Eddie told the gunslinger he doubted if his mother knew some of the things they had done—filching comic books from the candy store on Rincon Avenue or smoking cigarettes behind the Bonded Electroplate Factory on Cohoes Street.
Once they saw a Chevrolet with the keys in it and although Henry barely knew how to drive—he was sixteen then, Eddie eight—he had crammed his brother into the car and said they were going to New York City. Eddie was scared, crying, Henry scared too and mad at Eddie, telling him to shut up, telling him to stop being such a fuckin baby, he had ten bucks and Eddie had three or four, they could go to the movies all fuckin day and then catch a Pelham train and be back before their mother had time to put supper on the table and wonder where they were. But Eddie kept crying and near the Queensboro Bridge they saw a police car on a side street and although Eddie was pretty sure the cop in it hadn’t even been looking their way, he said Yeah when Henry asked him in a harsh, quavering voice if Eddie thought that bull had seen them. Henry turned white and pulled over so fast that he had almost amputated a fire hydrant. He was running down the block while Eddie, now in a panic himself, was still struggling with the unfamiliar doorhandle. Henry stopped, came back, and hauled Eddie out of the car. He also slapped him twice. Then they had walked—well, actually they slunk—all the way back to Brooklyn. It took them most of the day, and when their mother asked them why they looked so hot and sweaty and tired out, Henry said it was because he’d spent most of the day teaching Eddie how to go one-on-one on the basketball court at the playground around the block. Then some big kids came and they had to run. Their mother kissed Henry and beamed at Eddie. She asked him if he didn’t have the bestest big brother in the world. Eddie agreed with her. This was honest agreement, too. He thought he did.
“He was as scared as I was that day,” Eddie told Roland as they sat and watched the last of the day dwindle from the water, where soon the only light would be that reflected from the stars. “Scareder, really, because he thought that cop saw us and I knew he didn’t. That’s why he ran. But he came back. That’s the important part. He came back.”
Roland said nothing.
“You see that, don’t you?” Eddie was looking at Roland with harsh, questioning eyes.
“I see.”
“He was always scared, but he always came back.”
Roland thought it would have been better for Eddie, maybe better for both of them in the long run, if Henry had just kept showing his heels that day . . . or on one of the others. But people like Henry never did. People like Henry always came back, because people like Henry did know how to use. First they changed trust into need, then they changed need into a drug, and once that was done, they—what was Eddie’s word for it?—push. Yes. They pushed it.
“I think I’ll turn in,” the gunslinger said.
The next day Eddie went on, but Roland already knew it all. Henry hadn’t played sports in high school because Henry couldn’t stay after for practice. Henry had to take care of Eddie. The fact that Henry was scrawny and uncoordinated and didn’t much care for sports in the first place had nothing to do with it, of course; Henry would have made a wonderful baseball pitcher or one of those basketball jumpers, their mother assured them both time and again. Henry’s grades were bad and he needed to repeat a number of subjects—but that wasn’t because Henry was stupid; Eddie and Mrs. Dean both knew Henry was just as smart as lickety-split. But Henry had to spend the time he should have spent studying or doing homework taking care of Eddie （the fact that this usually took place in the Dean living room, with both boys sprawled on the sofa watching TV or wrestling around on the floor somehow seemed not to matter）。 The bad grades meant Henry hadn’t been able to be accepted into anything but NYU, and they couldn’t afford it because the bad grades precluded any scholarships, and then Henry got drafted and then it was Viet Nam, where Henry got most of his knee blown off, and the pain was bad, and the drug they gave him for it had a heavy morphine base, and when he was better they weaned him from the drug, only they didn’t do such a good job because when Henry got back to New York there was still a monkey on his back, a hungry monkey waiting to be fed, and after a month or two he had gone out to see a man, and it had been about four months later, less than a month after their mother died, when Eddie first saw his brother snorting some white powder off a mirror. Eddie assumed it was coke. Turned out it was heroin. And if you traced it all the way back, whose fault was it?