Scramm talked with them.
They all watched. It seemed that the three of them conferred for a very long time.
“Now what the hell are they up to?” Pearson whispered fearfully to himself.
Suddenly the conference was over. Scramm walked a ways distant from Mike and Joe. Even from back here Garraty could hear the ragged bite of his cough. The soldiers were watching all three of them carefully. Joe put a hand on his brother's shoulder and squeezed it hard. They looked at each other. Garraty could discern no emotion on their bronzed faces. Then Mike hurried a little and caught up with Scramm.
A moment later Mike and Scramm did an abrupt about-face and began to walk toward the crowd, which, sensing the sharp tang of fatality about them, shrieked, unclotted, and backed away from them as if they had the plague.
Garraty looked at Pearson and saw his lips tighten.
The two boys were warned, and as they reached the guardrails that bordered the road, they about-faced smartly and faced the oncoming halftrack. Two middle fingers stabbed the air in unison.
“I fucked your mother and she sure was fine!” Scramm cried.
Mike said something in his own language.
A tremendous cheer went up from the Walkers, and Garraty felt weak tears beneath his eyelids. The crowd was silent. The spot behind Mike and Scramm was barren and empty. They took second warning, then sat down together, crosslegged, and began to talk together calmly. And that was pretty goddamned strange, Garraty thought as they passed by, because Scramm and Mike did not seem to be talking in the same language.
He did not look back. None of them looked back, not even after it was over.
“Whoever wins better keep his word,” McVries said suddenly. “He just better.”
No one said anything.
CHAPTER 13
“Joanie Greenblum, come on down!”
Two in the afternoon.
“You're cheating, you fuck!” Abraham shouted.
“I'm not cheating,” Baker said calmly. “That's a dollar forty you owe me, turkey.”
“I don't pay cheaters.” Abraham clutched the dime he had been flipping tightly in his hand.
“And I usually don't match dimes with guys that call me that,” Baker said grimly, and then smiled. “But in your case, Abe, I'll make an exception. You have so many winning ways I just can't help myself.”
“Shut up and flip,” Abraham said.
“Oh please don't take that tone of voice to me,” Baker said abjectly, rolling his eyes. “I might fall over in a dead faint!” Garraty laughed.
Abraham snorted and flicked his dime, caught it, and slapped it down on his wrist. “You match me.”
“Okay.” Baker flipped his dime higher, caught it more deftly and, Garraty was sure, palmed it on edge.
“You show first this time,” Baker said.
“Nuh-uh. I showed first last time.”
“Oh shit, Abe, I showed first three times in a row before that. Maybe you're the one cheating.”
Abraham muttered, considered, and then revealed his dime. It was tails, showing the Potomac River framed in laurel leaves.
Baker raised his hand, peeked under it, and smiled. His dime also showed tails. “That's a dollar fifty you owe me.”
“My God you must think I'm dumb!” Abraham hollered. “You think I'm some kind of idiot, right? Go on and admit it! Just taking the rube to the cleaners, right?”
Baker appeared to consider.
“Go on, go on!” Abraham bellowed. “I can take it!”
“Now that you put it to me,” Baker said, “whether or not you're a rube never entered my mind. That you're an ijit is pretty well established. As far as taking you to the cleaners" - he put a hand on Abraham's shoulder - "that, my friend, is a certainty.”
“Come on,” Abraham said craftily. “Double or nothing for the whole bundle. And this time you show first.”
Baker considered. He looked at Garraty. “Ray, would you?”
“Would I what?” Garraty had lost track of the conversation. His left leg had begun to feel decidedly strange.
“Would you go double or nothing against this here fella?”
“Why not? After all, he's too dumb to cheat you.”
“Garraty, I thought you were my friend,” Abraham said coldly.
“Okay, dollar fifty, double or nothing,” Baker said, and that was when the monstrous pain bolted up Garraty's left leg, making all the pain of the last thirty hours seem like a mere whisper in comparison.
“My leg, my leg, my leg!” he screamed, unable to help himself.
“Oh, Jesus, Garraty,” Baker had time to say - nothing in his voice but mild surprise, and then they had passed beyond him, it seemed that they were all passing him as he stood here with his left leg turned to clenched and agonizing marble, passing him, leaving him behind.
“Warning! Warning 47!”
Don't panic. If you panic now you've had the course.
He sat down on the pavement, his left leg stuck out woodenly in front of him. He began to massage the big muscles. He tried to knead them. It was like trying to knead ivory.
“Garraty?” It was McVries. He sounded scared... surely that was only an illusion? “What is it? Charley horse?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Keep going. It'll be all right.”
Time. Time was speeding up for him, but everyone else seemed to have slowed to a crawl, to the speed of an instant replay on a close play at first base. McVries was picking up his pace slowly, one heel showing, then the other, a glint from the worn nails, a glimpse of cracked and tissue-thin shoeleather. Barkovitch was passing by slowly, a little grin on his face, a wave of tense quiet came over the crowd slowly, moving outward in both directions from where he had sat down, like great glassy combers headed for the beach. My second warning, Garraty thought, my second warning's coming up, come on leg, come on goddam leg. I don't want to buy a ticket, what do you say, come on, gimme a break.
“Warning! Second warning, 47!”
Yeah, I know, you think I can't keep score, you think I'm sitting here trying to get a suntan?
The knowledge of death, as true and unarguable as a photograph, was trying to get in and swamp him. Trying to paralyze him. He shut it out with a desperate coldness. His thigh was excruciating agony, but in his concentration he barely felt it. A minute left. No, fifty seconds now, no, forty-five, it's dribbling away, my time's going.
With an abstract, almost professorly expression on his face, Garraty dug his fingers into the frozen straps and harnesses of muscle. He kneaded. He flexed. He talked to his leg in his head. Come on, come on, come on, goddam thing. His fingers began to ache and he did not notice that much either. Stebbins passed him and murmured something. Garraty did not catch what it was. It might have been good luck. Then he was alone, sitting on the broken white line between the travel lane and the passing lane.
All gone. The carny just left town, pulled stakes in the middle of everything and blew town, no one left but this here kid Garraty to face the emptiness of flattened candy wrappers and squashed cigarette butts and discarded junk prizes.
All gone except one soldier, young and blond and handsome in a remote sort of way. His silver chronometer was in one hand, his rifle in the other. No mercy in that face.
“Warning! Warning 47! Third warning, 47!”
The muscle was not loosening at all. He was going to die. After all this, after ripping his guts out, that was the fact, after all.
He let go of his leg and stared calmly at the soldier. He wondered who was going to win. He wondered if McVries would outlast Barkovitch. He wondered what a bullet in the head felt like, if it would just be sudden darkness or if he would actually feel his thoughts being ripped apart.