He broke off for a moment, thinking, smelling early April.
“I couldn't back down. There were too many people watching. I think it must work the same with just about everyone. It's one of the ways they tip the game, you know. I let the April 15th backout date go by and the day after that they had a big testimonial dinner for me at the town hall - all my friends were there and after dessert everyone started yelling Speech! Speech! And I got out and mumbled something down at my hands about how I was gonna do the best I could if I got in, and everyone applauded like mad. It was like I'd laid the fucking Gettysburg Address on their heads. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know,” McVries said, and laughed - but his eyes were dark.
Behind them the guns thunder-clapped suddenly. Garraty jumped convulsively and nearly froze in his tracks. Somehow he kept walking. Blind instinct this time, he thought. What about next time?
“Son of a bitch,” McVries said softly. “It was Joe.”
“What time is it?” Garraty asked, and before McVries could answer he remembered that he was wearing a watch of his own. It was 2:38. Christ. His two-second margin was like an iron dumbbell on his back.
“No one tried to talk you out of it?” McVries asked. They were far out beyond the rest now, better than a hundred yards beyond Harold Quince. A soldier had been dispatched to keep tabs on them. Garraty was very glad it wasn't the blond guy. “No one tried to talk you into using the April 31st backout?”
“Not at first. My mother and Jan and Dr. Patterson - he's my mother's special friend, you know, they've been keeping company for the last five years or so - they just kind of soft-pedaled it at first. They were pleased and proud because most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes. And that still leaves thousands of kids and they can use two hundred - one hundred Walkers and a hundred backups. And there's no skill in getting picked, you know that.”
“Sure, they draw the names out of that cocksucking drum. Big TV spectacular.” McVries's voice cracked a little.
“Yeah. The Major draws the two hundred names, but the names're all they announce. You don't know if you're a Walker or just a backup.”
“And no notification of which you are until the final backout date itself,” McVries agreed, speaking of it as if the final backout date had been years ago instead of only four days. “Yeah, they like to stack the deck their way.”
Somebody in the crowd had just released a flotilla of balloons. They floated up to the sky in a dissolving area of reds, blues, greens, yellows. The steady south wind carried them away with taunting, easy speed.
“I guess so,” Garraty said. “We were watching the TV when the Major drew the names. I was number seventy-three out of the drum. I fell right out of my chair. I just couldn't believe it.”
“No, it can't be you,” McVries agreed. “Things like that always happen to the other guy.”
“Yeah, that's the feeling. That's when everybody started in on me. It wasn't like the first backout date when it was all speeches and pie in the sky by-and-by. Jan...”
He broke off. Why not? He'd told everything else. It didn't matter. Either he or McVries was going to be dead before it was over. Probably both of them. “Jan said she'd go all the way with me, any time, any way, as often as I wanted if I'd take the April 31st backout. I told her that would make me feel like an opportunist and a heel, and she got mad at me and said it was better than feeling dead, and then she cried a lot. And begged me.” Garraty looked up at McVries. “I don't know. Anything else she could have asked me, I would have tried to do it. But this one thing... I couldn't. It was like there was a stone caught in my throat. After a while she knew I couldn't say Yes, okay, I'll call the 800 number. I think she started to understand. Maybe as well as I did myself, which God knows wasn't — isn't — very well.”
“Then Dr. Patterson started in. He's a diagnostician, and he's got a wicked logical mind. He said, 'Look here, Ray. Figuring in the Prime group and the backups, your chance of survival is fifty-to-one. Don't do this to your mother, Ray.' I was polite with him for as long as I could, but finally I told him to just kiss off. I said I figured the odds on him ever marrying my mother were pretty long, but I never noticed him backing off because of that.”
Garraty ran both hands through the straw-thatch of his hair. He had forgotten about the two-second margin.
“God, didn't he get mad. He ranted and raved and told me if I wanted to break my mother's heart to just go ahead. He said I was as insensitive as a... a wood tick, I think that's what he said, insensitive as a wood tick, maybe it's a family saying of his or something, I don't know. He asked me how it felt to be doing the number on my mom and on a nice girl like Janice. So I countered with my own unarguable logic.”
“Did you,” McVries said, smiling. “What was that?”
“I told him if he didn't get out I was going to hit him.”
“What about your mother?”
“She didn't say much at all. I don't think she could believe it. And the thought of what I'd get if I won. The Prize - everything you want for the rest of your life - that sort of blinded her, I think. I had a brother, Jeff. He died of pneumonia when he was six, and - it's cruel - but I don't know how we'd've gotten along if he'd've lived. And... I guess she just kept thinking I'd be able to back out of it if I did turn out to be Prime. The Major is a nice man. That's what she said. I'm sure he'd let you out of it if he understood the circumstances. But they Squad them just as fast for trying to back out of a Long Walk as they do for talking against it. And then I got the call and I knew I was a Walker. I was Prime.”
“I wasn't.”
“No?”
“No. Twelve of the original Walkers used the April 31st backout. I was number twelve, backup. I got the call just past 11 PM four days ago.”
“Jesus! Is that so?”
“Uh-huh. That close.”
“Doesn't it make you... bitter?”
McVries only shrugged.
Garraty looked at his watch. It was 3:02. It was going to be all right. His shadow, lengthening in the afternoon sun, seemed to move a little more confidently. It was a pleasant, brisk spring day. His leg felt okay now.
“Do you still think you might just... sit down?” he asked McVries. “You've outlasted most of them. Sixty-one of them.”
“How many you or I have outlasted doesn't matter, I think. There comes a time when the will just runs out. Doesn't matter what I think, see? I used to have a good time smearing away with oil paints. I wasn't too bad, either. Then one day - bingo. I didn't taper off, I just stopped. Bingo. There was no urge to go on even another minute. I went to bed one night liking to paint and when I woke up it was nowhere.”
“Staying alive hardly qualifies as a hobby.”
“I don't know about that. How about skin divers? Big-game hunters? Mountain climbers? Or even some half-wilted millworker whose idea of a good time is picking fights on Saturday night? All of those things reduce staying alive to a hobby. Part of the game.”
Garraty said nothing.
“Better pick it up some,” McVries said gently. “We're losing speed. Can't have that.”
Garraty picked it up.
“My dad has a half-ownership in a drive-in movie theater,” McVries said. “He was going to tie me and gag me down in the cellar under the snack concession to keep me from coming, Squads or no Squads.”
“What did you do? Just wear him down?”
“There was no time for that. When the call came, I had just ten hours. They laid on an airplane and a rental car at the Presque Isle airport. He ranted and raved and I just sat there and nodded and agreed and pretty soon there was a knock on the door and when my mom opened it, two of the biggest, meanest-looking soldiers you ever saw were standing on the porch. Man, they were so ugly they could have stopped clocks. My dad took one look at them and said, 'Petie, you better go upstairs and get your Boy Scout pack.'” McVries jolted the pack up and down on his shoulders and laughed at the memory. “And just about the next thing any of us knew, we were on that plane, even my little sister Katrina. She's only four. We landed at three in the morning and drove up to the marker. And I think Katrina was the only one who really understood. She kept saying 'Petie's going on an adventure.'” McVries flapped his hands in an oddly uncompleted way. “They're staying at a motel in Presque Isle. They didn't want to go home until it was over. One way or the other.”