The Waste Lands

The gunslinger smiled. He had done more smiling these last five weeks than he had done in the five years which had come before them. “I can’t do that, and you know it. We were children, for one thing- children who hadn’t been through our rites of manhood yet. You may slap a child to correct him, or her, but-”

“In my world, whoppin’ the kiddies is also frowned on by the better class of people,” Susa

Roland shrugged. It was hard for him to imagine that sort of world- did not the Great Book say “Spare not the birch so you spoil not the child"?-but he didn’t believe Susa

“I guess you did.”

“In any case, you and Eddie are not children. It would be wrong for me to treat you as if you were. And if tests were needed, you both passed them.”

Although he did not say so, he was thinking of how it had ended on the beach, when she had blown three of the lumbering lobstrosities to hell before they could peel him and Eddie to the bone. He saw her answering smile and thought she might be remembering the same thing.

“So what you goan do if I shoot fo’ shit?”

“I’ll look at you. I think that’s all I’ll need to do.”

She thought this over, then nodded. “Might be.”

She tested the gunbelt again. It was slung across her bosom almost like a shoulder-holster (an arrangement Roland thought of as a docker’s clutch) and looked simple enough, but it had taken many weeks of trial and error-and a great deal of tailoring-to get it just right. The belt and the revolver which cocked its eroded sandalwood grip out of the ancient oiled holster had once been the gunslinger’s; the holster had hung on his right hip. He had spent much of the last five weeks coming to realize it was never going to hang there again. Thanks to the lobstrosities, he was strictly a lefthanded gun now.

“So how is it?” he asked again.

This time she laughed up at him. “Roland, this ole gunbelt’s as com’fable as it’s ever go

He felt tension worming sharp little fingers under his skin now, and he supposed Cort had felt much the same at times like this under his gruff, bluff exterior. I le wanted her to be good… needed her to be good. But to show how badly he wanted and needed-that could lead to disaster.

“Tell me your lesson again, Susa

She sighed in mock exasperation… but as she spoke her smile faded and her dark, beautiful face became solemn. And from her lips he heard the old catechism again, made new in her mouth. He had never expected to hear these words from a woman. How natural they sounded… yet how strange and dangerous, as well.

“I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.”

“I aim with my eye.”

“I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.”

“I shoot with my mind.”

“I do not kill with my gun-”

She broke off and pointed at the mica-shiny stones on the boulder.

“I’m not going to kill anything anyhow-they’re just itty bitty rocks.”

Her expression-a little haughty, a little naughty-suggested that she expected Roland to be exasperated with her, perhaps even angry. Roland, however, had been where she was now; he had not forgotten that apprentice gunslingers were fractious and high-spirited, nervy and apt to bite exactly at the wrong moment… and he had discovered an unexpected capacity in himself. He could teach. More, he liked to teach, and he found himself wondering, from time to time, if that had been true of Cort, as well. He guessed that it had been.

Now more crows began to call raucously, these from the forest behind them. Some part of Roland’s mind registered the fact that the new cries were agitated rather than merely quarrelsome; these birds sounded as if they had been scared up and away from whatever they had been feeding on. He had more important things to think about than whatever it was that had scared a bunch of crows, however, so he simply filed the information away and refocused his concentration on Susa

“No,” he said. “They’re not rocks.”

She raised her eyebrows a little and began to smile again. Now that she saw he wasn’t going to explode at her as he sometimes did when she was slow or fractious (or at least not yet), her eyes again took on the mocking sun-on-steel glint he associated with Detta Walker. “They ain’t?” The teasing in her voice was still good - nut u red, but he thought it would turn mean if he let it. She was tense, keyed up, her claws already halfway out of their sheaths.

“No, they ain’t,” he said, returning her mockery. His own smile began to return, but it was hard and humorless. “Susa

Her smile began to fade.

“The honk mahfahs in Oxford Town?”

Her smile was gone.

“Do you remember what the honk mahfahs did to you and your friends?”

“That wasn’t me,” she said. “That was another woman.” Her eyes had taken on a dull, sullen cast. He hated that look, but he also liked it just fine. It was the right look, the one that said the kindling was burning well and soon the bigger logs would start to catch.

“Yes. It was. Like it or not, it was Odetta Susa

She had told them these things, and many others, over many long nights as the campfire burned low. The gunslinger hadn’t understood everything, but he had listened carefully, just the same. And remembered. Pain was a tool, after all. Sometimes it was the best tool.

“What’s wrong with you, Roland? Why you want to go recallin that trash in my mind?”

Now the sullen eyes glinted at him dangerously; they reminded him of Alain’s eyes when good-natured Alain was finally roused.

“Yonder stones are those men,” Roland said softly. “The men who locked you in a cell and left you to foul yourself. The men with the clubs and the dogs. The men who called you a nigger cunt.”

He pointed at them, moving his finger from left to right.

“There’s the one who pinched your breast and laughed. There’s the one who said he better check and see if you had something stuffed up your ass. There’s the one who called you a chimpanzee in a five-hundred-dollar dress. That’s the one that kept ru

“There. Those stones. Those men.”

She was breathing rapidly now, her bosom rising and falling in swift little jerks beneath the gunslinger’s gunbelt with its heavy freight of bullets. Her eyes had left him; they were looking at the mica-flecked chips of stone. Behind them and at some distance, a tree splintered and fell over. More crows called in the sky. Deep in the game which was no longer a game, neither of them noticed.

“Oh yeah?” she breathed. “That so?”

“It is. Now say your lesson, Susa