The Long Walk

“Oh yeah?”

“No help for anybody. Do it on your own or don’t do it.”

Garraty looked at his feet. He wondered how long it had been since he was hungry, and he wondered how long it would be before he fainted if he didn’t eat something. He thought that Abraham’s Oxfords were like Stebbins-those shoes could carry him from here to the Golden Gate Bridge without so much as a busted shoelace… at least they looked that way.

“That sounds pretty heartless,” he said finally.

“It’s gotten to be a pretty heartless situation.” Abraham wouldn’t look at him. “Have you talked to all the others about this?”

“Not yet. About a dozen.”

“Yeah, it’s a real bitch. I can see how hard it is for you to talk about.”

“It seems to get harder rather than easier.”

“What did they say?” He knew what they said, what were they supposed to say?

“They’re for it.”

Garraty opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked at Baker up ahead. Baker was wearing his jacket, and it was soaked. His head was bent. One hip swayed and jutted awkwardly. His left leg had stiffened up quite badly.

“Why’d you take off your shirt?” he asked Abraham suddenly.

“It was making my skin itch. It was raising hives or something. It was a synthetic, maybe I have an allergy to synthetic fabrics, how the hell should I know? What do you say, Ray?”

“You look like a religious penitent or something.”

“What do you say? Yes or no?”

“Maybe I owe McVries a couple.” McVries was still close by, but it was impossible to tell if he could hear their conversation over the din of the crowd. Come on, McVries, he thought. Tell him I don’t owe you anything. Come on, you son of a bitch. But McVries said nothing.

“All right, count me in,” Garraty said.

“Cool.”

Now I’m an animal, nothing but a dirty, tired, stupid animal. You did it. You sold it out.

“If you try to help anybody, we can’t hold you back. That’s against the rules. But we’ll shut you out. And you’ll have broken your promise.”

“I won’t try.”

“Same goes for anyone who tries to help you.”

“Yuh.”

“It’s nothing personal. You know that, Ray. But we’re down against it now.”

“Root hog or die.”

“That’s it.”

“Nothing personal. Just back to the jungle.”

For a second he thought Abraham was going to get pissed, but his quickly drawn-in breath came out in a harmless sigh. Maybe he was too tired to get pissed. “You agreed. I’ll hold you to that, Ray.”

“Maybe I should get all high-flown and say I’ll keep my promise because my word is my bond,” Garraty said. “But I’ll be honest. I want to see you get that ticket, Abraham. The sooner the better.”

Abraham licked his lips. “Yeah.”

“Those look like good shoes, Abe.”

“Yeah. But they’re too goddam heavy. You buy for distance, you gain the weight.”

“Just ain’t no cure for the summertime blues, is there?”

Abraham laughed. Garraty watched McVries. His face was unreadable. He might have heard. He might not have. The rain fell in steady straight lines, heavier now, colder. Abraham’s skin was 6shbelly white. Abraham looked more like a convict with his shirt off. Garraty wondered if anyone had told Abraham he didn’t stand a dog’s chance of lasting the night with his shirt off. Twilight already seemed to be creeping in. McVries? Did you hear us? I sold you down, McVries. Musketeers forever.

“Ah, I don’t want to die this way,” Abraham said. He was crying. “Not in public with people rooting for you to get up and walk another few miles. It’s so fucking mindless. Just fucking mindless. This has about as much dignity as a mongoloid idiot strangling on his own tongue and shitting his pants at the same time.”

It was quarter past three when Garraty gave his no help promise. By six that evening, only one more had gotten a ticket. No one talked. There seemed to be an uncomfortable conspiracy afoot to ignore the last fraying inches of their lives, Garraty thought, to just pretend it wasn’t happening. The groups-what pitiful little remained of them-had broken down completely. Everyone had agreed to Abraham’s proposal. McVries had. Baker had. Stebbins had laughed and asked Abraham if he wanted to prick his finger so he could sign in blood.

It was growing very cold. Garraty began to wonder if there really was such a thing as a sun, or if he had dreamed it. Even Jan was a dream to him now-a summer dream of a summer that never was.

Yet he seemed to see his father ever more clearly. His father with the heavy shock of hair he himself had inherited, and the big, meaty truck-driver’s shoulders.

His father had been built like a fullback. He could remember his father picking him up, swinging him dizzyingly, rumpling his hair, kissing him. Loving him.

He hadn’t really seen his mother back there in Freeport at all, he realized sadly, but she had been there-in her shabby black coat, “for best,” the one that showed the white snowfall of dandruff on the collar no matter how often she shampooed. He had probably hurt her deeply by ignoring her in favor of Jan. Perhaps he had even meant to hurt her. But that didn’t matter now. It was past. It was the future that was unraveling, even before it was knit.

You get in deeper, he thought. It never gets shallower, just deeper, until you’re out of the bay and swimming into the ocean. Once all of this had looked simple. Pretty funny, all right. He had talked to McVries and McVries had told him the first time he had saved him out of pure reflex. Then, in Freeport, it had been to prevent an ugliness in front of a pretty girl he would never know. Just as he would never know Scramm’s wife, heavy with child. Garraty had felt a pang at the thought, and sudden sorrow. He had not thought of Scramm in such a long time. He thought McVries was quite grown-up, really. He wondered why he hadn’t managed to grow up any.

The Walk went on. Towns marched by.

He fell into a melancholy, oddly satisfying mood that was shattered quite suddenly by an irregular rattle of gunfire and hoarse screams from the crowd. When he looked around he was stunned to see Collie Parker standing on top of the halftrack with a rifle in his hands.

One of the soldiers had fallen off and lay staring up at the sky with empty, expressionless eyes. There was a neat blue hole surrounded by a corona of powder burns in the center of his forehead.

“Goddam bastards!” Parker was screaming. The other soldiers had jumped from the halftrack. Parker looked out over the stunned Walkers. “Come on, you guys! Come on! We can-”

The Walkers, Garraty included, stared at Parker as if he had begun to speak in a foreign language. And now one of the soldiers who had jumped when Parker swarmed up the side of the 'track now carefully shot Collie Parker in the back.

“Parker!” McVries screamed. It was as if he alone understood what had happened, and a chance that might have been missed. “Oh, no! Parker!”

Parker grunted as if someone had hit him in the back with a padded Indian club. The bullet mushroomed and there was Collie Parker, standing on top of the halftrack with his guts all over his torn khaki shirt and blue jeans. One hand was frozen in the middle of a wide, sweeping gesture, as if he was about to deliver an angry philippic.

“God.”

“Damn,” Parker said.

He fired the rifle he had wrenched away from the dead soldier twice into the road. The slugs snapped and whined, and Garraty felt one of them tug air in front of his face. Someone in the crowd screamed in pain. Then the gun slid from Parker’s hands. He made an almost military half-turn and then fell to the road where he lay on his side, panting rapidly like a dog that has been struck and mortally wounded by a passing car. His eyes blazed. He opened his mouth and struggled through blood for some coda.

“You. Ba. Bas. Bast. Ba.” He died, staring viciously at them as they passed by.

“What happened?” Garraty cried out to no one in particular. “What happened to him?”

“He snuck up on ’em,” McVries said. “That’s what happened. He must have known he couldn’t make it. He snuck right up behind ’em and caught ’em asleep at the switch.” McVries’s voice hoarsened. “He wanted us all up there with him, Garraty. And I think we could have done it.”

“What are you talking about?” Garraty asked, suddenly terrified.

“You don’t know?” McVties asked. “You don’t know?”

“Up there with him?… What?…”

“Forget it. Just forget it.”

McVries walked away. Garraty had a sudden attack of the shivers. He couldn’t stop them. He didn’t know what McVries was talking about. He didn’t want to know what McVries was talking about. Or even think about it.

The Walk went on.

By nine o’clock that night the rain had stopped, but the sky was starless. No one else had gone down, but Abraham had begun to moan inarticulately. It was very cold, but no one offered to give Abraham something to wear. Garraty tried to think of it as poetic justice, but it only made him feel sick. The pain within him had turned into a sickness, a rotten sick feeling that seemed to be growing in the hollows of his body like a green fungus. His concentrate belt was nearly full, but it was all he could do to eat a small tube of tuna paste without gagging.

Baker, Abraham, and McVries. His circle of friends had come down to those three. And Stebbins, if he was anyone’s friend. Acquaintance, then. Or demigod. Or devil. Or whatever. He wondered if any of them would be here by morning, and if he would be alive to know.

Thinking such things, he almost tan into Baker in the dark. Something clinked in Baker’s hands.

“What you doing?” Garraty asked.

“Huh?” Baker looked up blankly.