The Road to The Dark Tower (19 page)

Jake spies their old buddy Charlie the Choo-Choo in an amusement park across the street from the train station. Father Callahan is familiar with this park, too. Topeka is where he hit bottom during his drunken binge tour of America in the early 1980s.

At the entrance ramp to the interstate, they see graffiti that says
WATCH FOR THE WALKIN
’
DUDE
, a reference to Randall Flagg, who appeared to Tick-Tock Man in Lud under the name Richard Fannin. In another place they see
ALL HAIL THE CRIMSON KING
written in red letters over a single red eye, referring to a character introduced in
Insomnia
and later woven into the revised version of
The Gunslinger
. Roland shakes his head as if he
doesn’t recognize the name, but he’s troubled by it all the same. When Susannah asks him directly who the Crimson King is, Roland replies, “I know not.”

Eddie still dreams of the empty field containing the rose, but now he sees a bulldozer, which tells Roland that their quest has doubled. They have to protect the rose as well as save the Tower. Troubled by the dream, Eddie asks Roland if he would ever betray them. The gunslinger can’t answer to anyone’s satisfaction, even his own. Roland believes his next betrayal would be his last and would spell defeat for him and his quest. Even so, he warns Eddie, “I bear watching, as you well know.”

The thinny’s wailing vibrates their foreheads and makes their eyes water. Roland tells his companions to put bullets in their ears to block the sound. The only ones that work are the few remaining “wets” from Gilead. Roland can’t explain why this is so; he just knows it.
⁹

At several times during their quest, a member of the ka-tet will need to perform some act akin to repentance before they are able to continue, like an alcoholic who performs acts of contrition to those he or she may have injured in the past. The thinny reminds Roland of a painful part of his youth that he hasn’t yet told his friends about. He needs to summon the courage to start, like King summoning the courage to write.

I’m not sure you need to hear, but I think I need to tell. Our future is the Tower, and to go toward it with a whole heart, I must put my past to rest as best I may. There’s no way I could tell you all of it—in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways—but this one story may stand for all the rest.
¹⁰

Before they reach the strange building looming on the road ahead—which appears to be a crystal palace—Roland finds the strength to tell his story, starting with Marten’s ruse to goad him into taking his manhood challenge early. For the rest of the night, Roland talks. It may not have been an ordinary night, but one more akin to the time when Roland and Walter held palaver. “[S]torytelling always changes time,” Roland tells them. “At least it does in my world.”

The morning after his victory over Cort, Roland’s irate father finds him in a prostitute’s bed and castigates him for allowing Marten to drive him “like a cow in a chute.” Emboldened by his recent success, Roland
speaks back to his father, telling him what he knows of his mother’s treachery with Marten. He wants to take his new apprentice guns and kill the enchanter. Stephen Deschain has the cool head of a seasoned gunslinger. He’s known of his wife’s deceit and Marten’s duplicity for two years.

Without mentioning the Tower explicitly, Stephen tries to make Roland understand that the pending civil war isn’t important. The gunslingers of Gilead consider all other problems minor compared to protecting the Beams and the Tower. Their view—which Stephen passes on to his son like a defective gene—proves to be shortsighted; they fail to realize that Farson’s insurrection will destroy the Affiliation and those who guard the Tower.

Though he’s now officially a gunslinger, Roland isn’t any match for Marten, who is far slyer than Roland will ever be, according to his father. Gilead is no longer safe; Marten has sworn to kill Roland before he can grow to be a problem. Though he won his challenge, he is still to be banished, sent east rather than west. “My real growing up didn’t start until my Da’ sent me away,” Roland once told Jake.

Stephen sends Roland and two friends, future gunslingers Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns, to Mejis,
¹¹
where they may be beyond the reach of the leaders of the insurrection in In-World. The boys, barely teenagers, pretend to have been sent to count things that might aid the Affiliation in time of war as punishment for some unspecified youthful sins.

They don’t expect to uncover treason and conspiracy. Mejis is supposedly faithful to the Affiliation, but the barony is a remote colony and the locals have little interest in the goings-on of some far-off empire. Because of its isolation, John Farson, the leader of the revolution,
¹²
chose this place to amass supplies for the coming battle. Farson is either Walter or is controlled by him to the extent that it makes no difference.

To oversee his projects, Farson sent three regulators—one a failed gunslinger—who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters
¹³
to Hambry, the barony seat, taking the powerful and legendary rose-colored Wizard’s Glass with them. Farson has no use for it at present and sends it away because it consumes those who use it.

The pink “grapefruit” is part of Maerlyn’s Rainbow. There are thirteen glass balls, one for each of the twelve guardians and one for the Dark Tower. Roland’s father told him that his grandfather believed it wasn’t
wise to talk about Black Thirteen, “for it might hear its name called and roll your way.” Stephen believes most of the balls are broken, but the Crimson King possessed six in his castle. The Talisman—also known as the Globe of Forever—emitted white light, the sum of all colors, and may have been an opposing or unifying power.

The Big Coffin Hunters entrust the grapefruit to Rhea Dubativo, called Rhea of Cöos, a witch who lives on the outskirts of town. The moment she removes the glass from its sealed box, she is addicted. She can’t control what she sees within it, but it shows her the people of Hambry at their vilest. Using it sucks the life and vitality out of her like a vampire sucks blood. When she isn’t looking into it, she’s thinking about looking into it.
¹⁴

The lives of those in Hambry who won’t agree to support Farson are at risk. Pat Delgado, who for years was in charge of the barony’s horses, was killed—though the murder was made to look like an accident—because he wouldn’t cooperate with a plan to hide the increased number of horses in Mejis.

Mayor Hart Thorin of Hambry turns a blind eye to the goings-on in his town. As a payoff, Farson’s local conspirators steal Pat Delgado’s papers of ownership for his land and horses. This puts Delgado’s daughter, Susan,
¹⁵
in a difficult financial situation. Thorin seems like the only solution to her problem. He offers money to Delgado’s sister Cordelia,
¹⁶
effectively purchasing Susan as his gilly.
¹⁷
Susan’s aunt claims the arrangement is necessary for them to survive.
¹⁸

While Susan is at Rhea’s house (sent by Thorin to have the witch vouch for her purity), she spies on Rhea basking in the aura of the Wizard’s Glass. During the examination, Rhea takes liberties with Susan, and plants a posthypnotic suggestion designed to spoil Thorin’s pleasure.

Rhea vouches for Susan’s suitability as a bride, and then proclaims that Thorin isn’t to touch her for another three months. This is a relief for Susan, but Aunt Cordelia doesn’t consider it good news; Thorin is holding two-thirds of her payment until the deal is consummated. By setting this condition, Rhea unwittingly sets up the tragedy that follows, for otherwise Thorin would have bedded Susan immediately and she would have felt bound to him. During her reprieve she has time to fall in love with Roland.

What happens next is inspired not by spaghetti westerns but rather by
Romeo and Juliet
.
¹⁹
Ka thrusts the two star-crossed
²⁰
lovers together almost immediately. They meet while Susan is returning from Rhea’s house mere hours after the three boys arrive in Mejis. Roland introduces himself by his cover name, Will Dearborn. His manners and diction betray him as coming from the Inner Baronies. He says he is from a small village in New Canaan, the center of the Affiliation—a place less grand than Gilead.
²¹

Thus begin the first steps in their dance of courtship. Susan is evasive when Roland asks if she’s promised to another and mentally curses her poor timing.
²²
Concerned about appearances, she turns down Roland’s repeated offer of a ride back to town on his horse. Roland tries to charm her with news of insurrection in the baronies thousands of miles west. He implies that he and his friends got in trouble back home and were sent on a make-work project that is a step short of exile.

The sixteen-year-old girl soon has Roland’s measure. “[H]e’s the sort to burn bridges and upset mail-carts, then go on his merry way without a single look back.” Roland is “far from the relentless creature he would eventually become, but the seeds of that relentlessness were there.”

The three boys are to present themselves in town the next day. Susan knows Mayor Thorin will invite them to his house for an official welcoming dinner. Without explaining why, she asks Roland to pretend they’ve never met. He assumes she is a servant. She also warns him about the Coffin Hunters, who work as private guards at Thorin’s house.

When they part, she kisses him briefly, but not in a sisterly way. It’s Roland’s first kiss. The prostitute in Gilead took his virginity but wouldn’t kiss him. He is so swept up with emotion that he rides in the dark for hours. What is promised can also be unpromised, he thinks. He’s not so lovesick that he fails to notice signs that something may be amiss in Mejis. There are far too many horses in the fields.

Though Cuthbert suspects something is preoccupying Roland, the young gunslinger decides without thinking not to tell his friends about meeting Susan. “Most of his decisions, certainly the best of them, were made in this same way.” It’s unclear if this was ultimately a good decision, but it’s typical of him. Even at fourteen, Roland hides things from the people who rely on him and might help him.

The Big Coffin Hunters—Eldred Jonas, Clay Reynolds and Roy Depape—have important business in Mejis that won’t be done for months.
Having three Affiliation brats around counting things makes them nervous. They can’t kill the boys—that might draw the wrong kind of attention—but they arrange quarters for them in an abandoned ranch, far enough out of town to keep them from being constantly underfoot. “If ye’d steal the silver from the dining room, first put the dog in the pantry,” Jonas says. He doesn’t know who Roland and his friends are, but he smells “quite a little wrong on them.” The failed gunslinger is the most dangerous of the Big Coffin Hunters. He also knows about the Manni, and sometimes talks about the other worlds he has visited through special doors.

Roland meets no one at Mayor Thorin’s formal dinner that he likes or trusts except Olive, the mayor’s wife.
²³
When he sees Susan, he struggles to maintain his composure and keep up the pretense that they haven’t met previously. He mentally upgrades her from Thorin’s servant to a relative before hearing Coral Thorin describing her as the mayor’s “quiet little woman.” Roland is incensed. He says hurtful things to Susan when they are forced to dance together. If he’d been wearing his guns, he might have been tempted to shoot her.

Later that night, the “brats” tip their hand to the Big Coffin Hunters during a showdown at Coral Thorin’s saloon, where the music is courtesy of Sheb McCurdy, who will move on to Tull and have his wrists broken by the gunslinger before being shot, along with the rest of the town.

The boy who cleans the saloon, Sheemie Ruiz, gets in Depape’s way. Cuthbert tries to talk him out of beating Sheemie but has to shoot the Big Coffin Hunter with his slingshot to get his full attention. A daisy chain Mexican standoff ensues, with Reynolds drawing on Cuthbert, only to find Alain’s knife at his throat. Eldred Jonas pulls his gun on Alain and is surprised to feel Roland’s knife between his shoulder blades. Sheriff Avery defuses the situation, threatening to run all six out of town if they don’t shake hands and promise to forget their argument. The Big Coffin Hunters are beyond Avery’s authority, but they comply because it is in their self-interest to do so.

Jonas needs to know more about these boys, who act like apprentice gunslingers. He sends Depape to follow their back trail and ask questions. Depape eventually finds a man who recognized one of the boys as the son of a gunslinger.

Roland regrets the way he treated Susan at the mayor’s party. He sends her a note via Sheemie, apologizing and asking to see her on “a matter of importance.” Susan rejects his request at first, but she can’t get him out of her head. If she hadn’t met him, she would have been resolved to her situation. After a fight with her aunt, she rides to where she first encountered him, only half hoping to see him.

Roland has two purposes for wanting to see her—he wants to profess his love for her, but he also needs her help. He suspects the level of cooperation they’re receiving from the locals is meant to hide something. Even Susan only vaguely supports the distant Affiliation. Why is everyone else bending over backward to help them? He has to trust someone, but Susan isn’t sure she wants his trust any more than she wants his love.

Together they uncover the lies being told to the Affiliation. Mejis has at least three times as many horses as reported and, contrary to what they’ve been told, very few of them are born mutant. Most of the locals—except those who have taken to calling them Little Coffin Hunters after their run-in with Jonas and his crew—regard the boys with genial contempt, planning to shift around their stock to confuse the boys when the time comes for them to count horses.