The Stand (Original Edition) (27 page)

That day, the twenty-seventh, Lloyd had begun eating only half of the meals that were thrust through the bars at him, and saving the other half—precious little—under his bunk mattress.

Yesterday Trask had gone into sudden convulsions. His face had turned as black as the ace of spades and he had died. Lloyd had looked longingly at Trask’s half-eaten lunch, but he had no way to reach it. Yesterday afternoon there had still been a few guards on the floor, but they weren’t carrying anyone down to the infirmary, no matter how sick. Maybe they were dying down in the infirmary, too, and the warden decided to stop wasting the effort. No one came to remove Trask’s body.

Lloyd napped late yesterday afternoon. When he woke, the Maximum Security corridors were empty. No supper had been served. Now the place really did sound like the lion house at the zoo. Lloyd wasn’t imaginative enough to wonder how much more savage it would have sounded if Maximum Security had been filled to its capacity. He had no idea how many were still alive and lively enough to yell for their supper, but the echoes made it sound like more. All Lloyd knew for sure was that Trask was gathering flies on his right, and the cell on his left was empty. The former occupant, a young, jive-talking black guy who had tried to mug an old lady and had killed her instead, had been taken to the infirmary days back. Across the way he could see two empty cells and the dangling feet of a man who was in for killing his wife and his brother-in-law during a penny Pokeno game. The Pokeno Killer, as he had been called, had apparently opted out with his belt, or, if they had taken that, his own pair of pants.

Later that night, after the lights had come on automatically, Lloyd had eaten some of the beans he had saved from two days ago. They tasted horrible but he ate them anyway. He washed them down with water from the toilet bowl and then crawled up on his bunk and clasped his knees against his chest, cursing Poke for getting him into such a mess. It was all Poke’s fault. On his own, Lloyd never would have been ambitious enough to get into more than smalltime trouble.

Little by little, the roaring for food had quieted down, and Lloyd suspected he wasn’t the only one who had been squirreling away some insurance. But he didn’t have much. If he had really believed this was going to happen, he would have put away more. There was something in the back of his mind that he didn’t want to see. It was as if there was a set of flapping drapes in the back of his mind, with something behind them. You could only see the bony, skeletal feet below the hem of the drapes. That’s all you wanted to see. Because the feet belonged to a nodding, emaciated corpse, and his name was
STARVATION.

“Oh no,” Lloyd said. “Someone’s gonna come. Sure they are. Just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket.”

But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn’t help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn’t want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it. But the trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn’t thought of his rabbit in . . . well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.

He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face. The fur he’d liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit’s pretty pink eyes. The rabbit’s paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.

Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy
had
a rabbit—Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy—but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of horrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn’t have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.

Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.

By one o’clock on the afternoon of June 29, he had the cotleg free. At the end the bolt had given with stupid ease and the leg had clanged to the floor of his cell and he had just looked at it, wondering what in God’s name he had wanted it for in the first place. It was about three feet long.

He took it to the front of the cell and began to hammer furiously against the blued-steel bars. “Hey!” he yelled, as the clanging bar gave off its deep, gonglike notes. “Hey, I want out! I want to get the fuck out of here, understand? Hey, goddammit,
hey!”

He stopped and listened as the echoes faded. For a moment there was total silence and then from the holding cellblock came the rapturous, hoarse answer: “Mother! Down here, Mother! I’m down here!”

“
Jeeesus
/” Lloyd cried, and threw the cotleg into the comer. He had struggled for hours, practically destroyed his fingers, just so he could wake that asshole up.

He sat on his bunk, lifted the mattress, and took out a piece of rough bread. He debated adding a handful of dates, told himself he should save them, and snatched them up anyway. He ate them one by one, grimacing, saving the bread for last to take that slimy, fruity taste out of his mouth.

When it was gone, he walked aimlessly to the right side of his cell. He looked down and stifled a cry of revulsion. Trask was sprawled half on his cot and half off it, and his pantslegs had pulled up a little. His ankles were bare above the prison slippers they gave you to wear. A large, sleek rat was lunching on Trask’s leg. Its repulsive pink tail was neatly coiled around its gray body.

Lloyd walked to the other comer of his own cell and picked up the cotleg. He went back and stood for a moment, wondering if the rat would see him and decide to go off where the company wasn’t quite so lively. But the rat’s back was to him, and as far as Lloyd could tell, the rat didn’t even know he was there. Lloyd measured the distance with his eye and decided the cotleg would reach admirably.

“Huh!” Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Trask’s leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.

“There you are, you cheap fuck,” Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: “How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?”

“Mother!” the voice cried happily in answer.
“Moootherrrr!”

"Shut up!”
Lloyd screamed. ‘7
ain’t your mother! Your mother’s in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana!”

“Mother?” the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.

Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get
out
of here.

When he woke up again it was 5
p.m.
and Maximum Security was dead quiet. Blearily, Lloyd got off his cot, which now leaned drunkenly toward the spot where one of its supports had been taken away. He got the cotleg, steeled himself for the cries of
Mother!
and began hammering on the bars like a farm cook calling the hired hands in for a big country supper.
Supper.
Now there was a word, had there ever been a finer? Ham steaks and potatoes with red-eye gravy and fresh new peas and milk with Hershey’s chocolate syrup to dump in it. And a great big ol4 dish of strawberry ice cream for dessert. No, there had never been a word to match supper.

“Hey, ain’t nobody there?” Lloyd cried, his voice breaking.

No answer. Not even a cry of
Mother
. At this point, he might have welcomed it. Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Lloyd let the cotleg drop with a crash. He stumbled back to his bunk, turned up the mattress, and made inventory. Two more hunks of bread, two more handfuls of dates, a half-gnawed porkchop, one piece of bologna. He pulled the slice of bologna in two and ate the big half, but that only whetted his appetite, brought it raging up.

“No more,” he whispered, then gobbled the rest of the pork off the chopbone and then called himself names and wept some more. He was going to die in here, just as his rabbit had died in its cage, just as Trask had died in his.

Trask.

He looked into Trask’s cell for a long, thoughtful time, watching the flies circle and land and take off. There was a regular L.A. International Airport for flies right on ole Trask’s face. At long last, Lloyd got the cotleg, went to the bars, and reached through with it. By standing on tiptoe he could get just enough length to catch the rat’s body and drag it toward his cell.

When it was close enough, Lloyd got on his knees and pulled the rat through to his side. He picked it up by the tail and held the dangling body before his eyes for a long time. Then he put it under his mattress where the flies could not get at it, segregating the limp body from what remained of his food-stash. He looked fixedly at the rat for a long time before letting the mattress fall back, mercifully hiding it from sight.

“Just in case,” Lloyd Henreid whispered to the silence. “Just in case, is all.”

Then he climbed up on the other end of the bunk, drew his knees up to his chin, and sat still.

For a long time, for days (how many days? who knew? not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure), Donald Merwin Elbert, known to the intimates of his dim and confusing grade-school past as the Trashcan Man, had wandered up and down the streets of Powtanville, Indiana, cringing from the voices in his head, dodging away and putting up his hands to shield against stones thrown by ghosts.

Hey Trashcan!

Hey Trashcan Man, diggin you, Trash! Lit any good fires this week?

Wha'd ole lady Semple say when you lit up her pension check, Trash?

Hey Trash-baby, wanna buy some kerosene?

How’d you like those shock-treatments down in Terre Haute, Trashie?

Trash
—

—Hey Trashcan
—

Sometimes he knew those voices weren’t real, but sometimes he would cry out loud for them to stop, only to realize that the only voice was his voice, hitting back at him from the houses and storefronts, bouncing off the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash where he used to work and where he now sat on the morning of June 30, eating a big sloppy sandwich of peanut butter and jelly and tomatoes and Gulden’s Diablo mustard. No voice but his voice, hitting the houses and stores and being turned away like an unwanted guest and thus returning to his own ears. Because, somehow, Powtanville was empty. Everyone was gone ... or were they? They said he was crazy, and that’s something a crazy man would think, that his home town was empty except for himself. But his eyes kept returning to the oil tanks on the horizon, huge and white and round, like low clouds. They stood between Powtanville and the road to Gary and Chicago, and he knew what he wanted to do and that wasn’t a dream. It was bad but not a dream and he wasn’t going to be able to help himself.

Burn your fingers, Trash?

Hey Trashcan Man, don’t you know playin with fire makes you wet the bed?

Something seemed to whistle past him and he sobbed and held up his hands, dropping his sandwich into the dust, cringing his cheek into his neck, but there was nothing, there was no one. Beyond the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash there was only Indiana Highway 130, going to Gary, but first going past the huge Cheery Oil Company holding tanks. Sobbing a little, he picked up his sandwich, brushed the gray dirt off the white bread as best he could, and began to munch it again.

Were they dreams? Once his father had been alive, and the sheriff had cut him down in the street light outside the Methodist Church, and he had had to live with that his whole life.

Hey Trash, Sheriff Greeley cut your old man down just like a mad dog, you know that, ya fuckin weirdo?

His father had been in O’Toole’s and there was some bad talk, and Wendell Elbert had a gun and he murdered the bartender with it, then went home and murdered Trashcan’s two older brothers and his sister with it—oh, Wendell Elbert was a strange fellow with a badass temper and he had been getting flaky for a long time before that night, anyone in Powtanville would tell you so, and they would tell you like father like son—and he would have murdered Trashcan’s mother, too, only Sally Elbert had fled screaming into the night with five-year-old Donald (later to be known as the Trashcan Man) in her arms. Wendell Elbert had stood on the front steps, shooting at them as they fled, the bullets whining and striking on the road, and on the last shot the cheap pistol, which Wendell had bought from a nigger in a bar located on Chicago’s State Street, had exploded in his hand. The flying shrapnel had erased most of his face. He had gone wandering up the street with blood running in his eyes, screaming and waving the remainder of the cheap pistol in one hand, the barrel mushroomed and split like the remains of a novelty exploding cigar, and just as he got to the Methodist Church, Sheriff Greeley pulled up in Powtanville’s only squad car and commanded him to stand still and drop the gun. Wendell Elbert pointed the remains of his Saturday night special at the sheriff instead, and Greeley gave him both barrels of his over and under.