by Stephen King
The carbines came slowly down from high port and found Harkness.
There was a long, terrible moment of silence, and then they went back up again to high port, all according to the rules, according to the book. Then they came down again. Garraty could hear Harkness’s hurried, wet breathing.
The guns went back up, then down, then slowly back up to high port.
The two Little Leaguers were still keeping pace. “Get outta here!” Baker said suddenly, hoarsely. “You don’t want to see this. Scat!”
They looked with flat curiosity at Baker and kept on. They had looked at Baker as if he was some kind of fish. One of them, a small, bulletheaded kid with a wiffle haircut and dish-sized eyes, blipped the horn bolted to his bike and grinned. He wore braces, and the sun made a savage metal glitter in his mouth.
The guns came back down. It was like some sort of dance movement, like a ritual. Harkness rode the edge. Read any good books lately? Garraty thought insanely. This time they’re going to shoot you. Just one step too slow—
Eternity.
Everything frozen.
Then the guns went back up to high port.
Garraty looked at his watch. The second hand swung around once, twice, three times. Harkness caught up to him, passed him by. His face was set and rigid. His eyes looked straight ahead. His pupils were contracted to tiny points. His lips had a faint bluish cast, and his fiery complexion had faded to the color of cream, except for two garish spots of color, one on each cheek. But he was not favoring the bad foot anymore. The cramp had loosened. His stocking foot slapped the road rhythmically. How long can you walk without your shoes? Garraty wondered.
He felt a loosening in his chest all the same, and heard Baker let out his breath. It was stupid to feel that way. The sooner Harkness stopped walking, the sooner he could stop walking. That was the simple truth. That was logic. But something went deeper, a truer, more frightening logic. Harkness was a part of the group that Garraty was a part of, a segment of his subclan. Part of a magic circle that Garraty belonged to. And if one part of that circle could be broken, any part of it could be broken.
The Little Leaguers biked along with them for another two miles before losing interest and turning back. It was better, Garraty thought. It didn’t matter if they had looked at Baker as though he were something in a zoo. It was better for them to be cheated of their death. He watched them out of sight.
Up ahead, Harkness had formed a new one-man vanguard, walking very rapidly, almost running. He looked neither right nor left. Garraty wondered what he was thinking.
Chapter 7
“I like to think I’m quite an engaging bloke, really. People I meet consider I’m schizophrenic just because I’m completely different offscreen than I am before the cameras . . .”
—Nicholas Parsons Sale of the Century (British version)
Scramm, 85, did not fascinate Garraty because of his flashing intelligence, because Scramm wasn’t all that bright. He didn’t fascinate Garraty because of his moon face, his crew cut, or his build, which was mooselike. He fascinated Garraty because he was married.
“Really?” Garraty asked for the third time. He still wasn’t convinced Scramm wasn’t having him on. “You’re really married?”
“Yeah.” Scramm looked up at the early morning sun with real pleasure. “I dropped out of school when I was fourteen. There was no point to it, not for me. I wasn’t no troublemaker, just not able to make grades. And our history teacher read us an article about how schools are over-populated. So I figured why not let somebody who can learn sit in, and I’ll get down to business. I wanted to marry Cathy anyway.”
“How old were you?” Garraty asked, more fascinated than ever. They were passing through another small town, and the sidewalks were lined with signs and spectators, but he hardly noticed. Already the watchers were in another world, not related to him in any way. They might have been behind a thick plate-glass shield.
“Fifteen,” Scramm answered. He scratched his chin, which was blue with beard stubble.
“No one tried to talk you out of it?”
“There was a guidance counselor at school, he gave me a lot of shit about sticking with it and not being a ditch digger, but he had more important things to do besides keep me in school. I guess you could say he gave me the soft sell. Besides, somebody has to dig ditches, right?”
He waved enthusiastically at a group of little girls who were going through a spastic cheer-leader routine, pleated skirts and scabbed knees flying.
“Anyhow, I never did dig no ditch. Never dug a one in my whole career. Went to work for a bedsheet factory out in Phoenix, three dollars an hour. Me and Cathy, we’re happy people.” Scramm smiled. “Sometimes we’ll be watching TV and Cath will grab me and say, ‘We’re happy people, honey.’ She’s a peach.”
“You got any kids?” Garraty asked, feeling more and more that this was an insane discussion.
“Well, Cathy’s pregnant right now. She said we should wait until we had enough in the bank to pay for the delivery. When we got up to seven hundred, she said go, and we went. She caught pregnant in no time at all.” Scramm looked sternly at Garraty. “My kid’s going to college. They say dumb guys like me never have smart kids, but Cathy’s smart enough for both of us. Cathy finished high school. I made her finish. Four night courses and then she took the H.S.E.T. My kid’s going to as much college as he wants.”
Garraty didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of anything to say. McVries was off to the side, in close conversation with Olson. Baker and Abraham were playing a word game called Ghost. He wondered where Harkness was. Far out of sight, anyway. That was Scramm, too. Really out of sight. Hey Scramm, I think you made a bad mistake. Your wife, she’s pregnant, Scramm, but that doesn’t win you any special favors around here. Seven hundred in the bank? You don’t spell pregnant with just three numbers, Scramm. And no insurance company in the world would touch a Long Walker.
Garraty stared at and through a man in a hound’s tooth jacket who was deliriously waving a straw hat with a stringy brim.
“Scramm, what happens if you buy it?” he asked cautiously.
Scramm smiled gently. “Not me. I feel like I could walk forever. Say, I wanted to be in the Long Walk ever since I was old enough to want anything. I walked eighty miles just two weeks ago, no sweat.”
“But suppose something should happen—”
But Scramm only chuckled.
“How old’s Cathy?”
“About a year older than me. Almost eighteen. Her folks are with her now, there in Phoenix.”
It sounded to Garraty as if Cathy Scramm’s folks knew something Scramm himself did not.
“You must love her a lot,” he said, a little wistfully.
Scramm smiled, showing the stubborn last survivors of his teeth. “I ain’t looked at anyone else since I married her. Cathy’s a peach.”
“And you’re doing this.”
Scramm laughed. “Ain’t it fun?”
“Not for Harkness,” Garraty said sourly. “Go ask him if he thinks it’s fun.”
“You don’t have any grasp of the consequences,” Pearson said, falling in between Garraty and Scramm. “You could lose. You have to admit you could lose.”
“Vegas odds made me the favorite just before the Walk started,” Scramm said. “Odds-on.”
“Sure,” Pearson said glumly. “And you’re in shape, too, anyone can see that.” Pearson himself looked pale and peaked after the long night on the road. He glanced disinterestedly at the crowd gathered in a supermarket parking lot they were just passing. “Everyone who wasn’t in shape is dead now, or almost dead. But there’s still seventy-two of us left.”
“Yeah, but . . .” A thinking frown spread over the broad circle of Scramm’s face. Garraty could almost hear the machinery up there working: slow, ponderous, but in the end as sure as death and as inescapable as taxes. It was somehow awesome.
“I don’t want to make you guys mad,” Scramm said. “Y
ou’re good guys. But you didn’t get into this thinking of winning out and getting the Prize. Most of these guys don’t know why they got into it. Look at that Barkovitch. He ain’t in it to get no Prize. He’s just walkin’ to see other people die. He lives on it. When someone gets a ticket, he gets a little more go-power. It ain’t enough. He’ll dry up just like a leaf on a tree.”
“And me?” Garraty asked.
Scramm looked troubled. “Aw, hell . . .”
“No, go on.”
“Well, the way I see it, you don’t know why you are walking, either. It’s the same thing. You’re going now because you’re afraid, but . . . that’s not enough. That wears out.” Scramm looked down at the road and rubbed his hands together. “And when it wears out, I guess you’ll buy a ticket like all the rest, Ray.”
Garraty thought about McVries saying, When I get tired . . . really tired . . . why, I guess I will sit down.
“You’ll have to walk a long time to walk me down,” Garraty said, but Scramm’s simple assessment of the situation had scared him badly.
“I,” Scramm said, “am ready to walk a long time.”
Their feet rose and fell on the asphalt, carrying them forward, around a curve, down into a dip and then over a railroad track that was metal grooves in the road. They passed a closed fried clam shack. Then they were out in the country again.
“I understand what it is to die, I think,” Pearson said abruptly. “Now I do, anyway. Not death itself, I still can’t comprehend that. But dying. If I stop walking, I’ll come to an end.” He swallowed, and there was a click in his throat. “Just like a record after the last groove.” He looked at Scramm earnestly. “Maybe it’s like you say. Maybe it’s not enough. But . . . I don’t want to die.”
Scramm looked at him almost scornfully. “You think just knowing about death will keep you from dying?”
Pearson smiled a funny, sick little smile, like a businessman on a heaving boat trying to keep his dinner down. “Right now that’s about all that’s keeping me going.” And Garraty felt a huge grate-fulness, because his defenses had not been reduced to that. At least, not yet.
Up ahead, quite suddenly and as if to illustrate the subject they had been discussing, a boy in a black turtleneck sweater suddenly had a convulsion. He fell on the road and began to snap and sunfish and jackknife viciously. His limbs jerked and flopped. There was a funny gargling noise in his throat, aaa-aaa-aaa, a sheeplike sound that was entirely mindless. As Garraty hurried past, one of the fluttering hands bounced against his shoe and he felt a wave of frantic revulsion. The boy’s eyes were rolled up to the whites. There were splotches of foam splattered on his lips and chin. He was being second-warned, but of course he was beyond hearing, and when his two minutes were up they shot him like a dog.
Not long after that they reached the top of a gentle grade and stared down into the green, unpopulated country ahead. Garraty was grateful for the cool morning breeze that slipped over his fast-perspiring body.
“That’s some view,” Scramm said.
The road could be seen for perhaps twelve miles ahead. It slid down the long slope, ran in flat zigzags through the woods, a blackish-gray charcoal mark across a green swatch of crepe paper. Far ahead it began to climb again, and faded into the rosy-pink haze of early morning light.
“This might be what they call the Hainesville Woods,” Garraty said, not too sure. “Truckers’ graveyard. Hell in the wintertime.”
“I never seen nothing like it,” Scramm said reverently. “There isn’t this much green in the whole state of Arizona.”
“Enjoy it while you can,” Baker said, joining the group. “It’s going to be a scorcher. It’s hot already and it’s only six-thirty in the morning.”
“Think you’d get used to it, where you come from,” Pearson said, almost resentfully.
“You don’t get used to it,” Baker said, slinging his light jacket over his arm. “You just learn to live with it.”
“I’d like to build a house up here,” Scramm said. He sneezed heartily, twice, sounding a little like a bull in heat. “Build it right up here with my own two hands, and look at the view every morning. Me and Cathy. Maybe I will someday, when this is all over.”
Nobody said anything.
By 6:45 the ridge was above and behind them, the breeze mostly cut off, and the heat already walked among them. Garraty took off his own jacket, rolled it, and tied it securely about his waist. The road through the woods was no longer deserted. Here and there early risers had parked their cars off the road and stood or sat in clumps, cheering, waving, and holding signs.
Two girls stood beside a battered MG at the bottom of one dip. They were wearing tight summer shorts, middy blouses, and sandals. There were cheers and whistles. The faces of these girls were hot, flushed, and excited by something ancient, sinuous, and, to Garraty, erotic almost to the point of insanity. He felt animal lust rising in him, an aggressively alive thing that made his body shake with a palsied fever all its own.
It was Gribble, the radical among them, that suddenly dashed at them, his feet kicking up spurts of dust along the shoulder. One of them leaned back against the hood of the MG and spread her legs slightly, tilting her hips at him. Gribble put his hands over her breasts. She made no effort to stop him. He was warned, hesitated, and then plunged against her, a jamming, hurtling, frustrated, angry, frightened figure in a sweaty white shirt and cord pants. The girl hooked her ankles around Gribble’s calves and put her arms lightly around his neck. They kissed.
Gribble took a second warning, then a third, and then, with perhaps fifteen seconds of grace left, he stumbled away and broke into a frantic, shambling run. He fell down, picked himself up, clutched at his crotch and staggered back onto the road. His tin face was hectically flushed.
“Couldn’t,” he was sobbing. “Wasn’t enough time and she wanted me to and I couldn’t . . . I . . .” He was weeping and staggering, his hands pressed against his crotch. His words were little more than indistinct wails.
“So you gave them their little thrill,” Barkovitch said. “Something for them to talk about in Show and Tell tomorrow.”
“Just shut up!” Gribble screamed. He dug at his crotch. “It hurts, I got a cramp—”
“Blue balls,” Pearson said. “That’s what he’s got.”
Gribble looked at him through the stringy bangs of black hair that had fallen over his eyes. He looked like a stunned weasel. “It hurts,” he muttered again. He dropped slowly to his knees, hands pressed into his lower belly, head drooping, back bowed. He was shivering and snuffling and Garraty could see the beads of sweat on his neck, some of them caught in the fine hairs on the nape—what Garraty’s own father had always called quackfuzz.
A moment later and he was dead.
Garraty turned his head to look at the girls, but they had retreated inside their MG. They were nothing but shadow-shapes.
He made a determined effort to push them from his mind, but they kept creeping back in. How must it have been, dry-humping that warm, willing flesh? Her thighs had twitched, my God, they had twitched, in a kind of spasm, orgasm, oh God, the uncontrollable urge to squeeze and caress . . . and most of all to feel that heat . . . that heat.
He felt himself go. That warm, shooting flow of sensation, warming him. Wetting him. Oh Christ, it would soak through his pants and someone would notice. Notice and point a finger and ask him how he’d like to walk around the neighborhood with no clothes on, walk naked, walk . . . and walk . . . and walk . . .
Oh Jan I love you really I love you, he thought, but it was confused, all mixed up in something else.
He retied his jacket about his waist and then went on walking as before, and the memory dulled and browned very quickly, like a Polaroid negative left out in the sun.
The pace stepped up. They were on a steep downhill grade now, and it was hard to walk slowly. Muscles worked and pistoned and squeezed against each other. The sweat rolled freely. Incredibly, Garraty found himself wis
hing for night again. He looked over at Olson curiously, wondering how he was making it.
Olson was staring at his feet again. The cords in his neck were knotted and ridged. His lips were drawn back in a frozen grin.
“He’s almost there now,” McVries said at his elbow, startling him. “When they start half-hoping someone will shoot them so they can rest their feet, they’re not far away.”
“Is that right?” Garraty asked crossly. “How come everybody else around here knows so much more about it than me?”
“Because you’re so sweet,” McVries said tenderly, and then he sped up, letting his legs catch the downgrade, and passed Garraty by.
Stebbins. He hadn’t thought about Stebbins in a long time. He turned his head to look for Stebbins. Stebbins was there. The pack had strung out coming down the long hill, and Stebbins was about a quarter of a mile back, but there was no mistaking those purple pants and that chambray workshirt. Stebbins was still tailing the pack like some thin vulture, just waiting for them to fall—
Garraty felt a wave of rage. He had a sudden urge to rush back and throttle Stebbins. There was no rhyme or reason to it, but he had to actively fight the compulsion down.
By the time they had reached the bottom of the grade, Garraty’s legs felt rubbery and unsteady. The state of numb weariness his flesh had more or less settled into was broken by unexpected darning-needles of pain that drove through his feet and legs. threatening to make his muscles knot and cramp. And Jesus, he thought, why not? They had been on the road for twenty-two hours. Twenty-two hours of nonstop walking, it was unbelievable.
“How do you feel now?” he asked Scramm, as if the last time he had asked him had been twelve hours ago.
“Fit and fine,” Scramm said. He wiped the back of his hand across his nose, sniffed, and spat. “Just as fit and fine as can be.”
“You sound like you’re getting a cold.”
“Naw, it’s the pollen. Happens every spring. Hay fever. I even get it in Arizona. But I never catch colds.”