5

They made the best time of the entire trek that day, but there was still no door in sight when the sun began to spill its gold track across the ocean. Although she told him she was perfectly capable of going on for another half an hour, he called a halt and helped her out of the chair. He carried her to an even patch of ground that looked fairly smooth, got the cushions from the back of the chair and the seat, and eased them under her.

“Lord, it feels so good to stretch out,” she sighed. “But . . .” Her brow clouded. “I keep thinking of that man back there, Roland, all by himself, and I can’t really enjoy it. Eddie, who is he? What is he?” And, almost as an afterthought: “And why does he shout so much?”

“Just his nature, I guess,” Eddie said, and abruptly went off to gather rocks. Roland hardly ever shouted. He guessed some of it was this morning—FUCK the shells!—but that the rest of it was false memory: the time she thought she had been Odetta.

He killed triple, as the gunslinger had instructed, and was so intent on the last that he skipped back from a fourth which had been closing in on his right with only an instant to spare. He saw the way its claws clicked on the empty place which had been occupied by his foot and leg a moment before, and thought of the gunslinger’s missing fingers.

He cooked over a dry wood fire—the encroaching hills and increasing vegetation made the search for good fuel quicker and easier, that was one thing—while the last of the daylight faded from the western sky.

“Look, Eddie!” she cried, pointing up.

He looked, and saw a single star gleaming on the breast of the night.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Yes,” he said, and suddenly, for no reason, his eyes filled with tears. Just where had he been all of his goddamned life? Where had he been, what had he been doing, who had been with him while he did it, and why did he suddenly feel so grimy and abysmally beshitted?

Her lifted face was terrible in its beauty, irrefutable in this light, but the beauty was unknown to its possessor, who only looked at the star with wide wondering eyes, and laughed softly.

“Star light, star bright,” she said, and stopped. She looked at him. “Do you know it, Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Eddie kept his head down. His voice sounded clear enough, but if he looked up she would see he was weeping.

“Then help me. But you have to look.”

“Okay.”

He wiped the tears into the palm of one hand and looked up at the star with her.

“Star light—” she looked at him and he joined her. “Star bright—”

Her hand reached out, groping, and he clasped it, one the delicious brown of light chocolate, the other the delicious white of a dove’s breast.

“First star I see tonight,” they spoke solemnly in unison, boy and girl for this now, not man and woman as they would be later, when the dark was full and she called to ask him if he was asleep and he said no and she asked if he would hold her because she was cold; “Wish I may, wish I might—”