The Drawing of the Three (24 page)

“Good. Honky fuzz jus be lettin him off anyway. I be gittin him. I be cuttin his cock off. Sumbitch! I tell you what I goan do t’dat sumbitch! I tell you one thing, you sumbitch honky! I goan tell you . . . tell . . .”

Her eyes fluttered again and George had thought
Yes, go to sleep,
please
go to sleep, I don’t get paid for this, I don’t understand this, they told us about shock but nobody mentioned schizophrenia as one of the—

The eyes opened. The first woman was there.

“What sort of accident was it?” she asked. “I remember coming out of the I—”

“Eye?” he said stupidly.

She smiled a little. It was a painful smile. “The
Hungry I.
It’s a coffee house.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.”

The other one, hurt or not, had made him feel dirty and a little ill. This one made him feel like a knight in an Arthurian tale, a knight who has successfully rescued the Lady Fair from the jaws of the dragon.

“I remember walking down the stairs to the platform, and after that—”

“Someone pushed you.” It sounded stupid, but what was wrong with that? It
was
stupid.

“Pushed me in front of the train?”

“Yes.”

“Have I lost my legs?”

George tried to swallow and couldn’t. There seemed to be nothing in his throat to grease the machinery.

“Not all of them,” he said inanely, and her eyes closed.

Let it be a faint,
he thought then,
please let it be a f—

They opened, blazing. One hand came up and slashed five slits through the air within an inch of his face—any closer and he would have been in the E.R. getting his cheek stitched up instead of smoking Chesties with Julio Estavez.

“YOU AIN’T NUTHIN BUT A BUNCHA HONKY SONSA BITCHES!”
she screamed. Her face was monstrous, her eyes full of hell’s own light. It wasn’t even the face of a human being.
“GOAN KILL EVERY MAHFAHIN HONKY I SEE! GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN CUT OFF THEIR BALLS AND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES! GOAN—”

It was crazy. She talked like a cartoon black woman, Butterfly McQueen gone Loony Tunes. She—or it—also seemed superhuman. This screaming, writhing thing could not have just undergone impromptu surgery by subway train half an hour ago. She bit. She clawed out at him again and again. Snot spat from her nose. Spit flew from her lips. Filth poured from her mouth.

“Shoot her up, doc!”
one of the paras yelled. His face was pale.
“Fa crissakes shoot her up!”
The para reached toward the supply case. George shoved his hand aside.

“Fuck off, chickenshit.”

George looked back at his patient and saw the calm, cultured eyes of the other one looking at him.

“Will I live?” she asked in a conversational tea-room voice. He thought,
She is unaware of her lapses. Totally unaware.
And, after a moment:
So is the other one, for that matter.

“I—” He gulped, rubbed at his galloping heart through his tunic, and then ordered himself to get control of this. He had saved her life. Her mental problems were not his concern.

“Are
you
all right?” she asked him, and the genuine concern in her voice made him smile a little—
her
asking
him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“To which question are you responding?”

For a moment he didn’t understand, then did. “Both,” he said, and took her hand. She squeezed it, and he looked into her shining lucent eyes and thought
A man could fall in love,
and that was when her hand turned into a claw and she was telling him he was a honky mahfah, and she wadn’t just goan
take
his balls, she was goan
chew
on those mahfahs.

He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman—the first woman.

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to die. Pl—” Then she went out for good, and that
was
good. For all of them.

“So whatchoo think?” Julio asked.

“About who’s gonna be in the Series?” George squashed the butt under the heel of his loafer. “White Sox. I got ’em in the pool.”

“Whatchoo think about that lady?”

“I think she might be schizophrenic,” George said slowly.

“Yeah, I
know
that. I mean, what’s gonna happen to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“She needs help, man. Who gonna give it?”

“Well, I already gave her one,” George said, but his face felt hot, as if he were blushing.

Julio looked at him. “If you already gave her all the help you can give her, you shoulda let her die, doc.”

George looked at Julio for a moment, but found he couldn’t stand what he saw in Julio’s eyes—not accusation but sadness.

So he walked away.

He had places to go.

The Time of the Drawing:

In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in control, but Detta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do best was steal. It didn’t matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than it mattered that she often threw it away later.

The
taking
was what mattered.

When the gunslinger entered her head in Macy’s, Detta screamed in a combination of fury and horror and terror, her hands freezing on the junk jewelry she was scooping into her purse.

She screamed because when Roland came into her mind, when he
came forward,
she for a moment sensed the
other,
as if a door had been swung open inside of her head.

And she screamed because the invading raping presence was a honky.

She could not see but nonetheless
sensed
his whiteness.

People looked around. A floorwalker saw the screaming woman in the wheelchair with her purse open, saw one hand frozen in the act of stuffing costume jewelry into a purse that looked (even from a distance of thirty feet) worth three times the stuff she was stealing.

The floorwalker yelled,
“Hey Jimmy!”
and Jimmy Halvorsen, one of Macy’s house detectives, looked around and saw what was happening. He started toward the black woman in the wheelchair on a dead run. He couldn’t help running—he had been a city cop for eighteen years and it was built into his system—but he was already thinking it was gonna be a shit bust. Little kids, cripples, nuns; they were always a shit bust. Busting them was like kicking a drunk. They cried a little in front of the judge and then took a walk. It was hard to convince judges that cripples could also be slime.

But he ran just the same.

Roland was momentarily horrified by the snakepit of hate and revulsion in which he found himself . . . and then he heard the woman screaming, saw the big man with the potato-sack belly running toward her/him, saw people looking, and took control.

Suddenly he
was
the woman with the dusky hands. He sensed some strange duality inside her, but couldn’t think about it now.

He turned the chair and began to shove it forward. The aisle rolled past him/her. People dived away to either side. The purse was lost, spilling Detta’s credentials and stolen treasure in a wide trail along the floor. The man with the heavy gut skidded on bogus gold chains and lipstick tubes and then fell on his ass.

Shit!
Halvorsen thought furiously, and for a moment one hand clawed under his sport-coat where there was a .38 in a clamshell holster. Then sanity reasserted itself. This was no drug bust or armed robbery; this was a crippled black lady in a wheelchair. She was rolling it like it was some punk’s drag-racer, but a crippled black lady was all she was just the same. What was he going to do, shoot her? That would be great, wouldn’t it? And where was she going to go? There was nothing at the end of the aisle but two dressing rooms.

He picked himself up, massaging his aching ass, and began after her again, limping a little now.

The wheelchair flashed into one of the dressing rooms. The door slammed, just clearing the push-handles on the back.

Got you now, bitch,
Jimmy thought.
And I’m going to give you one hell of a scare. I don’t care if you got five orphan children and only a year to live. I’m not gonna hurt you, but oh babe I’m gonna shake your dice.

He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left shoulder, and it was empty.

No black woman.

No wheelchair.

No nothing.

He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.

“Other one!” the floorwalker yelled. “Other one!”

Before Jimmy could move, the floorwalker had busted open the door of the other dressing room. A woman in a linen skirt and a Playtex Living Bra screamed piercingly and crossed her arms over her chest. She was very white and very definitely not crippled.

“Pardon me,” the floorwalker said, feeling hot crimson flood his face.

“Get out of here, you pervert!”
the woman in the linen skirt and the bra cried.

“Yes, ma’am,” the floorwalker said, and closed the door.

At Macy’s, the customer was always right.

He looked at Halvorsen.

Halvorsen looked back.

“What is this shit?” Halvorsen asked. “Did she go in there or not?”

“Yeah, she did.”

“So where is she?”

The floorwalker could only shake his head. “Let’s go back and pick up the mess.”

“
You
pick up the mess,” Jimmy Halvorsen said. “I feel like I just broke my ass in nine pieces.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, me fine bucko, I also feel extremely confused.”

The moment the gunslinger heard the dressing room door bang shut behind him, he rammed the wheelchair around in a half turn, looking for the doorway. If Eddie had done what he had promised, it would be gone.

But the door was open. Roland wheeled the Lady of Shadows through it.

Not long after, Roland would think:
Any other woman, crippled or otherwise, suddenly shoved all the way down the aisle of the mart in which she was doing business—monkeybusiness, you may call it if you like—by a stranger inside her head, shoved into a little room while some man behind her yelled for her to stop, then suddenly turned, shoved again where there was by rights no room in which to shove, then finding herself suddenly in an entirely different world . . . I think any other woman, under those circumstances, would have most certainly have asked, “Where am I?” before all else.

Instead, Odetta Holmes asked almost pleasantly, “What exactly are you planning to do with that knife, young man?”

Roland looked up at Eddie, who was crouched with his knife held less than a quarter of an inch over the skin. Even with his uncanny speed, there was no way the gunslinger could move fast enough to evade the blade if Eddie decided to use it.

“Yes,” Roland said. “What
are
you planning to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said, sounding completely disgusted with himself. “Cut bait, I guess. Sure doesn’t look like I came here to fish, does it?”

He threw the knife toward the Lady’s chair, but well to the right. It stuck, quivering, in the sand to its hilt.

Then the Lady turned her head and began, “I wonder if you could please explain where you’ve taken m—”

She stopped. She had said
I wonder if you
before her head had gotten around far enough to see there was no one behind her, but the gunslinger observed with some real interest that she went on speaking for a moment anyway, because the fact of her condition made certain things elementary truths of her life—if she had moved, for instance, someone must have moved her. But there was no one behind her.

No one at all.

She looked back at Eddie and the gunslinger, her dark eyes troubled, confused, and alarmed, and now she asked. “Where am I? Who pushed me? How can I be here? How can I be dressed, for that matter, when I was home watching the twelve o’clock news in my robe? Who am I? Where is this? Who are you?”

“Who am I?” she asked,
the gunslinger thought.
The dam broke and there was a flood of questions; that was to be expected. But that one question—“Who am I?”—even now I don’t think she knows she asked it.

Or when.

Because she had asked
before.

Even before she had asked who
they
were, she had asked who
she
was.

Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to Roland’s face.

“How come she doesn’t know?”

“I can’t say. Shock, I suppose.”

“Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy’s? You telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting
in her bathrobe and listening to some blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with Christa McAuliffe’s left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?”

Roland didn’t answer.

More dazed than ever, the Lady said, “Who is Christa McAuliffe? Is she one of the missing Freedom Riders?”

Now it was Eddie’s turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were
they?

The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can’t you see she’s in shock?

I know what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn’t wipe out my memory banks.

Speaking of shock, he’d gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had been kneeling over Roland’s inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the throat . . . but the truth was Eddie couldn’t have used the knife anyway—not then, anyway. He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy’s rushed forward—he was reminded again of
The Shining,
where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much more mundane: a white door. The words
ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME
,
PLEASE
were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy’s, all right. Macy’s for sure.

One black hand flew out and slammed the door open while the male voice (a cop voice if Eddie had ever heard one, and he had heard many in his time) behind yelled for her to quit it, that was no way out, she was only making things a helluva lot worse for herself, and Eddie caught a bare glimpse of the black woman in the wheelchair in the mirror to the left, and he remembered thinking
Jesus, he’s got her, all right, but she sure don’t look happy about it.

Then the view pivoted
and Eddie was looking at himself.
The
view rushed toward the viewer and he wanted to put up the hand holding the knife to shield his eyes because all at once the sensation of looking through two sets of eyes was too much, too crazy, it was going to
drive
him crazy if he didn’t shut it out, but it all happened too fast for him to have time.

The wheelchair came through the door. It was a tight fit; Eddie heard its hubs squeal on the sides. At the same moment he heard another sound: a thick
tearing
sound that made him think of some word
(placental)
that he couldn’t quite think of because he didn’t know he knew it.

Then the woman was rolling toward him on the hard-packed sand, and she no longer looked mad as hell—hardly looked like the woman Eddie had glimpsed in the mirror at all, for that matter, but he supposed
that
wasn’t surprising; when you all at once went from a changing-room at Macy’s to the seashore of a godforsaken world where some of the lobsters were the size of small Collie dogs, it left you feeling a little winded. That was a subject on which Eddie Dean felt he could personally give testimony.

She rolled about four feet before stopping, and only went that far because of the slope and the gritty pack of the sand. Her hands were no longer pumping the wheels as they must have been doing (
when you wake up with sore shoulders tomorrow you can blame them on Sir Roland, lady,
Eddie thought sourly). Instead they went to the arms of the chair and gripped them as she regarded the two men.

Behind her, the doorway had already disappeared. Disappeared? That was not quite right. It seemed to
fold in
on itself, like a piece of film run backward. This began to happen just as the store dick came slamming through the other, more mundane door—the one between the store and the dressing room. He was coming hard, expecting the shoplifter would have locked the door, and Eddie thought he was going to take one hell of a splat against the far wall, but Eddie was never going to see it happen or not happen. Before the shrinking space where the door between that world and this disappeared entirely, Eddie saw everything on that side freeze solid.

The movie had become a still photograph.

All that remained now were the dual tracks of the wheelchair, starting in sandy nowhere and running four feet to where it and its occupant now sat.

“Won’t somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?” the woman in the wheelchair asked—almost pleaded.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears. Eddie could see her trying to hold them in but it was no good. She began to sob.

Furious (and disgusted with himself as well), Eddie turned on the gunslinger, who had staggered to his feet. Roland moved, but not toward the weeping Lady. Instead he went to pick up his knife.

“Tell her!” Eddie shouted. “You brought her,
so go on and tell her, man!
” And after a moment he added in a lower tone, “And then tell me how come she doesn’t remember herself.”

Roland did not respond. Not at once. He bent, pinched the hilt of the knife between the two remaining fingers of his right hand, transferred it carefully to his left, and slipped it into the scabbard at the side of one gunbelt. He was still trying to grapple with what he had sensed in the Lady’s mind. Unlike Eddie, she had fought him, fought him like a cat, from the moment he
came forward
until they rolled through the door. The fight had begun the moment she sensed him. There had been no lapse, because there had been no surprise. He had experienced it but didn’t in the least understand it. No surprise at the invading stranger in her mind, only the instant rage, terror, and the commencement of a battle to shake him free. She hadn’t come close to winning that battle—could not, he suspected—but that hadn’t kept her from trying like hell. He had felt a woman insane with fear and anger and hate.

He had sensed only darkness in her—this was a mind entombed in a cave-in.

Except—

Except that in the moment they burst through the doorway and separated, he had wished—wished
desperately
—that he could tarry a moment longer. One moment would have told so much. Because the woman before them now wasn’t the woman in whose mind he had been. Being in Eddie’s mind had been like being in a room with jittery, sweating walls. Being in the Lady’s had been like lying naked in the dark while venomous snakes crawled all over you.

Until the end.

She had changed at the end.

And there had been something else, something he believed was vitally important, but he either could not understand it or remember it. Something like
(a glance)
the doorway itself, only in her mind. Something about
(you broke the
forspecial
it was you)
some sudden burst of understanding. As at studies, when you finally saw—

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie said disgustedly. “You’re nothing but a goddam machine.”

He strode past Roland, went to the woman, knelt beside her, and when she put her arms around him, panic-tight, like the arms of a drowning swimmer, he did not draw away but put his own arms around her and hugged her back.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, it’s not great, but it’s okay.”

“Where are we?”
she wept.
“I was sitting home watching TV so I could hear if my friends got out of Oxford alive and now I’m here and I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE HERE IS!”

“Well, neither do I,” Eddie said, holding her tighter, beginning to rock her a little, “but I guess we’re in it together. I’m from where you’re from, little old New York City, and I’ve been through the same thing—well, a little different, but same principle—and you’re gonna
be just fine.” As an afterthought he added: “As long as you like lobster.”

She hugged him and wept and Eddie held her and rocked her and Roland thought,
Eddie will be all right now. His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.

But he felt a pang: a deep reproachful hurt in his heart. He was capable of shooting—with his left hand, anyway—of killing, of going on and on, slamming with brutal relentlessness through miles and years, even dimensions, it seemed, in search of the Tower. He was capable of survival, sometimes even of protection—he had saved the boy Jake from a slow death at the way station, and from sexual consumption by the Oracle at the foot of the mountains—but in the end, he had let Jake die. Nor had this been by accident; he had committed a conscious act of damnation. He watched the two of them, watched Eddie hug her, assure her it was going to be all right. He could not have done that, and now the rue in his heart was joined by stealthy fear.

If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell’s own price in the end, but what if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, actually storm the Dark Tower and win it? If there is naught but darkness in your heart, what could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one’s object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an
elephaunt.
But to gain one’s object as a monster . . .

To
pay
hell is one thing. But do you want to
own
it?

He thought of Allie, and of the girl who had once waited for him at the window, thought of the tears he had shed over Cuthbert’s lifeless corpse. Oh, then he had loved. Yes. Then.

I do
want to love!
he cried, but although Eddie was also crying a little now with the woman in the wheelchair, the gunslinger’s eyes remained as dry as the desert he had crossed to reach this sunless sea.

He would answer Eddie’s question later. He would do that because he thought Eddie would do well to be on guard. The reason she didn’t remember was simple. She wasn’t one woman but two.

And one of them was dangerous.

Eddie told her what he could, glossing over the shoot-out but being truthful about everything else.

When he was done, she remained perfectly silent for some time, her hands clasped together on her lap.

Little streamlets coursed down from the shallowing mountains, petering out some miles to the east. It was from these that Roland and Eddie had drawn their water as they hiked north. At first Eddie had gotten it because Roland was too weak. Later they had taken turns, always having to go a little further and search a little longer before finding a stream. They grew steadily more listless as the mountains slumped, but the water hadn’t made them sick.

So far.

Roland had gone yesterday, and although that made today Eddie’s turn, the gunslinger had gone again, shouldering the hide water-skins and walking off without a word. Eddie found this queerly discreet. He didn’t want to be touched by the gesture—by anything about Roland, for that matter—and found he was, a little, just the same.