Song of Susannah (28 page)

Aaron Deepneau nodded. Rather regretfully, Eddie thought.

“All right, then,” Tower said. Then, after a pause: “All right, let’s do it.” But still he didn’t sign.

Roland spoke to him in that other language. Tower flinched, then signed his name in a quick scrawl, his lips tucked into a line so narrow his mouth seemed almost not to be there. Eddie signed for the Tet Corporation, marveling at how strange the pen felt in his hand—he couldn’t remember when last he had held one.

When the thing was done, sai Tower reverted—looked at Eddie and cried in a cracked voice that was almost a shriek, “There! I’m a pauper! Give me my dollar! I’m promised a dollar! I feel a need to take a shit coming on and I need something to wipe my ass with!”

Then he put his hands over his face. He sat like that for several seconds, while Roland folded the signed paper (Deepneau had witnessed both signatures) and put it in his pocket.

When Tower lowered his hands again, his eyes were dry and his face was composed. There even seemed to be a touch of color in his formerly ashy cheeks. “I think I actually do feel a little better,” he said. He turned to Aaron. “Do you suppose these two
cockuhs
might be right?”

“I think it’s a real possibility,” Aaron said, smiling.

Eddie, meanwhile, had thought of a way to find
out for sure if it really was these two men who would save Callahan from the Hitler Brothers—or almost for sure. One of them had said . . .

“Listen,” he said. “There’s a certain phrase, Yiddish, I think.
Gai cocknif en yom.
Do you know what it means? Either of you?”

Deepneau threw back his head and laughed. “Yeah, it’s Yiddish, all right. My Ma used to say it all the time when she was mad at us. It means go shit in the ocean.”

Eddie nodded at Roland. In the next couple of years, one of these men—probably Tower—would buy a ring with the words
Ex Libris
carved into it. Maybe—how crazy was
this
—because Eddie Dean himself had put the idea into Cal Tower’s head. And Tower—selfish, acquisitive, miserly, book-greedy Calvin Tower—would save Father Callahan’s life while that ring was on his finger. He was going to be shit-scared (Deepneau, too), but he was going to do it. And—

At that point Eddie happened to look at the pen with which Tower had signed the bill of sale, a perfectly ordinary Bic Clic, and the enormous truth of what had just happened struck home. They owned it. They owned the vacant lot.
They
, not the Sombra Corporation.
They owned the rose!

He felt as if he’d just taken a hard shot to the head. The rose belonged to the Tet Corporation, which was the firm of Deschain, Dean, Dean, Chambers & Oy. It was now their responsibility, for better or for worse. This round they had won. Which did not change the fact that he had a bullet in his leg.

“Roland,” he said, “there’s something you have to do for me.”

Five minutes later Eddie lay on the cabin’s linoleum floor in his ridiculous knee-length Calla Bryn Sturgis underbritches. In one hand he held a leather belt which had spent its previous life holding up various pairs of Aaron Deepneau’s pants. Beside him was a basin filled with a dark brown fluid.

The hole in his leg was about three inches below his knee and a little bit to the right of the shinbone. The flesh around it had risen up in a hard little cone. This miniature volcano’s caldera was currently plugged with a shiny red-purple clot of blood. Two folded towels had been laid beneath Eddie’s calf.

“Are you going to hypnotize me?” he asked Roland. Then he looked at the belt he was holding and knew the answer. “Ah, shit, you’re not, are you?”

“No time.” Roland had been rummaging in the junk-drawer to the left of the sink. Now he approached Eddie with a pair of pliers in one hand and a paring knife in the other. Eddie thought they made an exceedingly ugly combo.

The gunslinger dropped to one knee beside him. Tower and Deepneau stood in the living area, side by side, watching with big eyes. “There was a thing Cort told us when we were boys,” Roland said. “Will I tell it to you, Eddie?”

“If you think it’ll help, sure.”

“Pain rises. From the heart to the head, pain rises. Double up sai Aaron’s belt and put it in your mouth.”

Eddie did as Roland said, feeling very foolish and very scared. In how many Western movies had he seen a version of this scene? Sometimes John Wayne bit a stick and sometimes Clint Eastwood bit a bullet, and he believed that in some TV show or other, Robert Culp had actually bitten a belt.

But of course we have to remove the bullet
, Eddie thought.
No story of this type would be complete without at least one scene where—

A sudden memory, shocking in its brilliance, struck him and the belt tumbled from his mouth. He actually cried out.

Roland had been about to dip his rude operating instruments in the basin, which held the rest of the disinfectant. Now he looked at Eddie, concerned. “What is it?”

For a moment Eddie couldn’t reply. His breath was quite literally gone, his lungs as flat as old inner tubes. He was remembering a movie the Dean boys had watched one afternoon on TV in their apartment, the one in

(
Brooklyn
)

(
the Bronx
)

Co-Op City. Henry mostly got to pick what they watched because he was bigger and older. Eddie didn’t protest too often or too much; he idolized his big brother. (When he
did
protest too much he was apt to get the old Indian Rope Burn or maybe a Dutch Rub up the back of his neck.) What Henry liked was Westerns. The sort of movies where,
sooner or later, some character had to bite the stick or belt or bullet.

“Roland,” he said. His voice was just a faint wheeze to start with. “Roland, listen.”

“I hear you very well.”

“There was a movie. I told you about movies, right?”

“Stories told in moving pictures.”

“Sometimes Henry and I used to stay in and watch them on TV. Television’s basically a home movie-machine.”

“A shit-machine, some would say,” Tower put in.

Eddie ignored him. “One of the movies we watched was about these Mexican peasants—
folken
, if it does ya—who hired some gunslingers to protect them from the
bandidos
who came every year to raid their village and steal their crops. Does any of this ring a bell?”

Roland looked at him with gravity and what might have been sadness. “Yes. Indeed it does.”

“And the name of Tian’s village. I always knew it sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why. Now I do. The movie was called
The Magnificent Seven
, and just by the way, Roland, how many of us were in the ditch that day, waiting for the Wolves?”

“Would you boys mind telling us what you’re talking about?” Deepneau asked. But although he asked politely, both Roland and Eddie ignored him, too.

Roland took a moment to cull his memory, then said: “You, me, Susannah, Jake, Margaret, Zalia, and Rosa. There were more—the Tavery twins and Ben Slightman’s boy—but seven fighters.”

“Yes. And the link I couldn’t quite make was to the movie’s director. When you’re making a movie, you need a director to run things. He’s the dinh.”

Roland nodded.

“The dinh of
The Magnificent Seven
was a man named John Sturges.”

Roland sat a moment longer, thinking. Then he said: “Ka.”

Eddie burst out laughing. He simply couldn’t help it. Roland always had the answer.

“In order to catch the pain,” Roland said, “you have to clamp down on the belt at the instant you feel it. Do you understand?
The very instant.
Pin it with your teeth.”

“Gotcha. Just make it quick.”

“I’ll do the best I can.”

Roland dipped first the pliers and then the knife into the disinfectant. Eddie waited with the belt in his mouth, lying across his teeth. Yes, once you saw the basic pattern, you couldn’t unsee it, could you? Roland was the hero of the piece, the grizzled old warrior who’d be played by some grizzled but vital star like Paul Newman or maybe Eastwood in the Hollywood version. He himself was the young buck, played by the hot young boy star of the moment. Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, someone like that. And here’s a set we all know, a cabin in the woods, and a situation we’ve seen many times before but still relish, Pulling the Bullet. All that
was missing was the ominous sound of drums in the distance. And, Eddie realized, probably the drums were missing because they’d already been through the Ominous Drums part of the story: the god-drums. They had turned out to be an amplified version of a Z.Z. Top song being broadcast through streetcorner speakers in the City of Lud. Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny:
they were characters in someone’s story.
This whole world—

I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that I was raised in Brooklyn simply because of some writer’s mistake, something that will eventually be fixed in the second draft. Hey, Pere, I’m with you—I refuse to believe I’m a
character.
This is my fucking
life!

“Go on, Roland,” he said. “Get that thing outta me.”

The gunslinger poured some of the disinfectant from the bowl over Eddie’s shin, then used the tip of the knife to flick the clot out of the wound. With that done, he lowered the pliers. “Be ready to bite the pain, Eddie,” he murmured, and a moment later Eddie did.

Roland knew what he was doing, had done it before, and the bullet hadn’t gone deep. The whole thing was over in ninety seconds, but it was the longest minute and a half in Eddie’s life. At last Roland tapped the pliers on one of Eddie’s closed hands. When Eddie managed to unroll his fingers,
the gunslinger dropped a flattened slug into it. “Souvenir,” he said. “Stopped right on the bone. That was the scraping that you heard.”

Eddie looked at the mashed piece of lead, then flicked it across the linoleum floor like a marble. “Don’t want it,” he said, and wiped his brow.

Tower, ever the collector, picked up the cast-off slug. Deepneau, meanwhile, was examining the toothmarks in his belt with silent fascination.

“Cal,” Eddie said, getting up on his elbows. “You had a book in your case—”

“I want those books back,” Tower said immediately. “You better be taking care of them, young man.”

“I’m sure they’re in great condition,” Eddie said, telling himself once more to bite his tongue if he had to.
Or grab Aaron’s belt and bite that again, if your tongue won’t do.

“They better be, young man; now they’re all I have left.”

“Yes, along with the forty or so in your various safe deposit boxes,” Aaron Deepneau said, completely ignoring the vile look his friend shot him. “The signed
Ulysses
is probably the best, but there are several gorgeous Shakespeare folios, a complete set of signed Faulkners—”

“Aaron, would you please be quiet?”

“—and a
Huckleberry Finn
that you could turn into a Mercedes-Benz sedan any day of the week,” Deepneau finished.

“In any case, one of them was a book called ’
Salem’s Lot
,” Eddie said. “By a man named—”

“Stephen King,” Tower finished. He gave the
slug a final look, then put it on the kitchen table next to the sugarbowl. “I’ve been told he lives close to here. I’ve picked up two copies of
Lot
and also three copies of his first novel,
Carrie.
I was hoping to take a trip to Bridgton and get them signed. I suppose now that won’t happen.”

“I don’t understand what makes it so valuable,” Eddie said, and then: “Ouch, Roland, that hurts!”

Roland was checking the makeshift bandage around the wound in Eddie’s leg. “Be still,” he said.

Tower paid no attention to this. Eddie had turned him once more in the direction of his favorite subject, his obsession, his darling. What Eddie supposed Gollum in the Tolkien books would have called “his precious.”

“Do you remember what I told you when we were discussing
The Hogan
, Mr. Dean? Or
The Dogan
, if you prefer? I said that the value of a rare book—like that of a rare coin or a rare stamp—is created in different ways. Sometimes it’s just an autograph—”

“Your copy of ’
Salem’s Lot
isn’t signed.”

“No, because this particular author is very young and not very well known. He may amount to something one day, or he may not.” Tower shrugged, almost as if to say that was up to ka. “But this particular book . . . well, the first edition was only seventy-five hundred copies, and almost all of them sold in New England.”

“Why? Because the guy who wrote it is from New England?”

“Yes. As so often happens, the book’s value was created entirely by accident. A local chain decided
to promote it heavily. They even produced a TV commercial, which is almost unheard-of at the local retail level. And it worked. Bookland of Maine ordered five thousand copies of the first edition—almost seventy per cent—and sold nearly every single one. Also, as with
The Hogan
, there were misprints in the front matter. Not the title, in this case, but on the flap. You can tell an authentic first of ’
Salem’s Lot
by the clipped price—at the last minute, Doubleday decided to raise the price from seven-ninety-five to eight-ninety-five—and by the name of the priest in the flap copy.”

Roland looked up. “What about the name of the priest?”

“In the book, it’s Father Callahan. But on the flap someone wrote Father
Cody
, which is actually the name of the town’s doctor.”

“And that’s all it took to bump the price of a copy from nine bucks to nine hundred and fifty,” Eddie marveled.

Tower nodded. “That’s all—scarcity, clipped flap, misprint. But there’s also an element of speculation in collecting rare editions which I find . . . quite exciting.”

“That’s one word for it,” Deepneau said dryly.

“For instance, suppose this man King becomes famous or critically acclaimed? I admit the chances are small, but suppose that did happen? Available first editions of his second book are so rare that, instead of being worth seven hundred and fifty dollars, my copy might be worth ten times that.” He frowned at Eddie. “So you’d better be taking good care of it.”