NINETEEN.
And oh dear God, she knew that she would. Already it trembled on her lips. Nineteen, she would say--Nort, listen: Nineteen. And the secrets of Death and the land beyond would be opened to her.
Sooner or later you will ask.
The next day things were almost normal, although none of the children followed Nort. The day after that, the catcalls resumed. Life had gotten back on its own sweet keel. The uprooted corn was gathered together by the children, and a week after Nort's resurrection, they burned it in the middle of the street. The fire was momentarily bright and most of the barflies stepped or staggered out to watch. They looked primitive. Their faces seemed to float between the flames and the ice-chip brilliance of the sky. Allie watched them and felt a pang of fleeting despair for the sad times of this world. The loss. Things had stretched apart. There was no glue at the center anymore. Somewhere something was tottering, and when it fell, all would end. She had never seen the ocean, never would.
"If I had guts," she murmured. "If I had guts, guts, guts . . ."
Nort raised his head at the sound of her voice and smiled emptily at her from hell. She had no guts. Only a bar and a scar. And a word. It struggled behind her closed lips. Suppose she were to call him over now and draw him close despite his stink? Suppose she said the word into the waxy buggerlug he called an ear? His eyes would change. They would turn into his eyes--those of the man in the robe. And then Nort would tell what he'd seen in the Land of Death, what lay beyond the earth and the worms.
I'll never say that word to him.
But the man who had brought Nort back to life and left her a note--left her a word like a cocked pistol she would someday put to her temple--had known better.
Nineteen would open the secret.
Nineteen was the secret.
She caught herself writing it in a puddle on the bar--19--and skidded it to nothingness when she saw Nort watching her.
The fire burned down rapidly and her customers came back in. She began to dose herself with the Star Whiskey, and by midnight she was blackly drunk.
VIII
She ceased her narrative, and when he made no immediate comment, she thought at first that the story had put him to sleep. She began to drowse herself when he asked: "That's all?"
"Yes. That's all. It's very late."
"Um." He was rolling another cigarette.
"Don't go getting your tobacco dandruff in my bed," she told him, more sharply than she had intended.
"No."
Silence again. The tip of his cigarette winked off and on.
"You'll be leaving in the morning," she said dully.
"I should. I think he's left a trap for me here. Just like he left one for you."
"Do you really think that number would--"
"If you like your sanity, you don't ever want to say that word to Nort," the gunslinger said. "Put it out of your head. If you can, teach yourself that the number after eighteen is twenty. That half of thirty-eight is seventeen. The man who signed himself Walter o' Dim is a lot of things, but a liar isn't one of them."
"But--"
"When the urge comes and it's strong, come up here and hide under your quilts and say it over and over again--scream it, if you have to--until the urge passes."
"A time will come when it won't pass."
The gunslinger made no reply, for he knew this was true. The trap had a ghastly perfection. If someone told you you'd go to hell if you thought about seeing your mother naked (once when the gunslinger was very young he had been told this very thing), you'd eventually do it. And why? Because you did not want to imagine your mother naked. Because you did not want to go to hell. Because, if given a knife and a hand in which to hold it, the mind would eventually eat itself. Not because it wanted to; because it did not want to.
Sooner or later Allie would call Nort over and say the word.
"Don't go," she said.
"We'll see."
He turned on his side away from her, but she was comforted. He would stay, at least for a little while. She drowsed.
On the edge of sleep she thought again about the way Nort had addressed him, in that strange talk. It was the only time she had seen her strange new lover express emotion. Even his love-making had been a silent thing, and only at the last had his breathing roughened and then stopped for a second or two. He was like something out of a fairytale or a myth, a fabulous, dangerous creature. Could he grant wishes? She thought the answer was yes, and that she would have hers. He would stay awhile. That was wish enough for a luckless scarred bitch such as she. Tomorrow was time enough to think of another, or
a third. She slept.
IX
In the morning she cooked him grits, which he ate without comment. He shoveled them in without thinking about her, hardly seeing her. He knew he should go. Every minute he sat here the man in black was further away--probably out of the hardpan and arroyos and into the desert by now. His path had been undeviatingly southeast, and the gunslinger knew why.
"Do you have a map?" he asked, looking up.
"Of the town?" she laughed. "There isn't enough of it to need a map."
"No. Of what's southeast of here."
Her smile faded. "The desert. Just the desert. I thought you'd stay for a little."
"What's on the other side of the desert?"
"How would I know? Nobody crosses it. Nobody's tried since I was here." She wiped her hands on her apron, got potholders, and dumped the tub of water she had been heating into the sink, where it splashed and steamed. "The clouds all go that way. It's like something sucks them--"
He got up.
"Where are you going?" She heard the shrill fear in her voice and hated it.
"To the stable. If anyone knows, the hostler will." He put his hands on her shoulders. The hands were hard, but they were also warm. "And to arrange for my mule. If I'm going to be here, he should be taken care of. For when I leave."
But not yet. She looked up at him. "But you watch that Kennerly. If he doesn't know a thing, he'll make it up."
"Thank you, Allie."
When he left she turned to the sink, feeling the hot, warm drift of her grateful tears. How long since anyone had thanked her? Someone who mattered?
X
Kennerly was a toothless and unpleasant old satyr who had buried two wives and was plagued with daughters. Two half-grown ones peeked at the gunslinger from the dusty shadows of the barn. A baby drooled happily in the dirt. A full-grown one, blond, dirty, and sensual, watched with a speculative curiosity as she drew water from the groaning pump beside the building. She caught the gunslinger's eye, pinched her nipples between her fingers, dropped him a wink, and then went back to pumping.
The hostler met him halfway between the door to his establishment and the street. His manner vacillated between a kind of hateful hostility and craven fawning.
"Hit's bein' cared for, never fear 'at," he said, and before the gunslinger could reply, Kennerly turned on his daughter with his fists up, a desperate scrawny rooster of a man. "You get in, Soobie! You get right the hell in!"