The Long Walk

There was a sluggish stirring in his bowels. Soon they would have to be emptied. The thought made him grind his mental teeth. People would point and laugh. He would drop his shit in the street like a mongrel hound and afterward people would gather it up in paper napkins and put it in bottles for souvenirs. It seemed impossible that people would do such things, but he knew it happened.

Olson with his guts falling out.

McVries and Priscilla and the pajama factory.

Scramm, glowing fever-bright.

Abraham… what price stovepipe hat, audience?

Garraty’s head dropped. He dozed. The Walk went on.

Over hill, over dale, over stile and mountain. Over ridge and under bridge and past my lady’s fountain. Garraty giggled in the dimming recesses of his brain. His feet pounded the pavement and the loose heel flapped looser, like an old shutter on a dead house.

I think, therefore I am. First-year Latin class. Old tunes in a dead language. Ding-dong-bell-pussy’s-down-the-well. Who pushed her in? Little Jackie Flynn.

I exist, therefore I am.

Another firecracker went off. There were whoops and cheers. The halftrack ground and clattered and Garraty listened for the sound of his number in a warning and dozed deeper.

Daddy, I wasn’t glad when you had to go, but I never really missed you when you were gone. Sorry. But that’s not the reason I’m here. I have no subconscious urge to kill myself, sorry Stebbins. So sorry but-

The guns again, startling him awake, and there was the familiar mailsack thud of another boy going home to Jesus. The crowd screamed its horror and roared its approval.

“Garraty!” a woman squealed. “Ray Garraty!” Her voice was harsh and scabbed. “We’re with you, boy! We’re with you Ray!”

Her voice cut through the crowd and heads turned, necks craned, so that they could get a better look at Maine’s Own. There were scattered boos drowned in a rising cheer.

The crowd took up the chant again. Garraty heard his name until it was reduced to a jumble of nonsense syllables that had nothing to do with him.

He waved briefly and dozed again.

CHAPTER 11

“Come on, assholes! You want to live forever?”

–Unknown World War I Top Sergeant

They passed into Oldtown around midnight. They switched through two feeder roads, joined Route 2, and went through the center of town.

For Ray Garraty the entire passage was a blurred, sleep-hazed nightmare. The cheering rose and swelled until it seemed to cut off any possibility of thought or reason. Night was turned into glaring, shadowless day by flaring arc-sodium lamps that threw a strange orange light. In such a light even the most friendly face looked like something from a crypt. Confetti, newspaper, shredded pieces of telephone book, and long streamers of toilet paper floated and soared from second- and third-story windows. It was a New York ticker-tape parade in Bush League U.S.A.

No one died in Oldtown. The orange arc-lamps faded and the crowd depleted a little as they walked along the Stillwater River in the trench of morning. It was May 3rd now. The ripe smell of paper mill smote them. A juicy smell of chemicals, woodsmoke, polluted river, and stomach cancer waiting to happen. There were conical piles of sawdust higher than the buildings downtown. Heaped stacks of pulpwood stood to the sky like monoliths. Garraty dozed and dreamed his shadowy dreams of relief and redemption and after what seemed to be an eternity, someone began jabbing him in the ribs. It was McVries.

“Wassamatter?”

“We’re going on the turnpike,” McVries said. He was excited. “The word’s back. They got a whole sonofabitchin’ color guard on the entrance ramp. We’re gonna get a four-hundred-gun salute!”

“Into the valley of death rode the four hundred,” Garraty muttered, rubbing the sleepy-seeds out of his eyes. “I’ve heard too many three-gun salutes tonight. Not interested. Lemme sleep.”

“That isn’t the point. After they get done, we’re gonna give them a salute.”

“We are?”

“Yeah. A forty-six-man raspberry.”

Garraty grinned a little. It felt stiff and uncertain on his lips. “That right?”

“It certainly is. Well… a forty-man raspberry. A few of the guys are pretty far gone now.”

Garraty had a brief vision of Olson, the human Flying Dutchman.

“Well, count me in,” he said.

“Bunch up with us a little, then.”

Garraty picked it up. He and McVries moved in tighter with Pearson, Abraham, Baker and Scramm. The leather boys had further shortened their vanguard.

“Barkovitch in on it?” Garraty asked.

McVries snorted. “He thinks it’s the greatest idea since pay toilets.”

Garraty clutched his cold body a little tighter to himself and let out a humorless little giggle. “I bet he’s got a hell of a wicked raspberry.”

They were paralleling the turnpike now. Garraty could see the steep embankment to his right, and the fuzzy glow of more arc-sodiums-bone-white this time-above. A distance ahead, perhaps half a mile, the entrance ramp split off and climbed.