He was quite sure he would make it.
He heard The Kid a long time before he saw him. It was the heavy, crackling roar of unmuffled straightpipes thundering toward him from the east, branding the day. The sound was coming up Highway 34 from the direction of Yuma, Colorado. His first impulse was to hide, the way he'd hidden from the few other survivors he'd seen since Gary. But this time something made him stay where he was, astride his bike on the shoulder of the road, looking back apprehensively over his shoulder.
The thunder grew louder and louder, and then the sun was reflecting off chrome and
(??FIRE??)
something bright and orange.
The driver saw him. Downshifted in a machine-gun burst of backfires. Goodyear rubber peeled off on the highway in hot swatches. And then the car was beside him, not idling but panting like a deadly animal which may or may not be tamed, and the driver was getting out. But at first Trashcan only had eyes for the car. He knew about cars, he liked cars, even though he had never gotten so much as a learner's permit. This one was a beauty, a car someone had worked on for years, put thousands of dollars into, the kind of thing you usually only saw at funnycar shows, a labor of love.
It was a 1932 Ford deuce coupe, but the owner had not stinted nor stopped with the usual deuce coupe customizing innovations. He had gone on and on, turning it into a parody of all American cars, a glittering science fiction vehicle with hand-painted flames billowing out of the manifold pipes. The paint job was flake gold. The chrome headpipes, which stretched almost the whole length of the car, reflected the sun fiercely. The windshield was a convex bubble. The back tires were gigantic Goodyear Wide Ovals, the wheel-wells cut to an exaggerated height and depth to accommodate them. Growing out of the hood like a weird heating duct was a supercharger. Growing out of the roof, solid black but shot with red flecks like embers, was a steel sharkfin. Written on both sides were two words, raked backward to indicate speed. THE KID, they said.
"Hey, youall long tall an og ly," the driver drawled, and Trash shifted his attention from the painted flames to the driver of this rolling bomb.
He stood about five feet three inches. His hair was piled and swirled and pomaded and brilliantined. The hair alone gave him another three inches of height. The swirls all met above his collar in what was not just a duck's ass but the avatar of all the duck's-ass hairdos ever affected by the punks and hoods of the world. He was wearing black boots with pointed toes. The sides were elasticized. The heels, which gave The Kid another three inches, bringing him up to a respectable five-nine total, were stacked Cubans. His pegged and faded jeans were tight enough to read the dates of the coins in his pockets. They limned each nifty little buttock into a kind of blue sculpture and made his crotch look like he'd maybe stuffed a chamois bag full of Spalding golfballs in there. He wore a Western-style silk shirt of an off-burgundy color. It was decorated with yellow trim and imitation sapphire buttons. The cufflinks looked like polished bone, and Trash later found out that was just what they were. The Kid had two sets, one made from a pair of human molars, the other from the incisors of a Doberman pinscher. Over this wonder of a shirt, in spite of the heat of the day, he wore a black leather motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back. It was crisscrossed with zippers, the teeth glimmering like diamonds. From the shoulder-flaps and waistbelt three rabbits' feet dangled. One was white, one brown, one bright St. Paddy's Day green. This jacket, even more wonderful than the shirt, creaked smugly with rich oil. Above the eagle, this time written in white silk thread, were the words THE KID. The face now looking up at the Trashcan Man from between the high pile of gleaming hair and the upturned collar of the gleaming motorcycle jacket was tiny and pallid, a doll's face, with heavy but flawlessly sculpted pouting lips, dead gray eyes, a wide forehead without a mark or a seam, and strange full cheeks. He looked like Baby Elvis.
Two gunbelts were crisscrossed on his flat belly, and a giant .45 leaned out of each of the sagging holsters on his hips.
"Hey, boy, whatchall say?" The Kid drawled.
And the only thing Trashcan could think of to say was, "I like your car."
It was the right thing. Maybe the only thing. Five minutes later Trash was in the passenger seat and the deuce coupe was accelerating up to The Kid's cruising speed, which was about ninety-five. The bike Trash had ridden all the way from eastern Illinois was fading to a speck on the horizon.
Timidly, Trashcan Man suggested that at such a speed The Kid would not be able to see a wreck or a stall in the road if they came to one (they had already come to several, as a matter of fact; The Kid simply slalomed around them, the Wide Ovals shrieking unheeded protest).