“Eat my dust, cowboy!” he says, and giggles. He doesn’t know why he said cowboy when the word in his mind was muthafuckah, as in eat my dust muthafuckah, but it sounds good. It sounds right. He sees he’s drifted into the other lane and corrects his course. “Back on the road again!” he cries, and lets loose another highpitched giggle. Back on the road again is a good one, and he always uses it on girls. Another good one is when you twist the wheel from side to side, making your car loop back and forth, and you say Ahh jeez, musta had too much cough-syrup! He knows lots of lines like this, even once thought of writing a book called Crazy Road Jokes, wouldn’t that be a sketch, Bryan Smith writing a book just like that guy King over in Lovell!
He turns on the radio (the van yawing onto the soft shoulder to the left of the tarvy, throwing up a rooster-tail of dust, but not quite running into the ditch) and gets Steely Dan, singing “Hey Nineteen.” Good one! Yassuh, wicked good one! He drives a little faster in response to the music. He looks into the rearview mirror and sees his dogs, Bullet and Pistol, looking over the rear seat, bright-eyed. For a moment Bryan thinks they’re looking at him, maybe thinking what a good guy he is, then wonders how he can be so stupid. There’s a Styrofoam cooler behind the driver’s seat, and a pound of fresh hamburger in it. He means to cook it later over a campfire back at Million Dollar. Yes, and a couple more Marses’ Bars for dessert, by the hairy old Jesus! Marses’ Bars are wicked good!
“You boys ne’mine that cooler,” Bryan Smith says, speaking to the dogs he can see in the rear-view mirror. This time the minivan pitches instead of yawing, crossing the white line as it climbs a blind grade at fifty miles an hour. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on your point of view—nothing is coming the other way; nothing puts a stop to Bryan Smith’s northward progress.
“You ne’mine that hamburg, that’s my supper.” He says suppah, as John Cullum would, but the face looking back at the bright-eyed dogs from the rearview mirror is the face of Sheemie Ruiz. Almost exactly.
Sheemie could be Bryan Smith’s litter-twin.
Six
Irene Tassenbaum was driving the truck with more assurance now, standard shift or not. She almost wished she didn’t have to turn right a quarter of a mile from here, because that would necessitate using the clutch again, this time to downshift. But that was Turtleback Lane right up ahead, and Turtleback was where these boys wanted to go.
Walk-ins! They said so, and she believed it, but who else would? Chip McAvoy, maybe, and surely the Reverend Peterson from that crazy Church of the Walk-Ins down in Stoneham Corners, but anyone else? Her husband, for instance? Nope. Never. If you couldn’t engrave a thing on a microchip, David Tassenbaum didn’t believe it was real. She wondered—not for the first time lately—if forty-seven was too old to think about a divorce.
She shifted back to Second without grinding the gears too much, but then, as she turned off the highway, had to shift all the way down to First when the silly old pickup began to grunt and chug. She thought that one of her passengers would make some sort of smart comment (perhaps the boy’s mutant dog would even say fuck again), but all the man in the passenger seat said was, “This doesn’t look the same.”
“When were you here last?” Irene Tassenbaum asked him. She considered shifting up to second gear again, then decided to leave things just as they were. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” David liked to say.
“It’s been awhile,” the man admitted. She had to keep sneaking glances at him. There was something strange and exotic about him—especially his eyes. It was as if they’d seen things she’d never even dreamed of.
Stop it, she told herself. He’s probably a drugstore cowboy all the way from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
But she kind of doubted that. The boy was odd, as well—him and his exotic crossbreed dog—but they were nothing compared to the man with the haggard face and the strange blue eyes.
“Eddie said it was a loop,” the boy said. “Maybe last time you guys came in from the other end.”
The man considered this and nodded. “Would the other end be the Bridgton end?” he asked the woman.
“Yes indeed.”
The man with the odd blue eyes nodded. “We’re going to the writer’s house.”
“Cara Laughs,” she said at once. “It’s a beautiful house. I’ve seen it from the lake, but I don’t know which driveway—”
“It’s nineteen,” the man said. They were currently passing the one marked 27. From this end of Turtleback Lane, the numbers would go down rather than up.
“What do you want with him, if I may I be so bold?”
It was the boy who answered. “We want to save his life.”
Seven
Roland recognized the steeply descending driveway at once, even though he’d last seen it under black, thundery skies, and much of his attention had been taken by the brilliant flying taheen. There was no sign of taheen or other exotic wildlife today. The roof of the house below had been dressed with copper instead of shingles at some point during the intervening years, and the wooded area beyond it had become a lawn, but the driveway was the same, with a sign reading CARA LAUGHS on the lefthand side and one bearing the number 19 in large numerals on the right. Beyond was the lake, sparkling blue in the strong afternoon light.
From the lawn came the blat of a hard-working small engine. Roland looked at Jake and was dismayed by the boy’s pale cheeks and wide, frightened eyes.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“He’s not here, Roland. Not him, not any of his family. Just the man cutting the grass.”
“Nonsense, you can’t—” Mrs. Tassenbaum began.
“I know!” Jake shouted at her. “I know, lady!”
Roland was looking at Jake with a frank and horrified sort of fascination… but in his current state, the boy either did not understand the look or missed it entirely.
Why are you lying, Jake? the gunslinger thought. And then, on the heels of that: He’s not.
“What if it’s already happened?” Jake demanded, and yes, he was worried about King, but Roland didn’t think that was all he was worried about. “What if he’s dead and his family’s not here because the police called them, and—”
“It hasn’t happened,” Roland said, but that was all of which he was sure. What do you know, Jake, and why won’t you tell me?
There was no time to wonder about it now.
Eight
The man with the blue eyes sounded calm as he spoke to the boy, but he didn’t look calm to Irene Tassenbaum; not at all. And those singing voices she’d first noticed outside the East Stoneham General Store had changed. Their song was still sweet, but wasn’t there a note of desperation in it now, as well? She thought so. A high, pleading quality that made her temples throb.
“How can you know that?” the boy called Jake shouted at the man—his father, she assumed. “How can you be so fucking sure?”
Instead of answering the kid’s question, the one called Roland looked at her. Mrs. Tassenbaum felt the skin of her arms and back break out in gooseflesh.
“Drive down, sai, may it do ya.”
She looked doubtfully at the steep slope of the Cara Laughs driveway. “If I do, I might not get this bucket of bolts back up.”
“You’ll have to,” Roland said.
Nine
The man cutting the grass was King’s bondservant, Roland surmised, or whatever passed for such in this world. He was white-haired under his straw hat but straight-backed and hale, wearing his years with little effort. When the truck drove down the steep driveway to the house, the man paused with one arm resting on the handle of the mower. When the passenger door opened and the gunslinger got out, he used the switch to turn the mower off. He also removed his hat—without being exactly aware that he was doing it, Roland thought. Then his eyes registered the gun that hung at Roland’s hip, and widened enough to make the crow’s-feet around them disappear.