But Roland's time of power was passing. As his importance waned with his good health, he found himself remembering all the times he had cried to either Sasha or Flagg: "Won't these people ever leave me alone?" The memory brought a rueful smile to his lips. Now that they did, he missed them.
Thomas felt contempt because people are rarely at their best when they are alone. They usually put their masks of politeness, good order, and good breeding aside. What's beneath? Some warty monster? Some disgusting thing that would make people run away, screaming? Sometimes, perhaps, but usually it's noth-ing bad at all. Usually people would just laugh if they saw us with our masks off-laugh, make a revolted face, or do both at the same time.
Thomas saw that his father, whom he had always loved and feared, who had seemed to him the greatest man in the world, often picked his nose when he was alone. He would root around in first one nostril and then the other until he got a plump green booger. He would regard these with solemn satisfaction, turning each one this way and that in the firelight, the way a jeweler might turn a particularly fine emerald. Most of these he would then rub under the chair in which he was sitting. Others, I regret to say, he popped into his mouth and munched with an expression of reflective enjoyment on his face.
He would have only a single glass of wine at night-the glass which Peter brought him-but after Peter left, he drank what seemed to Thomas huge amounts of beer (it was only years later that Thomas came to realize that his father hadn't wanted Peter to see him drunk), and when he needed to urinate, he rarely used the commode in the corner. Most times he simply stood up and pissed into the fire, often farting as he did so.
He talked to himself. He would sometimes walk around the long room like a man who was not sure where he was, speaking either to the air or to the mounted heads.
"I remember that day we got you, Bonsey," he would say to one of the elk heads (another of his eccentricities was that he had named every one of the trophies). "I was with Bill Squathings and that fellow with the great lump on the side of his face. I remember how you come through the trees and Bill let loose, and then that fellow with the lump let loose, then I let loose-"
Then his father would demonstrate how he had let loose by raising his leg and farting, even as he mimed drawing back a bowstring and letting fly. And he would laugh an old man's shrill, unpleasant cackle.
Thomas would slide the little panels back after awhile and slink down the corridor again, his head pounding and an uneasy grin on his face-the head and grin of a boy who has been eating green apples and knows he may be sicker by morning than he is now.
This was the father he had always loved and feared?
He was an old man who farted out stinking clouds of steam.
This was the King his loyal subjects called Roland the Good?
He pissed into the fire, sending up more clouds of steam.
This was the man who made his heart break by not liking his boat?
He talked to the stuffed heads on his walls, calling them silly names like Bonsey and Stag-Pool and Puckerstring; he picked his nose and sometimes ate the boogers.
I don't care for you anymore, Thomas would think, checking the peephole to make sure the corridor was empty and then creeping back to his room like a felon. You're a filthy, silly old man and you're nothing to me! Nothing at all! No!
But he was something to Thomas. Some part of him went on loving Roland just the same-some part of him wanted to go to his father so his father would have something better to talk to than a bunch of stuffed heads on the walls.
Still, there was that other part of him that liked spying better.
28
The night that Flagg came to King Roland's private rooms with the glass of poisoned wine was the first occasion in a very long time that Thomas had dared spy. There was a good reason for this.
One night about three months before, Thomas found himself unable to sleep. He tossed and turned until he heard the keep watchman cry eleven. Then he got up, dressed, and left his rooms. Less than ten minutes later, he was looking down into his father's den. He had thought his father might be asleep, but he was not. Roland was awake, and very, very drunk.
Thomas had seen his father drunk many times before, but he had never seen him in anything remotely like his current state. The boy was flabbergasted and badly frightened.