The Dark Tower

Something has happened, and I have to be gone for awhile. 2 days at least, I think maybe 3 or 4. Please don’t worry about me and don’t call anyone. ESPECIALLY NOT POLICE. It’s a stray cat thing.

Would he understand that? She thought he would if he remembered how they’d met. At the Santa Monica ASPCA, that had been, among the stacked rows of kennels in back: love blooms as the mongrels yap. It sounded like James Joyce to her, by God. He had brought in a stray dog he’d found on a suburban street near the apartment where he was staying with half a dozen egghead friends. She’d been looking for a kitten to liven up what was an essentially friendless life. He’d had all his hair then. As for her, she’d thought women who dyed theirs mildly amusing. Time was a thief, and one of the first things it took was your sense of humor.

She hesitated, then added

Love you,

Ree

Was that true any longer? Well, let it stand, either way. Crossing out what you’d written in ink always looked ugly. She put the note back on the fridge with the same magnet to hold it in place.

She got the keys to the Mercedes out of the basket by the door, then remembered the rowboat, still tied up at the little stub of dock behind the store. It would be all right there. But then she thought of something else, something the boy had told her. He doesn’t know about money.

She went into the pantry, where they always kept a slim roll of fifties (there were places out here in the boondocks where she would be willing to swear they’d never even heard of MasterCard) and took three. She started away, shrugged, went back, and took the other three, as well. Why not? She was living dangerously today.

On her way out, she paused again to look at the note. And then, for absolutely no reason she could understand, she took the Positronics magnet away and replaced it with an orange slice. Then she left.

Never mind the future. For the time being, she had enough to keep her occupied in the present.

NINE

The emergency bucka was gone, bearing the writer to the nearest hospital or infirmary, Roland assumed. Peace officers had come just as it left, and they spent perhaps half an hour talking with Bryan Smith. The gunslinger could hear the palaver from where he was, just over the first rise. The bluebacks’ questions were clear and calm, Smith’s answers little more than mumbles. Roland saw no reason to stop working. If the blues came back here and found him, he would deal with them. Just incapacitate them, unless they made that impossible; gods knew there had been enough killing. But he would bury his dead, one way or another.

He would bury his dead.

The lovely green-gold light of the clearing deepened. Mosquitoes found him but he did not stop what he was doing in order to slap them, merely let them drink their fill and then lumber off, heavy with their freight of blood. He heard engines starting as he finished hand-digging the grave, the smooth roar of two cars and the more uneven sound of Smith’s van-mobile. He had heard the voices of only two peace officers, which meant that, unless there had been a third blueback with nothing to say, they were allowing Smith to drive away by himself. Roland thought this rather odd, but—like the question of whether or not King was paralyzed—it was none of his matter or mind. All that mattered was this; all that mattered was seeing to his own.

He made three trips to collect stones, because a grave dug by hand must necessarily be a shallow one and animals, even in such a tame world as this, are always hungry. He stacked the stones at the head of the hole, a scar lined with earth so rich it could have been black satin. Oy lay by Jake’s head, watching the gunslinger come and go, saying nothing. He’d always been different from his kind as they were since the world had moved on; Roland had even speculated that it was Oy’s extraordinary chattiness that had caused the others in his tet to expel him, and not gently, either. When they’d come upon this fellow, not too far from the town of River Crossing, he’d been scrawny to the point of starvation, and with a half-healed bite-mark on one flank. The bumbler had loved Jake from the first: “That’s as clear as Earth needs,” Cort might have said (or Roland’s own father, for that matter). And it was to Jake the bumbler had talked the most. Roland had an idea that Oy might fall mostly silent now that the boy was dead, and this thought was another way of defining what was lost.