foul yourself. The men with the clubs and the dogs. The men who called you a nigger cunt.'
He pointed at them, moving his finger from left to right.
'There's the one who pinched your breast and laughed. There's the one who said he better check and see if you had something stuffed up your ass. There's the one who called you a chimpanzee in a five-hundred-dollar dress. That's the one that kept running his billyclub over the spokes of your wheelchair until you thought the sound would send you mad. There's the one who called your friend Leon pinko-fag. And the one on the end, Susannah, is Jack Mort.
'There. Those stones. Those men.'
She was breathing rapidly now, her bosom rising and falling in swift little jerks beneath the gunslinger's gunbelt with its heavy freight of bullets. Her eyes had left him; they were looking at the mica-flecked chips of stone. Behind them and at some distance, a tree splintered and fell over. More crows called in the sky. Deep in the game which was no longer a game, neither of them noticed.
'Oh yeah?' she breathed. 'That so?'
'It is. Now say your lesson, Susannah Dean, and be true.' — This time the words fell from her lips like small chunks of ice. Her right hand trembled lightly on the arm of her wheelchair like an idling engine.
' ‘I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
' 'I aim with my eye.' '
'Good.'
' ‘I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
' ‘I shoot with my mind.' '
'So it has ever been, Susannah Dean.'
' 'I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.
' 'I kill with my heart.' '
'Then KILL them, for your father's sake!' Roland shouted. 'KILL THEM ALL!'
Her right hand was a blur between the arm of the chair and the butt of Roland's sixgun. It was out in a second, her left hand descending, fanning at the hammer in flutters almost as swift and delicate as the wing of a hummingbird. Six flat cracks pealed off across the valley, and five of the six chips of stone set atop the boulder blinked out of existence.
For a moment neither of them spoke—did not even breathe, it seemed—as the echoes rolled back and forth, dimming. Even the crows were silent, at least for the time being.
The gunslinger broke the silence with four toneless yet oddly emphatic words: 'It is very well.'
Susannah looked at the gun in her hand as if she had never seen it before. A tendril of smoke rose from the barrel, perfectly straight in the windless silence. Then, slowly, she returned it to the holster below her bosom.
'Good, but not perfect,' she said at last. 'I missed one.'
'Did you?' He walked over to the boulder and picked up the remaining chip of stone. He glanced at it, then tossed it to her.
She caught it with her left; her right stayed near the bolstered gun, he saw with approval. She shot better and more naturally than Eddie, but had not learned this particular lesson as swiftly as Eddie had done.
If she had been with them during the shootout at Balazar's nightclub, she might have. Now, Roland saw, she was at last learning that, too. She looked at the stone and saw the notch, barely a sixteenth of an inch deep, in its upper corner.
'You only clipped it,' Roland said, returning to her, 'but in a shooting scrape, sometimes that's all you wed. If you clip a fellow, throw his aim off …' He paused. 'Why an— you looking at me that way?'
'You don't know, do you? You really don't?'
'No. Your mind is often closed to me, Susannah.'
There was no defensiveness in his voice, and Susannah shook her head in exasperation. The rapid turn-and-turn-about dance of her personality sometimes unnerved him; his seeming inability to say anything other than exactly what was on his mind never failed to do the same to her. He was the most literal man she had ever met.
'All right,' she said, 'I'll tell you why I'm looking at you that way, Roland. Because what you did was a mean trick. You said you wouldn't slap me, couldn't slap me, even if I cut up rough . . . but either you lied or you're very stupid, and I know you ain't stupid. People don't always slap with their hands, as every man and woman of my race could testify. We have a little rhyme where I come from: 'Sticks and stones will break my bones—' '
' '—yet taunts shall never wound me,' ' Roland finished.
'Well, that's not exactly the way we say it, but I guess it's close enough. It's bullshit no matter how you say it. They don't call what you did a tongue-lashing for nothing. Your words hurt me, Roland—are you gonna stand there and say you didn't know they would?'
She sat in her chair, looking up at him with bright, stern curiosity, and Roland thought—not for the first time—that the honk mahfahs of Susannah's land must have been either very brave or very stupid to cross her, wheelchair or no wheelchair. And, having walked among them, he didn't think bravery was the answer.
'I did not think or care about your hurt,' he said patiently. 'I saw you show your teeth and knew you meant to bite, so I put a stick in your jaws. And it worked . . . didn't it?'
Her expression was now one of hurt astonishment. 'You bastardl'
Instead of replying, he took the gun from her holster, fumbled the cylinder open with the remaining two fingers on his right hand, and began to reload the chambers with his left hand.
'Of all the high-handed, arrogant—'
'You needed to bite,' he said in that same patient tone. 'Had you not, you would have shot all wrong—with your hand and your gun instead of your eye and mind and heart. Was that a trick? Was it arrogant? I think not. I think. Susannah, that you were the one with arrogance in her heart. I think you were the one with a mind to get up to tricks. That doesn't distress me. Quite the opposite. A gunslinger without teeth is no gunslinger.'
'Damn it, I'm not a gunslinger!'
He ignored that; he could afford to. If she was no gunslinger, then he was a billy-bumbler. 'If we were playing a game, I might have behaved differently. But this is no game. It …'
His good hand went to his forehead for a moment and paused there, fingers tented just above the left temple. The tips of the fingers, she saw, were trembling minutely.
'Roland, what's ailing you?' she asked quietly.
The hand lowered slowly. He rolled the cylinder back into place and replaced die revolver in the holster she wore. 'Nothing.'
'Yes there is. I've seen it. Eddie has, too. It started almost as soon as we left the beach. It's something wrong, and it's getting worse.'
'There is nothing wrong,' he repeated.
She put her hands out and took his. Her anger was gone, at least for the time being. She looked earnestly up into his eyes. 'Eddie and I . . . this isn't our world, Roland. Without you, we'd die here. We'd have your guns, and we can shoot them, you've taught us to do that well enough, but we'd die just the same. We … we depend on you. So tell me what's wrong. Let me try to help. Let us try to help.'
He had never been a man who understood himself deeply or cared to; the concept of self- consciousness (let alone self-analysis) was alien to him. His way was to act—to quickly consult his own interior, utterly mysterious workings, and then act. Of them all, he had been the most perfectly made, a man whose deeply romantic core was encased in a brutally simple box which consisted of instinct and pragmatism. He took one of those quick looks inside now and decided to tell her everything. There was something wrong with him, oh yes. Yes indeed. Something wrong with his mind, something as simple as his nature and as strange as the weird, wandering life into which that nature had impelled him.
He opened his mouth to say I'll tell you what's wrong, Susannah, and I'll do it in just three words. I'm going insane. But before he could begin, another tree fell in the forest—it went with a huge, grinding crash. This treefall was closer, and this time they were not deeply engaged in a test of wills masquerading as a lesson. Both
