"Big." Kennerly endeavored to look serious. "Maybe three hundred miles. Maybe a thousand. I can't tell you, mister. There's nothing out there but devil-grass and maybe demons. That's the way the other fella went The one who fixed up Norty when he was sick."
"Sick? I heard he was dead."
Kennerly kept grinning. "Well, well. Maybe. But we're growed-up men, ain't we?"
"But you believe in demons."
Kennerly looked affronted. "That's a lot different."
The gunslinger took off his hat and wiped his forehead. The sun was hot, beating steadily. Kennerly seemed not to notice. In the thin shadow by the livery, the baby girl was gravely smearing dirt on her face.
"You don't know what's after the desert?"
Kennerly shrugged. "Some might. The coach ran through part of it fifty years ago. My pap said so. He used to say 'twas mountains. Others say an ocean... a green ocean with monsters. And some say that's where the world ends. That there ain't nothing but lights that'll drive a man blind and the face of God with his mouth open to eat them up."
"Drivel," the gunslinger said shortly.
"Sure it is." Kennerly cried happily. He cringed again, hating, fearing, wanting to please.
"You see my mule is looked after." He flicked Kennerly
another coin, which Kennerly caught on the fly.
"Surely. You stayin' a little?"
"I guess I might."
"That Allie's pretty nice when she wants to be, ain't she?"
"Did you say something?" The gunslinger asked remotely.
Sudden terror dawned in Kennerly's eyes, like twin moons coming over the horizon. "No, sir, not a word. And I'm sorry if I did." He caught sight of Soobie leaning out a window and whirled on her. "I'll whale you now, you little slut-face! 'Fore God! I'll - "
The gunslinger walked away, aware that Kennerly had turned to watch him, aware of the fact that he could whirl and catch the hostler with some true and untinctured emotion distilled on his face. He let it slip. It was hot. The only sure thing about the desert was its size. And it wasn't all played out in this town. Not yet.
XI
They were in bed when Sheb kicked the door open and came in with the knife.
It had been four days, and they had gone by in a blinking haze. He ate. He slept. He made sex with Allie. He found that she played the fiddle and he made her play it for him. She sat by the window in the milky light of daybreak, only a profile, and played something haltingly that might have been good if she had been trained. He felt a growing (but strangely absent-minded) affection for her and thought this might be the trap the man in black had left behind. He read dry and tattered back issues of magazines with faded pictures. He thought very little about everything.
He didn't hear the little piano player come up - his
reflexes had sunk. That didn't seem to matter either, although it would have frightened him badly in another time and place.
Allie was naked, the sheet below her br**sts, and they were preparing to make love.
"Please," she was saying. "Like before, I want that, I want - "
The door crashed open and the piano player made his ridiculous, knock-kneed run for the sun. Allie did not scream, although Sheb held an eight-inch carving knife in his hand. Sheb was making a noise, an inarticulate blabbering. He sounded like a man being drowned in a bucket of mud. Spittle flew. He brought the knife down with both hands, and the gunslinger caught his wrists and turned them. The knife went flying. Sheb made a high screeching noise, like a rusty screen door. His hands fluttered in marionette movements, both wrists broken. The wind gritted against the window. Allie's glass on the wall, faintly clouded and distorted, reflected the room.
"She was mine!" He wept. "She was mine first! Mine!"
Allie looked at him and got out of bed. She put on a wrapper, and the gunslinger felt a moment of empathy for a man who must be seeing himself coming out on the far end of what he once had. He was just a little man, and gelded.
"It was for you," Sheb sobbed. "It was only for you, Allie. It was you first and it was all for you. I - ah,oh God, dear God - "The words dissolved into a paroxysm of un intelligibilities, finally to tears. He rocked back and forth, holding his broken wrists to his belly.
"Shhh. Shhh. Let me see." She knelt beside him. "Broken. Sheb, you ass. Didn't you know you were never strong?" She helped him to his feet. He tried to hold his hands to his face, but they would not obey, and he wept nakedly., "Come on over to the table and let me see what I can do."
She led him to the table and set his wrists with slats of
kindling from the fire box. He wept weakly and without volition, and left without looking back.
She came back to the bed. "Where were we?"
"No," he said.
She said patiently, "You knew about that. There's nothing to be done. What else is there?" She touched his shoulder. "Except I'm glad that you are so strong."
"Not now," he said thickly.
"I can make you strong - "
"No," he said. "You can't do that."
XII