The Stand, Page 72

  The final "aahh" sound drew out and out, a sound of all the pleasures that all the people who have ever lived on the earth have ever known, and it ended only when he struck the lip of the fountain chest-high and yanked himself up and over and into a bath of incredible coolness and mercy. He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge. He screamed. He lowered his head, snorted in water, and blew it back out in a combined sneeze and cough that sent blood and water and snot against the side of the fountain in a splat. He lowered his head and drank like a cow.

  "Cibola! Cibola!" Trash cried rapturously. "My life for you!"

  He dogpaddled his way around the fountain, drank again, then climbed over the edge and fell onto the grass with an awkward thump. It had all been worth it, everything had been worth it. Water cramps struck him and he suddenly threw up with a loud grunt. Even throwing up felt grand.

  He got to his feet, and holding on to the lip of the fountain with his claw hand, he drank again. This time his belly accepted the gift gratefully.

  Sloshing like a filled goatskin, he staggered toward the alabaster steps which led to the doors of this fabulous place, steps that led between the golden pyramids. Halfway up the steps, a water cramp struck him and doubled him over. When it passed he lurched gamely onward. The doors were of the revolving type, and it took all his feeble strength to get one of them in motion. He pushed through into a plushy carpeted lobby that seemed miles long. The rug underfoot was thick and lush and cranberry-colored. There was a registration desk, a mail desk, a key desk, the cashiers' windows. All empty. To his right, beyond an ornamental grilled railing, was the casino. Trashcan Man stared at it in awe--the serried ranks of slot machines like soldiers standing at parade rest, beyond them the roulette and crap tables, the marble railings enclosing the baccarat tables.

  "Who's here?" Trash croaked, but no answer came back.

  He was afraid then, because this was a place of ghosts, a place where monsters might lurk, but the fear was weakened by his weariness. He stumbled down the steps and into the casino, passing the Cub Bar, where Lloyd Henreid sat silently in the deep shadows, watching him and holding a glass of Poland water.

  He came to a table upholstered in green baize, the mystic legend DEALER MUST HIT 16 AND STAND ON 17 inscribed thereon. Trash climbed up on it and fell instantly asleep. Soon nearly half a dozen men stood around the sleeping ragamuffin that was the Trashcan Man.

  "What do we do with him?" Ken DeMott asked.

  "Let him sleep," Lloyd answered. "Flagg wants him."

  "Yeah? Where the Christ is Flagg, anyway?" another asked.

  Lloyd turned to look at the man, who was balding and stood a full foot taller than Lloyd. Nonetheless, he drew back a step at Lloyd's gaze. The stone around Lloyd's neck was the only one that was not solid jet; in the center gleamed a small and disquieting red flaw.

  "Are you that anxious to see him, Hec?" Lloyd asked.

  "No," the balding man said. "Hey, Lloyd, you know I didn't--"

  "Sure." Lloyd looked down at the man sleeping on the blackjack table. "Flagg will be around," he said. "He's been waiting for this guy. This guy is something special."

  On the table, oblivious of all this, Trashcan Man slept on.

  Trash and The Kid spent the night of July 18 in a motel in Golden, Colorado. The Kid picked two rooms with a connecting door. The connecting door was locked. The Kid, now well in the bag, solved this minor problem by blowing the lock off with three bullets from one of his .45s.

  The Kid raised one tiny boot and kicked the door. It shuddered open in a fine blue haze of gunsmoke.

  "Betcha fuckin A," he said. "Which room? Take your pick, Trashy."

  Trashcan Man opted for the room on the right, and for a while was left alone. The Kid had gone out someplace. Trashcan Man was slowly considering the idea of simply fading away into the gloom before something really bad could happen--trying to balance that possibility against his lack of transportation--when The Kid returned. Trashcan Man was alarmed to see that he was pushing a shopping cart which was full of six-packs of Coors beer. The doll's eyes were now bloodshot and rimmed with red. The pompadour hairdo was coming unraveled like a broken and expanding clockspring, and greasy bunches of hair now hung down over The Kid's ears and cheeks, making him look like some dangerous (albeit absurd) caveman who had found a leather jacket left by a time-traveler and put it on. The rabbits' feet bobbed back and forth on the belt of the jacket.

  "It's warm," The Kid said, "but who gives a rip, am I right?"

  "Right, absolutely," Trashcan Man said.

  "Have a beer, asshole," The Kid said, and tossed him a can. When Trashcan pulled the ringtab, he got a faceful of foam and The Kid roared with oddly diminutive laughter, holding his flat belly with both hands. Trash smiled weakly. He decided that later tonight, after this small monster had succumbed to sleep, he would slip away. He had had enough. And what The Kid had said about the dark priest ... Trashcan Man's fears about that were so big he could not even get them to coalesce. Saying things like that, even if you were joking, was like shitting on the altar of a church or holding your face up to the sky in a thunderstorm and begging the lightning to come hit you.

  The worst thing was that he didn't think The Kid had been joking.

  Trashcan Man had no intention of going up into the mountains and around all those hairpin turns with this crazy dwarf who drank all day (and apparently all night) and who talked about overthrowing the dark man and putting himself in his place.

  Meanwhile, The Kid had put away two beers in two minutes, crushed the cans, and tossed them indifferently on one of the room's twin beds. He was looking morosely at the RCA Chromacolor, a fresh Coors in his left hand and the .45 he had used to blow open the connecting door in his right.

  "No fuckin lectricity, so there ain't no fuckin TV," he said. As he grew more drunk, his Southern accent grew more pronounced, putting fur on his words. "Don't I hate that. I love it that all the assholes got wasted, but Jesus-jumped-up-baldheaded-ole-Christ, where's HBO? Where's the goddam rasslin matches? Where's the Playboy Channel? That was a good one, Trashy. I mean, they never showed guys gettin right down and eating hair pie, munchin the ole bearded clam, you know what I mean, but some of those ladies had laigs went right up to their chins, you know what the motherfuck I'm talkin about?"

  "Sure," Trashcan said.

  "You're fuckin A. Don't tell me, I'll tell you."

  The Kid stared at the dead TV. "You numb cunt," he said, and shot the TV. The picture tube imploded with a great hollow bang. Glass belched out onto the carpet. Trashcan Man raised his arm to shield his eyes, and his beer gurgled out onto the green nylon shag when he did.

  "Oh looka that, you dumb dork!" The Kid exclaimed. His tone was one of great outrage. Suddenly the .45 was pointed at Trash, its bore as big and dark as an ocean liner's smokestack. Trashcan felt his groin go numb. He thought he might be pissing himself, but had no way of telling for sure.

  "I'm gonna venilate your thinkin-machine for that," The Kid said. "You done spilt the beer. If it was any other kind I wun't do it, but that was Coors you spilled. I'd piss Coors if I could, you believe that happy crappy?"

  "Sure," Trashcan whispered.

  "And do you think they're makin any more Coors these days, Trash? That seem very fuckin likely to you?"

  "No," Trashcan whispered. "Guess not."

  "You're fuckin right. It's a dangered spee-shees." He raised the gun slightly. Trashcan Man thought it was the end of his life, the end of his life for sure. Then The Kid lowered the gun again ... slightly. He had an absolutely vacant look on his face. Trashcan guessed this expression indicated deep thought. "I'll tell you what, Trash. You get you another can, and you chug it. If you can chug the whole thing, I won't send you to the Cadillac Ranch. You believe that happy crappy?"

  "What's ... what's chugging?"

  "Jesus Christ, boy, you as dumb as a stone boat! Drink the whole can without stoppin, that's wha
t chuggin is! Where you been spendin your time, motherfuckin Africa? You want to get on the stick, Trashy. If I have to put one inya, it goes right in your eye. I got this sucker loaded up with dumdums. Open you right the fuck up, turn you into a fuckin buffet dinner for the cockroaches in this dump." He gestured with the pistol, his red eyes fixed on Trash. There was a speckle of beer-foam on his upper lip.

  Trashcan went to the cardboard carton, selected a beer, and popped the top.

  "Go on. Ever drop. And if you puke it back up, you're a gone fuckin goose. "

  Trashcan Man upended the can. Beer gurgled out. He swallowed convulsively, his Adam's apple going up and down like a monkey on a stick. When the can was empty he dropped it between his feet, fought a seemingly endless battle with his gorge, and won his life back in one long, echoing belch. The Kid threw his small head back and laughed with tinkling delight. Trash swayed on his feet, grinning sickly. All at once he was a lot drunk instead of a little.

  The Kid holstered his piece.

  "Okay. Not bad, Trashcan Man. Not too motherfuckin shabby."

  The Kid continued to drink. Squashed cans piled up on the motel bed. Trash held a can of Coors between his knees and sipped on it whenever The Kid seemed to be looking at him with disapproval. The Kid muttered on and on, his voice growing ever lower and more Southern as the empties piled up. He talked of places he had been. Races he had won. A load of dope he had run across the border from Mexico in a laundry truck with a 442 hemi engine under the hood. Nasty stuff, he said. All dope was nasty motherfuckin stuff. He never touched it himself, but boy-howdy, after you muled a few loads of that shit, you could wipe your ass with gold toilet-paper. At last he began to nod off, the little red eyes closing for longer and longer periods, then coming reluctantly back to half-mast.

  "Gonna get him, Trashy," The Kid muttered. "I'll go out there, check it out, keep kissin his motherfuckin ass until I see how the land lays. But nobody orders this Kid around. No-fuckin-body. Not for long. I don't do piecework. If I'm on a job, I run it. That's just my style. I dunno who he is or where he comes from or how he can broadcast into our motherfuckin thinkin-machines, but I'm gonna run him right the fuck"--huge yawn--"outta town. Gonna shut him down. Gonna send him to the Cadillac Ranch. Stick with me, Crash, or whoever the fuck y are."

  He collapsed slowly backward onto the bed. His can of beer, freshly opened, fell from his relaxing hand. More Coors puddled on the rug. The case was gone, and by Trashcan's reckoning, The Kid had gotten through twenty-one cans of it himself. Trashcan Man couldn't understand how such a little man could drink so much beer, but he did understand what time it was: time for him to go. He knew that, but he felt drunk and weak and ill. What he wanted more than anything was to sleep for a little while. That would be all right, wouldn't it? The Kid was apt to sleep like a log all night, maybe half of tomorrow morning, too. Plenty of time for him to take a little nap.

  So he went into the other room (tiptoeing in spite of The Kid's comatose state) and closed the connecting door as well as he could-- which wasn't very well. The force of the bullets had warped it somehow. There was a wind-up alarm-clock on the dresser. Trash wound it, set it for midnight since he didn't know (and didn't care) what time it really was, and then set the alarm for five o'clock. He lay down on one of the twin beds without even stopping to take off his sneakers. He was asleep in five minutes.

  He woke up sometime later, in the dark grave of the morning, with the smell of beer and puke blowing across his face in a dry little gale. Something was in bed with him, something hot and smooth and squirmy. His first panicky thought was that a weasel had somehow gotten right out of his Nebraska dream and into reality. A whimpery little moan came out of him as he realized that the animal in bed with him, while not big, was too big to be a weasel. He had a headache from the beer; it drilled mercilessly at his temples.

  "Grab on me," The Kid whispered in the dark. Trashcan's hand was seized and led to something hard and cylindrical and throbbing like a piston. "Jerk me off. Go on, jerk me off, you know what to do, I saw that the first time I looked atcha. Come on, ya motherfuckin jerkoff, jerk me off. "

  Trashcan Man knew how to do it. In many ways it was a relief. He knew about it from the long nights in stir. They said it was bad, that it was queer, but what the queers did was better than what some of the others did, the ones who spent their nights sharpening spoon-handles into shanks, and the ones who just lay there on their bunks, cracking their knuckles and looking at you and grinning.

  The Kid had put Trashcan's hand on the kind of gun he understood. He closed his hand around it and began. After it was over The Kid would fall asleep again. Then he would creep out.

  The Kid's breath was becoming ragged. He began to bump his hips in time with Trashcan's strokes. Trash did not at first realize The Kid was also unbuckling his belt, then slipping his jeans and underpants down to his knees. Trash let him. It didn't matter if The Kid wanted to slip it to him. Trash had had it slipped to him before. You didn't die. It wasn't poison.

  Then his hand froze. Whatever it was suddenly pressing against his anus, it wasn't flesh. It was cold steel.

  And suddenly he knew what it was.

  "No," he whispered. His eyes were wide and terrified in the dark. Now he could dimly see that homicidal doll's face in the mirror, hanging over his shoulder with its hair in its red eyes.

  "Yes," The Kid whispered back. "And you don't want to lose a stroke, Trashy. Not one motherfuckin stroke. Or I might just pull the trigger on this thang. Blow your shit-factory all to hell and gone. Dumdums, Trashy. You believe that happy crappy?"

  Whining, Trashcan began to stroke him again. His whines became little gasps of pain as the barrel of the .45 worked its way into him, rotating, gouging, tearing. And could it be that this was exciting him? It was.

  Eventually his excitement became apparent to The Kid.

  "Like it, dontcha?" The Kid panted. "I knew you would, you bag of pus. You like having it up your ass, dontcha? Say yes, pusbag. Say yes or right to hell you go."

  "Yes," Trashcan Man whimpered.

  "Want me to do it to you?"

  He didn't. Excited or not, he didn't. But he knew better than to say so. "Yes."

  "I wouldn't touch your dick if it was diamonds. Do it yaself. Why you think God gave you two hands?"

  How long did it go on? God might know; the Trashcan Man did not. A minute, an hour, an age--what was the difference? He became sure that at the instant of The Kid's orgasm he would feel two things simultaneously : the hot jet of the small monster's semen on his belly and the mushrooming agony of a dumdum bullet roaring up through his vitals. The ultimate enema.

  Then The Kid's hips froze and his penis went through its convulsions in Trashcan Man's hand. His fist became slick, like a rubber glove. An instant later, the pistol was withdrawn. Silent tears of relief gushed down Trashcan's cheeks. He was not afraid to die, at least not in the service of the dark man, but he did not want to die in this dark motel room at the hands of a psychopath. Not before he had seen Cibola. He would have prayed to God, but he knew instinctively that God would not lend a sympathetic ear to those who had thrown their allegiance to the dark man. And what had God ever done for the Trashcan Man, anyway? Or for Donald Merwin Elbert either, for that matter?

  In the breathing silence The Kid's voice rose in song, offkey, cracking, trailing down toward sleep:

  "My buddies an me are gettin real well known ... yeah, the bad guys know us an they leave us alone ... "

  He began to snore.

  Now I'll leave, Trashcan Man thought, but he was afraid that if he moved, he would wake The Kid up. I'll leave just as soon as I'm sure he's really asleep. Five minutes. Shouldn't take any longer than that.

  But no one knows how long five minutes is in the dark; it might be fair to say that, in the dark, five minutes does not exist. He waited. He rolled in and out of a doze without knowing he had dozed. Before long he had slipped down the slide of sleep.

  He was on a dark
road that was very high. The stars seemed close enough to reach up and touch; it seemed you could just pick them off the sky and pop them into a jar, like fireflies. It was bitterly cold. It was dark. Dimly, frosted with starshine, he could see the living rockfaces through which this highway had been cut.

  And in the darkness, something was walking toward him.

  And then his voice, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere : In the mountains I'll give you a sign. I'll show you my power. I'll show you what happens to those who would set themselves against me. Wait. Watch.

  Red eyes began to open in the dark, as if someone had set out three dozen danger lamps with hoods on them and now that someone was pulling the hoods off in pairs. They were eyes, and they surrounded the Trashcan Man in a fey ring. At first he thought they were the eyes of weasels, but as the ring tightened around him he saw they were great gray mountain wolves, their ears cocked forward, foam dripping from their dark muzzles.

  He was afraid.

  They are not for you, my good and faithful servant. See?

  And they were gone. Just like that, the panting gray timberwolves were gone.

  Watch, the voice said.

  Wait, the voice said.

  The dream ended. He woke to discover bright sunshine falling in through the motel room window. The Kid was standing in front of it, seeming none the worse for wear from his bout with the now-defunct Adolph Coors Company the night before. His hair was combed into its former shining swirls and eddies, and he was admiring his reflection in the glass. He had slipped his leather jacket over the back of a chair. The rabbits' feet dangled from the belt like tiny corpses from a gibbet.

  "Hey, pusbag! I thought I was gonna hafta grease your hand again to wake you up. Come on, we got us a big day ahead. Lotta stuff gonna happen today, am I right?"

  "You sure are," the Trashcan Man replied with a queer smile.

  When the Trashcan Man swam out of sleep on the evening of August 5, he was still lying on the blackjack table in the casino of the MGM Grand Hotel. Sitting backward on a chair in front of him was a young man with lank straw-blond hair and mirror sunglasses. The first thing Trash noticed was the stone which hung about his neck in the v of his open sport-shirt. Black, with a red flaw in the center. Like the eye of a wolf in the night.