The Long Walk

“Shut your goddam mouth!”

“Virgin, aren’t you? Maybe a little bit queer in the bargain? Touch of the lavender? Don’t be afraid. You can talk to Papa Stebbins.”

“I’ll walk you down if I have to walk to Virginia, you cheap fuck!” Garraty was shaking with anger. He could not remember being so angry in his whole life.

“That’s okay,” Stebbins said soothingly. “I understand.”

“Motherfucker! You!-”

“Now there’s an interesting word. What made you use that word?”

For a moment Garraty was sure he must throw himself on Stebbins or faint with rage, yet he did neither. “If I have to walk to Virginia,” he repeated. “If I have to walk all the way to Virginia.”

Stebbins stretched up on his toes and grinned sleepily. “I feel like I could walk all the way to Florida, Garraty.”

Garraty lunged away from him, hunting for Baker, feeling the anger and rage die into a throbbing kind of shame. He supposed Stebbins thought he was an easy mark. He supposed he was.

Baker was walking beside a boy Garraty didn’t know. His head was down, his lips moving a little.

“Hey, Baker,” Garraty said.

Baker started, then seemed to shake himself all over, like a dog. “Garraty,” he said. “You.”

“Yea, me.”

“I was having a dream-an awful real one. What time?”

Garraty checked. “Almost twenty to seven.”

“Will it rain all day, you think?”

“I… uh!” Garraty lurched forward, momentarily off balance. “My damn shoe-heel came off,” he said.

“Get rid of ’em both,” Baker advised. “The nails will get to pokin’ through. And you have to work harder when you’re off balance.”

Garraty kicked off one shoe and it went end over end almost to the edge of the crowd, where it lay like a small crippled puppy. The hands of Crowd groped for it eagerly. One snared it, another took it away, and there was a violent, knotted struggle over it. His other shoe would not kick off; his foot had swelled tight inside it. He knelt, took his warning, untied it, and took it off. He considered throwing it to the crowd and then left it lying on the road instead. A great and irrational wave of despair suddenly washed over him and he thought: I have lost my shoes. I have lost my shoes.

The pavement was cold against his feet. The ripped remains of his stockings were soon soaked. Both feet looked strange, oddly lumpish. Garraty felt despair turn to pity for his feet. He caught up quickly with Baker, who was also walking shoeless. “I’m about done in,” Baker said simply.

“We all are.”

“I get to remembering all the nice things that ever happened to me. The first time I took a girl to a dance and there was this big ole drunk fella that kep tryin’ to cut in and I took him outside and whipped his ass for him. I was only able to because he was so drunk. And that girl looked at me like I was the greatest thing since the internal combustion engine. My first bike. The first time I read The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins… that’s my favorite book, Garraty, should anyone ever ask you. Sittin’ half asleep by some mudhole with a fishin’ line and catchin’ crawdaddies by the thousands. Layin’ in the backyard and sleepin’ with a Popeye funnybook over my face. I think about those things, Garraty. Just lately. Like I was old and gettin’ senile.”

The early morning rain fell silverly around them. Even the crowd seemed quieter, more withdrawn. Faces could be seen again, blurrily, like faces behind rainy panes of glass. They were pale, sloe-eyed faces with brooding expressions under dripping hats and umbrellas and spread newspaper tents. Garraty felt a deep ache inside him and it seemed it would be better if he could cry out, but he could not, any more than he could comfort Baker and tell him it was all right to die. It might be, but then again, it might not.

“I hope it won’t be dark,” Baker said. “That’s all I hope. If there is an… an after, I hope it’s not dark. And I hope you can remember. I’d hate to wander around in the dark forever, not knowing who I was or what I was doin’ there, or not even knowing that I’d ever had anything different.”

Garraty began to speak, and then the gunshots silenced him. Business was picking up again. The hiatus Parker had so accurately predicted was almost over. Baker’s lips drew up in a grimace.

“That’s what I’m most afraid of. That sound. Why did we do it, Garraty? We must have been insane.”

“I don’t think there was any good reason.'

'All we are is mice in a trap.”

The Walk went on. Rain fell. They walked past the places that Garraty knew-tumbledown shanties where no one lived, an abandoned one-room schoolhouse that had been replaced by the new Consolidated building, chicken houses, old trucks up on blocks, newly harrowed fields. He seemed to remember each field, each house. Now he tingled with excitement. The road seemed to fly by. His legs seemed to gain a new and spurious springiness. But maybe Stebbins was right-maybe she wouldn’t be there. It had to be considered and prepared for, at least.

The word came back through the thinned ranks that there was a boy near the front who believed he had appendicitis.

Garraty would have boggled at this earlier, but now he couldn’t seem to care about anything except Jan and Freeport. The hands on his watch were racing along with a devilish life of their own. Only five miles out now. They had passed the Freeport town line. Somewhere up ahead Jan and his mother were already standing in front of Woolman’s Free Trade Center Market, as they had arranged it.

The sky brightened somewhat but remained overcast. The rain turned to a stubborn drizzle. The road was now a dark mirror, black ice in which Garraty could almost see the twisted reflection of his own face. He passed a hand across his forehead. It felt hot and feverish. Jan, oh Jan. You must know I-

The boy with the hurting side was 59, Klingerman. He began to scream. His screams quickly became monotonous. Garraty thought back to the one Long Walk he had seen-also in Freeport-and the boy who had been monotonously chanting I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

Klingerman, he thought, shut ya trap.

But Klingerman kept on walking, and he kept on screaming, hands laced over his side, and Garraty’s watch hands kept on racing. It was eight-fifteen now. You’ll be there, Jan, right? Right. Okay. I don’t know what you mean anymore, but I know I’m still alive and that I need you to be there, to give me a sign, maybe. Just be there. Be there.

Eight-thirty.

“We gettin’ close to this goddam town, Garraty?” Parker hollered.

“What do you care?” McVries jeered. “You sure don’t have a girl waiting for you.”

“I got girls everywhere, you dumb hump,” Parker said. “They take one look at this face and cream in their silks.” The face to which he referred was now haggard and gaunt, just a shadow of what it had been.

Eight forty-five.

“Slow down, fella,” McVries said as Garraty caught up with him and started to pass by. “Save a little for tonight.”

“I can’t. Stebbins said she wouldn’t be there. That they wouldn’t have a man to spare to help her through. I have to find out. I have to-”

“Just take it easy is all I’m saying. Stebbins would get his own mother to drink a Lysol cocktail if it would help him win. Don’t listen to him. She’ll be there. It makes great PR, for one thing.”

“But-'

'But me no buts, Ray. Slow down and live.”

“You can just cram your fucking platitudes!” Garraty shouted. He licked his lips and put a shaky hand to his face. “I… I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. Stebbins also said I really only wanted to see my mother anyway.”

“Don’t you want to see her?”

“Of course I want to see her! What the hell do you think I-no-yes-I don’t know. I had a friend once. And he and I-we-we took off our clothes-and she she-”

“Garraty,” McVries said, and put out a hand to touch his shoulder. Klingerman was screaming very loudly now. Somebody near the front lines asked him if he wanted an Alka-Seltzer. This sally brought general laughter. “You’re falling apart, Garraty. Settle down. Don’t blow it.”

“Get off my back!” Garraty screamed. He crammed one fist against his lips and bit down on it. After a second he said, “Just get off me.”

“Okay. Sure.”

McVries strode away. Garraty wanted to call him back but couldn’t.

Then, for the fourth time, it was nine o’clock in the morning. They turned left and the crowd was again below the twenty-four of them as they crossed the 295 overpass and into the town of Freeport. Up ahead was the Dairy Joy where he and Jan sometimes used to stop after the movies. They turned right and were on U.S. 1, what somebody had called the big highway. Big or small, it was the last highway. The hands on Garraty’s watch seemed to jump out at him. Downtown was straight ahead. Woolman’s was on the right. He could just see it, a squat and ugly building hiding behind a false front. The tickertape was starting to fall again. The rain made it sodden and sticky, lifeless. The crowd was swelling. Someone turned on the town fire siren, and its wails mixed and blended with Klingerman’s. Klingerman and the Freeport fire siren sang a nightmarish duet.

Tension filled Garraty’s veins, stuffed them full of copper wire. He could hear his heart thudding, now in his guts, now in his throat, now right between the eyes. Two hundred yards. They were screaming his name again (RAY-RAY-ALL-THE-WAY!) but he had not seen a familiar face in the crowd yet.

He drifted over to the right until the clutching hands of Crowd were inches from him-one long and brawny arm actually twitched the cloth of his shirt, and he jumped back as if he had almost been drawn into a threshing machine-and the soldiers had their guns on him, ready to let fly if he tried to disappear into the surge of humanity. Only a hundred yards to go now. He could see the big brown Woolman’s sign, but no sign of his mother or of Jan. God, oh God God, Stebbins had been right… and even if they were here, how was he going to see them in this shifting, clutching mass?

A shaky groan seeped out of him, like a disgorged strand of flesh. He stumbled and almost fell over his own loose legs. Stebbins had been right. He wanted to stop here, to not go any further. The disappointment, the sense of loss, was so staggering it was hollow. What was the point? What was the point now?

Fire siren blasting, Crowd screaming, Klingerman shrieking, rain falling, and his own little tortured soul, flapping through his head and crashing blindly off its walls.

I can’t go on. Can’t, can’t, can’t. But his feet stumbled on. Where am I? Jan? Jan?… JAN!

He saw her. She was waving the blue silk scarf he had gotten her for her birthday, and the rain shimmered in her hair like gems. His mother was beside her, wearing her plain black coat. They had been jammed together by the mob and were being swayed helplessly back and forth. Over Jan’s shoulder a TV camera poked its idiot snout.