Ted feels like he just took a spear in the middle of the back himself, but he, at least, is still standing. And he didn't mean it. There's that. He knoivs in his heart that he didn't mean it. He was just... surprised into anger.
He picks up his wallet and sees the stickball kids staring at him, their mouths open. He points his wallet at them like some kind of gun with a floppy barrel, and the boy holding the sawed-off broomhandle flinches. It's the flinch even more than the falling body that will haunt Ted's dreams for the next year or so, and then off and on for the rest of his life. Because he likes kids, would never scare one on purpose. And he knows what they are seeing: a man with his pants mostly pulled down so his boxer shorts show (for all he knows his dingus could be hanging out of the fly front, and wouldn't that just be the final magical touch), a wallet in his hand and a loony look on his bloody kisser.
"You didn't see anything!" he shouts at them. "You hear me, now!
You hear me! You didn't see anything!"
Then he hitches up his pants. Then he goes back to his briefcase and picks it up, but not the pork chop in the brown paper sack, f**k the pork chop, he lost his appetite along with one of his incisors. Then he takes another look at the body on the sidewalk, and the frightened kids.
Then he runs.
Which turns into a career.
FIVE
The end of the second tape pulled free of the hub and made a soft fwip-fwip-fwip sound as it turned.
"Jesus," Susannah said. "Jesus, that poor man."
"So long ago," Jake said, and shook his head as if to clear it.
To him, the years between his when and Mr. Brautigan's seemed an unbridgeable chasm.
Eddie picked up the third box and displayed the tape inside, raising his eyebrows at Roland. The gunslinger twirled a finger in his old gesture, the one that said go on, go on.
Eddie threaded the tape through the heads. He'd never done this before, but you didn't have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying went. The tired voice began again, speaking from the Gingerbread House Dinky Earnshaw had made for Sheemie, a real place created from nothing more than imagination. A balcony on the side of the Dark Tower, Brautigan had called it.
He'd killed the man (by accident, they all would have agreed; they had come to live by the gun and knew the difference between by accident and on purpose without needing to discuss the matter) around seven in the evening. By nine that night, Brautigan was on a westbound train. Three days later he was scanning the Accountants Wanted ads in the Des Moines newspaper. He knew something about himself by then, knew how careful he would have to be. He could no longer allow himself the luxury of anger even when anger was justified. Ordinarily he was just your garden-variety telepath-could tell you what you had for lunch, could tell you which card was the queen of hearts because the streetcorner sharpie running the monte-con knew-but when angry he had access to this spear, this terrible spear...
"And just by the way, that's not true," said the voice from the tape recorder. "The part about being just a garden-variety telepath, I mean, and I understood that even when I was a wetbehind-the-ears kid trying to get into the Army. I just didn't know the word for what I was."
The word, it turned out, was facilitator. And he later became sure that certain folks-certain talent scouts-were watching him even then, sizing him up, knowing he was different even in the subset of telepaths but not how different. For one thing, telepaths who did not come from die Keystone Earth (it was their phrase) were rare. For another, Ted had come to realize by the mid-nineteen-thirties that what he had was actually catching.
If he touched a person while in a state of high emotion, that person for a short time became a telepath. What he hadn't known tfien was that people who were already telepaths became stronger.
Exponentially stronger.
"But that's ahead of my story," he said.
He moved from town to town, a hobo who rode the rods in a passenger car and wearing a suit instead of in a boxcar wearing Oshkosh biballs, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. And in retrospect, he supposed he knew that even then he was being watched. It was an intuitive thing, or like oddities one sometimes glimpsed from the corner of one's eye. He became aware of a certain kind of people, for instance.
A few were women, most were men, and all had a taste for loud clothes, rare steak, and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their clouiing. Their faces were oddly heavy and strangely inexpressive.
It was a look he much later came to associate with dumbbells who'd gotten plastic surgery from quack doctors.
During that same twenty-year period-but once again not consciously, only in the corner of his mind's eye-he became aware that no matter what city he was in, those childishly simple symbols had a way of turning up on fences and stoops and sidewalks.