The Long Walk

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 punchdrunk 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.”