if she could be tempered by Odetta Holmes’s calm humanity—especially now, with him short two fingers, almost out of bullets, and growing more fever.
But that is a step ahead. I think if I can make them acknowledge each other, that would bring them into confrontation. How may it be done?
He lay awake all that long night, thinking, and although he felt the fever in him grow, he found no answer to his question.
8
Eddie woke up shortly before daybreak, saw the gunslinger sitting near the ashes of last night’s fire with his blanket wrapped around him Indian-fashion, and joined him.
“How do you feel?” Eddie asked in a low voice. The Lady still slept in her crisscrossing of ropes, although she occasionally jerked and muttered and moaned.
“All right.”
Eddie gave him an appraising glance. “You don’t look all right.”
“Thank you, Eddie,” the gunslinger said dryly.
“You’re shivering.”
“It will pass.”
The Lady jerked and moaned again—this time a word that was almost understandable. It might have been Oxford.
“God, I hate to see her tied up like that,” Eddie murmured. “Like a goddam calf in a barn.”
“She’ll wake soon. Mayhap we can unloose her when she does.”
It was the closest either of them came to saying out loud that when the Lady in the chair opened her eyes, the calm, if slightly puzzled gaze of Odetta Holmes might greet them.
Fifteen minutes later, as the first sunrays struck over the hills, those eyes did open—but what the men saw was not the calm gaze of Odetta Holmes but the mad glare of Detta Walker.
“How many times you done rape me while I was buzzed out?” she asked. “My cunt feel all slick an tallowy, like somebody done been at it with a couple them little bitty white candles you graymeat mahfahs call cocks.”
Roland sighed.
“Let’s get going,” he said, and gained his feet with a grimace.
“I ain’t goan nowhere wit choo, mahfah,” Detta spat.
“Oh yes you are,” Eddie said. “Dreadfully sorry, my dear.”
“Where you think I’m goan?”
“Well,” Eddie said, “what was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right on ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware.”
“I ain’t goan.”
“You’re going, all right,” Eddie said, and walked behind her chair. She began struggling again, but the gunslinger had made these knots, and her struggles only drew them tighter. Soon enough she saw this and ceased. She was full of poison but far from stupid. But she looked back over her shoulder at Eddie with a grin which made him recoil a little. It seemed to him the most evil expression he had ever seen on a human face.
“Well, maybe I be goan on a little way,” she said, “but maybe not s’far’s you think, white boy. And sure-God not s’fast’s you think.”
“What do you mean?”
That leering, over-the-shoulder grin again.
“You find out, white boy.” Her eyes, mad but cogent, shifted briefly to the gunslinger. “You bofe be findin dat out.”
Eddie wrapped his hands around the bicycle grips at the ends of the push-handles on the back of her wheelchair and they began north again, now leaving not only footprints but the twin tracks of the Lady’s chair as they moved up the seemingly endless beach.
9
The day was a nightmare.
It was hard to calculate distance travelled when you were moving along a landscape which varied so little, but Eddie knew their progress had slowed to a crawl.
And he knew who was responsible.
Oh yeah.
You bofe be findin dat out, Detta had said, and they hadn’t been on the move more than half an hour before the finding out began.
Pushing.
That was the first thing. Pushing the wheelchair up a beach of fine sand would have been as impossible as driving a car through deep unplowed snow. This beach, with its gritty, marly surface, made moving the chair possible but far from easy. It would roll along smoothly enough for awhile, crunching over shells and popping little pebbles to either side of its hard rubber tires . . . and then it would hit a dip where finer sand had drifted, and Eddie would have to shove, grunting, to get it and its solid unhelpful passenger through it. The sand sucked greedily at the wheels. You had to simultaneously push and