Oy howled one final time, then returned to Jake. He stood on the kid's feet, looking up at him with those spooky wedding-ring eyes of his. Jake picked him up, took him in a circle around the wolf, and then set him down again on the brick path.
The path led them to a steep set of steps (weeds had begun to push through the stonework already), and at the top Roland looked back over the zoo and the gardens. From here they could easily see the circuit the toy train-tracks made, allowing Charlie's riders to tour the entire perimeter of Gage Park. Beyond it, fallen leaves clattered down Gage Boulevard before a rush of cold wind.
"So fell Lord Perth," murmured Roland.
"And the countryside did shake with that thunder," Jake finished.
Roland looked down at him with surprise, like a man awakening from a deep sleep, then smiled and put an arm around Jake's shoulders. "I have played Lord Perth in my time," he said.
"Have you?"
"Yes. Very soon now you shall hear."
4
Beyond the steps was an aviary full of dead exotic birds; beyond the aviary was a snackbar advertising (perhaps heartlessly, given the location) topeka's best buffaloburger; beyond the snackbar was another wrought iron arch with a sign reading come back to gage park real soon! Beyond this was the curving upslope of a limited-access-highway entrance ramp. Above it, the green signs they had first spotted from across the way stood clear.
"Tumpikin' again," Eddie said in a voice almost too low to hear. "Goddam." Then he sighed.
"What's tumpikin', Eddie?"
Jake didn't think Eddie was going to answer; when Susannah craned around to look at him as he stood with his fingers wrapped around the handles of the new wheelchair, Eddie looked away. Then he looked back, first at Susannah, then at Jake. "It's not pretty. Not much about my life before Gary Cooper here yanked me across the Great Divide was."
"You don't have to - "
"It's also no big deal. A bunch of us would get together - me, my brother Henry, Bum O'Hara, usually, 'cause he had a car, Sandra Corbitt, and maybe this friend of Henry's we called Jimmie Polio - and we'd stick all our names in a hat. The one we drew out was the ... the trip-guide, Henry used to call him. He - she, if it was Sandi - had to stay straight. Relatively, anyway. Everyone else got seriously goobered. Then we'd all pile into Bum's Chrysler and go up 1-95 into Connecticut or maybe take the Taconic Parkway into upstate New York . . . only we called it the Catatonic Parkway. Listen to Creedence or Marvin Gaye or maybe even Elvis 's Greatest Hits on the tape-player.
"It was better at night, best when the moon was full. We'd cruise for hours sometimes with our heads stuck out the windows like dogs do when they're riding, looking up at the moon and watching for shooting stars. We called it tumpikin'." Eddie smiled. It looked like an effort. "A charming life, folks."
"It sounds sort of fun," Jake said. "Not the drug part, I mean, but riding around with your pals at night, looking at the moon and listening to the music . . . that sounds excellent."
"It was, actually," Eddie said. "Even stuffed so full of reds we were as apt to pee on our own shoes as in the bushes, it was excellent." He paused. "That's the horrible part, don't you get it?"
"Tumpikin'," the gunslinger said. "Let's do some."
They left Gage Park and crossed the road to the entrance ramp.
5
Someone had spray-painted over both signs marking the ramp's ascending curve. On the one reading st. louis 215, someone had slashed
in black. On the one marked next rest area 10 mi.,
had been written in fat red letters. That scarlet was still bright enough to scream even after an entire summer. Each had been decorated with a symbol -
"Do you know what any of that truck means, Roland?" Susannah asked. Roland shook his head, but he looked troubled, and that introspective look never left his own eyes. They went on.
6
At the place where the ramp merged with the turnpike, the two men, the boy, and the bumbler clustered around Susannah in her new wheelchair. All of them looked east.
Eddie didn't know what the traffic situation would be like once they cleared Topeka, but here all the lanes, those headed west as well as the eastbound ones on their side, were crammed with cars and trucks. Most of the vehicles were piled high with possessions gone rusty with a season's worth of rain.