by Stephen King
Garraty ran both hands through the straw-thatch of his hair. He had forgotten about the two-second margin.
“God, didn’t he get mad. He ranted and raved and told me if I wanted to break my mother’s heart to just go ahead. He said I was as insensitive as a . . . a wood tick, I think that’s what he said, insensitive as a wood tick, maybe it’s a family saying of his or something, I don’t know. He asked me how it felt to be doing the number on my mom and on a nice girl like Janice. So I countered with my own unarguable logic.”
“Did you,” McVries said, smiling. “What was that?”
“I told him if he didn’t get out I was going to hit him.”
“What about your mother?”
“She didn’t say much at all. I don’t think she could believe it. And the thought of what I’d get if I won. The Prize—everything you want for the rest of your life—that sort of blinded her, I think. I had a brother, Jeff. He died of pneumonia when he was six, and—it’s cruel—but I don’t know how we’d’ve gotten along if he’d’ve lived. And . . . I guess she just kept thinking I’d be able to back out of it if I did turn out to be Prime. The Major is a nice man. That’s what she said. I’m sure he’d let you out of it if he understood the circumstances. But they Squad them just as fast for trying to back out of a Long Walk as they do for talking against it. And then I got the call and I knew I was a Walker. I was Prime.”
“I wasn’t.”
“No?”
“No. Twelve of the original Walkers used the April 31st backout. I was number twelve, backup. I got the call just past 11 PM four days ago.”
“Jesus! Is that so?”
“Uh-huh. That close.”
“Doesn’t it make you . . . bitter?”
McVries only shrugged.
Garraty looked at his watch. It was 3:02. It was going to be all right. His shadow, lengthening in the afternoon sun, seemed to move a little more confidently. It was a pleasant, brisk spring day. His leg felt okay now.
“Do you still think you might just . . . sit down?” he asked McVries. “You’ve outlasted most of them. Sixty-one of them.”
“How many you or I have outlasted doesn’t matter, I think. There comes a time when the will just runs out. Doesn’t matter what I think, see? I used to have a good time smearing away with oil paints. I wasn’t too bad, either. Then one day—bingo. I didn’t taper off, I just stopped. Bingo. There was no urge to go on even another minute. I went to bed one night liking to paint and when I woke up it was nowhere.”
“Staying alive hardly qualifies as a hobby.”
“I don’t know about that. How about skin divers? Big-game hunters? Mountain climbers? Or even some half-witted millworker whose idea of a good time is picking fights on Saturday night? All of those things reduce staying alive to a hobby. Part of the game.”
Garraty said nothing.
“Better pick it up some,” McVries said gently. “We’re losing speed. Can’t have that.”
Garraty picked it up.
“My dad has a half-ownership in a drive-in movie theater,” McVries said. “He was going to tie me and gag me down in the cellar under the snack concession to keep me from coming, Squads or no Squads.”
“What did you do? Just wear him down?”
“There was no time for that. When the call came, I had just ten hours. They laid on an airplane and a rental car at the Presque Isle airport. He ranted and raved and I just sat there and nodded and agreed and pretty soon there was a knock on the door and when my mom opened it, two of the biggest, meanest-looking soldiers you ever saw were standing on the porch. Man, they were so ugly they could have stopped clocks. My dad took one look at them and said, ‘Petie, you better go upstairs and get your Boy Scout pack.’ ” McVries jolted the pack up and down on his shoulders and laughed at the memory. “And just about the next thing any of us knew, we were on that plane, even my little sister Katrina. She’s only four. We landed at three in the morning and drove up to the marker. And I think Katrina was the only who really understood. She kept saying ‘Petie’s going on an adventure. ’ ” McVries flapped his hands in an oddly uncompleted way. “They’re staying at a motel in Presque Isle. They didn’t want to go home until it was over. One way or the other.”
Garraty looked at his watch. It was 3:20.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For saving your life again?” McVries laughed merrily.
“Yes, that’s just right.”
“Are you sure that would be any kind of a favor?”
“I don’t know.” Garraty paused. “I’ll tell you something though. It’s never going to be the same for me. The time limit thing. Even when you’re walking with no warnings, there’s only two minutes between you and the inside of a cemetery fence. That’s not much time.”
As if on cue, the guns roared. The holed Walker made a high, gobbling sound, like a turkey grabbed suddenly by a silent-stepping farmer. The crowd made a low sound that might have been a sigh or a groan or an almost sexual outletting of pleasure.
“No time at all,” McVries agreed.
They walked. The shadows got longer. Jackets appeared in the crowd as if a magician had conjured them out of a silk hat. Once Garraty caught a warm whiff of pipesmoke that brought back a hidden, bittersweet memory of his father. A pet dog escaped from someone’s grasp and ran out into the road, red plastic leash dragging, tongue lolling out pinkly, foam flecked on its jaws. It yipped, chased drunkenly after its stubby tail, and was shot when it charged drunkenly at Pearson, who swore bitterly at the soldier who had shot it. The force of the heavy-caliber bullet drove it to the edge of the crowd where it lay dull-eyed, panting, and shivering. No one seemed anxious to claim it. A small boy got past the police, wandered out into the left lane of the road, and stood there, weeping. A soldier advanced on him. A mother screamed shrilly from the crowd. For one horrified moment Garraty thought the soldier was going to shoot the kid as the dog had been shot, but the soldier merely swept the little boy indifferently back into the crowd.
At 6:00 PM the sun touched the horizon and turned the western sky orange. The air turned cold. Collars were turned up. Spectators stamped their feet and rubbed their hands together.
Collie Parker registered his usual complaint about the goddam Maine weather.
By quarter of nine we’ll be in Augusta, Garraty thought. Just a hop, skip, and a jump from there to Freeport. Depression dropped over him. What then? Two minutes you’ll have to see her, unless you should miss her in the crowd—God forbid. Then what? Fold up?
He was suddenly sure Jan and his mother wouldn’t be there anyway. Just the kids he had gone to school with, anxious to see the suicidal freak they had unknowingly nurtured among them. And the Ladies’ Aid. They would be there. The Ladies’ Aid had given him a tea two nights before the Walk started. In that antique time.
“Let’s start dropping back,” McVries said. “We’ll do it slow. Get together with Baker. We’ll walk into Augusta together. The original Three Musketeers. What do you say, Garraty?”
“All right,” Garraty said. It sounded good.
They dropped back a little at a time, eventually leaving the sinister-faced Harold Quince to lead the parade. They knew they were back with their own people when Abraham, out of the gathering gloom, asked: “You finally decide to come back and visit the po’ folks?”
“Je-sus, he really does look like him,” McVries said, staring at Abraham’s weary, three-day-bearded face. “Especially in this light.”
“Fourscore and seven years ago,” Abraham intoned, and for an eerie moment it was as if a spirit had inhabited seventeen-year-old Abraham. “Our fathers set forth on this continent . . . ah, bullshit. I forget the rest. We had to learn it in eighth grade history if we wanted an A.”
“The face of a founding father and the mentality of a syphilitic donkey,” McVries said sadly. “Abraham, how did you get into a balls-up like this?”
“Bragged my way in,” Abraham said promptly. He started to go on and th
e guns interrupted him. There was the familiar mailsack thud.
“That was Gallant,” Baker said, looking back. “He’s been walking dead all day.”
“Bragged his way into it,” Garraty mused, and then laughed.
“Sure.” Abraham ran a hand up one cheek and scratched the cavernous hollow under one eye. “You know the essay test?”
They all nodded. An essay, Why Do You Feel Qualified to Participate in the Long Walk?, was a standard part of the Mentals section of the exam. Garraty felt a warm trickle on his right heel and wondered if it was blood, pus, sweat, or all of the above. There seemed to be no pain, although his sock felt ragged back there.
“Well, the thing was,” Abraham said, “I didn’t feel particularly qualified to participate in anything. I took the exam completely on the spur of the moment. I was on my way to the movies and I just happened past the gym where they were having the test. You have to show your Work Permit card to get in, you know. I just happened to have mine with me that day. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered to go home and get it. I just would have gone on to the movies and I wouldn’t be here right now, dying in such jolly company.”
They considered this silently.
“I took the physical and then I zipped through the objective stuff and then I see this three-page blank at the end of the folder. ‘Please answer this question as objectively and honestly as you can, using not more than 1500 words,’ oh holy shit, I think. The rest of it was sort of fun. What a bunch of fucked-up questions.”
“Yeah, how often do you have a bowel movement?” Baker said dryly. “Have you ever used snuff ?”
“Yeah, yeah, stuff like that,” Abraham agreed. “I’d forgotten all about that stupid snuff question. I just zipped along, bullshitting in good order, you know, and I come to this essay about why I feel qualified to participate. I couldn’t think of a thing. So finally some bastard in an army coat strolls by and says, ‘Five minutes. Will everyone finish up, please?’ So I just put down, ‘I feel qualified to participate in the Long Walk because I am one useless S.O.B. and the world would be better off without me, unless I happened to win and get rich in which case I would buy a Van Go to put in every room of my manshun and order up sixty high-class horrs and not bother anybody.’ I thought about that for about a minute, and then I put in parenthesis: ‘(I would give all my sixty high-class horrs old-age pensions, too.)’ I thought that would really screw ’em up. So a month later—I’d forgotten all about the whole thing—I get a letter saying I qualified. I damn near creamed my jeans.”
“And you went through with it?” Collie Parker demanded.
“Yeah, it’s hard to explain. The thing was, everybody thought it was a big joke. My girlfriend wanted to have the letter photographed and get it turned into a T-shirt down at the Shirt Shack, like she thought I’d pulled the biggest practical joke of the century. It was like that with everybody. I’d get the big glad hand and somebody was always saying something like, ‘Hey, Abe, you really tweaked the Major’s balls, din’tchoo?’ It was so funny I just kept on going. I tell you,” Abraham said, smiling morbidly, “it got to be a real laff riot. Everybody thought I was just gonna go on tweaking the Major’s balls to the very end. Which was what I did. Then one morning I woke up and I was in. I was a Prime Walker, sixteenth out of the drum, as a matter of fact. So I guess it turned out the Major was tweaking my balls.”
An abortive little cheer went through the Walkers, and Garraty glanced up. A huge reflector sign overhead informed them: AUGUSTA 10.
“You could just die laughing, right?” Collie said.
Abraham looked at Parker for a long time. “The Founding Father is not amused,” he said hollowly.
Chapter 14
“And remember, if you use your hands, or gesture with any part of your body, or use any part of the word, you will forfeit your chance for the ten thousand dollars. Just give a list. Good luck.”
—Dick Clark The Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid
They had all pretty much agreed that there was little emotional stretch or recoil left in them. But apparently, Garraty thought tiredly as they walked into the roaring darkness along U.S. 202 with Augusta a mile behind them, it was not so. Like a badly treated guitar that has been knocked about by an unfeeling musician, the strings were not broken but only out of tune, discordant, chaotic.
Augusta hadn’t been like Oldtown. Oldtown had been a phony hick New York. Augusta was some new city, a once-a-year city of crazy revelers, a party-down city full of a million boogying drunks and cuckoo birds and out-and-out maniacs.
They had heard Augusta and seen Augusta long before they had reached Augusta. The image of waves beating on a distant shore recurred to Garraty again and again. They heard the crowd five miles out. The lights filled the sky with a bubble-like pastel glow that was frightening and apocalyptic, reminding Garraty of pictures he had seen in the history books of the German air-blitz of the American East Coast during the last days of World War II.
They stared at each other uneasily and bunched closer together like small boys in a lightning storm or cows in a blizzard. There was a raw redness in that swelling sound of Crowd. A hunger that was numbing. Garraty had a vivid and scary image of the great god Crowd clawing its way out of the Augusta basin on scarlet spider-legs and devouring them all alive.
The town itself had been swallowed, strangled, and buried. In a very real sense there was no Augusta, and there were no more fat ladies, or pretty girls, or pompous men, or wet-crotched children waving puffy clouds of cotton candy. There was no bustling Italian man here to throw slices of watermelon. Only Crowd, a creature with no body, no head, no mind. Crowd was nothing but a Voice and an Eye, and it was not surprising that Crowd was both God and Mammon. Garraty felt it. He knew the others were feeling it. It was like walking between giant electrical pylons, feeling the tingles and shocks stand every hair on end, making the tongue jitter nuttily in the mouth, making the eyes seem to crackle and shoot off sparks as they rolled in their beds of moisture. Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshiped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.
They plowed through ankle-deep drifts of confetti. They lost each other and found each other in a sheeting blizzard of magazine streamers. Garraty snatched a paper out of the dark and crazy air at random and found himself looking at a Charles Atlas body-building ad. He grabbed another one and was brought face-to-face with John Travolta.
And at the height of the excitement, at the top of the first hill on 202, overlooking the mobbed turnpike behind and the gorged and glutted town at their feet, two huge purple-white spotlights split the air ahead of them and the Major was there, drawing away from them in his jeep like an hallucination, holding his salute ramrod stiff, incredibly, fantastically oblivious of the crowd in the gigantic throes of its labor all around him.
And the Walkers—the strings were not broken on their emotions, only badly out-of-tune. They had cheered wildly with hoarse and totally unheard voices, the thirty-seven of them that were left. The crowd could not know they were cheering but somehow they did, somehow they understood that the circle between death-worship and death-wish had been completed for another year and the crowd went completely loopy, convulsing itself in greater and greater paroxysms. Garraty felt a stabbing, needling pain in the left side of his chest and was still unable to stop cheering, even though he understood he was driving at the very brink of disaster.
A shifty-eyed Walker named Milligan saved them all by falling to his knees, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands pressed to his temples, as if he were trying to hold his brains in. He slid forward on the end of his nose, abrading the tip of it on the road like soft chalk on a rough blackboard—how amazing, Garraty thought, that kid’s wearing his nose away on the road—and then Milligan was mercifully blasted. After that the Walkers stopped cheering. Garraty was badly scared by the pain in his chest that was subsiding only partially. He promised that was the end of the craziness.
“We getting close to y
our girl?” Parker asked. He had not weakened, but he had mellowed. Garraty liked him okay now.
“About fifty miles. Maybe sixty. Give or take.”
“You’re one lucky sonofabitch, Garraty,” Parker said wistfully.
“I am?” He was surprised. He turned to see if Parker was laughing at him. Parker wasn’t.
“You’re gonna see your girl and your mother. Who the hell am I going to see between now and the end? No one but these pigs.” He gestured with his middle finger at the crowd, which seemed to take the gesture as a salute and cheered him deliriously. “I’m homesick,” he said. “And scared.” Suddenly he screamed at the crowd: “Pigs! You pigs!” They cheered him more loudly than ever.
“I’m scared, too. And homesick. I . . . I mean we . . .” He groped. “We’re all too far away from home. The road keeps us away. I may see them, but I won’t be able to touch them.”
“The rules say—”
“I know what the rules say. Bodily contact with anyone I wish, as long as I don’t leave the road. But it’s not the same. There’s a wall.”
“Fuckin’ easy for you to talk. You’re going to see them, just the same.”
“Maybe that’ll only make it worse,” McVries said. He had come quietly up behind them. They had just passed under a blinking yellow warning flasher at the Winthrop intersection. Garraty could see it waxing and waning on the pavement after they had passed it, a fearful yellow eye, opening and closing.
“You’re all crazy,” Parker said amiably. “I’m getting out of here.” He put on a little speed and had soon nearly disappeared into the blinking shadows.
“He thinks we’re queer for each other,” McVries said, amused.
“He what?” Garraty’s head snapped up.
“He’s not such a bad guy,” McVries said thoughtfully. He cocked a humorous eye at Garraty. “Maybe he’s even half-right. Maybe that’s why I saved your ass. Maybe I’m queer for you.”