De body-stealin kind,Detta replied cheerfully.Pretty soon you be havin a white belly...white breas's...white neck...white cheeks...
Stop it,Susannah warned, but when had Detta Walker ever listened to her warnings? Hers or anybody's?
And den, las' of all, you have a whitebrain,girl! A Mia brain! And won't dat be fahn? Sho! You be all Mia den! Nobody give you no shit if you want to ride right up front on de bus!
Then the shirt was drawn over her hips; the jeans were again buttoned up. Mia sat down on the toilet ring that way. In front of her, scrawled on the door, was this graffito: BANGO SKANK AWAITS THE KING!
Who is this Bango Skank?Mia asked.
I have no idea.
I think...It was hard, but Mia forced herself.I think I owe you a word of thanks.
Susannah's response was cold and immediate.Thank me with the truth.
First tell me why you'd help me at all, after I...
This time Mia couldn't finish. She liked to think of herself as brave - as brave as she had to be in the service of her chap, at least - but this time she couldn't finish.
After you betrayed the man I love to men who are, when you get right down to it, footsoldiers of the Crimson King? After you decided it would be all right for them to kill mine so long as you could keep yours? Is that what you want to know?
Mia hated to hear it spoken of that way, but bore it.Had to bear it.
Yes, lady, if you like.
It was the other one who replied this time, in that voice - harsh, cawing, laughing, triumphant, and hateful - that was even worse than the shrill laughter of the birdy-women. Worse by far.
Because mah boys got away, dass why! Fucked those honkies mos' righteous! The ones dey didn't shoot all blowed to smithereens!
Mia felt a deep stirring of unease. Whether it was true or not, the bad laughing woman clearlybelieved it was true. And if Roland and Eddie Dean were still out there, wasn't it possible the Crimson King wasn't as strong, as all-powerful, as she had been told? Wasn't it even possible that shehad been misled about -
Stop it, stop it, you can't think that way!
There's another reason I helped.The harsh one was gone and the other was back. At least for now.
What?
It's my baby, too,Susannah said.I don't want it killed.
I don't believe you.
But she did. Because the woman inside was right: Mordred Deschain of Gilead and Discordia belonged to both of them. The bad one might not care, but the other, Susannah, clearly felt the chap's tidal pull. And if she was right about Sayre and whoever waited for her at the Dixie Pig...if they were liars and cozeners...
Stop it. Stop. I have nowhere else to go but to them.
You do,Susannah said quickly.With Black Thirteen you can go anywhere.
You don't understand. He'd follow me. Followit.
You're right, Idon'tunderstand. She actually did, orthought she did, but...Burn up the day,he'd said.
All right, I'll try to explain. I don't understand everything myself - there are things I don't know - but I'll tell you what I can.
Thank y -
Before she could finish, Susannah was falling again, like Alice down the rabbit-hole. Through the toilet, through the floor, through the pipes beneath the floor, and into another world.
Nine
No castle at the end of her drop, not this time. Roland had told them a few stories of his wandering years - the vampire nurses and little doctors of Eluria, the walking waters of East Downe, and, of course, the story of his doomed first love - and this was a little like falling into one of those tales. Or, perhaps, into one of the oat-operas ("adult Westerns," as they were called) on the still relatively new ABC-TV network:Sugarfoot, with Ty Hardin,Maverick, with James Garner, or - Odetta Holmes's personal favorite - Cheyenne,starring Clint Walker. (Odetta had once written a letter to ABC programming, suggesting they could simultaneously break new ground and open up a whole new audience if they did a series about a wandering Negro cowboy in the years after the Civil War. She never got an answer. She supposed writing the letter in the first place had been ridiculous, a waste of time.)
There was a livery stable with a sign out front reading TACK MENDED CHEAP . The sign over the hotel promised QUIET ROOMS, GUD BEDS . There were at least five saloons. Outside one of them, a rusty robot that ran on squalling treads turned its bulb head back and forth, blaring a come-on to the empty town from the horn-shaped speaker in the center of its rudimentary face: "Girls, girls,girls! Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can't tell the difference, they do what you want without complaint, won't is not in their vo-CAB-u-lary, they give satisfaction with every action! Girls, girls, girls! Some are cybie, some are real, you can't tell the difference when you cop a feel! They do what you want! They want whatyou want!"
Walking beside Susannah was the beautiful young white woman with the swollen belly, scratched legs, and shoulder-length black hair. Now, as they walked below the gaudy false front of THE FEDIC GOOD-TIME SALOON, BAR, AND DANCE EMPORIUM , she was wearing a faded plaid dress which advertised her advanced state of pregnancy in a way that made it seem freakish, almost a sign of the apocalypse. Thehuaraches of the castle allure had been replaced by scuffed and battered shor'boots. Both of them were wearing shor'boots, and the heels clumped hollowly on the boardwalk.
From one of the deserted barrooms farther along came the herky-jerky jazz of a jagtime tune, and a snatch of some old poem came to Susannah:A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon!
She looked over the batwing doors and was not in the least surprised to see the words SERVICE'S MALAMUTE SALOON .
She slowed long enough to peer over the batwing doors and saw a chrome piano playing itself, dusty keys popping up and down, just a mechanical music-box no doubt built by the ever-popular North Central Positronics, entertaining a room that was empty except for a dead robot and, in the far corner, two skeletons working through the process of final decomposition, the one that would take them from bone to dust.