"For your precious Tower," Eddie sneered, but he did come skid-ding halfway down the slope of ground he had climbed, his tattered tennies kicking up listless clouds of maroon dust.
"For my precious Tower and your precious health," the gunslinger said. "Not to mention your precious life."
He slipped the remaining revolver from the left holster and looked at it with an expression both sad and strange.
"If you think you can scare me with that--"
"I don't. You know I can't shoot you, Eddie. But I think you do need an object lesson in how things have changed. How much things have changed."
Roland lifted the gun, its muzzle pointing not toward Eddie but toward the empty surging ocean, and thumbed the hammer. Eddie steeled himself against the gun's heavy crack.
No such thing. Only a dull click.
Roland thumbed the hammer back again. The cylinder rotated. He squeezed the trigger, and again there was nothing but a dull click.
"Never mind," Eddie said. "Where I come from, the Defense Department would have hired you after the first misfire. You might as well qui--"
But the heavy KA-BLAM of the revolver cut off the word's end as neatly as Roland had cut small branches from trees as a target-shooting exercise when he had been a student. Eddie jumped. The gunshot momentarily silenced the constant riiiiii of the insects in the hills. They only began to tune up again slowly, cautiously, after Roland had put the gun in his lap.
"What in hell does that prove?"
"I suppose that all depends on what you'll listen to and what you refuse to hear," Roland said a trifle sharply. "It's supposed to prove that not all the shells are duds. Furthermore, it suggests--strongly suggests--that some, maybe even all, of the shells in the gun you gave Odetta may be live."
"Bullshit!" Eddie paused. "Why?"
"Because I loaded the gun I just fired with shells from the backs of my gunbelts--with shells that took the worst wetting, in other words. I did it just to pass the time while you were gone. Not that it takes much time to load a gun, even shy a pair of fingers, you understand!" Roland laughed a little, and the laugh turned into a cough he muzzled with an abridged fist. When the cough had subsided he went on: "But after you've tried to fire wets, you have to break the machine and clean the machine. Break the machine, clean the machine, you maggots--it was the first thing Cort, our teacher, drummed into us. I didn't know how long it would take me to break down my gun, clean it, and put it back together with only a hand and a half, but I thought that if I intended to go on living--and I do, Eddie, I do--I'd better find out. Find out and then learn to do it faster, don't you think so? Come a little closer, Eddie! Come a little closer for your father's sake!"
"All the better to see you with, my child," Eddie said, but did take a couple of steps closer to Roland. Only a couple.
"When the first slug I pulled the trigger on fired, I almost filled my pants," the gunslinger said. He laughed again. Shocked, Eddie realized the gunslinger had reached the edge of delirium. "The first slug, but believe me when I say it was the last thing I had expected."
Eddie tried to decide if the gunslinger was lying, lying about the gun, and lying about his condition as well. Cat was sick, yeah. But was he really this sick? Eddie didn't know. If Roland was acting, he was doing a great job; as for guns, Eddie had no way of telling because he had no experience with them. He had shot a pistol maybe three times in his life before suddenly finding himself in a firefight at Balazar's place. Henry might have known, but Henry was dead--a thought which had a way of constantly surprising Eddie into grief.
"None of the others fired," the gunslinger said, "so I cleaned the machine, re-loaded, and fired around the chamber again. This time I used shells a little further toward the belt buckles. Ones which would have taken even less of a wetting. The loads we used to kill our food, the dry loads, were the ones closest to the buckles."
He paused to cough dryly into his hand, then went on.
"Second time around I hit two live rounds. I broke my gun down again, cleaned it again, then loaded a third time. You just watched me drop the trigger on the first three chambers of that third loading." He smiled faintly. "You know, after the first two clicks I thought it would be my damned luck to have filled the cylinder with nothing but wets. That wouldn't have been very convincing, would it? Can you come a little closer, Eddie?"
"Not very convincing at all," Eddie said, "and I think I'm just as close to you as I'm going to come, thanks. What lesson am I supposed to take from all this, Roland?"
Roland looked at him as one might look at an imbecile. "I didn't send you out here to die, you know. I didn't send either of you out here to die. Great gods, Eddie, where are your brains? She's packing live iron!" His eyes regarded Eddie closely. "She's someplace up in those hills. Maybe you think you can track her, but you're not going to have any luck if the ground is as stony as it looks from here. She's lying up there, Eddie, not Odetta but Detta, lying up there with live iron in her hand. If I leave you and you go after her, she'll blow your guts out of your asshole."
Another spasm of coughing set in.
Eddie stared at the coughing man in the wheelchair and the waves pounded and the wind blew its steady idiot's note.
At last he heard his voice say, "You could have held back one shell you knew was live. I wouldn't put it past you." And with that said he knew it to be true: he wouldn't put that or anything else past Roland.
His Tower.
His goddamned Tower.
And the slyness of putting the saved shell in the third cylin
der! It provided just the right touch of reality, didn't it? Made it hard not to believe.
"We've got a saying in my world," Eddie said. " 'That guy could sell Frigidaires to the Eskimos.' That's the saying."
"What does it mean?"
"It means go pound sand."
The gunslinger looked at him for a long time and then nodded. "You mean to stay. All right. As Detta she's safer from . . . from whatever wildlife there may be around here . . . than she would have been as Odetta, and you'd be safer away from her--at least for the time being--but I can see how it is. I don't like it, but I've no time to argue with a fool."
"Does that mean," Eddie asked politely, "that no one ever tried to argue with you about this Dark Tower you're so set on getting to?"
Roland smiled tiredly. "A great many did, as a matter of fact. I suppose that's why I recognize you'll not be moved. One fool knows another. At any rate, I'm too weak to catch you, you're obviously too wary to let me coax you close enough to grab you, and time's grown too short to argue. All I can do is go and hope for the best. I'm going to tell you one last time before I do go, and hear me, Eddie: Be on your guard."
Then Roland did something that made Eddie ashamed of all his doubts (although no less solidly set in his own decision): he flicked open the cylinder of the revolver with a practiced flick of his wrist, dumped all the loads, and replaced them with fresh loads from the loops closest to the buckles. He snapped the cylinder back into place with another flick of his wrist.
"No time to clean the machine now," he said, "But 'twont matter, I reckon. Now catch, and catch clean--don't dirty the machine any more than it is already. There aren't many machines left in my world that work anymore."
He threw the gun across the space between them. In his anxiety, Eddie almost did drop it. Then he had it safely tucked into his waistband.
The gunslinger got out of the wheelchair, almost fell when it slid backward under his pushing hands, then tottered to the door. He grasped its knob; in his hand it turned easily. Eddie could not see the scene the door opened upon, but he heard the muffled sound of traffic.
Roland looked back at Eddie, his blue bullshooter's eyes gleaming out of a face which was ghastly pale.