"Do you mind?"
"No. I don't mind. I meant to say mother gave her a special plate. It was white, with delicate blue tracework woven all around the rim." Odetta smiled a little. Eddie didn't think it was an entirely comfortable smile. Something about this memory disturbed her, and the way its immediacy seemed to have taken precedence over the extremely strange situation she had found herself in, a situation which should be claiming all or most of her attention, disturbed him.
"I can see that plate as clearly as I can see you now, Eddie. My mother gave it to Aunt Blue and she cried and cried over it. I think she'd seen a plate like that once when she and my mother were children, only of course their parents could never have afforded such a thing. There was none of them who got any thing forspecial as kids. After the reception Aunt Blue and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. They went on the train." She looked at Eddie.
"In the Jim Crow car," he said.
"That's right! In the Crow car! In those days that's what Negros rode in and where they ate. That's what we're trying to change in Oxford Town ."
She looked at him, almost surely expecting him to insist she was here, but he was caught in the webwork of his own memory again: wet diapers and those words. Oxford Town . Only suddenly other words came, just a single line, but he could remember Henry singing it over and over until his mother asked if he couldn't please stop so she could hear Walter Cronkite.
Somebody better investigate soon. Those were the words. Sung over and over by Henry in a nasal monotone. He tried for more but couldn't get it, and was that any real surprise? He could have been no more than three at the time. Somebody better investigate soon. The words gave him a chill.
"Eddie, are you all right?"
"Yes. Why?"
"You shivered."
He smiled. "Donald Duck must have walked over my grave."
She laughed. "Anyway, at least I didn't spoil the wedding. It happened when we were walking back to the railway station. We stayed the night with a friend of Aunt Blue's, and in the morning my father called a taxi. The taxi came almost right away, but when the driver saw we were colored, he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. Aunt Blue's friend had already gone ahead to the depot with our luggage―there was a lot of it, because we were going to spend a week in New York . I remember my father saying he couldn't wait to see my face light up when the clock in Central Park struck the hour and all the animals danced.
"My father said we might as well walk to the station. My mother agreed just as fast as lickety-split, saying that was a fine idea, it wasn't but a mile and it would be nice to stretch our legs after three days on one train just behind us and half a day on another one just ahead of us. My father said yes, and it was gorgeous weather besides, but I think I knew even at five that he was mad and she was embarrassed and both of them were afraid to call another taxi-cab because the same thing might happen again.
"So we went walking down the street. I was on the inside because my mother was afraid of me getting too close to the traffic. I remember wondering if my daddy meant my face would actually start to glow or something when I saw that clock in Central Park, and if that might not hurt, and that was when the brick came down on my head. Everything went dark for a while. Then the dreams started. Vivid dreams."
She smiled.
"Like this dream, Eddie."
"Did the brick fall, or did someone bomb you?"
"They never found anyone. The police (my mother told me this long after, when I was sixteen or so) found the place where they thought the brick had been, but there were other bricks missing and more were loose. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room in an apartment building that had been condemned. But of course there were lots of people staying there just the same. Especially at night."
"Sure," Eddie said.
"No one saw anyone leaving the building, so it went down as an accident. My mother said she thought it had been, but I think she was lying. She didn't even bother trying to tell me what my father thought. They were both still smarting over how the cab-driver had taken one look at us and driven off. It was that more than anything else that made them believe someone had been up there, just looking out, and saw us coming, and decided to drop a brick on the niggers.
"Will your lobster-creatures come out soon?"
"No," Eddie said. "Not until dusk. So one of your ideas is that all of this is a coma-dream like the ones you had when you got bopped by the brick. Only this time you think it was a billy-club or something."
"Yes."
"What's the other one?"
Odetta's face and voice were calm enough, but her head was filled with an ugly skein of images which all added up to Oxford Town , Oxford Town . How did the song go? Two men killed by the light of the moon,/Somebody better investigate soon. Not quite right, but it was close. Close.
"I may have gone insane," she said.
7
The first words which came into Eddie's mind were If you think you've gone insane, Odetta, you're nuts.
Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprofitable line of argument to take.
Instead he remained silent for a time, sitting by her wheelchair, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his wrists.
"Were you really a heroin addict?"
"Am," he said. "It's like being an alcoholic, or 'basing. It's not a thing you ever get over. I used to hear that and go 'Yeah, yeah, right, right,' in my head, you know, but now I understand. I still want it, and I guess part of me will always want it, but the physical part has passed."
"What's 'basing?" she asked.
"Something that hasn't been invented yet in your when. It's something you do with cocaine, only it's like turning TNT into an A-bomb."
"You did it?"
"Christ, no. Heroin was my thing. I told you."
"You don't seem like an addict," she said.
Eddie actually was fairly spiffy ... if, that was, one ignored the gamy smell arising from his body and clothes (he could rinse himself and did, could rinse his clothes and did, but lacking soap, he could not really wash either). His hair had been short when Roland stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big joke that had turned out to be), and was a still a respectable length. He shaved every morning, using the keen edge of Roland's knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing confidence. He'd been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for 'Nam, and it hadn't been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into "mowing the stubble." When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few others―foot-powder after showering; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one you took care of with a needle.
"Too clean-cut?" he asked her, grinning.
"Too white," she said shortly, and then was quiet for a moment, looking sternly out at the sea. Eddie was quiet, too. If there was a comeback to something like that, he didn't know what it was.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That was very unkind, very unfair, and very unlike me."
"It's all right."
"It's not. It's like a white person saying something like 'Jeez, I never would have guessed you were a nigger' to someone with a very light skin."
"You like to think of yourself as more fair-minded," Eddie said.
"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common, I should think, but yes―I like to think of myself as more fair-minded. So please accept my apology, Eddie."
"On one condition."
"What's that?" she was smiling a little again. That was good. He liked it when he was able to make her smile.
"Give this a fair chance. That's the condition."
"Give what a fair chance?" She sounded slightly amused. Eddie might have bristled at that tone in someone else's voice, might have felt he was getting boned, but with her it was different. With her it was all right. He supposed with her just about anything would have been.
"That there's a third alternative. That this really is happening. I mean ..." Eddie cleared his throat. "I'm not very good at this philosophical shit, or, you know, metamorphosis or whatever the hell you call it―"
"Do you mean metaphysics?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I think so. But I know you can't go around disbelieving what your senses tell you. Why, if your idea about this all being a dream is right―"
"I didn't say a dream―"
"Whatever you said, that's what it comes down to, isn't it? A false reality?"
If there had been something faintly condescending in her voice a moment ago, it was gone now. "Philosophy and metaphysics may not be your bag, Eddie, but you must have been a hell of a debater in school."
"I was never in debate. That was for g*ys and hags and wimps. Like chess club. What do you mean, my bag? What's a bag?"
"Just something you like. What do you mean, g*ys? What are g*ys?"
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. "Homos. Fags. Never mind. We could swap slang all day. It's not getting us anyplace. What I'm trying to say is that if it's all a dream, it could be mine, not yours. You could be a figment of my imagination."
Her smile faltered. "You ... nobody bopped you."
"Nobody bopped you, either."
Now her smile was entirely gone. "No one that I remember," she corrected with some sharpness.
"Me either!" he said. "You told me they're rough in Oxford . Well, those Customs guys weren't exactly cheery joy when they couldn't find the dope they were after. One of them could have head-bopped me with the butt of his gun. I could be lying in a Bellevue ward right now, dreaming you and Roland while they write their reports, explaining how, while they were interrogating me, I became violent and had to be subdued."
"It's not the same."
"Why? Because you're this intelligent socially active black lady with no legs and I'm just a hype from Co-Op City ?" He said it with a grin, meaning it as an amiable jape, but she flared at him.
"I wish you would stop calling me black!"
He sighed. "Okay, but it's gonna take getting used to."
"You should have been on the debate club anyway."
"Fuck," he said, and the turn of her eyes made him realize again that the difference between them was much wider than color; they were speaking to each other from separate islands. The water between was time. Never mind. The word had gotten her attention. "I don't want to debate you. I want to wake you up to the fact that you are awake, that's all."
"I might be able to at least operate provisionally according to the dictates of your third alternative as long as this ... this situation ... continued to go on, except for one thing: There's a fundamental difference between what happened to you and what happened to me. So fundamental, so large, that you haven't seen it."
"Then show it to me."
"There is no discontinuity in your consciousness. There is a very large one in mine."
"I don't understand."
"I mean you can account for all of your time," Odetta said. "Your story follows from point to point: the airplane, the incursion by that ... that ... by him―
She nodded toward the foothills with clear distaste.
"The stashing of the drugs, the officers who took you into custody, all the rest. It's a fantastic story, it has no missing links.
"As for myself, I arrived back from Oxford , was met by Andrew, my driver, and brought back to my building. I bathed and I wanted sleep―I was getting a very bad headache, and sleep is the only medicine that's any good for the really bad ones. But it was close on midnight , and I thought I would watch the news first. Some of us had been released, but a good many more were still in the jug when we left. I wanted to find out if their cases had been resolved.
"I dried off and put on my robe and went into the living room. I turned on the TV news. The newscaster started talking about a speech Krushchev had just made about the American advisors in Viet Nam . He said, 'We have a film report from―' and then he was gone and I was rolling down this beach. You say you saw me in some sort of magic doorway which is now gone, and that I was in Macy's, and that I was stealing. All of this is preposterous enough, but even if it was so, I could find something better to steal than costume jewelry. I don't wear jewelry."
"You better look at your hands again, Odetta," Eddie said quietly.
For a very long time she looked from the "diamond" on her left pinky, too large and vulgar to be anything but paste, to the large opal on the third finger of her right hand, which was too large and vulgar to be anything but real.
"None of this is happening," she repeated firmly.
"You sound like a broken record!" He was genuinely angry for the first time. "Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that 'none of this is happening' shit. You have to wise up, 'Detta."
"Don't call me that! I hate that!" she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.
"Sorry. Jesus! I didn't know."
"I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!"
"But your memories don't stop in Oxford ," he said softly.
"W-What?" Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.
"If you got whacked in Oxford , how come your memories don't stop there?"
"There isn't always a lot of logic to things like this." She was rubbing her temples again. "And now, if it's all the same to you, Eddie, I'd just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It's quite bad."
"I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy's, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don't do things like that, but you also told me you don't wear jewelry. You told me that even though you'd looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn't see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them."
"I don't want to talk about it!" she shouted. "My head hurts!"
"All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn't in Oxford ."
"Leave me alone," she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
"I wish I could help you," Eddie said, "but to do that, I guess I'd have to be real."
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
"Sit down." Eddie took the bags. "You look all in."
"I am. I'm getting sick again."
Eddie looked at the gunslinger's flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. "I hoped it wouldn't happen, but I'm not that surprised, man. You didn't bat for the cycle. Balazar didn't have enough Keflex."
"I don't understand you."
"If you don't take a penicillin drug long enough, you don't kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We'll need more, but at least there's a door to go to. In the meantime you'll just have to take it easy." But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta's missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn't see how.
"I have to tell you something about Odetta."
"That's her name?"
"Uh-huh."
"It's very lovely," the gunslinger said.
"Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn't so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn't think she's here."
"I know. And she doesn't like me much, does she?"
No, Eddie thought, but that doesn't keep her from think-ing you're one booger of a hallucination. He didn't say it, only nodded.
"The reasons are almost the same," the gunslinger said. "She's not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.''
Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror ... that snarling face ... the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn't been Odetta at all.
Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse―almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.
The rings had been there.
Same rings.