His voice kept climbing and climbing. It was like a fire whistle gone insane. And Barkovitch’s hands suddenly went up like startled doves taking flight and Barkovitch ripped out his own throat.
“My Jesus!” Pearson wailed, and threw up over himself.
They fled from him, fled and scattered ahead and behind, and Barkovitch went on screaming and gobbling and clawing and walking, his feral face turned up to the sky, his mouth a twisted curve of darkness.
Then the fire-whistle sound began to fail, and Barkovitch failed with it. He fell down and they shot him, dead or alive.
Garraty turned around and walked forward again. He was dimly grateful that he hadn’t been warned. He saw a carbon copy of his horror on the faces of all about him. The Barkovitch part of it was over. Garraty thought it did not bode well for the rest of them, for their future on this dark and bloody road.
“I don’t feel good,” Pearson said. His voice was flat. He dry-retched and walked doubled over for a moment. “Oh. Not so good. Oh God. I don’t. Feel. So good. Oh.”
McVries looked straight ahead. “I think… I wish I were insane,” he said thoughtfully.
Only Baker said nothing. And that was odd, because Garraty suddenly got a whiff of Louisiana honeysuckle. He could hear the croak of the frogs in the bottoms. He could feel the sweaty, lazy hum of cicadas digging into the tough cypress bark for their dreamless seventeen-year sleep. And he could see Baker’s aunt rocking back and forth, her eyes dreamy and smiley and vacant, sitting on her porch and listening to the static and hum and faraway voices on an old Philco radio with a chipped and cracked mahogany cabinet. Rocking and rocking and rocking. Smiling, sleepy. Like a cat that has been into the cream and is well satisfied.
CHAPTER 15
“I don’t care if you win or lose, just as long as you win.”
Daylight came in creeping through a white, muted world of fog. Garraty was walking by himself again. He no longer even knew how many had bought it in the night. Five, maybe. His feet had headaches. Terrible migraines. He could feel them swelling each time he put his weight on them. His buttocks hurt. His spine was icy fire. But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.
And still there was a worm of excitement growing in his guts: they were now only thirteen miles out of Freeport. They were in Porterville now, and the crowd could barely see them through the dense fog, but they had been chanting his name rhythmically since Lewiston. It was like the pulse of a giant heart.
Freeport and Jan, he thought.
“Garraty?” The voice was familiar but washed out. It was McVries. His face was a furry skull. His eyes were glittering feverishly. “Good morning,” McVries croaked. “We live to fight another day.”
“Yeah. How many got it last night, McVries?”
“Six.” McVries dug ajar of bacon spread out of his belt and began to finger it into his mouth. His hands were shaking badly. “Six since Barkovitch.” He put the jar back with an old man’s palsied care. “Pearson bought it.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s not many of us left, Garraty. Only twenty-six.”
“No, not many.” Walking through the fog was like walking through weightless clouds of mothdust.
“Not many of us, either. The Musketeers. You and me and Baker and Abraham. Collie Parker. And Stebbins. If you want to count him in. Why not? Why the fuck not? Let’s count Stebbins in, Garraty. Six Musketeers and twenty spearcarriers.”
“Do you still think I’ll win?”
“Does it always get this foggy up here in the spring?”
“What’s that mean?”
“No, I don’t think you’ll win. It’s Stebbins, Ray. Nothing can wear him down, he’s like diamonds. The word is Vegas likes him nine-to-one now that Scramm’s out of it. Christ, he looks almost the same now as when we started.”
Garraty nodded as if expecting this. He found his tube of beef concentrate and began to eat it. What he wouldn’t have given for some of McVries’s long-gone raw hamburger.
McVries snuffled a little and wiped a hand across his nose. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you? Being back on your home stomping grounds after all of this?”
Garraty felt the worm of excitement wriggle and turn again. “No,” he said. “It seems like the most natural thing in the world.”
They walked down a long hill, and McVries glanced up into white drive-in screen nothing. “The fog’s getting worse.”
“It’s not fog,” Garraty said. “It’s rain now.”
The rain fell softly, as if it had no intention of stopping for a very long time.
“Where’s Baker?”
“Back there someplace,” McVries said.
Without a word-words were almost unnecessary now-Garraty began dropping back. The road took them past a traffic island, past the rickety Porterville Rec Center with its five lanes of candlepins, past a dead black Government Sales building with a large MAY IS CONFIRM-YOUR-SEX MONTH sign in the window.
In the fog Garraty missed Baker and ended up walking beside Stebbins. Hard like diamonds, McVries had said. But this diamond was showing some small flaws, he thought. Now they were walking parallel to the mighty and dead-polluted Androscoggin River. On the other side the Porterville Weaving Company, a textile mill reared its turrets into the fog like a filthy medieval castle.
Stebbins didn’t look up, but Garraty knew Stebbins knew he was there. He said nothing, foolishly determined to make Stebbins say the first word. The road curved again. For a moment the crowd was gone as they crossed the bridge spanning the Androscoggin. Beneath them the water boiled along, sullen and salty, dressed with cheesy yellow foam.
“Well?”
“Save your breath for a minute,” Garraty said. “You’ll need it.”
They came to the end of the bridge and the crowd was with them again as they swung left and started up the Brickyard Hill. It was long, steep, and banked. The river was dropping away below them on the left, and on their right was an almost perpendicular upslope. Spectators clung to trees, to bushes, to each other, and chanted Garraty’s name. Once he had dated a girl who lived on Brickyard Hill, a girl named Carolyn. She was married now. Had a kid. She might have let him, but he was young and pretty dumb.
From up ahead Parker was giving a whispery, out-of-breath goddam! that was barely audible over the crowd. Garraty’s legs quivered and threatened to go to jelly, but this was the last big hill before Freeport. After that it didn’t matter. If he went to hell he went to hell. Finally they breasted it (Carolyn had nice breasts, she often wore cashmere sweaters) and Stebbins, panting just a little, repeated: “Well?”
The guns roared. A boy named Charlie Field bowed out of the Walk.
“Well, nothing,” Garraty said. “I was looking for Baker and found you in stead. McVries says he thinks you’ll win.”
“McVries is an idiot,” Stebbins said casually. “You really think you’ll see your girl, Garraty? In all these people?”
“She’ll be in the front,” Garraty said. “She’s got a pass.”
“The cops’ll be too busy holding everybody back to get her through to the front.”
“That isn’t true,” Garraty said. He spoke sharply because Stebbins had articulated his own deep fear. “Why do you want to say a thing like that?”
“It’s really your mother you want to see anyway.”
Garraty recoiled sharply. “What?”
“Aren’t you going to marry her when you grow up, Garraty? That’s what most little boys want.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Am I?”
“Yes!”
“What makes you think you deserve to win, Garraty? You’re a second-class intellect, a second-class physical specimen, and probably a second-class libido. Garraty, I’d bet my dog and lot you never slipped it to that girl of yours.”