The Long Walk

The blue kerchief. The belligerent, gleaming eyes. Even the navy dress with the crooked hem. They were all familiar. The woman’s screams had become incoherent. One pinwheeling hand ripped stripes of blood across the face of one of the cops holding her-trying to hold her.

Garraty passed within ten feet of her. As he walked past, he knew where he had seen her before-she was Percy ’s mom, of course. Percy who had tried to sneak into the woods and had snuck right into the next world instead.

“I want m'boy!” she hollered. “I want m'boy!”

The crowd cheered her enthusiastically and impartially. A small boy behind her spat on her leg and then darted away.

Jan, Garraty thought. I’m walking to you, Jan, fuck this other shit, I swear to God I’m coming. But McVries had been right. Jan hadn’t wanted him to come. She had cried. She had begged him to change his mind. They could wait, she didn’t want to lose him, please Ray, don’t be dumb, the Long Walk is nothing but murder-

They had been sitting on a bench beside the bandstand. It had been a month ago, April, and he had his arm around her. She had been wearing the perfume he had gotten her for her birthday. It seemed to bring out the secret girl-smell of her, a dark smell, fleshy and heady. I have to go, he had told her. I have to, don’t you understand, I have to.

Ray, you don’t understand what you’re doing. Ray, please don’t. I love you.

Well, he thought now, as he walked on down the road, she was right about that. I sure didn’t understand what I was doing.

But I don’t understand it even now. That’s the hell of it. The pure and simple hell of it.

“Garraty?”

He jerked his head up, startled. He had been half-asleep again. It was McVries, walking beside him.

“How you feeling?”

“Feeling?” Garraty said cautiously. “All right, I guess. I guess I’m all right.”

“Barkovitch is cracking,” McVries said with quiet joy. “I’m sure of it. He’s talking to himself. And he’s limping.”

“You’re limping, too,” Garraty said. “So’s Pearson. So am I.”

“My foot hurts, that’s all. But Barkovitch… he keeps rubbing his leg. I think he’s got a pulled muscle.”

“Why do you hate him so much? Why not Collie Parker? Or Olson? Or all of us?”

“Because Barkovitch knows what he’s doing.”

“He plays to win, do you mean?”

“You don’t know what I mean, Ray.”

“I wonder if you do yourself,” Garraty said. “Sure he’s a bastard. Maybe it takes a bastard to win.”

“Good guys finish last?”

“How the hell should I know?”

They passed a clapboard one-room schoolhouse. The children stood out in the play yard and waved. Several boys stood atop the jungle gym like sentries, and Garraty was reminded of the men in the lumberyard a ways back.

“Garraty!” One of them yelled. “Ray Garraty! Gar-ra-tee!” A small boy with a tousled head of hair jumped up and down on the top level of the jungle gym, waving with both arms. Garraty waved back halfheartedly. The boy flipped over, hung upside down by the backs of his legs, and continued to wave. Garraty was a little relieved when he and the schoolyard were out of sight. That last had been a little too strenuous to bear thinking about for long.

Pearson joined them. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Save your strength,” McVries said.

“Feeble, man. That is feeble.”

“What have you been thinking about?” Garraty asked.

“How tough it’s going to be for the second-to-last guy.”

“Why so tough?” McVries asked.

“Well…” Pearson robbed his eyes, then squinted at a pine tree that had been struck by lightning some time in the past. “You know, to walk down everybody, absolutely everybody but that last guy. There ought to be a runner-up Prize, that’s what I think.”

“What?” McVries asked flatly.

“I dunno.”

“How about his life?” Garraty asked.

“Who’d walk for that?”

“Nobody, before the Walk started, maybe. But right now I’d be happy enough with just that, the hell with the Prize, the hell with having my every heart’s desire. How about you?”

Pearson thought about it for a long time. “I just don’t see the sense of it,” he said at last, apologetically.

“You tell him, Pete,” Garraty said.

“Tell him what? He’s right. The whole banana or no banana at all.”

“You’re crazy,” Garraty said, but without much conviction. He was very hot and very tired, and there were the remotest beginnings of a headache in back of his eyes. Maybe this is how sunstroke starts, he thought. Maybe that would be the best way, too. Just go down in a dreamy, slow-motion half-knowingness, and wake up dead.

“Sure,” McVries said amiably. “We’re all crazy or we wouldn’t be here. I thought we’d thrashed that out a long time ago. We want to die, Ray. Haven’t you got that through your sick, thick head yet? Look at Olson. A skull on top of a stick. Tell me he doesn’t want to die. You can’t. Second place? It’s bad enough that even one of us has got to get gypped out of what he really wants.”

“I don’t know about all that fucking psychohistory,” Pearson said finally. “I just don’t think anyone should get to cop out second.”

Garraty burst out laughing. “You’re nuts,” he said.