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.
�C 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 �C 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.
"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.
�C 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.
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 �C "Naa-naa-naa naa-na na-na... hey, Jude..." �C 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."