The Stand

makes great burgers, but try not to puke, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Me, I got places to go and people to see. If my old buddy Poke could see me now, he’d never believe it. I’m busier’n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Catch you later.”

“Sure,” Trashcan said, and then added, almost timidly: “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

“Don’t thank me,” Lloyd said amiably. “Thank him.”

“I do,” Trashcan Man said. “Every night.” But he was talking to himself. Lloyd was already halfway down the lobby, talking with the man who had brought the soup and the hamburger. Trashcan Man watched them fondly until they were out of sight, and then he began to chow down, eating ravenously until almost everything was gone. He would have been fine if he hadn’t looked down into the soup bowl. It was tomato soup, and it was the color of blood.

He pushed the bowl aside, his appetite suddenly gone. It was all very well for him to tell Lloyd Henreid he didn’t want to talk about The Kid; it was quite another thing to stop thinking about what had happened to him.

He walked over to the roulette wheel, sipping at the glass of milk that had come with his food. He gave the wheel an idle twist and dropped the little white marble into the dish. It rolled around the rim, then hit the slots below and began to racket back and forth. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if someone would come and show him which room was his. He thought about The Kid. He wondered if the ball would fetch up on a red number or a black one… but mostly he thought about The Kid. The bouncing, jittering ball caught in one of the slots, this time for good. The wheel came to a stop. The ball was sitting under the green double zero.

House spin.

On the cloudless, eighty-degree day when they headed west from Golden directly into the Rockies along Interstate 70, The Kid had given up Coors in favor of a bottle of Rebel Yell whiskey. Two more bottles sat between the two of them on the driveshaft hump, each neatly packed into an empty cardboard milk carton so the bottles wouldn’t roll around and break. The Kid would nip at the bottle, chase the nip with a swallow of Pepsi-Cola, and then holler hot-damn! or yahoo! or sex-machine! at the top of his lungs. He remarked several times that he would piss Rebel Yell if he could. He asked Trashcan Man if he believed that happy crappy. Trashcan Man, pale with fright and still hung over from his three beers of the night before, said he did.

Even The Kid couldn’t stampede along at ninety on these roads. He lowered his speed to sixty and muttered about the goddam fucking mountains under his breath. Then he brightened. “When we get over in Utah n Nevada, we’ll make up plenty of lost time, Trashy. This little darlin’ll do a hunnert n sixty on the flat. You believe that happy crappy?”

“Sure is a nice car,” Trashcan said with a sick-doggy smile.

“Bet your ass.” He nipped Rebel Yell. Chased it with Pepsi. Yelled yahoo! at the top of his lungs.

Trash stared morbidly out at the passing scenery, which was now washed with midmorning sunshine. The Interstate had been blasted right into the shoulder of the mountain, and at times they were traveling between huge cliffs of rock. The cliffs he had seen in his dream of the night before. After dark, would those red eyes open again?

He shuddered.

A short while later he became aware that their speed had dropped from sixty to forty. Then to thirty. The Kid was swearing monotonously and horribly under his breath. The deuce coupe wove in and out of steadily thickening traffic, all of it stalled and deadly silent.

“What the fuck is this?” The Kid raged. “What did they? All decide to die at ten thousand motherfuckin feet? Hey, you stupid fucks, out my way! You hear me? Get the fuck out my way! ”

Trashcan Man cringed.

They rounded a curve and faced a horrendous four-car pileup which blocked the westbound lanes of I-70 completely. A dead man covered with blood which had dried to an uneven crack-glaze long since lay spreadeagled facedown in the road. Near him was a broken Chatty Cathy doll. Any way around the jam on the left was blocked by steel guardrail posts six feet high. On the right, the land fell away into cloudy distance.

The Kid gulped Rebel Yell and swung the deuce coupe toward the dropoff. “Hang on, Trashy,” he whispered, “we’re goin around.”

“There’s no room,” Trashcan Man rasped. His throat felt like the side of a steel file.

“Yeah, just enough,” The Kid whispered. His eyes were glittering. He began to edge the car off the road. The righthand wheels were now hissing in the dirt of the shoulder.

“Count me out,” Trashcan said hurriedly, and grabbed for the doorhandle.

“You sit,” said The Kid, “or you’re gonna be one dead pusbag.”

Trash turned his head and looked into the bore of a .45. The Kid giggled tensely.

Trashcan Man sat back. He wanted to close his eyes but could not. On his side of the car, the last six inches of shoulder dropped from view. Now he was looking straight down at a long vista of blue-gay pines and huge tumbled boulders. He could imagine the deuce coupe’s Wide Oval tires now four inches from the edge… now two…

“Another inch,” The Kid crooned, his eyes huge, his grin enormous. Sweat stood out on that pale doll’s forehead in perfect clear drops. “Just… one… more.”

It ended in a hurry. Trashcan Man felt the right rear of the car slip suddenly outward and sharply downward. He heard a falling millrace, first of pebbles, then of larger stones. He screamed. The Kid cursed horribly, changed down to first gear, and floored the accelerator. From the left, where they had been inching by the overturned corpse of a VW Microbus, came a squall of grinding metal.

“Fly! ” The Kid screamed. “Just like a bigass bird! Fly! Goddammit, FLY! ”

The deuce coupe’s rear wheels spun. For a moment their shift toward the drop seemed to be increasing. Then the car jerked forward, lurched up, and they were back on the road on the far side of the pileup, laying rubber.

“I told you she’d do it! ” The Kid screamed triumphantly. “Goddam! Did we do it? Did we do it, Trashy, ya fuckin chickenshit suckhole? ”

“We did it,” Trashcan Man said quietly. He was twitching all over. He couldn’t seem to control it. And then, for the second time since meeting The Kid, he unwittingly said the one thing that could have saved his life—had he not said it, The Kid surely would have killed him; it would have been his queer way of celebrating. “Good driving, champ,” he said. He had never called anyone “champ” in his whole life before now.

“Ahhh… not that great,” The Kid said patronizingly. “There’s at least two other guys in the country coulda done it. You believe that happy crappy?”

“If you say so, Kid.”

“Don’t tell me, sweetheart, I’ll fuckin tell you. Well, on we go. All in a day’s work.”

But they did not go on for long. The Kid’s deuce coupe was stopped for good fifteen minutes later, eighteen hundred miles or more from its point of origin in Shreveport, Louisiana.

“I don’t believe it,” The Kid said. “I don’t… motherfuckin… B’LEEVE it!”

He threw open the driver’s side door and jumped out, the quarter-full bottle of Rebel Yell still clutched in his left hand.

“GET OUTTA MY ROAD! ” The Kid roared, dancing about in his grotesquely high- heeled boots, a tiny natural force of destruction, like an earthquake in a bottle. “GET OUTTA MY ROAD, MOTHERFUCKERS, YOU’RE DEAD, Y’ALL B’LONG IN THE MOTHERFUCKIN BONEYARD, YOU GOT NO BUSINESS IN MY FUCKIN ROAD! ”

He threw the Rebel Yell bottle and it flew end over end, spraying amber droplets. It crashed into a hundred pieces against the side of an old Porsche. The Kid stood silent, panting and reeling a little on his feet.

The problem was nothing so simple as a four-car pileup this time. This time the problem was nothing but traffic. The eastbound lanes were here divided from those westbound by a grassy median strip about ten yards across, and the deuce coupe probably could have made it from one side of the highway to the other, but the condition of both arteries was the same: the four lanes were crowded with six lanes of traffic, bumper to bumper