Eddie smiles.

“I like to think maybe I got one of the ones that ate Jack. I like to think I’m eating that dink. It, like, eases my mind, you know?”

“One of them ate part of me, too,” the gunslinger husks out. “Two fingers, one toe.”

“That’s also cool,” Eddie keeps smiling. His face is pallid, sharklike . . . but some of that ill look has gone now, and the smell of shit and death which has hung around him like a shroud seems to be going away.

“Fuck yourself,” the gunslinger husks.

“Roland shows a flash of spirit!” Eddie cries. “Maybe you ain’t gonna die after all! Dahling! I think that’s mah-vellous!”

“Live,” Roland says. The husk has become a whisper again. The fishhooks are returning to his throat.

“Yeah?” Eddie looks at him, then nods and answers his own question. “Yeah. I think you mean to. Once I thought you were going and once I thought you were gone. Now it looks like you’re going to get better. The antibiotics are helping, I guess, but mostly I think you’re hauling yourself up. What for? Why the fuck do you keep trying so hard to keep alive on this scuzzy beach?”

Tower, he mouths, because now he can’t even manage a husk.

“You and your fucking Tower,” Eddie says, starts to turn away, and then turns back, surprised, as Roland’s hand clamps on his arm like a manacle.

They look into each other’s eyes and Eddie says, “All right. All right!”

North, the gunslinger mouths. North, I told you. Has he told him that? He thinks so, but it’s lost. Lost in the shuffle.

“How do you know?” Eddie screams at him in sudden frustration. He raises his fists as if to strike Roland, then lowers them.

I just know—so why do you waste my time and energy asking me foolish questions? he wants to reply, but before he can, the cards

shuffle

being dragged along, bounced and bumped, his head lolling helplessly from one side to the other, bound to some kind of a weird travois by his own gunbelts, and he can hear Eddie Dean singing a song which is so weirdly familiar he at first believes this must be a delirium dream:

“Heyy Jude . . . don’t make it bad . . . take a saaad song . . . and make it better . . .”

Where did you hear that? he wants to ask. Did you hear me singing it, Eddie? And where are we?

But before he can ask anything

shuffle

Cort would bash the kid’s head in if he saw that contraption, Roland thinks, looking at the travois upon which he has spent the day, and laughs. It isn’t much of a laugh. It sounds like one of those waves dropping its load of stones on the beach. He doesn’t know how far they have come, but it’s far enough for Eddie to be totally bushed. He’s sitting on a rock in the lengthening light with one of the gunslinger’s revolvers in his lap and a half-full waterskin to one side. There’s a small bulge in his shirt pocket. These are the bullets from the back of the gunbelts—the diminishing supply of “good” bullets. Eddie has tied these up in a piece of his own shirt. The main reason the supply of “good” bullets is diminishing so fast is because one of every four or five has also turned out to be a dud.