The long walk Read online

  “You know what you can do with Rule 8,” Olson said with a pallid smile.

  “Watch out,” McVries grinned, “you're starting to sound pretty lively again.”

  By 7 PM the pace, which had been lagging very close to the minimum limit, began to pick up a little. It was cool and if you walked faster you kept warmer. They passed beneath a turnpike overpass, and several people cheered them around mouthfuls of Dunkin' Donuts from the glass-walled shop situated near the base of the exit ramp.

  “We join up with the turnpike someplace, don't we?” Baker asked.

  “In Oldtown,” Garraty said. “Approximately one hundred and twenty miles.”

  Harkness whistled through his teeth.

  Not long after that, they walked into downtown Caribou. They were forty four miles from their starting point.

  CHAPTER 4

  “The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant was killed”

  —Chuck Barns. MC of The Gong Show

  Everyone was disappointed with Caribou.

  It was just like Limestone.

  The crowds were bigger, but otherwise it was just another mill-pulp-and-service town with a scattering of stores and gas stations, one shopping center that was having, according to the signs plastered everywhere, OUR ANNUAL WALK-IN FOR VALUES SALE!, and a park with a war memorial in it. A small, evil-sounding high school band struck up the National Anthem, then a medley of Sousa marches, and then, with taste so bad it was almost grisly, Marching to Pretoria.

  The same woman who had made a fuss at the crossroads so far back turned up again. She was still looking for Percy. This time she made it through the police cordon and right onto the road. She pawed through the boys, unintentionally tripping one of them up. She was yelling for her Percy to come home now. The soldiers went for their guns, and for a moment it looked very much as if Percy's mom was going to buy herself an interference ticket. Then a cop got an armlock on her and dragged her away. A small boy sat on a KEEP MAINE TIDY barrel and ate a hotdog and watched the cops put Percy's mom in a police cruiser. Percy's mom was the high point of going through Caribou.

  “What comes after Oldtown, Ray?” McVries asked.

  “I'm not a walking roadmap,” Garraty said irritably. “Bangor, I guess. Then Augusta. Then Kittery and the state line, about three hundred and thirty miles from here. Give or take. Okay? I'm picked clean.”

  Somebody whistled. “Three hundred and thirty miles.”

  “It's unbelievable,” Harkness said gloomily.

  “The whole damn thing is unbelievable,” McVries said. “I wonder where the Major is?”

  “Shacked up in Augusta,” Olson said.

  They all grinned, and Garraty reflected how strange it was about the Major, who had gone from God to Mammon in just ten hours.

  Ninety-five left. But that wasn't even the worst anymore. The worst was trying to visualize McVries buying it, or Baker. Or Harkness with his silly book idea. His mind shied away from the thought.

  Once Caribou was behind them, the road became all but deserted. They walked through a country crossroads with a single lightpole rearing high above, spotlighting them and making crisp black shadows as they passed through the glare. Far away a train whistle hooted. The moon cast a dubious light on the groundfog, leaving it pearly and opalescent in the fields.

  Garraty took a drink of water.

  “Warning! Wanting 12! This is your final warning, 12!”

  12 was a boy named Fenter who was wearing a souvenir T-shirt which read I RODE THE MT. WASHINGTON COG RAILWAY. Fenter was licking his lips. The word was that his foot had stiffened up on him badly. When he was shot ten minutes later, Garraty didn't feel much. He was too tired. He walked around Fenter. Looking down he saw something glittering in Fenter's hand. A St. Christopher's medal.

  “If I get out of this,” McVries said abruptly, “you know what I'm going to do?”

  “What?” Baker asked.

  “Fornicate until my cock turns blue. I've never been so horny in my life as I am right this minute, at quarter of eight on May first.”

  “You mean it?” Garraty asked.

  “I do,” McVries assured. “I could even get horny for you, Ray, if you didn't need a shave.”

  Garraty laughed.

  “Prince Charming, that's who I am,” McVries said. His hand went to the scar on his cheek and touched it. “Now all I need is a Sleeping Beauty. I could awake her with a biggy sloppy soul kiss and the two of us would ride away into the sunset. At least as far as the nearest Holiday Inn.”

  “Walk,” Olsen said listlessly.

  “Huh?”

  “Walk into the sunset.”

  “Walk into the sunset, okay,” McVries said. “True love either way. Do you believe in true love, Hank dear?”

  “I believe in a good screw,” Olson said, and Art Baker burst out laughing.

  “I believe in true love,” Garraty said, and then felt sorry he had said it. It sounded naive.

  “You want to know why I don't?” Olson said. He looked up at Garraty and grinned a scary, furtive grin. “Ask Fenter. Ask Zuck. They know.”

  “That's a hell of an attitude,” Pearson said. He had come out of the dark from someplace and was walking with them again. Pearson was limping, not badly, but very obviously limping.

  “No, it's not,” McVries said, and then, after a moment, he added cryptically: “Nobody loves a deader.”

  “Edgar Allan Poe did,” Baker said. “I did a report on him in school and it said he had tendencies that were nerecto—”

  “Necrophiliac,” Garraty said.

  “Yeah, that's right.”

  “What's that?” Pearson asked.

  “It means you got an urge to sleep with a dead woman,” Baker said. “Or a dead man, if you're a woman.”

  “Or if you're a fruit,” McVries put in.

  “How the hell did we get on this?” Olson croaked. “Just how in the hell did we get on the subject of screwing dead people? It's fucking repulsive.”

  “Why not?” A deep, somber voice said. It was Abraham, 2. He was tall and disjointed-looking; he walked in a perpetual shamble. “I think we all might take a moment or two to stop and think about whatever kind of sex life there may be in the next world.”

  “I get Marilyn Monroe,” McVries said. “You can have Eleanor Roosevelt, Abe old buddy.”

  Abraham gave him the finger. Up ahead, one of the soldiers droned out a warning.

  “Just a second now. Just one motherfucking second here.” Olson spoke slowly, as if he wrestled with a tremendous problem in expression. “You're all off the subject. All off.”

  “The Transcendental Quality of Love, a lecture by the noted philosopher and Ethiopian jug-rammer Henry Olson,” McVries said. “Author of A Peach Is Not a Peach without a Pit and other works of—”

  “Wait!” Olson cried out. His voice was as shrill as broken glass. “You wait just one goddam second! Love is a put-on! It's nothing! One big fat el zilcho! You got it?”

  No one replied. Garraty looked out ahead of him, where the dark charcoal hills met the star-punched darkness of the sky. He wondered if he couldn't feel the first faint twinges of a charley horse in the arch of his left foot. I want to sit down, he thought irritably. Damn it all, I want to sit down.

  “Love is a fake!” Olson was blaring. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that's all! And when you get like Fenter and Zuck—”

  “Shut up,” a bored voice said, and Garraty knew it was Stebbins. But when he looked back, Stebbins was only looking at the road and walking along near the left-hand edge.

  A jet passed overhead, trailing the sound of its engines behind it and chalking a feathery line across the night sky. It passed low enough for them to be able to see its running lights, pulsing yellow and green. Baker was whistling again. Garraty let his eyelids drop mostly shut. His feet moved on their own.

  His half-dozing mind began to slip aw
ay from him. Random thoughts began to chase each other lazily across its field. He remembered his mother singing him an Irish lullaby when he was very small... something about cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o. And her face, so huge and beautiful, like the face of an actress on a movie screen. Wanting to kiss her and be in love with her for always. When he grew up, he would marry her.

  This was replaced by Jan's good-humored Polish face and her dark hair that streamed nearly to her waist. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit beneath a short beach coat because they were going to Reid Beach. Garraty himself was wearing a ragged pair of denim shorts and his zoris.

  Jan was gone. Her face became that of Jimmy Owens, the kid down the block from them. He had been five and Jimmy had been five and Jimmy's mother had caught them playing Doctor's Office in the sandpit behind Jimmy's house. They both had boners. That's what they called them - boners. Jimmy's mother had called his mother and his mother had come to get him and had sat him down in her bedroom and had asked him how he would like it if she made him go out and walk down the street with no clothes on. His dozing body contracted with the groveling embarrassment of it, the deep shame. He had cried and begged, not to make him walk down the street with no clothes on... and not to tell his father.

  Seven years old now. He and Jimmy Owens peering through the dirt-grimed window of the Burr's Building Materials office at the naked lady calendars, knowing what they were looking at but not really knowing, feeling a crawling shameful exciting pang of something. Of something. There had been one blond lady with a piece of blue silk draped across her hips and they had stared at it for a long, long time. They argued about what might be down there under the cloth. Jimmy said he had seen his mother naked. Jimmy said he knew. Jimmy said it was hairy and cut open. He had refused to believe Jimmy, because what Jimmy said was disgusting.

  Still he was sure that ladies must be different from men down there and they had spent a long purple summer dusk discussing it, swatting mosquitoes and watching a scratch baseball game in the lot of the moving van company across the street from Burr's. He could feel, actually feel in the half-waking dream the sensation of the hard curb beneath his fanny.

  The next year he had hit Jimmy Owens in the mouth with the barrel of his Daisy air rifle while they were playing guns and Jimmy had to have four stitches in his upper lip. A year after that they had moved away. He hadn't meant to hit Jimmy in the mouth. It had been an accident. Of that he was quite sure, even though by then he had known Jimmy was right because he had seen his own mother naked (he had not meant to see her naked - it had been an accident). They were hairy down there. Hairy and cut open.

  Shhh, it isn't a tiger, love, only your teddy bear, see?... Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o... Mother loves her boy... Shhh... Go to sleep...

  “Warning! Warning 47!”

  An elbow poked him rudely in the ribs. “That's you, boy. Rise and shine.” McVries was grinning at him.

  “What time is it?” Garraty asked thickly.

  “Eight thirty-five.”

  “But I've been—”

  “—dozing for hours,” McVries said. “I know the feeling.”

  “Well, it sure seemed that way.”

  “It's your mind,” McVries said, “using the old escape hatch. Don't you wish your feet could?”

  “I use Dial,” Pearson said, pulling an idiotic face. “Don't you wish everybody did?

  Garraty thought that memories were like a line drawn in the dirt. The further back you went the scuffier and harder to see that line got. Until finally there was nothing but smooth sand and the black hole of nothingness that you came out of. The memories were in a way like the road. Here it was real and hard and tangible. But that early road, that nine in the morning road, was far back and meaningless.

  They were almost fifty miles into the Walk. The word came back that the Major would be by in his jeep to review them and make a short speech when they actually got to the fifty-mile point. Garraty thought that was most probably horseshit.

  They breasted a long, steep rise, and Garraty was tempted to take his jacket off again. He didn't. He unzipped it, though, and then walked backward for a minute. The lights of Caribou twinkled at him, and he thought about Lot's wife, who had looked back and fumed into a pillar of salt.

  “Warning! Warning 47! Second warning, 47!”

  It took Garraty a moment to realize it was him. His second warning in ten minutes. He started to feel afraid again. He thought of the unnamed boy who had died because he had slowed down once too often. Was that what he was doing?

  He looked around. McVries, Harkness, Baker and Olson were all staring at him. Olson was having a particularly good look. He could make out the intent expression on Olson's face even in the dark. Olson had outlasted six. He wanted to make Garraty lucky seven. He wanted Garraty to die.

  “See anything green?” Garraty asked irritably.

  “No,” Olson said, his eyes sliding away. “Course not.”

  Garraty walked with determination now, his arms swinging aggressively. It was twenty to nine. At twenty to eleven - eight miles down the road - he would be free again. He felt an hysterical urge to proclaim he could do it, they needn't send the word back on him, they weren't going to watch him get a ticket... at least not yet.

  The groundfog spread across the road in thin ribbons, like smoke. The shapes of the boys moved through it like dark islands somehow set adrift. At fifty miles into the Walk they passed a small, shut-up garage with a rusted-out gas pump in front. It was little more than an ominous, leaning shape in the fog. The clear fluorescent light from a telephone booth cast the only glow. The Major didn't come. No one came.

  The road dipped gently around a curve, and then there was a yellow mad sign ahead. The word came back, but before it got to Garraty he could read the sign for himself:

  STEEP GRADE TRUCKS USE LOW GEAR

  Groans and moans. Somewhere up ahead Barkovitch called out merrily: “Step into it, brothers! Who wants to race me to the top?”

  “Shut your goddam mouth, you little freak,” someone said quietly.

  “Make me, Dumbo!” Barkovitch shrilled. “Come on up here and make me!”

  “He's crackin',” Baker said.

  “No,” McVries replied. “He's just stretching. Guys like him have an awful lot of stretch.”

  Olson's voice was deadly quiet. “I don't think I can climb that hill. Not at four miles an hour.”

  The hill stretched above them. They were almost to it now. With the fog it was impossible to see the top. For all we know, it might just go up forever, Garraty thought.

  They started up.

  It wasn't as bad, Garraty discovered, if you stared down at your feet as you walked and leaned forward a little. You stared strictly down at the tiny patch of pavement between your feet and it gave you the impression that you were walking on level ground. Of course, you couldn't kid yourself that your lungs and the breath in your throat weren't heating up, because they were.

  Somehow the word started coming back — some people still had breath to spare, apparently. The word was that this hill was a quarter of a mile long. The word was it was two miles long. The word was that no Walker had ever gotten a ticket on this hill. The word was that three boys had gotten tickets here just last year. And after that, the word stopped coming back.

  “I can't do it,” Olson was saying monotonously. “I can't do it anymore.” His breath was coming in doglike pants. But he kept on walking and they all kept on walking. Little granting noises and soft, plosive breathing became audible. The only other sounds were Olson's chant, the scuff of many feet, and the grinding, ratcheting sound of the halftrack's engine as it chugged along beside them.

  Garraty felt the bewildered fear in his stomach grow. He could actually die here. It wouldn't be hard at all. He had screwed around and had gotten two warnings on him already. He couldn't be much over the limit right now. All he had to do was slip his pace a little and he'd have number three - final warning. And then...r />
  “Warning! Warning 70!”

  “They're playing your song, Olson,” McVries said between pants. “Pick up your feet. I want to see you dance up this hill like Fred Astaire.”

  “What do you care?” Olson asked fiercely.

  McVries didn't answer. Olson found a little more inside himself and managed to pick it up. Garraty wondered morbidly if the little more Olson had found was his last legs. He also wondered about Stebbins, back there tailing the group. How are you, Stebbins? Getting tired?

  Up ahead, a boy named Larson, 60, suddenly sat down on the road. He got a warning. The other boys split and passed around him, like the Red Sea around the Children of Israel.

  “I'm just going to rest for a while, okay?” Larson said with a trusting, shell-shocked smile. “I can't walk anymore right now, okay?” His smile stretched wider, and he fumed it on the soldier who had jumped down from the halftrack with his rifle unslung and the stainless steel chronometer in his hand.

  “Warning, 60,” the soldier said. “Second warning.”

  “Listen, I'll catch up,” Larson hastened to assure him. “I'm just resting. A guy can't walk all the time. Not all the time. Can he, fellas?” Olson made a little moaning noise as he passed Larson, and shied away when Larson tried to touch his pants cuff.

  Garraty felt his pulse beating warmly in his temples. Larson got his third warning. Now he'll understand, Garraty thought, now he'll get up and start flogging it.

  And at the end, Larson did realize, apparently. Reality came crashing back in. “Hey!” Larson said behind them. His voice was high and alarmed. “Hey, just a second, don't do that, I'll get up. Hey, don't! D—”

  The shot. They walked on up the hill.

  “Ninety-three bottles of beer left on the shelf,” McVries said softly.

  Garraty made no reply. He stared at his feet and walked and focused all of his concentration on getting to the top without that third warning. It couldn't go on much longer, this monster hill. Surely not.

  Up ahead someone uttered a high, gobbling scream, and then the rifles crashed in unison.