The Stand

and side to side. The breakdown lanes were as full as the travel lanes. Some drivers had even attempted to use the median itself, although it was rough and upgraded and full of rocks which punched out of the thin gray soil like dragon’s teeth. Perhaps there had been high-hung four-wheel-drive vehicles which had had some success there, but what Trashcan saw on the median strip was an automobile graveyard of crashed, bashed, and mashed Detroit rolling iron. It was as if a mass madness had infected all the drivers and they had decided to hold an apocalyptic demolition derby or lunatic gymkhana here high up on I-70. Colorado Rocky Mountain high, Trashcan Man thought, I’ve seen it raining Chevies in the sky. He almost giggled and hurriedly covered his mouth. If The Kid heard him giggling now, he would most likely never giggle again.

The Kid came striding back in his high-heeled boots, his carefully coiffed hair gleaming. His face was that of a dwarf basilisk. His eyes were bulging with fury. “I’m not leavin my fuckin car,” he said. “You hear me? No way. I’m not leavin it. You get walkin, Trashy. You walk up there and see how far this motherfuckin traffic jam goes. Maybe it’s a truck in the road, I don’t know. I know we can’t fuckin backtrack. We lost the shoulder. We’d go all the way down. But if it’s just a stalled truck or somethin, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’ll jump these sonsofwhores one at a time and run em right the fuck over the edge. I can do it, and you better believe that happy crappy. Get movie, son.”

Trash didn’t argue. He began to walk carefully up the road, weaving in and out between the packed cars. He was ready to duck and run if The Kid started shooting. But The Kid didn’t. When Trashcan had walked what he judged to be a safe distance (i.e., out of pistol range), he climbed atop a tanker truck and looked back. The Kid, miniature streetpunk from hell, truly doll-sized at this half-a-mile distance, was leaning against the side of his deucey, having a drink. Trashcan Man thought of waving and then decided it might be a bad idea.

The Trashcan Man started his walk that day at about ten-thirty in the morning, MDT. Walking was slow—he often had to scramble over the hoods and roofs of cars and trucks, they were so tightly packed together—and by the time he got to the first TUNNEL CLOSED sign, it was already quarter past three in the afternoon. He had made about twelve miles. Twelve miles wasn’t so much—not to someone who’d crossed twenty percent of the country on a bicycle—but considering the obstacles, he thought twelve miles was pretty awesome. He could have gone back long-ago to tell The Kid it was impossible… if, that was, he’d ever had any intentions of going back. He didn’t, of course. Trashcan Man had never read much history (after the electroshock therapy, reading had gotten sort of tough for him), but he didn’t need to know that, in times of old, kings and emperors had often killed the bearers of bad news out of simple pique. What he did know was enough: he had seen enough of The Kid to know he didn’t ever want to see any more.

He stood pondering the sign, black letters on an orange diamond-shaped field. It had been knocked over and was lying beneath one wheel of what looked like the world’s oldest Yugo. TUNNEL CLOSED. What tunnel? He peered ahead, shading his eyes, and thought he could see something. He walked on another three hundred yards, scrambling over cars when he had to, and came to an alarming confusion of crashed vehicles and dead bodies. Some of the cars and trucks had been burned to the axles. Many were army vehicles. Many of the bodies were dressed in khaki. Beyond the scene of this battle—Trash was pretty sure that’s what it had been—the traffic jam began again. And beyond it, east and west, the traffic disappeared into the twin bores of what a huge sign bolted to the living rock proclaimed to be THE EISENHOWER TUNNEL.

He walked closer, heart bumping, not knowing just what he intended. Those twin bores punching their way into the rock intimidated him, and as he drew closer, intimidation became outright terror. He would have understood Larry Underwood’s feelings about the Lincoln Tunnel perfectly; in that instant they were unknowing soul brothers, the shared soul emotion one of stark fear.

The main difference was that, while the Lincoln Tunnel’s pedestrian catwalk was set high off the roadbed, here it was low enough so that some cars had actually attempted to run along the side, with one pair of wheels up on the catwalk and the other on the road. The tunnel was two miles long. The only way to negotiate it would be to crawl along from car to car in the pitch dark. It would take hours.

Trashcan Man felt his bowels turn to water.

He stood looking at the tunnel for a long time. Larry Underwood, over a month before, had gone into his tunnel in spite of his fear. After a long contemplation, Trashcan Man turned away and began to walk back toward The Kid, his shoulders slumped, the corners of his mouth trembling. It was not just the absence of any easy place to walk which made him turn back, or the length of the tunnel (Trash, who had lived his whole life in Indiana, had no idea how long the Eisenhower Tunnel was). Larry Underwood had been moved (and perhaps controlled) by an underlying streak of self-interest by the simple logic of survival: New York was an island, and he had to get off. The tunnel was the quickest way. So he would walk through as quick as he could; he would do it the way you held your nose and swallowed fast when you knew the medicine was going to taste bad. Trashcan Man was a beaten thing, used to accepting the punchings and pummelings of both fate and his own inexplicable nature… and doing so with a bowed head. He had been further unmanned, brainwashed almost, by his cataclysmic encounter with The Kid. He had been whooshed along at speeds high enough to induce brain-damage. He had been threatened with extinction if he could not drink a whole can of beer without stopping and without throwing up afterward. He had been sodomized with a pistol barrel. He had been nearly dumped a thousand feet straight down from the edge of the turnpike. On top of this, could he summon enough courage to crawl through a hole bored straight through the base of a mountain, a hole where he might encounter who knew what horrors in the dark? He could not. Others, maybe, but not the Trashcan Man. And there was also a certain logic in the idea of turning back. It was the logic of the beaten and the half-mad, true, but it still had its own perverse charm. He was not on an island. If he had to backtrack the rest of today and all day tomorrow in order to find a road that went over the mountains instead of through them, he would do it. He’d have to get by The Kid, it was true, but he thought The Kid might have changed his mind and left already, in spite of his declarations to the contrary. He might be dead drunk. He might even (although Trash really doubted that such extraordinarily good luck would ever come his way) be simply dead. At the worst, if The Kid was still there, watching and waiting, Trashcan could wait until dark and then creep past him like

(a weasel)

some small animal in the underbrush. Then he would just continue on to the east until he found the road he was looking for.

He arrived back at the tanker truck from whose top he had last seen The Kid and The Kid’s mythic deuce coupe, making better time on the return trip. This time he did not climb up to where he would be clearly silhouetted against the evening sky but began to crawl from car to car on his hands and knees, trying to be very quiet. The Kid might be alert and on watch. With a guy like The Kid, you just couldn’t tell… and it didn’t pay to take chances. He found himself wishing he had taken one of the soldiers’ guns, even though he had never used a gun in his life. He kept crawling, the road-pebbles biting painfully into his claw hand. It was eight o’clock, and the sun had gone behind the mountains.

Trashcan stopped behind the hood of the Porsche The Kid had thrown his liquor bottle at and carefully raised his eyes over it. Yes, there was The Kid’s deuce coupe, with its flamboyant flake-gold paint, its convex windshield and sharkfin cutting at the bruise-colored evening sky. The Kid was slumped behind the Day-Glo steering wheel, his eyes closed, his mouth open. Trashcan Man’s heart thundered a percussive victory song in his chest. Dead drunk! his heartbeat proclaimed in syllables of two. Dead drunk! By God! Dead drunk! Trash thought he could be twenty miles east of here before The Kid even woke up to his hangover.

Still, he was careful. He skittered from car to car like a waterbug crossing the still surface of a pond, skirting the deuce coupe on his left, hurrying across the increasing gaps. Now the deucey was at nine o’clock on his left, now seven, now six and directly behind him. Now to put distance between him and that crazy—

“You prick-stupid cocksucker, you hold still.”

Trash froze on his hands and knees. He made wee-wee in his pants, and his mind dissolved into a madly fluttering black bird of panic.

He turned around little by little, the tendons in his neck creaking like the hinges of a door in a haunted house. And there stood The Kid, resplendent in an iridescent shirt of green and gold and a pair of sunfaded cords. There was a .45 in each hand and a horrible grimace of hate and rage on his face.

“I was just chuh-checkin down this way,” Trashcan Man heard himself saying. “To make sure the cuh-cuh- coast was clear.”