"Iam from Brooklyn, though. Just not the...well...the same one."
John Cullum was still looking at them with that wide-eyed child's expression of wonder. "What about those other fellas? The ones who were waiting for you? Are they...?"
"No," Roland said. "Not they. No more time for this, John - not now." He got cautiously to his feet, grabbed an overhead beam, and stepped out of the boat with a little wince of pain. John followed and Eddie came last. The two other men had to help him. The steady throb in his right calf had receded a little bit, but the leg was stiff and numb, hard to control.
"Let's go to your place," Roland said. "There's a man we need to find. With the blessing, you may be able to help us do that."
He may be able to help us in more ways than that,Eddie thought, and followed them back into the sunlight, gimping along on his bad leg with his teeth gritted.
At that moment, Eddie thought he would have slain a saint in exchange for a dozen aspirin tablets.
STAVE: Commala-loaf-leaven!
They go to hell or up to heaven!
When the guns are shot and the fire's hot,
You got to poke em in the oven.
RESPONSE: Commala-come-seven!
Salt and yow' for leaven!
Heat em up and knock em down
And poke em in the oven.
8th Stanza: A Game of Toss
One
In the winter of 1984 - 85, when Eddie's heroin use was quietly sneaking across the border from the Land of Recreational Drugs and into the Kingdom of Really Bad Habits, Henry Dean met a girl and fell briefly in love. Eddie thought Sylvia Goldover was a SkankEl Supremo (smelly armpits and dragon breath wafting out from between a pair of Mick Jagger lips), but kept his mouth shut becauseHenry thought she was beautiful, and Eddie didn't want to hurt Henry's feelings. That winter the young lovers spent a lot of time either walking on the windswept beach at Coney Island or going to the movies in Times Square, where they would sit in the back row and wank each other off once the popcorn and the extra-large box of Goobers were gone.
Eddie was philosophic about the new person in Henry's life; if Henry could work his way past that awful breath and actually tangle tongues with Sylvia Goldover, more power to him. Eddie himself spent a lot of those mostly gray three months alone and stoned in the Dean family apartment. He didn't mind; liked it, in fact. If Henry had been there, he would have insisted on TV and would have ragged Eddie constantly about his story-tapes. ("Oh boy! Eddie's gonna wissen to his wittle sto-wy about theelves and theogs and the cute wittlemidgets! ") Always calling the orcs the ogs, and always calling the Ents "the scawwy walkingtwees. " Henry thought made-up shit was queer. Eddie had sometimes tried to tell him there was nothing more made-up than the crud they showed on afternoon TV, but Henry wasn't having any of that; Henry could tell you all about the evil twins onGeneral Hospital and the equally evil stepmother onThe Guiding Light.
In many ways, Henry Dean's great love affair - which ended when Sylvia Goldover stole ninety bucks out of his wallet, left a note sayingI'm sorry, Henry in its place, and took off for points unknown with herold boyfriend - was a relief to Eddie. He'd sit on the sofa in the living room, put on the tapes of John Gielgud reading Tolkien'sRings trilogy, skin-pop along the inside of his right arm, and nod off to the Forests of Mirkwood or the Mines of Moria along with Frodo and Sam.
He'd loved the hobbits, thought he could have cheerfully spent the rest of his life in Hobbiton, where the worst drug going was tobacco and big brothers did not spend entire days ragging on little brothers, and John Cullum's little cottage in the woods returned him to those days and that dark-toned story with surprising force. Because the cottage had a hobbit-hole feel about it. The furniture in the living room was small but perfect: a sofa and two overstuffed chairs with those white doilies on the arms and where the back of your head would rest. The gold-framed black-and-white photograph on one wall had to be Cullum's folks, and the one opposite it had to be his grandparents. There was a framed Certificate of Thanks from the East Stoneham Volunteer Fire Department. There was a parakeet in a cage, twittering amiably, and a cat on the hearth. She raised her head when they came in, gazed greenly at the strangers for a moment, then appeared to go back to sleep. There was a standing ashtray beside what had to be Cullum's easy chair, and in it were two pipes, one a corncob and the other a briar. There was an old-fashioned Emerson record-player/radio (the radio of the type featuring a multi-band dial and a large knurled tuning knob) but no television. The room smelled pleasantly of tobacco and potpourri. As fabulously neat as it was, a single glance was enough to tell you that the man who lived here wasn't married. John Cullum's parlor was a modest ode to the joys of bachelorhood.
"How's your leg?" John asked. " 'Pears to have stopped bleeding, at least, but you got a pretty good hitch in your gitalong."
Eddie laughed. "It hurts like a son of a bitch, but I can walk on it, so I guess that makes me lucky."
"Bathroom's in there, if you want to wash up," Cullum said, and pointed.
"Think I better," Eddie said.
The washing-up was painful but also a relief. The wound in his leg was deep, but seemed to have totally missed the bone. The one in his arm was even less of a problem; the bullet had gone right through, praise God, and there was hydrogen peroxide in Cullum's medicine cabinet. Eddie poured it into the hole, teeth bared at the pain, and then went ahead and used the stuff on both his leg and the laceration in his scalp before he could lose his courage. He tried to remember if Frodo and Sam had had to face anything even close to the horrors of hydrogen peroxide, and couldn't come up with anything. Well, of course they'd had elves to heal them, hadn't they?