The Drawing of the Three

Really Bad Man there used to be full of piss an vinegar. Not no mo. He know I'm up here and doan want to do nothin but git away befo I come down an kill his ass. His little buddy, though—he still be pretty strong, and he ain't had his fill of hurting on me just yet. Want to come up here and hunt me down no matter how that Really Bad Man be. Sho. He be thinkin, One black bitch widdout laigs no match fo a big ole swingin dick like me. I doan wan t'run. I want to be huntin that black quiff down. I give her a poke or two, den we kin go like you want. That what he be thinkin, and that be all right. That be jes fine, graymeat. You think you can take DettaWalker, you jes come on up here in these Drawers and give her a try. You goan find out when you fuckin with me, you fuckin wit the best, honeybunch! You goan find out—

But she was jerked from the rat-run of her thoughts by a sound that came to her clearly in spite of the surf and wind: the heavy crack of a pistol-shot.

15

'I think you understand better than you let on,' Eddie said. 'A whole hell of a lot better. You'd like for me to get in grabbing distance, that's what I think.' He jerked his head toward the door without taking his eyes from Roland's face. Unaware that not far away someone was thinking exactly the same thing, he added: 'I know you're sick, all right, but it could be you're pretending to be a lot weaker than you really are. Could be you're laying back in the tall grass just a little bit.'

'Could be I am,' Roland said, unsmiling, and added: 'But I'm not.'

He was, though … a little.

'A few more steps wouldn't hurt, though, would it? I'm not going to be able to shout much longer.' The last syllable turned into a frog's croak as if to prove his point. 'And I need to make you think about what you're doing—planning to do. If I can't persuade you to come with me, maybe I can at least put you on your guard … again.'

'For your precious Tower,' Eddie sneered, but he did come skidding halfway down the slope of ground he had climbed, his tattered tennies kicking up listless clouds of maroon dust.

'For my precious Tower and your precious health,' the gunslinger said. 'Not to mention your precious life.'

He slipped the remaining revolver from the left holster and looked at it with an expression both sad and strange.

'If you think you can scare me with that—'

'I don't. You know I can't shoot you, Eddie. But I think you do need an object lesson in how things have changed. How much things have changed.'

Roland lifted the gun, its muzzle pointing not toward Eddie but toward the empty surging ocean, and thumbed the hammer. Eddie steeled himself against the gun's heavy crack.

No such thing. Only a dull click.

Roland thumbed the hammer back again. The cylinder rotated. He squeezed the trigger, and again there was nothing but a dull click.

'Never mind,' Eddie said. 'Where I come from, the Defense Department would have hired you after the first misfire. You might as well qui—'

But the heavy KA-BLAM of the revolver cut off the word's end as neatly as Roland had cut small branches from trees as a target-shooting exercise when he had been a student. Eddie jumped. The gunshot momentarily silenced the constant riiiiii of the insects in the hills. They only began to tune up again slowly, cautiously, after Roland had put the gun in his lap.

'What in hell does that prove?'

'I suppose that all depends on what you'll listen to and what you refuse to hear,' Roland said a trifle sharply. 'It's supposed to prove that not all the shells are duds. Furthermore, it suggests—strongly suggests—that some, maybe even all, of the shells in the gun you gave Odetta may be live.'

'Bullshit!' Eddie paused. 'Why?'

'Because I loaded the gun I just fired with shells from the backs of my gunbelts—with shells that took the worst wetting, in other words. I did it just to pass the time while you were gone. Not that it takes much time to load a gun, even shy a pair of fingers, you understand!' Roland laughed a little, and the laugh turned into a cough he muzzled with an abridged fist. When the cough had subsided he went on: 'But after you've tried to fire wets, you have to break the machine and clean the machine. Break the machine, clean the machine, you maggots— it was the first thing Cort, our teacher, drummed into us. I didn't know how long it would take me to break down my gun, clean it, and put it back together with only a hand and a half, but I thought that if I intended to go on living—and I do, Eddie, I do—I'd better find out. Find out and then learn to do it faster, don't you think so? Come a little closer, Eddie! Come a little closer for your father's sake!'

'All the better to see you with, my child,' Eddie said, but did take a couple of steps closer to Roland. Only a couple.

'When the first slug I pulled the trigger on fired, I almost filled my pants,' the gunslinger said. He laughed again. Shocked, Eddie realized the gunslinger had reached the edge of delirium. 'The first slug, but believe me when I say it was the last thing I had expected.'

Eddie tried to decide if the gunslinger was lying, lying about the gun, and lying about his condition as well. Cat was sick, yeah. But was he really this sick? Eddie didn't know. If Roland was acting, he was doing a great job; as for guns, Eddie had no way of telling because he had no experience with them. He had shot a pistol maybe three times in his life before suddenly finding himself in a firefight at Balazar's place. Henry might have known, but Henry was dead—a thought which had a way of constantly surprising Eddie into grief.

'None of the others fired,' the gunslinger said, 'so I cleaned the machine, re-loaded, and fired around the chamber again. This time I used shells a little further toward the belt buckles. Ones which would have taken even less of a wetting. The loads we used to kill our food, the dry loads, were the ones closest to the buckles.'

He paused to cough dryly into his hand, then went on.

'Second time around I hit two live rounds. I broke my gun down again, cleaned it again, then loaded a third time. You just watched me drop the trigger on the first three chambers of that third loading.' He smiled faintly. 'You know, after the first two clicks I thought it would be my damned luck to have filled the cylinder with nothing but wets. That wouldn't have been very convincing, would it? Can you come a little closer, Eddie?'

'Not very convincing at all,' Eddie said, 'and I think I'm just as close to you as I'm going to come, thanks. What lesson am I supposed to take from all this, Roland?'

Roland looked at him as one might look at an imbecile. 'I didn't send you out here to die, you know. I didn't send either of you out here to die. Great gods, Eddie, where are your brains? She's packing live iron!' His eyes regarded Eddie closely. 'She's someplace up in those hills. Maybe you think you can track her, but you're not going to have any luck if the ground is as stony as it looks from here. She's lying up there, Eddie, not Odetta but Detta, lying up there with live iron in her hand. If I leave you and you go after her, she'll blow your guts out of your asshole.'

Another spasm of coughing set in.

Eddie stared at the coughing man in the wheelchair and the waves pounded and the wind blew its steady idiot's note.

At last he heard his voice say, 'You could have held back one shell you knew was live. I wouldn't put it past you.' And with that said he knew it to be true: he wouldn't put that or anything else past Roland.

His Tower.

His goddamned Tower.

And the slyness of putting the saved shell in the third cylinder! It provided just the right touch of reality, didn't it? Made it hard not to believe.