“Stop, Joe,” Roland said. He sounded out of breath. Weak.
With laughter, Susannah supposed. Oh, but the side of her face hurt, and-
Joe opened his eyes, looking annoyed. “What? Jesus Christ, you wanted it and I was givingit to ya!”
“Susannah’s hurt herself.” The gunslinger was up and looking at her, laughter lost in concern.
“I’m not hurt, Roland, I just slapped myself upside the head a litde harder than I m-” Then she looked at her hand and was dismayed to see it was wearing a red glove.
NINE
Oy barked again. Roland snatched the napkin from beside his overturned cup. One end was brown and soaking with coffee, but the other was dry. He pressed it against the gushing sore and Susannah winced away from his touch at first, her eyes filling with tears.
“Nay, let me stop the bleeding at least,” Roland murmured, and grasped her head, working his fingers gently into the tight cap of her curls. “Hold steady.” And for him she managed to do it.
Through her watering eyes Susannah thought Joe still looked pissed that she had interrupted his comedy routine in such drastic (not to mention messy) fashion, and in a way she didn’t blame him. He’d been doing a really good job; she’d gone and spoiled it. Aside from the pain, which was abating a little now, she was horribly embarrassed, remembering the time she had started her period in gym class and a little trickle of blood had run down her thigh for the whole world to see-that part of it with whom she had third-period PE, at any rate. Some of the girls had begun chanting Plug it UP!, as if it were the funniest thing in the world.
Mixed with this memory was fear concerning the sore itself.
What if it was cancer? Before, she’d always been able to thrust this idea away before it was fully articulated in her mind. This time she couldn’t. What if she’d caught her stupid self a cancer on her trek through the Badlands?
Her stomach knotted, then heaved. She kept her fine dinner in its place, but perhaps only for the time being.
Suddenly she wanted to be alone, needed to be alone. If she was going to vomit, she didn’t want to do it in front of Roland and this stranger. Even if she wasn’t, she wanted some time to get herself back under control. A gust of wind strong enough to shake the entire cottage roared past like a hot-enj in full flight; the lights flickered and her stomach knotted again at the seasick motion of the shadows on the wall.
“I’ve got to go… the bathroom…” she managed to say.
For a moment the world wavered, but then it steadied down again. In the fireplace a knot of wood exploded, shooting a flurry of crimson sparks up the chimney.
“You sure?” Joe asked. He was no longer angry (if he had been), but he was looking at her doubtfully.
“Let her go,” Roland said. “She needs to settle herself down,
I think.”
Susannah began to give him a grateful smile, but it hurt the sore place and started it bleeding again, too. She didn’t know what else might change in the immediate future thanks to the dumb, unhealing sore, but she did know she was done listening to jokes for awhile. She’d need a transfusion if she did much more laughing.
“I’ll be back,” she said. “Don’t you boys go and eat all the rest of that pudding on me.” The very thought of food made her feel ill, but it was something to say.
“On the subject of pudding, I make no promise,” Roland said. Then, as she began to turn away: “If thee feels lightheaded in there, call me.”
“I will,” she said. “Thank you, Roland.”
TEN
Although Joe Collins lived alone, his bathroom had a pleasantly feminine feel to it. Susannah had noticed that the first time she’d used it. The wallpaper was pink, with green leaves and-what else?-wild roses. The John looked perfectly modern except for the ring, which was wood instead of plastic. Had he carved it himself? She didn’t think it was out of the question, although probably the robot had brought it from some forgotten store of stuff. Stuttering Carl? Was that what Joe called the robot? No, Bill. Stuttering Bill.
On one side of the John there was a stool, on the other a claw-foot tub with a shower attachment that made her think of Hitchcock’s Psycho (but every shower made her think of that damned movie since she’d seen it in Times Square). There was also a porcelain washstand set in a waist-high wooden cabinet-good old plainoak rather than ironwood, she judged.
There was a mirror above it. She presumed you swung it out and there were your pills and potions. All the comforts of home.
She removed the napkin with a wince and a litde hissing cry.
It had stuck in the drying blood, and pulling it away hurt. She was dismayed by the amount of blood on her cheeks, lips, and chin-not to mention her neck and the shoulder of her shirt.
She told herself not to let it make her crazy; you ripped the top off something and it was going to bleed, that was all. Especially if it was on your stupid face.
In the other room she heard Joe say something, she couldn’t tell what, and Roland’s response: a few words with a chuckle tacked on at the end. So weird to hear him do that, she thought. Almost like he’s drunk. Had she ever seen Roland drunk? She realized she had not. Never falling-down drunk, never mother-naked, never fully caught by laughter… until now.
Ten’yo business, woman, Detta told her.
“All right,” she muttered. “All right, all right.”
Thinking drunk. Thinking naked. Thinking lost in laughter.
Thinking they were all so close to being the same thing.
Maybe they were the same thing.
Then she got up on the stool and turned on the water. It came in a gush, blotting out the sounds from the other room.
She setded for cold, splashing it gendy on her face, then using a facecloth-even more gendy-to clean die skin around the sore. When that was done, she patted the sore itself. Doing it didn’t hurt as much as she’d been afraid it might. Susannah was a litde encouraged. When she was done, she rinsed out Joe’s facecloth before the bloodstains could set and leaned close to the mirror. What she saw made her breathe a sigh of relief. Slapping her hand incautiously to her face like that had torn the entire top off the sore, but maybe in the end that would turn out to be for the best. One thing was for sure: if Joe had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or some kind of antibiotic cream in his medicine cabinet, she intended to give the damned mess a good cleaning-out while it was open. And ne’mine how much it might sting. Such a cleansing was due and overdue. Once it was finished, she’d bandage it over and then just hope for the best.
She spread the facecloth on the side of the basin to dry, then plucked a towel (it was the same shade of pink as the wallpaper) from a fluffy stack on a nearby shelf. She got it halfway to her face, then froze. There was a piece of notepaper lying on the next towel in the stack. It was headed with a flower-decked bench being lowered by a pair of happy cartoon angels. Beneath was this printed, bold-face line:
RELAX! /te«e OOM amp;S, rue-
And, in faded fountain pen ink Odd’s Odd O amp;»
Frowning, Susannah plucked the sheet of notepaper from the stack of towels. Who had left it here? Joe? She doubted it like hell. She turned the paper over. Here the same hand had written: s T’vc left fo* Sonc/liig 1*1 ife JnediciJte but- -fit’/
In the other room, Joe continued to speak and this time Roland burst out laughing instead of just chuckling. It sounded to Susannah as if Joe had resumed his monologue. In a way she could understand that-he’d been doing something he loved, something he hadn’t had a chance to do in a good long stretch of years-but part of her didn’t like the idea at all. That Joe would resume while she was in the bathroom tending to herself, that Roland would let him resume. Would listen and laugh while she was shedding blood. It seemed like a rotten, boysclubby kind of thing to do. She supposed she had gotten used to better from Eddie.
Why don’t you forget the boys for the time being and concentrate on what’s right in front of you? What does it mean?
One thing seemed obvious: someone had expected her to come in here and find that note. Not Roland, not Joe. Her.
What a bad girl, it said. Girl.
But who could have known? Who could have been sure? It wasn’t as if she made a habit of slapping her face (or her chest, or her knee) when she laughed; she couldn’t remember a single other instance when-
But she could. Once. At a Dean Martin^Jerry Lewis movie.
Dopes at Sea, or something like that. She’d been caught up in the same fashion then, laughing simply because the laughter had reached some point of critical mass and become selffeeding.
The whole audience-at the Clark in Times Square, for all she knew-doing the same, rocking and rolling, swinging and swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their own. Mouths that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at sea. But it had only happened that once.
Comedy plus tragedy equals make-believe. But there’s no tragedy here, is there?
She didn’t expect an answer to this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition.
Not yet, there isn’t.
For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning, gruesome Lippy. Did the folken laugh in hell?
Susannah was somehow sure they did. They grinned like Lippy the Wonder-Nag when Satan began his
(take my horse… please)
routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly. For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all.
