The Long Walk

by Richard Bachman

For the next ten minutes none of them said anything sensible. They aped conversation and watched Percy watching the soldiers, watching and mentally gauging the short distance to the thick woods. “He hasn’t got the guts,” Pearson muttered finally, and before any of them could answer, Percy began walking, slowly and unhurriedly, toward the woods. Two steps, then three. One more, two at the most, and he would be there. His jeans-clad legs moved unhurriedly. His sun-bleached blond hair ruffled just a little in a light puff of breeze. He might have been an Explorer Scout out for a day of bird-watching. There were no warnings. Percy had forfeited his right to them when his right foot passed over the verge of the shoulder. Percy had left the road, and the soldiers had known all along. Old Percy What’s-His-Name hadn’t been fooling anybody. There was one sharp, clean report, and Garraty jerked his eyes from Percy to the soldier standing on the back deck of the halftrack. The soldier was a sculpture in clean, angular lines, the rifle nestled into the hollow of his shoulder, his head half-cocked along the barrel. Then his head swiveled back to Percy again. Percy was the real show, wasn’t he? Percy was standing with both his feet on the weedy border of the pine forest now. He was as frozen and as sculpted as the man who had shot him. The two of them together would have been a subject for Michelangelo, Garraty thought. Percy stood utterly still under a blue springtime sky. One hand was...

“Probably he’s loaded up with perishables headed for Montreal,” Garraty said. “All the way from Boston. We forced him off the road. He’s probably afraid he’ll lose his job—or his rig, if he’s an independent.” “Isn’t that tough?” Collie Parker brayed. “Isn’t that too goddam tough? They only been tellin’ people what the route was gonna be for two months or more. Just another goddam hick, that’s all!” “You seem to know a lot about it,” Abraham said to Garraty. “A little,” Garraty said, staring at Parker. “My father drove a rig before he got… before he went away. It’s a hard job to make a buck in. Probably that guy back there thought he had time to make it to the next cutoff. He wouldn’t have come this way if there was a shorter route.”

Up ahead, the guns cracked out their single word. A body spun, flipped over, and lay still. Two soldiers dragged it over to the side of the road. A third tossed them a bodybag from the halftrack.

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. After he lost his own rig, he made a living driving Government trucks out of Brunswick. It would have been a good living if Jim Garraty could have kept his politics to himself. But when you work for the Government, the Government is twice as aware that you’re alive, twice as ready to call in a Squad if things seem a little dicky around the edges. And Jim Garraty had not been much of a Long Walk booster. So one day he got a telegram and the next day two soldiers turned up on the doorstep and Jim Garraty had gone with them, blustering, and his wife had closed the door and her cheeks had been pale as milk and when Garraty asked his mother where Daddy was going with the soldier mens, she had slapped him hard enough to make his mouth bleed and told him to shut up, shut up. Garraty had never seen his father since. It had been eleven years. It had been a neat removal. Odorless, sanitized, pasteurized, sanforized, and dandruff-free.

At that moment the rifles went again. “There goes one more,” Scramm said. His voice sounded clogged and nasal, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Thirty-four,” Pearson said. He took a penny out of one pocket and put it in the other. “I brought along ninety-nine pennies. Every time someone buys a ticket, I put one of ’em in the other pocket. And when—” “That’s gruesome!” Olson said. His haunted eyes stared balefully at Pearson. “Where’s your death watch? Where’s your voodoo dolls?”

“Death is great for the appetites,” McVries said. “How about those two girls and Gribble? They wanted to see what screwing a dead man felt like. Now for Something Completely New and Different. I don’t know if Gribble got much out of it, but they sure as shit did. It’s the same with anybody. It doesn’t matter if they’re eating or drinking or sitting on their cans. They like it better, they feel it and taste it better because they’re watching dead men. “But even that’s not the real point of this little expedition, Garraty. The point is, they’re the smart ones. They’re not getting thrown to the lions. They’re not staggering along and hoping they won’t have to take a shit with two warnings against them. You’re dumb, Garraty. You and me and Pearson and Barkovitch and Stebbins, we’re all dumb. Scramm’s dumb because he thinks he understands and he doesn’t. Olson’s dumb because he understood too much too late. They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”

Two more of them had gone down between eight-thirty and nine; one of them had been the Wayne that the gas jockey had been cheering for a ways back. But they had come ninety-nine miles with just thirty-six gone.

“Pete?” “What?” “If you had it to do all over again… if you knew you could get this far and still be walking… would you do it?” McVries put his hands down and stared at Garraty. “Are you kidding? You must be.” “No, I’m serious.” “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.”

In the crowd-hushed stillness the sound was shockingly loud and he could hear someone screaming. Now you know, he thought, you live long enough to hear the sound of the guns, long enough to hear yourself screaming— But one of his feet kicked a small stone then and there was pain and it wasn’t him that had bought it, it was 64, a pleasant, smiling boy named Frank Morgan. They were dragging Frank Morgan off the road. His glasses were dragging and bouncing on the pavement, still hooked stubbornly over one ear. The left lens had been shattered.

The huge crowd dwindled a little as they walked out of the radius of TV cameras and microphones, but it did not disappear or even break up into isolated knots of spectators. The crowd had come now, and the crowd was here to stay. The people who made it up merged into one anonymous Crowd Face, a vapid, eager visage that duplicated itself mile by mile. It peopled doorsteps, lawns, driveways, picnic areas, gas station tarmacs (where enterprising owners had charged admission), and, in the next town they passed through, both sides of the street and the parking lot of the town’s supermarket. The Crowd Face mugged and gibbered and cheered, but always remained essentially the same. It watched voraciously as Wyman squatted to make his bowels work. Men, women, and children, the Crowd Face was always the same, and Garraty tired of it quickly.

“I’m not the caterpillar, anyway,” Stebbins said with a small, somehow secretive smile. “I’m more the white rabbit type, don’t you think? Except I left my gold watch at home and no one has invited me to tea. At least, to the best of my knowledge, no one has. Maybe that’s what I’ll ask for when I win. When they ask me what I want for my prize, I’ll say, ‘Why, I want to be invited home for tea.’ ”

“You reach a certain point,” Stebbins said, “when the crowd ceases to matter, either as an incentive or a drawback. It ceases to be there. Like a man on a scaffold, I think. You burrow away from the crowd.” “I think I understand that,” Garraty said. He felt timid. “If you understood it, you wouldn’t have gone into hysterics back there and needed your friend to save your ass. But you will.” “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.

Garraty didn’t want to walk with Stebbins anymore, not right now. Stebbins made him uneasy. He could only take Stebbins in small doses. He walked faster, leaving Stebbins by himself again. 10:02. In twenty-three minutes he could drop a warning, but for now he was still walking with three. It didn’t scare him the way he had thought it would. 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. Maybe he would eventually come to understand the untruth of that emotionally as well as intellectually… maybe that was the final depth of which Stebbins had spoken. It was a shivery, unwelcome thought.

“Don’t hurt me!” someone screamed. “Please don’t hurt me!” It was a redhead with a plaid shirt tied around his waist. He had stopped in the middle of the road and he was weeping. He was given first warning. And then he raced toward the halftrack, his tears cutting runnels through the sweaty dirt on his face, red hair glinting like a fire in the sun. “Don’t… I can’t… please… my mother… I can’t… don’t… no more… my feet…” He was trying to scale the side, and one of the soldiers brought the butt of his carbine down on his hands. The boy cried out and fell in a heap. He screamed again, a high, incredibly thin note that seemed sharp enough to shatter glass and what he was screaming was: “My feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—” “Jesus,” Garraty muttered. “Why doesn’t he stop that?” The screams went on and on. “I doubt if he can,” McVries said clinically. “The back treads of the halftrack ran over his legs.” Garraty looked and felt his stomach lurch into his throat. It was true. No wonder the redheaded kid was screaming about his feet. They had been obliterated. “Warning! Warning 38!” “—eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—” “I want to go home,” someone behind Garraty said very quietly. “Oh Christ, do I ever want to go home.” A moment later the redheaded boy’s face was blown away.

“She love you? Your girl? Jan?” “Yeah, I think so,” Garraty said. McVries shook his head slowly. “All of that romantic horseshit… you know, it’s true. At least, for some people for some short time, it is. It was for me. I felt like you.”

“These things, they don’t even bear the weight of conversation,” he said. “J. D. Salinger… John Knowles… even James Kirkwood and that guy Don Bredes… they’ve destroyed being an adolescent, Garraty. If you’re a sixteen-year-old boy, you can’t discuss the pains of adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon.”

“We got separate apartments in Newark. Great town, Newark, on a given day you can smell all the cowshit in New Jersey in Newark. Our parents kicked a little, but with separate apartments and good summer jobs, they didn’t kick too much. My place was with two other guys, and there were three girls in with Pris. We left on June the third in my car, and we stopped once around three in the afternoon at a motel and got rid of the virginity problem. I felt like a real crook. She didn’t really want to screw, but she wanted to please me. That was the Shady Nook motel. When we were done I flushed that Trojan down the Shady Nook john and washed out my mouth with a Shady Nook paper cup. It was all very romantic, very ethereal.

“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?”

“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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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 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.

“How tough it’s going to be for the second-to-last guy.” “Why so tough?” McVries asked. “Well…” Pearson rubbed his eyes, then squinted at a pine tree that had been struck by lightning some time in the past. “You know, to walk down everybody, absolutely everybody but that last guy. There ought to be a runner-up Prize, that’s what I think.” “What?” McVries asked flatly. “I dunno.” “How about his life?” Garraty asked. “Who’d walk for that?” “Nobody, before the Walk started, maybe. But right now I’d be happy enough with just that, the hell with the Prize, the hell with having my every heart’s desire.

He was very hot and very tired, and there were the remotest beginnings of a headache in back of his eyes. Maybe this is how sunstroke starts, he thought. Maybe that would be the best way, too. Just go down in a dreamy, slow-motion half-knowingness, and wake up dead.

The sun seemed neatly poised on the roof of the world. The mercury reached seventy-nine degrees (one of the boys had a pocket thermometer) and eighty trembled in its grasp for a few broiling minutes. Eighty, Garraty thought. Eighty. Not that hot. In July the mercury would go ten degrees higher. Eighty. Just the right temperature to sit in the backyard under an elm tree eating a chicken salad on lettuce. Mighty. Just the ticket for belly-flopping into the nearest piece of the Royal River, oh Jesus, wouldn’t that feel good. The water was warm on the top, but down by your feet it was cold and you could feel the current pull at you just a little and there were suckers by the rocks, but you could pick ’em off if you weren’t a pussy. All that water, bathing your skin, your hair, your crotch. His hot flesh trembled as he thought about it. Eighty. Just right for shucking down to your swim trunks and laying up in the canvas hammock in the backyard with a good book. And maybe drowse off. Once he had pulled Jan into the hammock with him and they had lain there together, swinging and necking until his cock felt like a long hot stone against his lower belly. She hadn’t seemed to mind. Eighty. Christ in a Chevrolet, eighty degrees.

The guns went off and he didn’t even jump. The boy in the green silk vest had bought a ticket, and he was staring up at the sun. Not even death was that bad, maybe. Everybody, even the Major himself, had to face it sooner or later. So who was swindling who, when you came right down to it?

The guns cracked, a small popgun sound almost lost in the thunder and the wind. Garraty jerked his head around, the premonition that Olson had finally bought his bullet strong upon him. But Olson was still there, his flapping clothes revealing how amazingly fast the weight had melted off him. Olson had lost his jacket somewhere; the arms that poked out of his short shirtsleeves were bony and as thin as pencils. It was somebody else who was being dragged off. The face was small and exhausted and very dead beneath the whipping mane of his hair.

“Yoo-hoo! Raymond! Raymond Garraty!” Garraty’s head jerked up. For one awful moment he thought it was his mother, and visions of Percy danced through his head. But it was only an elderly, sweet-faced lady peeping at him from beneath a Vogue magazine she was using as a rainhat. “Old bag,” Art Baker muttered at his elbow. “She looks sweet enough to me. Do you know her?” “I know the type,” Baker said balefully. “She looks just like my Aunt Hattie. She used to like to go to funerals, listen to the weeping and wailing and carrying-ons with just that same smile. Like a cat that got into the aigs.” “She’s probably the Major’s mother,” Garraty said. It was supposed to be funny, but it fell flat. Baker’s face was strained and pallid under the fading light in the rushing sky. “My Aunt Hattie had nine kids. Nine, Garraty. She buried four of ’em with just that same look. Her own young. Some folks like to see other folks die. I can’t understand that, can you?” “No,” Garraty said. Baker was making him uneasy. The thunder had begun to roll its wagons across the sky again. “Your Aunt Hattie, is she dead now?” “No.” Baker looked up at the sky. “She’s down home. Probably out on the front porch in her rockin’ chair. She can’t walk much anymore. Just sittin’ and rockin’ and listenin’ to the bulletins on the radio. And smilin’ each time she hears the new figures.” Baker rubbed his elbows with his palms. “You ever see a cat eat its own kittens, Garraty?”

“Some people say they don’t care,” Baker said suddenly. “ ‘Something simple, that’s all I want when I go, Don.’ That’s what they’d tell him. My uncle. But most of ’em care plenty. That’s what he always told me. They say, ‘Just a pine box will do me fine.’ But they end up having a big one… with a lead sleeve if they can afford it. Lots of them even write the model number in their wills.” “Why?” Garraty asked. “Down home, most of them want to be buried in mausoleums. Aboveground. They don’t want to be underground ’cause the water table’s so high where I come from. Things rot quick in the damp. But if you’re buried aboveground, you got the rats to worry about. Big Louisiana bayou rats. Graveyard rats. They’d gnaw through one of them pine boxes in zip flat.”

In a space of five seconds they were being pelted by hailstones the size of small pebbles. Several of the boys cried out, and Garraty shielded his eyes with one hand. The wind rose to a shriek. Hailstones bounced and smashed against the road, against faces and bodies. Jensen ran in a huge, rambling circle, eyes covered, feet stumbling and rebounding against each other, in a total panic. He finally blundered off the shoulder, and the soldiers on the halftrack pumped half a dozen rounds into the undulating curtain of hail before they could be sure. Goodbye, Jensen, Garraty thought. Sorry, man.

Maybe the crowds provided some warmth. Radiant heat, or something. More and more of them lined the road. They were huddled together for warmth but were undemonstrative. They watched the Walkers go past and then went home or hurried on to the next vantage point. If it was blood the crowds were looking for, they hadn’t gotten much of it. They had lost only two since Jensen, both of them younger boys who had simply fainted dead away. That put them exactly halfway. No… really more than half. Fifty down, forty-nine to go. Garraty was walking by himself. He was too cold to be sleepy. His lips were pressed together to keep the tremble out of them. Olson was still back there; halfhearted bets had gone round to the effect that Olson would be the fiftieth to buy a ticket, the halfway boy. But he hadn’t. That signal honor had gone to 13, Roger Fenum. Unlucky old 13.

Garraty was beginning to think that Olson would go on indefinitely. Maybe until he starved to death. He had locked himself safely away in a place beyond pain. In a way he supposed it would be poetic justice if Olson won. He could see the headlines: LONG WALK WON BY DEAD MAN.

“Ask your cracker friend, Art Baker. A mule doesn’t like to plow. But he likes carrots. So you hang a carrot in front of his eyes. A mule without a carrot gets exhausted. A mule with a carrot spends a long time being tired. You get it?” “No.” Stebbins smiled again. “You will. Watch Olson. He’s lost his appetite for the carrot. He doesn’t quite know it yet, but he has. Watch Olson, Garraty. You can learn from Olson.” Garraty looked at Stebbins closely, not sure how seriously to take him. Stebbins laughed aloud. His laugh was rich and full—a startling sound that made other Walkers turn their heads. “Go on. Go talk to him, Garraty. And if he won’t talk, just get up close and have a good look. It’s never too late to learn.” Garraty swallowed. “Is it a very important lesson, would you say?” Stebbins stopped laughing. He caught Garraty’s wrist in a strong grip. “The most important lesson you’ll ever learn, maybe. The secret of life over death. Reduce that equation and you can afford to die, Garraty. You can spend your life like a drunkard on a spree.”

Once, a long time ago, he had been frightened into a long night of wakefulness by a movie starring—who? It had been Robert Mitchum, hadn’t it? He had been playing the role of an implacable Southern revival minister who had also been a compulsive murderer. In silhouette, Olson looked a little bit like him now. His form had seemed to elongate as the weight sloughed off him. His skin had gone scaly with dehydration. His eyes had sunk into hollowed sockets. His hair flew aimlessly on his skull like wind-driven cornsilk. Why, he’s nothing but a robot, nothing but an automation, really. Can there still be an Olson in there hiding? No. He’s gone. I am quite sure that the Olson who sat on the grass and joked and told about the kid who froze on the starting line and bought his ticket right there, that Olson is gone. This is a dead clay thing.

The first gunshots rang out. There was a loud, yipping scream that was drowned by more gunshots. And at the brow of the hill they got one more. Garraty could see nothing in the dark. His tortured pulse hammered in his temples. He found that he didn’t give a fuck who had bought it this time. It didn’t matter. Only the pain mattered, the tearing pain in his legs and lungs.

Olson’s eyes moved jerkily in their sockets, as if long rusted and in need of oil. His mouth fell open with a nearly audible clunk. “That’s it,” Garraty whispered eagerly. “Talk. Talk to me, Olson. Tell me. Tell me.” “Ah,” Olson said. “Ah. Ah.” Garraty moved even closer. He put a hand on Olson’s shoulder and leaned into an evil nimbus of sweat, halitosis, and urine. “Please,” Garraty said. “Try hard.” “Ga. Go. God. God’s garden—” “God’s garden,” Garraty repeated doubtfully. “What about God’s garden, Olson?” “It’s full. Of. Weeds,” Olson said sadly. His head bounced against his chest. “I.” Garraty said nothing. He could not. They were going up another hill now and he was panting again. Olson did not seem to be out of breath at all. “I don’t. Want. To die,” Olson finished.

“Garraty?” “What?” Garraty said more quietly. “Je. Jesus will save you.” Olson’s head came up all the way. He began to walk off the road. He was walking at the halftrack. “Warning. Warning 70!” Olson never slowed. There was a ruinous dignity about him. The gabble of the crowd quieted. They watched, wide-eyed. Olson never hesitated. He reached the soft shoulder. He put his hands over the side of the halftrack. He began to clamber painfully up the side. “Olson!” Abraham yelled, startled. “Hey, that’s Hank Olson!” The soldiers brought their guns around in perfect four-part harmony. Olson grabbed the barrel of the closest and yanked it out of the hands that held it as if it had been an ice-cream stick. It clattered off into the crowd. They shrank from it, screaming, as if it had been a live adder. Then one of the other three guns went off. Garraty saw the flash at the end of the barrel quite clearly. He saw the jerky ripple of Olson’s shirt as the bullet entered his belly and then punched out the back.

The blue snakes of Olson’s intestines were slowly slipping through his fingers. They dropped like link sausages against his groin, where they flapped obscenely. He stopped, bent over as if to retrieve them (retrieve them, Garraty thought in a near ecstasy of wonder and horror), and threw up a huge glut of blood and bile. He began to walk again, bent over. His face was sweetly calm.

Olson went to his knees. His head hung between his arms, which were propped on the road. One of the rifles roared, and a bullet clipped asphalt beside Olson’s left hand and whined away. He began to climb slowly, wearily, to his feet again. They’re playing with him, Garraty thought. All of this must be terribly boring for them, so they are playing with Olson. Is Olson fun, boys? Is Olson keeping you amused?

Olson got to his feet. He stood astride the white line. He raised both hands up into the sky. The crowd sighed softly. “I DID IT WRONG!” Olson shouted tremblingly, and then fell flat and dead. The soldiers on the halftrack put another two bullets in him and then dragged him busily off the road.

“The reason all of this is so horrible,” McVries said, “is because it’s just trivial. You know? We’ve sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren’t mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope.”

“They’ll drop out tonight,” he said. “They’ll go like bugs on a wall tonight.” “I wouldn’t count on it,” Collie Parker said, and now he sounded worn and tired—subdued at last. “Why not?” “It’s like shaking a box of crackers through a sieve, Garraty. The crumbs fall through pretty fast. Then the little pieces break up and they go, too. But the big crackers”—Parker’s grin was a crescent flash of saliva-coated teeth in the darkness—“the whole crackers have to bust off a crumb at a time.”

Garraty looked up, half-stupefied and a little sweaty in spite of the night chill. Someone had hollered. The guns were centered on a small, nearly portly figure. It looked like Barkovitch. They fired in neat unison, and the small, nearly portly figure was thrown across two lanes like a limp laundry sack. The bepimpled moon face was not Barkovitch’s. To Garraty the face looked rested, at peace.

He began to doze again, and this time it was the image of Jan that came. For a while he had forgotten all about her. In a way, he thought disjointedly, it was better to doze than to sleep. The pain in his feet and his legs seemed to belong to someone else to whom he was tethered only loosely, and with just a little effort he could regulate his thoughts. Put them to work for him. He built her image slowly in his mind. Her small feet. Her sturdy but completely feminine legs—small calves swelling to full earthy peasant thighs. Her waist was small, her breasts full and proud. The intelligent, rounded planes of her face. Her long blond hair. Whore’s hair he thought it for some reason. Once he had told her that—it had simply slipped out and he thought she would be angry, but she had not replied at all. He thought she had been secretly pleased…

“Joe and Mike? The leather-jacket guys everybody thought was queer for each other? They’re Hopis. I think that was what Scramm was trying to tell us before, and we weren’t gettin’ him. But… see… what I hear is that they’re brothers.” Garraty’s jaw dropped. “I walked up and took a good look at ’em,” Baker was going on. “And I’ll be goddamned if they don’t look like brothers.” “That’s twisted,” McVries said angrily. “That’s fucking twisted! Their folks ought to be Squaded for allowing something like that!” “You ever know any Indians?” Baker asked quietly. “Not unless they came from Passaic,” McVries said. He still sounded angry. “There’s a Seminole reservation down home, across the state line,” Baker said. “They’re funny people. They don’t think of things like ‘responsibility’ the same way we do. They’re proud. And poor. I guess those things are the same for the Hopis as they are for the Seminoles. And they know how to die.” “None of that makes it right,” McVries said. “They come from New Mexico,” Baker said. “It’s an abortion,” McVries said with finality, and Garraty tended to agree.

The night had passed in a dream-sequence of odd names on the reflectorized overhead signs. Veazie. Bangor. Hermon. Jampden. Winterport. The soldiers had made only two kills, and Garraty was beginning to accept the truth of Parker’s cracker analogy.

“Sure, sure.” Barkovitch’s hand tightened convulsively on Garraty’s sleeve, pulling it like the emergency-stop cord on a bus. “I’ll send her enough bread to keep her in clover the rest of her life. I just wanted to tell you… make you see… a guy’s got to have some friends… a guy’s got to have a crowd, you know? Who wants to die hated, if you got to die, that’s the way I look at it. I… I…” “Sure, right.” Garraty began to drop back, feeling like a coward, still hating Barkovitch but somehow feeling sorry for him at the same time. “Thanks a lot.” It was the touch of human in Barkovitch that scared him. For some reason it scared him. He didn’t know why.