Pointing fingers, half-seen and half-imagined in the darkness. Flashbulbs popped and Garraty turned his head away miserably. Nothing could be worse than this. Nothing.
He almost fell on his back and managed to prop himself up with one arm.
A squealing, girlish voice: “I see it! I see his thing!”
Baker passed him without a glance.
For a terrifying moment he thought it was all going to be for nothing anyway-a false alarm-but then it was all right. He was able to take care of business. Then, with a grunting half-sob, he rose to his feet and stumbled into a half-walk, halfrun, cinching his pants tight again, leaving part of him behind to steam in the dark, eyed avidly by a thousand people-bottle it! put it on your mantel! The shit of a man with his life laid straight out in the line! This is it, Betty, I told you we had something special in the game room… right up here, over the stereo. He was shot twenty minutes later…
He caught up with McVries and walked beside him, head down.
“Tough?” McVries asked. There was unmistakable admiration in his voice.
“Real tough,” Garraty said, and let out a shivery, loosening sigh. “I knew I forgot something.”
“What?”
“I left my toilet paper home.”
McVries cackled. “As my old granny used to say, if you ain’t got a cob, then just let your hips slide a little freer.”
Garraty burst out laughing, a clear, hearty laugh with no hysteria in it. He felt lighter, looser. No matter how things turned out, he wouldn’t have to go through that again.
“Well, you made it,” Baker said, falling in step.
“Jesus,” Garraty said, surprised. “Why don’t all you guys just send me a getwell card, or something?”
“It’s no fun, with all those people staring at you,” Baker said soberly. “Listen, I just heard something. I don’t know if I believe it. I don’t know if I even want to believe it.”
“What is it?” Garraty asked.
“Joe and Mike? The leather-jacket guys everybody thought was queer for each other? They’re Hopis. I think that was what Scramm was trying to tell us before, and we weren’t gettin’ him. But… see… what I hear is that they’re brothers.”
Garraty’s jaw dropped.
I walked up and took a good look at ’em,” Baker was going on. “And I’ll be goddamned if they don’t look like brothers.”
“That’s twisted,” McVries said angrily. “That’s fucking twisted! Their folks ought to be Squaded for allowing something like that!”
You ever know any Indians?” Baker asked quietly.
“Not unless they came from Passaic,” McVries said. He still sounded angry.
“There’s a Seminole reservation down home, across the state line,” Baker said. “They’re funny people. They don’t think of things like ’responsibility' the same way we do. They’re proud. And poor. I guess those things are the same for the Hopis as they are for the Seminoles. And they know how to die.”
“None of that makes it right,” McVries said.
“They come from New Mexico,” Baker said.
“It’s an abortion,” McVries said with finality, and Garraty tended to agree.
Talk flagged all up and down the line, partially because of the noise from the crowd. but more, Garraty suspected, because of the very monotony of the turnpike itself. The hills were long and gradual, barely seeming like hills. Walkers dozed, snorted fitfully, and seemed to pull their belts tighter and resign themselves to a long, barely understood bitterness ahead. The little clots of society dissolved into threes, twos, solitary islands.
The crowd knew no fatigue. They cheered steadily with one hoarse voice, they waved unreadable placards. Garraty’s name was shouted with monotonous frequency, but blocs of out-of-staters cheered briefly for Barkovitch, Pearson, Wyman. Other names blipped past and were gone with the speeding velocity of snow across a television screen.
Firecrackers popped and spluttered in strings. Someone threw a burning road flare into the cold sky and the crowd scattered, screaming, as it pinwheeled down to hiss its glaring purple light into the dirt of a gravel shoulder beyond the breakdown lane. There were other crowd standouts. A man with an electric bullhorn who alternately praised Garraty and advertised his own candidacy to represent the second district; a woman with a big crow in a small cage which she hugged jealously to her giant bosom; a human pyramid made out of college boys in University of New Hampshire sweatshirts; a hollow-cheeked man with no teeth in an Uncle Sam suit wearing a sign which said: WE GAVE AWAY THE PANAMA CANAL TO THE COMMUNIST NIGGERS. But otherwise the crowd seemed as dull and bland as the turnpike itself.
Garraty dozed on fitfully, and the visions in his head were alternately of love and horror. In one of the dreams a low and droning voice asked over and over again: Are you experienced? Are you experienced? Are you experienced? and he could not tell if it was the voice of Stebbins or of the Major.
CHAPTER 12
“I went down the road, the road was muddy. I stubbed my toe, my toe was bloody. You all here?”
Somehow it had got around to nine in the morning again.
Ray Garraty turned his canteen over his head, leaning back until his neck popped. It had only just warmed up enough so you could no longer see your breath, and the water was frigid, driving back the constant drowsiness a little.
He looked his traveling companions over. McVries had a heavy scrub of beard now, as black as his hair. Collie Parker looked haggard but tougher than ever. Baker seemed almost ethereal. Scramm was not so flushed, but he was coughing steadily-a deep, thundering cough that reminded Garraty of himself, long ago. He had had pneumonia when he was five.
The night had passed in a dream-sequence of odd names on the reflectorized overhead signs. Veazie. Bangor. Hermon. Hampden. Winterport. The soldiers had made only two kills, and Garraty was beginning to accept the truth of Parker’s cracker anthology.
And now bright daylight had come again. The little protective groups had reformed, Walkers joking about beards but not about feet… never about feet. Garraty had felt several small blisters break on his right heel during the night, but the soft, absorbent sock had buffered the raw flesh somewhat. Now they had just passed a sign that read AUGUSTA 48 PORTLAND 117.
“It’s further than you said,” Pearson told him reproachfully. He was horribly haggard, his hair hanging lifelessly about his cheeks.
“I’m not a walking roadmap,” Garraty said.
“Still… it’s your state.”
“Tough.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” There was no rancor in Pearson’s tired voice. “Boy, I’d never do this again in a hundred thousand years.”
“You should live so long.”
“Yeah.” Pearson’s voice dropped. “I’ve made up my mind, though. If I get so tired and I can’t go on, I’m gonna tun over there and dive into the crowd. They won’t dare shoot. Maybe I can get away.”
“It’d be like hitting a trampoline,” Garraty said. “They’ll bounce you right back onto the pavement so they can watch you bleed. Don’t you remember Percy?”
“Percy wasn’t thinkin’. Just trying to walk off into the woods. They beat the dog out of Percy, all right.” He looked curiously at Garraty. “Aren’t you tired, Ray?”
“Shit, no.” Garraty flapped his thin arms with mock grandeur. “I’m coasting, couldn’t you tell?”
“I’m in bad shape,” Pearson said, and licked his lips. “I’m havin’ a hard job just thinking straight. And my legs feel like they got harpoons in them all the way up to-”
McVries came up behind them. “Scramm’s dying,” he said bluntly.
Garraty and Pearson said “Huh?” in unison.
“He’s got pneumonia,” McVries said.