The Stand, Page 35

  Sobbing with pain and terror, Nick heaved against the weight on top of him and Booth's body half fell, half slithered off him. Nick crawled out from underneath, one hand clapped over his wounded eye. He lay on the floor for a long time, his throat on fire. His head felt as if giant, merciless calipers had been screwed into his temples.

  At last he felt around, found a candle, and lit it with the desk lighter. By its weak yellow glow he could see Ray Booth lying facedown on the floor. He looked like a dead whale cast up on a beach. The gun had made a blackened circle on the side of his shirt the size of a flapjack. There was a great deal of blood. Booth's shadow stretched away to the far wall in the candle's uncertain flicker, huge and unshaped.

  Moaning, Nick stumbled into the small bathroom, his hand still clapped over his eye, and then looked into the mirror. He saw blood seeping out from between his fingers and took his hand away reluctantly. He wasn't sure, but he thought he might now be one-eyed as well as deaf and dumb.

  He walked back into the office and kicked Ray Booth's limp body.

  You fixed me, he told the dead man. First my teeth and now my eye. Are you happy? You would have taken both eyes if you could have done it, wouldn't you? Taken my eyes and left me deaf, dumb, and blind in a world of the dead. How do you like this, home-boy?

  He kicked Booth again, and the feel of his foot sinking into that dead meat made him feel ill. After a little bit he retreated to the bunk and sat on it and put his head in his hands. Outside, the dark held hard. Outside, all the lights of the world were going out.

  CHAPTER 34

  For a long time, for days (how many days? who knew? not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure), Donald Merwin Elbert, known to the intimates of his dim and confusing grade-school past as the Trashcan Man, had wandered up and down the streets of Powtanville, Indiana, cringing from the voices in his head, dodging away and putting up his hands to shield against stones thrown by ghosts.

  Hey, Trashcan!

  Hey, Trashcan Man, digging you, Trash! Lit any good fires this week?

  What'd ole lady Semple say when you lit up her pension check, Trash?

  Hey, Trash-baby, wanna buy some kerosene?

  How'd you like those shock-treatments down in Terre Haute, Trashie?

  Trash--

  --Hey, Trashcan--

  Sometimes he knew those voices weren't real, but sometimes he would cry out loud for them to stop, only to realize that the only voice was his voice, hitting back at him from the houses and storefronts, bouncing off the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash where he used to work and where he now sat on the morning of June 30, eating a big sloppy sandwich of peanut butter and jelly and tomatoes and Gulden's Diablo mustard. No voice but his voice, hitting the houses and stores and being turned away like an unwanted guest and thus returning to his own ears. Because, somehow, Powtanville was empty. Everyone was gone ... or were they? They had always said he was crazy, and that's something a crazy man would think, that his home town was empty except for himself. But his eyes kept returning to the oil tanks on the horizon, huge and white and round, like low clouds. They stood between Powtanville and the road to Gary and Chicago, and he knew what he wanted to do and that wasn't a dream. It was bad but not a dream and he wasn't going to be able to help himself.

  Burn your fingers, Trash?

  Hey, Trashcan Man, don't you know playin with fire makes you wet the bed?

  Something seemed to whistle past him and he sobbed and held up his hands, dropping his sandwich into the dust, cringing his cheek into his neck, but there was nothing, there was no one. Beyond the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash there was only Indiana Highway 130, going to Gary, but first going past the huge Cheery Oil Company storage tanks. Sobbing a little, he picked up his sandwich, brushed the gray dirt off the white bread as best he could, and began to munch it again.

  Were they dreams? Once his father had been alive, and the sheriff had cut him down in the street right outside the Methodist Church, and he had had to live with that his whole life.

  Hey, Trash, Sheriff Greeley cut your old man down just like a mad dog, you know that, ya fuckin weirdo?

  His father had been in O'Toole's and there was some bad talk, and Wendell Elbert had a gun and he murdered the bartender with it, then went home and murdered Trashcan's two older brothers and his sister with it--oh, Wendell Elbert was a strange fellow with a badass temper and he had been getting flaky for a long time before that night, anyone in Powtanville would tell you so, and they would tell you like father like son--and he would have murdered Trashcan's mother, too, only Sally Elbert had fled screaming into the night with five-year-old Donald (later to be known as the Trashcan Man) in her arms. Wendell Elbert had stood on the front steps, shooting at them as they fled, the bullets whining and striking on the road, and on the last shot the cheap pistol, which Wendell had bought from a nigger in a bar located on Chicago's State Street, had exploded in his hand. The flying shrapnel had erased most of his face. He had gone wandering up the street with blood running in his eyes, screaming and waving the remainder of the cheap pistol in one hand, the barrel mushroomed and split like the remains of a novelty exploding cigar, and just as he got to the Methodist Church, Sheriff Greeley pulled up in Powtanville's only squad car and commanded him to stand still and drop the gun. Wendell Elbert pointed the remains of his Saturday night special at the sheriff instead, and Greeley either did not notice that the barrel of the Saturday night special was ruptured or pretended not to notice, and either way the result was the same. He gave Wendell Elbert both barrels of his over and under.

  Hey, Trash, ya burned ya COCK off yet?

  He looked around for whoever had yelled that--it sounded like Carley Yates or one of the kids who hung out with him--except Carley wasn't a kid anymore, any more than he was himself.

  Maybe now he could be just Don Elbert again instead of the Trashcan Man, the way Carley Yates was now just Carl Yates who sold cars at the Stout Chrysler-Plymouth dealership here in town. Except that Carl Yates was gone, everyone was gone, and maybe it was too late for him to be anyone anymore.

  And he wasn't sitting against the wall of the Scrubba-Dubba anymore; he was a mile or more to the northwest of town, walking along 130, and the town of Powtanville was laid out below him like a scale-model community on a kid's HO railroad table. The tanks were only half a mile away and he had a toolkit in one hand and a five-gallon can of gas in the other.

  Oh it was so bad but--

  So after Wendell Elbert was underground, Sally Elbert had gotten a job at the Powtanville Cafe and sometime, in the first or second grade, her one remaining chick, Donald Merwin Elbert, had started lighting fires in people's trashcans and running away.

  Look out girls here comes the Trashcan Man, he'll burn up ya dresses!

  Eeeek! A freeeak!

  It wasn't until he was in the third grade or so that the grown-ups found out who was doing it and then the sheriff came around, good old Sheriff Greeley, and he guessed that was how the man who cut his father down in front of the Methodist Church ended up being his stepfather.

  Hey, Carley, got a riddle for ya: How can your father kill your father?

  I dunno, Petey, how?

  I dunno either, but it helps if you're the Trashcan Man!

  HeeheehahahaHawHawHaw!

  He was standing at the head of the graveled drive now, his shoulders aching from carrying the toolkit and the gas. The sign on the gate read CHEERY PETROLEUM COMPANY, INC. ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT THE OFFICE! THANKS!

  A few cars were parked in the lot, not many. Many were standing on flats. Trashcan Man walked up the drive and slipped through the gate, which was standing ajar. His eyes, blue and strange, were fixed on the spidery stairs that wound around the nearest tank in a spiral, all the way to the top. There was a chain across the bottom of these stairs and another sign swung from the chain. This one said KEEP OFF! PUMPING STATION CLOSED. He stepped over the chain and started up the stairs.

  It
wasn't right, his mother marrying that Sheriff Greeley. The year he was in the fourth grade he had started lighting fires in mailboxes, that was the year he burned up old Mrs. Semple's pension check, and he got caught again. Sally Elbert Greeley went into hysterics the one time her new husband mentioned sending the boy to that place down in Terre Haute (You think he's crazy! How can a ten-year-old boy be crazy? I think you just want to get rid of him! You got rid of his father and now you want to get rid of him!). The only other thing Greeley could do was to bring the boy up on charges and you can't send a kid of ten to reform school, not unless you want him to come out with a size eleven asshole, not unless you wanted your new wife to divorce you.

  Up the stairs and up the stairs. His feet made little ringing noises on the steel. He had left the voices down below and no one could throw a stone this high; the cars in the parking lot looked like twinkling Corgi toys. There was only the wind's voice, talking low in his ear and moaning in a vent somewhere; that, and the far-off call of a bird. Trees and open fields spread out all around, all in shades of green only slightly blued by a dreaming morning haze. He was smiling now, happy, as he followed the steel spiral up and up, around and around.

  When he got to the tank's flat, circular cap, it seemed that he must be standing directly under the roof of the world, and if he reached up he could scratch blue chalk from the bottom of the sky with his fingernails. He put the gascan and the toolkit down and just looked. From here you could actually see Gary, because the industrial smokes that usually poured from its factory stacks were absent and the air up that way was as clear as it was down here. Chicago was a dream wrapped in summer haze, and there was a faint blue glint to the far north that was either Lake Michigan or just wishful thinking. The air had a soft, golden aroma that made him think of a calm breakfast in a well-lighted kitchen. And soon the day would burn.

  Leaving the gas where it was, he took the toolkit over to the pumping machinery and began to puzzle it out. He had an intuitive grasp of machinery; he could handle it the way certain idiots savants can multiply and divide seven-digit numbers in their heads. There was nothing thoughtful or cognitive about it; he simply let his eyes wander here and there for a few moments, and then his hands would move with quick, effortless confidence.

  Hey, Trashcan, whydja want to burn up a church? Why dintcha burn up the SCHOOL?

  When he was in the fifth grade he had started a fire in the living room of a deserted house in the neighboring town of Sedley, and the house burned flat. His stepfather Sheriff Greeley put him in the cooler because a gang of kids had beaten him up and now the grown-ups wanted to start (Why, if it hadn't rained, we could have lost half the township thanks to that goddam firebug kid!). Greeley told Sally that Donald would have to go down to that place in Terre Haute and have the tests. Sally said she would leave him if he did that to her baby, her only chick and child, but Greeley went ahead and got the judge to sign the order and so the Trashcan Man left Powtanville for a while, for two years, and his mother divorced the sheriff and later that year the voters disowned the sheriff and Greeley ended up going to Gary to work on an auto assembly line. Sally came to see Trash every week and always cried.

  Trashcan whispered: "There you are, motherfuck," and then looked around furtively to see if anyone had heard him say that bad swear. Of course no one had, because he was on top of Cheery Oil's #1 storage tank, and even if he had been down on the ground, there was no one left. Except for ghosts. Above him, fat white clouds floated by.

  A large pipe projected out of the tangle of pumping machinery, its bore better than two feet, its end threaded to take what the oil people called a clutch-hose. It was strictly for outflow or overflow, but the tank was now full of unleaded gasoline and some of it had trickled out, perhaps a pint, cutting shiny tracks through the light fall of dust on the tank. Trashcan stood back, eyes bright, still gripping a large wrench in one hand and a hammer in the other. He dropped them and they clanged.

  He wouldn't need the gasoline he'd brought after all. He picked up the can, yelled "Bombs away!" and dropped it over the side. He watched its tumbling, glinting progress with great interest. A third of the way down it hit the stairs, bounced off, and then fell all the way to the ground, turning over and over, spraying amber gas from the side that had been punched open when it hit the stairs.

  He turned back to the outflow pipe. He looked at the shiny puddles of gasoline. He took a package of paper matches from his breast pocket and looked at them, guilty and fascinated and excited. There was an ad on the front that said you could get an education in most anything you wanted at the La Salle Correspondence School in Chicago. I'm standing on a bomb, he thought. He closed his eyes, trembling in fear and ecstasy, the old cold excitement on him, making his toes and fingers feel numb.

  Hey, Trash, ya fuckin firebug!

  The place in Terre Haute let him go when he was thirteen. They didn't know if he was cured or not, but they said he was. They needed his room so they could put some other crazy kid in it for a couple of years. Trashcan went home. He was way behind in his schoolwork now, and he couldn't seem to catch the hang of it. They had given him shock treatments in Terre Haute, and when he got back to Powtanville, he couldn't remember things. He would study for a test and then forget half the stuff and flunk with a 60 or 40 or something like that.

  For a while he didn't light any fires, though; there was that, at least. Everything had gone back to the way it should be, it seemed. The father-killing sheriff was gone; he was up there in Gary putting headlights on Dodges ("Putting wheels on miscarriages," his mother sometimes said). His mother was back working in the Powtanville Cafe. It was all right. Of course, there was CHEERY OIL, the white tanks rising on the horizon like oversized whitewashed tin cans, and behind them the industrial smokes from Gary--where the father-killing sheriff was--as if Gary was already on fire. He often wondered how the Cheery Oil tanks would go up. Three single explosions, loud enough to rip your eardrums to tatters and bright enough to fry your eyeballs in their sockets? Three pillars of fire (father, son, and holy father-killing sheriff) that would burn day and night for months? Or would they maybe not burn at all?

  He would find out. The soft summer breeze puffed out the first two matches he lit, and he dropped their blackened stumps onto the riveted steel. Off to his right, near the knee-high railing that circled the edge of the tank, he saw a bug struggling weakly in a puddle of gasoline. I'm like that bug, he thought resentfully, and wondered what kind of a world it was where God would not only let you be caught in a big sticky mess like a bug in a puddle of gas, but leave you there alive and struggling for hours, maybe days ... or in his case, for years. It was a world that deserved to burn, that was what. He stood, head bowed, a third match ready to strike when the breeze died.

  For a while when he came back he was called loony and halfwit and torchy, but Carley Yates, who was by then three grades ahead, remembered the trashcans and it was Carley's name that stuck. When he turned sixteen he left school with his mother's permission (What do you expect? They roont him down there in Terre Haute. I'd sue em if I had the money. Shock treatments, they call it. Goddamned electric chair, I call it!) and went to work at the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash: soap the headlights/soap the rocker panels/knock the wipers/wipe the mirrors/hey mister you want hotwax with that? And for a little while longer things went their appointed course. People would yell at him from street corners or passing cars, would want to know what ole lady Semple (now four years in her grave) had said when he lit up her pension check, or if he had wet the bed after he torched that house over in Sedley; and they'd catcall to each other as they lounged in front of the candy store or leaned in the doorway of O'Toole's; they'd holler to each other to hide their matches or butt their smokes because the Trashcan Man was on his way. The voices all became phantom voices, but the rocks were impossible to ignore when they came whizzing from the mouths of dark alleys or from the other side of the street. Once someone had pegged a half-full can of beer at him from a passi
ng car and the beer can had struck him on the forehead and had driven him to his knees.

  That was life: the voices, the occasional flying rock, the Scrubba-Dubba. And on his lunch break he would sit where he had been sitting today, eating the BLT his mother had made for him, looking at the Cheery Oil tanks and wondering which way it would be.

  That was life, anyway, until one night he found himself in the vestibule of the Methodist Church with a five-gallon can of gasoline, splashing it everywhere--especially on the heaps of old hymnals in the comer --and he had stopped and thought, This is bad, and maybe worse than that, it's STUPID, they'll know who did it, they'd know who did it even if someone else did it, and they'll "put you away"; he thought about it and smelled gas while the voices fluttered and circled in his head like bats in a haunted belfry. Then a slow smile came to his face and he had upended the gascan and he had run straight up the center aisle with it, the gas spraying out, all the way from the vestibule to the altar he had run, like a groom late to his own wedding and so eager that he had begun to spray hot fluid more properly meant for his soon-to-be marriage bed.

  Then he had run back to the vestibule, pulled a single wooden match from his breast pocket, scratched it on the zipper of his jeans, flung the match on the pile of dripping hymnals, direct hit, kaflump!, and the next day he was riding to the Northern Indiana Correctional Center for Boys past the black and smoldering ribs of the Methodist Church.

  And there was Carley Yates leaning against the light standard across from the Scrubba-Dubba, a Lucky Strike pasted in the comer of his mouth, and Carley had yelled his valedictory, his epitaph, his hail and farewell: Hey, Trashcan, whydja wanta burn up a church? Why dintcha burn up the SCHOOL?

  He was seventeen when he went to the jail for kids, and when he turned eighteen they sent him over to the state prison, and how long was he there? Who knew? Not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure. No one in stir cared that he had burned the Methodist Church down. There were people in stir who had done much worse. Murder. Rape. Breaking open the heads of old lady librarians. Some of the inmates wanted to do something to him, and some of them wanted him to do something to them. He didn't mind. It happened after the lights were out. One man with a bald head had said he loved him--I love you, Donald--and that was sure better than dodging rocks. Sometimes he would think, just as long as I can stay in here forever. But sometimes at night he would dream of CHEERY OIL, and in the dreams it was always a single, thundering explosion followed by two others, and the sound was WHAM! ...... ..... WHAM! WHAM! Huge, toneless explosions slamming their way into bright daylight, shaping the daylight like the blows of a hammer shaping thin copper. And everyone in town would stop what they were doing and look north, toward Gary, toward where the three tanks stood against the sky like oversized whitewashed tin cans. Carley Yates would be trying to sell a two-year-old Plymouth to a young couple with a baby, and he would stop in mid-spiel and look. The idlers in O'Toole's and in the candy store would crowd outside, leaving their beers and chocolate malteds behind. In the cafe his mother would pause in front of the cash register. The new boy at the Scrubba-Dubba would straighten from the headlights he had been soaping, the sponge glove still on his hand, looking north as that huge and portentous sound sledgehammered its way into the thin copper routine of the day: WHAMM! That was his dream.