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“How many you or I have outlasted doesn’t matter, I think. There comes a time when the will just runs out. Doesn’t matter what I think, see? I used to have a good time smearing away with oil paints. I wasn’t too bad, either. Then one day—bingo. I didn’t taper off, I just stopped. Bingo. There was no urge to go on even another minute. I went to bed one night liking to paint and when I woke up it was nowhere.” “Staying alive hardly qualifies as a hobby.”
“The face of a founding father and the mentality of a syphilitic donkey,” McVries said sadly. “Abraham, how did you get into a balls-up like this?” “Bragged my way in,” Abraham said promptly. He started to go on and the guns interrupted him. There was the familiar mailsack thud.
The lights filled the sky with a bubblelike pastel glow that was frightening and apocalyptic, reminding Garraty of pictures he had seen in the history books of the German air-blitz of the American East Coast during the last days of World War II.
There was a raw redness in that swelling sound of Crowd. A hunger that was numbing. Garraty had a vivid and scary image of the great god Crowd clawing its way out of the Augusta basin on scarlet spider-legs and devouring them all alive.
Only Crowd, a creature with no body, no head, no mind. Crowd was nothing but a Voice and an Eye, and it was not surprising that Crowd was both God and Mammon. Garraty felt it. He knew the others were feeling it. It was like walking between giant electrical pylons, feeling the tingles and shocks stand every hair on end, making the tongue jitter nuttily in the mouth, making the eyes seem to crackle and shoot off sparks as they rolled in their beds of moisture. Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshiped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.
And the Walkers—the strings were not broken on their emotions, only badly out-of-tune. They had cheered wildly with hoarse and totally unheard voices, the thirty-seven of them that were left. The crowd could not know they were cheering but somehow they did, somehow they understood that the circle between death-worship and death-wish had been completed for another year and the crowd went completely loopy, convulsing itself in greater and greater paroxysms. Garraty felt a stabbing, needling pain in the left side of his chest and was still unable to stop cheering, even though he understood he was
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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?”
“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.”
“Bruh,” Garraty said, shivering. “A guy could go crazy.”
“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.
“What makes you think you deserve to win, Garraty? You’re a second-class intellect, a second-class physical specimen, and probably a second-class libido. Garraty, I’d bet my dog and lot you never slipped it to that girl of yours.”
“Virgin, aren’t you? Maybe a little bit queer in the bargain? Touch of the lavender? Don’t be afraid. You can talk to Papa Stebbins.”
weirdo
“I hope it won’t be dark,” Baker said. “That’s all I hope. If there is an… an after, I hope it’s not dark. And I hope you can remember. I’d hate to wander around in the dark forever, not knowing who I was or what I was doin’ there, or not even knowing that I’d ever had anything different.”
She was reaching out to him. Hands touching. Her cool hand. Her tears— His mother. Her hands, reaching— He grasped them. In one hand he held Jan’s hand, in the other his mother’s hand. He touched them. It was done. It was done until McVries’s arm came down around his shoulder again, cruel McVries. “Let me go! Let me go!” “Man, you must really hate her!” McVries screamed in his ear. “What do you want? To die knowing they’re both stinking with your blood? Is that what you want? For Christ’s sake, come on!”
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?
“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.
“Those look like good shoes, Abe.” “Yeah. But they’re too goddam heavy. You buy for distance, you gain the weight.”
“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
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“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?”
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.
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.
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. “No,” he said. “No more musketeers. And now it’s real.” They walked on without looking back.
The guns were shooting again, God, they were shooting at him now, he felt the air from that one, it was over, all over— He snapped full awake and took two running steps, sending jolts of pain all the way up from his feet to his groin before he realized they had been shooting at someone else, and the someone else was dead, facedown in the rain.
Just before dawn, three of them went down at once. The mouth of the crowd roared and belched anew with enthusiasm as the bodies spun and thumped like chunks of cut cordwood. To Garraty it seemed the beginning of a dreadful chain reaction that might sweep through them and finish them all. But it ended. It ended with Abraham crawling on his knees, eyes turned blindly up to the halftrack and the crowd beyond, mindless and filled with confused pain. They were the eyes of a sheep caught in a barbed wire fence. Then he fell on his face. His heavy Oxfords drummed fitfully against the wet road and
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Stebbins was now walking beside him. My guardian angel, Garraty thought wryly. As Garraty watched, Stebbins smiled widely and crammed two crackers smeared with peanut butter into his mouth. He ate noisily. Garraty felt sick. “Wassa matter?” Stebbins asked around his sticky mouthful. “Can’t take it?”
Ass
“What’ll you do if you win, Stebbins?” McVries asked. Stebbins laughed. In the rain, his thin, fuzzed face, lined with fatigue, looked lionlike. “What do you think? Get a big yella Cadillac with a purple top and a color TV with stereo speakers for every room of the house?” “I’d expect,” McVries said, “that you’d donate two or three hundred grand to the Society for Intensifying Cruelty to Animals.”
“Garraty,” Stebbins said amiably, “why don’t you go have sex with your mother?” “Sorry, you’re not pushing the right button anymore.”
Stebbins was totally mad. His low-pitched voice rose to a pulpit shout. “How come I know so much about the Long Walk? I know all about the Long Walk! I ought to! The Major is my father, Garraty! He’s my father!”
“It’s true,” Stebbins said, almost genially, “I’m his bastard. You see… I didn’t think he knew. I didn’t think he knew I was his son. That was where I made my mistake. He’s a randy old sonofabitch, is the Major. I understand he’s got dozens of little bastards. What I wanted was to spring it on him—spring it on the world. Surprise, surprise. And when I won, the Prize I was going to ask for was to be taken into my father’s house.”
Garraty’s head seemed to be playing jazz. Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Cannonball Adderly—the Banned Noisemakers that everybody kept under the table and played when the party got noisy and drunk.
It seemed that he had once been loved, once he himself had loved. But now it was just jazz and the rising drumbeat in his head and his mother had only been stuffed straw in a fur coat, Jan nothing but a department store dummy. It was over. Even if he won, if he managed to outlast McVries and Stebbins and Baker, it was over. He was never going home again.
“If you win, will you do something for me? I’m scairt to ask anyone else.” And Baker made a sweeping gesture at the deserted road as if the Walk was still rich with its dozens. For a chilling moment Garraty wondered if maybe they were all there still, walking ghosts that Baker could now see in his moment of extremis. “Anything.” Baker put a hand on Garraty’s shoulder, and Garraty began weeping uncontrollably. It seemed that his heart would burst out of his chest and weep its own tears. Baker said, “Lead-lined.”
He tried to pick McVries up, but, thin as he was, McVries was much too heavy. McVries wouldn’t even look at him. His eyes were shut. And suddenly two of the soldiers were wrenching McVries away from him. They were putting their guns to McVries’s head. “No!” Garraty screamed again. “Me! Me! Shoot me!” But instead, they gave him his third warning. McVries opened his eyes and smiled again. The next instant, he was gone.
“Let it go, then,” Stebbins said, and smiled winningly. “If there are such things as souls, his is still close. You could catch up.” Garraty looked at Stebbins and said, “I’m going to walk you into the ground.” Oh, Pete, he thought. He didn’t even have any tears left to cry. “Are you?” Stebbins said. “We’ll see.”
