The Road to The Dark Tower (16 page)

Astonished by what he has written and terrified of how his teacher
will react to it, Jake goes truant from school for the first time in his short academic career.
⁹
He wanders the streets, ending up at a used bookstore called The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, where he meets the proprietor—auspiciously named Calvin Tower—and his friend Aaron Deepneau,
¹⁰
both of whom will play important roles in Roland’s quest in days to come.

Two books capture Jake’s attention:
Charlie the Choo-Choo
by Beryl Evans and a collection of riddles with the answers torn out.
¹¹
He leaves the bookstore with his acquisitions—believing incorrectly that he will never be back here again—and is drawn to an empty lot at the corner of Second and Forty-sixth Street, the former site of Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli. If he had looked back over his shoulder, he would have seen Balazar pull up in front of the bookstore in a car that should have killed him three weeks earlier.

He feels like he is standing on the edge of a great mystery. On the fence around the lot he sees graffiti mentioning Bango Skank, the Turtle and the Beam, and senses the coming of the White. When he relates the episode to the ka-tet later, Roland says, “What happened to you in that lot was the most important thing ever to happen in your life, Jake. In all our lives.”

After he climbs over the fence, he finds a key that is the same shape as the one Eddie is carving.
¹²
He also sees the dusty pink wild rose growing among a mass of purple-paint-coated grass. In the vision Walter enabled, Roland saw a blade of purple grass but never got far enough to see the rose.

Jake understands that the rose is in danger and feels the overwhelming need to protect it—the same force that drives Roland to the Dark Tower. A voice tells him the rose doesn’t need to be guarded against normal injury—it can protect itself from being plucked or crushed.
¹³
This rose will draw the ka-tet back to New York again and again in the coming months.

Within the pages of
Charlie the Choo-Choo,
Jake discovers several clues. First is the train itself, which is supposedly benign but appears evil in the illustrations. The passengers on board look as if they’re afraid they’ll never get off alive. The president of the Railway Company is Raymond Martin, a subtle reference to Marten, the wizard from Gilead. The engineer’s daughter is named Susannah. The other engineers mock Charlie’s driver, saying, “He cannot understand that the world has moved on.”

The Ubiquitous Bango Skank

Peter Straub originally created Bango Skank for
The Talisman
but never used him in that book. In a personal communication, King said that Bango keeps popping up in his work like “a kind of graffiti boogeyman.” Jake notices his repeat appearances and muses, “Man, that guy Bango gets around.” Susannah calls him the Great Lost Character and identifies him as one of the voices that speaks to her in her dreams of being reunited with Eddie and Jake in Central Park.

When he’s not around, the ka-tet notices his absence. On the graffiti-free streets of Pleasantville in Algul Siento, they note, “If Bango Skank had been here, his mark had been erased.”

Graffiti is a recurring element in the series, providing information and warnings. In King’s short story “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” the main character, a traveling salesman, obsessively collects snippets of graffiti from his travels. As early as
The Talisman,
characters receive graffiti warnings:
GOOD BIRDS MAY FLY
;
BAD BOYS MUST DIE
.
THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE
:
GO HOME
.

The ka-tet sees signs of Bango Skank in the following locations:

• On the fence around the vacant lot containing the rose defacing a drawing of the Turtle Bay Condominiums
  
• On the back of a road sign outside Topeka
  
• In the Topeka jail cell where Father Callahan spends time after hitting bottom
  
• In Co-Op City
  
• In the bathroom at the hotel where Mia and Susannah hide. His message there is
  BANGO SKANK AWAITS THE KING
  
• In the lavatory at the New York public library where Father Callahan travels in 1977
  
• In the tunnel to the Fedic doorway behind the Dixie Pig
  (BANGO SKANK
  ’84
  )
  

Jake underlines all the passages that resonate with him.

The key Jake finds in the empty lot calms the feuding voices in his head and also gives him the power to persuade others in the same way the Turtle sigul Susannah finds in the bowling bag in 1999 does for her.
¹⁴
It also facilitates a telepathic link between Jake and Eddie. Jake transmits a message to Eddie—whom he has never met, it must be remembered—suggesting his carving will calm Roland’s mind, too. Roland, tormented to the point of welcoming death to bring silence to his mind, weeps with relief when Eddie gives him the wooden key to hold.

Jake receives a dream message to go to Co-Op City, Eddie’s old neighborhood.
¹⁵
In the dream, Eddie is about thirteen, the age he would have been in Jake’s time. The young Eddie is to be Jake’s guide to the doorway he has been seeking, the one that will return him to Mid-World. Before heading for Brooklyn the next day, Jake steals his father’s Ruger and a half-full box of shells, as if he knows his destiny is to become a gunslinger.

Meanwhile Roland, Eddie and Susannah reach the boundary of Mid-World and see Lud’s skyline in the distance.
¹⁶
Time is moving
slower in Jake’s world than in Mid-World. Later, the ka-tet will discover that in Keystone Earth—the primary American reality where time moves in only one direction and all deaths are final—time runs faster and faster than in Mid-World, putting additional pressure on them.
¹⁷

Two doors are needed to birth Jake back into Roland’s world, both located in “thin” and “attractive” places. One is in a dilapidated house in Dutch Hill, significant, perhaps, because Calvin Tower is of Dutch heritage. The other is in a speaking circle, where Eddie uses his hand-carved key to try to open a portal he sketches in the ground. The term “drawing” has two meanings in this context: Jake is being drawn into Mid-World through a doorway that is itself a drawing. This duality appears again when Patrick Danville draws a doorway for Susannah.

“Roland” beats Bango to the punch, leaving his mark outside the “real” tower in NYC. (
Ron J. Martirano, 2004
)

The demon doorkeeper guarding the passage between worlds is the oracle that Roland and Jake encountered in the mountains, though it has pulled itself inside out to change from its female aspect to male. On Earth-side, the doorkeeper is the condemned house itself, which is reminiscent of the black hotel in Point Venuti, California, from
The Talisman
. As soon as Jake enters it, he realizes he’s left his world.

Eddie is the midwife for Jake’s rebirth. The magnitude of his responsibility overwhelms him, amplifying his insecurities. His key doesn’t work, and Roland strikes him when he says he doesn’t care about forgetting the face of his father. The gunslinger deals his harsh lessons, confronting Eddie with his fears of failure, forcing him to decide. “Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare.” Eddie comes very close to shooting Roland before he breaks down.

Susannah hates Roland for what he did to the man she loves. “Sometimes I hate myself,” Roland says, but Susannah won’t let him escape with that thin confession. “Don’t ever stop you, though, do it?” The words come from deep within her. The voice is Detta’s.

Roland returns the key to Eddie to complete. Eddie apologizes for being afraid, but Roland doesn’t want an apology; he wants Eddie to remember his lessons. “[H]ere was the last of Eddie’s childhood, expiring painfully among the three of them.” The gunslinger adds this little death to the scorecard of things he’s done in the name of the Tower. It’s a bill he’s not sure he will ever be able to pay, but he manages to reassure Eddie, and goes so far as to tell Eddie that he loves him.

The demon, drawn by their presence in the speaking circle, appears in male form, so it falls to Susannah to divert it. Sex is its weapon, but also its weakness. Eddie struggles to finish his key and keep the door open while his wife is being sexually assaulted by an invisible entity. Jake scrambles on the other side to find the key he dropped, as the doorkeeper approaches. Eddie and Jake project messages back and forth, encouraging each other, but it is the voice of the rose that calms Jake, a powerful force that wants him to succeed.

Roland plucks Jake from the jaws of death, lifting him up instead of
letting him fall like he did before. Jake arrives without his pants and sneakers, but otherwise intact. The voices he and Roland have been hearing are silenced. What happens to Susannah during her long sexual struggle with the demon is left open, but it clearly will have serious implications in the future.

The ka-tet becomes complete four days after Jake’s rebirth when the boy is adopted by a billy-bumbler, a creature resembling a badger crossed with a raccoon.
¹⁸
He can speak, but usually only repeats what he hears. Roland has been told that bumblers are good luck. Dubbed Oy by Jake, he gradually becomes an integral part of the group and his heroic actions will be crucial to the completion of their quest.

A few days from the decaying city of Lud, the ka-tet stops in River Crossing, where they spend a pleasant day in the company of a group of old people who remember the world before it moved on. The foursome won’t see another meal like the one they are served here until they reach Calla Bryn Sturgis. After dinner, Susannah displays the first signs that her encounter with the demon may have yielded more than Roland anticipated. She considers the possibility that she’s pregnant, but dismisses it and doesn’t mention it to anyone else. Though they are a closely knit group, each member of the ka-tet will keep at least one secret from his or her companions.

River Crossing’s matriarch, Aunt Talitha Unwin,
¹⁹
tells them about conditions in Lud, a fortress-refuge where two factions continue a generations-old civil war that isolated the city from the world. The degenerate combatants use technological relics of the Great Old Ones against each other. She advises Roland to circle around the city, but he is loath to leave the path of the Beam. Also, if they bypass Lud, they will miss Blaine the Mono, whom Jake fears but knows intuitively is an important part of their quest without realizing that Blaine is the only way for them to cross the poisoned territory beyond Lud.

The old folk of River Crossing remember the sleek pink train that once traveled out from Lud faster than the speed of sound across the wastelands, reminiscent of the blasted lands near Conger Road in
Black House
and a similar region in
The Talisman
. These wastelands and the proliferation of mutant humans and animals seem to indicate that Roland’s world had a nuclear war in its past. In some areas the mutations are lessening, as in Mejis. Roland says this Old War took place more than
a thousand years ago, which puts it at about the same time as the fall of Gilead.

Their discussions at an end, Roland and his group take their leave. Even staying overnight would be a mistake, for the people of River Crossing, like the oracle in the mountain, could never be satisfied. The longer they stayed, the harder it would be to break away. Roland would find himself becalmed again, like he was in Tull.

As a parting gift, Aunt Talitha gives Roland a silver cross, asking him to wear it and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower. The gunslinger accepts her gift, but makes no promise as to its ultimate destination. This sigul of an olden age will come in handy later on and will ultimately reach the Tower on America-side via a member of Tet Corporation.

On the way to Lud, the group encounters the wreck of a Nazi airplane. Eddie wonders if aircraft that disappear in the Bermuda Triangle end up in Mid-World. The pilot was the fabled outlaw prince David Quick, leader of the army that attacked Lud nearly a century before. Later, the Tick-Tock Man will ask Jake if he is a “Not-See”; his mispronunciation of “Nazi” is also a phrase that forms the opening question in stanza XXXII of Browning’s poem: “Not see? because of night perhaps?”

During a break in their travels, the foursome takes turns retelling their stories up to that point. Jake shows the others
Charlie the Choo-Choo,
which they examine in detail. Eddie and Susannah recognize the book from their respective childhoods,
²⁰
though both remember losing their copies, Susannah after being hit by Jack Mort’s brick. Ka has been trying to place the book into their hands, but other forces may be working to keep it away from them. Roland dismisses the riddle book, perhaps because intuition tells him it isn’t important.