Where were you guys hoping to go? Jake wondered. Just where in the crispy crap did you think might be safe enough? Des Moines? Sioux City? Fargo? The moon?
They went down the stairs, Roland first, the others behind him, Jake still holding Susannah’s hand with Oy at his heels. The long-bodied bumbler seemed to descend each step in two stages, like a double trailer taking speed-bumps.
“Slow down, Roland,” Eddie said. “I want to check the crip spaces before we go on. We might get lucky.”
“Crip spaces?” Susannah said. “What’re those?”
Jake shrugged. He didn’t know. Neither did Roland.
Susannah switched her attention to Eddie. “I only ask, sugarpie, because it sounds a little on-pleasant. You know, like calling Negroes ‘blacks’ or gay folks ‘fruits.’ I know I’m just a poor ignorant pickaninny from the dark ages of 1964, but-”
“There.” Eddie pointed at a rank of signs marking the parking-row closest to the station. There were actually two signs to a post, the top of each pair blue and white, the bottom red and white. When they drew a little closer, Jake saw the one on top was a wheelchair symbol. The one on the bottom was a warning: $200 fine for improper use of handicapped PARKING SPACE. STRICTLY ENFORCED BY TOPEKA P.D.
“See there!” Susannah said triumphantly. “They shoulda done that a long time ago! Why, back in my when, you’re lucky if you can get your damn wheelchair through the doors of anything smaller than the Shop ’ Save. Hell, lucky if you can get it up over the curbs! And special parking? Forget it, sugar!”
The lot was jammed almost to capacity, but even with the end of the world at hand, only two cars that didn’t have little wheelchair symbols on their license plates were parked in the row Eddie had called “the crip spaces.”
Jake guessed that respecting the “crip spaces” was just one of those things that got a mysterious lifelong hold on people, like putting zip-codes on letters, parting your hair, or brushing your teeth before breakfast.
“And there it is!” Eddie cried. “Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo!”
Still carrying Susannah on his hip-a thing he would have been incapable of doing for any extended period of time even a month ago-Eddie hurried over to a boat of a Lincoln. Strapped on the roof was a complicated-looking racing bicycle; poking out of the half-open trunk was a wheelchair. Nor was this the only one; scanning the row of “crip spaces,” Jake saw at least four more wheelchairs, most strapped to roof-racks, some stuffed into the backs of vans or station wagons, one (it looked ancient and fearsomely bulky) thrown into the bed of a pickup truck.
Eddie set Susannah down and bent to examine the rig holding the chair in the trunk. There were a lot of crisscrossing elastic cords, plus some sort of locking bar. Eddie drew the Ruger Jake had taken from his father’s desk drawer. “Fire in the hole,” he said cheerfully, and before any of them could even think of covering their ears, he pulled the trigger and blew the lock off the security-bar. The sound went rolling into the silence, then echoed back. The warbling sound of the thinny returned with it, as if the gunshot had snapped it awake. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Jake thought, and grimaced with distaste. Half an hour ago, he wouldn’t have believed that a sound could be as physically upsetting, as… well, the smell of rotting meat, say, but he believed it now. He looked up at the turnpike signs. From this angle he could see only their tops, but that was enough to confirm that they were shimmering again. It throws some kind of field, Jake thought. The way mixers and vacuum cleaners make static on the radio or TV, or the way that cyclotron gadget made the hair on my arms stand up when Mr. Kingery brought it to class and then asked for volunteers to come up and stand next to it.
Eddie wrenched the locking bar aside, and used Roland’s knife to cut the elastic cords. Then he drew the wheelchair out of the trunk, examined it, unfolded it, and engaged the support which ran across the back at seat-level. “Voila!” he said.
Susannah had propped herself on one hand-Jake thought she looked a little like the woman in this Andrew Wyeth painting he liked, Christina ’s World-and was examining the chair with some wonder.
“God almighty, it looks so little ’ light!”
“Modem technology at its finest, darlin,” Eddie said. “It’s what we fought Vietnam for. Hop in.” He bent to help her. She didn’t resist him, but her face was set and frowning as he lowered her into the seat. Like she expected the chair to collapse under her, Jake thought. As she ran her hands over the arms of her new ride, her face gradually relaxed.
Jake wandered off a little, walking down another row of cars, running his fingers over their hoods, leaving trails of dust. Oy padded after him, pausing once to lift his leg and squirt a tire, as if he had been doing it all his life.
“Make you homesick, honey?” Susannah asked from behind Jake. “Probably thought you’d never see an honest-to-God American automobile again, am I right?”
Jake considered this and decided she was not right. It had never crossed his mind that he would remain in Roland’s world forever; that he might never see another car. He didn’t think that would bother him, actually, but he also didn’t think it was in the cards. Not yet, anyway. There was a certain vacant lot in the New York when he had come from. It was on the comer of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Once there had been a deli there-Tom and Gerry’s, Party Platters Our Specialty-but now it was just rubble, and weeds, and broken glass, and…
… and a rose. Just a single wild rose growing in a vacant lot where a bunch of condos were scheduled to go up at some point, but Jake had an idea that there was nothing quite like it growing anywhere else on Earth. Maybe not on any of those other worlds Roland had mentioned, either. There were roses as one approached the Dark Tower; roses by the billion, according to Eddie, great bloody acres of them. He had seen them in a dream. Still, Jake suspected that his rose was different even from those… and that until its fate was decided, one way or the other, he was not done with the world of cars and TVs and policemen who wanted to know if you had any identification and what your parents’ names were.
And speaking of parents, I may not be done with them, either, Jake thought. The idea hurried his heartbeat with a mixture of hope and alarm.
They stopped halfway down the row of cars, Jake staring blankly across a wide street (Gage Boulevard, he assumed) as he considered these things. Now Roland and Eddie caught up to them.
“This baby’s gonna be great after a couple of months pushing the Iron Maiden,” Eddie said with a grin. “Bet you could damn near puff it along.” He blew a deep breath at the back of the wheelchair to demonstrate. Jake thought of telling Eddie that there were probably others back there in the “crip spaces” with motors in them, then realized what Eddie must have known right away: their batteries would be dead.
Susannah ignored him for the time being; it was Jake she was interested in. “You didn’t answer me, sug. All these cars get you homesick?”
“Nah. But I was curious about whether or not they were all cars I knew. I thought maybe… if this version of 1986 grew out of some other world than my 1977, there’d be a way to tell. But I can’t tell. Because things change so dam fast. Even in nine years…” He shrugged, then looked at Eddie. “You might be able to, though. I mean, you actually lived in 1986.”
Eddie grunted. “I lived through it, but I didn’t exactly observe it. I was fucked to the sky most of the time. Still… I suppose…”