Eddie said: "Check me if I'm wrong on this, sport, because I know almost zilch about baseball west of Yankee Stadium, but shouldn't that say Kansas City Royals? You know, George Brett and all that?"
Jake nodded. He knew the Royals, and he knew Brett, although he had been a young player in Jake's when and must have been a fairly old one in Eddie's.
"Kansas City Athletics, you mean," Susannah said, sounding bewildered. Roland ignored it all; he was still cruising in his own personal ozone layer.
"Not by '86, darlin," Eddie said kindly. "By '86 the Athletics were in Oakland." He glanced from the bumper sticker to Jake. "Minor-league team, maybe?" he asked. "Triple A?"
"The Triple A Royals are still the Royals," Jake said. "They play in Omaha. Come on, let's go."
And although he didn't know about the others, Jake himself went on with a lighter heart. Maybe it was stupid, but he was relieved. He didn't believe that this terrible plague was waiting up ahead for his world, because there were no Kansas City Monarchs in his world. Maybe that wasn't enough information upon which to base a conclusion, but it felt true. And it was an enormous relief to be able to believe that his mother and father weren't slated to die of a germ people called Captain Trips and be burned in a ... a landfill, or something.
Except that wasn't quite a sure thing, even if this wasn't the 1986 version of his 1977 world. Because even if this awful plague had happened in a world where there were cars called Takuro Spirits and George Brett played for the K.C. Monarchs, Roland said the trouble was spreading . . .that things like the superflu were eating through the fabric of existence like battery acid eating its way into a piece of cloth.
The gunslinger had spoken of time's pool, a phrase which had at first struck Jake as romantic and charming. But suppose the pool was growing stagnant and swampy? And suppose these Bermuda Triangle-type things Roland called thinnies, once great rarities, were becoming the rule rather than the exception? Suppose - oh, and here was a hideous thought, one guaranteed to keep you lying awake until way past three - all of reality was sagging as the structural weaknesses of the Dark Tower grew? Suppose there came a crash, one level falling down into the next... and the next... and the next... until -
When Eddie grasped his shoulder and squeezed, Jake had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming.
"You're giving yourself the hoodoos," Eddie said.
"What do you know about it?" Jake asked. That sounded rude, but he was mad. From being scared or being seen into? He didn't know. Didn't much care, either.
"When it comes to the hoodoos, I'm an old hand," Eddie said. "I don't know exactly what's on your mind, but whatever it is, this would be an excellent time to stop thinking about it."
That, Jake decided, was probably good advice. They walked across the street together. Toward Gage Park and one of the greatest shocks of Jake's life.
2
Passing under the wrought-iron arch with gage park written on it in old-fashioned, curlicued letters, they found themselves on a brick path leading through a garden that was half English Formal and half Ecuadorian Jungle. With no one to tend it through the hot Midwestern summer, it had run to riot; with no one to tend it this fall, it had run to seed. A sign just inside the arch proclaimed this to be the Reinisch Rose Garden, and there were roses, all right; roses everywhere. Most had gone over, but some of the wild ones still throve, making Jake think of the rose in the vacant lot at Forty-sixth and Second with a longing so deep it was an ache.
Off to one side as they entered the park was a beautiful old-time carousel, its prancing steeds and racing stallions now still on their posts. The carousel's very silence, its flashing lights and steamy calliope music stilled forever, gave Jake a chill. Hung over the neck of one horse, dangling from a rawhide strip, was some kid's baseball glove. Jake was barely able to look at it.
Beyond the carousel, the foliage grew even thicker, strangling the path until the travellers edged along single-file, like lost children in a fairy-tale wood. Thorns from overgrown and unpruned rosebushes tore at Jake's clothes. He had somehow gotten into the lead (probably because Roland was still deep inside his own thoughts), and that was why he saw Charlie the Choo-Choo first.
His only thought while approaching the narrow-gauge train-tracks which crossed the path - they were little more than toy tracks, really - was of the gunslinger saying that ka was like a wheel, always rolling around to the same place again. We 're haunted by roses and trains, he thought. Why? I don't know. I guess it's just another rid -