The Dark Tower

He turns on the radio (the van yawing onto the soft shoulder to the left of the tarvy, throwing up a rooster-tail of dust, but not quite running into the ditch) and gets Steely Dan, singing “Hey Nineteen.” Good one! Yassuh, wicked good one! He drives a little faster in response to the music. He looks into the rearview mirror and sees his dogs, Bullet and Pistol, looking over the rear seat, bright-eyed. For a moment Bryan thinks they’re looking at him, maybe thinking what a good guy he is, then wonders how he can be so stupid. There’s a Styrofoam cooler behind the driver’s seat, and a pound of fresh hamburger in it. He means to cook it later over a campfire back at Million Dollar. Yes, and a couple more Marses’ Bars for dessert, by the hairy old Jesus! Marses’ Bars are wicked good!

“You boys ne’mine that cooler,” Bryan Smith says, speaking to the dogs he can see in the rear-view mirror. This time the minivan pitches instead of yawing, crossing the white line as it climbs a blind grade at fifty miles an hour. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on your point of view—nothing is coming the other way; nothing puts a stop to Bryan Smith’s northward progress.

“You ne’mine that hamburg, that’s my supper.” He says suppah, as John Cullum would, but the face looking back at the bright-eyed dogs from the rearview mirror is the face of Sheemie Ruiz. Almost exactly.

Sheemie could be Bryan Smith’s litter-twin.

SIX

Irene Tassenbaum was driving the truck with more assurance now, standard shift or not. She almost wished she didn’t have to turn right a quarter of a mile from here, because that would necessitate using the clutch again, this time to downshift. But that was Turtleback Lane right up ahead, and Turtleback was where these boys wanted to go.

Walk-ins! They said so, and she believed it, but who else would? Chip McAvoy, maybe, and surely the Reverend Peterson from that crazy Church of the Walk-Ins down in Stoneham Corners, but anyone else? Her husband, for instance? Nope. Never. If you couldn’t engrave a thing on a microchip, David Tassenbaum didn’t believe it was real. She wondered—not for the first time lately—if forty-seven was too old to think about a divorce.

She shifted back to Second without grinding the gears too much, but then, as she turned off the highway, had to shift all the way down to First when the silly old pickup began to grunt and chug. She thought that one of her passengers would make some sort of smart comment (perhaps the boy’s mutant dog would even say fuck again), but all the man in the passenger seat said was, “This doesn’t look the same.”

“When were you here last?” Irene Tassenbaum asked him. She considered shifting up to second gear again, then decided to leave things just as they were. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” David liked to say.

“It’s been awhile,” the man admitted. She had to keep sneaking glances at him. There was something strange and exotic about him—especially his eyes. It was as if they’d seen things she’d never even dreamed of.

Stop it, she told herself. He’s probably a drugstore cowboy all the way from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

But she kind of doubted that. The boy was odd, as well—him and his exotic crossbreed dog—but they were nothing compared to the man with the haggard face and the strange blue eyes.

“Eddie said it was a loop,” the boy said. “Maybe last time you guys came in from the other end.”

The man considered this and nodded. “Would the other end be the Bridgton end?” he asked the woman.

“Yes indeed.”