The long walk

“Piss on him,” Parker muttered. “I'll kill him myself if he don't shut up.” He passed trembling skeletal fingers across his lips, dropped them to his belt, and spent thirty seconds making them undo the clip that held his canteen to his belt. He almost dropped it getting it to his mouth, and then spilled half of it. He began to weep weakly.

It was three in the afternoon. Portland and South Portland were behind them. About fifteen minutes ago they had passed under a wet and flapping banner that proclaimed that the New Hampshire border was only 44 miles away.

Only, Garraty thought. Only, what a stupid little word that is. Who was the idiot who took it into his head that we needed a stupid little word like that?

He was walking next to McVries, but McVries had spoken only in monosyllables since Freeport. Garraty hardly dared speak to him. He was indebted again, and it shamed him. It shamed him because he knew he would not help McVries if the chance came. Now Jan was gone, his mother was gone. Irrevocably and for eternity. Unless he won. And now he wanted to win very badly.

It was odd. This was the first time he could remember wanting to win. Not even at the start, when he had been fresh (back when dinosaurs walked the earth), had he consciously wanted to win. There had only been the challenge. But the guns didn't produce little red flags with BANG written on them. It wasn't baseball or Giant Step; it was all real.

Or had he known it all along?

His feet seemed to hurt twice as badly since he had decided he wanted to win, and there were stabbing pains in his chest when he drew long breaths. The sensation of fever was growing - perhaps he had picked something up from Scramm.

He wanted to win, but not even McVries could carry him over the invisible finish line. He didn't think he was going to win. In the sixth grade he had won his school's spelling bee and had gone on to the district spelldown, but the district spellmaster wasn't Miss Petrie, who let you take it back. Softhearted Miss Petrie. He had stood there, hurt, unbelieving, sure there must have been some mistake, but there had been none. He just hadn't been good enough to make the cut then, and he wasn't going to be good enough now. Good enough to walk most of them down, but not all. His feet and legs had gone beyond numb and angry rebellion, and now mutiny was just a step away.

Only three had gone down since they left Freeport. One of them had been the unfortunate Klingerman. Garraty knew what the rest of them were thinking. It was too many tickets issued for them to just quit, any of them. Not with only twenty left to walk over. They would walk now until their bodies or minds shook apart.

They passed over a bridge spanning a placid little brook, its surface lightly pocked by the rain. The guns roared, the crowd cheered, and Garraty felt the stubborn cranny of hope in the back of his brain open an infinitesimal bit more.

“Did your girl look good to you?”

It was Abraham, looking like a victim of the Bataan March. For some inconceivable reason he had shucked both his jacket and his shirt, leaving his bony chest and stacked ribcage bare.

“Yeah,” Garraty said. “I hope I can make it back to her.”

Abraham smiled. “Hope? Yeah, I'm beginning to remember how to spell that word, too.” It was like a mild threat. “Was that Tubbins?”

Garraty listened. He heard nothing but the steady roar of the crowd. “Yeah, by God it was. Parker put the hex on him, I guess.”

“I keep telling myself,” Abraham said, “that all I got to do is to continue putting one foot in front of the other.”

“Yeah.”

Abraham looked distressed. “Garraty... this is a bitch to say...”

“What's that?”

Abraham was quiet for a long time. His shoes were big heavy Oxfords that looked horrendously heavy to Garraty (whose own feet were now bare, cold, and scraping raw). They clopped and dragged on the pavement, which had now expanded to three lanes. The crowd did not seem so loud or quite so terrifyingly close as it had ever since Augusta.

Abraham looked more distressed than ever. “It's a bitch. I just don't know how to say it.”

Garraty shrugged, bewildered. “I guess you just say it.”

“Well, look. We're getting together on something. All of us that are left.”

“Scrabble, maybe?”

“It's a kind of a... a promise.”

“Oh yeah?”

“No help for anybody. Do it on your own or don't do it.”

Garraty looked at his feet. He wondered how long it had been since he was hungry, and he wondered how long it would be before he fainted if he didn't eat something. He thought that Abraham's Oxfords were like Stebbins - those shoes could carry him from here to the Golden Gate Bridge without so much as a busted shoelace... at least they looked that way.

“That sounds pretty heartless,” he said finally.

“It's gotten to be a pretty heartless situation.” Abraham wouldn't look at him.

“Have you talked to all the others about this?”

“Not yet. About a dozen.”

“Yeah, it's a real bitch. I can see how hard it is for you to talk about.”

“It seems to get harder rather than easier.”