The Drawing of the Three

Eddie brings his kill back. It is still twitching, raising and lowering its claws, but soon enough it stops moving. The tail arches one final time, then simply drops instead of flexing downward. The boxers' claws hang limp.

'Dinnah will soon be served, mawster,' Eddie says. 'You have your choice: filet of creepy-crawler or filet of creepy-crawler. Which strikes your fancy, mawster?'

'I don't understand you,' the gunslinger said.

'Sure you do,' Eddie said. 'You just don't have any sense of humor. What happened to it?'

'Shot off in one war or another, I guess.'

Eddie smiles at that. 'You look and sound a little more alive tonight, Roland.'

'I am, I think.'

'Well, maybe you could even walk for awhile tomorrow. I'll tell you very frankly, my friend, dragging you is the pits and the shits.'

'I'll try.'

'You do that.'

'You look a little better, too,' Roland ventures. His voice cracks on the last two words like the voice of a young boy. IfIdon't stop talking soon, he thought, I won't be able to talk atall again.

'I guess I'll live.' He looks at Roland expressionlessly. 'You'll never know how close it was a couple of times, though. Once I took one of your guns and put it against my head. Cocked it, held it there for awhile, and then took it away. Eased the hammer down and shoved it back in your holster. Another night I had a convulsion. I think that was the second night, but I'm not sure.' He shakes his head and says something the gunslinger both does and doesn't understand. ' Michigan seems like a dream to me now.'

Although his voice is down to that husky murmur again and he knows he shouldn't be talking at all, the gunslinger has to know one thing. 'What stopped you from pulling the trigger?'

'Well, this is the only pair of pants I've got,' Eddie says. 'At the last second I thought that if I pulled the trigger and it was one of those dud shells, I'd never get up the guts to do it again … and once you shit your pants, you gotta wash 'em right away or live with the stink forever. Henry told me that. He said he learned it in Nam . And since it was nighttime and Lester the Lobster was out, not to mention all his friends?'

But the gunslinger is laughing, laughing hard, although only an occasional cracked sound actually escapes his lips. Smiling a little himself, Eddie says: 'I think maybe you only got your sense of humor shot off up to the elbow in that war.'' He gets up, meaning to go up the slope to where there will be fuel for a fire, Roland supposes.

'Wait,' he whispers, and Eddie looks at him. 'Why, really?'

'I guess because you needed me. If I'd killed myself, you would have died. Later on, after you're really on your feet again, I may, like, re-examine my options.' He looks around and sighs deeply.

'There may be a Disney land or Cony Island somewhere in your world, Roland, but what I've seen of it so far really doesn't interest me much.'

He starts away, pauses, and looks back again at Roland. His face is somber, although some of the sickly pallor has left it. The shakes have become no more than occasional tremors.

'Sometimes you really don't understand me, do you?'

'No,' the gunslinger whispers. 'Sometimes I don't.'

'Then I'll elucidate. There are people who need people to need them. The reason you don't understand is because you're not one of those people. You'd use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that's what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You're just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you'd go ahead and do it anyway. You wouldn't be able to help yourself. If I was lying on the beach there and screaming for help, you'd walk over me if I was between you and your goddam Tower. Isn't that pretty close to the truth?'

Roland says nothing, only watches Eddie.

'But not everyone is like that. There are people who need people to need them. Like the Barbara Streisand song. Corny, but true. It's just another way of being hooked through the bag.'

Eddie gazes at him.

'But when it comes to that, you're clean, aren't you?'

Roland watches him.

'Except for your Tower.' Eddie utters a short laugh. 'You're a Tower junkie, Roland.'

'Which war was it?' Roland whispers.

'What?'

'The one where you got your sense of nobility and purpose shot off?'

Eddie recoils as if Roland has reached out and slapped him.

'I'm gonna go get some water,' he says shortly. 'Keep an eye on the creepy crawlers. We came a long way today, but I still don't know if they talk to each other or not.'

He turns away then, but not before Roland has seen the last red rays of sunset reflected on his wet cheeks.

Roland turns back to the beach and watches. The lobstrosities crawl and question, question and crawl, but both activities seem aimless; they have some intelligence, but not enough to pass on information to others of their kind.

God doesn't always dish it in your face, Roland thinks. Most times, but not always.

Eddie returns with wood.

'Well?' he asks. 'What do you think?'

'We're all right,' the gunslinger croaks, and Eddie starts to say something but the gunslinger is tired now and lies back and looks at the first stars peeking through the canopy of violet sky and

shuffle

in the three days that followed, the gunslinger progressed steadily back to health. The red lines creeping up his arms first reversed their direction, then faded, then disappeared. On the next day he sometimes walked and sometimes let Eddie drag him. On the day following he didn't need to be dragged at all; every hour or two they simply sat for a period of time until the watery feeling went out of his legs. It was during these rests and in those times after dinner had been eaten but before the fire had burned all the way down and they went to sleep that the gunslinger heard about Henry and Eddie. He remembered wondering what had happened to make their brothering so difficult, but after Eddie had begun, haltingly and with that sort of resentful anger that proceeds from deep pain, the gunslinger could have stopped him, could have told him: Don'tbother, Eddie. I understand everything.

Except that wouldn't have helped Eddie. Eddie wasn't talking to help Henry because Henry was dead. He was talking to bury Henry for good. And to remind himself that although Henry was dead, he, Eddie, wasn't.

So the gunslinger listened and said nothing.

The gist was simple: Eddie believed he had stolen his brother's life. Henry also believed this. Henry might have believed it on his own or he might have believed it because he so frequently heard their mother lecturing Eddie on how much both she and Henry had sacrificed for him, so Eddie could be as safe as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so he could be happy, as happy as anyone could be in this jungle of a city, so he wouldn't end up like his poor sister that he didn't even hardly remember but she had been so beautiful, God love her. She was with the angels, and that was undoubtedly a wonderful place to be, but she didn't want Eddie to be with the angels just yet, run over in the road by some crazy drunken driver like his sister or cut up by some crazy junkie kid for the twenty-five cents in his pocket and left with his guts running out all over the sidewalk, and because she didn't think Eddie wanted to be with the angels yet, he just better listen to what his big brother said and do what his big brother said to do and always remember that Henry was making a love-sacrifice.

Eddie told the gunslinger he doubted if his mother knew some of the things they had done?filching comic books from the candy store on Rincon Avenue or smoking cigarettes behind the Bonded Electroplate Factory on Cohoes Street .

Once they saw a Chevrolet with the keys in it and although Henry barely knew how to drive?he was sixteen