ran off. Those parking lots . . . they were the Drawers, too. It was a dangerous game, but she was young enough, quick enough, and mean enough to play it to the hilt and enjoy it. Later, in New York, she’d go on shoplifting expeditions . . . you know about that. Both of you. Always to the fancy stores—Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s—and steal trinkets. And when she made up her mind to go on one of those sprees, she’d think: I’m goan to the Drawers today. Goan steal me some shit fum de white folks. Goan steal me sumpin forspecial and den break dat sumbitch.”
She paused, lips trembling, looking into the fire. When she looked around again, Roland and Eddie saw tears standing in her eyes.
“I’m crying, but don’t let that fool you. I remember doing those things, and I remember enjoying them. I guess I’m crying because I know I’d do it all again, if the circumstances were right.”
Roland seemed to have regained some of his old serenity, his weird equilibrium. “We have a proverb in my country, Susannah: ‘The wise thief always prospers.’ ”
“I don’t see nothing wise about stealing a bunch of paste jewelry,” she said sharply.
“Were you ever caught?”
“No—”
He spread his hands as if to say, There you have it.
“So for Detta Walker, the Drawers were bad places?” Eddie asked. “Is that right? Because it doesn’t exactly feel right.”
“Bad and good at the same time. They were powerful places, places where she . . . she reinvented herself, I suppose you could say . . . but they were lost places, too. And this is all off the subject of Roland’s ghost-boy, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not,” Roland said. “We had Drawers as well, you see, in my world. It was slang for us, too, and the meanings are very similar.”
“What did it mean to you and your friends?” Eddie asked.
“That varied slightly from place to place and situation to situation. It might mean a trash-midden. It might mean a whorehouse or a place where men came to gamble or chew devil-weed. But the most common meaning that I know is also the simplest.”
He looked at them both.
“The Drawers are places of desolation,” he said. “The Drawers are the waste lands.”
15
THIS TIME SUSANNAH THREW more wood on the fire. In the south, Old Mother blazed on brilliantly, not flickering. She knew from her school studies what that meant: it was a planet, not a star. Venus? she wondered. Or is the solar system of which this world is a part as different as everything else?
Again that feeling of unreality—the feeling that all this must surely be a dream—washed over her.
“Go on,” she said. “What happened after the voice warned you about the Drawers and the little boy?”
“I punched my hand into the hole the sand had come from, as I was taught to do if such a thing ever happened to me. What I plucked forth was a jawbone . . . but not this one. The jawbone I took from the wall of the way station was much larger; from one of the Great Old Ones, I have almost no doubt.”
“What happened to it?” Susannah asked quietly.
“One night I gave it to the boy,” Roland said. The fire painted his cheeks with hot orange highlights and dancing shadows. “As a protection—a kind of talisman. Later I felt it had served its purpose and threw it away.”
“So whose jawbone you got there, Roland?” Eddie asked.
Roland held it up, looked at it long and thoughtfully, and let it drop back. “Later, after Jake . . . after he died . . . I caught up with the men I had been chasing.”
“With Walter,” Susannah said.
“Yes. We held palaver, he and I . . . long palaver. I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up, Walter was dead. A hundred years dead at least, and probably more. There was nothing left of him but bones, which was fitting enough, since we were in a place of bones.”
“Yeah, it must have been a pretty long palaver, all right,” Eddie said dryly.
Susannah frowned slightly at this, but Roland only nodded. “Long and long,” he said, looking into the fire.
“You came to in the morning and reached the Western Sea that very evening,” Eddie said. “That night the lobstrosities came, right?”
Roland nodded again. “Yes. But before I left the place where Walter and I had spoken . . . or dreamed . . . or whatever it was we