“Yonder bridge is going to be in the river soon, I think,” Roland said. “Well, maybe,” Eddie said reluctantly, “but it doesn’t really look that bad to me.”
Roland sighed. “Don’t hope for too much, Eddie.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie heard the touchiness in his voice, but it was too late to do anything about it now. “It means that I want you to believe your eyes, Eddie—that’s all. There was a saying when I was growing up: ‘Only a fool believes he’s dreaming before he wakes up.’ Do you understand?”
Eddie felt a sarcastic reply on his tongue and banished it after a brief struggle. It was just that Roland had a way—it was unintentional, he was sure, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with—of making him feel like such a kid.
“I guess I do,” he said at last. “It means the same thing as my mother’s favorite saying.”
“And what was that?”
“Hope for the best and expect the worst,” Eddie said sourly. Roland’s face lightened in a smile. “I think I like your mother’s saying better.”
“But it is still standing!” Eddie burst out. “I agree it’s not in such fantastic shape—probably nobody’s done a really thorough maintenance check on it for a thousand years or so—but it is still there. The whole city is! Is it so wrong to hope we might find some things that’ll help us there? Or some people that’ll feed us and talk to us, like the old folks back in River Crossing, instead of shooting at us? Is it so wrong to hope our luck might be turning?” In the silence which followed, Eddie realized with embarrassment that he had been making a speech.
“No.” There was a kindness in Roland’s voice—that kindness which always surprised Eddie when it came. “It’s never wrong to hope.” He looked around at Eddie and the others like a man coming out of a deep dream. “We’re done travelling for today. It’s time we had our own pala-ver, I think, and it’s going to take awhile.”
The gunslinger left the road and walked into the high grass without looking back. After a moment, the other three followed.
UNTIL THEY MET THE old people in River Crossing, Susannah had seen Roland strictly in terms of television shows she rarely watched: Cheyenne, The Rifleman, and, of course, the archetype of them all, Gunsmoke. That was one she had sometimes listened to on tin- radio with her father before it came on TV (she thought of how foreign the idea of radio drama would be to Eddie and Jake and smiled—Roland’s was not the only world which had moved on). She could still remember what the narrator said at the beginning of every one of those radio playlets: “It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely.” Until River Crossing, that had summed Roland up perfectly for her. He was not broad-shouldered, as Marshal Dillon had been, nor anywhere near as tall, and his face seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild-west lawman, but she had still seen him as an existential version of that make-believe Kansas peace officer, whose only mission in life (other than an occasional drink in The Longbranch with his friends Doc and Kitty) had been to Clean Up Dodge. Now she understood that Roland had once been much more than a cop riding a Daliesque range at the end of the world. He had been a diplomat; a mediator; perhaps even a teacher. Most of all, he had been a soldier of what these people called “the white,” by which she guessed they meant the civilizing forces that kept people from killing each other enough of the time to allow some sort of progress. In his time he had been more wandering knight-errant than bounty hunter. And in many ways, this still was his time; the people of River Crossing had certainly thought so. Why else would they have knelt in the dust to receive his blessing?
In light of this new perception, Susannah could see how cleverly the gunslinger had managed them since that awful morning in the speaking ring, Each time they had begun a line of conversation which would lead to the comparing of notes—and what could be more natural, given the cataclysmic and inexplicable “drawing” each of them had experienced?— Roland had been there, stepping in quickly and turning the conversation into other channels so smoothly that none of them (even she, who had spent almost four years up to her neck in the civil-rights movement) had noticed what he was doing. Susannah thought she understood why—he had done it in order to give Jake time to heal. But understanding his motives didn’t change her own feelings—astonishment, amusement, chagrin—about how neatly he had handled them. She remembered something Andrew, her chauffeur, had said shortly before Roland had drawn her into this world. Something about President Kennedy being the last gunslinger of the western world. She had scoffed then, but now she thought she understood. There was a lot more JFK than Matt Dillon in Roland. She suspected that Roland possessed little of Kennedy’s imagination, but when it came to romance . . . dedication . . . charisma . . .
And guile, she thought. Don’t forget guile. She surprised herself by suddenly bursting into laughter. Roland had seated himself cross-legged. Now he turned toward her, raising his eyebrows. “Something funny?”
“Very. Tell me something—how many languages can you speak?” The gunslinger thought it over. “Five,” he said at last. “I used to speak the Sellian dialects fairly well, but I believe I’ve forgotten every-thing but the curses.”
Susannah laughed again. It was a cheerful, delighted sound. “You a fox, Roland,” she said. “Indeed you are.”
Jake looked interested. “Say a swear in Strelleran,” he said. “Sellian,” Roland corrected. He thought a minute, then said some-thing very fast and greasy—to Eddie it sounded a little as if he was gargling with some very thick liquid. Week-old coffee, say. Roland grinned as he said it. Jake grinned back. “What does it mean?”