Wizard and Glass

Roland supposed was a species of laughter. 'May look a little like it, but Kansas was never . . . you know, this thin:'

'I don't understand you,' Roland said. But he felt cold, and his heart was beating too fast. There were thinnies everywhere now, hadn't he told them that? Worlds melting into one another as the forces of the Tower weakened? As the day when the rose would be plowed under drew nearer?

'You saw things as you flew,' Eddie said. 'Before you got to the dark land, the one you called Thunderclap, you saw things. The piano-player, Sheb. Who turned up again later in your life, didn't he?'

'Yes, in Tull.'

'And the dweller with the red hair?'

'Him, too. He had a bird named Zoltan. But when we met, he and I, we said the normal. 'Life for you, life for your crop,' that sort of thing. I thought I heard the same when he flew by me in the pink storm, but he really said something else.' He glanced at Susannah. 'I saw your wheel-chair, too. The old one.'

'And you saw the witch.'

'Yes. I—'

In a creaky chortle that reminded Roland unnervingly of Rhea, Jake Chambers cried: 'I'll get you, my pretty! And your little dog, too!'

Roland stared at him, trying not to gape.

'Only in the movie, the witch wasn't riding a broom,' Jake said. 'She was on her bike, the one with the basket on the back.'

'Yeah, no reap-charms, either,' Eddie said. 'Would have been a nice touch, though. I tell you, Jake, when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about the way she laughed.'

'It was the monkeys that gave me the creeps,' Susannah said. 'The flying monkeys. I'd get thinkin about em, and then have to crawl into bed with my mom and dad. They'd still be arguin 'bout whose bright idea it was to take me to that show in the foist place when I fell asleep between em.'

'I wasn't worried about clapping the heels together,' Jake said. 'Not a bit.' It was Susannah and Eddie he was speaking to; for the time being, it was as if Roland wasn't even there. 'I wasn't wearing them, after all.'

'True,' Susannah said, sounding severe, 'but you know what my daddy always used to say?'

'No, but I have a feeling we're going to find out,' Eddie said.

She gave Eddie a brief, severe look, then turned her attention back to Jake. ' 'Never whistle for the wind unless you want it to blow,' ' she said. 'And it's good advice, no matter what Young Mister Foolish here may think.'

'Spanked again,' Eddie said, grinning.

'Tanked!' Oy said, eyeing Eddie severely.

'Explain this to me,' Roland said in his softest voice. 'I would hear. I would share your khef. And I would share it now.”

2

They told him a story almost every American child of the twentieth century knew, about a Kansas farmgirl named Dorothy Gale who had been carried away by a cyclone and deposited, along with her dog, in the Land of Oz. There was no 1-70 in Oz, but there was a yellow brick road which served much the same purpose, and there were witches, both good and bad. There was a ka-tet comprised of Dorothy, Toto, and three friends she met along the way: the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow. They each had

(bird and bear and hare and fish)

a fondest wish, and it was with Dorothy's that Roland's new friends (and Roland himself, for that matter) identified the most strongly: she wanted to find her way home again.

'The Munchkins told her that she had to follow the yellow brick road to Oz,' Jake said, 'and so she went. She met the others along the way, sort of like you met us, Roland—'

'Although you don't look much like Judy Garland,' Eddie put in.

'—and eventually they got there. To Oz, the Emerald Palace, and the guy who lived in the Emerald Palace.' He looked toward the glass palace ahead of them, greener and greener in the strengthening light, and then back to Roland.

'Yes, I understand. And was this fellow, Oz, a powerful dinh? A Baron? Perhaps a King?'

Again, the three of them exchanged a glance from which Roland was excluded. 'That's complicated,' Jake said. 'He was sort of a humbug—'

'A bumhug? What's that?'

'Humbug, ' Jake said, laughing. 'A faker. All talk, no action. But maybe the important thing is that the Wizard actually came from—'

'Wizard?' Roland asked sharply. He grasped Jake's shoulder with his diminished right hand. 'Why do you call him so?'

'Because that was his title, sug,' Susannah said. 'The Wizard of Oz.' She lifted Roland's hand gently but firmly from Jake's shoulder. 'Let him tell it, now. He don't need you to squeeze it out of him.'

'Did I hurt you? Jake, I cry your pardon.'

'Nah, I'm fine,' Jake said. 'Don't worry about it. Anyway, Dorothy and her friends had a lot of adventures before finding out the Wizard was a, you know, a bumhug.' Jake giggled at this with his hands clapped to his forehead and pushing back his hair, like a child of five. 'He couldn't give the Lion courage, the Scarecrow a brain, or the Tin Woodman a heart. Worst of all, he couldn't send Dorothy back to Kansas. The Wizard had a balloon, but he went without her. I don't think he meant to, but he did.'

'It seems to me, from your telling of the tale,' Roland said, speaking very slowly, 'that Dorothy's friends had the things they wanted all along.'

'That's the moral of the story,' Eddie said. 'Maybe what makes it a great story. But Dorothy was stuck in Oz, you see. Then Glinda showed up. Glinda the Good. And, as a present for smooshing one of the bad witches under her house and melting another one, Glinda told Dorothy how to use the ruby slippers. The ones Glinda gave her.'

Eddie raised the red Cuban-heeled street-boppers which had been left for him on the dotted white line of 1-70.

'Glinda told Dorothy to click the heels of the ruby slippers together three times. That would take her back to Kansas, she said. And it did.' 'And that's the end of the tale?'

'Well,' Jake said, 'it was so popular that the guy who wrote it went ahead and wrote about a thousand more Oz stories—'

'Yeah,' Eddie said. 'Everything but Glinda's Guide to Firm Thighs.'

'—and there was this crazy remake called The Wiz, starring black people —'

'Really?' Susannah asked. She looked bemused. 'What a peculiar concept.'

'—but the only one that really matters is the first one, I think,' Jake finished.

Roland hunkered and put his hands into the boots which had been left for him. He lifted them, looked at them, put them down again. 'Are we supposed to put them on, do you think? Here and now?'

His three friends from New York looked at each other doubtfully. At last Susannah spoke for them—fed him the khef which he could feel but not quite share on his own.

'Best not to right now, maybe. Too many bad-ass spirits here.' 'Takuro spirits,' Eddie murmured, mostly to himself. Then: 'Look, let's just take em along. If we're supposed to put em on, I think we'll know when the time comes. In the meantime, I think we ought to beware of bumhugs bearing gifts.'

It cracked Jake up, as Eddie had known it would; sometimes a word or an image got into your funny bone like a virus and just lived there awhile. Tomorrow the word 'bumhug' might mean nothing to the kid; for the rest of