The Dark Tower

“County Sheriff Eldon Royster took four fellas into custody over in Auburn couple of hours ago. Seems as though they was tryin to sneak past a police roadblock on a woods road and gut stuck for their trouble.” John put his pipe in his mouth, took a wooden match from his breast pocket, and set his thumb against the tip. For the moment, however, he didn’t flick it; only held it there. “Reason they ’us tryin to sneak around is they seemed to have quite a fair amount of fire-power.” Fiah-powah. “Machine-guns, grenades, and some of that stuff they call C-4. One of em was a fella I b’lieve you mentioned — Jack Andolini?” And with that he popped the Diamond Bluetip alight.

Eddie collapsed back in one of sai Beckhardt’s prim Shaker chairs, turned his head up to the ceiling, and bellowed laughter at the rafters. When he was tickled, Roland reflected, no one could laugh like Eddie Dean. At least not since Cuthbert Allgood had passed into the clearing. “Handsome Jack Andolini, sitting in a county hoosegow in the State of Maine!” he said. “Roll me in sugar and call me a fuckin jelly-doughnut! If only my brother Henry was alive to see it.”

Then Eddie realized that Henry probably was alive right now — some version of him, anyway. Assuming the Dean brothers existed in this world.

“Ayuh, thought that’d please ya,” John said, drawing the flame of the rapidly blackening match down into the bowl of his pipe. It clearly pleased him, too. He was grinning almost too hard to kindle his tobacco.

“Oh deary-dear,” Eddie said, wiping his eyes. “That makes my day. Almost makes my year.”

“I gut somethin else for ya,” John said, “but we’ll let her be for now.” The pipe was at last going to his satisfaction and he settled back, eyes shifting between the two strange, wandering men he had met earlier that day. Men whose ka was now entwined with his own, for better or worse, and richer or poorer. “Right now I’d like t’hear your story. And just what it is you’d have me do.”

“How old are you, John?” Roland asked him.

“Not s’ old I don’t still have a little get up n go,” John replied, a trifle coldly. “What about y’self, chummy? How many times you ducked under the pole?”

Roland gave him a smile — the kind that said point taken, now let’s change the subject. “Eddie will speak for both of us,” he said. They had decided on this during their ride from Bridgton. “My own tale’s too long.”

“Do you say so,” John remarked.

“I do,” Roland said. “Let Eddie tell you his story, as much as he has time for, and we’ll both tell what we’d have you do, and then, if you agree, he’ll give you one thing to take to a man named Moses Carver…and I’ll give you another.”

John Cullum considered this, then nodded. He turned to Eddie.

Eddie took a deep breath. “The first thing you ought to know is that I met this guy here in a middle of an airplane flight from Nassau, the Bahamas, to Kennedy Airport in New York. I was hooked on heroin at the time, and so was my brother. I was muling a load of cocaine.”

“And when might this have been, son?” John Cullum asked.

“The summer of 1987.”

They saw wonder on Cullum’s face but no shade of disbelief. “So you do come from the future! Gorry!” He leaned forward through the fragrant pipe-smoke. “Son,” he said, “tell your tale. And don’tcha skip a goddam word.”

Four