A great sore somewhere in his body seemed to burst. The infection ran out of him in a green flood. He burst into a shambling, pigeon-toed run. His ripped socks flapped and slapped his swollen feet.
“Jan! Jan!”
He could hear the thought but not the words in his mouth. The TV camera tracked him enthusiastically. The din was tremendous. He could see her lips form his name, and he had to reach her, had to-
An arm brought him up short. It was McVries. A soldier speaking through a sexless bullhorn was giving them both first warning.
“Not into the crowd!” McVries’s lips were against Garraty’s ear and he was shouting. A lancet of pain pierced into Garraty’s head.
“Let me go!”
“I won’t let you kill yourself, Ray!”
“
The time was fleeting. She was crying. He could see the tears on her cheeks. He wrenched free of McVries. He started for her again. He felt hard, angry sobs coming up from inside him. He wanted sleep. He would find it in her arms. He loved her.
He could see the words on her lips.
McVries was still beside him. The TV camera glared down. Now, peripherally, he could see his high school class, and they were unfurling a huge banner and somehow it was his own face, his yearbook photo, blown up to Godzilla size, he was grinning down at himself as he cried and struggled to reach her.
Second warning, blared from the loudhailer like the voice of God.
She was reaching out to him. Hands touching. Her cool hand. Her tears-
His mother. Her hands, reaching-
He grasped them. In one hand he held Jan’s hand, in the other his mother’s hand. He touched them. It was done.
It was done until McVries’s arm came down around his shoulder again, cruel McVries.
“Let me
He struggled, but McVries was strong. Maybe McVries was even right. He looked at Jan and now her eyes were wide with alarm. His mother made shooing gestures. And on Jan’s lips he could read the words like a damnation: Go
Of course I must go on, he thought dully. I am Maine’s Own. And in that second he hated her, although if he had done anything, it was no more than to catch her and his mother-in the snare he had laid for himself.
Third warning for him and McVries, rolling majestically like thunder; the crowd hushed a little and looked on with wet-eyed eagerness. Now there was panic written on the faces of Jan and his mother. His mother’s hands flew to her face, and he thought of Barkovitch’s hands flying up to his neck like startled doves and ripping out his own throat.
“If you’ve got to do it, do it around the next corner, you cheap shit!” McVries cried.
He began to whimper. McVries had beaten him again. McVries was very strong. “All right,” he said, not knowing if McVries could hear him or not. He began to walk. “All right, all right, let me loose before you break my collarbone.” He sobbed, hiccuped, wiped his nose.
McVries let go of him warily, ready to grab him again.
Almost as an afterthought, Garraty turned and looked back, but they were already lost in the crowd again. He thought he would never forget that look of panic rising in their eyes, that feeling of trust and sureness finally kicked brutally away. He got nothing but half a glimpse of a waving blue scarf.
He turned around and faced forward again, not looking at McVries, and his stumbling, traitorous feet carried him on and they walked out of town.
CHAPTER 16
“The blood has begun to flow! Liston is staggering! Clay is rocking him with combinations!… boring in! Clay is killing him! Clay is killing him! Ladies and gentlemen, Liston is down! Sonny Liston is down! Clay is dancing… waving… yelling into the crowd! Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know how to describe this scene!”
Tubbins had gone insane.
Tubbins was a short boy with glasses and a faceful of freckles. He wore hiphanging bluejeans that he had been constantly hitching up. He hadn’t said much, but he had been a nice enough sort before he went insane.
“WHORE!” Tubbins babbled to the rain. He had turned his face up into it, and the rain dripped off his specs onto his cheeks and over his lips and down off the end of his blunted chin. “THE WHORE OF BABYLON HAS COME AMONG US! SHE LIES IN THE STREETS AND SPREADS HER LEGS ON THE FILTH OF COBBLESTONES! VILE! VILE! BEWARE THE WHORE OF BABYLON! HER LIPS DRIP HONEY BUT HER HEART IS GALL AND WORMWOOD-”
“And she’s got the clap,” Collie Parker added tiredly. “Jeezus, he’s worse than Klingerman.” He raised his voice. “Drop down dead, Tubby!”
“WHOREMONGER AND WHOREMASTER!” shrieked Tubbins. “VILE! UNCLEAN!”
“Piss on him,” Parker muttered. “I’ll kill him myself if he don’t shut up.” He passed trembling skeletal fingers across his lips, dropped them to his belt, and spent thirty seconds making them undo the clip that held his canteen to his belt. He almost dropped it getting it to his mouth, and then spilled half of it. He began to weep weakly.
It was three in the afternoon. Portland and South Portland were behind them. About fifteen minutes ago they had passed under a wet and flapping banner that proclaimed that the New Hampshire border was only 44 miles away.
Only, Garraty thought.
He was walking next to McVries, but McVries had spoken only in monosyllables since Freeport. Garraty hardly dared speak to him. He was indebted again, and it shamed him. It shamed him because he knew he would not help McVries if the chance came. Now Jan was gone, his mother was gone. Irrevocably and for eternity. Unless he won. And now he wanted to win very badly.
It was odd. This was the first time he could remember wanting to win. Not even at the start, when he had been fresh (back when dinosaurs walked the earth), had he consciously
Or had he known it all along?
His feet seemed to hurt twice as badly since he had decided he wanted to win, and there were stabbing pains in his chest when he drew long breaths. The sensation of fever was growing-perhaps he had picked something up from Scramm.
He wanted to win, but not even McVries could carry him over the invisible finish line. He didn’t think he was going to win. In the sixth grade he had won his school’s spelling bee and had gone on to the district spelldown, but the district spellmaster wasn’t Miss Petrie, who let you take it back. Softhearted Miss Petrie. He had stood there, hurt, unbelieving, sure there must have been some mistake, but there had been none. He just hadn’t been good enough to make the cut then, and he wasn’t going to be good enough now. Good enough to walk most of them down, but not all. His feet and legs had gone beyond numb and angry rebellion, and now mutiny was just a step away.
Only three had gone down since they left Freeport. One of them had been the unfortunate Klingerman. Garraty knew what the rest of them were thinking. It was too many tickets issued for them to just quit, any of them. Not with only twenty left to walk over. They would walk now until their bodies or minds shook apart.
They passed over a bridge spanning a placid little brook, its surface lightly pocked by the rain. The guns roared, the crowd cheered, and Garraty felt the stubborn cranny of hope in the back of his brain open an infinitesimal bit more.
“Did your girl look good to you?”
It was Abraham, looking like a victim of the Bataan March. For some inconceivable reason he had shucked both his jacket and his shirt, leaving his bony chest and stacked ribcage bare.
“Yeah,” Garraty said. “I hope I can make it back to her.”
Abraham smiled. “Hope? Yeah, I’m beginning to remember how to spell that word, too.” It was like a mild threat. “Was that Tubbins?”
Garraty listened. He heard nothing but the steady roar of the crowd. “Yeah, by God it was. Parker put the hex on him, I guess.”
“I keep telling myself,” Abraham said, “that all I got to do is to continue putting one foot in front of the other.”
“Yeah.”
Abraham looked distressed. “Garraty… this is a bitch to say…”
“What’s that?”
Abraham was quiet for a long time. His shoes were big heavy Oxfords that looked horrendously heavy to Garraty (whose own feet were now bare, cold, and scraping raw). They clopped and dragged on the pavement, which had now expanded to three lanes. The crowd did not seem so loud or quite so terrifyingly close as it had ever since Augusta.
Abraham looked more distressed than ever. “It’s a bitch. I just don’t know how to say it.”
Garraty shrugged, bewildered. “I guess you just say it.”
“Well, look. We’re getting together on something. All of us that are left.”
“Scrabble, maybe?”
“It’s a kind of a… a promise.”
