Chapter 35 Chapter 34

That boy Donald Merwin Elbert knew that for a long time, many days (how many days? Who knows? Trash Bugs certainly didn't know, no doubt) that Litter Bugs had been wandering around the Indiana State Reserve for a long time. The streets of Tanwell are full of chaotic voices, and you have to hold your head with your hands to guard against stones thrown at any time. Hey, litterbugs are here! Hey, litter bugs, silly, have you lit a fire these days? What did old Mrs. Semple say when you burned her pension check, trash bug? Hey, garbage bug, do you want to buy kerosene? What do you think of Trey Holt's ECT, garbage bug?

garbage bug... Hey, trash bugs! He knew those voices were not real, and all he wanted to do was shout out and hear his own voice echo in the street.In front was the scrub shop, where he had worked in the past, and had sat there on the morning of June 30 eating a large, thin sandwich with peanut butter, jelly, tomato, and powdered mustard.The echo passed through houses and shops, and then returned to his ears.Somehow, Botanwell is empty, everything is gone... where are they?They always said he was crazy, some things, a lunatic would think about, how could his hometown be empty? His eyes had been fixed on the big, white, round oil tank in the distance, standing at the three-way intersection between Botanvale and Gary and Chicago.He knew what he wanted to do, it wasn't a dream, it was a bad thing but it wasn't a dream, he couldn't control it.

Have you ever burned your fingers, litter bug? You wet the bed a lot, litter bug? It was as if something was whistling past him.Sobbing under his breath, he threw his hands up and tossed the sandwich into the trash, head crouched in his neck.Nothing, no one.Indiana Highway 130 to Gary, passing the gigantic oil storage tanks of the Chilly Oil Company.After weeping softly for a while, he picked up the sandwich again, patted the dust off the bread, and started chewing again. Is this a dream?His father was still alive at that time, and the sheriff killed his father at the door of the Methodist church, and he had to live alone ever since.

"Hey, Garbage Bug, Judge Greeley killed your dad like a mad dog, you know that, dumbass?" His dad, Wendell Elbert, who had been working at O'Tooles, had a gun, according to some lurid rumors, and he killed the bartender with it, then came home and killed two of Trash Bug's older brothers and a younger sister.Oh, Wendell Elbert was a curmudgeon, and he'd been an oddity for a long time before that night, and everybody in Botanvale was blah blah blah.He was going to kill Trash Bug's mother, Sally Elbert, but Sally escaped screaming while holding 5-year-old Donald (later called Trash Bug).They ran ahead and he fired from behind, the bullets whizzing down the road.When the pistol blew its last shot, (Wendell bought it from a nigger who had a rental counter on State Street in Chicago) the splinters grazed his face and he screamed He slapped off the fragments in his hand, still chasing in the street, blood flowed from his eyes.Just as he reached the Methodist church gate, Judge Greeley, sitting in the only police car in Boultanville, ordered him to stand still and put his gun down.Wendell Elbert pointed at the wreckage of the gun used in the crime, not at the sheriff, but the sheriff either didn't notice that the gun was broken, or pretended not to know, but either way, the outcome was the same, he Shot Wendell Elbert twice with a double-barreled shotgun.

Hey litter bug, what are you burning next time? He looked around for the man who was yelling and it sounded like Callie Yates or one of the little guys Carl he was wandering with, no longer a little guy, that was himself. Maybe now he's still Elbert instead of a junkie, just like Callie Yates is now Callie Yates, the auto dealer who sold Chrysler Seabirds in town now that Callie Yates is gone , everyone disappears. He got up from the wall of the scrub shop and walked northwest of town along Highway 130 for more than a mile.The town was as small and dainty as a model on a railroad chart, and it was only half a mile from the oil tank.He held a toolbox in one hand and a 5-gallon can of gasoline in the other.

Oh, too bad! After Wendell Elbert's death, Sally Elbert took a job at a café in Boultanvale, and the surviving child, Donald Merwin Elbert, started in the second grade Playing with fire in the dumpster. Watch out girls, the trash bug is coming and he's going to burn your skirts! Hey, a madman! It wasn't until the third grade that the adults found out who was setting fires frequently, and the sheriff came to find him.Good old Justice Greeley, who couldn't figure out why he killed his father in front of the Methodist church, and later became his stepfather. Hey, idiot, how could your stepdad kill your father?

I don't know, how? I don't know either, God help you if you're a garbage bug! Hey……! He was standing in the gravel motor register, his shoulders aching from carrying the toolbox and gasoline."Chili Petroleum Co., Ltd. All visitors are required to register! Thank you!" on the door There are several cars in the parking lot.Litterbug circled the car and approached the gate, which was ajar, and he went to pull it open.Inside, a long, narrow staircase spiraled to the top of a nearby oil tank, and a sign dangled from a chain at the bottom of the staircase.The sign said "No Entry! Gas Station Closed." He stepped over the chain and climbed the stairs.

It was wrong for his mother to marry Justice Greeley.He started lighting mailboxes in fourth grade, the year he burned old Mrs. Semple's pension checks, and he got caught again.Sally Elbert Greeley had a hysterical fit because her new husband had proposed sending the boy to Trey Haute. (You thought he was crazy! How can a 10 year old boy be crazy? Do you want to kill him! You killed his father and now you want to kill him!) Greeley had to take the boy to the superintendent, because he couldn't send a 10-year-old to a juvenile home unless he wanted to divorce his new wife. Climbing and climbing, his feet stepped on the steel plate of the stairs and made a crisp sound. He could feel the sound coming down the stairs, and no one threw stones here.Cars in the open parking lot look like toy corgers.The wind was whistling gently in his ears, a bird was singing in the distance, and the dense trees and vast fields in the distance were shrouded in a dreamy morning mist.He smiled happily as he stepped up the spiral steel ladder.

He walked to the circular plane of the oil tank, and he felt that he was already standing on the roof of the world. If he could reach it, he would really like to grab a handful of clouds in the blue sky.He put down the gas can and toolbox.As far as the eye can see, Gary can actually be seen here, because the chimneys of the various factories are no longer smoking, and the view is wide.Chicago loomed like a mirage, and in the far north there was a faint blue light that might have been Lake Michigan.The warm air reminded him of peacefully eating breakfast in a bright kitchen. He put down the gasoline, picked up the toolbox and walked towards the oil pump, and operated the machine intuitively. Although he knew nothing, he also had nothing to think about. He just glanced around briefly, and moved his hands quickly on the oil pump.

Hey, litter bug, why are you burning churches down?Why did you burn down the school? In fifth grade he played with fire in an unoccupied house in a town near Sedley, which burned to the ground and his stepfather, Judge Greeley, tried to put him in solitary confinement. (Why? If it didn't rain, half our town would burn down, damn the pyromaniac bastard!) Greeley insisted that Sally send Donald to Trey Haute's place for testing.Sally said she would leave him if he did anything to her only precious child, but Greeley ignored Sally's warning and made his own mind, and like that, Trash Bug left Botanwell for a while—two years, His mother had divorced the sheriff that year, the voters had deposed the sheriff, and Greeley had ended his career as a sheriff to work on an automatic assembly line in Gary.Sally went to see the Trash Bugs every week and cried a lot every time.

Litterbug gritted his teeth and said in a low voice, "Show me some color, bastard." Then he looked furtively around to see if anyone was listening to his oath.Of course no one, he's on top of Tank 1 at Chilli Oil, and there's no one else, unless there's a ghost.Above him, only large white clouds were floating. The oil pump began to spray gasoline, with a diameter of more than 2 feet. The hose was still filling the oil tank. After it was filled with unleaded gasoline, the oil flowed out like a gleaming fountain.Trash Worm took a few steps back, his eyes sparkling with excitement, and he dropped the wrench and ax in his hand. He didn't need the gasoline he had brought.He picked up the can of gasoline, yelled "Bomb finished!", and threw it out.He watched with great interest as the can fell on the stairs, bounced a few times, turned a few times, and finally landed on the ground, belching amber gasoline. He turned back to the spilled gasoline pipe and looked at the glistening pool of gasoline.He took out a box of matches from his breast pocket and glanced at them with excitement and excitement.On the front of the matchbox is an advertising balloon that reads "If you attend LaSalle Communications School in Chicago, you will be well educated." I'm standing on a bomb. he thinks.He closed his eyes, terrified and in a daze, and felt the cold stimulation all over his body. Hey, trash bug, fuck you, what a pyromaniac you are! Trey Hoult put him back when he was 13, and although they didn't know if he was cured, Trey Hoult said he was fine.They needed his bed so that the other little lunatics could stay for another two years.The litter bug has come home.He seems to be unable to grasp the main points when doing classwork at school, and he always fails to do it.At Trey Holt's they gave him shock therapy and when he got back to Botanvale he couldn't remember the past and couldn't remember half the points in his studies and he got 60 points max on the exams , or 40 points or even lower. Although, it's been a while since he's played with fire, at least for a while, everything seems to be back to normal.The sheriff who killed his father disappears, installing headlights at Gary's factory.His mother later worked at the Paulanville Café, and all was well.Of course, those white oil tanks of the Chili Oil Company, in his imagination, often flew into the air on flames.He'd often wondered how the Chili Oil tanks would go up, three separate explosions loud enough to shatter eardrums into pieces, three fires (the son, the father, and the dreaded paternal sheriff ) light is strong enough to blind the eyes.The raging fire will burn day and night for months?Or maybe it doesn't burn at all? He found that the summer breeze had blown out his first two matches, and he threw the blackened ends away.There is a high railing around the edge of the oil tank roof on the right, and there is a small worm struggling in the oil on the right, I am that worm, he thought angrily, what kind of world is this, God not only wants me to live like this worm In a sticky mess, and to keep you alive, struggle for hours, maybe days... like in his case, maybe years.This is a world that should be destroyed. He stood with his head bowed. After the wind subsided, he was ready to light the third match. When he first came back, people called him a fool, a schmuck, a pyromaniac, and only his third-grade class president, Callie Yates, remembered him as Trash Bug, which was Donald's nickname. At 16, he left school with his mother's permission.What do you wish to do?At Tre Haute's they shocked him.If I had money, I would sue them.Shock therapy, damn the electric chair, I hate it! ) to work at the scrub shop.Car wash overhead light/car wash door sill plate/service wiper/glass wiper. For a long time, whenever he showed up, people would yell at him from the street or from passing cars wondering if old Mrs Semple (dead for 4 years) had him burning her pension checks and wondered if he had wet the bed when he burned Sedley's room.He was the subject of gossip, and they taunted him together in front of the candy store or over coffee in O'Tooles.When the Garbage Worm walked on the road, all the sounds turned into the sounds of monsters, the most unbearable were the stones flying from the corner of the street.Once, someone threw a half-full can of beer at him from a passing car, hitting him on the forehead and knocking him to his knees in pain. That's life: the sounds, the occasional flying rock, and car washes at the scrub shop.During his lunch break, he always sat where he had been sitting today, eating the bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches his mother made for him, and looking at the oil tanks of the Chili Oil Company. That was life anyway, until one night he found himself walking into a Methodist church with a five-gallon can of gasoline and spilling it everywhere, most of all on the hymnbook pile in the corner.He paused to think: this is bad, maybe worse than that, it's just stupid, they'll know who did it, and even if someone else did it, they'll think I did it, and they'll "catch you go".But as soon as he smelled gasoline, the worry disappeared from his face.He turned the petrol can upside down and walked straight down the center aisle, belching jets of petrol on the way to the altar. Then he went back to the door, took out a box of wooden matches from his underwear pocket, struck them, and threw the match into the wet hymn-book, where the fire crackled and crackled.The next day he cycled to the Northern Indiana Correction Center to see the burned skeleton of the Wayley Church. Only Callie Yates was leaning against the telephone pole in front of the scrub shop, with a gloating look on his lips, and Callie shouted farewell words, eulogy, and wished him a safe journey. Hey litter bug, why are you burning churches?Why are you burning this school down? He was 17 when he went to jail for the church, at 18 they transferred him to state prison, how long was he there?who knows?Litterbugs sure didn't know, and no one in prison cared that he burned down the Methodist Church.People in jail did worse than that, murder, rape, someone cracked the head off the old lady librarian.In the prison a few of his fellow inmates were always touching him, and some liked to be petted by him.He didn't care, that was after the lights were turned off.A bald man says he loves him.I love you, Donald, that must be better than a flying stone, sometimes he wants to stay here forever.But some nights, he dreamed of Qili Petroleum Company. In the dream, the Petroleum Company was always lonely, and the sound of explosions like thunder was always three times one after another, and the sound sounded like a bang! ……boom!boom!In broad daylight he hammered the thin copper, and all the town stopped what they were doing, and looked north, to Gary, to where the three oil tanks stood, as if they had been plastered Large tin can of water.Callie Yates, who was selling a two-year-old Plymouth to a young couple with a new child, stopped to look at the gas tank.O'Tooles and the people in the candy store rushed outside, leaving beer and chocolate drinks behind.His mother was stunned by the cash register in the cafe, and the boy new to the scrub shop broke the headlights he'd been wiping.People always looked north when that great ominous sound came out of the thin copper every day.boom!This is what he dreamed. When this strange disease came, he became a privileged inmate in prison, and they sent him to the infirmary.A few days ago, there were no more patients because those who got sick are now dead.The others either died or ran away.There was a young guard named Jason Debes, who was sitting in the back of a truck delivering clothes to prisoners, and shot himself. Where else could he go but home? The breeze gently brushed his cheek, and he died peacefully. He struck another match and threw it.The match fell into a small pool of gasoline, and the gasoline caught fire.The flames are blue and gradually spread past.Seeing all this almost stunned him with fascination.He climbed the stairs to the top of the tank and looked back again, and through the steaming smoke he saw the pumps flickering in and out like a mirage.There was a two-foot-tall blue flame that went up the pump, down the tubing, and the bug was no longer struggling.Nothing but silence. I just have to let it happen. But he didn't seem to want, it seemed vaguely, that his life might have another purpose, something of great importance.So he was afraid.He ran down the stairs quickly, his shoes jingling on the stairs, and he slid down the steep rusty handrail with his hand. Climbing and climbing, winding and winding, I don't know how long it was, until the smoke at the outlet of the oil pipe caught fire, and the heat of the fire passed through the pipe and entered the inside of the oil tank. Hair flew up from his forehead, a frightening moan came from his mouth, the wind whistled in his ears, and he rushed down.Now he was walking in the middle of the oil tank with the letter Ch, the letter was yellow and 20 feet high. The bones of the tree will snap like withered twigs. The ground is getting closer and closer, white gravel surrounds the oil tank, and the green lawn is surrounded by the gravel, and the cars in the open parking lot can be seen more and more clearly.He seemed to be floating all the time, floating in a dream, never reaching the bottom, running and running hard, and finally there was no way to go.Next to him was a bomb with its fuse lit. Suddenly there was a bang from the high top, like a 5-inch firecracker going off on the 4th of July.There was an indistinct jingling sound, and then something floated past his eyes. It turned out to be a section of oil pipe.He watched with fear and interest, the whole oil tank turned black, and gradually twisted into an indescribable shape. In the last 25 feet, he held on to the railing with one hand and jumped down with one hand. His arm was bitten by something and he felt a piercing pain.He landed on the gravel, which scratched the skin of his forearm, but he barely felt it.He was terribly frightened now, and it seemed to be daylight already. The garbage bug got up, stretched out its head, moved back and forth, stared at it, and then started to run.The top of the middle oil tank had turned into a yellow spot, which was expanding at an alarming rate.The entire oil tank could explode at any moment. Running, slapping his injured wrist with his right hand, he stepped over the guardrail of the parking lot, stepped on the asphalt, sped across the parking lot, and ran straight down the wide gravel road back to Route 130.He ran straight across the road, trying to jump into the far ditch, and landed on the soft dead leaves and wet moss, panting with his head in his hands, his body curled up like a jackknife. The oil tank exploded.Not bang!But bang!Snapped!That loud sound, so brief at the same time, that he felt his eardrums shatter, his eyeballs popped out, and somehow the whole air changed, followed by a second explosion, then a third Voice.Litterworms squirmed on the withered leaves, moaning silently, he sat up, raised his hands to cover his ears, a sudden gust of wind blew on him, and he fell down with a snap. The young sapling behind him bowed back, its leaves snapping wildly like pennants on a windy motor park.After a soft crack, several branches snapped, as if someone had shot a target with a gun.Fragments of the burning oil tank flew to the other side of the road, several pieces actually landed on the road, and the fragments made a clanging sound as they hit the road. boom!Snapped! Litterbug sat up again and saw a huge tree of fire on the outskirts of the Killi Petroleum parking lot, black smoke billowing upwards to astonishing heights until the wind parted it.With the radiant heat of a barbecue hitting him across the road, his skin tensed and burned, and his eyes welled up with tears.A flaming mass of metal, more than seven feet across at its widest point, fell like a diamond from the sky and landed in a ditch twenty feet to his left, where the dry, dead leaves on the wet moss immediately blew up. up. boom!Snapped!boom!Snapped! If he stays here, he will die of rapid burn.He stood up hastily and started running along the road in the direction of Gary.Breathing became hotter and hotter, and the air began to feel like heavy metal, filled with the stench of gasoline, as if to envelop him.The hot air tore his clothes, and he felt as if he were struggling in a microwave. Blades of glass whizzed through the air amid another roar as mounting air pressure caused the inside of the Chili Oil office building to explode.Chunks of concrete and cinders rained down from the air onto the road, a thick steel shard weighing about 25 lbs whizzed through the air and sliced ​​through the litter bug's shirt, scratching his skin, and a larger Fragments of it skimmed over his head, smacked in front of his feet, and then bounced out, leaving a large crater in the ground.He was running like hell, and the blood pouring out of his head like his special head could spray No. 2 hot oil was also on fire. boom!Snapped! That's another oil tank.The air resistance in front of him seemed to be getting less and less, and a big warm hand pushed him hard from behind, a hand that fit every contour of his body from head to toe, and that hand pushed him forward, only letting him landed on tiptoe.He was like a big kite with a broken string, and was blown by the wind, flying all the way to the blue sky. The wind didn't know where it was blowing, so he could only scream helplessly. After a series of explosions, God's ammunition depot was destroyed in flames, the devil Satan was messing around, and the little devil with green face and fangs was grinning. From then on, they only knew the name Garbage Worm, and Donald Merwin Elbert would disappear forever. There was devastation: cars on the road, Mr. Strong's blue mailbox, a dead dog with a broken leg, motor vehicles thrown into cornfields. At this moment, the hot hand stopped pushing him so hard, and the resistance returned to him.Litterworm took a risky look back and saw a fire on the mound where the oil tank stood.Everything is on fire.The road itself appears to be on fire. He ran more than 400 meters, and then staggered out of breath.A mile away from the fire, you can still smell the burning smell.With no firetrucks and firefighters to douse, wherever the wind blows, the fire will burn, possibly for months.Pottanville would disappear and the fire would spread south, destroying houses, villages, farms, crops, meadows, forests.It might burn as far south as Trey Haut, it would burn where he had been, it would burn far! His eyes turned north again, in the direction of Gary, and he could see the town, the tall chimneys standing peacefully.Chicago far from here, how many oil tanks are on the way?How many petrol stations?How many trains loaded with gasoline and flammable goods sit quietly at the station?How many villages?How many cities? In the summer sun the whole country would burn. Garbage Worm bared his teeth, stood up, and began to walk.His skin had turned a lobster red, but he didn't feel it, and although it was getting dark, he was still wide awake.The fire in front of him was getting stronger and stronger, and his eyes were full of despair.