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 burn 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 sand-chafed 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, very much like the one Susan Stern had uttered when she split Roger Rabbit's skull with the butt of his own shotgun.
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 shirt 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 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. A long time ago a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert had burned up old lady Semple's pension check. That same boy had torched the Methodist Church in Powtanville, and if there had been anything left of Donald Merwin Elbert in this shell, it had surely been cremated with the oiltanks in Gary, Indiana. Over nine dozen of them, and they had gone up like a walloping string of firecrackers. Just in time for the Fourth of July, too. Nice. And in the wake of that conflagration, only the Trashcan Man had been left, his left arm a cracked and boiling stew, a fire inside his body that was never going to go out... at least not until his body was so much blackened charcoal.
And 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 water cramps.
"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 and the buzzards would dine on him.
At last, unable to bear the hideous possibility any 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 down. 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!