done, but he knew things might look different to her once she was away from him. Asking for her promise-Do you swear to come back for me, sat? Do you swear on this boy's stilled heart?-would do no good.
She could mean every word here and then think better of it once she was over the first hill.
Yet when he'd had a chance to take the shopkeeper who owned the truck, he didn't. Nor had he swapped her for the old man cutting the grass at the writer's house.
"Later will do," he said. "For now, hurry on your way. If for some reason you feel you can't come back here, I'll not hold it against you."
"Where would you go on your own?" she asked him.
"Where would you know to go? This isn't your world. Is it?"
Roland ignored the question. "If there are people still here the first time you come back-peace officers, guards O'The watch, bluebacks, I don't know-drive past without stopping.
Come back again in half an hour's time. If they're still here, drive on again. Keep doing that until they're gone."
"Will they notice me going back and forth?"
"I don't know," he said. "Will they?"
She considered, then almost smiled. "The cops in this part of the world? Probably not."
He nodded, accepting her judgment. "When you feel it's safe, stop. You won't see me, but I'll see you. I'll wait until dark. If you're not here by then, I go."
"I'll come for you, but I won't be driving that miserable excuse for a truck when I do," she said. "I'll be driving a Mercedes-Benz S600." She said this with some pride.
Roland had no idea what a Mercedes-Bends was, but he nodded as though he did. "Go. We'll talk later, after you come back."
If you come back, he thought.
"I think you may want this," she said, and slipped his revolver back into its holster.
"Thankee-sai."
"You're welcome."
He watched her go to the old truck (which he thought she'd rather come to like, despite her dismissive words) and haul herself up by the wheel. And as she did, he realized there was something he needed, something that might be in the truck. "Whoa!"
Mrs. Tassenbaum had put her hand on the key in the ignition.
Now she took it off and looked at him inquiringly. Roland settled Jake gently back to the earth beneath which he must soon lie (it was that thought which had caused him to call out)
and got to his feet. He winced and put his hand to his hip, but that was only habit. There was no pain.
"What?" she asked as he approached. "If I don't go soon-"
It wouldn't matter if she went at all. 'Yes. I know."
He looked in the bed of the truck. Along with the careless scatter of tools there was a square shape under a blue tarpaulin.
The edges of the tarp had been folded beneath the object to keep it from blowing away. When Roland pulled the tarp free, he saw eight or ten boxes made of the stiff paper Eddie called
"card-board." They'd been pushed together to make the square shape. The pictures printed on the card-board told him they were boxes of beer. He wouldn't have cared if they had been boxes of high explosive.
It was the tarpaulin he wanted.
He stepped back from the truck with it in his arms and said,
"Wow you can go."
She grasped the key that started the engine once more, but did not immediately turn it. "Sir," said she, "I am sorry for your loss. I just wanted to tell yovi that. I can see what that boy meant to you."
Roland Deschain bowed his head and said nothing.
Irene Tassenbaum looked at him for a moment longer, reminded herself that sometimes words were useless things, then started the engine and slammed the door. He watched her drive into the road (her use of the clutch had already grown smooth and sure), making a tight turn so she could drive north, back toward East Stoneham.
Sorry for your loss.
And now he was alone with that loss. Alone with Jake. For a moment Roland stood surveying the litde grove of trees beside the highway, looking at two of the three who had been drawn to this place: a man, unconscious, and a boy dead. Roland's eyes were dry and hot, throbbing in their sockets, and for a moment he was sure that he had again lost the ability to weep. The idea horrified him. If he was incapable of tears after all of this-after what he'd regained and then lost again-what good was any of it? So it was an immense relief when the tears finally came. They spilled from his eyes, quieting their nearly insane blue glare.
They ran down his dirty cheeks. He cried almost silently, but there was a single sob and Oy heard it. He raised his snout to the corridor of fast-moving clouds and howled a single time at them. Then he too was silent.
SIX
Roland carried Jake deeper into the woods, with Oy padding at his heel. That the bumbler was also weeping no longer surprised Roland; he had seen him cry before. And the days when he had believed Oy's demonstrations of intelligence (and empathy)
might be no more than mimicry had long since passed. Most of what Roland thovight about on that short walk was a prayer for the dead he had heard Cuthbert speak on their last campaign together, the one that had ended at Jericho Hill. He doubted that Jake needed a prayer to send him on, but the gunslinger needed to keep his mind occupied, because it did not feel strong just now; if it went too far in the wrong direction, it would certainly break. Perhaps later he could indulge in hysteria-or even irina, the healing madness-but not now. He would not break now. He would not let the boy's death come to nothing.
The hazy green-gold summerglow that lives only in forests
(and old forests, at that, like the one where the Bear Shardik had rampaged), deepened. It fell through the trees in dusky beams, and the place where Roland finally stopped felt more like a church than a clearing. He had gone roughly two hundred paces from the road on a westerly line. Here he set Jake down and looked about. He saw two rusty beer-cans and a few ejected shell-casings, probably the leavings of hunters. He tossed them further into the woods so the place would be clean. Then he looked at Jake, wiping away his tears so he could see as clearly as possible. The boy's face was as clean as the clearing, Oy had seen to that, but one of Jake's eyes was still open, giving the boy an evil winky look that must not be allowed. Roland rolled the lid closed wiui a finger, and when it sprang back up again (like a balky windowshade, he thought), he licked the ball of his thumb and rolled the lid shut again. This time it stayed closed.