Roland said nothing, but his eyes gleamed bright under brows that were now threaded with white.
"Oh, I remember it. It may be the best opening line I ever wrote." King set his beer aside, then raised his hands with the first two fingers of each held out and bent, as if making quotation marks. " 'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.' The rest might have been puff and blow, but man, that was clean." He dropped his hands and picked up his beer. "For the forty-third time, is this really happening?"
"Was the man in black's name Walter?" Roland asked.
King's beer tilted shy of his mouth and he spilled some down his front, wetting his fresh shirt. Roland nodded, as if that was all the answer he needed.
"Don't faint on us again," Eddie said, a trifle sharply. "Once was enough to impress me."
King nodded, took another sip of his beer, seemed to take hold of himself at the same time. He glanced at the clock. "Are you gentlemen really going to let me pick up my son?"
"Yes," Roland said.
"You..." King paused to consider, then smiled. "Do you set your watch and your warrant on it?"
With no smile in return, Roland said, "So I do."
"Okay, then,The Dark Tower, Reader's Digest Condensed Book version. Keeping in mind that oral storytelling isn't my thing, I'll do the best I can."
Nine
Roland listened as if worlds depended on it, as he was quite sure they did. King had begun his version of Roland's life with the campfires, which had pleased the gunslinger because they confirmed Walter's essential humanity. From there, King said, the story went back to Roland's meeting with a kind of shirttail farmer on the edge of the desert. Brown, his name had been.
Life for your crop,Roland heard across an echo of years, andLife for your own. He'd forgotten Brown, and Brown's pet raven, Zoltan, but this stranger had not.
"What I liked," King said, "was how the story seemed to be going backward. From a purely technical standpoint, it was very interesting. I start with you in the desert, then slip back a notch to you meeting Brown and Zoltan. Zoltan was named after a folk-singer and guitarist I knew at the University of Maine, by the way. Anyway, from the dweller's hut the story slips back another notch to you coming into the town of Tull...named after a rock group - "
"Jethro Tull," Eddie said. "Goddam of course! Iknew that name was familiar! What about Z.Z. Top, Steve? Do you know them?" Eddie looked at King, saw the incomprehension, and smiled. "I guess it's not their when quite yet. Or if it is, you haven't found out about them."
Roland twirled his fingers:Go on, go on. And gave Eddie a look that suggested he stop interrupting.
"Anyway, from Roland coming into Tull, the story slips back another notch to tell how Nort, the weed-eater, died and was resurrected by Walter. You see what buzzed me about it, don't you? The early part of it was all told in reverse gear. It was bass-ackwards."
Roland had no interest in the technical aspects that seemed to fascinate King; this was his life they were talking about, after all, hislife, and to him it had all been moving forward. At least until he'd reached the Western Sea, and the doors through which he had drawn his traveling companions.
But Stephen King knew nothing of the doors, it seemed. He had written of the way station, and Roland's meeting with Jake Chambers; he had written of their trek first into the mountains and then through them; he had written of Jake's betrayal by the man he had come to trust and to love.
King observed the way Roland hung his head during this part of the tale, and spoke with odd gentleness. "No need to look so ashamed, Mr. Deschain. After all, I was the one who made you do it."
But again, Roland wondered about that.
King had written of Roland's palaver with Walter in the dusty golgotha of bones, the telling of the Tarot and the terrible vision Roland had had of growing right through the roof of the universe. He had written of how Roland had awakened following that long night of fortune-telling to find himself years older, and Walter nothing but bones. Finally, King said, he'd written of Roland going to the edge of the water and sitting there. "You said, 'I loved you, Jake' "
Roland nodded matter-of-factly. "I love him still."
"You speak as though he actually exists."
Roland looked at him levelly. "Do I exist? Do you?"
King was silent.
"What happened then?" Eddie asked.
"Then,se?or, I ran out of story - or got intimidated, if you like that better - and stopped."