Roland threw his weight on the back of the chair next to Eddie’s and it settled back.

Detta looked around and gave them a wink of such obscene conspiracy that Eddie felt his arms crawl up in gooseflesh.

“You almost opsot me agin, boys,” she said. “You want to look out for me, now. I ain’t nuthin but a old crippled lady, so you want to have a care for me now.”

She laughed . . . laughed fit to split.

Although Eddie cared for the woman that was the other part of her—was near to loving her just on the basis of the brief time he had seen her and spoken with her—he felt his hands itch to close around her windpipe and choke that laugh, choke it until she could never laugh again.

She peered around again, saw what he was thinking as if it had been printed on him in red ink, and laughed all the harder. Her eyes dared him. Go on, graymeat. Go on. You want to do it? Go on and do it.

In other words, don’t just tip the chair; tip the woman, Eddie thought. Tip her over for good. That’s what she wants. For Detta, being killed by a white man may be the only real goal she has in life.

“Come on,” he said, and began pushing again. “We are gonna tour the seacoast, sweet thang, like it or not.”

“Fuck you,” she spat.

“Cram it, babe,” Eddie responded pleasantly.

The gunslinger walked beside him, head down.

11

They came to a considerable outcropping of rocks when the sun said it was about eleven and here they stopped for nearly an hour, taking the shade as the sun climbed toward the roofpeak of the day. Eddie and the gunslinger ate leftovers from the previous night’s kill. Eddie offered a portion to Detta, who again refused, telling him she knew what they wanted to do, and if they wanted to do it, they best to do it with their bare hands and stop trying to poison her. That, she said, was the coward’s way.

Eddie’s right, the gunslinger mused. This woman has made her own chain of memories. She knows everything that happened to her last night, even though she was really fast asleep.

She believed they had brought her pieces of meat which smelled of death and putrescence, had taunted her with it while they themselves ate salted beef and drank some sort of beer from flasks. She believed they had, every now and then, held pieces of their own untainted supper out to her, drawing it away at the last moment when she snatched at it with her teeth—and laughing while they did it, of course. In the world (or at least in the mind) of Detta Walker, Honk Mahfahs only did two things to brown women: raped them or laughed at them. Or both at the same time.

It was almost funny. Eddie Dean had last seen beef during his ride in the sky-carriage, and Roland had seen none since the last of his jerky was eaten, Gods alone knew how long ago. As far as beer . . . he cast his mind back.