Not all of them cheered. Collie Parker spat on the ground. Barkovitch thumbed his nose. And McVries only looked, his lips moving soundlessly. Olson appeared not to notice at all as the Major went by; he was back to looking at his feet.
Garraty cheered. So did Percy What’s-His-Name and Harkness, who wanted to write a book, and Wyman and Art Baker and Abraham and Sledge, who had just picked up his second warning.
Then the Major was gone, moving fast. Garraty felt a little ashamed of himself. He had, after all, wasted energy.
A short time later the road took them past a used car lot where they were given a twenty-one-horn salute. An amplified voice roaring out over double rows of fluttering plastic pennants told the Walkers-and the spectators-that no one out-traded McLaren’s Dodge. Garraty found it all a little disheartening.
“You feel any better?” he asked McVries hesitantly.
“Sure,” McVries said. “Great. I’m just going to walk along and watch them drop all around me. What fun it is. I just did all the division in my head-math was my good subject in school-and I figure we should be able to make at least three hundred and twenty miles at the rate we’re going. That’s not even a record distance.”
“Why don’t you just go and have it on someplace else if you’re going to talk like that, Pete,” Baker said. He sounded strained for the first time.
“Sorry, Mum,” McVries said sullenly, but he shut up.
The day brightened. Garraty unzipped his fatigue jacket. He slung it over his shoulder. The road was level here. It was dotted with houses, small businesses, and occasional farms. The pines that had lined the road last night had given way to Dairy Queens and gas stations and little crackerbox ranchos. A great many of the ranchos were FOR SALE. In two of the windows Garraty saw the familiar signs: MY SON GAVE HIS LIFE IN THE SQUADS.
“Where’s the ocean?” Collie Parker asked Garraty. “Looks like I was back in Illy-noy.”
“Just keep walking,” Garraty said. He was thinking of Jan and Freeport again. Freeport was on the ocean. “It’s there. About a hundred and eight miles south.”
“Shit,” said Collie Parker. “What a dipshit state this is.”
Parker was a big-muscled blond in a polo shirt. He had an insolent look in his eye that not even a night on the road had been able to knock out. “Goddam trees everyplace! Is there a city in the whole damn place?”
“We’re funny, up here,” Garraty said. “We think it’s fun to breathe real air instead of smog.”
“Ain’t no smog in Joliet, you fucking hick,” Collie Parker said furiously. “What are you laying on me?”
“No smog but a lot of hot air,” Garraty said. He was angry.
“If we was home, I’d twist your balls for that.”
“Now boys,” McVries said. He had recovered and was his old sardonic self again. “Why don’t you settle this like gentlemen? First one to get his head blown off has to buy the other one a beer.”
“I hate beer,” Garraty said automatically.
Parker cackled. “You fucking bumpkin,” he said, and walked away.
“He’s buggy,” McVries said. “Everybody’s buggy this morning. Even me. And it’s a beautiful day. Don’t you agree, Olson?”
Olson said nothing.
“Olson’s got bugs, too,” McVries confided to Garraty. “Olson! Hey, Hank!”
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Baker asked.
“Hey Hank!” McVries shouted, ignoring Baker. “Wanna go for a walk?”
“Go to hell,” Olson muttered.
“What?” McVries cried merrily, cupping a hand to his ear. “Wha choo say?”
“Hell! Hell!” Olson screamed. “Go to hell!”
“Is that what you said.” McVries nodded wisely.
Olson went back to looking at his feet, and McVries tired of baiting him, if that was what he was doing.
Garraty thought about what Parker had said. Parker was a bastard. Parker was a big drugstore cowboy and Saturday night tough guy. Parker was a leather jacket hero. What did he know about Maine? He had lived in Maine all his life, in a little town called Porterville, just west of Freeport. Population 970 and not so much as a blinker light and just what’s so damn special about Joliet, Illy-noy anyway?
Garraty’s father used to say Porterville was the only town in the county with more graveyards than people. But it was a clean place. The unemployment was high, the cars were rusty, and there was plenty of screwing around going on, but it was a clean place. The only action was Wednesday Bingo at the grange hall (last game a coverall for a twenty-pound turkey and a twenty-dollar bill), but it was clean. And it was quiet. What was wrong with that?
He looked at Collie Parker’s back resentfully. You missed out, buddy, that’s all. You take Joliet and your candy-store ratpack and your mills and you jam them. Jam them crossways, if they’ll fit. He thought about Jan again. He needed her. I love you, Jan, he thought. He wasn’t dumb, and he knew she had become more to him than she actually was. She had turned into a life-symbol. A shield against the sudden death that came from the halftrack. More and more he wanted her because she symbolized the time when he could have a piece of ass-his own.
It was quarter of six in the morning now. He stared at a clump of cheering housewives bundled together near an intersection, small nerve-center of some unknown village. One of them was wearing tight slacks and a tighter sweater. Her face was plain. She wore three gold bracelets on her right wrist that clinked as she waved. Garraty could hear them clink. He waved back, not really thinking about it. He was thinking about Jan, who had come up from Connecticut, who had seemed so smooth and self-confident, with her long blond hair and her flat shoes. She alnost always wore flats because she was so tall. He met her at school. It went slow, but finally it clicked. God, had it clicked.
“… Garraty?”
“Huh?”
It was Harkness. He looked concerned. “I got a cramp in my foot, man. I don’t know if I can walk on it.” Harkness’s eyes seemed to be pleading for Garraty to do something.
Garraty didn’t know what to say. Jan’s voice, her laughter, the tawny caramel-colored sweater and her cranberry-red slacks, the time they took his little brother’s sled and ended up making out in a snowbank (before she put snow down the back of his parka)… those things were life. Harkness was death. By now Garraty could smell it.
“I can’t help you,” Garraty said. “You have to do it yourself.”
Harkness looked at him in panicked consternation, and then his face turned grim and he nodded. He stopped, kneeled, and fumbled off his loafer.
“Warning! Warning 49!”
He was massaging his foot now. Garraty had turned around and was walking backwards to watch him. Two small boys in Little League shirts with their baseball gloves hung from their bicycle handlebars were also watching him from the side of the road, their mouths hung open.
“Warning! Second warning, 49!”
Harkness got up and began to limp onward in his stocking foot, his good leg already trying to buckle with the extra weight it was bearing. He dropped his shoe, grabbed for it, got two fingers on it, juggled it, and lost it. He stopped to pick it up and got his third warning.
Harkness’s normally florid face was now fire-engine red. His mouth hung open in a wet, sloppy O. Garraty found himself rooting for Harkness. Come on, he thought, come on, catch up. Harkness, you can.
Harkness limped faster. The Little League boys began to pedal along, watching him. Garraty turned around frontward, not wanting to watch Harkness anymore. He stared straight ahead, trying to remember just how it had felt to kiss Jan, to touch her swelling breast.
A Shell station came slowly up on the right. There was a dusty, fender-dented pickup parked on the tarmac, and two men in red-and-black-checked hunting shirts sitting on the tailgate, drinking beer. There was a mailbox at the end of a rutted dirt driveway, its lid hanging open like a mouth. A dog was barking hoarsely and endlessly somewhere just out of sight.