The Long Walk Read online

  Garraty looked over at him. There was shame in Baker’s tired face, but there was also dignity there, outlined against a dusky shaft of sunlight poking through the trees.

  “That’s a Squading offense, but I didn’t care. I was only twelve when I got into it. Ain’t hardly nothing but kids who go night-riding now, you know. Older heads are wiser heads. They’d tell us to go to it and pat our heads, but they weren’t out to get Squaded, not them. I got out after we burnt a cross on some black man’s lawn. I was scairt green. And ashamed, too. Why does anybody want to go burning a cross on some black man’s lawn? Jesus Christ, that stuff’s history, ain’t it? Sure it is.” Baker shook his head vaguely. “It wasn’t right.”

  At that moment the rifles went again.

  “There goes one more,” Scramm said. His voice sounded clogged and nasal, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Thirty-four,” Pearson said. He took a penny out of one pocket and put it in the other. “I brought along ninety-nine pennies. Every time someone buys a ticket, I put one of ’em in the other pocket. And when—”

  “That’s gruesome!” Olson said. His haunted eyes stared balefully at Pearson. “Where’s your death watch? Where’s your voodoo dolls?”

  Pearson didn’t say anything. He studied the fallow field they were passing with anxious embarrassment. Finally he muttered, “I didn’t mean to say anything about it. It was for good luck, that was all.”

  “It’s dirty,” Olson croaked. “It’s filthy. It’s—”

  “Oh, quit it,” Abraham said. “Quit getting on my nerves.”

  Garraty looked at his watch. It was twenty past eight. Forty minutes to food. He thought how nice it would be to go into one of those little roadside diners that dotted the road, snuggle his fanny against one of the padded counter stools, put his feet up on the rail (oh God, the relief of just that!) and order steak and fried onions, with a side of French fries and a big dish of vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce for dessert. Or maybe a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs, with Italian bread and peas swimming in butter on the side. And milk. A whole pitcher of milk. To hell with the tubes and the canteens of distilled water. Milk and solid food and a place to sit and eat it in. Would that be fine?

  Just ahead a family of five—mother, father, boy, girl, and white-haired grandmother—were spread beneath a large elm, eating a picnic breakfast of sandwiches and what looked like hot cocoa. They waved cheerily at the Walkers.

  “Freaks,” Garraty muttered.

  “What was that?” McVries asked.

  “I said I want to sit down and have something to eat. Look at those people. Fucking bunch of pigs.”

  “You’d be doing the same thing,” McVries said. He waved and smiled, saving the biggest, flashiest part of the smile for the grandmother, who was waving back and chewing—well, gumming, was closer to the truth—what looked like an egg salad sandwich.

  “The hell I would. Sit there and eat while a bunch of starving—”

  “Hardly starving, Ray. It just feels that way.”

  “Hungry, then—”

  “Mind over matter,” McVries incanted. “Mind over matter, my young friend.” The incantation had become a seamy imitation of W.C. Fields.

  “To hell with you. You just don’t want to admit it. Those people, they’re animals. They want to see someone’s brains on the road, that’s why they turn out. They’d just as soon see yours.”

  “That isn’t the point,” McVries said calmly. “Didn’t you say you went to see the Long Walk when you were younger?”

  “Yes, when I didn’t know any better!”

  “Well, that makes it okay, doesn’t it?” McVries uttered a short, ugly-sounding laugh. “Sure they’re animals. You think you just found out a new principle? Sometimes I wonder just how naive you really are. The French lords and ladies used to screw after the guillotinings. The old Romans used to stuff each other during the gladiatorial matches. That’s entertainment, Garraty. It’s nothing new.” He laughed again. Garraty stared at him, fascinated.

  “Go on,” someone said. “You’re at second base, McVries. Want to try for third?”

  Garraty didn’t have to turn. It was Stebbins, of course. Stebbins the lean Buddha. His feet carried him along automatically, but he was dimly aware that they felt swollen and slippery, as if they were filling with pus.

  “Death is great for the appetites,” McVries said. “How about those two girls and Gribble? They wanted to see what screwing a dead man felt like. Now for Something Completely New and Different. I don’t know if Gribble got much out of it, but they sure as shit did. It’s the same with anybody. It doesn’t matter if they’re eating or drinking or sitting on their cans. They like it better, they feel it and taste it better because they’re watching dead men.

  “But even that’s not the real point of this little expedition, Garraty. The point is, they’re the smart ones. They’re not getting thrown to the lions. They’re not staggering along and hoping they won’t have to take a shit with two warnings against them. You’re dumb, Garraty. You and me and Pearson and Barkovitch and Stebbins, we’re all dumb. Scramm’s dumb because he thinks he understands and he doesn’t. Olson’s dumb because he understood too much too late. They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”

  He paused, badly out of breath.

  “There,” he said. “You went and got me going. Sermonette No. 342 in a series of six thousand, et cetera, et cetera. Probably cut my lifespan by five hours or more.”

  “Then why are you doing it?” Garraty asked him. “If you know that much, and if you’re that sure, why are you doing it?”

  “The same reason we’re all doing it,” Stebbins said. He smiled gently, almost lovingly. His lips were a little sun-parched; otherwise, his face was still unlined and seemingly invincible. “We want to die, that’s why we’re doing it. Why else, Garraty? Why else?”

  Chapter 8

  “Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine

  The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line

  The line broke

  The monkey got choked

  And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat . . . ”

  —Children’s rhyme

  Ray Garraty cinched the concentrate belt tightly around his waist and firmly told himself he would eat absolutely nothing until nine-thirty at least. He could tell it was going to be a hard resolution to keep. His stomach gnawed and growled. All around him Walkers were compulsively celebrating the end of the first twenty-four hours on the road.

  Scramm grinned at Garraty through a mouthful of cheese spread and said something pleasant but untranslatable. Baker had his vial of olives—real olives—and was popping them into his mouth with machine-gun regularity. Pearson was jamming crackers mounded high with tuna spread into his mouth, and McVries was slowly eating chicken spread. His eyes were half-lidded, and he might have been in extreme pain or at the pinnacle of pleasure.

  Two more of them had gone down between eight-thirty and nine; one of them had been the Wayne that the gas jockey had been cheering for a ways back. But they had come ninety-nine miles with just thirty-six gone. Isn’t that wonderful, Garraty thought, feeling the saliva spurt in his mouth as McVries mopped the last of the chicken concentrate out of the tube and then cast the empty aside. Great. I hope they all drop dead right now.

  A teenager in pegged jeans raced a middle-aged housewife for McVries’s empty tube, which had stopped being something useful and had begun its new career as a souvenir. The housewife was closer but the kid was faster and he beat her by half a length. “Thanks!” he hollered to McVries, holding the bent and twisted tube aloft. He scampered back to his friends, still waving it. The housewife eyed him sourly.

  “Aren’t you eating anything?” McVries asked.

  “I’m making myself wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  McVries eyed him thoughtfully. “The old self-discip
line bit?”

  Garraty shrugged, ready for the backlash of sarcasm, but McVries only went on looking at him.

  “You know something?” McVries said finally.

  “What?”

  “If I had a dollar . . . just a dollar, mind you . . . I think I’d put it on you, Garraty. I think you’ve got a chance to win this thing.”

  Garraty laughed self-consciously. “Putting the whammy on me?”

  “The what?”

  “The whammy. Like telling a pitcher he’s got a no-hitter going.”

  “Maybe I am,” McVries said. He put his hands out in front of him. They were shaking very slightly. McVries frowned at them in a distracted sort of concentration. It was a half-lunatic sort of gaze. “I hope Barkovitch buys out soon,” he said.

  “Pete?”

  “What?”

  “If you had it to do all over again . . . if you knew you could get this far and still be walking . . . would you do it?”

  McVries put his hands down and stared at Garraty. “Are you kidding? You must be.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “Ray, I don’t think I’d do it again if the Major put his pistol up against my nates. This is the next thing to suicide, except that a regular suicide is quicker.”

  “True, ” Olson said. “How true.” He smiled a hollow, concentration-camp smile that made Garraty’s belly crawl.

  Ten minutes later they passed under a huge red-and-white banner that proclaimed: 100 MILES!! CONGRATULATIONS FROM THE JEFFERSON PLANTATION CHAMBER OF COMMERCE! CONGRATULATIONS TO THIS YEAR’S “CENTURY CLUB” LONG WALKERS!!

  “I got a place where they can put their Century Club,” Collie Parker said. “It’s long and brown and the sun never shines there.”

  Suddenly the spotty stands of second-growth pine and spruce that had bordered the road in scruffy patches were gone, hidden by the first real crowd they had seen. A tremendous cheer went up, and that was followed by another and another. It was like surf hammering on rocks. Flashbulbs popped and dazzled. State police held the deep ranks of people back, and bright orange nylon restraining ropes were strung along the soft shoulders. A policeman struggled with a screaming little boy. The boy had a dirty face and a snotty nose. He was waving a toy glider in one hand and an autograph book in the other.

  “Jeez!” Baker yelled. “Jeez, look at ’em, just look at ’em all!”

  Collie Parker was waving and smiling, and it was not until Garraty closed up with him a little that he could hear him calling in his flat Midwestern accent: “Glad to seeya, ya goddam bunch of fools!” A grin and a wave. “Howaya, Mother Mc-Cree, you goddam bag. Your face and my ass, what a match. Howaya, howaya?”

  Garraty clapped his hands over his mouth and giggled hysterically. A man in the first rank waving a sloppily lettered sign with Scramm’s name on it had popped his fly. A row back a fat woman in a ridiculous yellow sunsuit was being ground between three college students who were drinking beer. Stone-ground fatty, Garraty thought, and laughed harder.

  You’re going to have hysterics, oh my God, don’t let it get you, think about Gribble . . . and don’t . . . don’t let . . . don’t . . .

  But it was happening. The laughter came roaring out of him until his stomach was knotted and cramped and he was walking bent-legged and somebody was hollering at him, screaming at him over the roar of the crowd. It was McVries. “Ray! Ray! What is it? You all right?”

  “They’re funny!” He was nearly weeping with laughter now. “Pete, Pete, they’re so funny, it’s just . . . just . . . that they’re so funny!”

  A hard-faced little girl in a dirty sundress sat on the ground, pouty-mouthed and frowning. She made a horrible face as they passed. Garraty nearly collapsed with laughter and drew a warning. It was strange—in spite of all the noise he could still hear the warnings clearly.

  I could die, he thought. I could just die laughing, wouldn’t that be a scream?

  Collie was still smiling gaily and waving and cursing spectators and newsmen roundly, and that seemed funniest of all. Garraty fell to his knees and was warned again. He continued to laugh in short, barking spurts, which were all his laboring lungs would allow.

  “He’s gonna puke!” someone cried in an ecstasy of delight. “Watch ’im, Alice, he’s gonna puke!”

  “Garraty! Garraty for God’s sake!” McVries was yelling. He got an arm around Garraty’s back and hooked a hand into his armpit. Somehow he yanked him to his feet and Garraty stumbled on.

  “Oh God,” Garraty gasped. “Oh Jesus Christ they’re killing me. I . . . I can’t . . .” He broke into loose, trickling laughter once more. His knees buckled. McVries ripped him to his feet once more. Garraty’s collar tore. They were both warned. That’s my last warning, Garraty thought dimly. I’m on my way to see that fabled farm. Sorry, Jan, I . . .

  “Come on, you turkey, I can’t lug you!” McVries hissed.

  “I can’t do it,” Garraty gasped. “My wind’s gone, I—”

  McVries slapped him twice quickly, forehand on the right cheek, backhand on the left. Then he walked away quickly, not looking back.

  The laughter had gone out of him now but his gut was jelly, his lungs empty and seemingly unable to refill. He staggered drunkenly along, weaving, trying to find his wind. Black spots danced in front of his eyes, and a part of him understood how close to fainting he was. His one foot fetched against his other foot, he stumbled, almost fell, and somehow kept his balance.

  If I fall, I die. I’ll never get up.

  They were watching him. The crowd was watching him. The cheers had died away to a muted, almost sexual murmur. They were waiting for him to fall down.

  He walked on, now concentrating only on putting one foot out in front of the other. Once, in the eighth grade, he had read a story by a man named Ray Bradbury, and this story was about the crowds that gather at the scenes of fatal accidents, about how these crowds always have the same faces, and about how they seem to know whether the wounded will live or die. I’m going to live a little longer, Garraty told them. I’m going to live. I’m going to live a little longer.

  He made his feet rise and fall to the steady cadence in his head. He blotted everything else out, even Jan. He was not aware of the head, or of Collie Parker, or of Freaky D’Allessio. He was not even aware of the steady dull pain in his feet and the frozen stiffness of the hamstring muscles behind his knees. The thought pounded in his mind like a big kettledrum. Like a heartbeat. Live a little longer. Live a little longer. Live a little longer. Until the words themselves became meaningless and signified nothing.

  It was the sound of the guns that brought him out of it.

  In the crowd-hushed stillness the sound was shockingly loud and he could hear someone screaming. Now you know, he thought, you live long enough to hear the sound of the guns, long enough to hear yourself screaming—

  But one of his feet kicked a small stone then and there was pain and it wasn’t him that had bought it, it was 64, a pleasant, smiling boy named Frank Morgan. They were dragging Frank Morgan off the road. His glasses were dragging and bouncing on the pavement, still hooked stubbornly over one ear. The left lens had been shattered.

  “I’m not dead,” he said dazedly. Shock hit him in a warm blue wave, threatening to turn his legs to water again.

  “Yeah, but you ought to be,” McVries said.

  “You saved him,” Olson said, turning it into a curse.“Why did you do that? Why did you do that?” His eyes were as shiny and as blank as doorknobs. “I’d kill you if I could. I hate you. You’re gonna die, McVries. You wait and see. God’s gonna strike you dead for what you did. God’s gonna strike you dead as dogshit.” His voice was pallid and empty. Garraty could almost smell the shroud on him. He clapped his own hands over his mouth and moaned through them. The truth was that the smell of the shroud was on all of them.

  “Piss on you,” McVries said calmly. “I pay my debts, that’s all.” He looked at Garraty. “We’re square, man. It’s the end, right?” He
walked away, not hurrying, and was soon only another colored shirt about twenty yards ahead.

  Garraty’s wind came back, but very slowly, and for a long time he was sure he could feel a stitch coming in his side . . . but at last that faded. McVries had saved his life. He had gone into hysterics, had a laughing jag, and McVries had saved him from going down. We’re square, man. It’s the end, right? All right.

  “God will punish him,” Hank Olson was blaring with dead and unearthly assurance. “God will strike him down.”

  “Shut up or I’ll strike you down myself,” Abraham said.

  The day grew yet hotter, and small, quibbling arguments broke out like brushfires. The huge crowd dwindled a little as they walked out of the radius of TV cameras and microphones, but it did not disappear or even break up into isolated knots of spectators. The crowd had come now, and the crowd was here to stay. The people who made it up merged into one anonymous Crowd Face, a vapid, eager visage that duplicated itself mile by mile. It peopled doorsteps, lawns, driveways, picnic areas, gas station tarmacs (where enterprising owners had charged admission), and, in the next town they passed through, both sides of the street and the parking lot of the town’s supermarket. The Crowd Face mugged and gibbered and cheered, but always remained essentially the same. It watched voraciously as Wyman squatted to make his bowels work. Men, women, and children, the Crowd Face was always the same, and Garraty tired of it quickly.

  He wanted to thank McVries, but somehow doubted that McVries wanted to be thanked. He could see him up ahead, walking behind Barkovitch. McVries was staring intently at Barkovitch’s neck.

  Nine-thirty came and passed. The crowd seemed to intensify the heat, and Garraty unbuttoned his shirt to just above his belt buckle. He wondered if Freaky D’Allessio had known he was going to buy a ticket before he did. He supposed that knowing wouldn’t have really changed things for him, one way or the other.