Eddie glanced at Roland, who shook his head slightly. On the stove, the first bubble of coffee blinked in the pot’s glass eye.

“Sai King—” Eddie began.

“Steve.”

“Steve, then. We ought to transact our business now. Matters of trust aside, we’re in a ripping hurry.”

“Sure, sure, right, racing against time,” King said, and laughed. The sound was charmingly goofy. Eddie suspected that the beer was starting to do its work, and he wondered if the man was maybe a juice-head. Impossible to tell for sure on such short acquaintance, but Eddie thought some of the signs were there. He didn’t remember a whole hell of a lot from high school English, but he did recall some teacher or other telling him that writers really liked to drink. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, “The Raven” guy. Writers liked to drink.

“I’m not laughing at you guys,” King said. “It’s actually against my religion to laugh at men who are toting guns. It’s just that in the sort of books I write, people are almost always racing against time. Would you like to hear the first line of The Dark Tower?”

“Sure, if you remember it,” Eddie said.

Roland said nothing, but his eyes gleamed bright under brows that were now threaded with white.

“Oh, I remember it. It may be the best opening line I ever wrote.” King set his beer aside, then raised his hands with the first two fingers of each held out and bent, as if making quotation marks. “‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’ The rest might have been puff and blow, but man, that was clean.” He dropped his hands and picked up his beer. “For the forty-third time, is this really happening?”

“Was the man in black’s name Walter?” Roland asked.

King’s beer tilted shy of his mouth and he spilled some down his front, wetting his fresh shirt. Roland nodded, as if that was all the answer he needed.

“Don’t faint on us again,” Eddie said, a trifle sharply. “Once was enough to impress me.”

King nodded, took another sip of his beer, seemed to take hold of himself at the same time. He glanced at the clock. “Are you gentlemen really going to let me pick up my son?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“You …” King paused to consider, then smiled. “Do you set your watch and your warrant on it?”

With no smile in return, Roland said, “So I do.”

“Okay, then, The Dark Tower, Reader’s Digest Condensed Book version. Keeping in mind that oral storytelling isn’t my thing, I’ll do the best I can.”

NINE

Roland listened as if worlds depended on it, as he was quite sure they did. King had begun his version of Roland’s life with the campfires, which had pleased the gunslinger because they confirmed Walter’s essential humanity. From there, King said, the story went back to Roland’s meeting with a kind of shirttail farmer on the edge of the desert. Brown, his name had been.