The Gunslinger

another coin, which Kennerly caught on the fly.



"Surely. You stayin' a little?"



"I guess I might."



"That Allie's pretty nice when she wants to be, ain't she?"



"Did you say something?" The gunslinger asked remotely.



Sudden terror dawned in Kennerly's eyes, like twin moons coming over the horizon. "No, sir, not a word. And I'm sorry if I did." He caught sight of Soobie leaning out a window and whirled on her. "I'll whale you now, you little slut-face! 'Fore God! I'll �C "



The gunslinger walked away, aware that Kennerly had turned to watch him, aware of the fact that he could whirl and catch the hostler with some true and untinctured emotion distilled on his face. He let it slip. It was hot. The only sure thing about the desert was its size. And it wasn't all played out in this town. Not yet.



XI



They were in bed when Sheb kicked the door open and came in with the knife.



It had been four days, and they had gone by in a blinking haze. He ate. He slept. He made sex with Allie. He found that she played the fiddle and he made her play it for him. She sat by the window in the milky light of daybreak, only a profile, and played something haltingly that might have been good if she had been trained. He felt a growing (but strangely absent-minded) affection for her and thought this might be the trap the man in black had left behind. He read dry and tattered back issues of magazines with faded pictures. He thought very little about everything.



He didn't hear the little piano player come up �C his



reflexes had sunk. That didn't seem to matter either, although it would have frightened him badly in another time and place.



Allie was naked, the sheet below her breasts, and they were preparing to make love.



"Please," she was saying. "Like before, I want that, I want �C "



The door crashed open and the piano player made his ridiculous, knock-kneed run for the sun. Allie did not scream, although Sheb held an eight-inch carving knife in his hand. Sheb was making a noise, an inarticulate blabbering. He sounded like a man being drowned in a bucket of mud. Spittle flew. He brought the knife down with both hands, and the gunslinger caught his wrists and turned them. The knife went flying. Sheb made a high screeching noise, like a rusty screen door. His hands fluttered in marionette movements, both wrists broken. The wind gritted against the window. Allie's glass on the wall, faintly clouded and distorted, reflected the room.



"She was mine!" He wept. "She was mine first! Mine!"



Allie looked at him and got out of bed. She put on a wrapper, and the gunslinger felt a moment of empathy for a man who must be seeing himself coming out on the far end of what he once had. He was just a little man, and gelded.



"It was for you," Sheb sobbed. "It was only for you, Allie. It was you first and it was all for you. I �C ah,oh God, dear God �C "The words dissolved into a paroxysm of un intelligibilities, finally to tears. He rocked back and forth, holding his broken wrists to his belly.



"Shhh. Shhh. Let me see." She knelt beside him. "Broken. Sheb, you ass. Didn't you know you were never strong?" She helped him to his feet. He tried to hold his hands to his face, but they would not obey, and he wept nakedly., "Come on over to the table and let me see what I can do."



She led him to the table and set his wrists with slats of



kindling from the fire box. He wept weakly and without volition, and left without looking back.



She came back to the bed. "Where were we?"



"No," he said.



She said patiently, "You knew about that. There's nothing to be done. What else is there?" She touched his shoulder. "Except I'm glad that you are so strong."



"Not now," he said thickly.



"I can make you strong  - "



"No," he said. "You can't do that."



XII



The next night the bar was closed. It was whatever passed for the Sabbath in Tull. The gunslinger went to the tiny, leaning church by the graveyard while Allie washed tables with strong disinfectant and rinsed kerosene lamp chimnies in soapy water.



An odd purple dusk had fallen, and the church, lit from the inside, looked almost like a blast furnace from the road.



"I don't go," Allie had said shortly. "The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go.



He stood in the vestibule, hidden in a shadow, looking in. The pews were gone and the congregation stood (he saw Kennerly and his brood; Castner, owner of the town's scrawny dry-goods emporium and his slat-sided wife; a few barflies; a few "town" women he had never seen before; and, surprisingly, Sheb). They were singing a hymn raggedly, a cappella. He looked curiously at the mountainous woman at the pulpit. Allie had said: "She lives alone, hardly ever sees anybody. Only comes out on Sunday to serve up the hellfire. Her name is Sylvia Pittston. She's crazy, but she's got the hoodoo on them. They like it that way. It suits them."



No description could take the measure of the woman.



Breasts like earthworks. A huge pillar of a neck overtopped by a pasty white moon of a face, in which blinked eyes so large and so dark that they seemed to be bottomless tarns. Her hair was a beautiful rich brown and it was piled atop her head in a haphazard, lunatic sprawl, held by a hairpin big enough to be a meat skewer. She wore a dress that seemed to be made of burlap. The arms that held the hymnal were slabs. Her skin was creamy, unmarked, lovely. He thought that she must top three hundred pounds. He felt a sudden red lust for her that made him feel shaky, and he turned his head and looked away.



"Shall we gather at the river,



The beautiful, the beautiful,



The riiiiver,



Shall we gather at the river,



That flows by the Kingdom of God."



The last note of the last chorus faded off, and there was a moment of shuffling and coughing.



She waited. When they were settled, she spread her hands over them, as if in benediction. It was an evocative gesture.



"My dear little brothers and sisters in Christ."



It was a haunting line. For a moment the gunslinger felt mixed feelings of nostalgia and fear, stitched in with an eerie feeling of deja vu �C he thought: I dreamed this. When? He shook it off. The audience �C perhaps twenty-five all told �C had become dead silent.



"The subject of our meditation tonight is The Interloper." Her voice was sweet, melodious, the speaking voice of a well-trained soprano.



"A little rustle ran through the audience.



"I feel," Sylvia Pittston said reflectively, "I feel that I know everyone in The Book personally. In the last five years I have worn out five Bibles, and uncountable numbers before that. I love the story, and I love the players in that story. I have walked arm in arm in the lion's den with



Daniel. I stood with David when he was tempted by Bath sheba as she bathed at the pool. I have been in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I slew two thousand with Samson and was blinded with St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I wept with Mary at Golgotha."



A soft, shurring sigh in the audience.



"I have known and loved them. There is only one  - one �C "she held up a finger �C "only one player in the greatest of all dramas that I do not know. Only one who stands outside with his face in the shadow. Only one that makes my body tremble and my spirit quail. I fear him. I don't know his mind and I fear him. I fear The Interloper."



Another sigh. One of the women had put a hand over her mouth as if to stop a sound and was rocking, rocking.



"The Interloper who came to Eve as a snake on its belly, grinning and writhing. The Interloper who walked among the Children of Israel while Moses was up on the Mount, who whispered to them to make a golden idol, a golden calf, and to worship it with foulness and fornication."



Moans, nods.



"The Interloper! He stood on the balcony with Jezebel and watched as King Ahaz fell screaming to his death, and he and she grinned as the dogs gathered and lapped up his life's blood. Oh, my little brothers and sisters, watch thou for The Interloper."



"Yes, 0 Jesus �C "The man the gunslinger had first noticed coming into town, the one with the straw hat.



"He's always been there, my brothers and sisters. But I don't know his mind. And you don't know his mind. Who could understand the awful darkness that swirls there, the pride like pylons, the titanic blasphemy, the unholy glee? And the madness! The cyclopean, gibbering madness that walks and crawls and wriggles through men's most awful wants and desires?"



"0 Jesus Savior �C "



"It was him who took our Lord up on the mountain  - ""Yes �C "



"It was him that tempted him and shewed him all the world and the world's pleasures  - "Yesss �C "



"It's him that will come back when Last Times come on the world.., and they are coming, my brothers and sisters, can't you feel they are?"



"Yesss �C "



Rocking and sobbing, the congregation became a sea; the woman seemed to point at all of them, none of them.



"It's him that will come as the Antichrist, to lead men into the flaming bowels of perdition, to the bloody end of wickedness, as Star Wormwood hangs blazing in the sky, as gall gnaws at the vitals of the children, as women's wombs give forth monstrosities, as the works of men's hands turn to blood �C "



"Ahhh �C "



"Ah, God �C "



"Gawwwwwwww �C "



A woman fell on the floor, her legs crashing up and down against the wood. One of her shoes flew off.



"It's him that stands behind every fleshly pleasure ... him! The Interloper!"



"Yes, Lord!"



A man fell on his knees, holding his head and braying.



"When you take a drink, who holds the bottle?"



"The Interloper!"



"When you sit down to a faro or a Watch Me table, who turns the cards?"



"The Interloper!"



"When you riot in the flesh of another's body, when you pollute yourself, who are you selling your soul to?"



"In �C "