The Dark Tower

And no, she didn’t just think. She knew what it meant. Roland wanted her to know he was hiding his thoughts from Patrick. His desires. And while she’d known the gunslinger to lie (most spectacularly at the meeting on the Calla Bryn Sturgis common-ground before the coming of the Wolves), she had never known him to lie to her. To Detta, maybe, but not to her. Or Eddie. Or Jake. There had been times when he hadn’t told them all he knew, but outright lie…? No. They’d been ka-tet, and Roland had played them straight. Give the devil his due.

Patrick suddenly took up his pad and wrote quickly on the clean sheet. Then he showed it to them:

I will stay. Scared to go sumplace new.

As if to emphasize exactly what he meant, he opened his lips and pointed into his tongueless mouth.

And did she see relief on Roland’s face? If so, she hated him for it.

“All right, Patrick,” she said, trying to show none of her feelings in her voice. She even reached over and patted his hand. “I understand how you feel. And while it’s true that people can be cruel…cruel and mean…there’s plenty who are kind. Listen, thee: I’m not going until dawn. If you change your mind, the offer is open.”

He nodded quickly. Grateful I ain’t goan try no harder t’change his mine, Detta thought angrily. Ole white man probably grateful, too!

Shut up, Susannah told her, and for a wonder, Detta did.

Eighteen

But as the day brightened (revealing a medium-sized herd of grazing bannock not two miles away), she let Detta back into her mind. More: she let Detta take over. It was easier that way, less painful. It was Detta who took one more stroll around the campsite, briskly breathing the last of this world for both of them, and storing away the memory. It was Detta who went around the door, rocking first one way and then the other on the toughened pads of her palms, and saw the nothing at all on the other side. Patrick walked on one side of her, Roland on the other. Patrick hooted with surprise when he saw the door was gone. Roland said nothing. Oy walked up to the place where the door had been, sniffed at the air…and then walked through the place where it was, if you were looking from the other side. If we was over there, Detta thought, we’d see him walk right through it, like a magic trick.

She returned to Ho Fat III, which she had decided to ride through the door. Always assuming it would open, that was. This whole business would be quite a joke if it turned out it wouldn’t. Roland made to help her up into the seat; she brushed him brusquely away and mounted on her own. She pushed the red button beside the wheel, and the cart’s electric motor started with a faint hum. The needle marked CHG still swung well over into the green. She turned the throttle on the right handlebar and rolled slowly toward the closed door with the symbols meaning UNFOUND marching across the front. She stopped with the cart’s little bullet nose almost touching it.

She turned to the gunslinger with a fixed make-believe smile.

“All ri’, Roland — Ah’ll say g’bye to you, then. Long days n pleasant nights. May you reach y’damn Tower, and—”

“No,” he said.

She looked at him, Detta looked at him with her eyes both blazing and laughing. Challenging him to turn this into something she didn’t want it to be. Challenging him to turn her out now that she was in. C’mon, honky white boy, lessee you do it.

“What?” she asked. “What’s on yo’ mine, big boy?”

“I’d not say goodbye to you like this, after all this time,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Only in Detta’s angry burlesque, it came out Whatchu mean?

“You know.”

She shook her head defiantly. Doan.

“For one thing,” he said, taking her trail-toughened left hand gently in his mutilated right one, “there’s another who should have the choice to go or stay, and I’m not speaking of Patrick.”

For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she looked down at a certain pair of gold-ringed eyes, a certain pair of cocked ears, and did. She had forgotten about Oy.

“If Detta asks him, he’ll surely stay, for she’s never been to his liking. If Susannah asks him…why, then I don’t know.”

Just like that, Detta was gone. She would be back — Susannah understood now that she would never be entirely free of Detta Walker, and that was all right, because she no longer wanted to be — but for now she was gone.

“Oy?” she said gently. “Will you come with me, honey? It may be we’ll find Jake again. Maybe not quite the same, but still…”