The Long Walk

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 wood 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.