“A bumhug? What’s that?”

“Humbug,” Jake said, laughing. “A faker. All talk, no action. But maybe the important thing is that the Wizard actually came from—”

“Wizard?” Roland asked sharply. He grasped Jake’s shoulder with his diminished right hand. “Why do you call him so?”

“Because that was his title, sug,” Susannah said. “The Wizard of Oz.” She lifted Roland’s hand gently but firmly from Jake’s shoulder. “Let him tell it, now. He don’t need you to squeeze it out of him.”

“Did I hurt you? Jake, I cry your pardon.”

“Nah, I’m fine,” Jake said. “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, Dorothy and her friends had a lot of adventures before finding out the Wizard was a, you know, a bumhug.” Jake giggled at this with his hands clapped to his forehead and pushing back his hair, like a child of five. “He couldn’t give the Lion courage, the Scarecrow a brain, or the Tin Woodman a heart. Worst of all, he couldn’t send Dorothy back to Kansas. The Wizard had a balloon, but he went without her. I don’t think he meant to, but he did.”

“It seems to me, from your telling of the tale,” Roland said, speaking very slowly, “that Dorothy’s friends had the things they wanted all along.”

“That’s the moral of the story,” Eddie said. “Maybe what makes it a great story. But Dorothy was stuck in Oz, you see. Then Glinda showed up. Glinda the Good. And, as a present for smooshing one of the bad witches under her house and melting another one, Glinda told Dorothy how to use the ruby slippers. The ones Glinda gave her.”

Eddie raised the red Cuban-heeled street-boppers which had been left for him on the dotted white line of I-70.

“Glinda told Dorothy to click the heels of the ruby slippers together three times. That would take her back to Kansas, she said. And it did.”

“And that’s the end of the tale?”

“Well,” Jake said, “it was so popular that the guy who wrote it went ahead and wrote about a thousand more Oz stories—”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Everything but Glinda’s Guide to Firm Thighs.”

“—and there was this crazy remake called The Wiz, starring black people—”

“Really?” Susannah asked. She looked bemused. “What a peculiar concept.”

“—but the only one that really matters is the first one, I think,” Jake finished.

Roland hunkered and put his hands into the boots which had been left for him. He lifted them, looked at them, put them down again. “Are we supposed to put them on, do you think? Here and now?”

His three friends from New York looked at each other doubtfully. At last Susannah spoke for them—fed him the khef which he could feel but not quite share on his own.

“Best not to right now, maybe. Too many bad-ass spirits here.”