He collapsed slowly backward onto the bed. His can of beer, freshly opened, fell from his relaxing hand. More Coors puddled on the rug. The case was gone, and by Trashcan’s reckoning, The Kid had gotten through twenty-one cans of it himself. Trashcan Man couldn’t understand how such a little man could drink so much beer, but he did understand what time it was: time for him to go. He knew that, but he felt drunk and weak and ill. What he wanted more than anything was to sleep for a little while. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? The Kid was apt to sleep like a log all night, maybe half of tomorrow morning, too. Plenty of time for him to take a little nap.

So he went into the other room (tiptoeing in spite of The Kid’s comatose state) and closed the connecting door as well as he could—which wasn’t very well. The force of the bullets had warped it somehow. There was a wind-up alarm clock on the dresser. Trash wound it, set it for midnight since he didn’t know (and didn’t care) what time it really was, and then set the alarm for five o’clock. He lay down on one of the twin beds without even stopping to take off his sneakers. He was asleep in five minutes.

He woke up sometime later, in the dark grave of the morning, with the smell of beer and puke blowing across his face in a dry little gale. Something was in bed with him, something hot and smooth and squirmy. His first panicky thought was that a weasel had somehow gotten right out of his Nebraska dream and into reality. A whimpery little moan came out of him as he realized that the animal in bed with him, while not big, was too big to be a weasel. He had a headache from the beer; it drilled mercilessly at his temples.

“Grab on me,” The Kid whispered in the dark. Trashcan’s hand was seized and led to something hard and cylindrical and throbbing like a piston. “Jerk me off. Go on, jerk me off, you know what to do, I saw that the first time I looked atcha. Come on, ya motherfuckin jerkoff, jerk me off.”

Trashcan Man knew how to do it. In many ways it was a relief. He knew about it from the long nights in stir. They said it was bad, that it was queer, but what the queers did was better than what some of the others did, the ones who spent their nights sharpening spoonhandles into shanks, and the ones who just lay there on their bunks, cracking their knuckles and looking at you and grinning.

The Kid had put Trashcan’s hand on the kind of gun he understood. He closed his hand around it and began. After it was over The Kid would fall asleep again. Then he would creep out.

The Kid’s breath was becoming ragged. He began to bump his hips in time with Trashcan’s strokes. Trash did not at first realize The Kid was also unbuckling his belt, then slipping his jeans and underpants down to his knees. Trash let him. It didn’t matter if The Kid wanted to slip it to him. Trash had had it slipped to him before. You didn’t die. It wasn’t poison.

Then his hand froze. Whatever it was suddenly pressing against his anus, it wasn’t flesh. It was cold steel.

And suddenly he knew what it was.

“No,” he whispered. His eyes were wide and terrified in the dark. Now he could dimly see that homicidal doll’s face in the mirror, hanging over his shoulder with its hair in its red eyes.

“Yes,” The Kid whispered back. “And you don’t want to lose a stroke, Trashy. Not one motherfuckin stroke. Or I might just pull the trigger on this thang. Blow your shit-factory all to hell and gone. Dumdums, Trashy. You believe that happy crappy?”

Whining, Trashcan began to stroke him again. His whines became little gasps of pain as the barrel of the .45 worked its way into him, rotating, gouging, tearing. And could it be that this was exciting him? It was.

Eventually his excitement became apparent to The Kid.

“Like it, dontcha?” The Kid panted. “I knew you would, you bag of pus. You like having it up your ass, dontcha? Say yes, pusbag. Say yes or right to hell you go.”

“Yes,” Trashcan Man whimpered.

“Want me to do it to you?”

He didn’t. Excited or not, he didn’t. But he knew better than to say so. “Yes.”

“I wouldn’t touch your dick if it was diamonds. Do it yaself. Why you think God gave you two hands?”

How long did it go on? God might know; the Trashcan Man did not. A minute, an hour, an age—what was the difference? He became sure that at the instant of The Kid’s orgasm he would feel two things simultaneously: the hot jet of the small monster’s semen on his belly and the mushrooming agony of a dumdum bullet roaring up through his vitals. The ultimate enema.

Then The Kid’s hips froze and his penis went through its convulsions in Trashcan Man’s hand. His fist became slick, like a rubber glove. An instant later, the pistol was withdrawn. Silent tears of relief gushed down Trashcan’s cheeks. He was not afraid to die, at least not in the service of the dark man, but he did not want to die in this dark motel room at the hands of a psychopath. Not before he had seen Cibola. He would have prayed to God, but he knew instinctively that God would not lend a sympathetic ear to those who had thrown their allegiance to the dark man. And what had God ever done for the Trashcan Man, anyway? Or for Donald Merwin Elbert either, for that matter?

In the breathing silence The Kid’s voice rose in song, offkey, cracking, trailing down toward sleep:

“My buddies an me are gettin real well known… yeah, the bad guys know us an they leave us alone… ”

He began to snore.

Now I’ll leave, Trashcan Man thought, but he was afraid that if he moved, he would wake The Kid up. I’ll leave just as soon as I’m sure he’s really asleep. Five minutes. Shouldn’t take any longer than that.

But no one knows how long five minutes is in the dark; it might be fair to say that, in the dark, five minutes does not exist. He waited. He rolled in and out of a doze without knowing he had dozed. Before long he had slipped down the slide of sleep.

He was on a dark road that was very high. The stars seemed close enough to reach up and touch; it seemed you could just pick them off the sky and pop them into a jar, like fireflies. It was bitterly cold. It was dark. Dimly, frosted with starshine, he could see the living rockfaces through which this highway had been cut.

And in the darkness, something was walking toward him.

And then his voice, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere: In the mountains I’ll give you a sign. I’ll show you my power. I’ll show you what happens to those who would set themselves against me. Wait. Watch.

Red eyes began to open in the dark, as if someone had set out three dozen danger lamps with hoods on them and now that someone was pulling the hoods off in pairs. They were eyes, and they surrounded the Trashcan Man in a fey ring. At first he thought they were the eyes of weasels, but as the ring tightened around him he saw they were great gray mountain wolves, their ears cocked forward, foam dripping from their dark muzzles.

He was afraid.

They are not for you, my good and faithful servant. See?

And they were gone. Just tike that, the panting gray timberwolves were gone.

Watch, the voice said.

Wait, the voice said.

The dream ended. He woke to discover bright sunshine falling in through the motel room window. The Kid was standing in front of it, seeming none the worse for wear from his bout with the now-defunct Adolph Coors Company the night before. His hair was combed into its former shining swirls and eddies, and he was admiring his reflection in the glass. He had slipped his leather jacket over the back of a chair. The rabbits’ feet dangled from the belt like tiny corpses from a gibbet.

“Hey, pusbag! I thought I was gonna hafta grease your hand again to wake you up. Come on, we got us a big day ahead. Lotta stuff gonna happen today, am I right?”