1
They reached the shoes at mid-morning. Beyond them, clearer now, stood the glass palace. It glimmered a delicate green shade, like the reflection of a lily pad in still water. There were shining gates in front of it; red pennons snapped from its towers in a light breeze.
The shoes were also red.
Susannah's impression that there were six pairs was understandable but wrong - there were actually four pairs and one quartet. This latter - four dark red booties made of supple leather - was undoubtedly meant for the four-footed member of their ka-tet. Roland picked one of them up and felt inside it. He didn't know how many bumblers had worn shoes in the history of the world, but he was willing to guess that none had ever been gifted with a set of silk-lined leather booties.
"Bally, Gucci, eat your heart out," Eddie said. "This is great stuff."
Susannah's were easiest to pick out, and not just because of the feminine, sparkly swoops on the sides. They weren't really shoes at all - they had been made to fit over the stumps of her legs, which ended just above the knees.
"Now look at this," she marvelled, holding one up so the sun could flash on the rhinestones with which the shoes were decorated ... if they were rhinestones. She had a crazy notion that maybe they were diamond chips. "Cappies. After four years of gettin along in what my friend Cynthia calls 'circumstances of reduced leg-room,' I finally got myself a pair of cappies. Think of that."
"Cappies," Eddie mused. "Is that what they call em?"
"That's what they call em, sugar."
Jake's were bright red Oxfords - except for the color, they would have looked perfectly at home in the well-bred classrooms of The Piper School. He flexed one, then turned it over. The sole was bright and unmarked. There was no manufacturer's stamp, nor had he really expected one. His father had maybe a dozen pairs of fine handmade shoes. Jake knew them when he saw them.
Eddie's were low boots with Cuban heels {Maybe in this world you call them Mejis heels, he thought) and pointed toes ... what, back in his other life, had been known as "street-boppers." Kids from the mid-sixties - an era Odetta/Detta/Susannah had just missed - might have called them "Beatle-boots."
Roland's, of course, were cowboy boots. Fancy ones - you'd go dancing rather than droving in such as these. Looped stitching, side decorations, narrow, haughty arches. He examined them without picking them up, then looked at his fellow travellers and frowned. They were looking at each other. You would have said three people couldn't do that, only a pair ... but you only would have said it if you'd never been part of a ka-tet.
Roland still shared khef with them; he felt the powerful current of their mingled thought, but could not understand it. Because it's of their world. They come from different whens of that world, but they see something here that's common to all three of them.
"What is it?" he asked. "What do they mean, these shoes?"
"I don't think any of us know that, exactly," Susannah said.
"No," Jake said. "It's another riddle." He looked at the weird, blood red Oxford shoe in his hands with distaste. "Another goddamned riddle."
"Tell what you know." He looked toward the glass palace again. It was perhaps fifteen New York miles away, now, shining in the clear day, delicate as a mirage, but as real as ... well, as real as shoes. "Please, tell me what you know about these shoes."
"I got shoes, you got shoes, all God's chillun got shoes," Odetta said. "That's the prevailin opinion, anyway."
"Well," Eddie said, "we got em, anyway. And you're thinking what I'm thinking, aren't you?"
"I guess I am."
"You, Jake?"
Instead of answering with words, Jake picked up the other Oxford (Roland had no doubt that all the shoes, including Oy's, would fit perfectly) and clapped them briskly together three times. It meant nothing to Roland, but both Eddie and Susannah reacted violently, looking around, looking especially at the sky, as if expecting a storm born out of this bright autumn sunshine. I hey ended up looking at the glass palace again . . . and then at each other, in that knowing, round-eyed way that made Roland feel like shaking them both until their teeth rattled. Yet he waited. Sometimes that was all a man could do.
"After you killed Jonas, you looked into the ball," Eddie said, turning to him.
"Yes."
"Travelled in the ball."
"Yes, but I don't want to talk about that again now; it has nothing to do with these - "
"I think it does," Eddie said. "You flew inside a pink storm. Inside a pink gale, you could say. Gale is a word you might use for a storm, isn't it? Especially if you were making up a riddle."