The Drawing of the Three

think?'

'I think you did,' Roland said. He remembered the way Eddie had risen up from behind the desk, regardless of the risk, and felt an instant of doubt.

But only an instant.

'So? Peter pays Paul. One hand washes the other. All I want to do is go back for a few hours. Grab some take-out chicken, maybe a box of Dunkin Donuts.' Eddie nodded toward the doorway, where things had begun to move again. 'So what do you say?'

'No,' the gunslinger said, but for a moment he was hardly thinking about Eddie. That movement up the aisle?the Lady, whoever she was, wasn't moving the way an ordinary person moved?wasn't moving, for instance, the way Eddie had moved when Roland looked through his eyes, or (now that he stopped to think of it, which he never had before, any more than he had ever stopped and really noticed the constant presence of his own nose in the lower range of his peripheral vision) the way he moved himself. When one walked, vision became a mild pendulum: left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, the world rocking back and forth so mildly and gently that after awhile?shortly after you began to walk, he supposed?you simply ignored it. There was none of that pendulum movement in the Lady's walk?she simply moved smoothly up the aisle, as if riding along tracks. Ironically, Eddie had had this same perception … only to Eddie it had looked like a SteadiCam shot. He had found this perception comforting because it was familiar.

To Roland it was alien … but then Eddie was breaking in, his voice shrill.

'Well why not? Just why the fuck not?'

'Because you don't want chicken,' the gunslinger said. 'I know what you call the things you want, Eddie. You want to 'fix.' You want to 'score.' '

'So what?' Eddie cried?almost shrieked. 'So what if I do? I said I'd come back with you! You got my promise! I mean, you got my fuckin PROMISE! What else do you want? You want me to swear on my mother's name? Okay, I swear on my mother's name! You want me to swear on my brother Henry's name? All right, I swear! I swear! I SWEAR!'

Enrico Balazar would have told him, but the gunslinger didn't need the likes of Balazar to tell him this one fact of life: Never trust a junkie.

Roland nodded toward the door. 'Until after the Tower, at least, that part of your life is done. After that I don't care. After that you're free to go to hell in your own way. Until then I need you.'

''Oh you fuckin shitass liar,'' Eddie said softly. There was no audible emotion in his voice, but the gunslinger saw the glisten of tears in his eyes. Roland said nothing. 'You know there ain't gonna be no after, not for me, not for her, or whoever the Christ this third guy is. Probably not for you, either?you look as fuckin wasted as Henry did at his worst. If we don't die on the way to your Tower we'll sure as shit die when we get there so why are you lying to me?'

The gunslinger felt a dull species of shame but only repeated: 'At least for now, that part of your life is done.'

'Yeah?' Eddie said. 'Well, I got some news for you, Roland. I know what's gonna happen to your real body when you go through there and inside of her. I know because I saw it before. I don't need your guns. I got you by that fabled place where the short hairs grow, my friend. You can even turn her head the way you turned mine and watch what I do to the rest of you while you're nothing but your goddam ka. I'd like to wait until nightfall, and drag you down by the water. Then you could watch the lobsters chow up on the rest of you. But you might be in too much of a hurry for that.'

Eddie paused. The graty breaking of the waves and the steady hollow conch of the wind both seemed very loud.

'So I think I'll just use your knife to cut your throat.'

'And close that door forever?'

'You say that part of my life is done. You don't just mean smack, either. You mean New York , America , my time, everything. If that's how it is, I want this part done, too. The scenery sucks and the company stinks. There are times, Roland, when you make Jimmy Swaggart look almost sane.'

'There are great wonders ahead,' Roland said. 'Great adventures. More than that, there is a quest to course upon, and a chance to redeem your honor. There's something else, too. You could be a gunslinger. I needn't be the last after all. It's in you, Eddie. I see it. I feel it.'

Eddie laughed, although now the tears were coursing down his cheeks. 'Oh, wonderful. Wonderful! Just what I need! My brother Henry. He was a gunslinger. In a place called Viet Nam , that was. It was great for him. You should have seen him when he was on a serious nod, Roland. He couldn't find his way to the fuckin bathroom without help. If there wasn't any help handy, he just sat there and watched Big Time Wrestling and did it in his fuckin pants. It's great to be a gunslinger. I can see that. My brother was a doper and you're out of your fucking gourd.'

'Perhaps your brother was a man with no clear idea of honor.'

'Maybe not. We didn't always get a real clear picture of what that was in the Projects. It was just a word you used after Your if you happened to get caught smoking reefer or lifting the spinners off some guy's T-Bird and got ho'ed up in court for it.'

Eddie was crying harder now, but he was laughing, too.

'Your friends, now. This guy you talk about in your sleep, for instance, this dude Cuthbert?'

The gunslinger started in spite of himself. Not all his long years of training could stay that start.

'Did they get this stuff you're talking about like a goddam Marine recruiting sergeant? Adventure, quests, honor?'

'They understood honor, yes,' Roland said slowly, thinking of all the vanished others.

'Did it get them any further than gunslinging got my brother?'

The gunslinger said nothing.

'I know you,' Eddie said. 'I seen lots of guys like you. 'You're just another kook singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers' with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other. I don't want no honor. I just want a chicken dinner and fix. In that order. So I'm telling you: go on through. You can. But the minute you're gone, I'm gonna kill the rest of you.'

The gunslinger said nothing.

Eddie smiled crookedly and brushed the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands. 'You want to know what we call this back home?'

'What?'

'A Mexican stand-off.'

For a moment they only looked at each other, and then Roland looked sharply into the doorway. They had both been partially aware?Roland rather more than Eddie?that there had been another of those swerves, this time to the left. Here was an array of sparkling jewelry. Some was under protective glass but because most wasn't, the gunslinger supposed it was trumpery stuff … what Eddie would have called costume jewelry. The dark brown hands examined a few things in what seemed an only cursory manner, and then another salesgirl appeared. There had been some conversation which neither of them really noticed, and the Lady (some Lady, Eddie thought) asked to see something else. The salesgirl went away, and that was when Roland's eyes swung sharply back.

The brown hands reappeared, only now they held a purse. It opened. And suddenly the hands were scooping things?seemingly, almost certainly, at random?into the purse.

'Well, you're collecting quite a crew, Roland,' Eddie said, bitterly amused. 'First you got your basic white junkie, and then you got your basic black shoplif?'

But Roland was already moving toward the doorway between the worlds, moving swiftly, not looking at Eddie at all.

'I mean it!' Eddie screamed. 'You go through and I'll cut your throat, I'll cut your fucking thr?'

Before he could finish, the gunslinger was gone. All that was left of him was his limp, breathing body lying upon the beach.

For a moment Eddie only stood there, unable to believe that Roland had done it, had really gone ahead and done this idiotic thing in spite of his promise?his sincere fucking guarantee, as far as that went?of what the consequences would be.

He stood for a moment, eyes rolling like the eyes of a frightened horse at the onset of a thunderstorm …