The Gunslinger

When he woke up, he was on his back, and there was a pile of light, odorless hay beneath his head. The boy had not been able to move him, but he had made him reasonably comfortable. And he was cool. He looked down at himself and saw that his shirt was dark with moisture. He licked at his face and tasted water. He blinked at it



The boy was hunkered down beside him. When he saw the gunslinger's eyes were open, he reached behind him and gave the gunslinger a dented tin can filled with water. He grasped it with trembling hands and allowed himself to drink a little �C just a little. When that was down and sitting in his belly, he drank a little more. Then he spilled the rest over his face and made shocked blowing noises. The boy's pretty lips curved in a solemn little smile.



"Want something to eat?"



"Not yet," the gunslinger said. There was still a sick ache in his head from the sunstroke, and the water sat uneasily in his stomach, as if it did not know where to go. "Who are you?"



"My name is John Chambers. You can call me Jake."



The gunslinger sat up, and the sick ache became hard and immediate. He leaned forward and lost a brief struggle with his stomach.



"There's more," Jake said. He took the can and walked toward the rear of the stable. He paused and smiled back at the gunslinger uncertainly. The gunslinger nodded at him and then put his head down and propped it with his



hands. The boy was well-made, handsome, perhaps nine. There had been a shadow on his face, but there were shadows on all faces now.



A strange, thumping hum began at the rear of the stable, and the gunslinger raised his head alertly, hands going to gunbutts. The sound lasted for perhaps fifteen seconds and then quit. The boy came back with the can �C filled now.



The gunslinger drank sparingly again, and this time it was a little better. The ache in his head was fading.



"I didn't know what to do with you when you fell down," Jake said. "For a couple of seconds there, I thought you were going to shoot me."



"I thought you were somebody else."



"The priest?"



The gunslinger looked up sharply. "What priest?"



The boy looked at him, frowning lightly. "The priest He camped in the yard. I was in the house over there. I didn't like him, so I didn't come out He came in the night and went on the next day. I would have hidden from you, but I was sleepin' when you came." He looked darkly over the gunslinger's head. "I don't like people. They fuck me up."



"What did the priest look like?"



The boy shrugged. "Like a priest. He was wearing black things."



"Like a hood and a cassock?"



"What's a cassock?"



"A robe."



The boy nodded. "A robe and a hood."



The gunslinger leaned forward, and something in his face made the boy recoil a little. "How long ago?"



"I �C I �C "



Patiently, the gunslinger said, "I'm not going to hurt you."



"I don't know. I can't remember time. Every day is the same."



For the first time the gunslinger wondered consciously how the boy had come to this place, with dry and man killing leagues of desert all around it. But he would not make it his concern; not yet, at least. "Make a guess. Long ago?"



"No. Not long. I haven't been here long."



The fire lit in him again. He grabbed the can and drank from it with hands that trembled the smallest bit. A snatch of the cradle song recurred, but this time, instead of his mother's face, he saw the scarred face of Alice, who had been his woman in the now-defunct town of Tull. "How long? A week? Two? three?"



The boy looked at him distractedly. "Yes."



"Which one?"



"A week. Or two. I didn't come out. He didn't even drink. I thought he might be the ghost of a priest I was scared. I've been scared almost all the time." His face quivered like crystal on the edge of the ultimate, destructive high note. "He didn't even build a fire. He just sat there. I don't even know if he went to sleep."



Close! He was closer than he had ever been. In spite of his extreme dehydration, his hands felt faintly moist; greasy.



"There's some dried meat," the boy said.



"All right" The gunslinger nodded. "Good."



The boy got up to fetch it, his knees popping slightly. He made a fine straight figure. The desert had not yet sapped him. His arms were thin, but the skin, although tanned, had not dried and cracked. He's got juice, the gunslinger thought He drank from the can again. He's got juice and he didn't come from this place.



Jake came back with a pile of dried jerky on what looked like a sun-scoured breadboard. The meat was tough, stringy, and salty enough to make the cankered lining of the gunslinger's mouth sing. He ate and drank until he felt logy, and then settled back. The boy ate only a little.



The gunslinger regarded him steadily, and the boy looked back at him. "Where did you come from, Jake?" He asked finally.



"I don't know." The boy frowned. "I did know. I knew when I came here, but it's all fuzzy now, like a bad dream when you wake up. I have lots of bad dreams."



"Did somebody bring you?"



"No," the boy said. "I was just here."



"You're not making any sense," the gunslinger said flatly.



Quite suddenly the boy seemed on the verge of tears. "I can't help it. I was just here. And now you'll go away and I'll starve because you ate up almost all my food. I didn't ask to be here. I don't like it. It's spooky."



"Don't feel so sorry for yourself. Make do."



"I didn't ask to be here," the boy repeated bewildered defiance.



The gunslinger ate another piece of the meat, chewing the salt out of it before swallowing. The boy had become part of it, and the gunslinger was convinced he told the truth  - he had not asked for it. It was too bad. He himself ... he had asked for it But he had not asked for the game to become this dirty. He had not asked to be allowed to turn his guns on the unarmed populace of Tull; had not asked to shoot Allie, her face marked by that strange, shining scar; had not asked to be faced with a choice between the obsession of his duty and his quest and criminal amorality. The man in black had begun to pull bad strings in his desperation, if it was the man in black who had pulled this par ticular string. It was not fair to ring in innocent bystanders and make them speak lines they didn't understand on a strange stage. Allie, he thought Allie at least had been into the world in her own self-illusory way. But this boy... this God-damned boy....



"Tell me what you can remember," he told Jake.



"It's only a little. It doesn't seem to make any sense any more."



"Tell me. Maybe I can pick up the sense.



"There was a place... the one before this one. A high



place with lots of rooms and a patio where you could look at tall buildings and water. There was a statue that stood in the water."



"A statue in the water?"



"Yes. A lady with a crown and a torch."



"Are you making this up?"



"I guess I must be," the boy said hopelessly. "There were things to ride in on the streets. Big ones and little ones. Yellow ones. A lot of yellow ones. I walked to school. There were cement paths beside the streets. Windows to look in and more statues wearing clothes. The statues sold the clothes. I know it sounds crazy, but the statues sold the clothes."



The gunslinger shook his head and looked for a lie on the boy's face. He saw none.



"I walked to school," the boy repeated fixedly. "And I had a �C "His eyes tilted closed and his lips moved gropingly." �C a brown... book... bag. I carried a lunch. And I wore �C "the groping again, agonized groping" �C a tie."



"A what?"



"I don't know." The boy's fingers made a slow, unconscious clinching motion at his throat �C a gesture the gun-



slinger associated with hanging. "I don't know. It's just all gone." And he looked away.



"May I put you to sleep?" The gunslinger asked. "I'm not sleepy."



"I can make you sleepy, and I can make you remember."



Doubtfully, Jake asked, "How could you do that?"



"With this."



The gunslinger removed one of the shells from his gunbelt and twirled it in his fingers. The movement was dexterous, as flowing as oil. The shell cartwheeled effortlessly from thumb and index and index and second, to second and ring, to ring and pinky. It popped out of sight and reappeared; seemed to float briefly, and then reversed. The shell walked across the gunslinger's fingers. The fingers themselves moved like a beaded curtain in a breeze. The boy watched, his initial doubt replaced with plain delight, then by raptness, then by a dawning mute blankness. The eyes slipped shut The shell danced back and forth. Jake's eyes opened again, caught the steady, limpid dance between the gunslinger's fingers for a while longer, and then his eyes closed once more. The gunslinger continued, but Jake's eyes did not open again. The boy breathed with steady, bovine calmness. Was this part of it? Yes. There was a certain beauty, a logic, like the lacy frettings that fringe hard blue ice-packs. He seemed to hear the sound of wind-chimes. Not for the first time the gunslinger tasted the smooth, loden taste of soul-sickness. The shell in his fingers, manipulated with such unknown grace, was suddenly undead, horrific, the spoor of a monster. He dropped it into his palm and closed it into a fist with painful force. There were such things as rape in the world. Rape and murder and unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, for the myth, for the grail, for the Tower. Ah, the Tower stood somewhere, rearing its black bulk to



the sky, and in his desert-scoured ears, the gunslinger heard the faint sweet sound of wind-chimes.



"Where are you?" he asked.



Jake Chambers is going downstairs with his book bag There is Earth Science, there is Economic Geography, there is a notepad, a pencil, a lunch his mother's cook, Mrs. Greta Shaw, has made for him in the chrome-and-formica kitchen where a fan whirrs eternally, sucking up alien odors. In his lunch sack he has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bologna, lettuce, and onion sandwich, and four Oreo cookies. His parents do not hate him, but they seem to have overlooked him. They have abdicated and left him to Mrs. Greta Shaw, to nannies, to a tutor in the summer and The School (which is Private and Nice, and most of all, White) the rest of the time. None of these people have ever pretended to be more than what they are �C professional people, the best in their fields. None have folded him to a particularly warm bosom as usually happens in the historical novels his mother reads and which fake has dipped into, looking for the "hot parts. "Hysterical novels, his fat her sometimes calls them, and sometimes, "bodice-rippers." You should talk, his mother says with infinite scorn from behind some closed door where Jake listens. His father works for The Network, and Jake could pick him out of a line-up. Probably.



Jake does not know that he hates all the professional people, but he does. People have always bewildered him. He likes stairs and will not use the self-service elevator in his building His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way, often goes to bed with sick friends.



Now he is on the street, Jake Chambers is on the street, he has "Hit the bricks." He is clean and well-mannered, comely, sensitive. He has no friends; only acquaintances. He has never bothered to think about this, but it hurts him. He does not know or understand that a long association with professional people has caused him to take many of their traits. Mrs. Greta Shaw makes



hands folded in his lap, still breathing calmly. He had told his tale without much emotion, although his voice had trembled near the end, when he had come to the part about the "priest" and the "Act of Contrition." He had not, of course, told the gunslinger about his family and his own sense of bewildered dichotomy, but that had seeped through anyway �C enough had seeped through to make out its shape. The fact that there had never been such a city as the boy described (or, if so, it had only existed in the myth of prehistory) was not the most upsetting part of the story, but it was disturbing. It was all disturbing. The gunslinger was afraid of the implications.



"Jake?"



"Uh-huh?"



"Do you want to remember this when you wake up, or forget it?"



"Forget it," the boy said promptly. "I bled."



"All right You're going to sleep, understand? Go ahead and lie over."