“Are you all right?” she asked him, and the genuine concern in her voice made him smile a little—her asking him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“To which question are you responding?”

For a moment he didn’t understand, then did. “Both,” he said, and took her hand. She squeezed it, and he looked into her shining lucent eyes and thought A man could fall in love, and that was when her hand turned into a claw and she was telling him he was a honky mahfah, and she wadn’t just goan take his balls, she was goan chew on those mahfahs.

He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was poison, and being bitten by her would be about the same as being bitten by a copperhead or rattler. There was no blood. And when he looked again, it was the other woman—the first woman.

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to die. Pl—” Then she went out for good, and that was good. For all of them.

4

“So whatchoo think?” Julio asked.

“About who’s gonna be in the Series?” George squashed the butt under the heel of his loafer. “White Sox. I got ’em in the pool.”

“Whatchoo think about that lady?”

“I think she might be schizophrenic,” George said slowly.

“Yeah, I know that. I mean, what’s gonna happen to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“She needs help, man. Who gonna give it?”

“Well, I already gave her one,” George said, but his face felt hot, as if he were blushing.

Julio looked at him. “If you already gave her all the help you can give her, you shoulda let her die, doc.”

George looked at Julio for a moment, but found he couldn’t stand what he saw in Julio’s eyes—not accusation but sadness.

So he walked away.

He had places to go.

5

The Time of the Drawing:

In the time since the accident it was, for the most part, still Odetta Holmes who was in control, but Detta Walker had come forward more and more, the thing Detta liked to do best was steal. It didn’t matter that her booty was always little more than junk, no more than it mattered that she often threw it away later.

The taking was what mattered.

When the gunslinger entered her head in Macy’s, Detta screamed in a combination of fury and horror and terror, her hands freezing on the junk jewelry she was scooping into her purse.

She screamed because when Roland came into her mind, when he came forward, she for a moment sensed the other, as if a door had been swung open inside of her head.

And she screamed because the invading raping presence was a honky.

She could not see but nonetheless sensed his whiteness.

People looked around. A floorwalker saw the screaming woman in the wheelchair with her purse open, saw one hand frozen in the act of stuffing costume jewelry into a purse that looked (even from a distance of thirty feet) worth three times the stuff she was stealing.