"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)
Co-Op City. Henry mostly got to pick what they watched because he was bigger and older. Eddie didn't protest too often or too much; he idolized his big brother. (When hedid protest too much he was apt to get the old Indian Rope Burn or maybe a Dutch Rub up the back of his neck.) What Henry liked was Westerns. The sort of movies where, sooner or later, some character had to bite the stick or belt or bullet.
"Roland," he said. His voice was just a faint wheeze to start with. "Roland, listen."
"I hear you very well."
"There was a movie. I told you about movies, right?"
"Stories told in moving pictures."
"Sometimes Henry and I used to stay in and watch them on TV. Television's basically a home movie-machine."
"A shit-machine, some would say," Tower put in.
Eddie ignored him. "One of the movies we watched was about these Mexican peasants - folken,if it does ya - who hired some gunslingers to protect them from thebandidos who came every year to raid their village and steal their crops. Does any of this ring a bell?"
Roland looked at him with gravity and what might have been sadness. "Yes. Indeed it does."
"And the name of Tian's village. I always knew it sounded familiar, but I didn't know why. Now I do. The movie was calledThe Magnificent Seven, and just by the way, Roland, how many of us were in the ditch that day, waiting for the Wolves?"
"Would you boys mind telling us what you're talking about?" Deepneau asked. But although he asked politely, both Roland and Eddie ignored him, too.
Roland took a moment to cull his memory, then said: "You, me, Susannah, Jake, Margaret, Zalia, and Rosa. There were more - the Tavery twins and Ben Slightman's boy - but seven fighters."
"Yes. And the link I couldn't quite make was to the movie's director. When you're making a movie, you need a director to run things. He's the dinh."
Roland nodded.
"The dinh ofThe Magnificent Seven was a man named John Sturges."
Roland sat a moment longer, thinking. Then he said: "Ka."
Eddie burst out laughing. He simply couldn't help it. Roland always had the answer.
Eleven
"In order to catch the pain," Roland said, "you have to clamp down on the belt at the instant you feel it. Do you understand?The very instant. Pin it with your teeth."
"Gotcha. Just make it quick."
"I'll do the best I can."
Roland dipped first the pliers and then the knife into the disinfectant. Eddie waited with the belt in his mouth, lying across his teeth. Yes, once you saw the basic pattern, you couldn't unsee it, could you? Roland was the hero of the piece, the grizzled old warrior who'd be played by some grizzled but vital star like Paul Newman or maybe Eastwood in the Hollywood version. He himself was the young buck, played by the hot young boy star of the moment. Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, someone like that. And here's a set we all know, a cabin in the woods, and a situation we've seen many times before but still relish, Pulling the Bullet. All that was missing was the ominous sound of drums in the distance. And, Eddie realized, probably the drums were missing because they'd already been through the Ominous Drums part of the story: the god-drums. They had turned out to be an amplified version of a Z.Z. Top song being broadcast through streetcorner speakers in the City of Lud. Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny:they were characters in someone's story. This whole world -
I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that I was raised in Brooklyn simply because of some writer's mistake, something that will eventually be fixed in the second draft. Hey, Pere, I'm with you - I refuse to believe I'm acharacter.This is my f**king life!