"What has happened to me?" she asked.
George remembered the man who had told another man about what the woman had supposedly said (how she was going to hunt the motherfucker down and kill his ass, etc., etc.). That man had been white. George decided now it had been pure invention, inspired either by that odd human urge to make naturally dramatic situations even more dramatic, or just race prejudice. This was a cultured, intelligent woman.
"You've had an accident," he said. "You were--"
Her eyes slipped shut and he thought she was going to sleep again. Good. Let someone else tell her she had lost her legs. Someone who made more than $7,600 a year. He had shifted a little to the left, wanting to check her b.p. again, when she opened her eyes once more. When she did, George Shavers was looking at a different woman.
"Fuckah cut off mah laigs. I felt 'em go. Dis d'amblance?"
"Y-Y-Yes," George said. Suddenly he needed something to drink. Not necessarily alcohol. Just something wet. His voice was dry. This was like watching Spencer Tracy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, only for real.
"Dey get dat honkey mahfah?"
"No," George said, thinking The guy got it right, goddam, the guy did actually get it right.
He was vaguely aware that the paramedics, who had been hovering (perhaps hoping he would do something wrong) were now backing off.
"Good. Honky fuzz jus be lettin him off anyway. I be gittin him. I be cuttin his cock off. Sumbitch! I tell you what I goan do t'dat sumbitch! I tell you one thing, you sumbitch honky! I goan tell you . . . tell . . ."
Her eyes fluttered again and George had thought Yes, go to sleep, please go to sleep, I don't get paid for this, I don't understand this, they told us about shock but nobody mentioned schizophrenia as one of the--
The eyes opened. The first woman was there.
"What sort of accident was it?" she asked. "I remember coming out of the I--"
"Eye?" he said stupidly.
She smiled a little. It was a painful smile. "The Hungry I. It's a coffee house."
"Oh. Yeah. Right."
The other one, hurt or not, had made him feel dirty and a little ill. This one made him feel like a knight in an Arthurian tale, a knight who has successfully rescued the Lady Fair from the jaws of the dragon.
"I remember walking down the stairs to the platform, and after that--"
"Someone pushed you." It sounded stupid, but what was wrong with that? It was stupid.
"Pushed me in front of the train?"
"Yes."
"Have I lost my legs?"
George tried to swallow and couldn't. There seemed to be nothing in his throat to grease the machinery.
"Not all of them," he said inanely, and her eyes closed.
Let it be a faint, he thought then, please let it be a f--
They opened, blazing. One hand came up and slashed five slits through the air within an inch of his face--any closer and he would have been in the E.R. getting his cheek stitched up instead of smoking Chesties with Julio Estavez.
"YOU AIN'T NUTHIN BUT A BUNCHA HONKY SONSA BITCHES!" she screamed. Her face was monstrous, her eyes full of hell's own light. It wasn't even the face of a human being. "GOAN KILL EVERY MAHFAHIN HONKY I SEE! GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN CUT OFF THEIR BALLS AND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES! GOAN--"
It was crazy. She talked like a cartoon black woman, Butterfly McQueen gone Loony Tunes. She--or it--also seemed superhuman. This screaming, writhing thing could not have just undergone impromptu surgery by subway train half an hour ago. She bit. She clawed out at him again and again. Snot spat from her nose. Spit flew from her lips. Filth poured from her mouth.
"Shoot her up, doc!" one of the paras yelled. His face was pale. "Fa crissakes shoot her up!" The para reached toward the supply case. George shoved his hand aside.
"Fuck off, chickenshit."
George looked back at his patient and saw the calm, cultured eyes of the other one looking at him.
"Will I live?" she asked in a conversational tea-room voice. He thought, She is unaware of her lapses. Totally unaware. And, after a moment: So is the other one, for that matter.
"I--" He gulped, rubbed at his galloping heart through his tunic, and then ordered himself to get control of this. He had saved her life. Her mental problems were not his concern.
"Are you all right?" she asked him, and the genuine concern in her voice made him smile a little--her asking him.
"Yes, ma'am."
"To which question are you responding?"
For a moment he didn't understand, then did. "Both," he said, and took her hand. She squeezed it, and he looked into her shining lucent eyes and thought A man could fall in love, and that was when her hand turned into a claw and she was telling him he was a honky mahfah, and she wadn't just goan take his balls, she was goan chew on those mahfahs.
He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman--the first woman.
"Please," she said. "I don't want to die. Pl--" Then she went out for good, and that was good. For all of them.
4
"So whatchoo think?" Julio asked.
"About who's gonna be in the Series?" George squashed the butt under the heel of his loafer. "White Sox. I got 'em in the pool."
"Whatchoo think about that lady?"
"I think she might be schizophrenic," George said slowly.
"Yeah, I know that. I mean, what's gonna happen to her?"
"I don't know."
"She needs help, man. Who gonna give it?"
"Well, I already gave her one," George said, but his face felt hot, as if he were blushing.
Julio looked at him. "If you already gave her all the help you can give her, you shoulda let her die, doc."
George looked at Julio for a moment, but found he couldn't stand what he saw in Julio's eyes--not accusation but sadness.
So he walked away.
He had places to go.
5
The Time of the Drawing:
In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in control, but Detta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do best was steal. It didn't matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than it mattered that she often threw it away later.
The taking was what mattered.
When the gunslinger entered her head in Macy's, Detta screamed in a combination of fury and horror and terror, her hands freezing on the junk jewelry she was scooping into her purse.
She screamed because when Roland came into her mind, when he came forward, she for a moment sensed the other, as if a door had been swung open inside of her head.
And she screamed because the invading raping presence was a honky.
She could not see but nonetheless sensed his whiteness.
People looked around. A floorwalker saw the screaming woman in the wheelchair with her purse open, saw one hand frozen in the act of stuffing costume jewelry into a purse that looked (even from a distance of thirty feet) worth three times the stuff she was stealing.
The floorwalker yelled, "Hey Jimmy!" and Jimmy Halvorsen, one of Macy's house detectives, looked around and saw what was happening. He started toward the black woman in the wheelchair on a dead run. He couldn't help running--he had been a city cop for eighteen years and it was built into his system--but he was already thinking it was gonna be a shit bust. Little kids, cripples, nuns; they were always a shit bust. Busting them was like kicking a drunk. They cried a little in front of the judge and then took a walk. It was hard to convince judges that cripples could also be slime.
But he ran just the same.
6
Roland was momentarily horrified by the snakepit of hate and revulsion in which he found himself . . . and then
he heard the woman screaming, saw the big man with the potato-sack belly running toward her/him, saw people looking, and took control.
Suddenly he was the woman with the dusky hands. He sensed some strange duality inside her, but couldn't think about it now.
He turned the chair and began to shove it forward. The aisle rolled past him/her. People dived away to either side. The purse was lost, spilling Detta's credentials and stolen treasure in a wide trail along the floor. The man with the heavy gut skidded on bogus gold chains and lipstick tubes and then fell on his ass.
7
Shit! Halvorsen thought furiously, and for a moment one hand clawed under his sport-coat where there was a .38 in a clamshell holster. Then sanity reasserted itself. This was no drug bust or armed robbery; this was a crippled black lady in a wheelchair. She was rolling it like it was some punk's drag-racer, but a crippled black lady was all she was just the same. What was he going to do, shoot her? That would be great, wouldn't it? And where was she going to go? There was nothing at the end of the aisle but two dressing rooms.
He picked himself up, massaging his aching ass, and began after her again, limping a little now.
The wheelchair flashed into one of the dressing rooms. The door slammed, just clearing the push-handles on the back.
Got you now, bitch, Jimmy thought. And I'm going to give you one hell of a scare. I don't care if you got five orphan children and only a year to live. I'm not gonna hurt you, but oh babe I'm gonna shake your dice.
He beat the floorwalker to the dressing room, slammed the door open with his left shoulder, and it was empty.
No black woman.
No wheelchair.
No nothing.
He looked at the floorwalker, starey-eyed.
"Other one!" the floorwalker yelled. "Other one!"