the west is nice this time of year

He’ll dream of these places until he dies, probably — places he’d never seen before Roland pulled him through that door, except for in movies, dry riverbeds and sunburnt beaches and battle-haunted canyons, Old Mother rising. Eddie’s sneakers leave waffle-prints in the red dust. He walks like a man in a dream, light springy steps, and with every passing second something throbs in his throat like a pulse — hope, hope, hope.

Eddie rubs his hands over his face, shuts his eyes, opens them again. Jake is sitting cross-legged on the ground with a rag spread out over his knee, cleaning his gun — there’s a red can of cola in the dirt beside him and Eddie knows what Jake is drinking without looking. His blue jeans are patched with buckskin. Eddie squats down next to Jake — Jake gives him a flickering brother-look, and whacks him with the cleaning cloth.

“Where’s Suze?”

There’s no wheelchair and no wheelchair tracks. He doesn’t remember how they got to this place, or if they’ve been there before — at least, he thinks, it’s not a goddamn beach. Some ten paces away, Roland is hacking the pods off a cactus cluster with his knife — he’d be better off using a machete, but Eddie’s not about to tell him that.The cuts are leaking moisture down the thorny skin of the cactus barrel, and it makes Eddie’s dry throat prickle.

This is the right place. He knows these people. It stands to be seen if this is the right time.

In all his dreams Roland’s never looked as handsome as he does now, and those gunslinger’s eyes pierce straight through Eddie and lodge themselves in his heart — he’s wearing a faded red shirt, faded to the color of desert rock, but the stitching is so close and careful that it can only be from Mid-World, where they do this shit the old way.

Eddie Dean knows this — he never left Roland’s side, not really. It was all some sick game, and the reason it feels impossible is that they haven’t even gotten there yet — the reason how it ended felt like bullshit was that it was bullshit, everything that’s happened since then has been bullshit. It felt itchy around the edges. It didn’t feel right.

“Suze?” Roland tosses down another cactus pod, big as a Boy Scout canteen. Prickly pear, that’s what those things are called, isn’t it? Eddie has only seen them in cartoons.

“Yeah. Hey, Roland, those aren’t poisonous, are they?”

There’s water inside cactuses, if you’re stubborn enough to get it out. Maybe you have to cut them open, or core them out, or poke a hole in between the cactus needles. Jake might know. He seems like a bright kid, old for his age.

Roland draws his gun and steps to the side with purpose, so quickly — Eddie calls out, but Jake turns his head away at the sound of the hammer drawing back, his forehead wrinkling with boyish non-comprehension. The first bullet strikes Jake in the throat; the second in the chest.

Jake is knocked onto his back. His childish hand darts out for his own gun, before Roland’s boot knocks it away — the gap is closed between them. Eddie can’t make a sound. It’s a mirage, a trap. Of course it’s a fucking trap. Eddie’s hand goes for his own gun in that same split-second, right where it ought to be in his waistband and right where it isn’t.

Eddie drops to his knees — the red blood is beginning to run in the red dirt. Jake’s body is bent back, spider-like, lurching with impossible movement.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“Don’t be sorry, Eddie,” Jake says. “You shouldn’t have come back here.” Every breath he draws makes the bloody hole in his throat bubble and spit — he shouldn’t be able to breathe like this, he shouldn’t be able to speak. His head is bent like a broken toy. Eddie can’t even be grief-stricken – there’s only room in his mind for a single emotion of absolutely baffled horror. It’s like something out of a John Carpenter movie – the gaping hole, the bullet a dark fleck, and Susannah’s voice in the back of his mind — it’s a trick, it’s a glam.

“What the fuck was that for?” Eddie grabs for Jake’s gun instead, fumbling in the dirt, but Roland brings down the toe of his boot on the backs of Eddie’s fingers like a man extinguishing a cigarette. It’s a gesture Roland would never make — too pretentious, a flourish.

Roland smiles from above, and his face changes, like a hand of cards laid on the table to reveal a straight flush. Seeing that smile cross his face is like spotting a fat worm in an apple. In the movies, you never really knew if it was supposed to be the same guy — if Clint Eastwood in Fistful Of Dollars was Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Or Eddie never knew, really; after a hard night, all those movies blur together.

“Ta-da.”

The way he gestures with his hands is wrong — arch and insolent.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, not in a deployment of invective so much as out of surprise.

“Tch-tch-tch,” the man says, “too slow. He was dead, and now he’s dead again. The kid always dies. A speeding car, a helpful shove. A stray bullet. A needle-stick. You shouldn’t leave that shit lying around.”

The voice of the man in black is issuing from Roland’s lips — cool and magnetic. He doesn’t sound like Roland does, like something out of Roland Deschain’s Freudian nightmares — he just sounds like somebody else.

“Great, you shot a little kid. Talk about hot shit. Got any other magic tricks?”

His mouth still works. Eddie Dean can talk his way out of anything, he can talk his way out of this. Eddie talks and talks and the man in Roland’s skin raises the gun like he’s going to clock him with it. The barrel of Roland’s gun is still hot from the passage of the bullet that killed Jake — the man who is not Roland presses the metal barrel to Eddie’s cheek, and Eddie falls silent without meaning to, his words have all scattered and deserted him now.

“You know what to do,” the man with Roland’s face says. “Suck it. You never know, you might like it.”

Eddie opens his mouth to say something smart and the barrel of the gun thrusts past his tongue, splitting his lower lip

You might like it. Was that it, the first time? The man who isn’t Roland grabs at his dick through faded blue jeans, as if the subtleties of the gesture might have been lost on his audience. Metal rattles between Eddie’s teeth — he can taste it, that barren desert taste. The gun barrel gouges the inside of his mouth. Eddie tries to move his tongue out of the way, and the metal chips against enamel — the motion of the dark man’s hand is unmistakably obscene. He doesn’t want to die here — not when it’s suddenly urgently clear to him that there won’t be a do-over, that whatever happens here will cut off a half-dozen other places and times, that it will stop in their tracks a half-dozen other turns of the wheel. Shockwaves, sort of. And it won’t be pretty.

He’s not thinking about other places and other times, he’s thinking about now — about blinking out of existence, about pain. The revolver is heavy with bullets, wet with Eddie’s own spit.

In the corner of his eye he can see Jake’s small body heaving wet breaths. Jake is dying, again, and where’s Susannah, where’s the real Roland, where’s Oy for chrissakes —

*

And again. Switch back, try again, the scene changes like a television clicker turning to a new channel. He’s on the ground, on his back, the spit-slick barrel of the gun is pressing across his windpipe like an iron bar. The man in black is on top of him, one long leg on either side. Roland’s legs, whipcord-lean and tight as iron.

“You’re the weak link, Eddie Dean. Outgunned.”

Mortal fear squeezes him like a hand — like a hand pressing down on his collarbone, like forcing the air out of a joke-shop whoopee cushion, only the only sound is a terrible flat rattle that dimly registers as issuing from his own throat. The small body on the edge of his vision has vanished — in its place is a mound of picked bones, a rag of hide.

“Me? I’m so-so, I guess. I killed Blaine the Mono. I kicked heroin. I fought a bear. I bluffed Roland the gunslinger. You’re not real, you’re a fucking jawbone. What have you done lately? I fucked over Enrico Balazar.” All these things flood into his mouth like a tumble of obscenities. Eddie is panting, trying to swell his chest with air.

“You don’t know who I am.”

Plague breath on his face, spilling from Roland’s taut gash mouth, every white tooth like a tombstone. The smell of pestilence — the whiff of death he’d smelled in the air in Topeka. Eddie tries to keep his jaw tight and his breath from coming out in whimpers, but no amount of stiff contracted stubbornness can keep down the waves of knee-quaking fear rising up from his belly like nausea, fear like a child. Roland’s knife snags up the hem of Eddie’s shirt, scoring a line across his low belly.

Bleeding Jesus, he’s going to piss himself. Fear and desire are only a hair’s breadth apart, anyway — his bladder lets go, and he can feel the man in black thrum with laughter.

“Come on, you maggot. You pissed your fuckin’ pants, look at you. What would mom say? She’d say, sweet Jesus, Edward, but you’re a mess. You’re too good to get high, but not too good to piss your pants.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says. The knife dips and bites.

*

At least it’s not Roland any more, the figure that’s pressing down on him. They’re not in Mid-World any more, but where the fuck are they? Switch back — Eddie is on his hands and knees with the taste of bile in his mouth, the piss is plastering his blue jeans to the tops of his legs, spreading down his front instead of soaking into the dirt. They’re not in a desert any more, but one of those gray wasted places where only junkies go — no white-yellow sun in the sky, only a bare bulb and white-yellow walls with splitting outlet covers and faded posters. There’s cracked green linoleum under the palms of his hands. The knife isn’t a knife any more, but a hypodermic needle.

The light is different here, and the color — it has that wet blurred quality of an impending hangover, the furthest edges of an otherwise really vivid nodder. The knife-blade edge of his brother’s face turned against the light, the angle of his neck, he knows him — but those are not his brother’s eyes, when the man turns to him, there are no eyes

“It’s all right, Eddie boy, don’t worry about it. You kicked the habit. I’m proud of you. You’re a better man than I am, Eddie Dean, even if you always were a fuckin’ sissy.” Voice full of hurt and sardonic bitterness and anything but forgiveness, anything but pride — the great sage, the eminent junkie. Henry helps him up onto his knees. His grip on Eddie’s shoulder, on Eddie’s wrist.

“Fuck you, no fucking way. You never met my brother in your life.” Eddie is halfway laughing now. This is some phantom, torn out of the dusty back corridors of his brain. It’s fake, it’s nothing. It’s less than a dope-dream. “Henry wouldn’t give a shit about you.”

His voice comes out in a thin croak. No more words, only stupefied laughter, stunned incredulity.

“I could live in this body,” the man in black says, “and I don’t think you’d ever notice a damn lick of difference.”

Henry, Roland. Always en route to the bigger satisfaction. The man in black is himself again — a handsome drifter in worn denim, not junk-wasted like Henry but lean and strong and integral. In place of Henry’s seam-splitten denim jacket he wears a long black coat, and the pointed toecaps of his broken-down boots shine with lines of stitching. The buckle of his belt bears the design of a pig’s head in a police cap with a bullet hole in its forehead. Marten the wizard didn’t own one of those, probably. Didn’t have a needle and a spoon, either. Hasn’t Eddie seen this guy before? Hasn’t he scored something off this same guy before, this same guy coming in from out of town with a spring in his step —

Watch out for the walkin’ dude. Or maybe the dark man is in the west. Off to see the fuckin’ Wizard. This guy is the kind of guy who parks in the crip spaces, the kind of guy who grins at waitresses and makes them drop whole trayfuls of glasses, the kind of guy for whom the height of humor is a severed finger in a basket of French fries — you know, an asshole. A really incredible prick. The mark of the wizard is on him, a double-self flickering over him like the cowl of a black robe. Is this the kind of guy who’d go ahead and fuck your mother — or had Roland made half-a-dozen different men into one, folding them together like a deck of cards? A multiplicity of men.

“Let’s cut to the chase, Eddie, you know how this goes. Suck some cock and you’re free to go. You never told Roland about that part. After all that, you went and found yourself another junkie to look after. Did you ever do this for him?”

“You’re the wizard, you tell me.” Eddie can’t keep from snickering, a crazy hollow sound rattling at the back of his throat.

The man in black snaps the hypodermic like a matchstick and thrusts two fingers past Eddie’s teeth — beneath the slick of blood and the crumbs of glass the man’s fingertips taste like corner-store cigarettes, out of place and all too familiar with the dust of red deserts still caking Eddie’s sneakers. Eddie sneers and bites down hard, but he can’t control the quiver of arousal that shoots through him like a snapped guitar-string, from the floor of his mouth to the pit of his groin.

He doesn’t want this, he’s never wanted this, but the memory of other rooms and other back seats is strong — the smell of pot, the sound of Creedence on the stereo. This isn’t any more degrading now than it was then — what’s so scary about a blowjob you don’t want? What’s so bad about that? Besides the smell, and the taste, and the hitch in your throat —

This guy wants to put a scare into him, and Eddie won’t allow it. Eddie shuts his eyes and braces with his hands, hearing the metal belt buckle clink.

The man in black undoes the teeth of his zipper.

The first time Eddie Dean ever sucked a guy off, he was eighteen and stupid and too stubborn to be scared — he’s sure fucking scared now. In his heart and guts he’s scared, but he’s also angry, and the anger clamps down everything else from coming to the surface.

The man in black scuffs at the edge of Eddie’s temple with his thumb, and makes an encouraging sound that sounds like it’s coming from very far away. His erection is too-thick and too-hot, like taking a piece of hot metal on your tongue — Eddie takes it with a vengeance, with the man in black’s witchy hand pressing him down and making him gag, thrusting deep until the tears spring to Eddie’s eyes. If this is a dream, there’s no other option but to wake up at the end — to wake up into another dream.

The broken edge of Eddie’s tooth tears at flesh, but what Eddie tastes isn’t blood or cum but something else, some unspecified and unknown third thing. The man in black fucks his mouth like it was made for this, like it’s nothing but an uninterrupted slick opening made for entry. Any minute now Eddie is going to throw up and the acid contents of his stomach will burn his sinuses from the inside and the man in black will laugh at him for retching on the ground. Any minute now he’s going to choke —that thick, writhing cock wrenches at the back of his mouth and makes his gut hitch uselessly. Like something with a sick life of its own, only how would he ever know, with his eyes closed? He can’t draw a breath, he can’t open his jaw far enough, his jaw is going to lock and he’s going to lose everything inside himself — all things considered, Eddie Dean would have preferred the gun.

*

Switch back again. Eddie sags back into the dirt, breathing hard with newly unobstructed airways. Back in the desert, alone, Eddie cries out like an animal — his broken-down fingernails rake the ground, and his mouth is full of the taste of chemical salts. Susannah is a few yards away, asleep in a huddle, and she stirs at the sound of his voice. Curling over her shoulder is the gently twitching comma of Oy’s tail. The moon is fat and yellow-white in the sky, the stars are rising, Old Mother and Old Star —

Eddie rubs his hands over his face, shuts his eyes, opens them again. His tongue works against his teeth, feeling for a loose chip of enamel in the corner of his cheek.