The long walk Read online

  With that, Rank suddenly turned around and charged Barkovitch.

  Cries of “Break it up!” and “Cut the shit!” filled the air, but Rank took no notice. He went for Barkovitch with his head down, bellowing.

  Barkovitch sidestepped him. Rank went stumbling and pinwheeling across the soft shoulder, skidded in the sand, and sat down with his feet splayed out. He was given a third warning.

  “Come on, Dumbo!” Barkovitch goaded. “Get up!”

  Rank did get up. Then he slipped somehow and fell over on his back. He seemed dazed and woozy.

  The third thing that happened around eleven o'clock was Rank's death. There was a moment of silence when the carbines sighted in, and Baker's voice was loud and clearly audible: “There, Barkovitch, you're not a pest anymore. Now you're a murderer.”

  The guns roared. Rank's body was thrown into the air by the force of the bullets. Then it lay still and sprawled, one arm on the road.

  “It was his own fault!” Barkovitch yelled. “You saw him, he swung first! Rule 8! Rule 8!”

  No one said anything.

  “Go fuck yourselves! All of you!”

  McVries said easily: “Go on back and dance on him a little, Barkovitch. Go entertain us. Boogie on him a little bit, Barkovitch.”

  “Your mother sucks cock on 42nd Street too, scarface,” Barkovitch said hoarsely.

  “Can't wait to see your brains all over the road,” McVries said quietly. His hand had gone to the scar and was rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. “I'll cheer when it happens, you murdering little bastard.”

  Barkovitch muttered something else under his breath. The others had shied away from him as if he had the plague and he was walking by himself.

  They hit sixty miles at about ten past eleven, with no sign of a bridge of any kind. Garraty was beginning to think the grapevine had been wrong this time when they cleared a small hill and looked down into a pool of light where a small crowd of hustling, bustling men moved.

  The lights were the beams of several trucks, directed at a plank bridge spanning a fast-running rill of water. “Truly I love that bridge,” Olson said, and helped himself to one of McVries's cigarettes. “Truly.”

  But as they drew closer, Olson made a soft, ugly sound in his throat and pitched the cigarette away into the weeds. One of the bridge's supports and two of the heavy butt planks had been washed away, but the Squad up ahead had been working diligently. A sawed-off telephone pole had been planted in the bed of the stream, anchored in what looked like a gigantic cement plug. They hadn't had a chance to replace the butts, so they had put down a big convoy-truck tailgate in their place. Makeshift, but it would serve.

  “The Bridge of San Luis Ray,” Abraham said. “Maybe if the ones up front stomp a little, it'll collapse again.”

  “Small chance,” Pearson said, and then added in a breaking, weepy voice, “Aw, shit!”

  The vanguard, down to three or four boys, was on the bridge now. Their feet clumped hollowly as they crossed. Then they were on the other side, walking without looking back. The halftrack stopped. Two soldiers jumped out and kept pace with the boys. On the other side of the bridge, two more fell in with the vanguard. The boards rambled steadily now.

  Two men in corduroy coats leaned against a big asphalt-spattered truck marked HIGHWAY REPAIR. They were smoking. They wore green gumrubber boots.

  They watched the Walkers go by. As Davidson, McVries, Olson, Pearson, Harkness, Baker, and Garraty passed in a loose sort of group one of them flicked his cigarette end over end into the stream and said: “That's him. That's Garraty.”

  “Keep goin', boy!” the other yelled. “I got ten bucks on you at twelve-to-one!”

  Garraty noticed a few sawdusty lengths of telephone pole in the back of the track. They were the ones who had made sure he was going to keep going, whether he liked it or not. He raised one hand to them and crossed the bridge. The tailgate that had replaced the butt planks chinked under his shoes and then the bridge was behind them. The road doglegged, and the only reminder of the rest they'd almost had was a wedge-shaped swath of light on the trees at the side of the road. Soon that was gone, too.

  “Has a Long Walk ever been stopped for anything?” Harkness asked.

  “I don't think so,” Garraty said. “More material for the book?”

  “No,” Harkness said. He sounded tired. “Just personal information.”

  “It stops every year,” Stebbins said from behind them. “Once.”

  There was no reply to that.

  About half an hour later, McVries came up beside Garraty and walked with him in silence for a little while. Then, very quietly, he said: “Do you think you'll win, Ray?”

  Garraty considered it for along, long time.

  “No,” he said finally. “No, I... no.”

  The stark admission frightened him. He thought again about buying a ticket, no, buying a bullet, of the final frozen half-second of total knowledge, seeing the bottomless bores of the carbines swing toward him. Legs frozen. Guts crawling and clawing. Muscles, genitals, brain all cowering away from the oblivion a bloodbeat away.

  He swallowed dryly. “How about yourself?”

  “I guess not,” McVries said. “I stopped thinking I had any real chance around nine tonight. You see, I...” He cleared his throat. “It's hard to say, but I went into it with my eyes open, you know?” He gestured around himself at the other boys. “Lots of these guys didn't, you know? I knew the odds. But I didn't figure on people. And I don't think I ever realized the real gut truth of what this is. I think I had the idea that when the first guy got so he couldn't cut it anymore they'd aim the guns at him and pull the triggers and little pieces of paper with the word BANG printed on them would... would... and the Major would say April Fool and we'd all go home. Do you get what I'm saying at all?”

  Garraty thought of his own rending shock when Curley had gone down in a spray of blood and brains like oatmeal, brains on the pavement and the white line. “Yes,” he said. “I know what you're saying.”

  “It took me a while to figure it out, but it was faster after I got around that mental block. Walk or die, that's the moral of this story. Simple as that. It's not survival of the physically fittest, that's where I went wrong when I let myself get into this. If it was, I'd have a fair chance. But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty.” McVries's voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “It isn't man or God. It's something... in the brain.”

  A whippoorwill called once in the darkness. The groundfog was lifting.

  “Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he's worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he's as fresh as a daisy. I don't think I can do that. I'm not tired - not really tired - yet. But I will be.” The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness. “And I think... when I get tired enough... I think I'll just sit down.”

  Garraty was silent, but he felt alarmed. Very alarmed.

  “I'll outlast Barkovitch, though,” McVries said, almost to himself. “I can do that, by Christ.”

  Garraty glanced at his watch and saw it was 11:30. They passed through a deserted crossroads where a sleepy-looking constable was parked. The possible traffic he had been sent out to halt was nonexistent. They walked past him, out of the bright circle of light thrown by the single mercury lamp. Darkness fell over them like a coalsack again.

  “We could slip into the woods now and they'd never see us,” Garraty said thoughtfully.

  “Try it,” Olson said. “They've got infrared sweepscopes, along with forty other kinds of monitoring gear, including high-intensity microphones. They hear everything we're saying. They can almost pick up your
heartbeat. And they see you like daylight, Ray.”

  As if to emphasize his point, a boy behind them was given second warning.

  “You take all the fun outta livin',” Baker said softly. His faint Southern drawl sounded out of place and foreign to Garraty's ears.

  McVries had walked away. The darkness seemed to isolate each of them, and Garraty felt a shaft of intense loneliness. There were mutters and half-yelps every time something crashed through the woods they were going past, and Garraty realized with some amusement that a late evening stroll through the Maine woods could be no picnic for the city boys in the crew. An owl made a mysterious noise somewhere to their left. On the other side something rustled, was still, rustled again, was still, and then made a crashing break for less populated acreage. There was another nervous cry of “What was that?”

  Overhead, capricious spring clouds began to scud across the sky in mackerel shapes, promising more rain. Garraty turned up his collar and listened to the sound of his feet pounding the pavement. There was a trick to that, a subtle mental adjustment, like having better night vision the longer you were in the dark. This morning the sound of his feet had been lost to him. They had been lost in the tramp of ninety-nine other pairs, not to mention the rumble of the halftrack. But now he heard them easily. His own particular stride, and the way his left foot scraped the pavement every now and then. It seemed to him that the sound of his footfalls had become as loud to his ears as the sound of his own heartbeat. Vital, life and death sound.

  His eyes felt grainy, trapped in their sockets. The lids were heavy. His energy seemed to be draining down some sinkhole in the middle of him. Warnings were droned out with monotonous regularity, but no one was shot. Barkovitch had shut up. Stebbins was a ghost again, not even visible in back of them.

  The hands on his watch read 11:40.

  On up toward the hour of witches, he thought. When churchyards yawn and give up their moldy dead. When all good little boys are sacked out. When wives and lovers have given up the carnal pillow-fight for the evening. When passengers sleep uneasy on the Greyhound to New York. When Glenn Miller plays uninterrupted on the radio and bartenders think about putting the chairs up on the tables, and—

  Jan's face came into his mind again. He thought of kissing her at Christmas, almost half a year ago, under the plastic mistletoe his mother always hung from the big light globe in the kitchen. Stupid kid stuff. Look where you're standing. Her lips had been surprised and soft, not resisting. A nice kiss. One to dream on. His first real kiss. He did it again when he took her home. They had been standing in her driveway, standing in the silent grayness of falling Christmas snow. That had been something more than a nice kiss. His arms around her waist. Her arms around his neck, locked there, her eyes closed (he had peeked), the soft feel of her breasts - muffled up in her coat, of course - against him. He had almost told her he loved her then, but no... that would have been too quick.

  After that, they taught each other. She taught him that books were sometimes just to be read and discarded, not studied (he was something of a grind, which amused Jan, and her amusement first exasperated him and then he also saw the funny side of it). He taught her to knit. That had been a funny thing. His father, of all people, had taught him how to knit... before the Squads got him. His father had taught Garraty's father, as well. It was something of a male tradition in the clan Garraty, it seemed. Jan had been fascinated by the pattern of the increases and decreases, and she left him behind soon enough, overstepping his laborious scarves and mittens to sweaters, cable-knits, and finally to crocheting and even the tatting of doilies, which she gave up as ridiculous as soon as the skill was mastered.

  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.

  He thought now of the patterns of light and shadow on the nearly perfect oval of her face, the way she walked, the lift and fall of her voice, the easy, desirable swing of one hip, and he wondered in terror what he was doing here, walking down this dark road. He wanted her now. He wanted to do it all over again, but differently. Now, when he thought of the Major's tanned face, the salt-and-pepper mustache, the mirrored sunglasses, he felt a horror so deep it made his legs feel rubbery and weak. Why am I here? he asked himself desperately, and there was no answer, so he asked the question again: Why am—

  The guns crashed in the darkness, and there was the unmistakable mailsack thud of a body falling on the concrete. The fear was on him again, the hot, throat-choking fear that made him want to run blindly, to dive into the bushes and just keep on running until he found Jan and safety.

  McVries had Barkovitch to keep him going. He would concentrate on Jan. He would walk to Jan. They reserved space for Long Walkers' relatives and loved ones in the front lines. He would see her.

  He thought about kissing that other girl and was ashamed.

  How do you know you'll make it? A cramp... blisters... a bad cut or a nosebleed that just won't quit... a big hill that was just too big and too long. How do you know you'll make it?

  I'll make it, I'll make it.

  “Congratulations,” McVries said at his shoulder, making him jump.

  “Huh?”

  “It's midnight. We live to fight another day, Garraty.”

  “And many of 'em,” Abraham added. “For me, that is. Not that I begrudge you, you understand.”

  “A hundred and five miles to Oldtown, if you care,” Olson put in tiredly.

  “Who gives a shit about Oldtown?” McVries demanded. “You ever been there, Garraty?”

  “No.—

  “How about Augusta? Christ, I thought that was in Georgia.”

  “Yeah, I've been in Augusta. It's the state capital—”

  “Regional,” Abraham said.

  “And the Corporate Governor's mansion, and a couple of traffic circles, and a couple of movies—”

  “You have those in Maine?” McVries asked.

  “Well, it's a small state capital, okay?” Garraty said, smiling.

  “Wait'll we hit Boston,” McVries said.

  There were groans.

  From up ahead there came cheers, shouts, and catcalls. Garraty was alarmed to hear his own name called out. Up ahead, about half a mile away, was a ramshackle farmhouse, deserted and fallen down. But a battered Klieg light had been plugged in somewhere, and a huge sign, lettered with pine boughs across the front of the house read:

  GARRATY's OUR MAN!!!

  Aroostook County Parents' Association

  “Hey, Garraty, where's the parents?” someone yelled.

  “Back home making kids,” Garraty said, embarrassed. There could be no doubt that Maine was Garraty country, but he found the signs and cheers and the gibes of the others all a little mortifying. He had found - among other things - in the last fifteen hours that he didn't much crave the limelight. The thought of a million people all over the state rooting for him and laying bets on him (at twelve-to-one, the highway worker had said... was that good or bad?) was a little scary.

  “You'd think they would have left a few plump, juicy parents lying around somewhere,” Davidson said.

  “Poontang from the PTA?” Abraham asked.

  The ribbing was halfhearted and didn't last very long. The road killed most ribbing very quickly. They crossed another bridge, this time a cement one that spanned a good-sized river. The water rippled below them like black silk. A few crickets chirred cautiously, and around fifteen past midnight, a spatter of light, cold rain fell.

  Up ahead, someone began to play a harmonica. It didn't last long (Hint 6: Conserve Wind), but it was pretty for the moment it lasted. It sounded a little like Old Black Joe, Garraty thought. Down in de cornfiel', here dat mournful sour'. All de darkies am aweeping, Ewing's in de cole, cole groun'.

  No, that wasn't Old Black Joe, that tune was some other Stephen Fost
er racist classic. Good old Stephen Foster. Drank himself to death. So did Poe, it had been reputed. Poe the necrophiliac, the one who had married his fourteen-year-old cousin. That made him a pedophile as well. All-around depraved fellows, he and Stephen Foster both. If only they could have lived to see the Long Walk, Garraty thought. They could have collaborated on the world's first Morbid Musical. Massa's on De Cold, Cold Road, or The Tell-Tale Stride, or—

  Up ahead someone began to scream, and Garraty felt his blood go cold. It was a very young voice. It was not screaming words. It was only screaming. A dark figure broke from the pack, pelted across the shoulder of the road in front of the halftrack (Garraty could not even remember when the halftrack had rejoined their march after the repaired bridge), and dived for the woods. The guns roared. There was a rending crash as a dead weight fell through the juniper bushes and underbrush to the ground. One of the soldiers jumped down and dragged the inert form up by the hands. 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. Stebbins laughed. Garraty felt suddenly furious with Stebbins, and wanted to turn to him and ask him how he'd like someone laughing at his death. It was something you'd expect of Barkovitch. Barkovitch had said he'd dance on a lot of graves, and there were sixteen he could dance on already.

  I doubt that he'll have much left of his feet to dance with, Garraty thought. A sharp twinge of pain went through the arch of his right foot. The muscle there tightened heart-stoppingly, then loosened. Garraty waited with his heart in his mouth for it to happen again. It would hit harder. It would turn his foot into a block of useless wood. But it didn't happen.

  “I can't walk much further,” Olson croaked. His face was a white blur in the darkness. No one answered him.