“There are great wonders ahead,” Roland said. “Great adventures. More than that, there is a quest to course upon, and a chance to redeem your honor. There’s something else, too. You could be a gunslinger. I needn’t be the last after all. It’s in you, Eddie. I see it. I feel it.”
Eddie laughed, although now the tears were coursing down his cheeks. “Oh, wonderful. Wonderful! Just what I need! My brother Henry. He was a gunslinger. In a place called Viet Nam, that was. It was great for him. You should have seen him when he was on a serious nod, Roland. He couldn’t find his way to the fuckin bathroom without help. If there wasn’t any help handy, he just sat there and watched Big Time Wrestling and did it in his fuckin pants. It’s great to be a gunslinger. I can see that. My brother was a doper and you’re out of your fucking gourd.”
“Perhaps your brother was a man with no clear idea of honor.”
“Maybe not. We didn’t always get a real clear picture of what that was in the Projects. It was just a word you used after Your if you happened to get caught smoking reefer or lifting the spinners off some guy’s T-Bird and got ho’ed up in court for it.”
Eddie was crying harder now, but he was laughing, too.
“Your friends, now. This guy you talk about in your sleep, for instance, this dude Cuthbert—”
The gunslinger started in spite of himself. Not all his long years of training could stay that start.
“Did they get this stuff you’re talking about like a goddam Marine recruiting sergeant? Adventure, quests, honor?”
“They understood honor, yes,” Roland said slowly, thinking of all the vanished others.
“Did it get them any further than gunslinging got my brother?”
The gunslinger said nothing.
“I know you,” Eddie said. “I seen lots of guys like you. You’re just another kook singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other. I don’t want no honor. I just want a chicken dinner and fix. In that order. So I’m telling you: go on through. You can. But the minute you’re gone, I’m gonna kill the rest of you.”
The gunslinger said nothing.
Eddie smiled crookedly and brushed the tears from his cheeks with the backs of his hands. “You want to know what we call this back home?”
“What?”
“A Mexican stand-off.”
For a moment they only looked at each other, and then Roland looked sharply into the doorway. They had both been partially aware—Roland rather more than Eddie—that there had been another of those swerves, this time to the left. Here was an array of sparkling jewelry. Some was under protective glass but because most wasn’t, the gunslinger supposed it was trumpery stuff . . . what Eddie would have called costume jewelry. The dark brown hands examined a few things in what seemed an only cursory manner, and then another salesgirl appeared. There had been some conversation which neither of them really noticed, and the Lady （some Lady, Eddie thought） asked to see something else. The salesgirl went away, and that was when Roland’s eyes swung sharply back.
The brown hands reappeared, only now they held a purse. It opened. And suddenly the hands were scooping things—seemingly, almost certainly, at random—into the purse.
“Well, you’re collecting quite a crew, Roland,” Eddie said, bitterly amused. “First you got your basic white junkie, and then you got your basic black shoplif—”
But Roland was already moving toward the doorway between the worlds, moving swiftly, not looking at Eddie at all.
“I mean it!” Eddie screamed. “You go through and I’ll cut your throat, I’ll cut your fucking thr—”
Before he could finish, the gunslinger was gone. All that was left of him was his limp, breathing body lying upon the beach.