The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3)(98)
“Oy,” the humbler agreed, and closed his eyes again. Jake rolled over on his back and lay looking up at the stars. Blaine is more than a pain, he thought. It’s dangerous. Very dangerous. Yes, perhaps.
No perhaps about it! his mind insisted frantically. All right, Blaine was a pain—given. But his Final Essay had had something else to say on the subject of Blaine, hadn’t it? Blaine is the truth. Blaine is the truth. Blaine is the truth. “Oh Jeez, what a mess,” Jake whispered. He closed his eyes and was asleep again in seconds. This time his sleep was dreamless.
AROUND NOON THE NEXT day they reached the top of another drumlin and saw the bridge for the first time. It crossed the Send at a point where the river narrowed, bent due south, and passed in front of the city. “Holy Jesus,” Eddie said softly. “Does that look familiar to you, Suze?” “Yes.”
“Jake?”
“Yes—it looks like the George Washington Bridge.” “It sure does,” Eddie agreed.
“But what’s the GWB doing in Missouri?” Jake asked. Eddie looked at him. “Say what, sport?”
Jake looked confused. “Mid-World, I mean. You know.” Eddie was looking at him harder than ever. “How do you know this is Mid-World? You weren’t with us when we came to that marker.” Jake stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down at his mocca-sins. “Dreamed it,” he said briefly. “You don’t think I booked this trip with my dad’s travel-agent, do you?”
Roland touched Eddie’s shoulder. “Let it alone for now.” Eddie glanced briefly at Roland and nodded.
They stood looking at the bridge a little longer. They’d had time to get used to the city skyline, but this was something new. It dreamed in the distance, a faint shape sketched against the blue midmorning sky. Roland could make out four sets of impossibly tall metal towers—one set at each end of the bridge and two in the middle. Between them, gigantic cables swooped through the air in long arcs. Between these arcs and the base of the bridge were many vertical lines—either more cables or metal beams, he could not tell which. But he also saw gaps, and realized after a long time that the bridge was no longer perfectly level.
“Yonder bridge is going to be in the river soon, I think,” Roland said. “Well, maybe,” Eddie said reluctantly, “but it doesn’t really look that bad to me.”
Roland sighed. “Don’t hope for too much, Eddie.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie heard the touchiness in his voice, but it was too late to do anything about it now. “It means that I want you to believe your eyes, Eddie—that’s all. There was a saying when I was growing up: ‘Only a fool believes he’s dreaming before he wakes up.’ Do you understand?”
Eddie felt a sarcastic reply on his tongue and banished it after a brief struggle. It was just that Roland had a way—it was unintentional, he was sure, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with—of making him feel like such a kid.
“I guess I do,” he said at last. “It means the same thing as my mother’s favorite saying.”
“And what was that?”
“Hope for the best and expect the worst,” Eddie said sourly. Roland’s face lightened in a smile. “I think I like your mother’s saying better.”
“But it is still standing!” Eddie burst out. “I agree it’s not in such fantastic shape—probably nobody’s done a really thorough maintenance check on it for a thousand years or so—but it is still there. The whole city is! Is it so wrong to hope we might find some things that’ll help us there? Or some people that’ll feed us and talk to us, like the old folks back in River Crossing, instead of shooting at us? Is it so wrong to hope our luck might be turning?” In the silence which followed, Eddie realized with embarrassment that he had been making a speech.
“No.” There was a kindness in Roland’s voice—that kindness which always surprised Eddie when it came. “It’s never wrong to hope.” He looked around at Eddie and the others like a man coming out of a deep dream. “We’re done travelling for today. It’s time we had our own pala-ver, I think, and it’s going to take awhile.”
The gunslinger left the road and walked into the high grass without looking back. After a moment, the other three followed.
UNTIL THEY MET THE old people in River Crossing, Susannah had seen Roland strictly in terms of television shows she rarely watched: Cheyenne, The Rifleman, and, of course, the archetype of them all, Gunsmoke. That was one she had sometimes listened to on tin- radio with her father before it came on TV (she thought of how foreign the idea of radio drama would be to Eddie and Jake and smiled—Roland’s was not the only world which had moved on). She could still remember what the narrator said at the beginning of every one of those radio playlets: “It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely.” Until River Crossing, that had summed Roland up perfectly for her. He was not broad-shouldered, as Marshal Dillon had been, nor anywhere near as tall, and his face seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild-west lawman, but she had still seen him as an existential version of that make-believe Kansas peace officer, whose only mission in life (other than an occasional drink in The Longbranch with his friends Doc and Kitty) had been to Clean Up Dodge. Now she understood that Roland had once been much more than a cop riding a Daliesque range at the end of the world. He had been a diplomat; a mediator; perhaps even a teacher. Most of all, he had been a soldier of what these people called “the white,” by which she guessed they meant the civilizing forces that kept people from killing each other enough of the time to allow some sort of progress. In his time he had been more wandering knight-errant than bounty hunter. And in many ways, this still was his time; the people of River Crossing had certainly thought so. Why else would they have knelt in the dust to receive his blessing?