The Stand

“The Trashcan Man.”

“The whut?” For one horrible moment the dead doll’s eyes rested on Trashcan’s face. “You jokin me, boy? Ain’t nobody jokes The Kid. An you better believe that happy crappy.”

“I do believe it,” Trashcan said earnestly, “but that’s what they call me. Because I used to light fires in people’s trashcans and mailboxes and stuff. I set old lady Semple’s pension check on fire. I got sent to the reformatory for it. I also burned down the Methodist Church in Powtanville, Indiana.”

“Didja? ” The Kid asked, delighted. “Boy, you sound as crazy as a rat in a shithouse. That’s okay. I like crazy people. I’m crazy myself. Tripped right outta my fuckin gourd. Trashcan Man, huh? I like that. We make a pair. The fucking Kid and the fucking Trashcan Man. Shake, Trash.”

The Kid offered his hand and Trash shook it as quick as he could so that The Kid could put both hands back on the wheel. They whizzed around a bend and there was a Bekins semi nearly blocking the whole highway and Trashcan put his hands over his face, prepared to make an immediate transition to the astral plane. The Kid never turned a hair. The deuce coupe skittered along the left side of the highway like a waterbug and they skinned by the cab of the truck with a coat of paint to spare.

“Close,” Trashcan said when he felt he could speak without a quaver in his voice.

“Hey, boy,” The Kid said flatly. Then one of his doll’s eyes closed in a solemn wink. “Don’t tell me—I’ll tell you. How’s that beer? Pretty fuckin gnarly, ain’t it? Hits the spot after ridin that kiddy-bike, don’t it?”

“It sure does,” Trashcan Man said, and took another big swallow of warm Coors. He was insane, but not yet insane enough to disagree with The Kid while he was driving. Nowhere near.

“Well, no sense beatin around the motherfuckin bush,” The Kid said, reaching back over the seat to get his own can of suds. “I guess we’re goin to the same place.”

“I guess so,” Trash said cautiously.

“Gonna jine up,” The Kid said. “Goin west. Gonna get in on the motherfuckin ground floor. You believe that happy crappy?”

“I guess so.”

“You been gettin dreams about that boogeyman in the black flight-suit, ain’tcha?”

“You mean the priest.”

“I always mean what I say an say what I mean,” The Kid said flatly. “Don’t tell me, ya fuckin bug, I’ll tell you. It’s a black flight-suit, and the guy’s got goggles. Like in a John Wayne movie about Big Two. Goggles so big you can’t see his motherfuckin face. Spooky old cock-knocker, ain’t he?”

“Yeah,” Trashcan said, and sipped his warm beer. His head was beginning to buzz.

The Kid hunched over the orange steering wheel and began to imitate a fighter pilot—one who had done his stuff in Big Two, presumably—in a dogfight. The deuce coupe rollercoastered alarmingly from one side of the road to the other as he imitated loops and dives and barrel rolls.

“Neeeeyaaaahhhh… eheheheheheh… budda-budda-budda… take that, ya fuckin kraut… Cap’n! Bandits at twelve o’clock!… Turn the air-cooled cannon on em, ya fuckin dipstick… takka… takka… takka-takka-takka! We got em, sir! All clear… HowOOOGAH! Stand down, fellers! HowOOOOOOOGAH! ”

His face gained no expression as he went through this fantasy; not a single well-oiled hair fell from grace as he jerked the car back into its lane and pounded on up the road. Trashcan Man’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. A light sheen of sweat had oiled his body. He drank his beer. He had to make wee-wee.

“But he don’t scare me,” The Kid said, as if the former topic of conversation had never lapsed. “Fuck no. He’s a hard baby, but The Kid has handled hard babies before. I shut em up and then I shut em down, just like The Boss says. You believe that happy crappy?”

“Sure,” Trash said.

“You dig The Boss?”

“Sure,” Trash said. He hadn’t the slightest idea who The Boss was or had been.

“Fuckin better dig The Boss. Listen, you know what I’m gonna do?”

“Go west?” Trashcan Man hazarded. It seemed safe.

The Kid looked impatient. “After I get there, I mean. After. You know what I’m gonna do after?”

“No. What?”

“I’m gonna lay low for a while. Check out the situation. Can you dig that happy crappy?”

“Sure,” Trash said.

“Fuckin A. Don’t tell me, I’ll fuckin tell you. Just check it out. Check out the big man. Then…”

The Kid fell silent, brooding over the top of his orange steering wheel.

“Then what?” Trashcan asked hesitantly.

“Gonna shut him down. Send him around dead man’s curve. Put him out to pasture on the motherfuckin Cadillac Ranch. You believe it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m gonna take over,” The Kid said confidently. “Gonna strip his gears and leave him at the Cadillac Ranch. You stick with me, Trashman or whatever the fuck ya call yaself. We ain’t gonna eat no pork and beans. We’re gonna eat more chicken than any man ever seen.”

The deuce coupe roared down the highway with painted flames shooting up from the manifold. Trashcan Man sat in the passenger seat, a warm beer in his lap and troubled in his mind.

It was almost dawn on the morning of August 5 when Trashcan Man entered Cibola, otherwise known as Vegas. Somewhere in the last five miles he had lost his left sneaker and now, as he walked down the curving exit ramp, his footfalls sounded like this: slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP. They sounded like the flap of a flat tire.

He was almost done in, but a little wonder came back as he made his way down the Strip, which was jammed with dead cars and quite a few dead people, most of them well picked over by the buzzards. He had made it. He was here in Cibola. He had been tested and he had passed the test.

He saw a hundred honky-tonk nightclubs. There were signs that read LIBERAL SLOTS, signs that said BLUEBELL WEDDING CHAPEL and 60-SECOND WEDDING BUT IT’LL LAST A LIFETIME! He saw a Silver Ghost Rolls- Royce halfway through a plate glass window of an adult bookstore. He saw a naked woman hanging upside down from a lamppost. He saw two pages of the Las Vegas Sun go riffling by. The headline that revealed itself over and over again as the paper flapped and turned was PLAGUE GROWS WORSE WASHINGTON MUTE. He saw a gigantic billboard which said NEIL DIAMOND! THE AMERICANA HOTEL JUNE 15— AUGUST 30! Someone had scrawled the words DIE LAS VEGAS FOR YOUR SINS! across the show window of a jewelry store seeming to specialize in nothing but wedding and engagement rings. He saw an overturned grand piano lying in the street like a large dead wooden horse. His eyes were full of these wonders.

As he walked on he began to see other signs, their neon dead this midsummer for the first time in years. Flamingo. The Mint. Dunes. Sahara. Glass Slipper. Imperial. But where were the people? Where was the water?

Hardly knowing what he was doing, letting his feet pick their own path, Trashcan turned off the Strip. His head dropped forward, his chin resting on his chest. He dozed as he walked. And when his feet tripped over the curbing, when he fell forward and gave himself a bloody nose on the pavement, when he looked up and beheld what was there, he could hardly believe it. Blood ran unnoticed from his nose to his tattered blue shirt. It was as if he was still dozing and this was his dream.

A tall white building stretched up to the desert sky, a monolith in the desert, a needle, a monument, every bit as magnificent as the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid. The windows of its eastern face gave off the fire of the rising sun like an omen. In front of this bone-white desert edifice, flanking its entranceway, were two huge gold pyramids. Over the canopy was a great bronze medallion, and carved on it in bas-relief was the snarling head of a lion.

Above this, also in bronze, the simple but mighty legend: MGM GRAND HOTEL.

But what captured his eyes was what stood on the grassy quadrangle between the parking lot and the entranceway. Trashcan stared, an orgasmic shivering consuming him so fiercely that for a moment he could only prop himself on his bloody hands, the unraveling end of the Ace bandage trailing between them, and stare at the