Stephen King - The Gunslinger

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THE GUNSLINGER
STEPHEN KING
TO
ED FERMAN
who took a chance on these stories, one by one.
THE GUNSLINGER
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might
have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the
faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass
which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for
once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and
coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.
The gunslinger walked stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A hide waterbag was slung around his
middle like a bloated sausage. It was almost full. He had progressed through the khef over many
years, and had reached the fifth level. At the seventh or eighth, he would not have been thirsty;
he could have watched own body dehydrate with clinical, detached attention, watering its crevices
and dark inner hollows only when his logic told him it must be done. He was not seventh or eighth.
He was fifth. So he was thirsty, although he had no particular urge to drink. In a vague way, all
this pleased him. It was romantic.
Below the waterbag were his guns, finely weighted to his hand. The two belts crisscrossed
above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even this Philistine sun to crack. The
stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow and finely grained. The holsters were tied down with
raw hide cord, and they swung heavily against his hips. The brass casings of the cartridges looped
into the gun belts twinkled and flashed and heliographed in the sun. The leather made subtle
creaking noises. The guns themselves made no noise. They had spilled blood. There was no need to
make noise in the sterility of the desert
His clothes were the no-color of rain or dust. His shirt was open at the throat, with a rawhide
thong dangling loosely in hand-punched eyelets. His pants were seam-stretched dungarees.
He breasted a gently rising dune (although there was no sand here; the desert was hardpan, and
even the harsh winds that blew when dark came raised only an aggravating harsh dust like scouring
powder) and saw the kicked remains of a tiny campfire on the lee side, the side which the sun
would quit earliest. Small signs like this, once more affirming the man in black’s essential
humanity, never failed to please him. His lips stretched in the pitted, flaked remains of his
face. He squatted.
He had burned the devil-grass, of course. It was the only thing out here that would burn. It
burned with a greasy, flat light, and it burned slow. Border dwellers had told him that devils
lived even in the flames. They burned it but would not look into the light. They said the devils
hypnotized, beckoned, would eventually draw the one who looked into the fires. And the next man
foolish enough to look into the fire might see you.
The burned grass was crisscrossed in the now-familiar ideographic pattern, and crumbled to gray
senselessness before the gunslinger’s prodding hand. There was nothing
in the remains but a charred scrap of bacon, which he ate thoughtfully. It had always been this
way. The gunslinger had followed the man in black across the desert for two months now, across the
endless, screamingly monotonous purgatorial wastes, and had yet to find spoor other than the
hygienic sterile ideographs of the man in black’s camp fires. He had not found a can, a bottle, or
a waterbag (the gunslinger had left four of those behind, like dead snake-skins).
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— Perhaps the campfires are a message, spelled out letter by letter. Take a powder. Or, the end
draweth nigh. Or maybe even, Eat at Joe’s. It didn’t matter. He had no understanding of the
ideograms, if they were ideograms. And the remains were as cold as all the others. He knew he was
closer, but did not know how he knew. That didn’t matter either. He stood up, brushing his hands.
No other trace; the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away even what scant tracks the hardpan
held. He had never even been able to find his quarry’s droppings. Nothing. Only these cold
campfires along the ancient highway and the relentless range-finder in his own head.
He sat down and allowed himself a short pull from the waterbag. He scanned the desert, looked up
at the sun, which was now sliding down the far quadrant of the sky. He got up, removed his gloves
from his belt, and began to pull devil-grass for his own fire, which he laid over the ashes the
man in black had left. He found the irony, like the romance of his thirst, bitterly appealing.
He did not use the flint and steel until the remains of the day were only the fugitive heat in the
ground beneath him and a sardonic orange line on the monochrome western horizon. He watched the
south patiently, toward the mountains, not hoping or expecting to see the thin straight line of
smoke from a new campfire, but merely watching because that was a part of it. There was nothing.
He was
close, but only relatively so. Not close enough to see smoke at dusk.
He struck his spark to the dry, shredded grass and lay down upwind, letting the dreamsmoke blow
out toward the waste. The wind, except for occasional gyrating dust devils, was constant.
Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying
constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to
ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows as
the devil-grass burned its slow way down into new patterns —not ideograms but a straightforward
crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. He had laid his fuel in a pattern
that was not artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might
straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and
phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The gunslinger did not see. He slept. The two patterns,
art and craft, were welded together. The wind moaned. Every now and then a perverse downdraft
would make the smoke whirl and eddy toward him, and sporadic whiffs of the smoke touched him. They
built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster. Occasionally
the gunslinger moaned with the wind. The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars,
crucifixions, resurrections. This also would have pleased him.
II
He had come down off the last of the foothills leading the donkey, whose eyes were already dead
and bulging with the heat. He had passed the last town three weeks be-
fore, and since then there had only been the deserted coach track and an occasional huddle of
border dwellers’ sod dwellings. The huddles had degenerated into single dwellings, most inhabited
by lepers or madmen. He found the madmen better company. One had given him a stainless steel Silva
compass and bade him give it to Jesus. The gun slinger took it gravely. If he saw Him, he would
turn over the compass. He did not expect to.
Five days had passed since the last hut, and he had begun to suspect there would be no more when
he topped the last eroded hill and saw the familiar low-backed sod roof.
The dweller, a surprisingly young man with a wild shock of strawberry hair that reached almost to
his waist, was weeding a scrawny stand of corn with zealous abandon. The mule let out a wheezing
grunt and the dweller looked up, glaring blue eyes coming target-center on the gunslinger in a
moment He raised both hands in curt salute and then bent to the corn again, humping up the row
next to his hut with back bent, tossing devil-grass and an occasional stunted corn plant over his
shoulder. His hair flopped and flew in the wind that now came directly from the desert, with
nothing to break it
The gunslinger came down the hill slowly, leading the donkey on which his waterskins sloshed. He
paused by the edge of the lifeless-looking cornpatch, drew a drink from one of his skins to start
the saliva, and spatinto the arid soil.
“Life for your crop.”
“Life for your own,” the dweller answered and stood up. His back popped audibly. He surveyed the
gunslinger without fear. The little of his face visible between beard and hair seemed unmarked by
the rot, and his eyes, while a bit wild, seemed sane.
“I don’t have anything but corn and beans,” he said. “Corn’s free, but you’ll have to kick
something in for the
beans. A man brings them out once in a while. He don’t stay long.” The dweller laughed shortly.
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“Afraid of spirits.”
“I expect he thinks you’re one.”
“I expect he does.”
They looked at each other in silence for a moment. The dweller put out his hand. “Brown is my
name.” The gunslinger shook his hand. As he did so, a scrawny
raven croaked from the low peak of the sod roof. The dwell er gestured at it briefly:
“That’s Zoltan.”
At the sound of its name the raven croaked again and flew across to Brown. It landed on the
dweller’s head and roosted, talons firmly twined in the wild thatch of hair.
“Screw you,” Zoltan croaked brightly. “Screw you and the horse you rode in on.”
The gunslinger nodded amiably.
“Beans, beans, the musical fruit,” the raven recited, inspired. “The more you eat, the more you
toot”
“You teach him that?”
“That’s all he wants to learn, I guess,” Brown said. “Tried to teach him The Lord’s Prayer once.”
His eyes traveled out beyond the hut for a moment, toward the gritty, featureless hardpan. “Guess
this ain’t Lord’s Prayer country. You’re a gunslinger. That right?”
“Yes.” He hunkered down and brought out his makings. Zoltan launched himself from Brown’s head and
landed, flittering, on the gunslinger’s shoulder.
“After the other one, I guess.”
“Yes.” The inevitable question formed in his mouth:
“How long since he passed by?”
Brown shrugged. “I don’t know. Time’s funny out here. More than two weeks. Less than two months.
The bean man’s been twice since he passed. I’d guess six weeks. That’s probably wrong.”
“The more you eat, the more you toot,” Zoltan said.
“Did he stop off?” the gunslinger asked.
Brown nodded. “He stayed supper, same as you will, I guess. We passed the time.”
The gunslinger stood up and the bird flew back to the roof, squawking. He felt an odd, trembling
eagerness. “What did he talk about?”
Brown cocked an eyebrow at him. “Not much. Did it ever rain and when did I come here and had I
buried my wife. I did most of the talking, which ain’t usual.” He paused. and the only sound was
the stark wind. “He’s a sorcerer, ain’t he?”
“Yes.”
Brown nodded slowly. “I knew. Are you?”
“I’m just a man.”
“You’ll never catch him.”
“I’ll catch him.”
They looked at each other, a sudden depth of feeling between them, the dweller upon his dust-puff-
dry ground, the gunslinger on the hardpan that shelved down to the desert. He reached for his
flint.
“Here.” Brown produced a sulfur-headed match and struck it with a grimed nail. The gunslinger
pushed the tip of his smoke into the flame and drew.
“Thanks.”
“You’ll want to fill your skins,” the dweller said, turning away. “Spring’s under the eaves in
back. I’ll start dinner.”
The gunslinger stepped gingerly over the rows of corn and went around back. The spring was at the
bottom of a hand-dug well, lined with stones to keep the powdery earth from caving. As he
descended the rickety ladder, the gunslinger reflected that the stones must represent two years’
work easily — hauling, dragging, laying. The water was clear but slow-moving, and filling the
skins was a long chore.
While he was topping the second, Zoltan perched on the lip of the well.
“Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” he advised.
He looked up, startled. The shaft was about fifteen feet deep: easy enough for Brown to drop a
rock on him, break his head, and steal everything on him. A crazy or a rotter wouldn’t do it;
Brown was neither. Yet he liked Brown, and so he pushed the thought out of his mind and got the
rest of his water. What came, came.
When he came through the hut’s door and walked down the steps (the hovel proper was set below
ground level, de signed to catch and hold the coolness of the nights), Brown was poking ears of
corn into the embers of a tiny fire with a hardwood spatula. Two ragged plates had been set at op
posite ends of a dun blanket. Water for the beans was just beginning to bubble in a pot hung over
the fire.
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“I’ll pay for the water, too.”
Brown did not look up. “The water’s a gift from God. Pappa Doc brings the beans.”
The gunslinger grunted a laugh and sat down with his back against one rude wall, folded his arms
and closed his eyes. After a little, the smell of roasting corn came to his nose. There was a
pebbly rattle as Brown dumped a paper of dry beans into the pot An occasional tak-tak-tak as
Zoltan walked restlessly on the roof. He was tired; he had been going sixteen and sometimes
eighteen hours a day between here and the horror that had occurred in Tull, the last vil lage. And
he had been afoot for the last twelve days; the mule was at the end of its endurance.
Tak-tak-tak.
Two weeks, Brown had said, or as much as six. Didn’t matter. There had been calendars in Tull, and
they had remembered the man in black because of the old man he had healed on his way through. Just
an old man dying with
the weed. An old man of thirty-five. And if Brown was right, the man in black had lost ground
since then. But the desert was next. And the desert would be hell.
Tak-tak-tak.
— Lend me your wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.
He slept
III
Brown woke him up five hours later. It was dark. The only light was the dull cherry glare of the
banked embers.
“Your mule has passed on,” Brown said. “Dinner’s ready.”
“How?”
Brown shrugged. “Roasted and boiled, how else? You picky?”
“No, the mule.”
“It just laid over, that’s all. It looked like an old mule.” And with a touch of apology: “Zoltan
et the eyes.”
“Oh.” He might have expected it “All right”
Brown surprised him again when they sat down to the blanket that served as a table by asking a
brief blessing: Rain, health, expansion to the spirit
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” The gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn
onto his plate.
Brown nodded. “I think this is it.”
IV
The beans were like bullets, the corn tough. Outside, the prevailing wind snuffled and whined
around the ground-level eaves. He ate quickly, ravenously, drinking four cups of water with the
meal. Halfway through, there
was a machine-gun rapping at the door. Brown got up and let Zoltan in. The bird flew across the
room and hunched moodily in the corner.
“Musical fruit,” he muttered.
After dinner, the gunslinger offered his tobacco.
— Now. Now the questions will come.
But Brown asked no questions. He smoked and looked at the dying embers of the fire. It was already
noticeably cooler in the hovel.
“Lead us not into temptation,” Zoltan said suddenly, apocalyptically.
The gunslinger started as if he had been shot at. He was suddenly sure that it was an illusion,
all of it (not a dream, no; an enchantment), that the man in black had spun a spell and was trying
to tell him something in a maddeningly obtuse, symbolic way.
“Have you been through Tull?” he asked suddenly.
Brown nodded. “Coming here, and once to sell corn. It rained that year. Lasted maybe fifteen
minutes. The ground just seemed to open and suck it up. An hour later it was just as white and dry
as ever. But the corn — God, the corn. You could see it grow. That wasn’t so bad. But you could
hear it, as if the rain had given it a mouth. It wasn’t a happy sound. It seemed to be sighing and
groaning its way out of the earth.” He paused. “I had extra, so I took it and sold it. Pappa Doc
said he’d do it, but he would have cheated me. So I went.”
“You don’t like town?”
“No.’’
“I almost got killed there,” the gunslinger said abruptly.
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“That so?”
“I killed a man that was touched by God,” the gunslinger said. “Only it wasn’t God. It was the man
in black.”
“He laid you a trap.”
“Yes.”
The looked at each other across the shadows, the moment taking on overtones of finality.
— Now the questions will come.
But Brown had nothing to say. His smoke was a smoldering roach, but when the gunslinger tapped his
poke, Brown shook his head.
Zoltan shifted restlessly, seemed about to speak, subsided.
“May I tell you about it?” the gunslinger asked.
“Sure.”
The gunslinger searched for words to begin and found none. “I have to flow,” he said.
Brown nodded. “The water does that. The corn, please?”
“Sure.”
He went up the stairs and out into the dark. The stars glittered overhead in a mad splash. The
wind pulsed steadily. His urine arched out over the powdery cornfield in a wavering stream. The
man in black had sent him here. Brown might even be the man in black himself. It might be —He shut
the thoughts away. The only contingency he
had not learned how to bear was the possibility of his own madness. He went back inside.
“Have you decided if I’m an enchantment yet?” Brown asked, amused.
The gunslinger paused on the tiny landing, startled. Then he came down slowly and sat
“I started to tell you about Tull.”
“Is it growing?”
“It’s dead,” the gunslinger said, and the words hung in the air.
Brown nodded. “The desert. I think it may strangle
everything eventually. Did you know that there was once a coach road across the desert?”
The gunslinger closed his eyes. His mind whirled crazily.
“You doped me,” he said thickly.
“No. I’ve done nothing.”
The gunslinger opened his eyes warily.
“You won’t feel right about it unless I invite you,” Brown said. “And so I do. Will you tell me
about Tull?”
The gunslinger opened his mouth hesitantly and was surprised to find that this time the words were
there. He began to speak in flat bursts that slowly spread into an even, slightly toneless
narrative. The doped feeling left him, and he found himself oddly excited. He talked deep into the
night. Brown did not interrupt at all. Neither did the bird.
V
He had bought the mule in Pricetown, and when he reached Tull, it was still fresh. The sun had set
an hour earlier, but the gunslinger had continued traveling, guided by the town glow in the sky,
then by the uncannily clear notes of a honky-tonk piano playing Hey Jude. The road widened as it
took on tributaries.
The forests had been gone long now, replaced by the monotonous flat country: endless, desolate
fields gone to timothy and low shrubs, shacks, eerie, deserted estates guarded by brooding,
shadowed mansions where demons undeniably walked; leering, empty shanties where the people had
either moved on or had been moved along, an occasional dweller’s hovel, given away by a single
flickering point of light in the dark, or by sullen, inbred clans toiling silently in the fields
by day. Corn was the main crop, but there were beans and also some peas. An occasional
scrawny cow stared at him lumpishly from between peeled alder poles. Coaches had passed him four
times, twice coming and twice going, nearly empty as they came up on him from behind and bypassed
him and his mule, fuller as they headed back toward the forests of the north.
It was ugly country. It had showered twice since he had left Pricetown, grudgingly both times.
Even the timothy looked yellow and dispirited. Ugly country. He had seen no sign of the man in
black. Perhaps he had taken a coach.
The road made a bend, and beyond it the gunslinger clucked the mule to a stop and looked down at
Tull. It was at the floor of a circular, bowl-shaped hollow, a shoddy jewel in a cheap setting.
There were a number of lights, most of them clustered around the area of the music. There looked
to be four streets, three running at right angles to the coach road, which was the main avenue of
the town. Perhaps there would be a restaurant. He doubted it, but perhaps. He clucked at the mule.
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More houses sporadically lined the road now, most of them still deserted. He passed a tiny
graveyard with moldy, leaning wooden slabs overgrown and choked by the rank devil-grass. Perhaps
five hundred feet further on he passed a chewed sign which said: TULL
The paint was flaked almost to the point of illegibility. There was another further on, but the
gunslinger was not able to read that one at all.
A fool’s chorus of half-stoned voices was rising in the final protracted lyric of Hey Jude — “Naa-
naa-naa naa-na na-na... hey, Jude...” — as he entered the town proper. It was a dead sound, like
the wind in the hollow of a rotted tree. Only the prosaic thump and pound of the honky-tonk piano
saved him from seriously wondering if the man in black might not have raised ghosts to inhabit a
deserted town. He smiled a little at the thought.
There were a few people on the streets, not many, but a few. Three ladies wearing black slacks and
identical middy blouses passed by on the opposite boardwalk, not looking at him with pointed
curiosity. Their faces seemed to swim above their all-but-invisible bodies like huge, pallid
baseballs with eyes. A solemn old man with a straw hat perched firmly on top of his head watched
him from the steps of a boarded-up grocery store. A scrawny tailor with a late customer paused to
watch him by; he held up the lamp in his window for a better look. The gunslinger nodded. Neither
the tailor nor his customer nodded back. He could feel their eyes resting heavily against the low-
slung holsters that lay against his hips. A young boy, perhaps thirteen, and his girl crossed the
street a block up, pausing imperceptibly. Their footfalls raised little hanging clouds of dust. A
few of the street side lamps worked, but their glass sides were cloudy with congealed oil. Most
had been crashed out. There was a livery, probably depending on the coach line for its survival.
Three boys were crouched silently around a marble ring drawn in the dust to one side of the barn’s
gaping maw, smoking cornshuck cigarettes. They made long shadows in the yard.
The gunslinger led his mule past them and looked into the dim depths of the barn. One lamp glowed
sunken ly, and a shadow jumped and flickered as a gangling old man in bib overalls forked loose
timothy hay into the hay loft with huge, grunting swipes of his fork.
“Hey!” the gunslinger called.
The fork faltered and the hostler looked around waspishly. “Hey yourself!”
“I got a mule here.”
“Good for you.”
The gunslinger flicked a heavy, unevenly milled gold
piece into the semi dark. It rang on the old, chaff-drifted boards and glittered.
The hostler came forward, bent, picked it up, squinted at the gunslinger. His eyes dropped to the
gunbelts and he nodded sourly.
“How long you want him put up?”
“A night. Maybe two. Maybe longer.”
“I ain’t got no change for gold.”
“I’m not asking for any.”
“Blood money,” the hostler muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.” The hostler caught the mule’s bridle and led him inside.
“Rub him down!” the gunslinger called. The old man did not turn.
The gunslinger walked out to the boys crouched around the marble ring. They had watched the entire
exchange with contemptuous interest
“How they hanging?” the gunslinger asked conversationally.
No answer.
“You dudes live in town?”
No answer.
One of the boys removed a crazily tilted twist of corn-shuck from his mouth, grasped a green cat’s-
eye marble, and squirted it into the dirt circle. It struck a croaker and knocked it outside. He
picked up the cat’s-eye and prepared to shoot again.
“There a restaurant in this town?” the gunslinger asked.
One of them looked up, the youngest There was a huge cold-sore at the corner of his mouth, but his
eyes were still ingenuous. He looked at the gunslinger with hooded brimming wonder that was
touching and frightening.
“Might get a burger at Sheb’s.”
“That the honky-tonk?”
The boy nodded but didn’t speak. The eyes of his playmates had turned ugly and hostile.
The gunslinger touched the brim of his hat. “I’m grateful. It’s good to know someone in this town
is bright enough to talk.”
He walked past, mounted the boardwalk and started down toward Sheb’s, hearing the clear,
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contemptuous voice of one of the others, hardly more than a childish treble:
“Weed-eater! How long you been screwin’ your sister, Charlie? Weed-eater!”
There were three flaring kerosene lamps in front of Sheb’s, one to each side and one nailed above
the drunk-hung batwing doors. The chorus of Hey Jude had petered out, and the piano was plinking
some other old ballad. Voices murmured like broken threads. The gunslinger paused outside for a
moment, looking in. Sawdust floor, spittoons by the tipsy-legged tables. A plank bar on saw-
horses. A gummy mirror behind it, reflecting the piano player, who wore an inevitable piano-stool
slouch. The front of the piano had been removed so you could watch the wooden keys whonk up and
down as the contraption was played. The bartender was a straw-haired woman wearing a dirty blue
dress. One strap was held with a safety pin. There were perhaps six townies in the back of the
room, juicing and playing Watch Me apathetically. Another half-dozen were grouped loosely about
the piano. Four or five at the bar. And an old man with wild gray hair collapsed at a table by the
doors. The gunslinger went in.
Heads swiveled to look at him and his guns. There was a moment of near silence, except for the
oblivious piano player, who continued to tinkle. Then the woman mopped at the bar, and things
shifted back.
“Watch me,” one of the players in the corner said and matched three hearts with four spades,
emptying his hand. The one with the hearts swore, handed over his bet, and the next was dealt.
The gunslinger approached the bar. “You got hamburger?” he asked.
“Sure.” She looked him in the eye, and she might have been pretty when she started out, but now
her face was lumpy and there was a livid scar corkscrewed across her forehead. She had powdered it
heavily, but it called attention rather than camouflaging. “It’s dear, though.”
“I figured. Gimme three burgers and a beer.”
Again that subtle shift in tone. Three hamburgers. Mouths watered and tongues liked at saliva with
slow lust Three hamburgers.
“That would go you five bucks. With the beer.”
The gunslinger put a gold piece on the bar.
Eyes followed it.
There was a sullenly smoldering charcoal brazier behind the bar and to the left of the mirror. The
woman disappeared into a small room behind it and returned with meat on a paper. She scrimped out
three patties and put them on the fire. The smell that arose was maddening. The gunslinger stood
with stolid indifference, only peripherally aware of the faltering piano, the slowing of the card
game, the sidelong glances of the barflies.
The man was halfway up behind him when the gunslinger saw him in the mirror. The man was almost
completely bald, and his hand was wrapped around the haft of a gigantic hunting knife that was
looped onto his belt like a holster.
“Go sit down,” the gunslinger said quietly.
The man stopped. His upper lip lifted unconsciously, like a dog’s, and there was a moment of
silence. Then he
went back to his table, and the atmosphere shifted back again. His beer came in a cracked glass
schooner. “I ain’t got
change for gold,” the woman said truculently.
“Don’t expect any.”
She nodded angrily, as if this show of wealth, even at her benefit, incensed her. But she took his
gold, and a moment later the hamburgers came on a cloudy plate, still red around the edges.
“Do you have salt?”
She gave into him from underneath the bar. “Bread?”
“No.” He knew she was lying, but he didn’t push it. The bald man was staring at him with cyanosed
eyes, his hands clenching and unclenching on the splintered and gouged surface of his table. His
nostrils flared with pulsating regularity.
The gunslinger began to eat steadily, almost blandly, chopping the meat apart and forking it into
his mouth, trying not to think of what might have been added to cut the beef.
He was almost through, ready to call for another beer and roll a smoke when the hand fell on his
shoulder.
He suddenly became aware that the room had gone silent again, and he tasted thick tension in the
air. He turned around and stared into the face of the man who had been asleep by the door when he
entered. It was a terrible face. The odor of the devil-grass was a rank miasma. The eyes were
damned, the staring, glaring eyes of those who see but do not see, eyes ever turned inward to the
sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the
unconscious.
The woman behind the bar made a small moaning sound.
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The cracked lips writhed, lifted, revealing the green,
mossy teeth, and the gunslinger thought: — He’s not even smoking it anymore. He’s chewing it. He’s
really chewing it.
And on the heels of that: — He’s a dead man. He should have been dead a year ago.
And on the heels of that: — The man in black.
They stared at each other, the gunslinger and the man who had gone around the rim of madness.
He spoke, and the gunslinger, dumfounded, heard himself addressed in the High Speech:
“The gold for a favor, gunslinger. Just one? For a pretty.”
The High Speech. For a moment his mind refused to track it. It had been years — God! — centuries,
millenniums; there was no more High Speech, he was the last, the last gunslinger. The others were
—Numbed, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a gold piece. The split, scrubbed hand
reached for it, fondled it, held it up to reflect the greasy glare of the kerosene lamps. It threw
off its proud civilized glow; golden, reddish, bloody.
“Ahhhhhh... “An inarticulate sound of pleasure. The old man did a weaving turn and began moving
back to his table, holding the coin at eye level, turning it, flashing
it.
The room was emptying rapidly, the batwings shuffling madly back and forth. The piano player
closed the lid of his instrument with a bang and exited after the others in long, comic-opera
strides.
“Sheb!” The woman screamed after him, her voice an odd mixture of fear and shrewishness, “Sheb,
you come back here! Goddammit!”
The old man, meanwhile, had gone back to his table.
He spun the gold piece on the gouged wood, and the dead alive eyes followed it with empty
fascination. He spun it a second time, a third, and his eyelids drooped. The fourth time, and his
head settled to the wood before the coin stopped.
“There,” she said softly, furiously. “You’ve driven out my trade. Are you satisfied?”
“They’ll be back,” the gunslinger said.
“Not tonight they won’t.”
“Who is he?” He gestured at the weed-eater.
“Go — “She completed the command by describing an impossible act of masturbation.
“I have to know,” the gunslinger said patiently. “He—”
“He talked to you funny,” she said. “Nort never talked like that in his life.”
“I’m looking for a man. You would know him.”
She stared at him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then with a high, wet gleam
that he had seen before. The rickety building ticked thoughtfully to itself. A dog barked
brayingly, far away. The gunslinger waited. She saw his knowledge and the gleam was replaced by
hopelessness, by a dumb need that had no mouth.
“You know my price,” she said.
He looked at her steadily. The scar would not show in the dark. Her body was lean enough so the
desert and grit and grind hadn’t been able to sag everything. And she’d once been pretty, maybe
even beautiful. Not that it mattered. It would not have mattered if the grave-beetles had nested
in the arid blackness of her womb. It had all been written.
Her hands came up to her face and there was still some juice left in her — enough to weep.
“Don’t look! You don’t have to look at me so mean!”
“I’m sorry,” the gunslinger said. “I didn’t mean to be mean.”
“None of you mean it!” She cried at him.
“Put out the lights.”
She wept, hands at her face. He was glad she had her hands at her face. Not because of the scar
but because it gave her back her maidenhood, if not head. The pin that held the strap of her dress
glittered in the greasy light.
“Put out the lights and lock up. Will he steal anything?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Then put out the lights.”
She would not remove her hands until she was behind him and she doused the lamps one by one,
turning down the wicks and then breathing the flames into extinction. Then she took his hand in
the dark and it was warm. She led him upstairs. There was no light to hide their act.
VI
He made cigarettes in the dark, then lit them and passed one to her. The room held her scent,
fresh lilac, pathetic. The smell of the desert had overlaid it, crippled it. It was like the smell
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of the sea. He realized he was afraid of the desert ahead.
“His name is Nort,” she said. No harshness had been worn out of her voice. “Just Nort. He died.”
The gunslinger waited.
“He was touched by God.”
The gunslinger said, “I have never seen Him.”
“He was here ever since I can remember — Nort, I mean, not God.” She laughed jaggedly into the
dark. “He had a honeywagon for a while. Started to drink. Started to smell the grass. Then to
smoke it. The kids started to follow him around and sic their dogs onto him. He wore old green
pants that stank. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“He started to chew it. At the last he just sat in there and didn’t eat anything. He might have
been a king, in his mind. The children might have been his jesters, and the dogs his princes.”
“Yes.”
“He died right in front of this place,” she said. “He came clumping down the boardwalk — his boots
wouldn’t wear out, they were engineer boots — with the children and dogs behind him. He looked
like wire clothes hangers all wrapped and twirled together. You could see all the lights of hell
in his eyes, but he was grinning, just like the grins the children carve into their pumpkins on
All-Saints Eve. You could smell the dirt and the rot and the weed. It was running down from the
corners of his mouth like green blood. I think he meant to come in and listen to Sheb play the
piano. And right in front, he stopped and cocked his head. I could see him, and I thought he heard
a coach, although there was none due. Then he puked, and it was black and full of blood. It went
right through that grin like sewer water through a grate. The stink was enough to make you want to
run mad. He raised up his arms and just threw over. That was all. He died with that grin on his
face, in his own vomit.”
She was trembling beside him. Outside, the wind kept up its steady whine, and somewhere far away a
door was banging, like a sound heard in a dream. Mice ran in the walls. The gunslinger thought in
the back of his mind that it was probably the only place in town prosperous enough to support
mice. He put a hand on her belly and she started violently, then relaxed.
“The man in black,” he said.
“You have to have it, don’t you!”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll tell you.” She grasped his hand in both of hers and told him.
VII
He came in the late afternoon of the day Nort died, and the wind was whooping up, pulling away the
loose topsoil, sending sheets of grit and uprooted stalks of corn wind milling past. Kennerly had
padlocked the livery, and the other few merchants had shuttered their windows and laid boards
across the shutters. The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds moved flyingly
across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately
been.
He came in a rickety rig with a rippling tarp tied across its bed. They watched him come, and old
man Kennerly, lying by the window with a bottle in one hand and the loose, hot flesh of his second-
eldest daughter’s left breast in the other, resolved not to be there if he should knock.
But the man in black went by without hawing the bay that pulled his rig, and the spinning wheels
spumed up dust that the wind clutched eagerly. He might have been a priest or a monk; he wore a
black cassock that had been floured with dust, and a loose hood covered his head and obscured his
features. It rippled and flapped. Beneath the garment’s hem, heavy buckled boots with square toes.
He pulled up in front of Sheb’s and tethered the horse, which lowered its head and grunted at the
ground. Around the back of the rig he untied one flap, found a weathered saddlebag, threw it over
his shoulder, and went in through the batwings.
Alice watched him curiously, but no one else noticed
his arrival. The rest were drunk as lords. Sheb was playing Methodist hymns ragtime, and the
grizzled layabouts who had come in early to avoid the storm and to attend Nort’s wake had sung
themselves hoarse. Sheb, drunk nearly to the point of senselessness, intoxicated and horny with
his own continued existence, played with hectic, shut tlecock speed, fingers flying like looms.
Voices screeched and hollered, never overcoming the wind but sometimes seeming to challenge it. In
the corner Zachary had thrown Amy Feldon’s skirts over her head and was painting zodiac signs on
her knees. A few other women circulated. A fervid glow seemed to be on all of them. The dull
stormglow that filtered through the batwings seemed to mock them, however.
Nort had been laid out on two tables in the center of the room. His boots made a mystical V. His
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mouth hung open in a slack grin, although someone had closed his eyes and put slugs on them. His
hands had been folded on his chest with a sprig of devil-grass in them. He smelled like poison.
The man in black pushed back his hood and came to the bar. Alice watched him, feeling trepidation
mixed with the familiar want that hid within her. There was no religious symbol on him, although
that meant nothing by itself.
“Whiskey,” he said. His voice was soft and pleasant. “Good whiskey.”
She reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of Star. She could have palmed off the
local popskull on him as her best, but did not. She poured, and the man in black watched her. His
eyes were large, luminous. The shadows were too thick to determine their color exactly. Her need
intensified. The hollering and whooping went on behind, unabated. Sheb, the worthless gelding, was
playing about the Christian Soldiers and somebody had persuaded Aunt Mill to sing. Her voice,
warped and distorted, cut through the babble like a dull ax through a calf’s brain.
“Hey, Allie!”
She went to serve, resentful of the stranger’s silence, resentful of his no-color eyes and her own
restless groin. She was afraid of her needs. They were capricious and beyond her control. They
might be the signal of the change, which would in turn signal the beginning of her old age —a
condition which in Tull was usually as short and bitter as a winter sunset.
She drew beer until the keg was empty, then broached another. She knew better than to ask Sheb, he
would come willingly enough, like the dog he was, and would either chop off his own fingers or
spume beer all over everything. The stranger’s eyes were on her as she went about it; she could
feel them.
“It’s busy,” he said when she returned. He had not touched his drink, merely rolled it between his
palms to warm it.
“Wake,” she said.
“I noticed the departed.”
“They’re bums,” she said with sudden hatred. “All bums.”
“It excites them. He’s dead. They’re not.”
“He was their butt when he was alive. It’s not right that he should be their butt now. It’s...
“She trailed off, not able to express what it was, or how it was obscene.
“Weed-eater?”
“Yes! What else did he have?”
Her tone was accusing, but he did not drop his eyes, and she felt the blood rush to her face. “I’m
sorry. Are you a priest? This must revolt you.”
“I’m not and it doesn’t.” He knocked the whiskey back neatly and did not grimace. “Once more,
please.”
“I’ll have to see the color of your coin first. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be.”
He put a rough silver coin on the counter, thick on one edge, thin on the other, and she said as
she would say later:
“I don’t have change for this.”
He shook his head, dismissing it, and watched absently as he poured again.
“Are you only passing through?” she asked.
He did not reply for a long time, and she was about to repeat when he shook his head impatiently.
“Don’t talk trivialities. You’re here with death.”
She recoiled, hurt and amazed, her first thought being that he had lied about his holiness to test
her.
“You cared for him,” he said flatly. “Isn’t that true?”
“Who? Nort?” She laughed, affecting annoyance to cover her confusion. “I think you better — “
“You’re soft-hearted and a little afraid,” he went on, “and he was on the weed, looking out hell’s
back door. And there he is, and they’ve even slammed the door now, and you don’t think they’ll
open it until it’s time for you to walk through, isn’t it so?”
“What are you, drunk?”
“Mistuh Norton, he dead,” the man in black intoned sardonically. “Dead as anybody. Dead as you or
anybody.”
“Get out of my place.” She felt a trembling loathing spring up in her, but the warmth still
radiated from her belly.
“It’s all right,” he said softly. “It’s all right. Wait. Just wait.”
The eyes were blue. She felt suddenly easy in her mind, as if she had taken a drug.
“See?” he asked her. “Do you see?”
She nodded dumbly and he laughed aloud — a fine, strong, untainted laugh that swung heads around.
He whirled and faced them, suddenly made the center of attention by some unknown alchemy. Aunt
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