"How do you know?"
"Just know," he whispers.
Eddie looks at him. "You're crazy," he says.
The gunslinger smiles and tries to black out but Eddie slaps him, slaps him hard. Roland's blue eyes fly open and for a moment they are so alive and electric Eddie looks uneasy. Then his lips draw back in a smile that is mostly snarl.
"Yeah, you can drone off," he said, "but first you gotta take your dope. It's time. Sun says it is, anyway. I guess. I was never no Boy Scout, so I don't know for sure. But I guess it's close enough for Government work. Open wide, Roland. Open wide for Dr. Eddie, you kidnapping fuck."
The gunslinger opens his mouth like a baby for the breast. Eddie puts two of the pills in his mouth and then slops fresh water carelessly into Roland's mouth. Roland guesses it must be from a hill stream somewhere to the east. It might be poison; Eddie wouldn't know fair water from foul. On the other hand, Eddie seems fine himself, and there's really no choice, is there? No.
He swallows, coughs, and nearly strangles while Eddie looks at him indifferently.
Roland reaches for him.
Eddie tries to draw away.
The gunslinger's bullshooter eyes command him.
Roland draws him close, so close he can smell the stink of Eddie's sickness and Eddie can smell the stink of his; the combination sickens and compels them both.
"Only two choices here," Roland whispers. "Don't know how it is in your world, but only two choices here. Stand and maybe live, or die on your knees with your head down and the stink of your own armpits in your nose. Nothing …" He hacks out a cough. "Nothing to me."
"Who are you?" Eddie screams at him.
"Your destiny, Eddie," the gunslinger whispers.
"Why don't you just eat shit and die?" Eddie asks him. The gunslinger tries to speak, but before he can he floats off as the cards
shuffle
KA-BLAM!
Roland opens his eyes on a billion stars wheeling through the blackness, then closes them again.
He doesn't know what's going on but he thinks everything's okay. The deck's still moving, the cards still
shuffle
More of the sweet, tasty chunks of meat. He feels better. Eddie looks better, too. But he also looks worried.
"They're getting closer," he says. "They may be ugly, but they ain't completely stupid. They know what I been doing. Somehow they know, and they don't dig it. Every night they get a little closer. It might be smart to move on when daybreak comes, if you can. Or it might be the last daybreak we ever see."
"What?" This is not exactly a whisper but a husk somewhere between a whisper and real speech.
"Them," Eddie says, and gestures toward the beach. "Dad-a-chack, dum-a-chum, and all that shit. I think they're like us, Roland―all for eating, but not too big on getting eaten."
Suddenly, in an utter blast of horror, Roland realizes what the whitish-pink chunks of meat Eddie has been feeding him have been. He cannot speak; revulsion robs him of what little voice he has managed to get back. But Eddie sees everything he wants to say on his face.
"What did you think I was doing?" he nearly snarls. "Calling Red Lobster for take-out?"
"They're poison," Roland whispers. "That's why―"
"Yeah, that's why you're hors de combat. What I'm trying to keep from you being, Roland my friend, is h'ors d'oeuvres as well. As far as poison goes, rattlesnakes are poison, but people eat them. Rattlesnake tastes real good. Like chicken. I read that somewhere. They looked like lobsters to me, so I decided to take a chance. What else were we gonna eat? Dirt? I shot one of the fuckers and cooked the living Christ out of it. There wasn't anything else. And actually, they taste pretty good. I been shooting one a night just after the sun starts to go down. They're not real lively until it gets completely dark. I never saw you turning the stuff down."
Eddie smiles.
"I like to think maybe I got one of the ones that ate Jack. I like to think I'm eating that dink. It, like, eases my mind, you know?"
"One of them ate part of me, too," the gunslinger husks out. "Two fingers, one toe."
"That's also cool," Eddie keeps smiling. His face is pallid, sharklike … but some of that ill look has gone now, and the smell of shit and death which has hung around him like a shroud seems to be going away.
"Fuck yourself," the gunslinger husks.
"Roland shows a flash of spirit!" Eddie cries. "Maybe you ain't gonna die after all! Dahling! I think that's mahvellous!"
"Live," Roland says. The husk has become a whisper again. The fishhooks are returning to his throat.
"Yeah?" Eddie looks at him, then nods and answers his own question. "Yeah. I think you mean to. Once I thought you were going and once I thought you were gone. Now it looks like you're going to get better. The antibiotics are helping, I guess, but mostly I think you're hauling yourself up. What for? Why the fuck do you keep trying so hard to keep alive on this scuzzy beach?"
Tower, he mouths, because now he can't even manage a husk.
"You and your fucking Tower," Eddie says, starts to turn away, and then turns back, surprised, as Roland's hand clamps on his arm like a manacle.
They look into each others' eyes and Eddie says, "All right. All right!"
North, the gunslinger mouths. North, I told you. Has he told him that? He thinks so, but it's lost. Lost in the shuffle.
"How do you know?" Eddie screams at him in sudden frustration. He raises his fists as if to strike Roland, then lowers them.
I just know―so why do you waste my time and energy asking me foolish questions? he wants to reply, but before he can, the cards
shuffle
being dragged along, bounced and bumped, his head lolling helplessly from one side to the other, bound to some kind of a weird travois by his own gunbelts, and he can hear Eddie Dean singing a song which is so weirdly familiar he at first believes this must be a delirium dream:
"Heyy Jude …don't make it bad …take a saaad song …and make it better …"
Where did you hear that? he wants to ask. Did you hear mesinging it, Eddie? And where are we?
But before he can ask anything
shuffle
Cort would bash the kid's head in if he saw that contraption, Roland thinks, looking at the travois upon which he has spent the day, and laughs. It isn't much of a laugh. It sounds like one of those waves dropping its load of stones on the beach. He doesn't know how far they have come, but it's far enough for Eddie to be totally bushed. He's sitting on a rock in the lengthening light with one of the gunslinger's revolvers in his lap and a half-full water-skin to one side. There's a small bulge in his shirt pocket. These are the bullets from the back of the gunbelts―the diminishing supply of "good" bullets. Eddie has tied these up in a piece of his own shirt. The main reason the supply of "good" bullets is diminishing so fast is because one of every four or five has also turned out to be a dud.
Eddie, who has been nearly dozing, now looks up. "What are you laughing about?" he asks.
The gunslinger waves a dismissive hand and shakes his head. Because he's wrong, he realizes. Cort wouldn't bash Eddie for the travois, even though it was an odd, lame-looking thing. Roland thinks it might even be possible that Cort might grunt some word of compliment―such a rarity that the boy to whom it happened hardly ever knew how to respond; he was left gaping like a fish just pulled from a cook's barrel.