She still wouldn’t eat, and her face was becoming all stark lines and angles. Her eyes glittered in deepening sockets.

Roland gave her no notice at all, only studied Eddie closely. At last he nodded. “A little way. Not far, but a little way.”

Twenty minutes later Eddie called it quits himself. His arms felt like Jell-O.

They sat in the shadows of the rocks, listening to the gulls, watching the tide come in, waiting for the sun to go down and the lobstrosities to come out and begin their cumbersome cross-examinations.

Roland told Eddie in a voice too low for Detta to hear that he thought they were out of live shells. Eddie’s mouth tightened down a little but that was all. Roland was pleased.

“So you’ll have to brain one of them yourself,” Roland said. “I’m too weak to handle a rock big enough to do the job . . . and still be sure.”

Eddie was now the one to do the studying.

He had no liking for what he saw.

The gunslinger waved his scrutiny away.

“Never mind,” he said. “Never mind, Eddie. What is, is.”

“Ka,” Eddie said.

The gunslinger nodded and smiled faintly. “Ka.”

“Kaka,” Eddie said, and they looked at each other, and both laughed. Roland looked startled and perhaps even a little afraid of the rusty sound emerging from his mouth. His laughter did not last long. When it had stopped he looked distant and melancholy.

“Dat laffin mean you fine’ly managed to joik each other off?” Detta cried over at them in her hoarse, failing voice. “When you goan get down to de pokin? Dat’s what I want to see! Dat pokin!”

15

Eddie made the kill.

Detta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the other half.

“Nossuh!” she said, eyes sparking at him. “No SUH! You done put de poison in t’other end. One you trine to give me.”

Without saying anything, Eddie took the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.

“Doan mean a thing,” Detta said sulkily. “Leave me alone, graymeat.”

Eddie wouldn’t.

He brought her another piece.

“You tear it in half. Give me whichever you want. I’ll eat it, then you eat the rest.”

“Ain’t fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist’ Chah-lie. Git away f’um me is what I said, and git away f’um me is what I meant.”

16

She did not scream in the night . . . but she was still there the next morning.

17

That day they made only two miles, although Detta made no effort to upset her chair; Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing inexorably together: Eddie’s weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless days of sameness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland’s deteriorating condition.