Garraty laughed.
“Prince Charming, that’s who I am,” McVries said. His hand went to the scar on his cheek and touched it. “Now all I need is a Sleeping Beauty. I could awake her with a biggy sloppy soul kiss and the two of us would ride away into the sunset. At least as far as the nearest Holiday Inn.”
“Walk,” Olsen said listlessly.
“Huh?”
“Walk into the sunset.”
“Walk into the sunset, okay,” McVries said. “True love either way. Do you believe in true love, Hank dear?”
“I believe in a good screw,” Olson said, and Art Baker burst out laughing.
“I believe in true love,” Garraty said, and then felt sorry he had said it. It sounded naive.
“You want to know why I don’t?” Olson said. He looked up at Garraty and grinned a scary, furtive grin. “Ask Fenter. Ask Zuck. They know.”
“That’s a hell of an attitude,” Pearson said. He had come out of the dark from someplace and was walking with them again. Pearson was limping, not badly, but very obviously limping.
“No, it’s not,” McVries said, and then, after a moment, he added cryptically: “Nobody loves a deader.”
“Edgar Allan Poe did,” Baker said. “I did a report on him in school and it said he had tendencies that were ne-recto-”
“Necrophiliac,” Garraty said.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“What’s that?” Pearson asked.
“It means you got an urge to sleep with a dead woman,” Baker said. “Or a dead man, if you’re a woman.”
“Or if you’re a fruit,” McVries put in.
“How the hell did we get on this?” Olson croaked. “Just how in the hell did we get on the subject of screwing dead people? It’s fucking repulsive.”
“Why not?” A deep, somber voice said. It was Abraham, 2. He was tall and disjointed-looking; he walked in a perpetual shamble. “I think we all might take a moment or two to stop and think about whatever kind of sex life there may be in the next world.”
“I get Marilyn Monroe,” McVries said. “You can have Eleanor Roosevelt, Abe old buddy.”
Abraham gave him the finger. Up ahead, one of the soldiers droned out a warning.
“Just a second now. Just one motherfucking second here.” Olson spoke slowly, as if he wrestled with a tremendous problem in expression. “You’re all off the subject. All off.”
“The Transcendental Quality of Love, a lecture by the noted philosopher and Ethiopian jug-rammer Henry Olson,” McVries said. “Author of A Peach Is Not a Peach without a Pit and other works of-”
“Wait!” Olson cried out. His voice was as shrill as broken glass. “You wait just one goddam second! Love is a put-on! It’s nothing! One big fat el zilcho! You got it?”
No one replied. Garraty looked out ahead of him, where the dark charcoal hills met the star-punched darkness of the sky. He wondered if he couldn’t feel the first faint twinges of a charley horse in the arch of his left foot. I want to sit down, he thought irritably. Damn it all, I want to sit down.
“Love is a fake!” Olson was blaring. “There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that’s all! And when you get like Fenter and Zuck-”
“Shut up,” a bored voice said, and Garraty knew it was Stebbins. But when he looked back, Stebbins was only looking at the road and walking along near the left-hand edge.
A jet passed overhead, trailing the sound of its engines behind it and chalking a feathery line across the night sky. It passed low enough for them to be able to see its running lights, pulsing yellow and green. Baker was whistling again. Garraty let his eyelids drop mostly shut. His feet moved on their own.
His half-dozing mind began to slip away from him. Random thoughts began to chase each other lazily across its field. He remembered his mother singing him an Irish lullaby when he was very small… something about cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o. And her face, so huge and beautiful, like the face of an actress on a movie screen. Wanting to kiss her and be in love with her for always. When he grew up, he would marry her.
This was replaced by Jan’s good-humored Polish face and her dark hair that streamed nearly to her waist. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit beneath a short beach coat because they were going to Reid Beach. Garraty himself was wearing a ragged pair of denim shorts and his zoris.
Jan was gone. Her face became that of Jimmy Owens, the kid down the block from them. He had been five and Jimmy had been five and Jimmy’s mother had caught them playing Doctor’s Office in the sandpit behind Jimmy’s house. They both had boners. That’s what they called them-boners. Jimmy’s mother had called his mother and his mother had come to get him and had sat him down in her bedroom and had asked him how he would like it if she made him go out and walk down the street with no clothes on. His dozing body contracted with the groveling embarrassment of it, the deep shame. He had cried and begged, not to make him walk down the street with no clothes on… and not to tell his father.
Seven years old now. He and Jimmy Owens peering through the dirt-grimed window of the Burr’s Building Materials office at the naked lady calendars, knowing what they were looking at but not really knowing, feeling a crawling shameful exciting pang of something. Of something. There had been one blond lady with a piece of blue silk draped across her hips and they had stared at it for a long, long time. They argued about what might be down there under the cloth. Jimmy said he had seen his mother naked. Jimmy said he knew. Jimmy said it was hairy and cut open. He had refused to believe Jimmy, because what Jimmy said was disgusting.
Still he was sure that ladies must be different from men down there and they had spent a long purple summer dusk discussing it, swatting mosquitoes and watching a scratch baseball game in the lot of the moving van company across the street from Burr’s. He could feel, actually feel in the half-waking dream the sensation of the hard curb beneath his fanny.
The next year he had hit Jimmy Owens in the mouth with the barrel of his Daisy air rifle while they were playing guns and Jimmy had to have four stitches in his upper lip. A year after that they had moved away. He hadn’t meant to hit Jimmy in the mouth. It had been an accident. Of that he was quite sure, even though by then he had known Jimmy was right because he had seen his own mother naked (he had not meant to see her naked-it had been an accident). They were hairy down there. Hairy and cut open.
Shhh, it isn’t a tiger, love, only your teddy bear, see?… Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o… Mother loves her boy… Shhh… Go to sleep…
“Warning! Warning 47!”
An elbow poked him rudely in the ribs. “That’s you, boy. Rise and shine.” McVries was grinning at him.
“What time is it?” Garraty asked thickly.
“Eight thirty-five.”
“But I’ve been-”
“-dozing for hours,” McVries said. “I know the feeling.”
“Well, it sure seemed that way.”
“It’s your mind,” McVries said, “using the old escape hatch. Don’t you wish your feet could?”
“I use Dial,” Pearson said, pulling an idiotic face. “Don’t you wish everybody did?
Garraty thought that memories were like a line drawn in the dirt. The further back you went the scuffier and harder to see that line got. Until finally there was nothing but smooth sand and the black hole of nothingness that you came out of. The memories were in a way like the road. Here it was real and hard and tangible. But that early road, that nine in the morning road, was far back and meaningless.
They were almost fifty miles into the Walk. The word came back that the Major would be by in his jeep to review them and make a short speech when they actually got to the fifty-mile point. Garraty thought that was most probably horseshit.
They breasted a long, steep rise, and Garraty was tempted to take his jacket off again. He didn’t. He unzipped it, though, and then walked backward for a minute. The lights of Caribou twinkled at him, and he thought about Lot’s wife, who had looked back and fumed into a pillar of salt.