Stephen King - The Dark Tower

“You’re from America-side?” Susannah asked.

“Oh God yes, but long ago and long,” he said. “What’chee might call delah.” His good eye sparkled; his bad eye went on regarding the snowy wastes with that same dead lack of interest. He turned to Roland. “And who might you be, my friend? For I’ll call you my friend same as I would anyone, unless they prove different, in which case I’d belt em with Bessie, which is what I call my stick.”

Roland was grinning. Was helpless not to, Susannah thought. “Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Son of Steven.”

“Gilead! Gilead! ” Collins’s good eye went round with amazement. “There’s a name out of the past, ain’t it? One for the books! Holy Pete, you must be older’n God!”

“Some would say so,” Roland agreed, now only smiling…but warmly.

“And the little fella?” he asked, bending forward. From his pocket, Collins produced two more gumdrops, one red and one green. Christmas colors, and Susannah felt a faint touch of déjà vu . It brushed her mind like a wing and then was gone. “What’s your name, little fella? What do they holler when they want you to come home?”

“He doesn’t—”

— talk anymore, although he did once was how Susannah meant to finish, but before she could, the bumbler said: “Oy!” And he said it as brightly and firmly as ever in his time with Jake.

“Good fella!” Collins said, and tumbled the gumdrops into Oy’s mouth. Then he reached out with that same gnarled hand, and Oy raised his paw to meet it. They shook, well-met near the intersection of Odd’s Lane and Tower Road.

“I’ll be damned,” Roland said mildly.

“So won’t we all in the end, I reckon, Beam or no Beam,” Joe Collins remarked, letting go of Oy’s paw. “But not today. Now what I say is that we ort to get in where it’s warm and we can palaver over a cup of coffee — for I have some, so I do — or a pot of ale. I even have sumpin I call eggnog, if it does ya. It does me pretty fine, especially with a teensy piss o’ rum in it, but who knows? I ain’t really tasted nuffink in five years or more. Air outta the Discordia’s done for my taste-buds and for my nose, too. Anyro’, what do you say?” He regarded them brightly.

“I’d say that sounds pretty damned fine,” Susannah told him. Rarely had she said anything she meant more.

He slapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A good woman is a pearl beyond price! Don’t know if that’s Shakespeare, the Bible, or a combination of the t—

“Arrr, Lippy, goddam what used to be yer eyes, where do you think you’re going? Did yer want to meet these folks, was that it?”

His voice had fallen into the outrageous croon that seems the exclusive property of people who live alone except for a pet or two. His horse had blundered its way to them and Collins grabbed her around the neck, petting her with rough affection, but Susannah thought the beast was the ugliest quadruped she’d seen in her whole life. Some of her good cheer melted away at the sight of the thing. Lippy was blind — not in one eye but in both — and scrawny as a scarecrow. As she walked, the rack of her bones shifted back and forth so clearly beneath her mangy coat that Susannah almost expected some of them to poke through. For a moment she remembered the black corridor under Castle Discordia with a kind of nightmarish total recall: the slithering sound of the thing that had followed them, and the bones. All those bones.

Collins might have seen some of this on her face, for when he spoke again he sounded almost defensive. “Her an ugly old thing, I know, but when you get as old as she is, I don’t reckon you’ll be winnin many beauty contests yourself!” He patted the horse’s chafed and sore-looking neck, then seized her scant mane as if to pull the hair out by the roots (although Lippy showed no pain) and turned her in the road so she was facing the cottage again. As he did this, the first flakes of the coming storm skirled down.

“Come on, Lippy, y’old ki’-box and gammer-gurt, ye sway-back nag and lost four-legged leper! Can’t ye smell the snow in the air? Because I can, and my nose went south years ago!”

He turned back to Roland and Susannah and said, “I hope y’prove partial to my cookin, so I do, because I think this is gonna be a three-day blow. Aye, three at least before Demon Moon shows er face again! But we’re well-met, so we are, and I set my watch and warrant on it! Ye just don’t want to judge my hospitality by my horse -pitality! Hee!”

I should hope not, Susannah thought, and gave a little shiver. The old man had turned away, but Roland gave her a curious look. She smiled and shook her head as if to say It’s nothing —which, of course, it was. She wasn’t about to tell the gunslinger that a spavined nag with cataracts on her eyes and her ribs showing had given her a case of the whim-whams. Roland had never called her a silly goose, and by God she didn’t mean to give him cause to do so n—

As if hearing her thoughts, the old nag looked back and bared her few remaining teeth at Susannah. The eyes in Lippy’s bony wedge of a head were pus-rimmed plugs of blindness above her somehow gruesome grin. She whinnied at Susannah as if to say Think what you will, blackbird; I’ll be here long after thee’s gone thy course and died thy death . At the same time the wind gusted, swirling snow in their faces, soughing in the snow-laden firs, and hooting beneath the eaves of Collins’s little house. It began to die away and then strengthened again for a moment, making a brief, grieving cry that sounded almost human.

The outbuilding consisted of a chicken-coop on one side, Lippy’s stall on the other, and a little loft stuffed with hay. “I can get up there and fork it down,” Collins said, “but I take my life in my hands ever time I do, thanks to this bust hip of mine. Now, I can’t make you help an old man, sai Deschain, but if you would…?”

Roland climbed the ladder resting a-tilt against the edge of the loft floor and tossed down hay until Collins told him it was good, plenty enough to last Lippy through even four days’ worth of blow. (“For she don’t eat worth what’chee might call a Polish fuck, as you can see lookin at her,” he said.) Then the gunslinger came back down and Collins led them along the short back walk to his cottage. The snow piled on either side was as high as Roland’s head.

“Be it ever so humble, et cet’ra,” Joe said, and ushered them into his kitchen. It was paneled in knotty pine which was actually plastic, Susannah saw when she got closer. And it was delightfully warm. The name on the electric stove was Rossco, a brand she’d never heard of. The fridge was an Amana and had a special little door set into the front, above the handle. She leaned closer and saw the words MAGIC ICE. “This thing makes ice cubes?” she asked, delighted.

“Well, no, not exactly,” Joe said. “It’s the freezer that makes em, beauty; that thing on the front just drops em into your drink.”

This struck her funny, and she laughed. She looked down, saw Oy looking up at her with his old fiendish grin, and that made her laugh harder than ever. Mod cons aside, the smell of the kitchen was wonderfully nostalgic: sugar and spice and everything nice.

Roland was looking up at the fluorescent lights and Collins nodded. “Yar, yar, I got all the ’lectric,” he said. “Hot-air furnace, too, ain’t it nice? And nobody ever sends me a bill! The genny’s in a shed round to t’other side. It’s a Honda, and quiet as Sunday morning! Even when you get right up on top of its little shed, you don’t hear nuffink but mmmmmm . Stuttering Bill changes the propane tank and does the maintenance when it needs maintaining, which hasn’t been but twice in all the time I’ve been here. Nawp, Joey’s lyin, he’ll soon be dyin. Three times, it’s been. Three in all.”