And there was Carley Yates leaning against the light standard across from the Scrubba-Dubba, a Lucky Strike pasted in the corner of his mouth, and Carley had yelled his valedictory, his epitaph, his hail and farewell: Hey, Trashcan, whydja wanta burn up a church? Why dintcha burn up the SCHOOL?
He was seventeen when he went to the jail for kids, and when he turned eighteen they sent him over to the state prison, and how long was he there? Who knew? Not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure. No one in stir cared that he had burned the Methodist Church down. There were people in stir who had done much worse. Murder. Rape. Breaking open the heads of old lady librarians. Some of the inmates wanted to do something to him, and some of them wanted him to do something to them. He didn't mind. It happened after the lights were out. One man with a bald head had said he loved him - I love you, Donald - and that was sure better than dodging rocks. Sometimes he would think, just as long as I can stay in here forever. But sometimes at night he would dream of CHEERY OIL, and in the dreams it was always a single, thundering explosion followed by two others, and the sound was WHAM! ... ... ... ... WHAM! WHAM! Huge, toneless explosions slamming their way into bright daylight, shaping the daylight like the blows of a hammer shaping thin copper. And everyone in town would stop what they were doing and look north, toward Gary, toward where the three tanks stood against the sky like oversized whitewashed tin cans. Carley Yates would be trying to sell a two-year-old Plymouth to a young couple with a baby, and he would stop in mid-spiel and look. The idlers in O'Toole's and in the candy store would crowd outside, leaving their beers and chocolate malteds behind. In the café his mother would pause in front of the cash register. The new boy at the Scrubba-Dubba would straighten from the headlights he had been soaping, the sponge glove still on his hand, looking north as that huge and portentous sound sledgehammered its way into the thin copper routine of the day: WHAMM! That was his dream.
He became a trusty somewhere along the line, and when the strange sickness came they sent him to the infirmary and some days ago there had been no more sick people because all of those who had been sick were now dead. Everybody was dead or had run off, except for a young guard named Jason Debbins, who sat behind the wheel of a prison laundry truck and shot himself.
And where else did he have to go then, except home?
The breeze pressed softly against his cheek and then died.
He struck another match and dropped it. It landed in a small pool of gasoline and the gas caught. The flames were blue. They spread out delicately, a kind of corona with the burned match stub, at its center. Trashcan watched for a moment, paralyzed with fascination, and then he stepped quickly to the stairs that circled around the tank to the bottom, looking back over his shoulder. He could see the pumping machinery through a heat haze now, flickering back and forth like a mirage. The blue flames, no more than two inches high, spread toward the machinery and toward the open pipe in a widening semicircle. The bug's struggles had ended. It was nothing but a blackened husk.
I could let that happen to me.
But he didn't seem to want to. It seemed, vaguely, that there might be another purpose in his life now, something very grand and great. So he felt a touch of fear and he began to descend the steps on the run, his shoes clanging, his hand slipping quickly over the steep, rust-pitted railing.
Down and down, circling, wondering how long until the vapor hanging around the mouth of the outflow pipe would catch, how long before heat great enough for ignition would rush down the pipe's throat and into the tank's belly.
Hair flying back from his forehead, a terrified grin pasted to his face, the wind roaring in his ears, he rushed down. Now he was halfway, racing past the letters CH, letters twenty feet high and lime green against the white of the tank. Down and down, and if his flying feet stuttered or caught on anything, he would tumble like the gascan had tumbled, his bones breaking like dead branches.
The ground came closer, the white gravel circles around the tanks, the green grass beyond the gravel. The cars in the parking lot began to regain their normal size. And still he seemed to be floating, floating in a dream, and he would never reach the bottom, only run and run and get nowhere. He was next to a bomb and the fuse was lit.
From far overhead there came a sudden bang, like a five-inch Fourth of July firecracker. There was a dim clang, and then something whirred past him. It was part of the outflow pipe, he saw with a sharp and almost delicious fear. It was totally black and twisted into a new and excitingly senseless shape by the heat.