by Stephen King
The road inclined steeply, and the crowd fell away momentarily as they climbed up and over four sets of east/west railroad tracks that ran below, glittering hotly in their bed of cinders. At the top, as they crossed the wooden bridge, Garraty could see another belt of woods ahead, and the built-up, almost suburban area through which they had just passed to the right and left.
A cool breeze played over his sweaty skin, making him shiver. Scramm sneezed sharply three times.
“I am getting a cold,” he announced disgustedly.
“That’ll take the starch right out of you,” Pearson said. “That’s a bitch.”
“I’ll just have to work harder,” Scramm said.
“You must be made of steel,” Pearson said. “If I had a cold I think I’d roll right over and die. That’s how little energy I’ve got left.”
“Roll over and die now!” Barkovitch yelled back. “Save some energy!”
“Shut up and keep walking, killer,” McVries said immediately.
Barkovitch looked around at him. “Why don’t you get off my back, McVries? Go walk somewhere else.”
“It’s a free road. I’ll walk where I damn well please.”
Barkovitch hawked, spat, and dismissed him.
Garraty opened one of his food containers and began to eat cream cheese on crackers. His stomach growled bitterly at the first bite, and he had to fight himself to keep from wolfing everything. He squeezed a tube of roast beef concentrate into his mouth, swallowing steadily. He washed it down with water and then made himself stop there.
They walked by a lumberyard where men stood atop stacks of planks, silhouetted against the sky like Indians, waving to them. Then they were in the woods again and silence seemed to fall with a crash. It was not silent, of course; Walkers talked, the halftrack ground along mechanically, somebody broke wind, somebody laughed, somebody behind Garraty made a hopeless little groaning sound. The sides of the road were still lined with spectators, but the great “Century Club” crowd had disappeared and it seemed quiet by comparison. Birds sang in the high-crowned trees, the furtive breeze now and then masked the heat for a moment or two, sounding like a lost soul as it soughed through the trees. A brown squirrel froze on a high branch, tail bushed out, black eyes brutally attentive, a nut caught between his ratlike front paws. He chittered at them, then scurried higher up and disappeared. A plane droned far away, like a giant fly.
To Garraty it seemed that everyone was deliberately giving him the silent treatment. McVries was still walking behind Barkovitch. Pearson and Baker were talking about chess. Abraham was eating noisily and wiping his hands on his shirt. Scramm had torn off a piece of his T-shirt and was using it as a hanky. Collie Parker was swapping girls with Wyman. And Olson . . . but he didn’t even want to look at Olson, who seemed to want to implicate everyone else as an accessory in his own approaching death.
So he began to drop back, very carefully, just a little at a time (very mindful of his three warnings), until he was in step with Stebbins. The purple pants were dusty now. There were dark circles of sweat under the armpits of the chambray shirt. Whatever else Stebbins was, he wasn’t Superman. He looked up at Garraty for a moment, lean face questioning, and then he dropped his gaze back to the road. The knob of spine at the back of his neck was very prominent.
“How come there aren’t more people?” Garraty asked hesitantly. “Watching, I mean.”
For a moment he didn’t think Stebbins was going to answer. But finally he looked up again, brushed the hair off his forehead and replied, “There will be. Wait awhile. They’ll be sitting on roofs three deep to look at you.”
“But somebody said there was billions bet on this. You’d think they’d be lined up three deep the whole way. And that there’d be TV coverage—”
“It’s discouraged.”
“Why?”
“Why ask me?”
“Because you know,” Garraty said, exasperated.
“How do you know?”
“Jesus, you remind me of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, sometimes,” Garraty said. “Don’t you ever just talk?”
“How long would you last with people screaming at you from both sides? The body odor alone would be enough to drive you insane after a while. It would be like walking three hundred miles through Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”
“But they do let them watch, don’t they? Someone said it was one big crowd from Oldtown on.”
“I’m not the caterpillar, anyway,” Stebbins said with a small, somehow secretive smile. “I’m more the white rabbit type, don’t you think? Except I left my gold watch at home and no one has invited me to tea. At least, to the best of my knowledge, no one has. Maybe that’s what I’ll ask for when I win. When they ask me what I want for my prize, I’ll say, ‘Why, I want to be invited home for tea.’ ”
“Goddammit!”
Stebbins smiled more widely, but it was still only an exercise in lip-pulling. “Yeah, from Oldtown or thereabouts the damper is off. By then no one is thinking very much about mundane things like B.O. And there’s continuous TV coverage from Augusta. The Long Walk is the national pastime, after all.”
“Then why not here?”
“Too soon,” Stebbins said. “Too soon.”
From around the next curve the guns roared again, startling a pheasant that rose from the underbrush in an electric uprush of beating feathers. Garraty and Stebbins rounded the curve, but the bodybag was already being zipped up. Fast work. He couldn’t see who it had been.
“You reach a certain point,” Stebbins said, “when the crowd ceases to matter, either as an incentive or a drawback. It ceases to be there. Like a man on a scaffold, I think. You burrow away from the crowd.”
“I think I understand that,” Garraty said. He felt timid.
“If you understood it, you wouldn’t have gone into hysterics back there and needed your friend to save your ass. But you will.”
“How far do you burrow, I wonder?”
“How deep are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s something you’ll get to find out, too. Plumb the unplumbed depths of Garraty. Sounds almost like a travel ad, doesn’t it? You burrow until you hit bedrock. Then you burrow into the bedrock. And finally you get to the bottom. And then you buy out. That’s my idea. Let’s hear yours.”
Garraty said nothing. Right at present, he had no ideas.
The Walk went on. The heat went on. The sun hung suspended just above the line of trees the road cut its way through. Their shadows were stubby dwarves. Around ten o’clock, one of the soldiers disappeared through the back hatch of the halftrack and reappeared with a long pole. The upper two thirds of the pole was shrouded in cloth. He closed the hatch and dropped the end of the pole into a slot in the metal. He reached under the cloth and did something . . . fiddled something, probably a stud. A moment later a large, dun-colored sun umbrella popped up. It shaded most of the halftrack’s metal surface. He and the other two soldiers currently on duty sat cross-legged in the army-drab parasol’s shade.
“You rotten sonsabitches!” somebody screamed. “My Prize is gonna be your public castration!”
The soldiers did not seem exactly struck to the heart with terror at the thought. They continued to scan the Walkers with their blank eyes, referring occasionally to their computerized console.
“They probably take this out on their wives,” Garraty said. “When it’s over.”
“Oh, I’m sure they do,” Stebbins said, and laughed.
Garraty didn’t want to walk with Stebbins anymore, not right now. Stebbins made him uneasy. He could only take Stebbins in small doses. He walked faster, leaving Stebbins by himself again. 10:02. In twenty-three minutes he could drop a warning, but for now he was still walking with three. It didn’t scare him the way he had thought it would. There was still the unshakable, blind assurances that this organism Ray Garraty could not die. The others could die, they were extras in the movie of his life, but not
Ray Garraty, star of that long-running hit film, The Ray Garraty Story. Maybe he would eventually come to understand the untruth of that emotionally as well as intellectually . . . maybe that was the final depth of which Stebbins had spoken. It was a shivery, unwelcome thought.
Without realizing it, he had walked three quarters of the way through the pack. He was behind McVries again. There were three of them in a fatigue-ridden conga line: Barkovitch at the front, still trying to look cocky but flaking a bit around the edges; McVries with his head slumped, hands half-clenched, favoring his left foot a little now; and, bringing up the rear, the star of The Ray Garraty Story himself. And how do I look? he wondered.
He rubbed a hand up the side of his cheek and listened to the rasp his hand made against his light beard-stubble. Probably he didn’t look all that snappy himself.
He stepped up his pace a little more until he was walking abreast of McVries, who looked over briefly and then back at Barkovitch. His eyes were dark and hard to read.
They climbed a short, steep, and savagely sunny rise and then crossed another small bridge. Fifteen minutes went by, then twenty. McVries didn’t say anything. Garraty cleared his throat twice but said nothing. He thought that the longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence. Probably McVries was pissed that he had saved his ass now. Probably McVries had repented of it. That made Garraty’s stomach quiver emptily. It was all hopeless and stupid and pointless, most of all that, so goddam pointless it was really pitiful. He opened his mouth to tell McVries that, but before he could, McVries spoke.
“Everything’s all right.” Barkovitch jumped at the sound of his voice and McVries added, “Not you, killer. Nothing’s ever going to be all right for you. Just keep striding.”
“Eat my meat,” Barkovitch snarled.
“I guess I caused you some trouble,” Garraty said in a low voice.
“I told you, fair is fair, square is square, and quits are quits,” McVries said evenly. “I won’t do it again. I want you to know that.”
“I understand that,” Garraty said. “I just—”
“Don’t hurt me!” someone screamed. “Please don’t hurt me!”
It was a redhead with a plaid shirt tied around his waist. He had stopped in the middle of the road and he was weeping. He was given first warning. And then he raced toward the halftrack, his tears cutting runnels through the sweaty dirt on his face, red hair glinting like a fire in the sun. “Don’t . . . I can’t . . . please . . . my mother . . . I can’t . . . don’t . . . no more . . . my feet . . .” He was trying to scale the side, and one of the soldiers brought the butt of his carbine down on his hands. The boy cried out and fell in a heap.
He screamed again, a high, incredibly thin note that seemed sharp enough to shatter glass and what he was screaming was:
“My feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—”
“Jesus,” Garraty muttered. “Why doesn’t he stop that?” The screams went on and on.
“I doubt if he can,” McVries said clinically. “The back treads of the halftrack ran over his legs.”
Garraty looked and felt his stomach lurch into his throat. It was true. No wonder the redheaded kid was screaming about his feet. They had been obliterated.
“Warning! Warning 38!”
“—eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—”
“I want to go home,” someone behind Garraty said very quietly. “Oh Christ, do I ever want to go home.”
A moment later the redheaded boy’s face was blown away.
“I’m gonna see my girl in Freeport,” Garraty said rapidly. “And I’m not gonna have any warnings and I’m gonna kiss her, God I miss her, God, Jesus, did you see his legs? They were still warning him, Pete, like they thought he was gonna get up and walk—”
“Another boy has gone ober to dat Silver City, lawd, lawd,” Barkovitch intoned.
“Shut up, killer,” McVries said absently. “She pretty, Ray? Your girl?”
“She’s beautiful. I love her.”
McVries smiled. “Gonna marry her?”
“Yeah,” Garraty babbled. “We’re gonna be Mr. and Mrs. Norman Normal, four kids and a collie dog, his legs, he didn’t have any legs, they ran over him, they can’t run over a guy, that isn’t in the rules, somebody ought to report that, somebody—”
“Two boys and two girls, that what you’re gonna have?”
“Yeah, yeah, she’s beautiful, I just wish I hadn’t—”
“And the first kid will be Ray Junior and the dog’ll have a dish with its name on it, right?”
Garraty raised his head slowly, like a punch-drunk fighter. “Are you making fun of me? Or what?”
“No!” Barkovitch exclaimed. “He’s shitting on you, boy! And don’t you forget it. But I’ll dance on his grave for you, don’t worry.” He cackled briefly.
“Shut up, killer,” McVries said. “I’m not dumping on you, Ray. Come on, let’s get away from the killer, here.”
“Shove it up your ass!” Barkovitch screamed after them.
“She love you? Your girl? Jan?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Garraty said.
McVries shook his head slowly. “All of that romantic horseshit . . . you know, it’s true. At least, for some people for some short time, it is. It was for me. I felt like you.” He looked at Garraty. “You still want to hear about the scar?”
They rounded a bend and a camperload of children squealed and waved.
“Yes,” Garraty said.
“Why?” He looked at Garraty, but his suddenly naked eyes might have been searching himself.
“I want to help you,” Garraty said.
McVries looked down at his left foot. “Hurts. I can’t wiggle the toes very much anymore. My neck is stiff and my kidneys ache. My girl turned out to be a bitch, Garraty. I got into this Long Walk shit the same way that guys used to get into the Foreign Legion. In the words of the great rock and roll poet, I gave her my heart, she tore it apart, and who gives a fart.”
Garraty said nothing. It was 10:30. Freeport was still far.
“Her name was Priscilla,” McVries said. “You think you got a case? I was the original Korny Kid, Moon-June was my middle name. I used to kiss her fingers. I even took to reading Keats to her out in back of the house, when the wind was right. Her old man kept cows, and the smell of cowshit goes, to put it in the most delicate way, in a peculiar fashion with the works of John Keats. Maybe I should have read her Swinburne when the wind was wrong.” McVries laughed.
“You’re cheating what you felt,” Garraty said.
“Ah, you’re the one faking it, Ray, not that it matters. All you remember is the Great Romance, not all the times you went home and jerked your meat after whispering words of love in her shell-pink ear.”
“You fake your way, I’ll fake mine.”
McVries seemed not to have heard. “These things, they don’t even bear the weight of conversation,” he said. “J. D. Salinger . . . John Knowles . . . even James Kirkwood and that guy Don Bredes . . . they’ve destroyed being an adolescent, Garraty. If you’re a sixteen-year-old boy, you can’t discuss the pains of adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon.”
McVries laughed a little hysterically. Garraty had no idea what McVries was talking about. He was secure in his love for Jan, he didn’t feel in the least self-conscious about it. Their feet scuffed on the road. Garraty could feel his right heel wobbling. Pretty soon the nails would let go, and he would shed the shoeheel like dead skin. Behind them, Scramm had a coughing fit. It was the Walk that bothered Garraty, not all this weird shit about romantic love.
“But that doesn’t have anything to do with the story,” McVries said, as if reading his mind. “About the scar. It was last summer. We both wanted to get away from home, away from our parents, and away from the smell of all that cowshit so the Great Romance could bloom in earnest. So we got jobs working for a pajama factory in New Jersey. How does that grab you,
Garraty? A pj factory in New Jersey.
“We got separate apartments in Newark. Great town, Newark, on a given day you can smell all the cowshit in New Jersey in Newark. Our parents kicked a little, but with separate apartments and good summer jobs, they didn’t kick too much. My place was with two other guys, and there were three girls in with Pris. We left on June the third in my car, and we stopped once around three in the afternoon at a motel and got rid of the virginity problem. I felt like a real crook. She didn’t really want to screw, but she wanted to please me. That was the Shady Nook motel. When we were done I flushed that Trojan down the Shady Nook john and washed out my mouth with a Shady Nook paper cup. It was all very romantic, very ethereal.
“Then it was on to Newark, smelling the cowshit and being so sure it was different cowshit. I dropped her at her apartment and then went on to my own. The next Monday we started in at the Plymouth Sleepwear factory. It wasn’t much like the movies, Garraty. It stank of raw cloth and my foreman was a bastard and during lunch break we used to throw baling hooks at the rats under the fabric bags. But I didn’t mind because it was love. See? It was love.”
He spat dryly into the dust, swallowed from his canteen, then yelled for another one. They were climbing a long, curve-banked hill now, and his words came in out-of-breath bursts.
“Pris was on the first floor, the showcase for all the idiot tourists who didn’t have anything better to do than go on a guided tour of the place that made their jam-jams. It was nice down where Pris was. Pretty pastel walls, nice modern machinery, air conditioning. Pris sewed on buttons from seven till three. Just think, there are men all over the country wearing pj’s held up by Priscilla’s buttons. There is a thought to warm the coldest heart.
“I was on the fifth floor. I was a bagger. See, down in the basement they dyed the raw cloth and sent it up to the fifth floor in these warm-air tubes. They’d ring a bell when the whole lot was done, and I’d open my bin and there’d be a whole shitload of loose fiber, all the colors of the rainbow. I’d pitchfork it out, put it in two-hundred-pound sacks, and chain-hoist the sacks onto a big pile of other sacks for the picker machine. They’d separate it, the weaving machines wove it, some other guys cut it and sewed it into pajamas, and down there on that pretty pastel first floor Pris put on the buttons while the dumbass tourists watched her and the other girls through this glass wall . . . just like the people are watching us today. Am I getting through to you at all, Garraty?”