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1

Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfect schizophrenic�Dif there was such a person�Dwould be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life

Adler should have unslinger," Andrew said

He had been talking for quite awhile, but Andreays talked and Odetta usually just let it flow over her mind the way you let ater flow over your hair and face in the shower But this did ed it, as if on a thorn

"I beg pardon?"

"Oh, it was just some column in the paper," Andrew said "I dunno rote it I didn&039;t notice One of those political fellas Prob&039;ly you&039;d know, Miz Holht he was elected�D"

She smiled, touched in spite of herself Andrew said his ceaseless chatter was so he couldn&039;t stop, wasn&039;t responsible for, that it was just the Irish in his and chirrupings about relatives and friends she would never meet, half-baked political opinions, weird scientific co other things, Andreas a fir saucers, which he called you-foes)�D but this touched her because she had also cried the night he was elected

"But I didn&039;t cry when that son of a bitch�Dpardon my French, Miz Holmes�Dwhen that son of a bitch Oswald shot him, and I hadn&039;t cried since, and it&039;s been�Dwhat, two ht

"Souess"

Andrew nodded "Then I read this coluhta been�Dyesterday, about how Johnson&039;s probably gonna do a pretty good job, but it won&039;t be the sae of the world&039;s last gunslinger"

"I don&039;t think John Kennedy was that at all," Odetta said, and if her voice was sharper than the one Andreas accusto (which it ive a startled blink in the rear-view mirror, a blink that was more like a wince), it was because she felt herself touched by this, too It was absurd, but it was also a fact There was soe of the world&039;s last gunslinger�D that rang deeply in her ly, it was untrue�DJohn Kennedy had been a peace Billy the Kid type, that was iven her goosebuuy said there would be no shortage of shooters in the world," Andreent on, regarding her nervously in the rear-view mirror "He mentioned Jack Ruby for one, and Castro, and this fellow in Haiti�D"

"Duvalier," she said "Poppa Doc"

"Yeah, him, and Diem�D"

"The Diem brothers are dead"

"Well, he said Jack Kennedy was different, that&039;s all He said he would draw, but only if so else to do He said Kennedy was savvy enough to know that soood He said Kennedy knew if it&039;s foa at the mouth you have to shoot it"

His eyes continued to regard her apprehensively

"Besides, it was just so up Fifth Avenue now, headed toward Central Park West, the Cadillac eid February air

"Yes," Odetta said mildly, and Andrew&039;s eyes relaxed a trifle "I understand I don&039;t agree, but I understand"

You are a liar; a voice spoke up in her mind This was a voice she heard quite often She had even named it It was the voice of The Goad You understand perfectly and agree completely Lie to Andrew if you feel it necessary, but for God&039;s sake don&039;t lie to yourself, woman

Yet part of her protested, horrified In a world which had beco upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake�Dperhaps one of suicidal proportions�Dto believe there was a difference between good shooters and bad shooters There were too hters near too ers If there had ever been a time for them, it had passed

Hadn&039;t it?

She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed at her te on Sometimes they threatened, like an ominous buildup of thunderheads on a hot suly summer brews sometimes simply slipped away in one direction or another, to storound of soht, however, that this ti to happen It would coolf-balls

The streetlights ht

"So hoas Oxford , Miz Holmes?" Andrew asked tentatively

"Hu herself she wouldn&039;t say the words that were crowding up her throat like bile, that she would s them back down To say them would be needlessly brutal Andrew&039;s talk of the world&039;s last gunslinger had been justBut on top of everything else it was just a bit tooHer voice sounded as calm and as resolute as ever, she supposed, but she was not fooled: she knew a blurt when she heard one "The bail bondsman came very promptly, of course; he had been notified in advance They held onto us as long as they could nevertheless, and I held on as long as I could, but I guess they won that one, because I ended up wetting ain and she wanted to stop and couldn&039;t stop "It&039;s what they want to teach you, you see Partly because it frightens you, I suppose, and a frightened person may not coain But I think most of them�Deven the due will come in the end no rade you while they still can To teach you you can be degraded You can swear before God, Christ, and the whole company of Saints that you will not, will not, will not soil yourself, but if they hold onto you long enough of course you do The lesson is that you&039;re just an anie, no e So I wetcell They think we are descended from the monkeys, you know And that&039;s exactly what I sht now

"A monkey"

She saw Andrew&039;s eyes in the rear-view mirror and was sorry for the way his eyes looked So you couldn&039;t hold

"I&039; at her teain "I a three days, Andrew"

"I should think so," he said in a shocked old-h in spite of herself But ht she had knohat she was getting into, that she had fully anticipated how bad it could get She had been wrong

A trying three days Well, that was one way to put it Another ht be that her three days in Oxford , Mississippi had been a short season in hell But there were sos you would die before sayingunless you were called upon to testify to thehty, where, she supposed, even the truths that caused the hellish thunderstorray jelly between your ears (the scientists said that gray jelly was nerveless, and if that wasn&039;t a hoot and a half she didn&039;t knoas) et home and bathe, bathe, bathe, and sleep, sleep, sleep Then I reckon I will be as right as rain"

"Why, sure! That&039;s just what you&039;re going to be!" Andreanted to apologize for so, and this was as close as he could come And beyond this he didn&039;t want to risk further conversation So the two of theray Victorian block of apartments on the corner of Fifth and Central Park South, a very exclusive gray Victorian block of apartments, and she supposed that made her a blockbuster, and she knew there were people in those poshy-poshy flats ould not speak to her unless they absolutely had to, and she didn&039;t really care Besides, she was above them, and they knew she was above them It had occurred to her on alled so in the penthouse apart where once the only black hands allowed had been clad in white gloves or perhaps the thin black leather ones of a chauffeur She hoped it did gall the unchristian, but she did wish it, she hadn&039;t been able to stop the piss pouring into the crotch of her fine silk imported underwear and she didn&039;t seem to be able to stop this other flood of piss, either It was mean, it was unchristian, and almost as bad�Dno, worse, at least as far as the Move to win the rights they needed to win, and probably this year: Johnson, acy which had been left hi to put another nail in the coffin of Barry Goldwater), would do hts Act; if necessary he would ra and the hurt There was more work to be done Hate would not help do that work Hate would, in fact, hinder it

But so just the saht her that, too

2

Detta Walker had absolutely no interest in the Moves She lived in the loft of a peeling Greenwich Village apart Odetta didn&039;t know about the loft and Detta didn&039;t know about the penthouse and the only one left who suspected soht was Andrew Feeny, the chauffeur He had begun working for Odetta&039;s father when Odetta was fourteen and Detta Walker hardly existed at all

Soht be a matter of hours or of days Last summer she had disappeared for three weeks and Andrew had been ready to call the police when Odetta called hi the car around at ten the next day�Dshe planned to do so, she said

It trembled on his lips to cry out Miz Holmes! Where haveyou been? But he had asked this before and had received only puzzled stares�Dtruly puzzled stares, he was sure�Din return Right here, she would say Why, right here, Andrew�Dyou&039;ve been driving me two or three places every day, haven&039;t you? You aren&039;t starting to go a little h and if she was feeling especially good (as she often seemed to feel after her disappearances), she would pinch his cheek

"Very good, Miz Holmes," he had said "Ten it is"

That scary tione for three weeks, Andrew had put down the phone, closed his eyes, and said a quick prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Miz Hol Howard, the door

"What time did she coo," Howard said

"Who brought her?"

"Dunno You kno it is Different car every time Sometimes they park around the block and I don&039;t see em at all, don&039;t even know she&039;s back until I hear the buzzer and look out and see it&039;s her" Howard paused, then added: "She&039;s got one hell of a bruise on her cheek"

Howard had been right It sure had been one hell of a bruise, and noas getting better Andrew didn&039;t like to think what it ht have looked like when it was fresh Miz Hol a silk sundress with spaghetti-thin straps (this had been late July), and by then the bruise had started to yellow She had made only a perfunctory effort to cover it withthat too much effort to cover it would only draw further attention to it

"How did you get that, Miz Holhed merrily "You know rab-handle while I was getting out of the tub yesterday�DI was in a hurry to catch the national news I fell and banged the side ofready to start blithering about doctors and exa; after all these years I can read you like a book I won&039;t go, so you needn&039;t bother asking I&039;m just as fine as paint Onward, Andrew! I intend to buy half of Saks&039;, all of Gi at Four Seasons in between"

"Yes, Miz Holmes," he had said, and s it was not easy That bruise wasn&039;t a day old; it was a week old, at leastand he knew better, anyway, didn&039;t he? He had called her every night at seven o&039;clock for the last week, because if there was one time when you could catch Miz Holmes in her place, it hen the Huntley-Brinkley Report caular junkie for her neas Miz Holht Then he had gone over and wheedled the passkey fro on him steadily that she had had just the sort of accident she had describedonly instead of getting a bruise or a broken bone, she had died, died alone, and was lying up there dead right now He had let hi like a cat in a dark roo to be nervous about There was a butter-dish on the kitchen counter, and although the butter had been covered it had been out long enough to be growing a good crop of ot there at ten minutes of seven and had left by five after In the course of his quick exalanced into the bathroom The tub had been dry, the towels neatly�Deven austerely�Darrayed, the rooleam that was unspotted ater

He knew the accident she had described had not happened

But Andrew had not believed she was lying, either She had believed what she had told hiain and saw her rubbing her teers He didn&039;t like it He had seen her do that too many times before one of her disappearances

3

Andrew left theso she could have the benefit of the heater, then went around to the trunk He looked at her two suitcases with another wince They looked as if petulant e bodies had kicked thes in a way they did not quite dare daed him, for instance, if he had been there It wasn&039;t just that she was a wo where she had no business ured a wo was, she was also a rich nigger Thing was, she was alar Evers or Martin Luther King Thing was, she&039;d gotten her rich nigger face on the cover of Tiet aith sticking so What? No sir, boss, we sho dint see nobody looked like that down here, did we, boys? Thing was, it was a little harder to work yourself up to hurting a woman as the only heir to Holmes Dental Industries when there were twelve Holmes plants in the sunny South, one of them just one county over from Oxford Town, Oxford Town

So they&039;d done to her suitcases what they didn&039;t dare do to her

He looked at these mute indications of her stay in Oxford Toith shagage that had gone away looking s dumb and thumped He looked, temporarily unable to move, and his breath puffed out on the frosty air

Hoas corasping the handles of the cases Whoare you, Miz Holo sometimes, and what do you do that seems so bad that you have tohours or days even to yourself? And he thought so weirdly apt: Where&039;s the rest of you?

You want to quit thinking like that If anyone around here was going to do any thinking like that it would be Miz Holmes, but she doesn&039;t and so you don&039;t need to, either

Andrew lifted the bags out of the trunk and handed theht?"

"I think so," Andrew replied, also pitching his voice low "Just tired is all Tired all the way down to her roots"

Howard nodded, took the battered suitcases, and started back inside He paused only long enough to tip his cap to Odetta Hollass s�Din a soft and respectful salute

When he was gone, Andrew took out the collapsed stainless steel scaffolding at the bottoan to unfold it It was a wheelchair

Since August 19th, 1959 , some five and a half years before, the part of Odetta Hol as those blank hours and days

4

Before the subway incident, Detta Walker had had only been conscious a few times�Dthose were like coral islands which look isolated to one above the archipelago which is mostly underwater Odetta suspected Detta not at all, and Detta had no idea that there was such a person as Odettabut Detta at least had a clear understanding that so with her life Odetta&039;s is which had happened when Detta was in charge of her body; Detta was not so clever She thought she res, at least, but a lot of the time she didn&039;t

Detta was at least partially aware of the blanks

She could remember the china plate She could re it into the pocket of her dress, looking over her shoulder all the while toShe had to ed to the Blue Woue way, a forspecial Detta took it for that why Detta reh she didn&039;t kno she knew) as The Drawers, a s trash-littered hole in the earth where she had once seen a burning baby with plastic skin She reround and then starting to step on it and stopping, re them into the pocket where the plate had been, and then carefully slipping the first finger of her left hand carefully against the cut in her at the place where Old Stupid God had joined her and all other girls and woht, because she re to press, reina had been naked, without the cotton panties in the way of it and the world, and she had not pressed, not until her shoe pressed, her black patent leather shoe, not until her shoe pressed down on the plate, then she pressed on the cut with her finger the way she was pressing on the Blue Woman&039;s forspecial china plate with her foot, she remembered the way the black patent leather shoe covered the delicate blue webbing on the edge of the plate, she re in The Drawers, pressing with finger and foot, reer and cut, remembered that when the plate snapped with a bitter brittle snap a similar brittle pleasure had skewered upward frouts like an arrow, she remembered the cry which had broken fro like the sound of a crow scared up fro the plain white cotton panties slowly out of her dress pocket and putting theain, step-ins, so she had heard the loose like turves on a flood-tide, step-ins, good, because first you stepped out to do your business and then you stepped back in, first one shiny patent leather shoe and then the other, good, panties were good, she could re them past her knees, a scab on the left one almost ready to fall off and leave clean pink new babyskin, yes, she could reo or yesterday but only one single o, she could remember how the waistband had reached the heainst brown skin, like creaht suspended over coffee, the texture, the panties disappearing under the hee and the panties were not going up but down but they were still white but not cotton, they were nylon, cheap see-through nylon panties, cheap inout of thelie DeSoto, yes, hohite they were, how cheap they were, not anything dignified like underwear but cheap panties, the girl was cheap and it was good to be cheap, good to be on sale, to be on the block not even like a whore but like a good breedsow; she remembered no round china plate but the round white face of a boy, some surprised drunk fraternity boy, he was no china plate but his face was as round as the Blue Wo on his cheeks, and this webbing looked as blue as the webbing on the Blue Woman&039;s forspecial china plate had been, but that was only because the neon was red, the neon was garish, in the dark the neon fro blood from the places on his cheeks where she had clawed him look blue, and he had said Why did youwhy did you why did you do, and then he unrolled theso he could get his face outside to puke and she re about tan shoes with pink shoelaces and a big Panama with a purple hatband, she reravel in a cement mixer, and his penis, whichfro into a hite questionstopped and then started again and she thought Well I guess he ain&039;tand pressing her finger (which now caina which was bare but no longer bare because it was overgroith its own coarse briared tangle, and there had been the sa snap inside her, and it was still as much pain as it was pleasure (but better, far better, than nothing at all), and then he was grabbing blindly for her and saying in a hurt breaking tone Oh you goddaing hi the door on her side of the car, feeling the last blind thud of his fingers on the back of her blouse as she ran into a May night that was redolent of early honeysuckle, red-pink neon light stuttering off the gravel of so her panties, her cheap slick nylon panties not into the pocket of her dress but into a purse juloht was stuttering, and then she enty-three and it was not panties but a rayon scarf, and she was casually slipping it into her purse as she walked along a counter in the Nice Notions section of Macy&039;s�Da scarf which sold at that time for 199

Cheap

Cheap like the white nylon panties

Cheap

Like her

The body she inhabited was that of a woman who had inherited millions, but that was not known and didn&039;tblue, and there was that sa sense of pleasure as she sat in the back seat of the taxi, and, oblivious of the driver, held the scarf in one hand, looking at it fixedly, while her other hand crept up under her tweed skirt and beneath the leg-band of her white panties, and that one long dark finger took care of the business that needed to be taken care of in a single merciless stroke

So sometimes she wondered, in a distracted sort of here she hen she wasn&039;t here, butfor any extended contemplation, and she simply fulfilled what needed to be fulfilled, did what needed to be done

Roland would have understood

5

Odetta could have taken a lih her father was still alive and she was not as fabulously rich as she would become when he died in 1962, the money held in trust for her had become hers on her twenty-fifth birthday, and she could do pretty much as she liked But she cared very little for a phrase one of the conservative columnists had coined a year or two before�Dthe phrase was "lih not to want to be seen as one even if she really was one Not young enough (or stupid enough!) to believe that a few pairs of faded jeans and the khaki shirts she habitually wore in any real way changed her essential status, or riding the bus or the subhen she could have used the car (but she had been self-involved enough not to see Andrew&039;s hurt and deep puzzleht it h to still believe that gesture could sometimes overcoht of August 19th, 1959 , she paid for the gesture with half her legsand half her ed, then pulled, and finally caught up in the shich would eventually turn into a tidal wave In 1957, when she beca which eventually became known as the Moveround, knew the struggle for equality had gone on not since the Emancipation Proclamation but alht to Aia, in fact, the colony the British founded to get rid of their criin in the same place, with the same three words: I&039;m not omery, Alabama, and the words had been spoken by a black woman named Rosa Lee Parks, and the place from which Rosa Lee Parks was not movin was from the front of the city bus to the back of the city bus, which was, of course, the Ji "We Shall Not Be Moved" with the rest of them, and it alwaysit without a sense of sha ith your arms linked to the arms of a whole crowd; that was easy even for a wo we, so easy to be we There had been no we on that bus, that bus that arette ss like LUCKY STRIKE LSMFT and ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR CHOICE FOR HEAVEN&039;S SAKE and DRINK OVALTINE! YOU&039;LL SEE WHAT WE MEAN! and CHESTERFIELD , TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE TWENTY WONDERFUL SMOKES, no we under the disbelieving gazes of thewho stares of the blacks at the back

No we

Noa tidal ith three words: I&039;m notlike that�Dif I could be that brave - I think I could be happy for the rest of e is not in me

She had read of the Parks incident, but with little interest at first That came little by little It was hard to say exactly when or how her iht and fired by that at first alun to shake the south

A year or so later a youngher down to the Village, where soers who perfors to their repetoire�Dsuddenly, in addition to all those old wheezes about how John Henry had taken his ha himself in the process, lawd, lawd) and how Bar&039;bry Allen had cruelly rejected her lovesick young suitor (and ended up dying of shas about how it felt to be down and out and ignored in the city, how it felt to be turned away fro color, how it felt to be taken into a jail cell and whipped by Mr Charlie because your skin was dark and you had dared, lawd, lawd, to sit in the white folks&039; section of the lunch-counter at an FW Woolworths&039; in Montgomery, Alabama

Absurdly or not, it was only then that she had become curious about her own parents, and their parents, and their parents before them She would never read Roots�D she was in another world and tiht of, by Alex Haley, but it was at this absurdly late time in her life when it first dawned upon her that not so enitors had been taken in chains by white men Surely the fact had occurred to her before, but only as a piece of inforradient, like an equation, never as so which bore intimately upon her own life

Odetta totted up what she knew, and was appalled by the smallness of the sum She knew her mother had been born in Odetta , Arkansas , the town for which she (the only child) had been named She knew her father had been a s process which had lain dormant and unremarked for ten years and which had then, suddenly, made him a moderately wealthy man She knew that he had developed a nu the ten years before and the four years after the influx of wealth, most of them either orthodontic or cos to New York with his wife and daughter (who had been born four years after the original patent had been secured), he had founded a company called Holmes Dental Industries, which was now to teeth what Squibb was to antibiotics

But when she asked hi all the years between�Dthe years when she hadn&039;t been there, and the years when she had, her father wouldn&039;t tell her He would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn&039;t tell her anything He closed that part of himself off to her Once her ma, Alice�Dhe called her ood�Dsaid, "Tell her about the tih the covered bridge, Dan," and he gave Odetta&039;slook that herof a sparrow, had shrunk back in her seat and said no more

Odetta had tried her ht, but to no avail If she had tried before, she , but because he wouldn&039;t speak, she wouldn&039;t speak either�Dand to him, she realized, the past�Dthose relatives, those red dirt roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless s ungraced by a single simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harasshbor children ent dressed in sun life as flour sacks�Dall of that was for hi white caps He would not speak, perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South All else was hidden beneath that impervious outer cover His past was so well-protected that there had been no gap to slide through, no way past that perfect capped barrier and into the throat of revelation

Detta knew things, but Detta didn&039;t know Odetta and Odetta didn&039;t know Detta, and so the teeth lay as sate there, also

She had some of her mother&039;s shyness in her as well as her father&039;s unblinking (if unspoken) toughness, and the only tiest that what he was denying her was a deserved trust fund never proht in his library He had shaken his Wall Street Journal carefully, closed it, folded it, and laid it aside on the deal table beside the standing lamp He had removed his rimless steel spectacles and had laid them on top of the paper Then he had looked at her, a thin black ray hair noing rapidly away fro hollows of his tes of veins pulsed steadily, and he had said only, Idon&039;t talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it It would be pointless The world had moved on since then

Roland would have understood

7

When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS written upon it, he saw things he did not understand at all�Dbut he understood they didn&039;t matter

It was Eddie Dean&039;s world, but beyond that it was only a confusion of lights, people and objects�Ds, frolass, so piles and displays None it mattered any es of the doorway before theh theh Eddie&039;s eyes when Eddie had e

Eddie, on the other hand, was thunderstruck The revolver in his hand treer could have taken it from him easily but did not He only stood quietly It was a trick he had learned a long tih the doorway �Dbut Eddie found this sa Roland had never seen aat was like one of thosepoint-of-view shots they did in ones like Halloween and The Shining He even knehat they called the gadget they did it with Steadi-Cam That was it

"Star Wars, too," he muttered "Death Star That fuckin crack, re