“Are you going to hypnotize me?” he asked Roland. Then he looked at the belt he was holding and knew the answer. “Ah, shit, you’re not, are you?”

“No time.” Roland had been rummaging in the junk-drawer to the left of the sink. Now he approached Eddie with a pair of pliers in one hand and a paring knife in the other. Eddie thought they made an exceedingly ugly combo.

The gunslinger dropped to one knee beside him. Tower and Deepneau stood in the living area, side by side, watching with big eyes. “There was a thing Cort told us when we were boys,” Roland said. “Will I tell it to you, Eddie?”

“If you think it’ll help, sure.”

“Pain rises. From the heart to the head, pain rises. Double up sai Aaron’s belt and put it in your mouth.”

Eddie did as Roland said, feeling very foolish and very scared. In how many Western movies had he seen a version of this scene? Sometimes John Wayne bit a stick and sometimes Clint Eastwood bit a bullet, and he believed that in some TV show or other, Robert Culp had actually bitten a belt.

But of course we have to remove the bullet, Eddie thought. No story of this type would be complete without at least one scene where—

A sudden memory, shocking in its brilliance, struck him and the belt tumbled from his mouth. He actually cried out.

Roland had been about to dip his rude operating instruments in the basin, which held the rest of the disinfectant. Now he looked at Eddie, concerned. “What is it?”

For a moment Eddie couldn’t reply. His breath was quite literally gone, his lungs as flat as old inner tubes. He was remembering a movie the Dean boys had watched one afternoon on TV in their apartment, the one in

(Brooklyn)

(the Bronx)

Co-Op City. Henry mostly got to pick what they watched because he was bigger and older. Eddie didn’t protest too often or too much; he idolized his big brother. (When he did protest too much he was apt to get the old Indian Rope Burn or maybe a Dutch Rub up the back of his neck.) What Henry liked was Westerns. The sort of movies where, sooner or later, some character had to bite the stick or belt or bullet.

“Roland,” he said. His voice was just a faint wheeze to start with. “Roland, listen.”

“I hear you very well.”

“There was a movie. I told you about movies, right?”

“Stories told in moving pictures.”

“Sometimes Henry and I used to stay in and watch them on TV. Television’s basically a home movie-machine.”

“A shit-machine, some would say,” Tower put in.

Eddie ignored him. “One of the movies we watched was about these Mexican peasants—folken, if it does ya—who hired some gunslingers to protect them from the bandidos who came every year to raid their village and steal their crops. Does any of this ring a bell?”

Roland looked at him with gravity and what might have been sadness. “Yes. Indeed it does.”