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.