CHAPTER 1 #3
Brown surprised him again when they sat down to the blanket that served as a table by asking a brief blessing: Rain, health, expansion to the spirit.
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.
Brown nodded. “I think this is it.”
IV
The beans were like bullets, the corn tough.
Outside, the prevailing wind snuffled and whined around the ground-level eaves.
The gunslinger ate quickly, ravenously, drinking four cups of water with the meal.
Halfway through, there was a machine-gun rapping at the door.
Brown got up and let Zoltan in. The bird flew across the room and hunched moodily in the corner.
“Musical fruit,” he muttered.
“You ever think about eating him?” the gunslinger asked.
The dweller laughed. “Animals that talk be tough,” he said. “Birds, billy-bumblers, human beans. They be tough eatin’.”
After dinner, the gunslinger offered his tobacco. The dweller, Brown, accepted eagerly.
Now, the gunslinger thought. Now the questions will come.
But Brown asked no questions. He smoked tobacco that had been grown in Garlan years before and looked at the dying embers of the fire. It was already noticeably cooler in the hovel.
“Lead us not into temptation,” Zoltan said suddenly, apocalyptically.
The gunslinger started as if he had been shot at. He was suddenly sure all this was an illusion, that the man in black had spun a spell and was trying to tell him something in a maddeningly obtuse, symbolic way.
“Do you know Tull?” he asked suddenly.
Brown nodded. “Came through it to get here, went back once to sell corn and drink a glass of whiskey. It rained that year. Lasted maybe fifteen minutes. The ground just seemed to open and suck it up. An hour later it was just as white and dry as ever. But the corn—God, the corn. You could see it grow. That wasn’t so bad.
But you could hear it, as if the rain had given it a mouth.
It wasn’t a happy sound. It seemed to be sighing and groaning its way out of the earth.
” He paused. “I had extra, so I took it and sold it. Pappa Doc said he’d do it, but he would have cheated me. So I went.”
“You don’t like town?”
“No.”
“I almost got killed there,” the gunslinger said.
“Do you say so?”
“Set my watch and warrant on it. And I killed a man that was touched by God,” the gunslinger said. “Only it wasn’t God. It was the man with the rabbit up his sleeve. The man in black.”
“He laid you a trap.”
“You say true, I say thank ya.”
They looked at each other across the shadows, the moment taking on overtones of finality.
Now the questions will come.
But Brown still had no questions to ask. His cigarette was down to a smoldering roach, but when the gunslinger tapped his poke, Brown shook his head.
Zoltan shifted restlessly, seemed about to speak, subsided.
“Will I tell you about it?” the gunslinger asked. “Ordinarily I’m not much of a talker, but . . .”
“Sometimes talking helps. I’ll listen.”
The gunslinger searched for words to begin and found none. “I have to pass water,” he said.
Brown nodded. “Pass it in the corn, please.”
“Sure.”
He went up the stairs and out into the dark. The stars glittered overhead. The wind pulsed. His urine arched out over the powdery cornfield in a wavering stream. The man in black had drawn him here. It wasn’t beyond possibility that Brown was the man in black. He might be . . .
The gunslinger shut these useless and upsetting thoughts away. The only contingency he had not learned how to bear was the possibility of his own madness. He went back inside.
“Have you decided if I’m an enchantment yet?” Brown asked, amused.
The gunslinger paused on the tiny landing, startled. Then he came down slowly and sat. “The thought crossed my mind. Are you?”
“If I am, I don’t know it.”
This wasn’t a terribly helpful answer, but the gunslinger decided to let it pass. “I started to tell you about Tull.”
“Is it growing?”
“It’s dead,” the gunslinger said. “I killed it.” He thought of adding: And now I’m going to kill you, if for no other reason than I don’t want to have to sleep with one eye open. But had he come to such behavior? If so, why bother to go on at all? Why, if he had become what he pursued?
Brown said, “I don’t want nothing from you, gunslinger, except to still be here when you move on. I won’t beg for my life, but that don’t mean I don’t want it yet awhile longer.”
The gunslinger closed his eyes. His mind whirled.
“Tell me what you are,” he said thickly.
“Just a man. One who means you no harm. And I’m still willing to listen if you’re willing to talk.”
To this the gunslinger made no reply.
“I guess you won’t feel right about it unless I invite you,” Brown said, “and so I do. Will you tell me about Tull?”
The gunslinger was surprised to find that this time the words were there. He began to speak in flat bursts that slowly spread into an even, slightly toneless narrative. He found himself oddly excited. He talked deep into the night. Brown did not interrupt at all. Neither did the bird.
V
He’d bought the mule in Pricetown, and when he reached Tull, it was still fresh.
The sun had set an hour earlier, but the gunslinger had continued traveling, guided by the town glow in the sky, then by the uncannily clear notes of a honky-tonk piano playing “Hey Jude.” The road widened as it took on tributaries.
Here and there were overhead sparklights, all of them long dead.
The forests were long gone now, replaced by the monotonous flat prairie country: endless, desolate fields gone to timothy and low shrubs; eerie, deserted estates guarded by brooding, shadowed mansions where demons undeniably walked; leering, empty shanties where the people had either moved on or had been moved along; an occasional dweller’s hovel, given away by a single flickering point of light in the dark, or by sullen, inbred clan-fams toiling silently in the fields by day.
Corn was the main crop, but there were beans and also some pokeberries.
An occasional scrawny cow stared at him lumpishly from between peeled alder poles.
Coaches had passed him four times, twice coming and twice going, nearly empty as they came up on him from behind and bypassed him and his mule, fuller as they headed back toward the forests of the north.
Now and then a farmer passed with his feet up on the splashboard of his bucka, careful not to look at the man with the guns.
It was ugly country. It had showered twice since he had left Pricetown, grudgingly both times. Even the timothy looked yellow and dispirited. Pass-on-by country. He had seen no sign of the man in black. Perhaps he had taken a coach.
The road made a bend, and beyond it the gunslinger clucked the mule to a stop and looked down at Tull.
It was at the floor of a circular, bowl-shaped hollow, a shoddy jewel in a cheap setting.
There were a number of lights, most of them clustered around the area of the music.
There looked to be four streets, three running at right angles to the coach road, which was the main avenue of the town.
Perhaps there would be a cafe. He doubted it, but perhaps. He clucked at the mule.
More houses sporadically lined the road now, most of them still deserted. He passed a tiny graveyard with moldy, leaning wooden slabs overgrown and choked by the rank devil-grass. Perhaps five hundred feet further on he passed a chewed sign which said: TULL.
The paint was flaked almost to the point of illegibility. There was another further on, but the gunslinger was not able to read that one at all.
A fool’s chorus of half-stoned voices was rising in the final protracted lyric of “Hey Jude”—“Naa-naa-naa naa-na-na-na . . . hey, Jude . . .”—as he entered the town proper.
It was a dead sound, like the wind in the hollow of a rotted tree.
Only the prosaic thump and pound of the honky-tonk piano saved him from seriously wondering if the man in black might not have raised ghosts to inhabit a deserted town. He smiled a little at the thought.
There were people on the streets, but not many.
Three ladies wearing black slacks and identical high-collared blouses passed by on the opposite boardwalk, not looking at him with pointed curiosity.
Their faces seemed to swim above their all-but-invisible bodies like pallid balls with eyes.
A solemn old man with a straw hat perched firmly on top of his head watched him from the steps of a boarded-up mercantile store.
A scrawny tailor with a late customer paused to watch him go by; he held up the lamp in his window for a better look.
The gunslinger nodded. Neither the tailor nor his customer nodded back.
He could feel their eyes resting heavily upon the low-slung holsters that lay against his hips.
A young boy, perhaps thirteen, and a girl who might have been his sissa or his jilly-child crossed the street a block up, pausing imperceptibly.
Their footfalls raised little hanging clouds of dust. Here in town most of the streetside lamps worked, but they weren’t electric; their isinglass sides were cloudy with congealed oil.
Some had been crashed out. There was a livery with a just-hanging-on look to it, probably depending on the coach line for its survival.
Three boys were crouched silently around a marble ring drawn in the dust to one side of the barn’s gaping maw, smoking cornshuck cigarettes.
They made long shadows in the yard. One had a scorpion’s tail poked in the band of his hat.
Another had a bloated left eye bulging sightlessly from its socket.