The Long Walk Read online

  “WHOREMONGER AND WHOREMASTER!” shrieked Tubbins. “VILE! UNCLEAN!”

  “Piss on him,” Parker muttered. “I’ll kill him myself if he don’t shut up.” He passed trembling skeletal fingers across his lips, dropped them to his belt, and spent thirty seconds making them undo the clip that held his canteen to his belt. He almost dropped it getting it to his mouth, and then spilled half of it. He began to weep weakly.

  It was three in the afternoon. Portland and South Portland were behind them. About fifteen minutes ago they had passed under a wet and flapping banner that proclaimed that the New Hampshire border was only 44 miles away.

  Only, Garraty thought. Only, what a stupid little word that is. Who was the idiot who took it into his head that we needed a stupid little word like that?

  He was walking next to McVries, but McVries had spoken only in monosyllables since Freeport. Garraty hardly dared speak to him. He was indebted again, and it shamed him. It shamed him because he knew he would not help McVries if the chance came. Now Jan was gone, his mother was gone. Irrevocably and for eternity. Unless he won. And now he wanted to win very badly.

  It was odd. This was the first time he could remember wanting to win. Not even at the start, when he had been fresh (back when dinosaurs walked the earth), had he consciously wanted to win. There had only been the challenge. But the guns didn’t produce little red flags with BANG written on them. It wasn’t baseball or Giant Step; it was all real.

  Or had he known it all along?

  His feet seemed to hurt twice as badly since he had decided he wanted to win, and there were stabbing pains in his chest when he drew long breaths. The sensation of fever was growing—perhaps he had picked something up from Scramm.

  He wanted to win, but not even McVries could carry him over the invisible finish line. He didn’t think he was going to win. In the sixth grade he had won his school’s spelling bee and had gone on to the district spelldown, but the district spell-master wasn’t Miss Petrie, who let you take it back. Softhearted Miss Petrie. He had stood there, hurt, unbelieving, sure there must have been some mistake, but there had been none. He just hadn’t been good enough to make the cut then, and he wasn’t going to be good enough now. Good enough to walk most of them down, but not all. His feet and legs had gone beyond numb and angry rebellion, and now mutiny was just a step away.

  Only three had gone down since they left Freeport. One of them had been the unfortunate Klingerman. Garraty knew what the rest of them were thinking. It was too many tickets issued for them to just quit, any of them. Not with only twenty left to walk over. They would walk now until their bodies or minds shook apart.

  They passed over a bridge spanning a placid little brook, its surface lightly pocked by the rain. The guns roared, the crowd cheered, and Garraty felt the stubborn cranny of hope in the back of his brain open an infinitesimal bit more.

  “Did your girl look good to you?”

  It was Abraham, looking like a victim of the Bataan March. For some inconceivable reason he had shucked both his jacket and his shirt, leaving his bony chest and stacked ribcage bare.

  “Yeah,” Garraty said. “I hope I can make it back to her.”

  Abraham smiled. “Hope? Yeah, I’m beginning to remember how to spell that word, too.” It was like a mild threat. “Was that Tubbins?”

  Garraty listened. He heard nothing but the steady roar of the crowd. “Yeah, by God it was. Parker put the hex on him, I guess.”

  “I keep telling myself,” Abraham said, “that all I got to do is to continue putting one foot in front of the other.”

  “Yeah.”

  Abraham looked distressed. “Garraty . . . this is a bitch to say . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  Abraham was quiet for a long time. His shoes were big heavy Oxfords that looked horrendously heavy to Garraty (whose own feet were now bare, cold, and scraping raw). They clopped and dragged on the pavement, which had now expanded to three lanes. The crowd did not seem so loud or quite so terrifyingly close as it had ever since Augusta.

  Abraham looked more distressed than ever. “It’s a bitch. I just don’t know how to say it.”

  Garraty shrugged, bewildered. “I guess you just say it.”

  “Well, look. We’re getting together on something. All of us that are left.”

  “Scrabble, maybe?”

  “It’s a kind of a . . . a promise.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “No help for anybody. Do it on your own or don’t do it.”

  Garraty looked at his feet. He wondered how long it had been since he was hungry, and he wondered how long it would be before he fainted if he didn’t eat something. He thought that Abraham’s Oxfords were like Stebbins—those shoes could carry him from here to the Golden Gate Bridge without so much as a busted shoelace . . . at least they looked that way.

  “That sounds pretty heartless,” he said finally.

  “It’s gotten to be a pretty heartless situation.” Abraham wouldn’t look at him.

  “Have you talked to all the others about this?”

  “Not yet. About a dozen.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real bitch. I can see how hard it is for you to talk about.”

  “It seems to get harder rather than easier.”

  “What did they say?” He knew what they said, what were they supposed to say?

  “They’re for it.”

  Garraty opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked at Baker up ahead. Bake was wearing his jacket, and it was soaked. His head was bent. One hip swayed and jutted awkwardly. His left leg had stiffened up quite badly.

  “Why’d you take off your shirt?” he asked Abraham suddenly.

  “It was making my skin itch. It was raising hives or something. It was a synthetic, maybe I have an allergy to synthetic fibers, how the hell should I know? What do you say, Ray?”

  “You look like a religious penitent or something.”

  “What do you say? Yes or no?”

  “Maybe I owe McVries a couple.” McVries was still close by, but it was impossible to tell if he could hear their conversation over the din of the crowd. Come on, McVries, he thought. Tell him I don’t owe you anything. Come on, you son of a bitch. But McVries said nothing.

  “All right, count me in,” Garraty said.

  “Cool.”

  Now I’m an animal, nothing but a dirty, tired, stupid animal. You did it. You sold it out.

  “If you try to help anybody, we can’t hold you back. That’s against the rules. But we’ll shut you out. And you’ll have broken your promise.”

  “I won’t try.”

  “Same goes for anyone who tries to help you.”

  “Yuh.”

  “It’s nothing personal. You know that, Ray. But we’re down against it now.”

  “Root hog or die.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Nothing personal. Just back to the jungle.”

  For a second he thought Abraham was going to get pissed, but his quickly drawn-in breath came out in a harmless sigh. Maybe he was too tired to get pissed. “You agreed. I’ll hold you to that, Ray.”

  “Maybe I should get all high-flown and say I’ll keep my promise because my word is my bond,” Garraty said. “But I’ll be honest. I want to see you get that ticket, Abraham. The sooner the better.”

  Abraham licked his lips. “Yeah.”

  “Those look like good shoes, Abe.”

  “Yeah. But they’re too goddam heavy. You buy for distance, you gain the weight.”

  “Just ain’t no cure for the summertime blues, is there?”

  Abraham laughed. Garraty watched McVries. His face was unreadable. He might have heard. He might not have. The rain fell in steady straight lines, heavier now, colder. Abraham’s skin was fish-belly white. Abraham looked more like a convict with his shirt off. Garraty wondered if anyone had told Abraham he didn’t stand a dog’s chance of lasting the night with his shirt off. Twilight already seemed to be creeping in. McVries? Did you hea
r us? I sold you down, McVries. Musketeers forever.

  “Ah, I don’t want to die this way,” Abraham said. He was crying. “Not in public with people rooting for you to get up and walk another few miles. It’s so fucking mindless. Just fucking mindless. This has about as much dignity as a mongoloid idiot strangling on his own tongue and shitting his pants at the same time.”

  It was quarter past three when Garraty gave his no help promise. By six that evening, only one more had gotten a ticket. No one talked. There seemed to be an uncomfortable conspiracy afoot to ignore the last fraying inches of their lives, Garraty thought, to just pretend it wasn’t happening. The groups—what pitiful little remained of them—had broken down completely. Everyone had agreed to Abraham’s proposal. McVries had. Baker had. Stebbins had laughed and asked Abraham if he wanted to prick his finger so he could sign in blood.

  It was growing very cold. Garraty began to wonder if there really was such a thing as a sun, or if he had dreamed it. Even Jan was a dream to him now—a summer dream of a summer that never was.

  Yet he seemed to see his father ever more clearly. His father with the heavy shock of hair he himself had inherited, and the big, meaty truck-driver’s shoulders. His father had been built like a fullback. He could remember his father picking him up, swinging him dizzyingly, rumpling his hair, kissing him. Loving him.

  He hadn’t really seen his mother back there in Freeport at all, he realized sadly, but she had been there—in her shabby black coat, “for best,” the one that showed the white snowfall of dandruff on the collar no matter how often she shampooed. He had probably hurt her deeply by ignoring her in favor of Jan. Perhaps he had even meant to hurt her. But that didn’t matter now. It was past. It was the future that was unraveling, even before it was knit.

  You get in deeper, he thought. It never gets shallower, just deeper, until you’re out of the bay and swimming into the ocean. Once all of this had looked simple. Pretty funny, all right. He had talked to McVries and McVries had told him the first time he had saved him out of pure reflex. Then, in Freeport, it had been to prevent an ugliness in front of a pretty girl he would never know. Just as he would never know Scramm’s wife, heavy with child. Garraty had felt a pang at the thought, and sudden sorrow. He had not thought of Scramm in such a long time. He thought McVries was quite grown-up, really. He wondered why he hadn’t managed to grow up any.

  The Walk went on. Towns marched by.

  He fell into a melancholy, oddly satisfying mood that was shattered quite suddenly by an irregular rattle of gunfire and hoarse screams from the crowd. When he looked around he was stunned to see Collie Parker standing on top of the halftrack with a rifle in his hands.

  One of the soldiers had fallen off and lay staring up at the sky with empty, expressionless eyes. There was a neat blue hole surrounded by a corona of powder burns in the center of his forehead.

  “Goddam bastards!” Parker was screaming. The other soldiers had jumped from the halftrack. Parker looked out over the stunned Walkers. “Come on, you guys! Come on! We can—”

  The Walkers, Garraty included, stared at Parker as if he had begun to speak in a foreign language. And now one of the soldiers who had jumped when Parker swarmed up the side of the ’track now carefully shot Collie Parker in the back.

  “Parker!” McVries screamed. It was as if he alone understood what had happened, and a chance that might have been missed. “Oh, no! Parker!”

  Parker grunted as if someone had hit him in the back with a padded Indian club. The bullet mushroomed and there was Collie Parker, standing on top of the halftrack with his guts all over his torn khaki shirt and blue jeans. One hand was frozen in the middle of a wide, sweeping gesture, as if he was about to deliver an angry philippic.

  “God.

  “Damn,” Parker said.

  He fired the rifle he had wrenched away from the dead soldier twice into the road. The slugs snapped and whined, and Garraty felt one of them tug air in front of his face. Someone in the crowd screamed in pain. Then the gun slid from Parker’s hands. He made an almost military half-turn and then fell to the road where he lay on his side, panting rapidly like a dog that has been struck and mortally wounded by a passing car. His eyes blazed. He opened his mouth and struggled through blood for some coda.

  “You. Ba. Bas. Bast. Ba.” He died, staring viciously at them as they passed by.

  “What happened?” Garraty cried out to no one in particular. “What happened to him?”

  “He snuck up on ’em,” McVries said. “That’s what happened. He must have known he couldn’t make it. He snuck right up behind ’em and caught ’em sleep at the switch.” McVries’s voice hoars ened. “He wanted us all up there with him, Garraty. And I think we could have done it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Garraty asked, suddenly terrified.

  “You don’t know?” McVries asked. “You don’t know?”

  “Up there with him? . . . What? . . .”

  “Forget it. Just forget it.”

  McVries walked away. Garraty had a sudden attack of the shivers. He couldn’t stop them. He didn’t know what McVries was talking about. He didn’t want to know what McVries was talking about. Or even think about it.

  The Walk went on.

  By nine o’clock that night the rain had stopped, but the sky was starless. No one else had gone down, but Abraham had begun to moan inarticulately. It was very cold, but no one offered to give Abraham something to wear. Garraty tried to think of it as poetic justice, but it only made him feel sick. The pain within him had turned into a sickness, a rotten sick feeling that seemed to be growing in the hollows of his body like a green fungus. His concentrate belt was nearly full, but it was all he could do to eat a small tube of tuna paste without gagging.

  Baker, Abraham, and McVries. His circle of friends had come down to those three. And Stebbins, if he was anyone’s friend. Acquaintance, then. Or demi-god. Or devil. Or whatever. He wondered if any of them would be here by morning, and if he would be alive to know.

  Thinking such things, he almost ran into Baker in the dark. Something clinked in Baker’s hands.

  “What you doing?” Garraty asked.

  “Huh?” Baker looked up blankly.

  “What’re you doing?” Garraty repeated patiently.

  “Counting my change.”

  “How much you got?”

  Baker clinked the money in his cupped hands and smiled. “Dollar twenty-two,” he said.

  Garraty grinned. “A fortune. What you going to do with it?”

  Baker didn’t smile back. He looked into the cold darkness dreamily. “Git me one of the big ones,” he said. His light Southern drawl had thickened appreciably. “Git me a lead-lined one with pink silk insides and a white satin headpillow.” He blinked his empty doorknob eyes. “Wouldn’t never rot then, not till Judgment Trump, when we are as we were. Clothed in flesh incorruptible.”

  Garraty felt a warm trickle of horror. “Baker? Have you gone nuts, Baker?”

  “You cain’t beat it. We-uns was all crazy to try. You cain’t beat the rottenness of it. Not in this world. Lead-lined, that’s the ticket . . .”

  “If you don’t get hold of yourself, you’ll be dead by morning.”

  Baker nodded. His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones, giving him the aspect of a skull. “That’s the ticket. I wanted to die. Didn’t you? Isn’t that why?”

  “Shut up!” Garraty yelled. He had the shakes again.

  The road sloped sharply up then, cutting off their talk. Garraty leaned into the hill, cold and hot, his spine hurting, his chest hurting. He was sure his muscles would flatly refuse to support him much longer. He thought of Baker’s lead-lined box, sealed against the dark millennia, and wondered if it would be the last thing he ever thought of. He hoped not, and struggled for some other mental track.

  Warnings cracked out sporadically. The soldiers on the halftrack were back up to the mark; the one Parker had killed had been unobtrusively replaced. The c
rowd cheered monotonously. Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth’s wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.

  How would that be? Just how would that be?

  And suddenly his roiling, agonized muscles, the sweat running down his face, even the pain itself—seemed very sweet and real. Garraty tried harder. He struggled to the top of the hill and gasped raggedly all the way down the far side.

  At 11:40 Marty Wyman bought his hole. Garraty had forgotten all about Wyman, who hadn’t spoken or gestured for the last twenty-four hours. He didn’t die spectacularly. He just lay down and got shot. And someone whispered, that was Wyman. And someone else whispered, that’s eighty-three, isn’t it? And that was all.

  By midnight they were only eight miles from the New Hampshire border. They passed a drive-in theater, a huge white oblong in the darkness. A single slide blazed from the screen: THE MANAGEMENT OF THIS THEATRE SALUTES THIS YEAR’S LONG WALKERS! At 12:20 in the morning it began to rain again, and Abraham began to cough—the same kind of wet, ragged cough that had gotten Scramm not long before he bought out. By one o’clock the rain had become a hard, steady downpour that stung Garraty’s eyes and made his body ache with a kind of internal ague. The wind drove at their backs.

  At quarter past the hour, Bobby Sledge tried to scutter quietly into the crowd under the cover of the dark and the driving rain. He was holed quickly and efficiently. Garraty wondered if the blond soldier who had almost sold him his ticket had done it. He knew the blond was on duty; he had seen his face clearly in the glare from the drive-in spotlights. He wished heartily that the blond had been the one Parker had ticketed.

  At twenty of two Baker fell down and hit his head on the paving. Garraty started to go to him without even thinking. A hand, still strong, clamped on his arm. It was McVries. Of course it would have to be McVries.