The Long Walk Read online

  “The scar,” Garraty reminded.

  “I keep wandering away from that, don’t I?” McVries wiped his forehead and unbuttoned his shirt as they breasted the hill. Waves of woods stretched away before them to a horizon poked with mountains. They met the sky like interlocking jigsaw pieces. Perhaps ten miles away, almost lost in the heat-haze, a fire tower jutted up through the green. The road cut through it all like a sliding gray serpent.

  “At first, the joy and bliss was Keatsville all the way. I screwed her three more times, all at the drive-in with the smell of cowshit coming in through the car window from the next pasture. And I could never get all of the loose fabric out of my hair no matter how many times I shampooed it, and the worst thing was she was getting away from me, going beyond me; I loved her, I really did, I knew it and there was no way I could tell her anymore so she’d understand. I couldn’t even screw it into her. There was always that smell of cowshit.

  “The thing of it was, Garraty, the factory was on piecework. That means we got lousy wages, but a percentage for all we did over a certain minimum. I wasn’t a very good bagger. I did about twenty-three bags a day, but the norm was usually right around thirty. And this did not endear me to the rest of the boys, because I was fucking them up. Harlan down in the dyehouse couldn’t make piecework because I was tying up his blower with full bins. Ralph on the picker couldn’t make piecework because I wasn’t shifting enough bags over to him. It wasn’t pleasant. They saw to it that it wasn’t pleasant. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” Garraty said. He wiped the back of his hand across his neck and then wiped his hand on his pants. It made a dark stain.

  “Meanwhile, down in buttoning, Pris was keeping herself busy. Some nights she’d talk for hours about her girlfriends, and it was usually the same tune. How much this one was making. How much that one was making. And most of all, how much she was making. And she was making plenty. So I got to find out how much fun it is to be in competition with the girl you want to marry. At the end of the week I’d go home with a check for $64.40 and put some Cornhusker’s Lotion on my blisters. She was making something like ninety a week, and socking it away as fast as she could run to the bank. And when I suggested we go someplace dutch, you would have thought I’d suggested ritual murder.

  “After a while I stopped screwing her. I’d like to say I stopped going to bed with her, it’s more pleasant, but we never had a bed to go to. I couldn’t take her to my apartment, there were usually about sixteen guys there drinking beer, and there were always people at her place—that’s what she said, anyway—and I couldn’t afford another motel room and I certainly wasn’t going to suggest we go dutch on that, so it was just screwing in the back seat at the drive-in. And I could tell she was getting disgusted. And since I knew it and since I had started to hate her even though I still loved her, I asked her to marry me. Right then. She started wriggling around, trying to put me off, but I made her come out with it, yes or no.”

  “And it was no.”

  “Sure it was no. ‘Pete, we can’t afford it. What would my mom say. Pete, we have to wait.’ Pete this and Pete that and all the time the real reason was her money, the money she was making sewing on buttons.”

  “Well, you were damned unfair to ask her.”

  “Sure I was unfair!” McVries said savagely. “I knew that. I wanted to make her feel like a greedy, self-centered little bitch because she was making me feel like a failure.”

  His hand crept up to the scar.

  “Only she didn’t have to make me feel like a failure, because I was a failure. I didn’t have anything in particular going for me except a cock to stick in her and she wouldn’t even make me feel like a man by refusing that.”

  The guns roared behind them.

  “Olson?” McVries asked.

  “No. He’s still back there.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “The scar,” Garraty reminded.

  “Oh, why don’t you let it alone?”

  “You saved my life.”

  “Shit on you.”

  “The scar.”

  “I got into a fight,” McVries said finally, after a long pause. “With Ralph, the guy on the picker. He blacked both my eyes and told me I better take off or he’d break my arms as well. I turned in my time and told Pris that night that I’d quit. She could see what I looked like for herself. She understood. She said that was probably best. I told her I was going home and I asked her to come. She said she couldn’t. I said she was nothing but a slave to her fucking buttons and that I wished I’d never seen her. There was just so much poison inside me, Garraty. I told her she was a fool and an unfeeling bitch that couldn’t see any further than the goddam bank book she carried around in her purse. Nothing I said was fair, but . . . there was some truth in all of it, I guess. Enough. We were at her apartment. That was the first time I’d ever been there when all her roommates were out. They were at the movies. I tried to take her to bed and she cut my face open with a letter-opener. It was a gag letter-opener, some friend of hers sent it to her from England. It had Paddington Bear on it. She cut me like I was trying to rape her. Like I was germs and I’d infect her. Am I giving you the drift, Ray?”

  “Yes, I’m getting it,” Garraty said. Up ahead a white station wagon with the words WHGH NEWSMOBILE lettered on the side was pulled off the road. As they drew near, a balding man in a shiny suit began shooting them with a big news-reel ciné camera. Pearson, Abraham, and Jensen all clutched their crotches with their left hand and thumbed their noses with their right. There was a Rockettelike precision about this little act of defiance that bemused Garraty.

  “I cried,” McVries said. “I cried like a baby. I got down on my knees and held her skirt and begged her to forgive me, and all the blood was getting on the floor, it was a basically disgusting scene, Garraty. She gagged and ran off into the bathroom. She threw up. I could hear her throwing up. When she came out, she had a towel for my face. She said she never wanted to see me again. She was crying. She asked me why I’d done that to her, hurt her like that. She said I had no right. There I was, Ray, with my face cut wide open and she’s asking me why I hurt her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I left with the towel still on my face. I had twelve stitches and that’s the story of the fabulous scar and aren’t you happy?”

  “Have you ever seen her since?”

  “No,” McVries said. “And I have no real urge to. She seems very small to me now, very far away. Pris at this point in my life is no more than a speck on the horizon. She really was mental, Ray. Something . . . her mother, maybe, her mother was a lush . . . something had fixed her on the subject of money. She was a real miser. Distance lends perspective, they say. Yesterday morning Pris was still very important to me. Now she’s nothing. That story I just told you, I thought that would hurt. It didn’t hurt. Besides, I doubt if all that shit really has anything to do with why I’m here. It just made a handy excuse at the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you here, Garraty?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was mechanical, doll-like. Freaky D’Allessio hadn’t been able to see the ball coming—his eyes weren’t right, his depth perception was screwed—it had hit him in the forehead, and branded him with stitches. And later (or earlier . . . all of his past was mixed up and fluid now) he had hit his best friend in the mouth with the barrel of an air rifle. Maybe he had a scar like McVries. Jimmy. He and Jimmy had been playing doctor.

  “You don’t know,” McVries said. “You’re dying and you don’t know why.”

  “It’s not important after you’re dead.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” McVries said, “but there’s one thing you ought to know, Ray, so it won’t be all so pointless.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why, that you’ve been had. You mean you really didn’t know that, Ray? You really didn’t?”

  Chapter 9

  “Very good, Northwestern, now here is your ten-point tossup
question.”

  —Allen Ludden College Bowl

  At one o’clock, Garraty took inventory again.

  One hundred and fifteen miles traveled. They were forty-five miles north of Oldtown, a hundred and twenty-five miles north of Augusta, the state capital, one hundred and fifty to Freeport (or more . . . he was terribly afraid there were more than twenty-five miles between Augusta and Freeport), probably two-thirty to the New Hampshire border. And the word was that this Walk was sure to go that far.

  For a long while—ninety minutes or so—no one at all had been given a ticket. They walked, they half-listened to the cheers from the sidelines, and they stared at mile after monotonous mile of piney woods. Garraty discovered fresh twinges of pain in his left calf to go with the steady, wooden throbbing that lived in both of his legs, and the low-key agony that was his feet.

  Then, around noon, as the day’s heat mounted toward its zenith, the guns began to make themselves heard again. A boy named Tressler, 92, had a sunstroke and was shot as he lay unconscious. Another boy suffered a convulsion and got a ticket as he crawdaddied on the road, making ugly noises around his swallowed tongue. Aaronson, I, cramped up in both feet and was shot on the white line, standing like a statue, his face turned up to the sun in neck-straining concentration. And at five minutes to one, another boy Garraty did not know had a sunstroke.

  This is where I came in, Garraty thought, walking around the twitching, mumbling form on the road where the rifles sight in, seeing the jewels of sweat in the exhausted and soon-to-be-dead boy’s hair. This is where I came in, can’t I leave now?

  The guns roared, and a covey of high school boys sitting in the scant shade of a Scout camper applauded briefly.

  “I wish the Major would come through,” Baker said pettishly. “I want to see the Major.”

  “What?” Abraham asked mechanically. He had grown gaunter in the last few hours. His eyes were sunk deeper in their sockets. The blue suggestion of a beard patched his face.

  “So I can piss on him,” Baker said.

  “Relax,” Garraty said. “Just relax.” All three of his warnings were gone now.

  “You relax,” Baker said. “See what it gets you.”

  “You’ve got no right to hate the Major. He didn’t force you.”

  “Force me? FORCE me? He’s KILLING me, that’s all!”

  “It’s still not—”

  “Shut up,” Baker said curtly, and Garraty shut. He rubbed the back of his neck briefly and stared up into the whitish-blue sky. His shadow was a deformed huddle almost beneath his feet. He turned up his third canteen of the day and drained it.

  Baker said: “I’m sorry. I surely didn’t mean to shout. My feet—”

  “Sure,” Garraty said.

  “We’re all getting this way,” Baker said. “I sometimes think that’s the worst part.”

  Garraty closed his eyes. He was very sleepy.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” Pearson said. He was walking between Garraty and Baker.

  “Piss on the Major,” Garraty said. “Everybody wants to piss on the Major. When he comes through again we’ll gang up on him and drag him down and all unzip and drown him in—”

  “That isn’t what I want to do.” Pearson was walking like a man in the last stages of conscious drunkenness. His head made half-rolls on his neck. His eyelids snapped up and down like spastic windowblinds. “It’s got nothin’ to do with the Major. I just want to go into the next field and lay down and close my eyes. Just lay there on my back in the wheat—”

  “They don’t grow wheat in Maine,” Garraty said. “It’s hay.”

  “—in the hay, then. And compose myself a poem. While I go to sleep.”

  Garraty fumbled in his new foodbelt and found nothing in most of the pouches. Finally he happened on a waxpack of Saltines and began washing them down with water. “I feel like a sieve,” he said. “I drink it and it pops out on my skin two minutes later.”

  The guns roared again and another figure collapsed gracelessly, like a tired jack-in-the-box.

  “Fordy fibe,” Scramm said, joining them. “I don’t thing we’ll even get to Pordland ad this rade.”

  “You don’t sound so good,” Pearson said, and there might have been careful optimism in his voice.

  “Luggy for me I god a good codstitution,” Scramm said cheerfully. “I thing I’be rudding a fever now.”

  “Jesus, how do you keep going?” Abraham asked, and there was a kind of religious fear in his voice.

  “Me? Talk about me?” Scramm said. “Look at hib! How does he keep going? Thad’s what I’d like to know!” And he cocked his thumb at Olson.

  Olson had not spoken for two hours. He had not touched his newest canteen. Greedy glances were shot at his foodbelt, which was also almost untouched. His eyes, darkly obsidian, were fixed straight ahead. His face was speckled by two days of beard and it looked sickly vulpine. Even his hair, frizzed up in back and hanging across his forehead in front, added to the overall impression of ghoulishness. His lips were parched dry and blistering. His tongue hung over his bottom lip like a dead serpent on the lip of a cave. Its healthy pinkness had disappeared. It was dirty-gray now. Road-dust clung to it.

  He’s there, Garraty thought, sure he is. Where Stebbins said we’d all go if we stuck with it long enough. How deep inside himself is he? Fathoms? Miles? Light-years? How deep and how dark? And the answer came back to him: too deep to see out. He’s hiding down there in the darkness and it’s too deep to see out.

  “Olson?” he said softly. “Olson?”

  Olson didn’t answer. Nothing moved but his feet.

  “I wish he’d put his tongue in at least,” Pearson whispered nervously.

  The Walk went on.

  The woods melted back and they were passing through another wide place in the road. The sidewalks were lined with cheering spectators. Garraty signs again predominated. Then the woods closed in again. But not even the woods could hold the spectators back now. They were beginning to line the soft shoulders. Pretty girls in shorts and halters. Boys in basketball shorts and muscle shirts.

  Gay holiday, Garraty thought.

  He could no longer wish he wasn’t here; he was too tired and numb for retrospect. What was done was done. Nothing in the world would change it. Soon enough, he supposed, it would even become too much of an effort to talk to the others. He wished he could hide inside himself like a little boy rolled up inside a rug, with no more worries. Then everything would be much simpler.

  He had wondered a great deal about what McVries had said. That they had all been swindled, rooked. But that couldn’t be right, he insisted stubbornly to himself. One of them had not been swindled. One of them was going to swindle everyone else . . . wasn’t that right?

  He licked his lips and drank some water.

  They passed a small green sign that informed them the Maine turnpike was forty-four miles hence.

  “That’s it,” he said to no one in particular. “Forty-four miles to Oldtown.”

  No one replied and Garraty was just considering taking a walk back up to McVries when they came to another intersection and a woman began to scream. The traffic had been roped off, and the crowd pressed eagerly against the barriers and the cops manning them. They waved their hands, their signs, their bottles of suntan lotion.

  The screaming woman was large and red-faced. She threw herself against one of the waist-high sawhorse barriers, toppling it and yanking a lot of the bright yellow guard-rope after it. Then she was fighting and clawing and screaming at the policemen who held her. The cops were grunting with effort.

  I know her, Garraty thought. Don’t I know her?

  The blue kerchief. The belligerent, gleaming eyes. Even the navy dress with the crooked hem. They were all familiar. The woman’s screams had become incoherent. One pinwheeling hand ripped stripes of blood across the face of one of the cops holding her—trying to hold her.

  Garraty passed within ten feet of her. As he walked past, he
knew where he had seen her before—she was Percy’s mom, of course. Percy who had tried to sneak into the woods and had snuck right into the next world instead.

  “I want m’boy!” she hollered. “I want m’boy!”

  The crowd cheered her enthusiastically and impartially. A small boy behind her spat on her leg and then darted away.

  Jan, Garraty thought. I’m walking to you, Jan, fuck this other shit, I swear to God I’m coming. But McVries had been right. Jan hadn’t wanted him to come. She had cried. She had begged him to change his mind. They could wait, she didn’t want to lose him, please Ray, don’t be dumb, the Long Walk is nothing but murder—

  They had been sitting on a bench beside the bandstand. It had been a month ago, April, and he had his arm around her. She had been wearing the perfume he had gotten her for her birthday. It seemed to bring out the secret girl-smell of her, a dark smell, fleshy and heady. I have to go, he had told her. I have to, don’t you understand, I have to.

  Ray, you don’t understand what you’re doing. Ray, please don’t. I love you.

  Well, he thought now, as he walked on down the road, she was right about that. I sure didn’t understand what I was doing.

  But I don’t understand it even now. That’s the hell of it. The pure and simple hell of it.

  “Garraty?”

  He jerked his head up, startled. He had been half-asleep again. It was McVries, walking beside him.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Feeling?” Garraty said cautiously. “All right, I guess. I guess I’m all right.”

  “Barkovitch is cracking,” McVries said with quiet joy. “I’m sure of it. He’s talking to himself. And he’s limping.”

  “You’re limping, too,” Garraty said. “So’s Pearson. So am I.”