“You dig The Boss?”

“Sure,” Trash said. He hadn’t the slightest idea who The Boss was or had been.

“Fuckin better dig The Boss. Listen, you know what I’m gonna do?”

“Go west?” Trashcan Man hazarded. It seemed safe.

The Kid looked impatient. “After I get there, I mean. After. You know what I’m gonna do after?”

“No. What?”

“I’m gonna lay low for a while. Check out the situation. Can you dig that happy crappy?”

“Sure,” Trash said.

“Fuckin A. Don’t tell me, I’ll fuckin tell you. Just check it out. Check out the big man. Then…”

The Kid fell silent, brooding over the top of his orange steering wheel.

“Then what?” Trashcan asked hesitantly.

“Gonna shut him down. Send him around dead man’s curve. Put him out to pasture on the motherfuckin Cadillac Ranch. You believe it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m gonna take over,” The Kid said confidently. “Gonna strip his gears and leave him at the Cadillac Ranch. You stick with me, Trashman or whatever the fuck ya call yaself. We ain’t gonna eat no pork and beans. We’re gonna eat more chicken than any man ever seen.”

The deuce coupe roared down the highway with painted flames shooting up from the manifold. Trashcan Man sat in the passenger seat, a warm beer in his lap and troubled in his mind.

It was almost dawn on the morning of August 5 when Trashcan Man entered Cibola, otherwise known as Vegas. Somewhere in the last five miles he had lost his left sneaker and now, as he walked down the curving exit ramp, his footfalls sounded like this: slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP, slap-THUMP. They sounded like the flap of a flat tire.

He was almost done in, but a little wonder came back as he made his way down the Strip, which was jammed with dead cars and quite a few dead people, most of them well picked over by the buzzards. He had made it. He was here in Cibola. He had been tested and he had passed the test.

He saw a hundred honky-tonk nightclubs. There were signs that read LIBERAL SLOTS, signs that said BLUEBELL WEDDING CHAPEL and 60-SECOND WEDDING BUT IT’LL LAST A LIFETIME! He saw a Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce halfway through a plate glass window of an adult bookstore. He saw a naked woman hanging upside down from a lamppost. He saw two pages of the Las Vegas Sun go riffling by. The headline that revealed itself over and over again as the paper flapped and turned was PLAGUE GROWS WORSE WASHINGTON MUTE. He saw a gigantic billboard which said NEIL DIAMOND! THE AMERICANA HOTEL JUNE 15—AUGUST 30! Someone had scrawled the words DIE LAS VEGAS FOR YOUR SINS! across the show window of a jewelry store seeming to specialize in nothing but wedding and engagement rings. He saw an overturned grand piano lying in the street like a large dead wooden horse. His eyes were full of these wonders.

As he walked on he began to see other signs, their neon dead this midsummer for the first time in years. Flamingo. The Mint. Dunes. Sahara. Glass Slipper. Imperial. But where were the people? Where was the water?

Hardly knowing what he was doing, letting his feet pick their own path, Trashcan turned off the Strip. His head dropped forward, his chin resting on his chest. He dozed as he walked. And when his feet tripped over the curbing, when he fell forward and gave himself a bloody nose on the pavement, when he looked up and beheld what was there, he could hardly believe it. Blood ran unnoticed from his nose to his tattered blue shirt. It was as if he was still dozing and this was his dream.

A tall white building stretched up to the desert sky, a monolith in the desert, a needle, a monument, every bit as magnificent as the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid. The windows of its eastern face gave off the fire of the rising sun like an omen. In front of this bone-white desert edifice, flanking its entranceway, were two huge gold pyramids. Over the canopy was a great bronze medallion, and carved on it in bas-relief was the snarling head of a lion.

Above this, also in bronze, the simple but mighty legend: MGM GRAND HOTEL.

But what captured his eyes was what stood on the grassy quadrangle between the parking lot and the entranceway. Trashcan stared, an orgasmic shivering consuming him so fiercely that for a moment he could only prop himself on his bloody hands, the unraveling end of the Ace bandage trailing between them, and stare at the fountain with his faded blue eyes, eyes that were halfway to being glareblind by now. A little groaning noise began to escape him.

The fountain was working. It was a gorgeous construction of stone and ivory, chased and inlaid with gold. Colored lights played over the spray, making the water purple, then yellow-orange, then red, then green. The constant ticking patter as the spray fell back into the pool was very loud.

“Cibola,” he muttered, and struggled to his feet. His nose was still dripping blood.

He began to stagger toward the fountain. His stagger became a trot. The trot became a run, the run a sprint, the sprint a mad dash. His scabbed knees rose, pistonlike, almost to his neck. A word began to fly out of his mouth, a long word like a paper streamer that rose to the sky, bringing people to the windows high above (and who saw them? God, perhaps, or the devil, but certainly not the Trashcan Man). The word grew higher and shriller, longer and longer as he approached the fountain and that word was:

“CIIIIIIIIBOLAAAAAAAA!”

The final “aahh” sound drew out and out, a sound of all the pleasures that all the people who have ever lived on the earth have ever known, and it ended only when he struck the lip of the fountain chest-high and yanked himself up and over and into a bath of incredible coolness and mercy. He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge. He screamed. He lowered his head, snorted in water, and blew it back out in a combined sneeze and cough that sent blood and water and snot against the side of the fountain in a splat. He lowered his head and drank like a cow.

“Cibola! Cibola!” Trash cried rapturously. “My life for you!”

He dogpaddled his way around the fountain, drank again, then climbed over the edge and fell onto the grass with an awkward thump. It had all been worth it, everything had been worth it. Water cramps struck him and he suddenly threw up with a loud grunt. Even throwing up felt grand.

He got to his feet, and holding on to the lip of the fountain with his claw hand, he drank again. This time his belly accepted the gift gratefully.

Sloshing like a filled goatskin, he staggered toward the alabaster steps which led to the doors of this fabulous place, steps that led between the golden pyramids. Halfway up the steps, a water cramp struck him and doubled him over. When it passed he lurched gamely onward. The doors were of the revolving type, and it took all his feeble strength to get one of them in motion. He pushed through into a plushy carpeted lobby that seemed miles long. The rug underfoot was thick and lush and cranberry-colored. There was a registration desk, a mail desk, a key desk, the cashiers’ windows. All empty. To his right, beyond an ornamental grilled railing, was the casino. Trashcan Man stared at it in awe—the serried ranks of slot machines like soldiers standing at parade rest, beyond them the roulette and crap tables, the marble railings enclosing the baccarat tables.

“Who’s here?” Trash croaked, but no answer came back.

He was afraid then, because this was a place of ghosts, a place where monsters might lurk, but the fear was weakened by his weariness. He stumbled down the steps and into the casino, passing the Cub Bar, where Lloyd Henreid sat silently in the deep shadows, watching him and holding a glass of Poland water.

He came to a table upholstered in green baize, the mystic legend DEALER MUST HIT 16 AND STAND ON 17 inscribed thereon. Trash climbed up on it and fell instantly asleep. Soon nearly half a dozen men stood around the sleeping ragamuffin that was the Trashcan Man.