“Olson,” he said. “That's Oldtown. Those lights are Oldtown. We're getting there, fellow.”
Olson made no answer. And now he could remember what had been eluding him and it was nothing so vital after all. Just that Olson reminded him of the Flying Dutchman, sailing on and on after the whole crew had disappeared.
They walked rapidly down a long hill, passed through an S-curve, and crossed a bridge that spanned, according to the sign, Meadow Brook. On the far side of this bridge was another STEEP HILL TRUCKS USE LOW GEAR sign. There were groans from some of the Walkers.
It was indeed a steep hill. It seemed to rise above them like a toboggan slide. It was not long; even in the dark they could see the summit. But it was steep, all right. Plenty steep.
They started up.
Garraty leaned into the slope, feeling his grip on his respiration start to trickle away almost at once. Be panting like a dog at the top, he thought... and then thought, if I get to the top. There was a protesting clamor rising in both legs. It started in his thighs and worked its way down. His legs were screaming at him that they simply weren't going to do this shit any longer.
But you will, Garraty told them. You will or you'll die.
I don't care, his legs answered back. Don't care if I do die, do die, do die.
The muscles seemed to be softening, melting like Jell-O left out in a hot sun. They trembled almost helplessly. They twitched like badly controlled puppets.
Warnings cracked out right and left, and Garraty realized he would be getting one for his very own soon enough. He kept his eyes fixed on Olson, forcing himself to match his pace to Olson's. They would make it together, up over the top of this killer hill, and then he would get Olson to tell him his secret. Then everything would be jake and he wouldn't have to worry about Stebbins or McVries or Jan or his father, no, not even about Freaky D'Allessio, who had spread his head on a stone wall beside U.S. 1 like a dollop of glue.
What was it, a hundred feet on? Fifty? What?
Now he was panting.
The first gunshots rang out. There was a loud, yipping scream that was drowned by more gunshots. And at the brow of the hill they got one more. Garraty could see nothing in the dark. His tortured pulse hammered in his temples. He found that he didn't give a fuck who had bought it this time. It didn't matter. Only the pain mattered, the tearing pain in his legs and lungs.
The hill rounded, flattened, and rounded still more on the downslope. The far side was gently sloping, perfect for regaining wind. But that soft jelly feeling in his muscles didn't want to leave. My legs are going to collapse, Garraty thought calmly. They'll never take me as far as Freeport. I don't think I can make it to Oldtown. I'm dying, I think.
A sound began to beat its way into the night then, savage and orgiastic. It was a voice, it was many voices, and it was repeating the same thing over and over:
Garraty! Garraty! GARRATY! GARRATY! GARRATY!
It was God or his father, about to cut the legs out from under him before he could learn the secret, the secret, the secret of—
Like thunder: GARRATY! GARRATY! GARRATY!
It wasn't his father and it wasn't God. It was what appeared to be the entire student body of Oldtown High School, chanting his name in unison. As they caught sight of his white, weary, and strained face, the steady beating cry dissolved into wild cheering. Cheerleaders fluttered pompoms. Boys whistled shrilly and kissed their girls. Garraty waved back, smiled, nodded, and craftily crept closer to Olson.
“Olson,” he whispered. “Olson.”
Olson's eyes might have flickered a tiny bit. A spark of life like the single turn of an old starter in a junked automobile.
“Tell me how, Olson,” he whispered. “Tell me what to do.”
The high school girls and boys (did I once go to high school? Garraty wondered, was that a dream?) were behind them now, still cheering rapturously.
Olson's eyes moved jerkily in their sockets, as if long rusted and in need of oil. His mouth fell open with a nearly audible clunk.
“That's it,” Garraty whispered eagerly. “Talk. Talk to me, Olson. Tell me. Tell me.”
“Ah,” Olson said. “Ah. Ah.”
Garraty moved even closer. He put a hand on Olson's shoulder and leaned into an evil nimbus of sweat, halitosis, and urine.
“Please,” Garraty said. “Try hard.”
“Ga. Go. God. God's garden—”
“God's garden,” Garraty repeated doubtfully. “What about God's garden, Olson?”
“It's full. Of. Weeds,” Olson said sadly. His head bounced against his chest. “I…”
Garraty said nothing. He could not. They were going up another hill now and he was panting again. Olson did not seem to be out of breath at all.
“I don't. Want. To die,” Olson finished.
Garraty's eyes were soldered to the shadowed ruin that was Olson's face. Olson turned creakily toward him.
“Ah?” Olson raised his lolling head slowly. “Ga. Ga. Garraty?”
“Yes, it's me.”
“What time is it?”
Garraty had rewound and reset his watch earlier. God knew why. “It's quarter of nine.”
“No. No later. Than that?” Mild surprise washed over Olson's shattered old man's face.
“Olson—” He shook Olson's shoulder gently and Olson's whole frame seemed to tremble, like a gantry in a high wind. “What's it all about?” Suddenly Garraty cackled madly. “What's it all about, Alfie?”
Olson looked at Garraty with calculated shrewdness.
“Garraty,” he whispered. His breath was like a sewer-draught.
“What?”
“What time is it?”
“Dammit!” Garraty shouted at him. He turned his head quickly, but Stebbins was staring down at the road. If he was laughing at Garraty, it was too dark to see.
“Garraty?”
“What?” Garraty said more quietly.
“Je. Jesus will save you.”
Olson's head came up all the way. He began to walk off the road. He was walking at the halftrack.
“Warning. Warning 70!”
Olson never slowed. There was a ruinous dignity about him. The gabble of the crowd quieted. They watched, wide-eyed.
Olson never hesitated. He reached the soft shoulder. He put his hands over the side of the halftrack. He began to clamber painfully up the side.
“Olson!” Abraham yelled, startled. “Hey, that's Hank Olson!”
The soldiers brought their guns around in perfect four-part harmony. Olson grabbed the barrel of the closest and yanked it out of the hands that held it as if it had been an ice-cream stick. It clattered off into the crowd. They shrank from it, screaming, as if it had been a live adder.
Then one of the other three guns went off. Garraty saw the flash at the end of the barrel quite clearly. He saw the jerky ripple of Olson's shirt as the bullet entered his belly and then punched out the back.
Olson did not stop. He gained the top of the halftrack and grabbed the barrel of the gun that had just shot him. He levered it up into the air as it went off again.
“Get 'em!” McVries was screaming savagely up ahead. “Get'em, Olson! Kill 'em! Kill 'em!”
The other two guns roared in unison and the impact of the heavy-caliber slugs sent Olson flying off the halftrack. He landed spread-eagled on his back like a man nailed to a cross. One side of his belly was a black and shredded ruin. Three more bullets were pumped into him. The guard Olson had disarmed had produced another carbine (effortlessly) from inside the halftrack.
Olson sat up. He put his hands against his belly and stared calmly at the poised soldiers on the deck of the squat vehicle. The soldiers stared back.
“You bastards!” McVries sobbed. “You bloody bastards!”
Olson began to get up. Another volley of bullets drove him flat again.
Now there was a sound from behind Garraty. He didn't have to turn his head to know it was Stebbins. Stebbins was laughing softly.
Olson sat up again. The guns were still trained on him, but the soldiers did not shoot. Their silhouettes on the halftrack seemed almost to indicate curiosity.
Slowly, reflectively, Olson gained his feet, hands crossed on his belly. He seemed to sniff the air for direction, turned slowly in the direction of the Walk, and began to stagger along.
“Put him out of it!” a shocked voice screamed hoarsely. “For Christ's sake put him out of it!”
The blue snakes of Olson's intestines were slowly slipping through his fingers. They dropped like link sausages against his groin, where they flapped obscenely. He stopped, bent over as if to retrieve them (retrieve them, Garraty thought in a near ecstasy of wonder and horror), and threw up a huge glut of blood and bile. He began to walk again, bent over. His face was sweetly calm.
“Oh my God,” Abraham said, and turned to Garraty with his hands cupped over his mouth. Abraham's face was white and cheesy. His eyes were bulging. His eyes were frantic with terror. “Oh my God, Ray, what a fucking gross-out, oh Jesus!” Abraham vomited. Puke sprayed through his fingers.
Well, old Abe has tossed his cookies, Garraty thought remotely. That's no way to observe Hint 13, Abe.
“They gut-shot him,” Stebbins said from behind Garraty. “They'll do that. It's deliberate. To discourage anybody else from trying the old Charge of the Light Brigade number.”
“Get away from me,” Garraty hissed. “Or I'll knock your block off!”
Stebbins dropped back quickly.
“Warning! Warning 88!”
Stebbins's laugh drifted softly to him.
Olson went to his knees. His head hung between his arms, which were propped on the road.
One of the rifles roared, and a bullet clipped asphalt beside Olson's left hand and whined away. He began to climb slowly, wearily, to his feet again. They're playing with him, Garraty thought. All of this must be terribly boring for them, so they are playing with Olson. Is Olson fun, boys? Is Olson keeping you amused?
Garraty began to cry. He ran over to Olson and fell on his knees beside him and held the tired, hectically hot face against his chest. He sobbed into the dry, bad-smelling hair.
“Warning! Warning 47!”
“Warning! Warning 61!”
McVries was pulling at him. It was McVries again. “Get up, Ray, get up, you can't help him, for God's sake get up!”
“It's not fair!” Garraty wept. There was a sticky smear of Olson's blood on his cheekbone. “It's just not fair!”
“I know. Come on. Come on.”
Garraty stood up. He and McVries began walking backward rapidly, watching Olson, who was on his knees. Olson got to his feet. He stood astride the white line. He raised both hands up into the sky. The crowd sighed softly.
“I DID IT WRONG!” Olson shouted tremblingly, and then fell flat and dead.
The soldiers on the halftrack put another two bullets in him and then dragged him busily off the road.
“Yes, that's that.”
They walked quietly for ten minutes or so, Garraty drawing a low-key comfort just from McVries's presence. “I'm starting to see something in it, Pete,” he said at last. “There's a pattern. It isn't all senseless.”
“Yeah? Don't count on it.”
“He talked to me, Pete. He wasn't dead until they shot him. He was alive.” Now it seemed that was the most important thing about the Olson experience. He repeated it. “Alive.”
“I don't think it makes any difference,” McVries said with a tired sigh. “He's just a number. Part of the body count. Number fifty-three. It means we're a little closer and that's all it means.”
“You don't really think that.”
“Don't tell me what I think and what I don't!” McVries said crossly. “Leave it alone, can't you?”
“I put us about thirteen miles outside of Oldtown,” Garraty said.
“Well hot shit!”
“Do you know how Scramm is?”
“I'm not his doctor. Why don't you scram yourself?”
“What the hell's eating you?”
McVries laughed wildly. “Here we are, here we areand you want to know what's eating me! I'm worried about next year's income taxes, that's what's eating me. I'm worried about the price of grain in South Dakota, that's what's eating me. Olson, his guts were falling out, Garraty, at the end he was walking with his guts falling out, and that's eating me, that's eating me—” He broke off and Garraty watched him struggle to keep from vomiting. Abruptly McVries said, “Scramm's poor.“
“Is he?”
“Collie Parker felt his forehead and said he was burning up. He's talking funny. About his wife, about Phoenix, Flagstaff, weird stuff about the Hopis and the Navajos and kachina dolls... it's hard to make out.”
“How much longer can he go?”
“Who can say. He still might outlast us all. He's built like a buffalo and he's trying awful hard. Jesus, am I tired.”
“What about Barkovitch?”
“He's wising up. He knows a lot of us'll be glad to see him buy a ticket to see the farm. He's made up his mind to outlast me, the nasty little fucker. He doesn't like me shagging him. Tough shit, right, I know.” McVries uttered his wild laugh again. Garraty didn't like the sound of it. “He's scared, though. He's easing up on the lungpower and going to leg-power.”
“We all are.”
“Yeah. Oldtown coming up. Thirteen miles?”
“That's tight.”
“Can I say something to you, Garraty?”
“Sure. I'll carry it with me to the grave.”
“I suppose that's true.”
Someone near the front of the crowd set off a firecracker, and both Garraty and McVries jumped. Several women screeched. A burly man in the front row said “Goddammit!” through a mouthful of popcorn.
“The reason all of this is so horrible,” McVries said, “is because it's just trivial. You know? We've sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren't mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope.”
“You're as bad as Stebbins,” Garraty said resentfully.
“I wish Priscilla had killed me,” McVries said. “At least that wouldn't have been—”
“Trivial,” Garraty finished.
“Yes. I think—”
“Look, I want to doze a little if I can. You mind?”
“No. I'm sorry.” McVries sounded stiff and offended.
“I'm sorry,” Garraty said. “Look, don't take it to heart. It's really—”
“Trivial,” McVries finished. He laughed his wild laugh for the third time and walked away. Garraty wished - not for the first time - that he had made no friends on the Long Walk. It was going to make it hard. In fact, it was already hard.
There was a sluggish stirring in his bowels. Soon they would have to be emptied. The thought made him grind his mental teeth. People would point and laugh. He would drop his shit in the street like a mongrel hound and afterward people would gather it up in paper napkins and put it in bottles for souvenirs. It seemed impossible that people would do such things, but he knew it happened.
Olson with his guts falling out.
McVries and Priscilla and the pajama factory.
Scramm, glowing fever-bright.
Abraham... what price stovepipe hat, audience?
Garraty's head dropped. He dozed. The Walk went on.
Over hill, over dale, over stile and mountain. Over ridge and under bridge and past my lady's fountain. Garraty giggled in the dimming recesses of his brain. His feet pounded the pavement and the loose heel flapped looser, like an old shutter on a dead house.
I think, therefore I am. First-year Latin class. Old tunes in a dead language. Ding-dong-bell-pussy's-down-the-well. Who pushed her in? Little Jackie Flynn.
I exist, therefore I am.
Another firecracker went off. There were whoops and cheers. The halftrack ground and clattered an
d Garraty listened for the sound of his number in a warning and dozed deeper.
Daddy, I wasn't glad when you had to go, but I never really missed you when you were gone. Sorry. But that's not the reason I'm here. I have no subconscious urge to kill myself, sorry Stebbins. So sorry but—
The guns again, startling him awake, and there was the familiar mailsack thud of another boy going home to Jesus. The crowd screamed its horror and roared its approval.
“Garraty!” a woman squealed. “Ray Garraty!” Her voice was harsh and scabbed. “We're with you, boy! We're with you Ray!”
Her voice cut through the crowd and heads turned, necks craned, so that they could get a better look at Maine's Own. There were scattered boos drowned in a rising cheer.
The crowd took up the chant again. Garraty heard his name until it was reduced to a jumble of nonsense syllables that had nothing to do with him.
He waved briefly and dozed again.
CHAPTER 11
“Come on, assholes! You want to live forever?”
—Unknown World War I Top Sergeant
They passed into Oldtown around midnight. They switched through two feeder roads, joined Route 2, and went through the center of town.
For Ray Garraty the entire passage was a blurred, sleep-hazed nightmare. The cheering rose and swelled until it seemed to cut off any possibility of thought or reason. Night was turned into glaring, shadowless day by flaring arc-sodium lamps that threw a strange orange light. In such a light even the most friendly face looked like something from a crypt. Confetti, newspaper, shredded pieces of telephone book, and long streamers of toilet paper floated and soared from second- and third-story windows. It was a New York ticker-tape parade in Bush League U.S.A.
No one died in Oldtown. The orange arc-lamps faded and the crowd depleted a little as they walked along the Stillwater River in the trench of morning. It was May 3rd now. The ripe smell of paper mill smote them. A juicy smell of chemicals, woodsmoke, polluted river, and stomach cancer waiting to happen. There were conical piles of sawdust higher than the buildings downtown. Heaped stacks of pulpwood stood to the sky like monoliths. Garraty dozed and dreamed his shadowy dreams of relief and redemption and after what seemed to be an eternity, someone began jabbing him in the ribs. It was McVries.
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