the third by a whole chorus. Then they came on again.
The Kid began to back up. He was trying to load one of his guns now, but the shells were spilling out between his nerveless fingers. Suddenly he gave up. The gun fell out of his hand and clanked on the road. As if it had been a signal, the wolves rushed him.
With a high, reedy scream of fear, The Kid turned and ran for the Austin. As he ran, his second pistol tumbled from its low holster and bounced off the road. With a low, ripping growl, the wolf closest to him sprang just as The Kid dove into the Austin and slammed the door.
He just made it. The wolf bounced off the door, growling, its red eyes rolling horribly. It was joined by the others, and in moments the Austin was ringed with wolves. From inside, The Kid’s face was a small white moon looking out.
Then one of the wolves was coming toward the Trashcan Man, its triangular head held low, its eyes glowing like stormlamps.
Steadily, now not in the least afraid, Trash went to meet it. He held out his burned hand and the wolf licked it. After a moment it sat at his feet, curling its ragged, brushy tail about its withers.
The Kid was staring at him, his mouth hanging open.
Smiling into his eyes, Trashcan Man gave him the finger.
And he screamed: “Fuck you! You’re shut down! Do you hear me?
The wolf’s mouth closed gently on Trashcan’s good hand. He looked down. It was standing again, tugging him lightly. Tugging him west.
“All right,” Trashcan said serenely. “Okay, boy.”
He began to walk and the wolf fell in right behind him, walking like a well-trained dog at heel. As they walked away, five others joined them from amid the stalled cars. Now he walked with one wolf ahead of him, one behind him, and two on each side, like an escorted dignitary.
He paused once and looked back over his shoulder. He never forgot what he saw: a ring of wolves sitting patiently in a gray circle around the little Austin, and the pale circle of The Kid’s face staring out, his mouth working behind the windowglass. The wolves seemed to grin up at The Kid, their tongues lolling out of their mouths. They seemed to be asking him just how long it would be before he kicked the dark man out of ole Lost Wages on his ass. Just how long?
Trashcan Man wondered how long those wolves would sit around the little Austin, ringing it in a circle of teeth. The answer, of course, was as long as it took. Two days, three, maybe even four. The Kid would sit there, looking out. Nothing to eat (unless the teenage girl had had a passenger, that was), nothing to drink, the afternoon temperature in the car’s small interior maybe as high as a hundred and thirty degrees, what with the greenhouse effect. The dark man’s lapdogs would wait until The Kid starved to death, or until he got crazy enough to open the door and try to make a run for it. Trashcan Man giggled in the darkness. The Kid wasn’t very big. He wouldn’t make much more than a mouthful for each of them. And what they
“Am I right?” he cried, and cackled up at the bright stars. “Don’t tell
His gray-ghostly companions padded gravely along all about him, taking no notice of Trashcan Man’s shouts. When they reached The Kid’s deuce coupe, the wolf at his heel padded over to it, sniffed at one of the Wide Ovals, and then, grinning sardonically, lifted his leg and made wee-wee on it.
Trashcan Man had to laugh. He laughed until tears squirted from his eyes and ran down his cracked, stubbled cheeks. His madness, like a fine skillet dish, now wanted only for the desert sun to simmer it and complete it, to give it that final subtle touch of flavor.
They walked, the Trashcan Man and his escorts. As the traffic grew thicker, the wolves either squirmed under cars with their bellies dragging on the road or padded over hoods and roofs near him—sanguine, silent companions with red eyes and bright teeth. When, sometime after midnight, they reached the Eisenhower Tunnel, Trashcan did not hesitate but worked his way steadily into the maw of the westbound side. How could he be afraid now? How could he be afraid with guardians like these?
It was a long trip, and he had lost all track of time before it had little more than begun. He groped blindly forward from one car to the next. Once his hand plunged into something wet and sickeningly soft, and there was a horrible whoosh of stinking gas. Even then he did not falter. From time to time he saw red eyes in the dark, always up ahead, always leading him forward.
A time later he sensed a new freshness in the air and began to hurry, once losing his balance and plunging from the hood of one car to crack his skull painfully on the bumper of the next. A short time after that, he looked up and saw the stars again; now paling before the onset of dawn. He was out.
His guardians had faded away. But Trashcan fell to his knees and gave thanks in a long, rambling, disjointed prayer. He had seen the hand of the dark man at work, and he had seen it plain.
In spite of all he had been through since he had awakened the previous morning to see The Kid admiring his hairdo in the mirror of the Golden Motel room, Trash was too exalted to sleep. He walked instead, putting the tunnel behind him. The traffic was choked on the westbound side of the tunnel too, but it had cleared out enough to walk comfortably before he had gone two miles. Across the median, in the eastbound lanes, the stream of cars that had been waiting to use the tunnel stretched on and on.
At noon he began to come down from Vail Pass into Vail itself, passing the condominiums and the singles apartment complexes. Now weariness had almost overcome him. He broke a window, unlocked a door, found a bed. And that was all he remembered until early the next morning.
The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance… or change. Once such incantatory phrases as “we see now through a glass darkly” and “mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform” are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s
It was quite likely for this reason that the Trashcan Man talked to a crow for nearly twenty minutes on the road west of Vail, convinced it was either an emissary of the dark man… or the dark man himself. The crow regarded him silently from its perch on a high telephone wire for a long time, not flying away until it was bored or hungry… or until Trashcan’s outpouring of praise and promises of loyalty were complete.
He got another bike near Grand Junction, and by July 25 he had been speeding across western Utah on Route 4, which connects I-89 on the east to the great southwestern-tending I-15, which goes from north of Salt Lake City all the way to San Bernadino, California. And when the front wheel of his new bike suddenly decided to part company from the rest of the machine and go speeding off into the desert on its own, Trashcan Man was pitched over the handlebars to land on his head, a crash that should have fractured his skull (he was doing forty when it happened, and wearing no helmet). Yet he was able to stand up less than five minutes later, with blood streaming over his face from half a dozen cuts and lacerations, able to do his shuffling, grimacing little dance, able to chant: “
There is really nothing so comforting to the beaten of spirit or the broken of skull than a good strong dose of “Thy will be done.”
On August 7, Lloyd Henreid came to the room in which the dehydrated and semidelirious Trashcan Man had been installed the day before. It was a fine room, on the thirtieth floor of the MGM Grand. There was a round bed with silk sheets, and a round mirror which looked to be the exact same size as the bed, mounted on the ceiling.
Trashcan Man looked at Lloyd.
“How you feeling, Trash?” Lloyd asked, looking back.
“Good,” Trashcan Man said. “Better.”
“Some food and water and rest, that’s all you needed,” Lloyd said. “I brought you some clean clothes. Had to guess at the sizes.”
