Barkovitch looked around at him. “Why don’t you get off my back, McVries? Go walk somewhere else.”
“It’s a free road. I’ll walk where I damn well please.”
Barkovitch hawked, spat, and dismissed him.
Garraty opened one of his food containers and began to eat cream cheese on crackers. His stomach growled bitterly at the first bite, and he had to fight himself to keep from wolfing everything. He squeezed a tube of roast beef concentrate into his mouth, swallowing steadily. He washed it down with water and then made himself stop there.
They walked by a lumberyard where men stood atop stacks of planks, silhouetted against the sky like Indians, waving to them. Then they were in the wood again and silence seemed to fall with a crash. It was not silent, of course; Walkers talked, the halftrack ground along mechanically, somebody broke wind, somebody laughed, somebody behind Garraty made a hopeless little groaning sound. The sides of the road were still lined with spectators, but the great “Century Club” crowd had disappeared and it seemed quiet by comparison. Birds sang in the high-crowned trees, the furtive breeze now and then masked the heat for a moment or two, sounding like a lost soul as it soughed through the trees. A brown squirrel froze on a high branch, tail bushed out, black eyes brutally attentive, a nut caught between his ratlike front paws. He chittered at them, then scurried higher up and disappeared. A plane droned far away, like a giant fly.
To Garraty it seemed that everyone was deliberately giving him the silent treatment. McVries was still walking behind Barkovitch. Pearson and Baker were talking about chess. Abraham was eating noisily and wiping his hands on his shirt. Scramm had torn off a piece of his T-shirt and was using it as a hanky. Collie Parker was swapping girls with Wyman. And Olson… but he didn’t even want to look at Olson, who seemed to want to implicate everyone else as an accessory in his own approaching death.
So he began to drop back, very carefully, just a little at a time (very mindful of his three warnings), until he was in step with Stebbins. The purple pants were dusty now. There were dark circles of sweat under the armpits of the chambray shirt. Whatever else Stebbins was, he wasn’t Superman. He looked up at Garraty for a moment, lean face questioning, and then he dropped his gaze back to the road. The knob of spine at the back of his neck was very prominent.
“How come there aren’t more people?” Garraty asked hesitantly. “Watching, I mean.”
For a moment he didn’t think Stebbins was going to answer. But finally he looked up again, brushed the hair off his forehead and replied, “There will be. Wait awhile. They’ll be sitting on roofs three deep to look at you.”
“But somebody said there was billions bet on this. You’d think they’d be lined up three deep the whole way. And that there’d be TV coverage-”
“It’s discouraged.”
“Why?”
“Why ask me?”
“Because you know,” Garraty said, exasperated.
“How do you know?”
“Jesus, you remind me of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, sometimes,” Garraty said. “Don’t you ever just talk?”
“How long would you last with people screaming at you from both sides? The body odor alone would be enough to drive you insane after a while. It would be like walking three hundred miles through Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”
“But they do let them watch, don’t they? Someone said it was one big crowd from Oldtown on.”
“I’m not the caterpillar, anyway,” Stebbins said with a small, somehow secretive smile. “I’m more the white rabbit type, don’t you think? Except I left my gold watch at home and no one has invited me to tea. At least, to the best of my knowledge, no one has. Maybe that’s what I’ll ask for when I win. When they ask me what I want for my Prize, I’ll say, 'Why, I want to be invited home for tea.'”
“Goddammit!”
Stebbins smiled more widely, but it was still only an exercise in lip-pulling. “Yeah, from Oldtown or thereabouts the damper is off. By then no one is thinking very much about mundane things like B.O. And there’s continuous TV coverage from Augusta. The Long Walk is the national pastime, after all.”
“Then why not here?”
“Too soon,” Stebbins said. “Too soon.”
From around the next curve the guns roared again, startling a pheasant that rose from the underbrush in an electric uprush of beating feathers. Garraty and Stebbins rounded the curve, but the bodybag was already being zipped up. Fast work. He couldn’t see who it had been.
“You reach a certain point,” Stebbins said, “when the crowd ceases to matter, either as an incentive or a drawback. It ceases to be there. Like a man on a scaffold, I think. You burrow away from the crowd.”
“I think I understand that,” Garraty said. He felt timid.
“If you understood it, you wouldn’t have gone into hysterics back there and needed your friend to save your ass. But you will.”
“How far do you burrow, I wonder?”
“How deep are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s something you’ll get to find out, too. Plumb the unplumbed depths of Garraty. Sounds almost like a travel ad, doesn’t it? You burrow until you hit bedrock. Then you burrow into the bedrock. And finally you get to the bottom. And then you buy out. That’s my idea. Let’s hear yours.”
Garraty said nothing. Right at present, he had no ideas.
The Walk went on. The heat went on. The sun hung suspended just above the line of trees the road cut its way through. Their shadows were stubby dwarves. Around ten o’clock, one of the soldiers disappeared through the back hatch of the halftrack and reappeared with a long pole. The upper two thirds of the pole was shrouded in cloth. He closed the hatch and dropped the end of the pole into a slot in the metal. He reached under the cloth and did something… fiddled something, probably a stud. A moment later a large, dun-colored sun umbrella popped up. It shaded most of the halftrack’s metal surface. He and the other two soldiers currently on duty sat cross-legged in the army-drab parasol’s shade.
“You rotten sonsabitches!” somebody screamed. “My Prize is gonna be your public castration!”
The soldiers did not seem exactly struck to the heart with terror at the thought. They continued to scan the Walkers with their blank eyes, referring occasionally to their computerized console.
“They probably take this out on their wives,” Garraty said. “When it’s over.”
“Oh, I’m sure they do,” Stebbins said, and laughed.
Garraty didn’t want to walk with Stebbins anymore, not right now. Stebbins made him uneasy. He could only take Stebbins in small doses. He walked faster, leaving Stebbins by himself again. 10:02. In twenty-three minutes he could drop a warning, but for now he was still walking with three. It didn’t scare him the way he had thought it would. There was still the unshakable, blind assurances that this organism Ray Garraty could not die. The others could die, they were extras in the movie of his life, but not Ray Garraty, star of that long-running hit film, The Ray Garraty Story. Maybe he would eventually come to understand the untruth of that emotionally as well as intellectually… maybe that was the final depth of which Stebbins had spoken. It was a shivery, unwelcome thought.
Without realizing it, he had walked three quarters of the way through the pack. He was behind McVries again. There were three of them in a fatigue-ridden conga line: Barkovitch at the front, still trying to look cocky but flaking a bit around the edges; McVries with his head slumped, hands half-clenched, favoring his left foot a little now; and, bringing up the rear, the star of The Ray Garraty Story himself. And how do I look? he wondered.
He robbed a hand up the side of his cheek and listened to the rasp his hand made against his light beard-stubble. Probably he didn’t look all that snappy himself.
He stepped up his pace a little more until he was walking abreast of McVries, who looked over briefly and then back at Barkovitch. His eyes were dark and hard to read.