The Dark Tower

After dinner — surely the finest meal Susannah had had since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly the best in her entire life — the sore on her face burst wide open. It was Joe Collins’s fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only inhabitant of Odd’s Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last thing he would have wanted, surely.

He served chicken, roasted to a turn and especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas (“Only canned, say sorry,” he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank it with childish greed, although both passed on “the teensy piss o’ rum.” Oy had his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then set it on the floor by the stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room, licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while watching the humes with his ears up.

“I couldn’t eat dessert so don’t ask me,” Susannah said when she’d finished cleaning her plate for the second time, sop-ping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. “I’m not sure I can even get down from this chair.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Joe said, looking disappointed, “maybe later. I’ve got a chocolate pudding and a butterscotch one.”

Roland raised his napkin to muffle a belch and then said, “I could eat a dab of both, I think.”

“Well, come to that, maybe I could, too,” Susannah allowed. How many eons since she’d tasted butterscotch?

When they were done with the pudding, Susannah offered to help with the cleaning-up but Joe waved her away, saying he’d just put the pots and plates in the dishwasher to rinse and then run “the whole happy bunch of em” later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland went back and forth into the kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessed that the little piss o’ rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one large piss by the end of the meal) might have had something to do with it.

He poured coffee and the three of them (four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room. Outside it was growing dark and the wind was screaming louder than ever. Mordred’s out there someplace, hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought, and once again had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she hadn’t known that, murderous or not, he must still be a child.

“Tell us how you came to be here, Joe,” Roland invited.

Joe grinned. “That’s a hair-raising story,” he said, “but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don’t mind tellin it.” The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. “It’s nice, havin folks to talk to for a little bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says nuffink back.”

He’d started off trying to be a teacher, Joe said, but quickly discovered that life wasn’t for him. He liked the kids — loved them, in fact — but hated all the administrative bullshit and the way the system seemed set up to make sure no square pegs escaped the relentless rounding process. He quit teaching after only three years and went into show business.

“Did you sing or dance?” Roland wanted to know.

“Neither one,” Joe replied. “I gave em the old stand-up.”

“Stand-up?”

“He means he was a comedian,” Susannah said. “He told jokes.”

“Correct!” Joe said brightly. “Some folks actually thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority.”

He got an agent whose previous enterprise, a discount men’s clothing store, had gone bankrupt. One thing led to another, he said, and one gig led to another, too. Eventually he found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him. He almost never worked the weekends; on the weekends, even the third-rate clubs wanted to book rock-and-roll bands.

This was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there’d been no shortage of what Joe called “current events material”: hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers, movie-stars, and, as always, politics — but he said he had been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George Carlin do the current-events shtick if they wanted it; he’d stick to Speaking of my mother-in-law and They say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell you about this Irish girl I met.