“Each man owes a death. This is Jake. Give him peace.”
He knelt a moment longer with his hands clasped between his knees, thinking he had not understood the true power of sorrow, nor the pain of regret, until this moment.
I cannot bear to let him go.
But once again, that cruel paradox: if he didn’t, the sacrifice was in vain.
Roland opened his eyes and said, “Goodbye, Jake. I love you, dear.”
Then he closed the blue hood around the boy’s face against the rain of earth that must follow.
Eleven
When the grave was filled and the rocks placed over it, Roland walked back to the clearing by the road and examined the tale the various tracks told, simply because there was nothing else to do. When that meaningless task was finished, he sat down on a fallen log. Oy had stayed by the grave, and Roland had an idea he might bide there. He would call the bumbler when Mrs. Tassenbaum returned, but knew Oy might not come; if he didn’t, it meant that Oy had decided to join his friend in the clearing. The bumbler would simply stand watch by Jake’s grave until starvation (or some predator) took him. The idea deepened Roland’s sorrow, but he would bide by Oy’s decision.
Ten minutes later the bumbler came out of the woods on his own and sat down by Roland’s left boot. “Good boy,” Roland said, and stroked the bumbler’s head. Oy had decided to live. It was a small thing, but it was a good thing.
Ten minutes after that, a dark red car rolled almost silently up to the place where King had been struck and Jake killed. It pulled over. Roland opened the door on the passenger side and got in, still wincing against pain that wasn’t there. Oy jumped up between his feet without being asked, lay down with his nose against his flank, and appeared to go to sleep.
“Did you see to your boy?” Mrs. Tassenbaum asked, pulling away.
“Yes. Thankee-sai.”
“I guess I can’t put a marker there,” she said, “but later on I could plant something. Is there something you think he might like?”
Roland looked up, and for the first time since Jake’s death, he smiled. “Yes,” he said. “A rose.”
Twelve
They rode for almost twenty minutes without speaking. She stopped at a small store over the Bridgton town line and pumped gas: MOBIL, a brand Roland recognized from his wanderings. When she went in to pay, he looked up at los ángeles, running clear and true across the sky. The Path of the Beam, and stronger already, unless that was just his imagination. He supposed it didn’t matter if it was. If the Beam wasn’t stronger now, it soon would be. They had succeeded in saving it, but Roland felt no gladness at the idea.
When Mrs. Tassenbaum came out of the store, she was holding a singlet-style shirt with a picture of a bucka-wagon on it—a real bucka-wagon—and words written in a circle. He could make out HOME, but nothing else. He asked her what the words said.
“BRIDGTON OLD HOME DAYS, JULY 27TH TO JULY 30TH, 1999,” she told him. “It doesn’t really matter what it says as long as it covers your chest. Sooner or later we’ll want to stop, and there’s a saying we have in these parts: ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service.’ Your boots look beat-up and busted down, but I guess they’ll get you through the door of most places. But topless? Huh-uh, no way José. I’ll get you a better shirt later on—one with a collar—and some decent pants, too. Those jeans are so dirty I bet they’d stand up on their own.” She engaged in a brief (but furious) interior debate, then plunged. “You’ve got I’m going to say roughly two billion scars. And that’s just on the part of you I can see.”
Roland did not respond to this. “Do you have money?” he asked.
“I got three hundred dollars when I went back to the house to get my car, and I had thirty or forty with me. Also credit cards, but your late friend said to use cash as long as I could. Until you go on by yourself, if possible. He said there might be folks looking for you. He called them ‘low men.’”
Roland nodded. Yes, there would be low men out there, and after all he and his ka-tet had done to thwart the plans of their master, they’d be twice as eager to have his head. Preferably smoking, and on the end of a stick. Also the head of sai Tassenbaum, if they found out about her.
“What else did Jake tell you?” Roland asked.
“That I must take you to New York City, if you wanted to go there. He said there’s a door there that will take you to a place called Faydag.”
“Was there more?”
“Yes. He said there was another place you might want to go before you used the door.” She gave him a timid little sideways glance. “Is there?”
He considered this, then nodded.
“He also spoke to the dog. It sounded as if he was giving the dog… orders? Instructions?” She looked at him doubtfully. “Could that be?”
Roland thought it could. The woman Jake could only ask. As for Oy… well, it might explain why the bumbler hadn’t stayed by the grave, much as he might have wanted to.
For awhile they traveled in silence. The road they were on led to a much busier one, filled with cars and trucks running at high speed in many lanes. She had to stop at a tollbooth and give money to get on. The toll-taker was a robot with a basket for an arm. Roland thought he might be able to sleep, but he saw Jake’s face when he closed his eyes. Then Eddie’s, with the useless bandage covering his forehead. If this is what comes when I close my eyes, he thought, what will my dreams be like?
He opened his eyes again and watched as she drove down a smooth, paved ramp, slipping into the heavy flow of traffic without a pause. He leaned over and looked up through the window on his side. There were the clouds, los ángeles, traveling above them, in the same direction. They were still on the Path of the Beam.
Thirteen
“Mister? Roland?”
She thought he had been dozing with his eyes open. Now he turned to her from where he sat in the passenger bucket seat with his hands in his lap, the good one folded over the mutilated one, hiding it. She thought she had never seen anyone who looked less like he belonged in a Mercedes-Benz. Or any automobile. She also thought she had never seen a man who looked so tired.
But he’s not used up. I don’t think he’s anywhere near used up, although he may think otherwise.
“The animal… Oy?”
“Oy, yes.” The bumbler looked up at the sound of his name, but didn’t repeat it as he might have done only yesterday.
“Is it a dog? It isn’t, exactly, is it?”
“He, not it. And no, he’s not a dog.”
Irene Tassenbaum opened her mouth, then closed it again. This was difficult, because silence in company did not come naturally to her. And she was with a man she found attractive, even in his grief and exhaustion (perhaps to some degree because of those things). A dying boy had asked her to take this man to New York City, and get him to the places he needed to go once they were there. He’d said that his friend knew even less about New York than he did about money, and she believed that was true. But she also believed this man was dangerous. She wanted to ask more questions, but what if he answered them? She understood that the less she knew, the better her chance, once he was gone, of merging into the life she’d been living at quarter to four this afternoon. To merge the way you merged onto the turnpike from a side road. That would be best.
She turned on the radio and found a station playing “Amazing Grace.” The next time she looked at her strange companion, she saw that he was looking out at the darkening sky and weeping. Then she chanced to look down and saw something much odder, something that moved her heart as it had not been moved in fifteen years, when she had miscarried her one and only effort to have a child.
The animal, the not-dog, the Oy… he was crying, too.
Fourteen
She got off 95 just over the Massachusetts state line and checked them into a pair of side-by-side rooms in a dump called the Sea Breeze Inn. She hadn’t thought to bring her driving glasses, the ones she called her bug’s-asshole glasses (as in “when I’m wearing these things I can see up a bug’s asshole”), and she didn’t like driving at night, anyway. Bug’s-asshole glasses or not, driving at night fried her nerves, and that was apt to bring on a migraine. With a migraine she would be of no use to either of them, and her Imitrex was sitting uselessly in the medicine cabinet back in East Stoneham.