by Stephen King
Every dog has his day, Frannie.
He knelt, freezing at the gunshots of his bending knees, but no one stirred. He unbuckled her pack, untied the drawstring, and reached inside. He trained a small pencil flash on the pack’s contents. Frannie muttered from deep down in sleep, stirred, and Harold held his breath. He found what he wanted way at the bottom, behind three clean blouses and a lap-eared pocket road atlas. A Spiral notebook. He pulled it out, opened to the first page, and shone his light on Frannie’s close but extremely legible handwriting.
July 6, 1980—After some persuasion, Mr. Bateman has agreed to come along with us . . .
Harold shut the book and crept back to his sleeping bag with it. He was feeling like the little boy he had once been, the little boy with few friends (he had enjoyed a brief period of babyhood beauty until about age three, had been a fat, and ugly joke ever since) but many enemies, the boy who had been more or less taken for granted by his parents—their eyes had been trained on Amy as she began her long walk down the Miss America/Atlantic City runway of her life—the boy who had turned to books for solace, the boy who had escaped never being picked for baseball or always being passed over for School Patrol Boy by becoming Long John Silver or Tarzan or Philip Kent... the boy who had become these people late at night under his covers with a flashlight trained on the printed page, his eyes wide with excitement, barely smelling his own bedfarts; this boy now crawled upside down to the bottom of his sleeping bag with Frannie’s diary and his flashlight.
As he trained its beam on the front cover of the Spiral, there was a moment of sanity. For just a moment part of his mind cried out Harold! Stop! so strongly that he was shaken to his heels. And stop he almost did. For just a moment it seemed possible to stop, to put the diary back where he had found it, to give her up, to let them go their own way before something terrible and irrevocable happened. For that moment it seemed he could put the bitter drink away, pour it out of the cup, and refill it with whatever there was for him in this world. Give it over, Harold, this sane voice begged, but maybe it was already too late.
At age sixteen he had given up Burroughs and Stevenson and Robert Howard in favor of other fantasies, fantasies that were both well loved and much hated—not of rockets or pirates but of girls in silk see-through pajamas kneeling before him on satin pillows while Harold the Great lolled naked on his throne, ready to chastise them with small leather whips, with silver-headed canes. They were bitter fantasies through which every pretty girl at Ogunquit High School had strolled at one time or another. These daydreams always ended with a gathering expletive in his loins, an explosion of seminal fluid that was more curse than pleasure. And then he would sleep, the sperm drying to a scale on his belly. Every doggy has his day.
And now it was those bitter fantasies, the old hurts, that he gathered around him like yellowed sheets, the old friends who never died, whose teeth never dulled, whose deadly affection never wavered.
He turned to the first page, trained his flashlight on the words, and began to read.
In the hour before dawn, he replaced the diary in Fran’s pack and secured the buckles. He took no special precautions. If she woke, he thought coldly, he would kill her and then run. Run where? West. But he would not stop in Nebraska or even in Colorado, oh no.
She didn’t wake.
He went back to his sleeping bag. He masturbated bitterly. When sleep came, it was thin. He dreamed he was dying halfway down a steep grade of tumbled rocks and moonscape boulders. High above, riding the night thermals, were cruising buzzards, waiting for him to make them a meal. There was no moon, no stars—
And then a frightful red eye opened in the dark: vulpine, eldritch. The eye terrified him yet held him.
The eye beckoned him.
To the west, where the shadows were even now gathering, in their twilight dance of death.
When they made camp at sundown that evening, they were west of Joliet, Illinois. There was a case of beer, good talk, laughter. They felt they had put the rain behind them with Indiana. Everyone remarked specially on Harold, who had never been so cheerful.
“You know, Harold,” Frannie said late that evening, as the party began to break up, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you feeling so good. What is it?”
He gave her a jolly wink. “Every dog has his day, Fran.”
She smiled back at him, a little puzzled. That was just Harold, being elliptical. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that things were finally coming right.
That night Harold began his own journal.
Chapter 38
He came staggering and flapping up a long upgrade, the heat of the sun stewing his stomach and baking his brains. The interstate shimmered with reflected radiant heat. He had been Donald Merwin Elbert once, now he was Trashcan Man forever and ever, and he beheld the fabled City, Seven-in-One, Cibola.
He stood, swaying in his rags, looking down at Cibola, the City that is Promised, the City of Dreams. He was a wreck. The wrist that he had broken when he leaped the railing of the stairway bolted to the Cheery Oil tank had not healed right, and that wrist was a grotesque lump wrapped in a dirty, unraveling Ace bandage. All the bones in the fingers of that hand had pulled up somehow, turning the hand into a Quasimodo claw. His left arm was a slowly healing mass of bum tissue from elbow to shoulder. It no longer smelled bad and suppurated, but the new flesh was hairless and pink, like the skin of a cheap doll. His grinning, mad face was sunburned, peeling, scruffy-bearded, and covered with scabs from the header he had taken when the front wheel of his bike had parted company from the frame. He wore a faded blue J. C. Penney workshirt that was marked with expanding rings of sweatstain and a dirty pair of corduroy trousers. His pack, which had been new not so long ago had now taken on the style and substance of its owner—one strap had broken, Trash had knotted it as best he could, and the pack now hung askew on his back like a shutter on a haunted house. It was dusty, its creases filled with desert sand. On his feet were Keds now bound together with hanks of twine, and from them his scratched and sandchafed ankles rose innocent of socks.
He stared at the city far ahead and below. He turned his face up to the savage gunmetal sky and to the sun that blared down, coating him with furnace heat. He screamed. It was a savage, triumphant scream. He began to do a shuffling, victorious dance on the hot, shimmering surface of Interstate 15 while the desert sirocco blew sand across the highway and the blue peaks of the Pahranagat and Spotted ranges sawed their teeth indifferently at the brilliant sky as they had done for millennia. Off the other side of the highway, a Lincoln Continental and a T-Bird were now almost buried in sand, their occupants mummified behind safety glass. Up ahead on Trashcan’s side was an overturned pickup, everything covered but the wheels and the rocker panels.
He danced. His feet, clad in the lashed and bulging Keds, bumped up and down on the highway in a drunken sort of hornpipe. The tattered tail of his workshirt flapped. His canteen clunked against his pack. The unraveling ends of the Ace bandage fluttered in the hot breath of the wind. Pink, smooth burn tissue gleamed rawly. Clocksprings of veins bulged at his temples. He had been in God’s frying pan for a week now, moving southwest across Utah, the tip of Arizona, and then into Nevada, and he was just as mad as a hatter.
As he danced, he sang monotonously, the same words over and over, to a tune that had been popular when he was in the Terre Haute institution, a song called “Down to the Nightclub” that had been done by a black group called Tower of Power. But the words were his own. He sang:
“Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump! Ci-a-bola, Ci-a-bola, bump-ty, bump-ty, bump!" Each final bump! was followed by a little skipping leap until the heat made everything swim and the harsh bright sky went twilight gray and he collapsed on the road, half-fainting, his taxed heart thundering crazily in his arid chest. With the last of his strength, blubbering and grinning, he pulled himself over to the overturned pickup truck and lay in its diminishing shade, shivering in the heat and panting.
“Cibola!” He croaked. “Bumpty-bumpty-bump!”
He fumbled his canteen off his shoulder with his claw hand and shook it. The canteen was nearly empty. Didn’t matter. He would drink every single drop and lay up here until the sun went down, and then he would walk down the highway and into Cibola, fabled City, Seven-in-One. Tonight he would drink from ever-springing fountains faced in gold. But not until the killer sun went down. God was the greatest firebug of them all.
Tonight he would drink the water of Cibola, yes, and it would taste like wine.
He upended the canteen and his throat worked as the last of his
water, pisswarm, gurgled down into his belly. When it was gone, he threw the canteen out into the desert. Sweat had broken on his forehead like dew. He lay shivering deliciously with watercramps.
“Cibola!” He muttered. “Cibola! I’m coming! I’m coming! I’ll do whatever you want! My life for you! Bumpty-bumpty-bump!”
Drowsiness began to steal over him now that his thirst was a little slaked. He was nearly asleep when a polar thought slipped up through the floor of his mind like an icy stiletto blade:
What if Cibola had been a mirage?
“No,” he muttered. “No, uh-uh, no.”
But simple denial would not drive the thought off. The blade probed and poked, keeping sleep at arm’s length. What if he had drunk the last of his water in celebration of a mirage? In his own way he recognized his madness, and that was the sort of thing mad people did, right enough. If it had been a mirage, he would die here in the desert.
At last, unable to bear the hideous possibility longer, he staggered to his feet and made his way back to the road, fighting off the waves of faintness and nausea that wanted to take him. At the breast of the hill he stared out anxiously into the long flat plain below, studded with yucca and tumbleweed and devil’s mantilla. His breath caught in his throat and unraveled into a sigh, like a sleeve of fabric on a spike.
It was there! Cibola, fabled of old, searched for by many, found by the Trashcan Man!
Far down in the desert, surrounded by blue mountains, blued itself by the haze of distance, its towers and avenues gleamed in the desert day. There were palm trees ... he could see palm trees . . . and movement. . . and water!
“Oh, Cibola . . .” he crooned, and staggered back to the shade of the pickup. It was further than it looked, he knew that. Tonight, after God’s torch had left the sky, he would walk as he never had before. He would reach Cibola and his first act would be to plunge headlong into the first fountain he came to. Then he would find him, the man who had bade him come here. The man who had drawn him across the plains and the mountains and finally into the desert.
He who Is—the dark man, the hardcase. He waited for Trashcan Man in Cibola, and his were the armies of the night, his were the whitefaced riders of the dead who would sweep out of the west and into the very face of the rising sun. They would come raving and grinning and stinking of sweat and gunpowder. There would be shrieks, and Trashcan cared very little for shrieks, there would be rape and subjugation, things about which he cared even less, there would be murder, which was immaterial—
—and there would be a Great Burning.
About that he cared very much. In the dreams the dark man came to him and spread out his arms from a high place and showed Trashcan a country in flames. Cities going up like bombs. Cultivated fields drawn in lines of fire. The very rivers of Chicago and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Birmingham ablaze with floating oil. And the dark man had told him a very simple thing in his dreams, a thing which had brought him running: I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.
He rolled on his side, his cheeks and eyelids chafed and irritated from the blowing sand. He had been losing hope—yes, ever since the wheel had fallen off his bike he had been losing hope. God, the God of sheriffs who shot fathers, the God of Carley Yates, was stronger than the dark man after all, it seemed. Yet he had kept his faith and had kept on. And at last, when it had seemed he was going to bum up in this desert before he ever got to Cibola where the dark man waited, he had seen it far below, dreaming in the sun.
“Cibola!” he whispered, and slept. And his dreams were not of the dark man, but of the events that had brought him here.
The first dream had come to him in Gary, over a month ago, after he had burned his arm. He had gone to sleep that night sure that he was going to die; no one could be burned as badly as he was and live.
He had been running gleefully from one set of oiltanks to the next, setting up crude timing devices, each constructed of a steel pipe and a flammable paraffin mixture separated from a little pool of acid by a steel tab. He had been pushing these devices into the outflow pipes on top of the tanks. When the acid ate through the steel, the paraffin would ignite, and that would cause the tanks to blow. He had planned to get over to the west side of Gary before any of them went and watch the show as the entire dirty city went up in firestorm.
But he had misjudged the last device or constructed it badly. It had gone off while he worked at opening the cap on the outflow pipe with a pipewrench. There had been a blinding white flare as burning paraffin belched out of the tube, coating his left arm with fire. This was no painless flameglove of lighter fluid, to be waved in the air and then shaken out like a big match. This was agony, like having your arm in a volcano.
Shrieking, he had run wildly around the top of the oiltank, careering off the waist-high railings like a human pinball. Only accident saved his life; his feet tangled in each other and he fell flat with his left arm pinned under him, smothering the flames.
He sat up, still half-crazy with the pain. Later he would think that only blind luck—or the dark man’s purpose—had saved him from being burned to death. Most of the burning paraffin jet had missed him. That was later. At the time he could only cry out and rock back and forth, holding his crisped arm out from his body.
Vaguely, as the light faded from the sky, it occurred to him that he had already set a dozen of the time-devices. They might go anytime. Dying and being out of his exquisite misery would be wonderful; dying in flames would be utter horror.
Somehow he had crawled down from the tank and had staggered away, weaving in and out of the dead traffic, holding his burned left arm away from his body.
By the time he reached a small park near the center of town, it was sunset. He sat on the grass between two shuffleboard courts, trying to think what you did for burns. Put butter on them, that’s what Donald Merwin Elbert’s mother would have said. But that was for a scald, or when the bacon fat jumped extra high and spattered your arm. He couldn’t imagine putting butter on the cracked and blackened mess between his elbow and shoulder; couldn’t even imagine touching it.
Kill himself. That was it, that was the ticket. He would put himself out of his misery like an old dog—
There was a sudden gigantic explosion on the east side of town, as if the fabric of existence had been tom briskly in two. A liquid pillar of fire, even brighter than the sunset, shot up against dusk’s deepening indigo. He had to squeeze his eyes to watering, protesting slits against it.
Even in his agony the fire pleased him . . . more, it delighted, fulfilled him. The fire was the best medicine, even better than the morphine he found the next day (as a trustee in prison he had worked in the infirmary as well as the library and the motorpool, and he knew about morphine and Elavil and Darvon Complex). He did not connect his present agony to the pillar of fire. He only knew that the fire was good, the fire was beautiful, the fire was something he needed and would always need. Wonderful fire!
Moments later a second oiltank exploded and even here, three miles away, he could feel the warm push of expanding air. Another tank went, and another. A slight pause, and then six of them went up in a rattling string and now it was too bright over there to look at but he looked anyway, grinning, his eyes full of yellow flames, his wounded arm forgotten, thoughts of suicide forgotten.
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.