“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
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 halfmast.
“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
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 spoonhandles 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
“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
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:
“
He began to snore.
But no one knows how long five minutes is in the dark; it might be fair to say that, in the dark, five minutes
