The long walk Read online

  “Barkovitch,” Baker said hoarsely. “That was Barkovitch, I'm sure it was.”

  “Wrong, redneck!” Barkovitch yelled out of the darkness. “One hundred per cent dead wrong!”

  They never did see the boy who had been shot after Larson. He had been part of the vanguard and he was dragged off the road before they got there. Garraty ventured a look up from the pavement, and was immediately sorry. He could see the top of the hill just barely. They still had the length of a football field to go. It looked like a hundred miles. No one said anything else. Each of them had retreated into his own private world of pain and effort. Seconds seemed to telescope into hours.

  Near the top of the hill, a rutted dirt road branched off the main drag, and a farmer and his family stood there. They watched the Walkers go past - an old man with a deeply seamed brow, a hatchet-faced woman in a bulky cloth coat, three teenaged children who all looked half-wilted.

  “All he needs... is a pitchfork,” McVries told Garraty breathlessly. Sweat was streaming down McVries's face. “And... Grant Wood... to paint him.”

  Someone called out: “Hiya, Daddy!”

  The farmer and the farmer's wife and the farmer's children said nothing. The cheese stands alone, Garraty thought crazily. Hi-ho the dairy-o, the cheese stands alone. The farmer and his family did not smile. They did not frown. They held no signs. They did not wave. They watched. Garraty was reminded of the Western movies he had seen on all the Saturday afternoons of his youth, where the hero was left to die in the desert and the buzzards came and circled overhead. They were left behind, and Garraty was glad. He supposed the farmer and his wife and the three half-wilted children would be out there around nine o'clock next May first and the next... and the next. How many boys had they seen shot? A dozen? Two? Garraty didn't like to think of it. He took a pull at his canteen, sloshed the water around in his mouth, trying to cut through the caked saliva. He spit the mouthful out.

  The hill went on. Up ahead Toland fainted and was shot after the soldier left beside him had warned his unconscious body three times. It seemed to Garraty that they had been climbing the hill for at least a month now. Yes, it had to be a month at least, and that was a conservative estimate because they had been walking for just over three years. He giggled a little, took another mouthful of water, sloshed it around in his mouth, and then swallowed it. No cramps. A cramp would finish him now. But it could happen. It could happen because someone had dipped his shoes in liquid lead while he wasn't looking.

  Nine gone, and a third of them had gotten it right here on this hill. The Major had told Olson to give them hell, and if this wasn't hell, it was a pretty good approximation. A pretty good...

  Oh boy—

  Garraty was suddenly aware that he felt quite giddy, as if he might faint himself. He brought one hand up and slapped himself across the face, backward and forward, hard.

  “You all right?” McVries asked.

  “Feel faint.”

  “Pour your...” Quick, whistling breath,”... canteen over your head.”

  Garraty did it. I christen thee Raymond Davis Garraty, pax vobiscum. The water was very cold. He stopped feeling faint. Some of the water trickled down inside his shirt in freezing cold rivulets. “Canteen! 47!” he shouted. The effort of the shout left him feeling drained all over again. He wished he had waited awhile.

  One of the soldiers jog-trotted over to him and handed him a fresh canteen. Garraty could feel the soldier's expressionless marble eyes sizing him up. “Get away,” he said rudely, taking the canteen. “You get paid to shoot me, not to look at me.”

  The soldier went away with no change of expression. Garraty made himself walk a little faster.

  They kept climbing and no one else got it and then they were at the top. It was nine o'clock. They had been on the road twelve hours. It didn't mean anything. The only thing that mattered was the cool breeze blowing over the top of the hill. And the sound of a bird. And the feel of his damp shirt against his skin. And the memories in his head. Those things mattered, and Garraty clung to them with desperate awareness. They were his things and he still had them.

  “Pete?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, I'm glad to be alive.”

  McVries didn't answer. They were on the downslope now. Walking was easy.

  “I'm going to try hard to stay alive,” Garraty said, almost apologetically.

  The road curved gently downward. They were still a hundred and fifteen miles from Oldtown and the comparative levelness of the turnpike.

  “That's the idea, isn't it?” McVries asked finally. His voice sounded cracked and cobwebby, as if it had issued from a dusty cellar.

  Neither of them said anything for a while. No one was talking. Baker ambled steadily along - he hadn't drawn a warning yet - with his hands in his pockets, his head nodding slightly with the flatfooted rhythm of his walk. Olson had gone back to Hail Mary, full of grace. His face was a white splotch in the darkness. Harkness was eating.

  “Garraty,” McVries said.

  “I'm here.”

  “You ever see the end of a Long Walk?”

  “No, you?”

  “Hell, no. I just thought, you being close to it and all—”

  “My father hated them. He took me to one as a what-do-you-call-it, object lesson. But that was the only time.”

  “I saw.”

  Garraty jumped at the sound of that voice. It was Stebbins. He had pulled almost even with them, his head still bent forward, his blond hair flapping around his ears like a sickly halo.

  “What was it like?” McVries asked. His voice was younger somehow.

  “You don't want to know,” Stebbins said.

  “I asked, didn't I?”

  Stebbins made no reply. Garraty's curiosity about him was stronger than ever. Stebbins hadn't folded up. He showed no signs of folding up. He went on without complaint and hadn't been warned since the starting line.

  “Yeah, what's it like?” he heard himself asking.

  “I saw the end four years ago,” Stebbins said. “I was thirteen. It ended about sixteen miles over the New Hampshire border. They had the National Guard out and sixteen Federal Squads to augment the State Police. They had to. The people were packed sixty deep on both sides of the road for fifty miles. Over twenty people were trampled to death before it was all over. It happened because people were trying to move with the Walkers, trying to see the end of it. I had a front-row seat. My dad got it for me.”

  “What does your dad do?” Garraty asked.

  “He's in the Squads. And he had it figured just right. I didn't even have to move. The Walk ended practically in front of me.”

  “What happened?” Olson asked softly.

  “I could hear them coming before I could see them. We all could. It was one big soundwave, getting closer and closer. And it was still an hour before they got close enough to see. They weren't looking at the crowd, either of the two that were left. It was like they didn't even know the crowd was there. What they were looking at was the road. They were hobbling along, both of them. Like they had been crucified and then taken down and made to walk with the nails still through their feet.”

  They were all listening to Stebbins now. A horrified silence had fallen like a rubber sheet.

  “The crowd was yelling at them, almost as if they could still hear. Some were yelling one guy's name, and some were yelling the other guy's, but the only thing that really came through was this Go... Go... Go chant. I was getting shoved around like a beanbag. The guy next to me either pissed himself or jacked off in his pants, you couldn't tell which.

  “They walked right past me. One of them was a big blond with his shirt open. One of his shoe soles had come unglued or unstitched or whatever, and it was flapping. The other guy wasn't even wearing his shoes anymore. He was in his stocking feet. His socks ended at his ankles. The rest of them... why, he'd just walked them away, hadn't he? His feet were purple. You could see the broken blood vessels in his feet. I
don't think he really felt it anymore. Maybe they were able to do something with his feet later, I don't know. Maybe they were.”

  “Stop. For God's sake, stop it.” It was McVries. He sounded dazed and sick.

  “You wanted to know,” Stebbins said, almost genially. “Didn't you say that?”

  No answer. The halftrack whined and clattered and spurted along the shoulder, and somewhere farther up someone drew a warning.

  “It was the big blond that lost. I saw it all. They were just a little past me. He threw both of his arms up, like he was Superman. But instead of flying he just fell flat on his face and they gave him his ticket after thirty seconds because he was walking with three. They were both walking with three.

  “Then the crowd started to cheer. They cheered and they cheered and then they could see that the kid that won was trying to say something. So they shut up. He had fallen on his knees, you know, like he was going to pray, only he was just crying. And then he crawled over to the other boy and put his face in that big blond kid's shirt. Then he started to say whatever it was he had to say, but we couldn't hear it. He was talking into the dead kid's shirt. He was telling the dead kid. Then the soldiers rushed out and told him he had won the Prize, and asked him how he wanted to start.”

  “What did he say?” Garraty asked. It seemed to him that with the question he had laid his whole life on the line.

  “He didn't say anything to them, not then,” Stebbins said. “He was talking to the dead kid. He was telling the dead kid something, but we couldn't hear it.”

  “What happened then?” Pearson asked.

  “I don't remember,” Stebbins said remotely.

  No one said anything. Garraty felt a panicked, trapped sensation, as if someone had stuffed him into an underground pipe that was too small to get out of. Up ahead a third warning was given out and a boy made a croaking, despairing sound, like a dying crow. Please God, don't let them shoot anyone now, Garraty thought. I'll go crazy if I hear the guns now. Please God, please God.

  A few minutes later the guns rammed their steel-death sound into the night. This time it was a short boy in a flapping red and white football jersey. For a moment Garraty thought Percy's mom would not have to wonder or worry anymore, but it wasn't Percy - it was a boy named Quincy or Quentin or something like that.

  Garraty didn't go crazy. He turned around to say angry words at Stebbins - to ask him, perhaps, how it felt to inflict a boy's last minutes with such a horror - but Stebbins had dropped back to his usual position and Garraty was alone again.

  They walked on, the ninety of them.

  CHAPTER 5

  “You did not tell the truth and so you will have to pay the consequences.”

  —Bob Barker. Truth or Consequences

  At twenty minutes of ten on that endless May first, Garraty stuffed one of his two warnings. Two more Walkers had bought it since the boy in the football jersey. Garraty barely noticed. He was taking a careful inventory of himself.

  One head, a little confused and crazied up, but basically okay. Two eyes, grainy. One neck, pretty stiff. Two arms, no problem there. One torso, okay except for a gnawing in his gut that concentrates couldn't satisfy. Two damn tired legs. Muscles aching. He wondered how far his legs would carry him on their own - how long before his brain took them over and began punishing them, making them work past any sane limit, to keep a bullet from crashing into its own bony cradle. How long before the legs began to kink and then to bind up, to protest and finally to seize up and stop.

  His legs were tired, but so far as he could tell, still pretty much okay.

  And two feet. Aching. They were tender, no use denying it. He was a big boy. Those feet were shifting a hundred and sixty pounds back and forth. The soles ached. There were occasional strange shooting pains in them. His left great toe had poked through his sock (he thought of Stebbins's tale and felt a kind of creeping horror at that), and had begun to tub uncomfortably against his shoe. But his feet were working, there were still no blisters on them, and he felt his feet were still pretty much okay, too.

  Garraty, he pep-talked himself, you're in good shape. Twelve guys dead, twice that many maybe hurting bad by now, but you're okay. You're going good. You're great. You're alive.

  Conversation, which had died violently at the end of Stebbins's story, picked up again. Talking was what living people did. Yannick, 98, was discussing the ancestry of the soldiers on the halftrack in an overloud voice with Wyman, 97. Both agreed that it was mixed, colorful, hirsute, and bastardized.

  Pearson, meanwhile, abruptly asked Garraty: “Ever have an enema?”

  “Enema?” Garraty repeated. He thought about it. “No. I don't think so.”

  “Any of you guys?” Pearson asked. “Tell the truth, now.”

  “I did,” Harkness said, and chuckled a little. “My mother gave me one after Halloween once when I was little. I ate pretty near a whole shopping bag of candy.”

  “Did you like it?” Pearson pressed.

  “Hell, no! Who in hell would like a half a quart of warm soapsuds up your—”

  “My little brother,” Pearson said sadly. “I asked the little snot if he was sorry I was going and he said no because Ma said he could have an enema if he was good and didn't cry. He loves 'em.”

  “That's sickening,” Harkness said loudly.

  Pearson looked glum. “I thought so, too.”

  A few minutes later Davidson joined the group and told them about the times he got drunk at the Steubenville State Fair and crawled into the hoochie-kooch tent and got biffed in the head by a big fat momma wearing nothing but a G-string. When Davidson told her (so he said) that he was drunk and thought it was the tattooing tent he was crawling into, the red hot big fat momma let him feel her up for a while (so he said). He had told her he wanted to get a Stars and Bars tattooed on his stomach.

  Art Baker told them about a contest they'd had back home, to see who could light the biggest fart, and this hairy-assed old boy named Davey Popham had managed to burn off almost all the hair on his ass and the small of his back as well. Smelled like a grassfire, Baker said. This got Harkness laughing so hard he drew a warning.

  After that, the race was on. Tall story followed tall story until the whole shaky structure came tumbling down. Someone else was warned, and not long after, the other Baker (James) bought a ticket. The good humor went out of the group. Some of them began to talk about their girlfriends, and the conversation became stumbling and maudlin. Garraty said nothing about Jan, but as tired ten o'clock came rolling in, a black coalsack splattered with milky groundmist, it seemed to him that she was the best thing he had ever known.

  They passed under a short string of mercury streetlights, through a closed and shuttered town, all of them subdued now, speaking in low murmurs. In front of the Shopwell near the far end of this wide place in the road a young couple sat asleep on a sidewalk bench with their heads leaning together. A sign that could not be read dangled between them. The girl was very young - she looked no more than fourteen - and her boyfriend was wearing a sport shirt that had been washed too many times to ever look very sporty again. Their shadows in the street made a merge that the Walkers passed quietly over.

  Garraty glanced back over his shoulder, quite sure that the rumble of the halftrack must have awakened them. But they still slept, unaware that the Event had come and passed them by. He wondered if the girl would catch what-for from her old man. She looked awfully young. He wondered if their sign was for Go-Go Garraty, “Maine's Own.” Somehow he hoped not. Somehow the idea was a little repulsive.

  He ate the last of his concentrates and felt a little better. There was nothing left for Olson to cadge off him now. It was funny about Olson. Garraty would have bet six hours ago that Olson was pretty well done in. But he was still walking, and now without warnings. Garraty supposed a person could do a lot of things when his life was at stake. They had come about fifty-four miles now.

  The last of the talk died with the nameless town. Th
ey marched in silence for an hour or so, and the chill began to seep into Garraty again. He ate the last of his mom's cookies, balled up the foil, and pitched it into the brash at the side of the road. Just another litterbug on the great tomato plant of life.

  McVries had produced a toothbrush of all things from his small packsack and was busy dry-brushing his teeth. It all goes on, Garraty thought wonderingly. You burp, you say excuse me. You wave back at the people who wave to you because that's the polite thing to do. No one argues very much with anyone else (except for Barkovitch) because that's also the polite thing to do. It all goes on.

  Or did it? He thought of McVries sobbing at Stebbins to shut up. Of Olson taking his cheese with the dumb humility of a whipped dog. It all seemed to have a heightened intensity about it, a sharper contrast of colors and light and shadow.

  At eleven o'clock, several things happened almost at once. The word came back that a small plank bridge up ahead had been washed out by a heavy afternoon thunderstorm. With the bridge out, the Walk would have to be temporarily stopped. A weak cheer went up through the ragged ranks, and Olson, in a very soft voice, muttered “Thank God.”

  A moment later Barkovitch began to scream a flood of profanity at the boy next to him, a squat, ugly boy with the unfortunate name of Rank. Rank took a swing at him - something expressly forbidden by the roles - and was warned for it. Barkovitch didn't even break stride. He simply lowered his head and ducked under the punch and went on yelling.

  “Come on, you sonofabitch! I'll dance on your goddam grave! Come on, Dumbo, pick up your feet! Don't make it too easy for me!”

  Rank threw another punch. Barkovitch nimbly stepped around it, but tripped over the boy walking next to him. They were both warned by the soldiers, who were now watching the developments carefully but emotionlessly - like men watching a couple of ants squabbling over a crumb of bread, Garraty thought bitterly.

  Rank started to walk faster, not looking at Barkovitch. Barkovitch himself, furious at being warned (the boy he had tripped over was Gribble, who had wanted to tell the Major he was a murderer), yelled at him: “Your mother sucks cock on 42nd Street, Rank!”