The Stand (Original Edition) (57 page)

It took better than two hours for all of them to go up, and by then dark had fallen but it wasn’t dark, the night was yellow and orange and feverish with flames. The entire eastern arc of the horizon danced with fire.

It was time to leave the park. Already the temperature had risen ten degrees. He ought to go west, stay ahead of the fire the way he had in Powtanville, racing the expanding arc of destruction. But he was in no condition to race. And so he fell asleep on the grass, and the firelight played over the face of a tired, ill-used child.

In his dream, the dark man came in his hooded robe, his face invisible ... yet the Trashcan Man thought he had seen this man before. When the loungers in the candy store and the beer parlor back in Powtanville catcalled at him, it seemed that this man had been among them, silent and thoughtful. When he had worked at the Scrubba-Dubba (soap the headlights, knock the wipers, soap the rocker panels, hey mister you want hotwax on that?), wearing the sponge glove on his right hand until the hand beneath looked like a pale dead fish, the nails as white as fresh ivory, it seemed he had seen this man’s face, fiery and grinning with lunatic joy from behind the rippling film of water rolling down the windshield. When the sheriff sent him away to the nuthatch in Terre Haute, he had been the grinning psych aide standing above his head in the room where they gave you the shocks, his hands on the controls
(Tm gonna fry your brains out, boy, help you on your way as you change from Donald Merwin Elbert into the Trashcan Man, would you like hotwax on that?),
ready to send about a thousand volts zizzing into his brain. He knew this dark man all right, his was the face you could never quite see, the face beyond the flames, the face that hot, rising air turned into a rippling troll’s face.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you!”

The dark man had lifted his arms inside his robe, turning the robe into the shape of a black kite. They stood on a high place, and below them, America lay in flames.

I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man
/
want.

In the dream he saw an army of ten thousand raggle-taggle castoff men and women driving east, a rough beast of an army whose time had come round at last, loading down trucks and jeeps and Wagoneers and campers and tanks; each man and woman wore a dark stone about their necks, and deep in some of those stones was a red shape that might have been an Eye or might have been a Key. And riding in their van, atop a giant tanker with pillow tires, he saw himself, and knew that the truck was filled with jellied napalm . . . and behind him, in column, were trucks loaded with pressure bombs and Teller mines and plastic explosive; flame throwers and flares and heat-seeking missiles; grenades and machine guns and rocket launchers.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said gratefully in the dream. “My life for you! My soul for you!”

“I will set you to bum,” the dark man said gravely. “You must come to my city and there all will be made clear.”

‘‘Where? Where?” He was in an agony of hope and expectation.

“West,” the dark man said, fading. “West. Beyond the mountains.”

He woke up then, and it was still night and still bright. The flames were closer. The heat was stifling. Houses were exploding. The stars were gone, shrouded in a thick pall of oilsmoke. A fine rain of soot had begun. The shuffleboard courts were dusted with black snow.

Now that he had a purpose he found he could walk. He limped west, and from time to time he saw others leaving Gary, looking back over their shoulders at the conflagration. Fools, Trash thought, almost affectionately. You’ll burn. In good time, you’ll bum. The few survivors of the flu and the fire disappeared into the smoke and sometime after dawn Trashcan Man limped across the Illinois state line. Chicago was north of him, Joliet to the southwest, the fire lost in its own horizon-blotting smoke behind. That had been the dawn of July 2.

He had forgotten his dreams of more oiltanks and freightcars full of LP gas tucked away on railroad sidings and the tinder-dry tenements. That afternoon he broke into a Chicago Heights doctor’s office and stole a case of morphine syrettes. He took a huge jar of Vaseline from a drugstore that night and packed the burned part of his arm in an inch of the jelly. He was very thirsty; it seemed he wanted to drink all the time. Fantasies of the dark man buzzed in and out of his mind. When he collapsed at dusk, he had already begun to think that the city the dark man was directing him to must be Cibola, Seven-in-One, the City that is promised.

That night the dark man came to him again in his dreams, and with a sardonic giggle confirmed that this was so.

Trashcan Man awoke from these confused dream-memories of what had been to shivering desert cold. In the desert it was always ice or fire; there was no in-between.

Moaning a little, he stood up, holding himself as close to himself as he could. Overhead a trillion stars gleamed, seeming almost close enough to touch, bathing the desert in their cold witchlight.

He walked back to the road, wincing at his chafed and tender skin, and his many aches and pains. They were little to him now. He paused for a moment looking down at the city, dreaming in the night (there were little sparks of light here and there, like electric campfires). Then he began to walk.

When dawn began to color the sky hours later, Cibola seemed almost as distant as it had when he first came over the rise and saw it. And he had foolishly drunk all of his water, forgetting how magnified things looked out here. He didn’t dare walk for long after sunrise because of the dehydration. He would have to lie up again before the sun rose in all its power.

An hour past dawn he came to a Mercedes-Benz off the road, its right side drifted in sand up to the door panels. He opened one of the left side doors and pulled the two wrinkled, monkeylike occupants out—an old woman wearing a lot of bangled jewelry, an old man with theatrical-looking white hair. Muttering, Trash took the keys from the ignition, went around, and opened the trunk. Their suitcases were not locked. He hung a variety of clothes over the windows of the Mercedes, weighting them down with rocks. Now he had a cool, dim cave.

He crawled in and went to sleep. Miles to the west, the city of Las Vegas gleamed in the light of the summer sun.

He couldn’t drive a car, they had never taught him that in prison, but he could ride a bike. On July 4, the day that Larry Underwood discovered Rita Blakemoor had overdosed and died in her sleep, Trashcan Man took a ten-speed and began to ride. At first his progress was slow, because his left arm wasn’t much good to him. He fell off twice that first day, once squarely on his burn, causing terrible agony. By then the bum was suppurating freely through the Vaseline and the smell was terrific. He wondered from time to time about gangrene but would not allow himself to wonder for long.

Little by little he adjusted to riding the bike mostly one-handed and found that he could make good speed. The land had flattened out and most of the time he could keep the bike speeding giddily along. He drove himself steadily in spite of the bum and the lightheadedness that came from being constantly stoned on morphine. He drank gallons of water and ate prodigiously. He pondered the dark man’s words:
I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.
How lovely those words were—had anyone really wanted him before? The words played over and over in his mind as he pedaled under the hot midwestem sun. And he began to hum the melody of a little tune called “Down to the Nightclub” under his breath. The words (“Ci-a-bola! Bumpty-bumpty-bump!") came in their own good time. He was not then as insane as he was to become, but he was advancing.

On July 8 Trashcan Man crossed the Mississippi at the Quad Cities of Davenport, Rock Island, Bettendorf, and Moline. He was in Iowa. On the fourteenth, he crossed the Missouri north of Council Bluffs and entered Nebraska. He had regained some use of his left hand, his leg muscles had toned up, and he pressed on, feeling a huge need to hurry, hurry.

It was on the west side of the Missouri that he first suspected that God Himself might intervene between Trashcan Man and his destiny. There was something wrong about Nebraska, something dreadfully wrong. Something that made him afraid. It looked about the same as Iowa . . . but it wasn’t. The dark man had come to him every night in dreams, but when he crossed into Nebraska, he came no more.

Instead, he began to dream about an old woman. In these dreams he would find himself belly-down in a cornfield, almost paralyzed with hate and fear. He could hear flocks of crows cawing. In front of him was a screen of broad, swordlike corn-leaves. Not wanting to, but powerless to stop himself, he would spread the leaves with a shaking hand and peer between them. He saw an old house in the middle of a clearing. There was an old apple tree with a tire swing hanging from one of the branches. And sitting on the porch was an old black woman playing a guitar and singing some old-time spiritual song. The mother of a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert had sung many of the same songs as she did her housework.

This dream was a nightmare, but not just because something exceedingly horrible happened at the end of it. At first you would have said there wasn’t a frightening element in the whole dream. Corn? Blue sky? Old woman? Tire swing? What could be frightening about those things? Old women didn’t throw rocks and jeer, especially not old women that sang back-home spiritual songs like “In That Great Getting-Up Morning.” It was the Carley Yateses of the world who threw rocks.

But long before the dream ended he was paralyzed with fear, as if it wasn’t an old woman at all he was peeking at but at some secret, some barely concealed light that seemed ready to break out all around her, to play over her with a fiery brilliance that would make the flaming oiltanks of Gary seem like so many candles in comparison—a light so bright it would chalk his eyes to cinders. And during this part of the dream all he thought was:
Oh please get me away from her, I don’t want no part of that old biddy, please oh please get me out of Nebraska!

Then whatever song she had been playing would come to a discordant, jangling stop. She would look right at the place where he was peeping through a tiny loophole in the broad lattice of leaves. Her face was old and seamed with wrinkles, her hair was thin enough to show her brown skull, but her eyes were as bright as diamonds, full of the light he feared.

In an old, cracked, but strong voice she would cry out:
Weasels in the corn!
And he would feel the change in himself and would look down to see he had become a weasel, a furry, brownish-black slinking thing, his nose grown long and sharp, his eyes melted down to beady black points, his fingers turned into claws. He was a weasel, a cowardly nocturnal thing preying on the weak and the small.

He would begin to scream then, and eventually he would scream himself awake, streaming with sweat and buggy-eyed. His hands would fly over his body, reassuring himself that all his human parts were still there. At the end of this panicky check he would grip his head, making sure it was still a
human
head and not something long and sleek and streamlined, furry and bullet-shaped.

He crossed four hundred miles of Nebraska in three days, running mostly on high octane terror. He crossed into Colorado near Jules-burg, and the dream began to fade and grow sepia-toned.

(For Mother Abagail’s part, she woke on the night of July 15— shortly after Trashcan Man had passed north of Hemingford Home —with a terrible chill and a feeling that was both fear and pity; pity for whom or for what she did not know. She thought she might have been dreaming of her grandson Anders, who had been killed senselessly in a hunting accident when he was but six.)

On July 18, then southwest of Sterling, Colorado, he had met the old man.

He no longer remembered the old man’s name, and it didn’t really matter. He had been driving a big Thunderbird with Massachusetts plates and riding in a car was quicker than biking, that was what mattered. That, and the fact that the old man was going west to serve
him,
just as Trashcan Man was.

The old man wore gray banker’s pants and a series of strappy T-shirt tops. When he spoke—which was rarely—it was never above a mutter. He told Trash that the dark man was going to “set this house in order.” He told Trash that when the dark man had his hand firmly on the wheel and his foot on the gas, there would be no more hippies and niggerlovers and bleedingheart liberals like those fools that had tried to give away the Panama Canal. That was really the extent of his rap. He had a bad, diseased smell about him and he smoked an endless succession of Ode Perode cigars. The smell just about made Trashcan Man want to puke. But it was a ride.

That night, July 18, they slept in a Golden motel. The old man came into Trash’s room after dark, crushed out his cigar, and without a single word he began to grope for Trash’s privates. Trash knew about that sort of thing from prison. If the guy was bigger than you, you relaxed. If you were bigger than him, you didn’t have to take it. Trash slapped the old guy’s face. The old guy backed off, muttering, and left the room. He’ll be gone when I get up, Trash thought, not really caring. Now that he was away from Nebraska, the terror had faded. He could get there. He didn’t need the old man.

But the old man was still there in the morning, and they went on as if nothing had happened, the old man smoking his foul cigars and playing a succession of Montovani and Lawrence Welk tapes on the T-Bird’s eight-track, occasionally muttering about how the days of the bra-bumers and the white-nigger Catholics were finally over. Trashcan Man thought the old man was as crazy as a bedbug, but he seemed mostly harmless.

But they weren’t able to go along as if nothing had happened for long. By late morning their speed had dropped from sixty to forty. Then to thirty. The old man began to mutter a monotonous series of curses under his breath. His cigar was clamped between his false teeth. Thin hair wisped mistily around his bald and peeling skull. The T-Bird wove in and out of steadily thickening traffic, all of it deadly silent, stalled. They rounded a curve and faced a horrendous four-car pileup which blocked the westbound lanes of 1-70 completely. A dead man, lathered with long-since-dried blood, lay spreadeagled in the road. Nearby was a broken Chatty Cathy doll.