“That says TOLLS,” he said. “Maybe you’re right about Cullum and ka. Open it up, Roland, do it please ya.”
The child who had given this box as a gift had crafted a loving (and rather clumsy) catch on the front to hold it closed. Roland slipped the catch, opened the box, and showed Eddie a great many silver coins. “Is it enough to call sai Cullum’s house?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Looks like enough to call Fairbanks, Alaska. It won’t help us a bit, though, if Cullum’s on the road to Vermont.”
Five
The Bridgton town square was bounded by a drug store and a pizza-joint on one side; a movie theater (The Magic Lantern) and a department store (Reny’s) on the other. Between the theater and the department store was a little plaza equipped with benches and three pay phones.
Eddie swept through Cullum’s box of toll-change and gave Roland six dollars in quarters. “I want you to go over there,” he said, pointing at the drug store, “and get me a tin of aspirin. Will you know it when you see it?”
“Astin. I’ll know it.”
“The smallest size they have is what I want, because six bucks really isn’t much money. Then go next door, to that place that says Bridgton Pizza and Sandwiches. If you’ve still got at least sixteen of those money-coins left, tell them you want a hoagie.”
Roland nodded, which wasn’t good enough for Eddie. “Let me hear you say it.”
“Hoggie.”
“Hoagie.”
“HOOG-gie.”
“Ho—” Eddie quit. “Roland, let me hear you say ‘poorboy.’”
“Poor boy.”
“Good. If you have at least sixteen quarters left, ask for a poorboy. Can you say ‘lots of mayo’?”
“Lots of mayo.”
“Yeah. If you have less than sixteen, ask for a salami and cheese sandwich. Sandwich, not a popkin.”
“Salommy sanditch.”
“Close enough. And don’t say anything else unless you absolutely have to.”
Roland nodded. Eddie was right, it would be better if he did not speak. People only had to look at him to know, in their secret hearts, that he wasn’t from these parts. They also had a tendency to step away from him. Better he not exacerbate that.
The gunslinger dropped a hand to his left hip as he turned toward the street, an old habit that paid no comfort this time; both revolvers were in the trunk of Cullum’s Galaxie, wrapped in their cartridge belts.
Before he could get going again, Eddie grabbed his shoulder. The gunslinger swung round, eyebrows raised, faded eyes on his friend.
“We have a saying in our world, Roland—we say so-and-so was grasping at straws.”
“And what does it mean?”
“This,” Eddie said bleakly. “What we’re doing. Wish me good luck, fella.”
Roland nodded. “Aye, so I do. Both of us.”
He began to turn away and Eddie called him back again. This time Roland wore an expression of faint impatience.
“Don’t get killed crossing the street,” Eddie said, and then briefly mimicked Cullum’s way of speaking. “Summah folks’re thicker’n ticks on a dog. And they’re not ridin hosses.”
“Make your call, Eddie,” Roland said, and then crossed Bridgton’s high street with slow confidence, walking in the same rolling gait that had taken him across a thousand other high streets in a thousand small towns.
Eddie watched him, then turned to the telephone and consulted the directions. After that he lifted the receiver and dialed the number for Directory Assistance.
Six
He didn’t go, the gunslinger had said, speaking of John Cullum with flat certainty. And why? Because Cullum was the end of the line, there was no one else for them to call. Roland of Gilead’s damned old ka, in other words.
After a brief wait, the Directory Assistance operator coughed up Cullum’s number. Eddie tried to memorize it—he’d always been good at remembering numbers, Henry had sometimes called him Little Einstein—but this time he couldn’t be confident of his ability. Something seemed to have happened either to his thinking processes in general (which he didn’t believe) or to his ability to remember certain artifacts of this world (which he sort of did). As he asked for the number a second time—and wrote it in the gathered dust on the phone kiosk’s little ledge—Eddie found himself wondering if he’d still be able to read a novel, or follow the plot of a movie from the succession of images on a screen. He rather doubted it. And what did it matter? The Magic Lantern next door was showing Star Wars, and Eddie thought that if he made it to the end of his life’s path and into the clearing without another look at Luke Skywalker and another listen to Darth Vader’s noisy breathing, he’d still be pretty much okay.
“Thanks, ma’am,” he told the operator, and was about to dial again when there was a series of explosions behind him. Eddie whirled, heart-rate spiking, right hand dipping, expecting to see Wolves, or harriers, or maybe that son of a bitch Flagg—
What he saw was a convertible filled with laughing, goofy-faced high school boys with sunburned cheeks. One of them had just tossed out a string of firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July—what kids their age in Calla Bryn Sturgis would have called bangers.
If I’d had a gun on my hip, I might have shot a couple of those bucks, Eddie thought. You want to talk goofy, start with that. Yes. Well. And maybe he might not have. Either way, he had to admit the possibility that he was no longer exactly safe in the more civilized quarters.
“Live with it,” Eddie murmured, then added the great sage and eminent junkie’s favorite advice for life’s little problems: “Deal.”
He dialed John Cullum’s number on the old-fashioned rotary phone, and when a robot voice—Blaine the Mono’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, mayhap—asked him to deposit ninety cents, Eddie dropped in a buck. What the hell, he was saving the world.
The phone rang once… rang twice… and was picked up!
“John!” Eddie almost yelled. “Good fucking deal! John, this is—”
But the voice on the other end was already speaking. As a child of the late eighties, Eddie knew this did not bode well.
“—have reached John Cullum of Cullum Caretakin and Camp Checkin,” said Cullum’s voice in its familiar slow Yankee drawl. “I gut called away kinda sudden, don’tcha know, and can’t say with any degree a’ certainty just when I’ll be back. If this inconveniences ya, I beg pa’aad’n, but you c’n call Gary Crowell, at 926-5555, or Junior Barker, at 929-4211.”
Eddie’s initial dismay had departed—depaa-aated, Cullum himself would have said—right around the time the man’s wavery recorded voice was telling Eddie that he, Cullum, couldn’t say with any degree of certainty when he’d be back. Because Cullum was right there, in his hobbity little cottage on the western shore of Keywadin Pond, either sitting on his overstuffed hobbity sofa or in one of the two similarly overstuffed hobbity chairs. Sitting there and monitoring messages on his no-doubt-clunky mid-seventies answering machine. And Eddie knew this because… well…
Because he just knew.
The primitive recording couldn’t completely hide the sly humor that had crept into Cullum’s voice by the end of the message. “Coss, if you’re still set on talkin to nobody but yours truly, you c’n leave me a message at the beep. Keep it short.” The final word came out shawt.
Eddie waited for the beep and then said, “It’s Eddie Dean, John. I know you’re there, and I think you’ve been waiting for my call. Don’t ask me why I think that, because I don’t really know, but—”