“Ju’st thirty-five left to walk down. They’re all going to fall apart tonight. You’ll see. There won’t be a dozen left on the road when the sun comes up. You’ll see. You and your diddy-bop friends, Garraty. All dead by morning. Dead by midnight.”
Garraty felt suddenly very strong. He knew that Barkovitch would go soon now. He wanted to break into a run, bruised kidneys and aching spine and screaming feet and all, run and tell McVries he was going to be able to keep his promise.
“What will you ask for?” Garraty said aloud. “When you win?”
Barkovitch grinned gleefully as if he had been waiting for the question. In the uncertain light his face seemed to crumple and squeeze as if pushed and pummeled by giant hands. “Plastic feet,” he whispered. “Plaaastic feet, Garraty. I’m just gonna have these ones cut off, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. I’ll have new plastic feet put on and put these ones in a laundromat washing machine and watch them go around and around and around-”
“I thought maybe you’d wish for friends,” Garraty said sadly. A heady sense of triumph, suffocating and enthralling, roared through him.
“Friends?”
“Because you don’t have any,” Garraty said pityingly. “We’ll all be glad to see you die. No one’s going to miss you, Gary. Maybe I’ll walk behind you and spit on your brains after they blow them all over the road. Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe we all will.” It was crazy, crazy, as if his whole head was flying off, it was like when he had swung the barrel of the air rifle at Jimmy, the blood… Jimmy his whole head had gone heat-hazy with the savage, primitive justice of it.
“Don’t hate me,” Barkovitch was whining, “why do you want to hate me? I don’t want to die any more than you do. What do you want? Do you want me to be sorry? I’ll be sorry! I… I…”
“We’ll all spit in your brains,” Garraty said crazily. “Do you want to touch me too?”
Barkovitch looked at him palely, his eyes confused and vacant.
“I… I’m sorry,” Garraty whispered. He felt degraded and dirty. He hurried away from Barkovitch. Damn you McVries, he thought, why? Why?
All at once the guns roared, and there were two of them falling down dead at once and one of them had to be Barkovitch, had to be. And this time it was his fault, he was the murderer.
Then Barkovitch was laughing. Barkovitch was cackling, higher and madder and even more audible than the madness of the crowd. “Garraty! Gaaam'atee! I’ll dance on your grave, Garraty! I’ll daaaance-”
“Shut up!” Abraham yelled. “Shut up, you little prick!”
Barkovitch stopped, then began to sob.
“Go to hell,” Abraham muttered.
“Now you did it,” Collie Parker said reproachfully. “You made him cry, Abe, you bad boy. He’s gonna go home and tell his mommy.”
Barkovitch continued to sob. It was an empty, ashy sound that made Garraty’s skin crawl. There was no hope in it.
“Is little uggy-wuggy gonna tell Mommy?” Quince called back. “Ahhhh, Barkovitch, ain’t that too bad?”
Leave him alone, Garraty screamed out in his mind, leave him alone, you have no idea how bad he’s hurting. But what kind of lousy hypocritical thought was that? He wanted Barkovitch to die. Might as well admit it. He wanted Barkovitch to crack up and croak off.
And Stebbins was probably back there in the dark laughing at them all.
He hurried, caught up with McVries, who was ambling along and staring idly at the crowd. The crowd was staring back at him avidly.
“Why don’t you help me decide?” McVries said.
“Sure. What’s the topic for decision'?”
“Who’s in the cage. Us or them.”
Garraty laughed with genuine pleasure. “All of us. And the cage is in the Major’s monkey house.”
McVries didn’t join in Garraty’s laughter. “Barkovitch is going over the high side, isn’t he?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I don’t want to see it anymore. It’s lousy. And it’s a cheat. You build it all around something… set yourself on something… and then you don’t want it. Isn’t it too bad the great truths are all such lies?”
“I never thought much about it. Do you realize it’s almost ten o’clock?”
“It’s like practicing pole-vaulting all your life and then getting to the Olympics and saying, 'What the hell do I want to jump over that stupid bar for?'”
“Yeah.”
“You almost could care, right?” McVries said, nettled.
“It’s getting harder to work me up,” Garraty admitted. He paused. Something had been troubling him badly for some time now. Baker had joined them. Garraty looked from Baker to McVries and then back again. “Did you see Olson’s… did you see his hair? Before he bought it?”
“What about his hair?” Baker asked.
“It was going gray.”
“No, that’s crazy,” McVries said, but he suddenly sounded very scared. “No, it was dust or something.”
“It was gray,” Garraty said. “It seems like we’ve been on this road forever. It was Olson’s hair getting… getting that way that made me think of it first, but… maybe this is some crazy kind of immortality.” The thought was terribly depressing. He stared straight ahead into the darkness, feeling the soft wind against his face.
“I walk, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked,” McVries chanted. “Shall I translate into Latin?”
We’re suspended in time, Garraty thought.
Their feet moved but they did not. The cherry cigarette glows in the crowd, the occasional flashlight or flaring sparkler might have been stars, weird low constellations that marked their existence ahead and behind, narrowing into nothing both ways.,
“Bruh,” Garraty said, shivering. “A guy could go crazy.”
“That’s right,” Pearson agreed, and then laughed nervously. They were starting up a long, twisting hill. The road was now expansion-jointed concrete, hard on the feet It seemed to Garraty that he felt every pebble through the paper-thin-ness of his shoes. The frisky wind had scattered shallow drifts of candy wrappers, popcorn boxes, and other assorted muck in their way. At some places they almost had to fight their way through. It’s not fair, Garraty thought self-pityingly.
“What’s the layout up ahead?” McVries asked him apologetically.
Garraty closed his eyes and tried to make a map in his head. “I can’t remember all the little towns. We come to Lewiston, that’s the second-biggest city in the state, bigger than Augusta. We go right down the main drag. It used to be Lisbon Street, but now it’s Cotter Memorial Avenue. Reggie Cotter was the only guy from Maine to ever win the Long Walk. It happened a long time ago.”
“He died, didn’t he?” Baker said.
“Yeah. He hemorrhaged in one eye and finished the Walk half-blind. It turned out he had a blood clot on his brain. He died a week or so after the Walk.” And in a feeble effort to remove the onus, Garraty repeated: “It was a long time ago.”
No one spoke for a while. Candy wrappers crackled under their feet like the sound of a faraway forest fire. A cherry bomb went off in the crowd. Garraty could see a faint lightness on the horizon that was probably the twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn, the land of Dussettes and Aubuchons and Lavesques, the land of Nous parlons francais ici. Suddenly Garraty had a nearly obsessive craving for a stick of gum.
“What’s after Lewiston?”
“We go down Route 196, then along 126 to Freeport, where I’m going to see my mom and my girl. That’s also where we get on U.S. 1. And that’s where we stay until it’s over.”
“The big highway,” McVries muttered. “Sure.”
The guns blasted and they all jumped.
“It was Barkovitch or Quince,” Pearson said. “I can’t tell… one of them’s still walking… it’s-”
Barkovitch laughed out of the darkness, a high, gobbling sound, thin and terrifying. “Not yet, you whores! I ain’t gone yet! Not yeeeeeetttttt…”