The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

He had also taught her how to rhumba and cha-cha, skills he had learned on endless Saturday mornings at Mrs. Amelia Dorgens’s School for Modern Dance… that had been his mother’s idea, one he had objected to strenuously. His mother had stuck to her guns, thank God.

“You have those in Maine?” McVries asked. “Well, it’s a small state capital, okay?” Garraty said, smiling.

Garraty watched apathetically and thought, even the horror wears thin. There’s a surfeit even of death.

The harmonica player started in satirically on Taps and somebody—Collie Parker, by the sound—told him angrily to shut the fuck up.

“Ray.” McVries was tugging at his sleeve. “He won’t tell me, Pete, make him tell me, make him say his name—” “Don’t bother him,” McVries said. “He’s dying, don’t bother him.”

He stepped up his pace a little, approaching McVries, who was walking with his chin against his breast, his eyes half-open but glazed and vacant, more asleep than awake. A thin, delicate cord of saliva hung from the corner of his mouth, picking up the first tremulous touch of dawn with pearly, beautiful fidelity. Garraty stared at this strange phenomenon, fascinated. He didn’t want to wake McVries out of his doze. For the time being it was enough to be close to someone he liked, someone else who had made it through the night.

“I’m all done with that stuff,” Garraty said. “I got a girl up ahead. I’m going to be a good boy from now on.” “Sinless in thought, word, and deed,” McVries said sententiously.

Garraty caught sight of Barkovitch again and wondered if Barkovitch wasn’t really one of the smart ones. With no friends you had no grief.

“It’s a fake,” McVries said, his voice trembling. “There’s no winner, no Prize. They take the last guy out behind a barn somewhere and shoot him too.”

“I guess so, yeah,” Garraty said. “I myself have passed the point where I’d want to invite him home for tea.”

“You feel any better?” he asked McVries hesitantly. “Sure,” McVries said. “Great. I’m just going to walk along and watch them drop all around me. What fun it is. I just did all the division in my head—math was my good subject in school—and I figure we should be able to make at least three hundred and twenty miles at the rate we’re going. That’s not even a record distance.”

“We’re funny up here,” Garraty said. “We think it’s fun to breathe real air instead of smog.”

“Now boys,” McVries said. He had recovered and was his old sardonic self again. “Why don’t you settle this like gentlemen? First one to get his head blown off has to buy the other one a beer.” “I hate beer,” Garraty said automatically.

He had lived in Maine all his life, in a little town called Porterville, just west of Freeport. Population 970 and not so much as a blinker light

Garraty’s father used to say Porterville was the only town in the county with more graveyards than people.

“You don’t get used to it,” Baker said, slinging his light jacket over his arm. “You just learn to live with it.”

The faces of these girls were hot, flushed, and excited by something ancient, sinuous, and, to Garraty, erotic almost to the point of insanity. He felt animal lust rising in him, an aggressively alive thing that made his body shake with a palsied fever all its own.

Oh Christ, it would soak through his pants and someone would notice. Notice and point a finger and ask him how he’d like to walk around the neighborhood with no clothes on, walk naked, walk… and walk… and walk…

“Is that right?” Garraty asked crossly. “How come everybody else around here knows so much more about it than me?” “Because you’re so sweet,” McVries said tenderly, and then he sped up, letting his legs catch the downgrade, and passed Garraty by.

“Let this ground be seeded with salt,” McVries said suddenly, very rapidly. “So that no stalk of corn or stalk of wheat shall ever grow. Cursed be the children of this ground and cursed be their loins. Also cursed be their hams and hocks. Hail Mary full of grace, let us blow this goddam place.”

“My father drove a rig before he got… before he went away.

“Your father took off on your mother?” McVries asked Garraty. “My dad was Squaded,” Garraty said shortly.

His father had been a goddam fool, all right. A goddam drunkard who could not keep two cents together in the same place for long no matter what he tried his hand at, a man without the sense to keep his political opinions to himself. Garraty felt old and sick.

Parker studied Garraty for a long moment. His face was broad and beaded with sweat, his eyes still arrogant. Then he clapped Garraty briefly on the arm. “I got a loose lip sometimes. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Okay?” Garraty nodded wearily, and Parker shifted his glance to McVries. “Piss on you, Jack,” he said, and moved up again toward the vanguard. “What an unreal bastard,” McVries said glumly. “No worse than Barkovitch,” Abraham said. “Maybe even a little better.”

His father had been a sandy-haired giant with a booming voice and a bellowing laugh that had sounded to Garraty’s small ears like mountains cracking open.

He laughed again. Garraty stared at him, fascinated. “Go on,” someone said. “You’re at second base, McVries. Want to try for third?”

“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?”

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.

“Aren’t you eating anything?” McVries asked. “I’m making myself wait.” “For what?” “Nine-thirty.” McVries eyed him thoughtfully. “The old self-discipline bit?” Garraty shrugged, ready for the backlash of sarcasm, but McVries only went on looking at him.

“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.”

“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 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.

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.

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.

“How far do you burrow, I wonder?” “How deep are you?” “I don’t know.” “Well, that’s something you’ll get to find out, too. Plumb the unplumbed depths of Garraty. Sounds almost like a travel ad, doesn’t it? You burrow until you hit bedrock. Then you burrow into the bedrock. And finally you get to the bottom. And then you buy out. That’s my idea. Let’s hear yours.” Garraty said nothing. Right at present, he had no ideas.

The Walk went on. The heat went on. The sun hung suspended just above the line of trees the road cut its way through.

Garraty didn’t want to walk with Stebbins anymore, not right now. Stebbins made him uneasy. He could only take Stebbins in small doses.

There was still the unshakable, blind assurances that this organism Ray Garraty could not die. The others could die, they were extras in the movie of his life, but not Ray Garraty, star of that long-running hit film, The Ray Garraty Story.

Fifteen minutes went by, then twenty. McVries didn’t say anything. Garraty cleared his throat twice but said nothing. He thought that the longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence. Probably McVries was pissed that he had saved his ass now. Probably McVries had repented of it. That made Garraty’s stomach quiver emptily. It was all hopeless and stupid and pointless, most of all that, so goddam pointless it was really pitiful.

“I told you, fair is fair, square is square, and quits are quits,” McVries said evenly. “I won’t do it again. I want you to know that.”

I was the original Korny Kid, Moon-June was my middle name. I used to kiss her fingers. I even took to reading Keats to her out in back of the house, when the wind was right.

“You’re cheating what you felt,” Garraty said. “Ah, you’re the one faking it, Ray, not that it matters. All you remember is the Great Romance, not all the times you went home and jerked your meat after whispering words of love in her shell-pink ear.” “You fake your way, I’ll fake mine.”

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.

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.

The vanguard was in plain sight: two tall, tanned boys with black leather jackets tied around their waists. The word was that they were queer for each other, but Garraty believed that like he believed the moon was green cheese. They didn’t look effeminate, and they seemed like nice enough guys… not that either one of those things had much to do with whether or not they were queer, he supposed. And not that it was any of his business if they were. But…

The watermelon was cold, cold. Some of the juice got up his nose, some more ran down his chin, and oh sweet heaven in his throat, running down his throat. He only let himself eat half. “Pete!” he shouted, and tossed the remaining chunk to him. McVries caught it with a flashy backhand, showing the sort of stuff that makes college shortstops and, maybe, major league ballplayers. He grinned at Garraty and ate the melon.

“If it was a tailwind we could be in Oldtown by four-thirty!” Barkovitch said gleefully. He had his rainhat jammed down over his ears, and his sharp face was joyful and demented. Garraty suddenly understood. He reminded himself to tell McVries. Barkovitch was crazy.

Maybe the crowds provided some warmth. Radiant heat, or something.

It made him think of a story his mother had read him when he was small. It was about a mermaid who wanted to be a woman. Only she had a tail and a good fairy or someone said she could have legs if she wanted them badly enough. Every step she took on dry land would be like walking on knives, but she could have them if she wanted them, and she said yeah, okay, and that was the Long Walk.

“God’s garden,” Garraty repeated doubtfully. “What about God’s garden, Olson?” “It’s full. Of. Weeds,” Olson said sadly.