Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)(62)

Tower did not offer a toast, but drank off half his beer at a single go. "It isn't every day I get called the scum of the earth by a man who promises to make me a millionaire and also to relieve me of my heart's heaviest burden. Aaron, will this thing stand up in court?"

Aaron Deepneau nodded. Rather regretfully, Eddie thought.

"All right, then," Tower said. Then, after a pause: "All right, let's do it." But still he didn't sign.

Roland spoke to him in that other language. Tower flinched, then signed his name in a quick scrawl, his lips tucked into a line so narrow his mouth seemed almost not to be there. Eddie signed for the Tet Corporation, marveling at how strange the pen felt in his hand - he couldn't remember when last he had held one.

When the thing was done, sai Tower reverted - looked at Eddie and cried in a cracked voice that was almost a shriek, "There! I'm a pauper! Give me my dollar! I'm promised a dollar! I feel a need to take a shit coming on and I need something to wipe my ass with!"

Then he put his hands over his face. He sat like that for several seconds, while Roland folded the signed paper (Deepneau had witnessed both signatures) and put it in his pocket.

When Tower lowered his hands again, his eyes were dry and his face was composed. There even seemed to be a touch of color in his formerly ashy cheeks. "I think I actually do feel a little better," he said. He turned to Aaron. "Do you suppose these twocockuhs might be right?"

"I think it's a real possibility," Aaron said, smiling.

Eddie, meanwhile, had thought of a way to find out for sure if it really was these two men who would save Callahan from the Hitler Brothers - or almost for sure. One of them had said...

"Listen," he said. "There's a certain phrase, Yiddish, I think.Gai cocknif en yom. Do you know what it means? Either of you?"

Deepneau threw back his head and laughed. "Yeah, it's Yiddish, all right. My Ma used to say it all the time when she was mad at us. It means go shit in the ocean."

Eddie nodded at Roland. In the next couple of years, one of these men - probably Tower - would buy a ring with the wordsEx Libris carved into it. Maybe - how crazy wasthis  - because Eddie Dean himself had put the idea into Cal Tower's head. And Tower - selfish, acquisitive, miserly, book-greedy Calvin Tower - would save Father Callahan's life while that ring was on his finger. He was going to be shit-scared (Deepneau, too), but he was going to do it. And -

At that point Eddie happened to look at the pen with which Tower had signed the bill of sale, a perfectly ordinary Bic Clic, and the enormous truth of what had just happened struck home. They owned it. They owned the vacant lot.They, not the Sombra Corporation.They owned the rose!

He felt as if he'd just taken a hard shot to the head. The rose belonged to the Tet Corporation, which was the firm of Deschain, Dean, Dean, Chambers & Oy. It was now their responsibility, for better or for worse. This round they had won. Which did not change the fact that he had a bullet in his leg.

"Roland," he said, "there's something you have to do for me."

Ten

Five minutes later Eddie lay on the cabin's linoleum floor in his ridiculous knee-length Calla Bryn Sturgis underbritches. In one hand he held a leather belt which had spent its previous life holding up various pairs of Aaron Deepneau's pants. Beside him was a basin filled with a dark brown fluid.

The hole in his leg was about three inches below his knee and a little bit to the right of the shinbone. The flesh around it had risen up in a hard little cone. This miniature volcano's caldera was currently plugged with a shiny red-purple clot of blood. Two folded towels had been laid beneath Eddie's calf.

"Are you going to hypnotize me?" he asked Roland. Then he looked at the belt he was holding and knew the answer. "Ah, shit, you're not, are you?"

"No time." Roland had been rummaging in the junk-drawer to the left of the sink. Now he approached Eddie with a pair of pliers in one hand and a paring knife in the other. Eddie thought they made an exceedingly ugly combo.

The gunslinger dropped to one knee beside him. Tower and Deepneau stood in the living area, side by side, watching with big eyes. "There was a thing Cort told us when we were boys," Roland said. "Will I tell it to you, Eddie?"

"If you think it'll help, sure."

"Pain rises. From the heart to the head, pain rises. Double up sai Aaron's belt and put it in your mouth."

Eddie did as Roland said, feeling very foolish and very scared. In how many Western movies had he seen a version of this scene? Sometimes John Wayne bit a stick and sometimes Clint Eastwood bit a bullet, and he believed that in some TV show or other, Robert Culp had actually bitten a belt.

But of course we have to remove the bullet,Eddie thought.No story of this type would be complete without at least one scene where -

A sudden memory, shocking in its brilliance, struck him and the belt tumbled from his mouth. He actually cried out.

Roland had been about to dip his rude operating instruments in the basin, which held the rest of the disinfectant. Now he looked at Eddie, concerned. "What is it?"

For a moment Eddie couldn't reply. His breath was quite literally gone, his lungs as flat as old inner tubes. He was remembering a movie the Dean boys had watched one afternoon on TV in their apartment, the one in

(Brooklyn)

(the Bronx)