The Dark Tower (7 page)

Roland smiled bleakly. “I don’t think his belief would be an issue, Eddie. Because, think thee a moment, how much of our crazy story has Aaron Deepneau actually
heard
?”

“Not enough,” Eddie agreed. He closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his hands against them. Hard. “I can only think of one person who could actually convince Moses Carver to do the things we’d have to ask, and she’s otherwise occupied. In the year of ’99. And by then, Carver’s gonna be as dead as Deepneau and maybe Tower himself.”

“Well, what can we do without her? What will satisfy you?”

Eddie was thinking that perhaps Susannah could come back to 1977 without them, since
she,
at least, hadn’t visited it yet. Well . . . she’d come here todash, but he didn’t think that exactly counted. He supposed she might be barred from 1977 solely on the grounds that she was ka-tet with him and Roland. Or some other grounds. Eddie didn’t know. Reading the fine print had never been his strong point. He turned to ask Roland what he thought, but Roland spoke before he got a chance.

“What about our dan-tete?” he asked.

Although Eddie understood the term—it meant baby god or little savior—he did not at first understand what Roland meant by it. Then he did.
Had not their Waterford dan-tete loaned them the very car they were sitting in, say thankya?
“Cullum?
Is that who you’re talking about, Roland? The guy with the case of autographed baseballs?”

“You say true,” Roland replied. He spoke in that dry tone which indicated not amusement but mild exasperation. “Don’t overwhelm me with your enthusiasm for the idea.”

“But . . . you told him to go away! And he agreed to go!”

“And how enthusiastic would you say he was about visiting his friend in Vermong?”

“Mont,
” Eddie said, unable to suppress a smile. Yet, smiling or not, what he felt most strongly was dismay. He thought that ugly scraping sound he heard in his imagination was Roland’s two-fingered right hand, prospecting around at the very bottom of the barrel.

Roland shrugged as if to say he didn’t care if Cullum had spoken of going to Vermont or Barony o’ Garlan. “Answer my question.”

“Well . . .”

Cullum actually hadn’t expressed much enthusiasm for the idea at all. He had from the very first reacted more like one of
them
than one of the grass-eaters among whom he lived (Eddie recognized grass-eaters very easily, having been one himself until Roland first kidnapped him and then began his homicidal lessons). Cullum had been clearly intrigued by the gunslingers, and curious about their business in his little town. But Roland had been very emphatic about what he wanted, and folks had a way of following his orders.

Now he made a twirling motion with his right
hand, his old impatient gesture.
Hurry, for your father’s sake. Shit or get off the commode.

“I guess he really didn’t
want
to go,” Eddie said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s still at his house in East Stoneham.”

“He is, though. He
didn’t
go.”

Eddie managed to keep his mouth from dropping open only with some effort. “How can you know that? Can you touch him, is that it?”

Roland shook his head.

“Then how—”

“Ka.”

“Ka?
Ka?
Just what the fuck does
that
mean?”

Roland’s face was haggard and tired, the skin pale beneath his tan. “Who else do we know in this part of the world?”

“No one, but—”

“Then it’s him.” Roland spoke flatly, as if stating some obvious fact of life for a child: up is over your head, down is where your feet stick to the earth.

Eddie got ready to tell him that was stupid, nothing more than rank superstition, then didn’t. Putting aside Deepneau, Tower, Stephen King, and the hideous Jack Andolini, John Cullum
was
the only person they knew in this part of the world (or on this level of the Tower, if you preferred to think of it that way). And, after the things Eddie had seen in the last few months—hell, in the last
week
—who was he to sneer at superstition?

“All right,” Eddie said. “I guess we better try it.”

“How do we get in touch?”

“We can phone him from Bridgton. But in a story, Roland, a minor character like John Cullum would
never
come in off the bench to save the day. It wouldn’t be considered realistic.”

“In life,” Roland said, “I’m sure it happens all the time.”

And Eddie laughed. What the hell else could you do? It was just so perfectly
Roland
.

BRIDGTON HIGH STREET 1
HIGHLAND LAKE 2
HARRISON 3
WATERFORD 6
SWEDEN 9
LOVELL 18
FRYEBURG 24

They had just passed this sign when Eddie said, “Root around in the glove-compartment a little, Roland. See if ka or the Beam or whatever left us a little spare change for the pay phone.”

“Glove—? Do you mean this panel here?”

“Yeah.”

Roland first tried to turn the chrome button on the front, then got with the program and pushed it. The inside was a mare’s nest that hadn’t been improved by the Galaxie’s brief period of weightlessness. There were credit card receipts, a very old tube of what Eddie identified as “tooth-paste” (Roland could make out the words
HOLMES DENTAL
on it quite clearly), a fottergraff showing a smiling little girl—Cullum’s niece, mayhap—on a pony, a stick of what he first took for explosive (Eddie said it was a road flare, for emergencies), a magazine that appeared to be called
YANKME
. . . and a cigar-box. Roland couldn’t quite make out the word on this, although he thought it
might be
trolls
. He showed the box to Eddie, whose eyes lit up.

“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.”

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.

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—”

There was a loud click in Eddie’s ear, and then Cullum’s voice—his
live
voice—said, “Hello there, son, you takin good care of my car?”

For a moment Eddie was too bemused to reply, for Cullum’s Downeast accent had turned the question into something quite different:
You takin good care of my ka?

“Boy?” Cullum asked, suddenly concerned. “You still on the wire?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, “and so are you. I thought you were going to Vermont, John.”

“Well, I tell you what. This place ain’t seen a day this excitin prob’ly since South Stoneham Shoe burnt down in 1923. The cops’ve gut all the ruds out of town blocked off.”

Eddie was sure they were letting folks through the roadblocks if they could show proper identification, but he ignored that issue in favor of something else. “Want to tell me you couldn’t find your way out of that town without seeing a single cop, if it suited your fancy?”