THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

Eight secondary characters from the Dark Tower series

By Bev Vincent

Copyright © 2005 by Bev Vincent

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cemetery Dance Publications

132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

Forest Hill, MD 21050

http://www.cemeterydance.com

First Edition eBook

Artwork Copyright © 2005 by Glenn Chadbourne

Introduction

My contract with NAL (New American Library) for The Road to the Dark Tower stipulated that I would deliver to them a 70,000-word manuscript. Ron Martirano, my editor, said I could probably go as high as 80,000, but my publisher wanted to keep the book from appearing too thick and daunting on the shelf.

Early on, I had an idea I was going to have a hard time keeping it under 100,000 words. What I ultimately submitted ran slightly over 130,000 words, including footnotes and appendices. I fully expected to be told I’d have to cut some -- or a lot -- of material, a process I did not relish.

Fortunately, my editor is as big a fan of the Dark Tower series as I am and he made no mention of the fact that I’d delivered nearly double what my contract specified, concentrating instead on the content.

However, I had already removed some material before I submitted the manuscript. The Dramatis Personae chapter was by far the longest in the book and my first draft featured not only the principle characters but subsidiary characters who either made repeat appearances throughout the series or who I considered pivotal for other reasons.

Rather than reduce the space devoted to the major characters, I decided, after much soul-searching and regret, to delete some of the lesser players. Now, thanks to this Cemetery Dance chapbook, I have the opportunity to reintroduce readers to eight characters worthy of scrutiny.

Here, then, are the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

Calvin Tower (Toren)

Like Roland Deschain, Calvin Tower is the last in his line. For generations, the Torens (Tower changed his name legally from the original Dutch version) have been custodians, overseeing the safety of the rose, Keystone Earth’s representation of the Dark Tower. His family once owned most of the Turtle Bay region of Manhattan, but Tower has sold off everything except the vacant lot at Second and 46th to pay taxes, mortgages, and medical bills. Even his bookstore, the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, occupies leased property.

He dreams about the empty lot but he hasn’t been there since he paid to have Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli knocked down after it went bankrupt and he had a fence erected around it, which was almost as expensive as the demolition. Sometimes he dreams of a field of flowers that goes on forever from the lot beyond First Avenue. Roland believes that the voice of the Beam told Tower to keep the lot, which is worth millions. Even so, Tower’s resolve is weakening and, under considerable pressure, he accepts $100,000 in earnest money from Enrico Balazar on behalf of Sombra Corporation, thereby agreeing not to sell the property to anyone until July 15, 1977.

At the age of twenty-six he inherited a considerable sum of money. He should have been one of the most successful antiquarian book dealers in New York given his location and talents. However, his bookstore isn’t a moneymaking venture. Balazar calls it a hole that Tower pours money into and estimates that Tower does $50 worth of business a day at best.

Though he has divested himself of most of his real estate, when it comes to his beloved books Tower has issues with letting things go. He hounds the owners of books he wants until they relent but he in turn hates to let the books go again, even if he could make a tidy profit. On one occasion he didn’t sleep for a week after he sold a valuable edition. He allowed his insurance policy to lapse so he could use the money to buy a book collection. His first wife called him a packrat. He’s reluctant to let Eddie even hold one of his valuable tomes. Afterwards, he looks sorry, the way an alcoholic might look after a particularly destructive bout of drunkenness. He calls himself a coward and says that his analyst describes him as the archetypal child of an A-male father and a B-female mother.

He has been married more than once but now he lives alone. He’s in his fifties, stands five foot nine and, at 230 pounds, qualifies as heavy set. His hair is gone on the sides of his forehead. He has no children and Aaron Deepnau is his only friend. Eddie Dean is surprised that there’s even one person willing to befriend him. Tower thinks he and Aaron are friends because “we fit around each other’s wrong places, make something that’s almost whole.”

Though he is a force for good, he’s often not a terribly likable person. Even Jake, who buys Charlie the Choo-Choo and a book of riddles from him, isn’t sure he likes the man. Moses Carver calls him a greedy highfalutin whitebread sumbitch. Eddie respects any man who could hold out against Balazar’s goons but he dislikes Tower passionately.

In addition to stubbornness, there’s a kind of willful stupidity about him. Eddie believes Tower uses this homemade static to luxuriate in what he’s become without having to examine it very often. His analyst has probably propped up Tower’s belief that he needs to be the author of his own destiny and that it might even be noble to be a selfish fuck. Such a man could never be ka-tet and Eddie is uneasy to think that their destinies are so tightly bound together.

Tower has in his possession an envelope with “Stefan Toren” and “Dead Letter” written on it. Below are the hieroglyphics that mean UNFOUND. The envelope once held his great-great-great grandfather Stefan’s will. Now it contains the name of Roland of Gilead. Tower knows the High Speech and can converse in it with Roland once he accepts that the gunslinger is, indeed, the last of the line of Eld.

After Eddie intervenes on his behalf with Balazar’s thugs, Tower agrees to go into hiding until the ka-tet figures out how to deal with the situation. By demanding that Eddie help him save his most valuable books, he unwittingly delivers a copy of ‘Salem’s Lot into Roland’s hands, their first indication of Stephen King’s importance to their quest.

Tower can’t fight his nature, though, and is unable to keep a low profile in Maine. He goes on book-buying expeditions, leaving his tracks everywhere. Deepnau says, “He’s a decent enough man in most ways but he does not enjoy being taken to task.” He proves to be a difficult man for Roland to deal with and it is all Eddie can do not to kill the man. He reneges on his promises to sell the property several times and only Deepnau’s badgering wins him over in the end.

He and Deepnau rescue Father Callahan from the Hitler Brothers in an unlikely act of bravery. Eddie thinks Tower’s courage arises from greed. He also thinks that, to Tower, none of what happens to him is real. “It’s like he’s mistaken his life for a life in one of his storybooks. He thinks things have got to turn out all right because the writer’s under contract.” Tower might have been less complacent if he knew that the Crimson King had a contract out on the writer instead.

Tower comes up with the idea for the Tet Corporation to assemble a group of telepaths and precogs at a ranch in Taos. The idea came from books which Benjamin Slightman -- author of The Hogan -- wrote under the name Daniel Holmes, which was also Odetta’s father’s name.

In 1990, Calvin Tower died of a heart attack in his new bookstore, rebuilt after Balazar’s men burned the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind in 1977.

Aaron Deepnau

Aaron Deepnau is crucial enough to Roland’s quest that the Calvins believe Stephen King hid a veiled reference to him in Insomnia. In that book, Ed Deepnau is conscripted by the Crimson King to orchestrate the death of Patrick Danville. Aaron Deepnau had a cousin four or five times removed named Ed who died in 1947, the same year King was born. He was a bookkeeper, “as inoffensive as milk and cookies.”

A retired lawyer, Deepnau is a tall, skinny man who looks about seventy. He never had children and when Eddie and Roland meet him in 1977, he has been battling cancer for a couple of years. He has undergone radiation treatment and visits the doctor every few months for a checkup. He wears steel-rimmed glasses and walks like his hips pain him. His sister and two brothers are also lawyers, still in practice. Their letterhead says simply deepnau.

Deepnau is Calvin Tower’s only friend, chess partner, and the force that keeps the book dealer on the straight and narrow. He’s calm and rational even when Tower is unreasonable. He believes that Roland and Eddie’s proposal will give Tower a chance to redeem the purpose of his life. Tower thinks of Deepnau as a hothead, but a gentleman hothead. If anyone can convince Tower to do something, it’s Deepnau.

He is not bad off financially and has often offered money to help Tower out of his tight financial situations. He also frequently tries to get his friend to go on vacation. He’s curious about what Balazar’s men want from Tower, but he doesn’t ask his friend for an explanation. He’s aware that he’s at greater risk from the thugs than Tower because Balazar has to keep Tower alive, but has no need for Deepnau.

Loaded guns make him nervous.

Deepnau and Tower rescue Father Callahan from the Hitler Brothers in New York in 1981. With John Cullum and Moses Carver, he becomes one of the Old Farts of the Apocalypse, which is how they refer to Tet Corporation.

Roland learns from Deepnau’s grandniece Nancy that Deepnau lived until 1992, an astonishing fifteen years after the gunslinger last saw him. Working in the New York Dark Tower in such close proximity to the rose extended his life far beyond what any doctor would have anticipated. Ultimately, though, his cancer came back and he died in his bed. His last words were, “Tell Roland we did our best.”

John Cullum

Eddie Dean tells Roland, “In a story, a minor character like John Cullum would never come in off the bench to save the day. It wouldn’t be considered realistic.” Cullum is a country caretaker, one of the world’s unknown and unseen. He keeps an eye on vacant camps and cottages and does some rough carpenter work. His age is not specified but he’s described as “going-on-elderly.” He says he’s “not s’old I don’t still have a little powder in my pan.” He tells Roland, “I guess I can kick a fella in the crotch if the wind’s in the northwest.”

Like any good caretaker, he knows almost everyone in the area by sight, though he doesn’t bother with names. “You want to know who’s in your territory,” he says. When he tries to convince Eddie that he couldn’t leave town because of roadblocks, Eddie forces him to admit that he knows at least eight back-roads ways out of town.

He’s a former guard from Maine State Prison, where he spent ten miserable years in the 1950s. He rarely leaves western Maine. The last time he was in New York was on a 48-hour pass when he was in the Army. He visited Radio City Music Hall, the Empire State Building and at least one prostitute, who gave him a venereal disease.

He may be a bumpkin who wears checked flannel shirts, but he’s a long way from stupid. When Roland tells him he’s not a fool, he says, “Sh’d hope not.” Echoing Detta’s “never been to Morehouse,” he admits, “I’ve never been to Harvard Business School.”

He drives a twelve-year-old car (cartomobile) with over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer. This car is just getting warmed up, in his opinion. He also owns a truck. A confirmed bachelor, his fabulously neat home is an ode to the joys of the solitary lifestyle. He smokes a pipe and has an impressive collection of autographed baseballs.

When Eddie and Roland meet him, he’s minding his own business, buying groceries at the mercantile. During the ambush that follows, he has the presence of mind to drop to the floor the instant Roland yells. His military training serves him well -- he recognizes instantly that Roland is a leader who knows what he’s doing. Roland notices that his brilliant blue eyes show fright, but not panic.

Cullum follows Roland’s instructions without question during the ambush and volunteers for hazardous duty when the situation demands it. Because he’s familiar with the territory, he takes the lead when they escape through the storage room. When the diesel fuel fire Roland and Eddie ignite doesn’t burn rapidly enough, he leaps onto the loading dock and pulls out his lighter to speed things along. He has an awareness and an instinct for survival that makes him a useful soldier. He seems unconcerned by the bullets flying through the store, and when one of Andolini’s men appears around the corner of the building, he calmly tells Roland where to shoot.

Even before they get to know him better, Eddie loves him for being present and with them, linked to the gunslingers by the strongest of bonds for a few minutes. Roland thanks ka for putting such a useful man in their path. “Meeting him was a lot more than just luck; that was ka having a very good day.”

When the time comes to retreat, Cullum leads Roland and Eddie to the dock where his motorboat awaits and takes them back to his house. He asks Roland and Eddie if they are walk-ins, but doesn’t seem disturbed when they confess that they fit that description. He tells Roland that he feels like they’ve gotten to know each other “very damn well for folks who haven’t known each other very damn long.” It’s the way people in the Army get to know each other when at war.

When Roland tells Cullum to get out of town for a couple of days for his own safety, he agrees without enthusiasm. This is his busy season and he’s loath to inconvenience people by leaving. Later, when Eddie and Roland need someone to carry their message to Moses Carver, Roland knows that Cullum hasn’t left, not because of any extrasensory awareness, but because he’s the only person in the area they know. Ka will use him. He is their dan-tete (“little savior”).

Cullum agrees to become Executive Vice President of Tet Corporation, but the title doesn’t impress him. His tasks are to keep the rose and Stephen King safe -- Cullum knows of King and has read ‘Salem’s Lot, which he thought was “a corker” -- and to screw up Sombra and North Central Positronics at every opportunity. He doesn’t seem afraid of the huge responsibility that ka has chosen him for, but he confesses his fear to Roland, which the gunslinger takes as a good sign.

When Eddie asks why he would take all this on for two men he just met, Cullum says he believes that they want all the right things. He sees the truth in their eyes. “Also it appears to me you’re offering the keys to one humungous great engine. Who wouldn’t want to turn it on, and see what it does?”

With Aaron Deepnau and Moses Carver, he becomes one of the Three Elderly Stooges, the Three Toothless Musketeers, the Old Farts of the Apocalypse, with the potential of becoming one of the world’s more important people, a true prince of the earth. For the next twelve years, he proudly wears the cross Aunt Talitha gave Roland in River Crossing. When contemplating a big decision or preparing some covert action, he touches the only memento of his meeting with the last gunslinger. He regrets some of the filthy tricks he is forced to play on others as part of his duties with Tet Corporation as permanent foil to Sombra and North Central Positronics, some of which cost people their lives. More than that, he regrets that he never got the chance to see Roland’s world, briefly glimpsed through the storm on Turtleback Lane. The cross sends him dreams of that place, from which he awakens with feelings of longing and loss . . . and love. These dreams sweep away whatever regrets he might have, for they confirm that he chose the correct side in a cosmic battle.

Several attempts are made on his life over the years. All of them miss until he’s shot in 1989 while in New York for a board meeting. The incident is made to look like a mugging gone bad, but the surviving members of Tet Corporation believe he was killed by an agent of Sombra or North Central Positronics, probably by one of the can-toi.

Irene Tassenbaum

Irene Tassenbaun is a forty-seven-year-old woman whose hair has started going gray at the roots. Her face is becoming wrinkled, and she carries a “spare tire.” She has a dimpled scar from a lumpectomy that, according to her doctor, would have become cancerous in another five years. “Even in her prime she’d never mistaken herself for tits and ass attached to a life-support system. Nor had she ever let anyone else -- including her husband -- make the same mistake.”

A talkative Republican from Manhattan, she’s been married to David Tassenbaum, who calls her “Ree,” for eighteen years in 1999. Her husband, who doesn’t believe anything that can’t be engraved on a microchip, works for Positronics, where she brags that he -- and not Al Gore -- invented the Internet. Whatever the truth of that issue, David’s work has made the Tassenbaum’s rich.

They met at the Santa Monica ASPCA. He had brought in a stray dog he found near the apartment where he lived with half a dozen egghead friends. She’d been looking for a kitten to liven up what was an essentially friendless life. They have no children -- she suffered a miscarriage early in their marriage.

David’s successes have stolen him away so that her life is once again essentially friendless and lived mostly in a silence that has been making her increasingly angry lately. She sees herself as “David’s ornament, a supporting character in his increasingly famous life, the lady who passed out hors d’ouevres at parties.” The last time she had his full attention was probably seven years earlier, when she gave him a blowjob in the bathroom at a garden party while tea was being served on the lawn.

She and her husband have spent summers in the house that once belonged to John Cullum since 1994. She had it repainted it without trim (“Trim is for folks who can’t make up their minds”) and named it Sunset Cottage.

Roland and Jake meet her in the mercantile store where Roland encountered Cullum years earlier. The storeowner thinks of her as a typical summer visitor and routinely overcharges her. She’s too busy talking to notice. Roland is pressed for time so he fires his gun to make sure he has everyone’s full attention and cooperation. Though she screams and drops to the floor, she tells Roland what he needs to know. Like Cullum, her large brown eyes are fearful but not panicky. When Roland tells her he won’t kill her unless she dawdles, she doesn’t dawdle.

Her mission is simple -- drive Roland and Jake to Turtleback Lane in time to prevent Stephen King from dying. Though she hasn’t driven a standard shift since she was Irene Cantora of Staten Island and has never driven a stick shift, she quickly masters the skill. Roland, who senses her abilities, is patient with her. They had found her in ka’s road on the Path of the Beam.

Her adventure with Roland and Jake terrifies her, but she enjoys it at the same time. It’s the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her. Suddenly, she’s at the center of something that seems very important. She senses tremendous forces gathering all around them. Invigorated and electrified, she feels like she can go faster than the speed of light, that she might outrace time itself. She screams in excitement and pure joy. After a few minutes, she’s shifting gears like a NASCAR driver. Among the thoughts racing through her head is the question of whether she’s too old to divorce her husband.

Like Cullum, she isn’t perturbed when Roland and Jake admit to being walk-ins. Also like Cullum, she takes charge where she can in a crisis. After Jake is struck by Bryan Smith’s van while saving King, she picks up Roland’s gun and keeps Smith from leaving. She barks orders like a seasoned gunslinger.

After the accident, Irene helps a distraught Roland regain control of himself. Roland is eager to learn everything Jake said before he died, but she reminds him that people will soon be coming; there will be time to talk later. Roland sends her away, trusting that she will come back later in her dark (rose?) red Mercedes Benz S600. He is only vaguely surprised to learn later that the Tassenbaum’s other car is a “Beamer” (BMW). All things serve the Beam.

In the aftermath of Jake’s death, Irene reevaluates her life. She’s not sure she loves her husband any more. The thief of time has stolen her sense of humor. She’s already decided she would sleep with Roland -- who she thinks of as Marshall Dillon from Gunsmoke -- if he wants her. She keeps most of her many questions to herself. Keeping silent in company doesn’t come naturally to her, but the less she knows, the better her chances of survival and the easier it will be for her to return to her former, mundane life once Roland leaves her.

On the first night of their journey to New York, she finds Roland awake outside their motel room, afraid to sleep. Her heart pounds but her voice is calm when she offers to lay down with him. She is both pleased and disappointed when he falls asleep. When Roland does make love to her the next night, she understands that he is not driven by desire for her but simply understands what she wants. Sex with her husband was never like what she experiences with Roland, even though she realizes the gunslinger is distracted.

As their time together draws to a close, she mourns the impending loss; however, by the time they reach New York, she is eager to get back to her husband. She believes that leaving as unexpectedly as she did might get his attention. David’s attention did not compare to Roland’s, but Roland would vanish from her life soon, so it would be better than nothing.

She thanks Roland for choosing her for this experience and believes that her three days with him have provided her with enough adventure to last the rest of her life. She now knows that the world is thinner than she had ever imagined, and reality is wider. By saving the writer -- not a very good writer, in her opinion, though she’s read four or five of his books instead of stopping after just one -- she was part of saving the world. What she will never know, though, is how a writer gets to be in charge of the world’s destiny.

Roland leaves Irene outside the doors of the Dixie Pig in New York to somehow return to her normal life, irrevocably changed though she may be. She fared better than many others used by Roland on his way to the Dark Tower.

Ted (Theodore) Stevens Brautigan

Ted Brautigan was born in 1898 in Millford, Connecticut. By the age of six he suspects he has telepathic powers; by sixteen he’s sure of it. He tries to join the army but is rejected because of a heart murmur and substandard hearing. He thinks his mind-reading powers could be useful to Army Intelligence but his unequivocal demonstration before the enlistment physician doesn’t get him anywhere. He comes to realize that the Army guys want to fight and someone with his powers would spoil everything. He possesses a valuable, dangerous talent that no one wants.

Frustrated, he follows in his uncle’s footsteps, becoming an accountant after being accepted to Harvard at eighteen. Class of ‘20, Drama Society, Debate Club, Skull and Bones and Phi Beta Kappa. He graduates early and goes to the south of France, returning after his uncle dies. He decides to stop his march toward financial success and start his march toward financial obscurity.

He learns how dangerous his talent is when he’s mugged in Akron, Ohio in 1935. In anger, he throws a mental spear at his attacker without realizing what he’s doing. When the man dies, Ted realizes that he can no longer allow himself the luxury of anger even when it’s justified. He runs, which turns into his career. His story of life as a Wandering Accountant is reminiscent of Father Callahan’s tale. They could almost be twins.

Ted is not a garden-variety telepath. Unlike most people with psychic talents, he doesn’t come from Keystone Earth. Also, his powers are catching. If he touches someone while in a state of high emotion, the other person for a short time also becomes telepathic. Those who are already telepaths he makes exponentially stronger. He is a facilitator, though he doesn’t know to call it that at first.

He gradually becomes aware that he’s being watched by a certain kind of people. Mostly men, all with tastes for loud clothes, rare steak, and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their suits and dresses. Their symbols -- stars, comets, ringed planets, crescent moons and the occasional red eye -- adorn fences and sidewalks, often near hopscotch grids.

In 1955, he sees a job posting in the Sacramento Bee -- the same newspaper where Father Callahan read about George Magruder -- where accountancy is one of the qualifications. Of the four hundred applicants who complete the screening process, only four are chosen. Ted responds to some of the questions with answers he intuitively understands the screeners want.

The deal the company offers Ted sounds incredible: $250,000 at the beginning of the project and $500,000 after a six-year term, with an option to renew. Dazzled by the money and the short time he’s given to accept, Ted is “blitzed like a quarterback.” Low men wearing hats -- which contain mental screens to ward off the telepaths -- watch him during the six weeks before he ships out. Just before they are ushered through the one-way door to Thunderclap, Ted realizes the six-year commitment and the chance to renew are “shuck and jive.”

In the prison camp known as Blue Heaven, Ted understands he is working to break something, but at first he doesn’t know or care what. Breaking is like finally being able to scratch an irritating out-of-reach itch. He likes the roof over his head and most of his fellow inmates. He comforts the others when they get angry and assuages their homesickness. Some of his fellow Breakers regard him as a mentor, and some revere him.

He discovers the purpose of Blue Heaven after he befriends a low man named Trampas, who grows careless about wearing his protective hat in Ted’s presence. Not only is he helping break the Beams, Ted learns that, as a facilitator, he is magnifying the other Breakers’ output tenfold. He’s cutting centuries off their work and has already helped them snap one Beam. Ted compares the revelation to a story he once read about a man who discovers he’s been sleepwalking and taking his mother cup after cup of poisoned tea.

Psychic output is monitored at Blue Heaven and he has to keep his guard up all the time, awake or sleeping, once he decides to escape. The only place he can really relax is in the Gingerbread House, a safe haven Sheemie Ruiz creates. Ted gets Sheemie to create a doorway through which he travels to Connecticut in April of 1960.

He shows up at the boarding house where Bobby Garfield and his mother live with his possessions in a few shabby suitcases and some shopping bags. Bobby has never seen a man who looks so tired. Ted tells Bobby’s mother he is sixty-six. He’s tall and stooped over, reminding Bobby of Boris Karloff. His face is thin and weary. It’s not wrinkled so much as etched with deep lines. His white hair is baby-fine and receding from a liver-spotted brow. His clothes are cheap and look too big for him.

He’s evasive about where he came from, saying only that it was a place not so nice as here and a jail in some ways. He hires Bobby to look out for the low men, knowing the Crimson King’s minions won’t stop looking for him. After he surrenders to save Bobby, the low men take him to the Dixie Pig in New York, through the doorway to Fedic and back to Thunderclap Station and Blue Heaven, where he is interrogated but not tortured. The low men warn him that Bobby and Carol will be killed if he tries to get away again. To protect Sheemie, Ted tells his interrogators that he went to sleep one night and awoke on the Connecticut turnpike. He also doesn’t expose Trampas as his unwitting source of information.

Trampas tells him that he may no longer be indispensable because Stephen King has stopped writing and has become vulnerable to ka. The remaining two Beams are going to break with him or without. Ted knows there will be fear and confusion at the end and he wants to stay, if only to comfort the others when the sky tears open. He’s not without hope, though, aware that gunslingers are working against the low men and the Crimson King. He, Sheemie and Dinky Earnshaw amass a cache of arms and meet the ka-tet when they pass through the doorway under Thunderclap Station.

He mistakes Jake for Bobby Garfield when they meet. Ted has lost some of his gentlemanly charm -- he snarls impatiently at the ka-tet, reminding them of the risk he and the others are taking in rescuing them. He helps orchestrate the attack and assists the confused, frightened Breakers once the assault gets underway by broadcasting telepathic messages.

The can-toi Finli wounds Ted during the battle. Roland sends the freed Breakers, including Ted, in the direction of the Callas, recommending that they confess their involvement in Thunderclap and trust the good people of the Calla to treat them well. Perhaps someday they will find doorways back to America side, but the fate of Ted and the other Breakers is unknown.

In 1965, Bobby Garfield gets an envelope from Ted containing blood-red rose petals and the sweetest scent he ever smelled. He believes his old friend escaped again but this gift was likely sent after the liberation of the Breakers, so perhaps Ted did eventually find his way back to Earth.

The Bad

Enrico Balazar

Balazar is a second-generation Sicilian who has worked hard to lose his accent and to sound educated. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the crime business, he finished high school and went to NYU business school for two years.

In 1977, he looks middle-aged. He’s a fat, dumpy little guy with a potbelly and dandruffy black hair going gray around the edges. His ankles are covered with varicose veins. Sometimes he wears expensive suits but mostly he looks like a peasant.

His voice, like his business methods, is quiet, cultured and distinctly American, which gives him a deceiving appearance that he uses to his advantage. People hearing him for the first time almost always looked dazed, as if listening to a good ventriloquist. He speaks in a low, calm, reasonable voice that doesn’t mask the unspoken threats that lie behind it and his eyes say even more with their terrible intensity.

He looks like a farmer, innkeeper or a small-time Mafiosi whose success came through luck rather than intelligence. Some of the old-timers still call him Il Roche -- The Rock. In the right-hand top drawer of his desk, where other businessmen might keep office supplies, Balazar keeps three decks of cards that he uses to erect houses of cards. One of his employees once saw him build a tower nine levels high before it collapsed.

Eddie calls Balazar a despot. His way of doing business is to always escalate. He slaps back twice as hard when hit. Guys like Balazar don’t believe or disbelieve. What they do is test the limits. He will be impressed that Eddie scared Andolini, but only enough to be cautious.

He’s a powerful, important man in Brooklyn, but he is frightened and awed when Sombra Corporation hires him to acquire the vacant lot from Calvin Tower. In most cases, Balazar would have been content to send a couple of his thugs -- he calls them his gentlemen -- on such an errand, but this deal is important enough to warrant his personal attention.

Though it is purely accidental on his part, Balazar drives the car that strikes and kills Jake Chambers in one version of reality. Eddie and Roland shoot Balazar in the office at his club in 1987. When he crosses the gunslingers’ path again in 1977, Eddie calls Balazar the kind of guy he wouldn’t mind killing twice.

Jack Mort

Though he appears only briefly in the series, Jack Mort has a profound impact on several other characters. By his hand, Jake Chambers dies his first death on the streets of New York. By his hand, Odetta Holmes suffers a head injury when she is five, an injury that initiates the schism in her personality. Again by his hand, Odetta Holmes loses her legs and is almost killed when he pushes her in front of the A train at Christopher Street station. As a result of that incident, Detta Walker becomes a more prominent personality. Ultimately, though, Mort is an instrument of creation when Roland uses his body and mind to reveal Odetta and Detta to each other, creating Susannah Dean.

Mort is a sociopath, a monster worse than Detta Walker could ever be. He plans his crimes meticulously. Do-Bees cover all the bases is his motto, both at work and at play. He stalks Jake for two or three weeks before pushing him in front of a car. He has never owned a gun in his life; he does his nasty work in other ways. He takes only acceptable risks and minimizes those that remain. He knows that looking around to see if anyone is watching only invites suspicion. In the depths of his deranged mind, he wonders if he might not be sculpting the cosmos through his actions.

He is quite thin, has a long-healed scar over his chin, deep cobalt blue eyes, and blond hair. He wears gold-rimmed glasses, Gucci shoes and a solid gold Rolex watch. In his wallet he carries a photo of his mother in front of the Empire State Building. He drives unremarkable cars.

His coworkers at the agency where he works as a successful CPA are afraid of him. He carries an expensive silver lighter because his boss smokes. Mort confidently expects that he will have his boss’s job within the year, but for the time being he lights the man’s cigarettes when there is someone higher up present to appreciate Jack’s quiet courtesy and his good taste.

When it comes to murder, Mort is an equal-opportunity employer. He doesn’t care who he kills. Pushing is a hobby. He calls his practice of dropping bricks on people “depth charging.” He carefully clips articles concerning his deeds from the newspaper, making sure to stay exactly on the column lines, and pastes them into a scrapbook.

Unlike Odetta, Mort is completely oblivious to Roland when the gunslinger first enters his body. When confronted with the impossibility of Roland’s invasion, he goes into hysterics but this is an artificial reaction designed to avoid confrontation with his weird kidnapper. Though he has killed and maimed countless innocent people, the mere threat of losing one of his precious eyes forces him to cooperate with Roland.

His precious Dunhill lighter saves Roland’s life but Roland is the instrument of Mort’s destruction, forcing him to jump in front of the very train he’d used to assault Odetta Walker. He is cut in two, not at the knees but at the waist.

Jack Mort dies alone.

The Ugly

Jack Andolini

Jack Andolini is a huge man with a bulging caveman’s forehead and an Alley Oop jaw to match. His monkeylike hands are so large they are almost caricatures. Coarse sprouts of hair grow from his ears and his knuckles. His eyes are so brown the color seems to leak into his corneas.

In Roland’s vernacular, he is the New York version of a Big Coffin hunter. Eddie and others call him Old Double-Ugly -- though never to his face -- and he looks like Old Double-Stupid, but he is far from dumb. No one stupid would ever earn a position as Enrico Balazar’s number one lieutenant even if he does happen to be related to the man by marriage. In fact, he is dangerously bright. Creepy-smart. When it comes to short-term imagination, though, Andolini’s is busted.

He can look so charming at times that he disarms people into defenselessness. Other times he looks like an axe-wielding psycho from a horror movie. His bulging brow and ugly face intimidate others more than any words he could utter.

If someone crosses him and doesn’t gain the upper hand early on, Andolini will stomp them flat later. Even under attack, Andolini betrays only fear, not panic. Still, Eddie makes him lose face and when he confronts Eddie in Eastern Maine he can barely keep his rage in check. The ambush mission is the biggest job of his career, more than just payback. In the heat of the battle, Jack, though smarter than most of his fellow street hoods, contrives to forget that Eddie beat him once before and falls prey to Eddie and Roland’s taunts. He loses his temper when Roland tells him that, though some dreams may be destiny, Andolini’s are just dreams.

In one version of reality, Andolini’s gun explodes in his face shortly before he is consumed by lobstrosities on the beach at the Western Sea. In Keystone Earth the authorities capture him after the shootout at the mercantile store.

THE END

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly