set forth on this continent… ah, bullshit. I forget the rest. We had to learn it in eighth grade history if we wanted an A.”
“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.
“That was Gallant,” Baker said, looking back. “He’s been walking dead all day.”
“Bragged his way into it,” Garraty mused, and then laughed.
“Sure.” Abraham ran a hand up one cheek and scratched the cavernous hollow under one eye. “You know the essay test?”
They all nodded. An essay,
“Well, the thing was,” Abraham said, “I didn’t feel particularly qualified to participate in anything. I took the exam completely on the spur of the moment. I was on my way to the movies and I just happened past the gym where they were having the test. You have to show your Work Permit card to get in, you know. I just happened to have mine with me that day. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered to go home and get it. I just would have gone on to the movies and I wouldn’t be here right now, dying in such jolly company.”
They considered this silently.
“I took the physical and then I zipped through the objective stuff and then I see this three-page blank at the end of the folder. 'Please answer this question as objectively and honestly as you can, using not more than 1500 words,' oh holy shit, I think. The rest of it was sort of fun. What a bunch of fucked-up questions.”
“Yeah, how often do you have a bowel movement?” Baker said dryly. “Have you ever used snuff?”
“Yeah, yeah, stuff like that,” Abraham agreed. “I’d forgotten all about that stupid snuff question. I just zipped along, bullshitting in good order, you know, and I come to this essay about why I feel qualified to participate. I couldn’t think of a thing. So finally some bastard in an army coat strolls by and says, ‘Five minutes. Will everyone finish up, please?’ So I just put down, ‘I feel qualified to participate in the Long Walk because I am one useless S.O.B and the world would be better off without me, unless I happened to win and get rich in which case I would buy a Van Go to put in every room of my manshun and order up sixty high-class horrs and not bother anybody.’ I thought about that for about a minute, and then I put in parenthesis: ‘(I would give all my sixty high-class horns old-age pensions, too.)’ I thought that would really screw ’em up. So a month later-I’d forgotten all about the whole thing-I get a letter saying I qualified. I damn near creamed my jeans.”
“And you went through with it?” Collie Parker demanded.
“Yeah, it’s hard to explain. The thing was, everybody thought it was a big joke. My girlfriend wanted to have the letter photographed and get it turned into a T-shirt down at the Shirt Shack, like she thought I’d pulled the biggest practical joke of the century. It was like that with everybody. I’d get the big glad hand and somebody was always saying something like, 'Hey Abe, you really tweaked the Major’s balls, din’tchoo?' It was so funny I just kept on going. I’ll tell you,” Abraham said, smiling morbidly, “it got to be a real laff riot. Everybody thought I was just gonna go on tweaking the Major’s balls to the very end. Which was what I did. Then one morning I woke up and I was in. I was a Prime Walker, sixteenth out of the drum, as a matter of fact. So I guess it turned out the Major was tweaking my balls.”
An abortive little cheer went through the Walkers, and Garraty glanced up. A huge reflector sign overhead informed them: AUGUSTA 10.
“You could just die laughing, right?” Collie said.
Abraham looked at Parker for a long time. “The Founding Father is not amused,” he said hollowly.
CHAPTER 14
“And remember, if you use your hands, or gesture with any part of your body, or use any part of the word, you will forfeit your chance for the ten thousand dollars. Just give a list. Good luck.”
They had all pretty much agreed that there was little emotional stretch or recoil left in them. But apparently, Garraty thought tiredly as they walked into the roaring darkness along U.S. 202 with Augusta a mile behind them, it was not so. Like a badly treated guitar that has been knocked about by an unfeeling musician, the strings were not broken but only out of tune, discordant, chaotic.
Augusta hadn’t been like Oldtown. Oldtown had been a phony hick New York. Augusta was some new city, a once-a-year city of crazy revelers, a party- down city full of a million boogying drunks and cuckoo birds and out-and-out maniacs.
They had heard Augusta and seen Augusta long before they had reached Augusta. The image of waves beating on a distant shore recurred to Garraty again and again. They heard the crowd five miles out. 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.
They stared at each other uneasily and bunched closer together like small boys in a lightning storm or cows in a blizzard. 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 spiderlegs and devouring them all alive.
The town itself had been swallowed, strangled, and buried. In a very real sense there was no Augusta, and there were no more fat ladies, or pretty girls, or pompous men, or wet-crotched children waving puffy clouds of cotton candy. There was no bustling Italian man here to throw slices of watermelon. 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 fitter 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.
They plowed through ankle-deep drifts of confetti. They lost each other and found each other in a sheeting blizzard of magazine streamers. Garraty snatched a paper out of the dark and crazy air at random and found himself looking at a Charles Atlas body-building ad. He grabbed another one and was brought face-to-face with John Travolta.
And at the height of the excitement, at the top of the first hill on 202, overlooking the mobbed turnpike behind and the gorged and glutted town at their feet, two huge purple-white spotlights split the air ahead of them and the Major was there, drawing away from them in his jeep like an hallucination, holding his salute ramrod stiff, incredibly, fantastically oblivious of the crowd in the gigantic throes of its labor all around him.
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 driving at the very brink of disaster.
A shifty-eyed Walker named Milligan saved them all by falling to his knees, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands pressed to his temples, as if he were trying to hold his brains in. He slid forward on the end of his nose, abrading the tip of it on the road like soft chalk on a rough blackboard-how amazing, Garraty thought, that kid’s wearing his nose away on the road-and then Milligan was mercifully blasted. After that the Walkers stopped cheering. Garraty was badly scared by the pain in his chest that was subsiding only partially. He promised that was the end of the craziness.
“We getting close to your girl?” Parker asked. He had not weakened, but he had mellowed. Garraty liked him okay now.
“About fifty miles. Maybe sixty. Give or take.”
“You’re one lucky sonofabitch, Garraty,” Parker said wistfully.
“I am?” He was surprised. He turned to see if Parker was laughing at him. Parker wasn’t.
“You’re gonna see your girl and your mother. Who the hell am I going to see between now and the end? No one but these pigs.” He gestured with his middle finger at the crowd, which seemed to take the gesture as a salute and cheered him deliriously. “I’m homesick,” he said. “And scared.” Suddenly he screamed at the crowd: “Pigs! You pigs!” They cheered him more loudly than ever.
“I’m scared, too. And homesick. I… I mean we…” He groped. “We’re all too far away from home. The road keeps us away. I may see them, but I won’t be able to touch them.”
“The rules say-”
“I know what the rules say. Bodily contact with anyone I wish, as long as I don’t leave the road. But it’s not the same. There’s a wall.”
“Fuckin’ easy for you to talk. You’re going to see them, just the same.”
“Maybe that’ll only make it worse,” McVries said. He had come quietly up behind them. They had just passed under a blinking yellow warning flasher at the Winthrop intersection. Garraty could see it waxing and waning on the pavement after they had passed it, a fearful yellow eye, opening and closing.
“You’re all crazy,” Parker said amiably. “I’m getting out of here.” He put on a little speed and had soon nearly disappeared into the blinking shadows.
“He thinks we’re queer for each other,” McVries said, amused.
“He what?” Garraty’s head snapped up.
“He’s not such a bad guy,” McVries said thoughtfully. He cocked a humorous eye at Garraty. “Maybe he’s even half-right. Maybe that’s why I saved your ass. Maybe I’m queer for you.”
“With a face like mine? I thought you perverts liked the willowy type.” Still, he was suddenly uneasy.
Suddenly, shockingly, McVries said: “Would you let me jerk you oft?”
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?”
Garraty felt a sticky dryness in his throat. The thing was, he wanted to be touched. Queer, not queer, that didn’t seem to matter now that they were all busy dying. All that mattered was McVries. He didn’t want McVries to touch him, not that way.
“Well, I suppose you did save my life-” Garraty let it hang.
