Stephen King: The Dark Tower

“We can phone him from Bridgton. But in a story, Roland, a minor character like John Cullum would never come in off the bench to save the day. It wouldn’t be considered realistic.”

“In life,” Roland said, “I’m sure it happens all the time.”

And Eddie laughed. What the hell else could you do? It was just so perfectly Roland .

They had just passed this sign when Eddie said, “Root around in the glove-compartment a little, Roland. See if ka or the Beam or whatever left us a little spare change for the pay phone.”

“Glove—? Do you mean this panel here?”

“Yeah.”

Roland first tried to turn the chrome button on the front, then got with the program and pushed it. The inside was a mare’s nest that hadn’t been improved by the Galaxie’s brief period of weightlessness. There were credit card receipts, a very old tube of what Eddie identified as “tooth-paste” (Roland could make out the words HOLMES DENTALon it quite clearly), a fottergraff showing a smiling little girl — Cullum’s niece, mayhap — on a pony, a stick of what he first took for explosive (Eddie said it was a road flare, for emergencies), a magazine that appeared to be called YANKME…and a cigar-box. Roland couldn’t quite make out the word on this, although he thought it might be trolls . He showed the box to Eddie, whose eyes lit up.

“That says TOLLS,” he said. “Maybe you’re right about Cullum and ka. Open it up, Roland, do it please ya.”

The child who had given this box as a gift had crafted a loving (and rather clumsy) catch on the front to hold it closed. Roland slipped the catch, opened the box, and showed Eddie a great many silver coins. “Is it enough to call sai Cullum’s house?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Looks like enough to call Fairbanks, Alaska. It won’t help us a bit, though, if Cullum’s on the road to Vermont.”

The Bridgton town square was bounded by a drug store and a pizza-joint on one side; a movie theater (The Magic Lantern) and a department store (Reny’s) on the other. Between the theater and the department store was a little plaza equipped with benches and three pay phones.

Eddie swept through Cullum’s box of toll-change and gave Roland six dollars in quarters. “I want you to go over there,” he said, pointing at the drug store, “and get me a tin of aspirin. Will you know it when you see it?”

“Astin. I’ll know it.”

“The smallest size they have is what I want, because six bucks really isn’t much money. Then go next door, to that place that says Bridgton Pizza and Sandwiches. If you’ve still got at least sixteen of those money-coins left, tell them you want a hoagie.”

Roland nodded, which wasn’t good enough for Eddie. “Let me hear you say it.”

“Hoggie.”

“Hoagie .”

“HOOG-gie .”

“Ho—” Eddie quit. “Roland, let me hear you say ‘poorboy.’ ”

“Poor boy.”

“Good. If you have at least sixteen quarters left, ask for a poorboy. Can you say ‘lots of mayo’?”

“Lots of mayo.”

“Yeah. If you have less than sixteen, ask for a salami and cheese sandwich. Sandwich, not a popkin.”

“Salommy sanditch.”

“Close enough. And don’t say anything else unless you absolutely have to.”

Roland nodded. Eddie was right, it would be better if he did not speak. People only had to look at him to know, in their secret hearts, that he wasn’t from these parts. They also had a tendency to step away from him. Better he not exacerbate that.

The gunslinger dropped a hand to his left hip as he turned toward the street, an old habit that paid no comfort this time; both revolvers were in the trunk of Cullum’s Galaxie, wrapped in their cartridge belts.

Before he could get going again, Eddie grabbed his shoulder. The gunslinger swung round, eyebrows raised, faded eyes on his friend.

“We have a saying in our world, Roland — we say so-and-so was grasping at straws.”

“And what does it mean?”

“This,” Eddie said bleakly. “What we’re doing. Wish me good luck, fella.”

Roland nodded. “Aye, so I do. Both of us.”

He began to turn away and Eddie called him back again. This time Roland wore an expression of faint impatience.

“Don’t get killed crossing the street,” Eddie said, and then briefly mimicked Cullum’s way of speaking. “Summah folks’re thicker’n ticks on a dog. And they’re not ridin hosses.”

“Make your call, Eddie,” Roland said, and then crossed Bridgton’s high street with slow confidence, walking in the same rolling gait that had taken him across a thousand other high streets in a thousand small towns.

Eddie watched him, then turned to the telephone and consulted the directions. After that he lifted the receiver and dialed the number for Directory Assistance.

He didn’t go, the gunslinger had said, speaking of John Cullum with flat certainty. And why? Because Cullum was the end of the line, there was no one else for them to call. Roland of Gilead’s damned old ka, in other words.

After a brief wait, the Directory Assistance operator coughed up Cullum’s number. Eddie tried to memorize it — he’d always been good at remembering numbers, Henry had sometimes called him Little Einstein — but this time he couldn’t be confident of his ability. Something seemed to have happened either to his thinking processes in general (which he didn’t believe) or to his ability to remember certain artifacts of this world (which he sort of did). As he asked for the number a second time — and wrote it in the gathered dust on the phone kiosk’s little ledge — Eddie found himself wondering if he’d still be able to read a novel, or follow the plot of a movie from the succession of images on a screen. He rather doubted it. And what did it matter? The Magic Lantern next door was showing Star Wars, and Eddie thought that if he made it to the end of his life’s path and into the clearing without another look at Luke Skywalker and another listen to Darth Vader’s noisy breathing, he’d still be pretty much okay.

“Thanks, ma’am,” he told the operator, and was about to dial again when there was a series of explosions behind him. Eddie whirled, heart-rate spiking, right hand dipping, expecting to see Wolves, or harriers, or maybe that son of a bitch Flagg—

What he saw was a convertible filled with laughing, goofy-faced high school boys with sunburned cheeks. One of them had just tossed out a string of firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July — what kids their age in Calla Bryn Sturgis would have called bangers.

If I’d had a gun on my hip, I might have shot a couple of those bucks, Eddie thought. You want to talk goofy, start with that . Yes. Well. And maybe he might not have. Either way, he had to admit the possibility that he was no longer exactly safe in the more civilized quarters.

“Live with it,” Eddie murmured, then added the great sage and eminent junkie’s favorite advice for life’s little problems: “Deal. ”