Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, #5)

by Stephen King

He was filled with poison and had kissed them with his poisoned lips.

He gestured at her without turning in her direction. Overholser’s face took on a knowing, intensely male look Susannah had seen before.

“During the morning chores, you look forward with love,” he told his friends later. “During the evening ones, you look back with nostalgia.”

(“Food and palaver don’t mix” was but one of Roland’s many little nuggets of wisdom),

“You’re going to lose some crockery. When gunslingers come to town, sai, things get broken. It’s a simple fact of life.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed. Eddie loved it when Roland laughed. The sound was dry, as ugly as the calls of those giant blackbirds he called rusties . . . but he loved it.

There was no need for the boy to say what he was thinking, because Eddie was thinking it himself. Never had he seen a man who looked so lonely, so far from the run of human life with its fellowship and warmth.

The secret highways are out close, and they whisper to him. “Come on, buddy,” they say. “Here is where you can forget everything, even the name they tied on you when you were nothing but a naked, blatting baby still smeared with your mother’s blood. They tied a name to you like a can to a dog’s tail, didn’t they? But you don’t need to drag it around here. Come. Come on.”

He smiled easily and often and did so now beneath his great graying bush of a mustache, but it was painful—the smile of a man who doesn’t want you to know he’s bleeding somewhere inside his clothes.

Margaret, looking at him with a woman’s smile, said nothing to this, either for or against. Perhaps she didn’t know, but she certainly knew the politics that keep a marriage sweet.

And as always when he thought these things, the premonition came that ka was not their friend, that it would end badly between them. If it’s so, then your job is to make it as good as it can be for as long as it can be. Will you do your job, Eddie?

Here they are under the sun of their fathers, and the darkness will soon have them. They’ve come to their dying hour.

“Do’ee say the world will end in fire or in ice, gunslinger?” Roland considered this. “Neither,” he said at last. “I think in darkness.”

“He’s a hothead and I’m a coward. Perhaps that’s why we’re friends—we fit around each other’s wrong places, make something that’s almost whole.”

“Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it.

He crushed out his smoke and stood. He smiled. It was a younger man’s smile. “Say thankya.”