slithered off him. Nick crawled out from underneath, one hand clapped over his wounded eye. He lay on the floor for a long time, his throat on fire. His head felt as if giant, merciless calipers had been screwed into his temples.
At last he felt around, found a candle, and lit it with the desk lighter. By its weak yellow glow he could see Ray Booth lying facedown on the floor. He looked like a dead whale cast up on a beach. The gun had made a blackened circle on the side of his shirt the size of a flapjack. There was a great deal of blood. Booth’s shadow stretched away to the far wall in the candle’s uncertain flicker, huge and unshaped.
Moaning, Nick stumbled into the small bathroom, his hand still clapped over his eye, and then looked into the mirror. He saw blood seeping out from between his fingers and took his hand away reluctantly. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might now be one-eyed as well as deaf and dumb.
He walked back into the office and kicked Ray Booth’s limp body.
You fixed me, he told the dead man. First my teeth and now my eye. Are you happy? You would have taken both eyes if you could have done it, wouldn’t you? Taken my eyes and left me deaf, dumb, and blind in a world of the dead. How do you like this, home-boy?
He kicked Booth again, and the feel of his foot sinking into that dead meat made him feel ill. After a little bit he retreated to the bunk and sat on it and put his head in his hands. Outside, the dark held hard. Outside, all the lights of the world were going out.
Chapter 34
For a long time, for days (how many days? who knew? not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure), Donald Merwin Elbert, known to the intimates of his dim and confusing grade-school past as the Trashcan Man, had wandered up and down the streets of Powtanville, Indiana, cringing from the voices in his head, dodging away and putting up his hands to shield against stones thrown by ghosts.
–
Sometimes he knew those voices weren’t real, but sometimes he would cry out loud for them to stop, only to realize that the only voice was his voice, hitting back at him from the houses and storefronts, bouncing off the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash where he used to work and where he now sat on the morning of June 30, eating a big sloppy sandwich of peanut butter and jelly and tomatoes and Gulden’s Diablo mustard. No voice but his voice, hitting the houses and stores and being turned away like an unwanted guest and thus returning to his own ears. Because, somehow, Powtanville was empty. Everyone was gone… or were they? They had always said he was crazy, and that’s something a crazy man would think, that his home town was empty except for himself. But his eyes kept returning to the oil tanks on the horizon, huge and white and round, like low clouds. They stood between Powtanville and the road to Gary and Chicago, and he knew what he wanted to do and
Something seemed to whistle past him and he sobbed and held up his hands, dropping his sandwich into the dust, cringing his cheek into his neck, but there was nothing, there was no one. Beyond the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash there was only Indiana Highway 130, going to Gary, but first going past the huge Cheery Oil Company storage tanks. Sobbing a little, he picked up his sandwich, brushed the gray dirt off the white bread as best he could, and began to munch it again.
His father had been in O’Toole’s and there was some bad talk, and Wendell Elbert had a gun and he murdered the bartender with it, then went home and murdered Trashcan’s two older brothers and his sister with it—oh, Wendell Elbert was a strange fellow with a badass temper and he had been getting flaky for a long time before that night, anyone in Powtanville would tell you so, and they would tell you like father like son—and he would have murdered Trashcan’s mother, too, only Sally Elbert had fled screaming into the night with five-year-old Donald (later to be known as the Trashcan Man) in her arms. Wendell Elbert had stood on the front steps, shooting at them as they fled, the bullets whining and striking on the road, and on the last shot the cheap pistol, which Wendell had bought from a nigger in a bar located on Chicago’s State Street, had exploded in his hand. The flying shrapnel had erased most of his face. He had gone wandering up the street with blood running in his eyes, screaming and waving the remainder of the cheap pistol in one hand, the barrel mushroomed and split like the remains of a novelty exploding cigar, and just as he got to the Methodist Church, Sheriff Greeley pulled up in Powtanville’s only squad car and commanded him to stand still and drop the gun. Wendell Elbert pointed the remains of his Saturday night special at the sheriff instead, and Greeley either did not notice that the barrel of the Saturday night special was ruptured or
He looked around for whoever had yelled that—it sounded like Carley Yates or one of the kids who hung out with him—except Carley wasn’t a kid anymore, any more than he was himself.
Maybe now he could be just Don Elbert again instead of the Trashcan Man, the way Carley Yates was now just Carl Yates who sold cars at the Stout Chrysler-Plymouth dealership here in town. Except that Carl Yates was gone,
And he wasn’t sitting against the wall of the Scrubba-Dubba anymore; he was a mile or more to the northwest of town, walking along 130, and the town of Powtanville was laid out below him like a scale-model community on a kid’s HO railroad table. The tanks were only half a mile away and he had a toolkit in one hand and a five-gallon can of gas in the other.
So after Wendell Elbert was underground, Sally Elbert had gotten a job at the Powtanville Cafe and sometime, in the first or second grade, her one remaining chick, Donald Merwin Elbert, had started lighting fires in people’s trashcans and running away.
It wasn’t until he was in the third grade or so that the grown-ups found out who was doing it and then the sheriff came around, good old Sheriff Greeley, and he guessed that was how the man who cut his father down in front of the Methodist Church ended up being his stepfather.
He was standing at the head of the graveled drive now, his shoulders aching from carrying the toolkit and the gas. The sign on the gate read CHEERY PETROLEUM COMPANY, INC. ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT THE OFFICE! THANKS!
A few cars were parked in the lot, not many. Many were standing on flats. Trashcan Man walked up the drive and slipped through the gate, which was standing ajar. His eyes, blue and strange, were fixed on the spidery stairs that wound around the nearest tank in a spiral, all the way to the top. There was a chain across the bottom of these stairs and another sign swung from the chain. This one said KEEP OFF! PUMPING STATION CLOSED. He stepped over the chain and started up the stairs.
It wasn’t right, his mother marrying that Sheriff Greeley. The year he was in the fourth grade he had started lighting fires in mailboxes, that was the year he burned up old Mrs. Semple’s pension check, and he got caught
