The Long Walk Read online

  “With a face like mine? I thought you perverts liked the willowy type.” Still, he was suddenly uneasy.

  Suddenly, shockingly, McVries said: “Would you let me jerk you off ?”

  Garraty hissed in breath. “What the hell—”

  “Oh, shut up,” McVries said crossly. “Where do you get off with all this self-righteous shit? I’m not even going to make it any easier by letting you know if I’m joking. What say?”

  Garraty felt a sticky dryness in his throat. The thing was, he wanted to be touched. Queer, not queer, that didn’t seem to matter now that they were all busy dying. All that mattered was McVries. He didn’t want McVries to touch him, not that way.

  “Well, I suppose you did save my life—” Garraty let it hang.

  McVries laughed. “I’m supposed to feel like a heel because you owe me something and I’m taking advantage? Is that it?”

  “Do what you want,” Garraty said shortly. “But quit playing games.”

  “Does that mean yes?”

  “Whatever you want!” Garraty yelled. Pearson, who had been staring, nearly hypnotized, at his feet, looked up, startled. “Whatever you goddam want!” Garraty yelled.

  McVries laughed again. “You’re all right, Ray. Never doubt it.” He clapped Garraty’s shoulder and dropped back.

  Garraty stared after him, mystified.

  “He just can’t get enough,” Pearson said tiredly.

  “Huh?”

  “Almost two hundred and fifty miles,” Pearson groaned. “My feet are like lead with poison inside them. My back’s burning. And that screwed-up McVries doesn’t have enough yet. He’s like a starving man gobbling up laxatives.”

  “He wants to be hurt, do you think?”

  “Jesus, what do you think? He ought to be wearing a BEAT ME HARD sign. I wonder what he’s trying to make up for.”

  “I don’t know,” Garraty said. He was going to add something else, but saw Pearson wasn’t listening anymore. He was watching his feet again, his weary features drawn in lines of horror. He had lost his shoes. The dirty white athletic socks on his feet made gray-white arcs in the darkness.

  They passed a sign that said LEWISTON 32 and a mile beyond that an arched electric sign that proclaimed GARRATY 47 in lightbulb lettering.

  Garraty wanted to doze but was unable. He knew what Pearson meant about his back. His own spine felt like a blue rod of fire. The muscles at the backs of his legs were open, flaming sores. The numbness in his feet was being replaced by an agony much more sharp and defined than any that had gone before. He was no longer hungry, but he ate a few concentrates anyway. Several Walkers were nothing but flesh-covered skeletons—concentration-camp horrors. Garraty didn’t want to get like that . . . but of course he was, anyway. He ran a hand up his side and played the xylophone on his ribs.

  “I haven’t heard from Barkovitch lately,” he said in an effort to raise Pearson from his dreadful concentration—it was altogether too much like Olson reincarnated.

  “No. Somebody said one of his legs went stiff on him coming through Augusta.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  Garraty felt a sudden urge to drop back and look at Barkovitch. He was hard to find in the dark and Garraty drew a warning, but finally he spotted Barkovitch, now back in the rear echelon. Barkovitch was scurrying gimpily along, his face set in strained lines of concentration. His eyes were slitted down to a point where they looked like dimes seen edge-on. His jacket was gone. He was talking to himself in a low, strained monotone.

  “Hello, Barkovitch,” Garraty said.

  Barkovitch twitched, stumbled, and was warned his third warning. “There!” Barkovitch screamed shrewishly. “There, see what you did? Are you and your hotshit friends satisfied?”

  “You don’t look so good,” Garraty said.

  Barkovitch smiled cunningly. “It’s all a part of the Plan. You remember when I told you about the Plan? Didn’t believe me. Olson didn’t. Davidson neither. Gribble neither.” Barkovitch’s voice dropped to a succulent whisper, pregnant with spit. “Garraty, I daaanced on their graves!”

  “Your leg hurt?” Garraty asked softly. “Say, isn’t that awful.”

  “Just thirty-five left to walk down. They’re all going to fall apart tonight. You’ll see. There won’t be a dozen left on the road when the sun comes up. You’ll see. You and your diddy-bop friends, Garraty. All dead by morning. Dead by midnight.”

  Garraty felt suddenly very strong. He knew that Barkovitch would go soon now. He wanted to break into a run, bruised kidneys and aching spine and screaming feet and all, run and tell McVries he was going to be able to keep his promise.

  “What will you ask for?” Garraty said aloud. “When you win?”

  Barkovitch grinned gleefully as if he had been waiting for the question. In the uncertain light his face seemed to crumple and squeeze as if pushed and pummeled by giant hands. “Plastic feet,” he whispered. “Plaaastic feet, Garraty. I’m just gonna have these ones cut off, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. I’ll have new plastic feet put on and put these ones in a laundromat washing machine and watch them go around and around and around—”

  “I thought maybe you’d wish for friends,” Garraty said sadly. A heady sense of triumph, suffocating and enthralling, roared through him.

  “Friends?”

  “Because you don’t have any,” Garraty said pityingly. “We’ll all be glad to see you die. No one’s going to miss you, Gary. Maybe I’ll walk behind you and spit on your brains after they blow them all over the road. Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe we all will.” It was crazy, crazy, as if his whole head was flying off, it was like when he had swung the barrel of the air rifle at Jimmy, the blood . . . Jimmy screamed . . . his whole head had gone heat-hazy with the savage, primitive justice of it.

  “Don’t hate me,” Barkovitch was whining, “why do you want to hate me? I don’t want to die any more than you do. What do you want? Do you want me to be sorry? I’ll be sorry! I . . . I . . .”

  “We’ll all spit in your brains,” Garraty said crazily. “Do you want to touch me too?”

  Barkovitch looked at him palely, his eyes confused and vacant.

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” Garraty whispered. He felt degraded and dirty. He hurried away from Barkovitch. Damn you McVries, he thought, why? Why?

  All at once the guns roared, and there were two of them falling down dead at once and one of them had to be Barkovitch, had to be. And this time it was his fault, he was the murderer.

  Then Barkovitch was laughing. Barkovitch was cackling, higher and madder and even more audible than the madness of the crowd. “Garraty! Gaaarrratee! I’ll dance on your grave, Garraty! I’ll daaaance—”

  “Shut up!” Abraham yelled. “Shut up, you little prick!”

  Barkovitch stopped, then began to sob.

  “Go to hell,” Abraham muttered.

  “Now you did it,” Collie Parker said reproachfully. “You made him cry, Abe, you bad boy. He’s gonna go home and tell his mommy.”

  Barkovitch continued to sob. It was an empty, ashy sound that made Garraty’s skin crawl. There was no hope in it.

  “Is little uggy-wuggy gonna tell Mommy?” Quince called back. “Ahhhh, Barkovitch, ain’t that too bad?”

  Leave him alone, Garraty screamed out in his mind, leave him alone, you have no idea how bad he’s hurting. But what kind of lousy hypocritical thought was that? He wanted Barkovitch to die. Might as well admit it. He wanted Barkovitch to crack up and croak off.

  And Stebbins was probably back there in the dark laughing at them all.

  He hurried, caught up with McVries, who was ambling along and staring idly at the crowd. The crowd was staring back at him avidly.

  “Why don’t you help me decide?” McVries said.

  “Sure. What’s the topic for decision?”

  “Who’s in the cage. Us or them.”

  Garraty laughed with genuine pleasure. “All of us. A
nd the cage is in the Major’s monkey house.”

  McVries didn’t join in Garraty’s laughter. “Barkovitch is going over the high side, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I don’t want to see it anymore. It’s lousy. And it’s a cheat. You build it all around something . . . set yourself on something . . . and then you don’t want it. Isn’t it too bad the great truths are all such lies?”

  “I never thought much about it. Do you realize it’s almost ten o’clock?”

  “It’s like practicing pole-vaulting all your life and then getting to the Olympics and saying, ‘What the hell do I want to jump over that stupid bar for?’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “You almost could care, right?” McVries said, nettled.

  “It’s getting harder to work me up,” Garraty admitted. He paused. Something had been troubling him badly for some time now. Baker had joined them. Garraty looked from Baker to McVries and then back again. “Did you see Olson’s . . . did you see his hair? Before he bought it?”

  “What about his hair?” Baker asked.

  “It was going gray.”

  “No, that’s crazy,” McVries said, but he suddenly sounded very scared. “No, it was dust or something.”

  “It was gray,” Garraty said. “It seems like we’ve been on this road forever. It was Olson’s hair getting . . . getting that way that made me think of it first, but . . . maybe this is some crazy kind of immortality.” The thought was terribly depressing. He stared straight ahead into the darkness, feeling the soft wind against his face.

  “I walk, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked,” McVries chanted. “Shall I translate into Latin?”

  We’re suspended in time, Garraty thought.

  Their feet moved but they did not. The cherry cigarette glows in the crowd, the occasional flashlight or flaring sparkler might have been stars, weird low constellations that marked their existence ahead and behind, narrowing into nothing both ways.

  “Bruh,” Garraty said, shivering. “A guy could go crazy.”

  “That’s right,” Pearson agreed, and then laughed nervously. They were starting up a long, twisting hill. The road was now expansion-jointed concrete, hard on the feet. It seemed to Garraty that he felt every pebble through the paper-thinness of his shoes. The frisky wind had scattered shallow drifts of candy wrappers, popcorn boxes, and other assorted muck in their way. At some places they almost had to fight their way through. It’s not fair, Garraty thought self-pityingly.

  “What’s the layout up ahead?” McVries asked him apologetically.

  Garraty closed his eyes and tried to make a map in his head. “I can’t remember all the little towns. We come to Lewiston, that’s the second-biggest city in the state, bigger than Augusta. We go right down the main drag. It used to be Lisbon Street, but now it’s Cotter Memorial Avenue. Reggie Cotter was the only guy from Maine to ever win the Long Walk. It happened a long time ago.”

  “He died, didn’t he?” Baker said.

  “Yeah. He hemorrhaged in one eye and finished the Walk half-blind. It turned out he had a blood clot on his brain. He died a week or so after the Walk.” And in a feeble effort to remove the onus, Garraty repeated: “It was a long time ago.”

  No one spoke for a while. Candy wrappers crackled under their feet like the sound of a faraway forest fire. A cherry bomb went off in the crowd. Garraty could see a faint lightness on the horizon that was probably the twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn, the land of Dussettes and Aubuchons and Lavesques, the land of Nous parlons francais ici. Suddenly Garraty had a nearly obsessive craving for a stick of gum.

  “What’s after Lewiston?”

  “We go down Route 196, then along 126 to Freeport, where I’m going to see my mom and my girl. That’s also where we get on U.S. 1. And that’s where we stay until it’s over.”

  “The big highway,” McVries muttered.

  “Sure.”

  The guns blasted and they all jumped.

  “It was Barkovitch or Quince,” Pearson said. “I can’t tell . . . one of them’s still walking . . . it’s—”

  Barkovitch laughed out of the darkness, a high, gobbling sound, thin and terrifying. “Not yet, you whores! I ain’t gone yet! Not yeeeeeetttttt . . .”

  His voice kept climbing and climbing. It was like a fire whistle gone insane. And Barkovitch’s hands suddenly went up like startled doves taking flight and Barkovitch ripped out his own throat.

  “My Jesus!” Parson wailed, and threw up over himself.

  They fled from him, fled and scattered ahead and behind, and Barkovitch went on screaming and gobbling and clawing and walking, his feral face turned up to the sky, his mouth a twisted curve of darkness.

  Then the fire-whistle sound began to fail, and Barkovitch failed with it. He fell down and they shot him, dead or alive.

  Garraty turned around and walked forward again. He was dimly grateful that he hadn’t been warned. He saw a carbon copy of his horror on the faces of all about him. The Barkovitch part of it was over. Garraty thought it did not bode well for the rest of them, for their future on this dark and bloody road.

  “I don’t feel good,” Pearson said. His voice was flat. He dry-retched and walked doubled over for a moment. “Oh. Not so good. Oh God. I don’t. Feel. So good. Oh.”

  McVries looked straight ahead. “I think . . . I wish I were insane,” he said thoughtfully.

  Only Baker said nothing. And that was odd, because Garraty suddenly got a whiff of Louisiana honeysuckle. He could hear the croak of the frogs in the bottoms. He could feel the sweaty, lazy hum of cicadas digging into the tough cypress bark for their dreamless seventeen-year sleep. And he could see Baker’s aunt rocking back and forth, her eyes dreamy and smiley and vacant, sitting on her porch and listening to the static and hum and faraway voices on an old Philco radio with a chipped and cracked mahogany cabinet. Rocking and rocking and rocking. Smiling, sleepy. Like a cat that has been into the cream and is well satisfied.

  Chapter 15

  “I don’t care if you win or lose, just as long as you win.”

  —Vince Lombardi Ex-Green Bay Packers Head Coach

  Daylight came in creeping through a white, muted world of fog. Garraty was walking by himself again. He no longer even knew how many had bought it in the night. Five, maybe. His feet had headaches. Terrible migraines. He could feel them swelling each time he put his weight on them. His buttocks hurt. His spine was icy fire. But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.

  And still there was a worm of excitement growing in his guts: they were now only thirteen miles out of Freeport. They were in Porterville now, and the crowd could barely see them through the dense fog, but they had been chanting his name rhythmically since Lewiston. It was like the pulse of a giant heart.

  Freeport and Jan, he thought.

  “Garraty?” The voice was familiar but washed out. It was McVries. His face was a furry skull. His eyes were glittering feverishly. “Good morning,” McVries croaked. “We live to fight another day.”

  “Yeah. How many got it last night, McVries?”

  “Six.” McVries dug a jar of bacon spread out of his belt and began to finger it into his mouth. His hands were shaking badly. “Six since Barkovitch.” He put the jar back with an old man’s palsied care. “Pearson bought it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s not many of us left, Garraty. Only twenty-six.”

  “No, not many.” Walking through the fog was like walking through weightless clouds of mothdust.

  “Not many of us, either. The Musketeers. You and me and Baker and Abraham. Collie Parker. And Stebbins. If you want to count him in. Why not? Why the fuck not? Let’s count Stebbins in, Garraty. Six Musketeers and twenty spear-carriers.”

  “Do you still think I’ll win?”

  “Does it always get this foggy up here in the spring?”

  “What’s that mean?�
�

  “No, I don’t think you’ll win. It’s Stebbins, Ray. Nothing can wear him down, he’s like diamonds. The word is Vegas likes him nine-to-one now that Scramm’s out of it. Christ, he looks almost the same now as when we started.”

  Garraty nodded as if expecting this. He found his tube of beef concentrate and began to eat it. What he wouldn’t have given for some of McVries’s long-gone raw hamburger.

  McVries snuffled a little and wiped a hand across his nose. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you? Being back on your home stomping grounds after all of this?”

  Garraty felt the worm of excitement wriggle and turn again. “No,” he said. “It seems like the most natural thing in the world.”

  They walked down a long hill, and McVries glanced up into white drive-in screen nothing. “The fog’s getting worse.”

  “It’s not fog,” Garraty said. “It’s rain now.”

  The rain fell softly, as if it had no intention of stopping for a very long time.

  “Where’s Baker?”

  “Back there someplace,” McVries said.

  Without a word—words were almost unnecessary now—Garraty began dropping back. The road took them past a traffic island, past the rickety Porterville Rec Center with its five lanes of candlepins, past a dead black Government Sales building with a large MAY IS CONFIRM-YOUR-SEX MONTH sign in the window.

  In the fog Garraty missed Baker and ended up walking beside Stebbins. Hard like diamonds, McVries had said. But this diamond was showing some small flaws, he thought. Now they were walking parallel to the mighty and dead-polluted Androscoggin River. On the other side the Porterville Weaving Company, a textile mill, reared its turrets into the fog like a filthy medieval castle.

  Stebbins didn’t look up, but Garraty knew Stebbins knew he was there. He said nothing, foolishly determined to make Stebbins say the first word. The road curved again. For a moment the crowd was gone as they crossed the bridge spanning the Androscoggin. Beneath them the water boiled along, sullen and salty, dressed with cheesy yellow foam.