Trashcan Man cringed.
They rounded a curve and faced a horrendous four-car pileup which blocked the westbound lanes of I-70 completely. A dead man covered with blood which had dried to an uneven crack-glaze long since lay spreadeagled facedown in the road. Near him was a broken Chatty Cathy doll. Any way around the jam on the left was blocked by steel guardrail posts six feet high. On the right, the land fell away into cloudy distance.
The Kid gulped Rebel Yell and swung the deuce coupe toward the dropoff. "Hang on, Trashy," he whispered, "we're goin around."
"There's no room," Trashcan Man rasped. His throat felt like the side of a steel file.
"Yeah, just enough," The Kid whispered. His eyes were glittering. He began to edge the car off the road. The righthand wheels were now hissing in the dirt of the shoulder.
"Count me out," Trashcan said hurriedly, and grabbed for the doorhandle.
"You sit," said The Kid, "or you're gonna be one dead pusbag."
Trash turned his head and looked into the bore of a .45. The Kid giggled tensely.
Trashcan Man sat back. He wanted to close his eyes but could not. On his side of the car, the last six inches of shoulder dropped from view. Now he was looking straight down at a long vista of blue-gay pines and huge tumbled boulders. He could imagine the deuce coupe's Wide Oval tires now four inches from the edge... now two...
"Another inch," The Kid crooned, his eyes huge, his grin enormous. Sweat stood out on that pale doll's forehead in perfect clear drops. "Just... one... more."
It ended in a hurry. Trashcan Man felt the right rear of the car slip suddenly outward and sharply downward. He heard a falling millrace, first of pebbles, then of larger stones. He screamed. The Kid cursed horribly, changed down to first gear, and floored the accelerator. From the left, where they had been inching by the overturned corpse of a VW Microbus, came a squall of grinding metal.
"Fly! " The Kid screamed. "Just like a bigass bird! Fly! Goddammit, FLY! "
The deuce coupe's rear wheels spun. For a moment their shift toward the drop seemed to be increasing. Then the car jerked forward, lurched up, and they were back on the road on the far side of the pileup, laying rubber.
"I told you she'd do it! " The Kid screamed triumphantly. "Goddam! Did we do it? Did we do it, Trashy, ya f**kin chickenshit suckhole? "
"We did it," Trashcan Man said quietly. He was twitching all over. He couldn't seem to control it. And then, for the second time since meeting The Kid, he unwittingly said the one thing that could have saved his life - had he not said it, The Kid surely would have killed him; it would have been his queer way of celebrating. "Good driving, champ," he said. He had never called anyone "champ" in his whole life before now.
"Ahhh... not that great," The Kid said patronizingly. "There's at least two other guys in the country coulda done it. You believe that happy crappy?"
"If you say so, Kid."
"Don't tell me, sweetheart, I'll f**kin tell you. Well, on we go. All in a day's work."
But they did not go on for long. The Kid's deuce coupe was stopped for good fifteen minutes later, eighteen hundred miles or more from its point of origin in Shreveport, Louisiana.
"I don't believe it," The Kid said. "I don't... motherfuckin... B'LEEVE it!"
He threw open the driver's side door and jumped out, the quarter-full bottle of Rebel Yell still clutched in his left hand.
"GET OUTTA MY ROAD! " The Kid roared, dancing about in his grotesquely high-heeled boots, a tiny natural force of destruction, like an earthquake in a bottle. "GET OUTTA MY ROAD, MOTHERFUCKERS, YOU'RE DEAD, Y'ALL B'LONG IN THE MOTHERFUCKIN BONEYARD, YOU GOT NO BUSINESS IN MY FUCKIN ROAD! "