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“Drive down, sai, may it do ya.”
She looked doubtfully at the steep slope ofthe Cara Laughs driveway. “If I do, I might not get this bucket of bolts backup.”
“You’ll have to,” Roland said.
Nine
The man cutting the grass was King’sbondservant, Roland surmised, or whatever passed for such in this world. He waswhite-haired under his straw hat but straight-backed and hale, wearing hisyears with little effort. When the truck drove down the steep driveway to thehouse, the man paused with one arm resting on the handle of the mower. When thepassenger door opened and the gunslinger got out, he used the switch to turnthe mower off. He also removed his hat—without being exactly aware thathe was doing it, Roland thought. Then his eyes registered the gun that hung atRoland’s hip, and widened enough to make the crow’s-feet around them disappear.
“Howdy, mister,” he said cautiously. Hethinks I’m a walk-in, Roland thought. Just as she did.
And they were walk-ins of a sort, heand Jake; they just happened to have come to a time and place where such thingswere common.
And where time was racing.
Roland spoke before the man could go on.“Where are they? Where is he? Stephen King? Speak, man, and tell me thetruth!”
The hat slipped from the old man’s relaxingfingers and fell beside his feet on the newly cut grass. His hazel eyes staredinto Roland’s, fascinated: the bird looking at the snake.
“Fambly’s across the lake, at that placethey gut on t’other side,” he said. “T’old Schindler place. Havin some kind ofpa’ty, they are. Steve said he’d drive over after his walk.” And he gestured toa small black car parked on the driveway extension, its nose just visiblearound the side of the house.
“Where is he walking? Do ya know, tell thislady!”
The old man looked briefly over Roland’sshoulder, then back to the gunslinger. “Be easier was I t’drive ya therem’self.”
Roland considered this, but only briefly.Easier to begin with, yes. Maybe harder on the other end, where King wouldeither be saved or lost. Because they’d found the woman in ka’s road. Howeverminor a role she might have to play, it was her they had found first on thePath of the Beam. In the end it was as simple as that. As for the size of herpart, it was better not to judge such things in advance. Hadn’t he and Eddiebelieved John Cullum, met in that same roadside store some three wheels northof here, would have but a minor role to play in their story? Yet it had turnedout to be anything but.
All of this crossed his consciousness inless than a second, information (hunch, Eddie would have called it)delivered in a kind of brilliant mental shorthand.
“No,” he said, and jerked a thumb back overhis shoulder. “Tell her. Now.”
Ten
The boy—Jake—had fallen backagainst the seat with his hands lying limp at his sides. The peculiar dog waslooking anxiously up into the kid’s face, but the kid didn’t see him. His eyeswere closed, and Irene Tassenbaum at first thought he’d fainted.
“Son?… Jake?”
“I have him,” the boy said without openinghis eyes. “Not Stephen King—I can’t touch him—but the other one. Ihave to slow him down. How can I slow him down?”
Mrs. Tassenbaum had listened to her husbandenough at work—holding long, muttered dialogues with himself—toknow a self-directed enquiry when she heard one. Also, she had no idea of whomthe boy was speaking, only that it wasn’t Stephen King. Which left about sixbillion other possibilities, globally speaking.
Nevertheless, she did answer,because she knew what always slowed her down.
“Too bad he doesn’t need to go to thebathroom,” she said.
Eleven
Strawberries aren’t out in Maine, notthis early in the season, but there are raspberries. Justine Anderson (ofMaybrook, New York) and Elvira Toothaker (her Lovell friend) are walking alongthe side of Route 7 (which Elvira still calls The Old Fryeburg Road) with theirplastic buckets, harvesting from the bushes which run for at least half a milealong the old rock wall. Garrett McKeen built that wall a hundred years ago,and it is to Garrett’s great-grandson that Roland Deschain of Gilead isspeaking at this very moment. Ka is a wheel, do ya not ke
The two women have enjoyed their hour’swalk, not because either of them has any great love of raspberries (Justinereckons she won’t even eat hers; the seeds get caught in her teeth) but becauseit’s given them a chance to catch up on their respective families and to laugha little together about the years when their friendship was new and probablythe most important thing in either girl’s life. They met at Vassar College (athousand years ago, so it does seem) and carried the Daisy Chain together atgraduation the year they were juniors. This is what they are talking about whenthe blue minivan—it is a 1985 Dodge Caravan, Justine recognizes the makeand model because her oldest son had one just like it when his tribe startedgrowing—comes around the curve by Melder’s German Restaurant andBrathaus. It’s all over the road, looping from side to side, first spuming updust from the southbound shoulder, then plunging giddily across the tar andspuming up more from the northbound one. The second time it doesthis—rolling toward them now, and coming at a pretty damned goodclip—Justine thinks it may actually go into the ditch and turn over(“turn turtle,” they used to say back in the forties, when she and Elvira hadbeen at Vassar), but the driver hauls it back on the road just before that canhappen.
“Look out, that person’s drunk orsomething!” Justine says, alarmed. She pulls Elvira back, but they find theirway blocked by the old wall with its dressing of raspberry bushes. The thornscatch at their slacks (thank goodness neither of us was wearing shorts, Justinewill think later… when she has time to think) and pull out little puffsof cloth.
Justine is thinking she should put anarm around her friend’s shoulder and tumble them both over the thigh-highwall—do a backflip, just like in gym class all those years ago—butbefore she can make up her mind to do it, the blue van is by them, and at themoment it passes, it’s more or less on the road and not a danger to them.
Justine watches it go by in a muffledblare of rock music, her heart thumping heavily in her chest, the taste ofsomething her body has dumped—adrenaline would be the most likelypossibility—flat and metallic on her tongue. And halfway up the hill thelittle blue van once again lurches across the white line. The driver correctsthe drift… no, overcorrects. Once more the blue van is on the righthandshoulder, spuming up yellow dust for fifty yards.
“Gosh, I hope Stephen King sees thatasshole,” Elvira says. They have passed the writer half a mile or so back, andsaid hello. Probably everyone in town has seen him on his afternoon walk, atone time or another.
As if the driver of the blue van hasheard Elvira Toothaker call him an asshole, the van’s brakelights flare. Thevan suddenly pulls all the way off the road and stops. When the door opens, theladies hear a louder blast of rock and roll music. They also hear thedriver—a man—yelling at someone (Elvira and Justine just pity theperson stuck driving with that guy on such a beautiful June afternoon).“You leave ‘at alone!” he shouts. “That ain’t yoahs, y’hear?” And then thedriver reaches back into the van, brings out a cane, and uses it to help himover the rock wall and into the bushes. The van sits rumbling on the softshoulder, driver’s door open, emitting blue exhaust from one end and rock fromthe other.
“What’s he doing?” Justine asks,a little nervously.
“Taking a leak would be my guess,” herfriend replies. “But if Mr. King back there is lucky, maybe doing Number Two,instead. That might give him time to get off Route 7 and back onto TurtlebackLane.”