The Drawing of the Three (23 page)

“Well why not? Just why the fuck not?”

“Because you don’t want chicken,” the gunslinger said. “I know what you call the things you want, Eddie. You want to ‘fix.’ You want to ‘score.’ ”

“So what?” Eddie cried—almost shrieked. “So what if I do? I said I’d come back with you! You got my promise! I mean, you got my fuckin PROMISE! What else do you want? You want me to swear on my mother’s name? Okay, I swear on my mother’s name! You want me to swear on my brother Henry’s name? All right, I swear! I swear! I SWEAR!”

Enrico Balazar would have told him, but the gunslinger didn’t need the likes of Balazar to tell him this one fact of life: Never trust a junkie.

Roland nodded toward the door. “Until after the Tower, at least, that part of your life is done. After that I don’t care. After that you’re free to go to hell in your own way. Until then I need you.”

“Oh you fuckin shitass liar,” Eddie said softly. There was no audible emotion in his voice, but the gunslinger saw the glisten of tears in his eyes. Roland said nothing. “You know there ain’t gonna be no after, not for me, not for her, or whoever the Christ this third guy is. Probably not for you, either—you look as fuckin wasted as Henry did at his worst. If we don’t die on the way to your Tower we’ll sure as shit die when we get there
so why are you lying to me?
”

The gunslinger felt a dull species of shame but only repeated: “At least for now, that part of your life is done.”

“Yeah?” Eddie said. “Well, I got some news for you, Roland. I know what’s gonna happen to your
real
body when you go through there and inside of her. I know because I saw it before. I don’t need your guns. I got you by that fabled place where the short hairs grow, my friend. You can even turn her head the way you turned mine and watch what I do to the rest of you while you’re nothing but your goddam
ka.
I’d like to wait until nightfall, and drag you down by the water. Then you could watch the lobsters chow up on the rest of you. But you might be in too much of a hurry for that.”

Eddie paused. The graty breaking of the waves and the steady hollow conch of the wind both seemed very loud.

“So I think I’ll just use your knife to cut your throat.”

“And close that door forever?”

“You say that part of my life is done. You don’t just mean smack, either. You mean New York, America, my time,
everything.
If that’s how it is, I want this part done, too. The scenery sucks and the company stinks. There are times, Roland, when you make Jimmy Swaggart look almost sane.”

“There are great wonders ahead,” Roland said. “Great adventures. More than that, there is a quest to course upon, and a chance to
redeem your honor. There’s something else, too. You could be a gunslinger. I needn’t be the last after all. It’s in you, Eddie. I see it. I
feel
it.”

Eddie laughed, although now the tears were coursing down his cheeks. “Oh, wonderful.
Wonderful!
Just what I need! My brother Henry.
He
was a gunslinger. In a place called Viet Nam, that was. It was great for him. You should have seen him when he was on a serious nod, Roland. He couldn’t find his way to the fuckin bathroom without help. If there wasn’t any help handy, he just sat there and watched
Big Time Wrestling
and did it in his fuckin pants. It’s great to be a gunslinger. I can see that. My brother was a doper and you’re out of your fucking gourd.”

“Perhaps your brother was a man with no clear idea of honor.”

“Maybe not. We didn’t always get a real clear picture of what that was in the Projects. It was just a word you used after Your if you happened to get caught smoking reefer or lifting the spinners off some guy’s T-Bird and got ho’ed up in court for it.”

Eddie was crying harder now, but he was laughing, too.

“Your friends, now. This guy you talk about in your sleep, for instance, this dude Cuthbert—”

The gunslinger started in spite of himself. Not all his long years of training could stay that start.

“Did
they
get this stuff you’re talking about like a goddam Marine recruiting sergeant? Adventure, quests, honor?”

“They understood honor, yes,” Roland said slowly, thinking of all the vanished others.

“Did it get them any further than gunslinging got my brother?”

The gunslinger said nothing.

“I know you,” Eddie said. “I seen lots of guys like you. You’re just another kook singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other. I don’t want no honor. I just want a chicken dinner and fix. In that order. So I’m telling you: go on through. You can. But the minute you’re gone, I’m gonna kill the rest of you.”

The gunslinger said nothing.

Eddie smiled crookedly and brushed the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands. “You want to know what we call this back home?”

“What?”

“A Mexican stand-off.”

For a moment they only looked at each other, and then Roland looked sharply into the doorway. They had both been partially aware—Roland rather more than Eddie—that there had been another of those swerves, this time to the left. Here was an array of sparkling jewelry. Some was under protective glass but because most wasn’t, the gunslinger supposed it was trumpery stuff . . . what Eddie would have called costume jewelry. The dark brown hands examined a few things in what seemed an only cursory manner, and then another salesgirl appeared. There had been some conversation which neither of them really noticed, and the Lady (some Lady, Eddie thought) asked to see something else. The salesgirl went away, and that was when Roland’s eyes swung sharply back.

The brown hands reappeared, only now they held a purse. It opened. And suddenly the hands were scooping things—seemingly, almost certainly, at random—into the purse.

“Well, you’re collecting quite a crew, Roland,” Eddie said, bitterly amused. “First you got your basic white junkie, and then you got your basic black shoplif—”

But Roland was already moving toward the doorway between the worlds, moving swiftly, not looking at Eddie at all.

“I mean it!” Eddie screamed. “You go through and I’ll cut your throat, I’ll cut your fucking thr—”

Before he could finish, the gunslinger was gone. All that was left of him was his limp, breathing body lying upon the beach.

For a moment Eddie only stood there, unable to believe that Roland had done it, had really gone ahead and done this idiotic thing in spite of his promise—his sincere fucking
guarantee,
as far as that went—of what the consequences would be.

He stood for a moment, eyes rolling like the eyes of a frightened horse at the onset of a thunderstorm . . . except of course there was no thunderstorm, except for the one in the head.

All right. All right, goddammit.

There might only be a moment. That was all the gunslinger might give him, and Eddie damned well knew it. He glanced at the door and saw the black hands freeze with a gold necklace half in and half out of a purse that already glittered like a pirate’s cache of treasure. Although he could not hear it, Eddie sensed that Roland was speaking to the owner of the black hands.

He pulled the knife from the gunslinger’s purse and then rolled over the limp, breathing body which lay before the doorway. The eyes were open but blank, rolled up to the whites.

“Watch, Roland!” Eddie screamed. That monotonous, idiotic, never-ending wind blew in his ears. Christ, it was enough to drive anyone bugshit. “Watch very closely! I want to complete your fucking education! I want to show you what happens when you fuck over the Dean brothers!”

He brought the knife down to the gunslinger’s throat.

August, 1959:

When the intern came outside half an hour later, he found Julio leaning against the ambulance which was still parked in the emergency bay of Sisters of Mercy Hospital on 23rd Street. The heel of one of Julio’s pointy-toed boots was hooked over the front fender. He had changed to a pair of glaring pink pants and a blue shirt with his name written in gold stitches over the left pocket: his bowling league outfit. George checked his watch and saw that Julio’s team—The Spics of Supremacy—would already be rolling.

“Thought you’d be gone,” George Shavers said. He was an intern at Sisters of Mercy. “How’re your guys gonna win without the Wonder Hook?”

“They got Miguel Basale to take my place. He ain’t steady, but he gets hot sometimes. They’ll be okay.” Julio paused. “I was curious about how it came out.” He was the driver, a Cubano with a sense of humor George wasn’t even sure Julio knew he had. He looked around. Neither of the paramedics who rode with them were in sight.

“Where are they?” George asked.

“Who? The fuckin Bobbsey Twins? Where do you think they are? Chasin Minnesota poontang down in the Village. Any idea if she’ll pull through?”

“Don’t know.”

He tried to sound sage and knowing about the unknown, but the
fact was that first the resident on duty and then a pair of surgeons had taken the black woman away from him almost faster than you could say
hail Mary fulla grace
(which had actually been on his lips to say—the black lady really hadn’t looked as if she was going to last very long).

“She lost a hell of a lot of blood.”

“No shit.”

George was one of sixteen interns at Sisters of Mercy, and one of eight assigned to a new program called Emergency Ride. The theory was that an intern riding with a couple of paramedics could sometimes make the difference between life and death in an emergency situation. George knew that most drivers and paras thought that wet-behind-the-ears interns were as likely to kill red-blankets as save them, but George thought maybe it worked.

Sometimes.

Either way it made great PR for the hospital, and although the interns in the program liked to bitch about the extra eight hours (without pay) it entailed each week, George Shavers sort of thought most of them felt the way he did himself—proud, tough, able to take whatever they threw his way.

Then had come the night the T.W.A. Tri-Star crashed at Idlewild. Sixty-five people on board, sixty of them what Julio Estevez referred to as D.R.T.—Dead Right There—and three of the remaining five looking like the sort of thing you might scrape out of the bottom of a coal-furnace . . . except what you scraped out of the bottom of a coal furnace didn’t moan and shriek and beg for someone to give them morphine or kill them, did they?
If you can take this,
he thought afterward, remembering the severed limbs lying amid the remains of aluminum flaps and seat-cushions and a ragged chunk of tail with the numbers 17 and a big red letter T and part of a W on it, remembering the eyeball he had seen resting on top of a charred Samsonite suitcase, remembering a child’s teddybear with staring shoe-button eyes lying beside a small red sneaker with a child’s foot still in it,
if you can take this, baby, you can take anything.
And he had been taking it
just fine. He went right on taking it just fine all the way home. He went on taking it just fine through a late supper that consisted of a Swanson’s turkey TV dinner. He went to sleep with no problem at all, which proved beyond a shadow of a
doubt
that he was taking it just fine. Then, in some dead dark hour of the morning he had awakened from a hellish nightmare in which the thing resting on top of the charred Samsonite suitcase had not been a teddybear but
his mother’s head,
and her eyes had opened, and they had been charred; they were the staring expressionless shoebutton eyes of the teddybear, and her mouth had opened, revealing the broken fangs which had been her dentures up until the T.W.A. Tri-Star was struck by lightning on its final approach, and she had whispered
You couldn’t save me, George, we scrimped for you, we saved for you, we went without for you, your dad fixed up the scrape you got into with that girl and you STILL COULDN’T SAVE ME GOD DAMN YOU,
and he had awakened screaming, and he was vaguely aware of someone pounding on the wall, but by then he was already pelting into the bathroom, and he barely made it to the kneeling penitential position before the porcelain altar before dinner came up the express elevator. It came special delivery, hot and steaming and still smelling like processed turkey. He knelt there and looked into the bowl, at the chunks of half-digested turkey and the carrots which had lost none of their original fluorescent brightness, and this word flashed across his mind in large red letters:

Correct.

It was:

He was going to get out of the sawbones business. He was going to get out because:

He was going to get out because Popeye’s motto was
That’s all I can stands and I can’t stand nummore,
and Popeye was as right as rain.

He had flushed the toilet and gone back to bed and fell asleep almost instantly and awoke to discover he still wanted to be a doctor, and that was a goddam good thing to know for sure, maybe worth the whole program, whether you called it Emergency Ride or Bucket of Blood or Name That Tune.

He
still
wanted to be a doctor.

He knew a lady who did needlework. He paid her ten dollars he couldn’t afford to make him a small, old-fashioned-looking sampler. It said:

IF YOU CAN TAKE THIS
,
YOU CAN TAKE ANYTHING
.

Yes. Correct.

The messy business in the subway happened four weeks later.

“That lady was some fuckin weird, you know it?” Julio said.

George breathed an interior sigh of relief. If Julio hadn’t opened the subject, George supposed he wouldn’t have had the sack. He was an intern, and someday he was going to be a full-fledged doc, he really believed that now, but Julio was a
vet,
and you didn’t want to say something stupid in front of a
vet.
He would only laugh and say
Hell, I seen that shit a thousand times, kid. Get y’self a towel and wipe off whatever it is behind your ears, cause it’s wet and drippin down the sides of your face.

But apparently Julio
hadn’t
seen it a thousand times, and that was good, because George
wanted
to talk about it.

“She was weird, all right. It was like she was two people.”

He was amazed to see that now
Julio
was the one who looked relieved, and he was struck with sudden shame. Julio Estavez, who was
going to do no more than pilot a limo with a couple of pulsing red lights on top for the rest of his life, had just shown more courage than he had been able to show.

“You got it, doc. Hunnert per cent.” He pulled out a pack of Chesterfields and stuck one in the corner of his mouth.

“Those things are gonna kill you, my man,” George said.

Julio nodded and offered the pack.

They smoked in silence for awhile. The paras were maybe chasing tail like Julio had said . . . or maybe they’d just had enough.
George
had been scared, all right, no joke about
that.
But he also knew
he
had been the one who saved the woman, not the paras, and he knew Julio knew it too. Maybe that was really why Julio had waited. The old black woman had helped, and the white kid who had dialed the cops while everyone else (except the old black woman) had just stood around watching like it was some goddam movie or TV show or something, part of a
Peter Gunn
episode, maybe, but in the end it had all come down to George Shavers, one scared cat doing his duty the best way he could.

The woman had been waiting for the train Duke Ellington held in such high regard—that fabled A-train. Just been a pretty young black woman in jeans and a khaki shirt waiting for the fabled A-train so she could go uptown someplace.

Someone had pushed her.

George Shavers didn’t have the slightest idea if the police had caught the slug who had done it—that wasn’t his business. His business was the woman who had tumbled screaming into the tube of the tunnel in front of that fabled A-train. It had been a miracle that she had missed the third rail; the fabled third rail that would have done to her what the State of New York did to the bad guys up at Sing-Sing who got a free ride on that fabled A-train the cons called Old Sparky.

Oboy, the miracles of electricity.

She tried to crawl out of the way but there hadn’t been quite enough time and that fabled A-train had come into the station screeching and squalling and puking up sparks because the motorman had
seen her but it was too late, too late for him and too late for her. The steel wheels of that fabled A-train had cut the living legs off her from just above the knees down. And while everyone else (except for the white kid who had dialed the cops) had only stood there pulling their puds (or pushing their pudenda, George supposed), the elderly black woman had jumped down, dislocating one hip in the process (she would later be given a Medal of Bravery by the Mayor), and had used the doorag on her head to cinch a tourniquet around one of the young woman’s squirting thighs. The young white guy was screaming for an ambulance on one side of the station and the old black chick was screaming for someone to give her a help, to give her a tie-off for God’s sake, anything, anything at all, and finally some elderly white business type had reluctantly surrendered his belt, and the elderly black chick looked up at him and spoke the words which became the headline of the New York
Daily News
the next day, the words which made her an authentic American apple-pie heroine: “Thank you, bro.” Then she had noosed the belt around the young woman’s left leg halfway between the young woman’s crotch and where her left knee had been until that fabled A-train had come along.

George had heard someone say to someone else that the young black woman’s last words before passing out had been
“WHO WAS THAT MAHFAH? I GONE HUNT HIM DOWN AND KILL HIS ASS!”

There was no way to punch holes far enough up for the elderly black woman to notch the belt, so she simply held on like grim old death until Julio, George, and the paras arrived.

George remembered the yellow line, how his mother had told him he must never, never,
never
go past the yellow line while he was waiting for a train (fabled or otherwise), the stench of oil and electricity when he hopped down onto the cinders, remembered how hot it had been. The heat seemed to be baking off him, off the elderly black woman, off the young black woman, off the train, the tunnel, the unseen sky above and hell itself beneath. He remembered thinking incoherently
If they put a blood-pressure cuff on me now I’d go off the dial
and then he went cool and yelled for his bag, and when one of the
paras tried to jump down with it he told the para to fuck off, and the para had looked startled, as if he was really seeing George Shavers for the first time, and he
had
fucked off.

George tied off as many veins and arteries as he could tie off, and when her heart started to be-bop he had shot her full of Digitalin. Whole blood arrived. Cops brought it.
Want to bring her up, doc?
one of them had asked and George had told him not yet, and he got out the needle and stuck the juice to her like she was a junkie in dire need of a fix.

Then
he let them take her up.

Then
they had taken her back.

On the way she had awakened.

Then
the weirdness started.

George gave her a shot of Demerol when the paras loaded her into the ambulance—she had begun to stir and cry out weakly. He gave her a boost hefty enough for him to be confident she would remain quiet until they got to Sisters of Mercy. He was ninety per cent sure she
would
still be with them when they got there, and that was one for the good guys.

Her eyes began to flutter while they were still six blocks from the hospital, however. She uttered a thick moan.

“We can shoot her up again, doc,” one of the paras said.

George was hardly aware this was the first time a paramedic had deigned to call him anything other than George or, worse, Georgie. “Are you nuts? I’d just as soon not confuse D.O.A. and O.D. if it’s all the same to you.”

The paramedic drew back.

George looked back at the young black woman and saw the eyes returning his gaze were awake and aware.

“What has happened to me?” she asked.

George remembered the man who had told another man about what the woman had supposedly said (how she was going to hunt the motherfucker down and kill his ass, etc., etc.). That man had been white. George decided now it had been pure invention, inspired either by that odd human urge to make naturally dramatic situations even more dramatic, or just race prejudice. This was a cultured, intelligent woman.

“You’ve had an accident,” he said. “You were—”

Her eyes slipped shut and he thought she was going to sleep again. Good. Let someone else tell her she had lost her legs. Someone who made more than $7,600 a year. He had shifted a little to the left, wanting to check her b.p. again, when she opened her eyes once more. When she did, George Shavers was looking at a different woman.

“Fuckah cut off mah laigs. I felt ’em go. Dis d’amblance?”

“Y-Y-Yes,” George said. Suddenly he needed something to drink. Not necessarily alcohol. Just something wet. His voice was dry. This was like watching Spencer Tracy in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
only for real.

“Dey get dat honkey mahfah?”

“No,” George said, thinking
The guy got it right, goddam, the guy did actually get it right.

He was vaguely aware that the paramedics, who had been hovering (perhaps hoping he would do something wrong) were now backing off.