Chapter 16

" The blood has begun to flow! Liston is staggering! Clay is rocking him with combinations!... boring in! Clay is killing him! Clay is killing him! Ladies and gentlemen, Liston is down! Sonny Liston is down! Clay is dancing... waving... yelling into the crowd! Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how to describe this scene! "

Radio Commentator

Second Clay‑ Liston Fight

Tubbins had gone insane.

Tubbins was a short boy with glasses and a faceful of freckles. He wore hip­hanging bluejeans that he had been constantly hitching up. He hadn't said much, but he had been a nice enough sort before he went insane.

" WHORE! " Tubbins babbled to the rain. He had turned his face up into it, and the rain dripped off his specs onto his cheeks and over his lips and down off the end of his blunted chin. " THE WHORE OF BABYLON HAS COME AMONG US! SHE LIES IN THE STREETS AND SPREADS HER LEGS ON THE FILTH OF COBBLESTONES! VILE! VILE! BEWARE THE WHORE OF BABYLON! HER LIPS DRIP HONEY BUT HER HEART IS GALL AND WORMWOOD‑ "

" And she's got the clap, " Collie Parker added tiredly. " Jeezus, he's worse than Klingerman." He raised his voice. " Drop down dead, Tubby! "

" WHOREMONGER AND WHOREMASTER! " shrieked Tubbins. " VILE! UNCLEAN! "

" Piss on him, " Parker muttered. " I'll kill him myself if he don't shut up." He passed trembling skeletal fingers across his lips, dropped them to his belt, and spent thirty seconds making them undo the clip that held his canteen to his belt. He al­most dropped it getting it to his mouth, and then spilled half of it. He began to weep weakly.

It was three in the afternoon. Portland and South Portland were behind them. About fifteen minutes ago they had passed under a wet and flapping banner that proclaimed that the New Hampshire border was only 44 miles away.

Only, Garraty thought. Only, what a stupid little word that is. Who was the idiot who took it into his head that we needed a stupid little word like that?

He was walking next to McVries, but McVries had spoken only in monosyllables since Freeport. Garraty hardly dared speak to him. He was indebted again, and it shamed him. It shamed him because he knew he would not help McVries if the chance came. Now Jan was gone, his mother was gone. Irrevocably and for eternity. Unless he won. And now he wanted to win very badly.

It was odd. This was the first time he could remember wanting to win. Not even at the start, when he had been fresh (back when dinosaurs walked the earth), had he consciously wanted to win. There had only been the challenge. But the guns didn't produce little red flags with BANG written on them. It wasn't baseball or Giant Step; it was all real.

Or had he known it all along?

His feet seemed to hurt twice as badly since he had decided he wanted to win, and there were stabbing pains in his chest when he drew long breaths. The sen­sation of fever was growing‑ perhaps he had picked something up from Scramm.

He wanted to win, but not even McVries could carry him over the invisible fin­ish line. He didn't think he was going to win. In the sixth grade he had won his school's spelling bee and had gone on to the district spelldown, but the district spellmaster wasn't Miss Petrie, who let you take it back. Softhearted Miss Petrie. He had stood there, hurt, unbelieving, sure there must have been some mistake, but there had been none. He just hadn't been good enough to make the cut then, and he wasn't going to be good enough now. Good enough to walk most of them down, but not all. His feet and legs had gone beyond numb and angry rebellion, and now mutiny was just a step away.

Only three had gone down since they left Freeport. One of them had been the unfortunate Klingerman. Garraty knew what the rest of them were thinking. It was too many tickets issued for them to just quit, any of them. Not with only twenty left to walk over. They would walk now until their bodies or minds shook apart.

They passed over a bridge spanning a placid little brook, its surface lightly pocked by the rain. The guns roared, the crowd cheered, and Garraty felt the stub­born cranny of hope in the back of his brain open an infinitesimal bit more.

" Did your girl look good to you? "

It was Abraham, looking like a victim of the Bataan March. For some incon­ceivable reason he had shucked both his jacket and his shirt, leaving his bony chest and stacked ribcage bare.

" Yeah, " Garraty said. " I hope I can make it back to her."

Abraham smiled. " Hope? Yeah, I'm beginning to remember how to spell that word, too." It was like a mild threat. " Was that Tubbins? "

Garraty listened. He heard nothing but the steady roar of the crowd. " Yeah, by God it was. Parker put the hex on him, I guess. "

" I keep telling myself, " Abraham said, " that all I got to do is to continue put­ting one foot in front of the other. "

" Yeah."

Abraham looked distressed. " Garraty... this is a bitch to say... "

" What's that? "

Abraham was quiet for a long time. His shoes were big heavy Oxfords that looked horrendously heavy to Garraty (whose own feet were now bare, cold, and scraping raw). They clopped and dragged on the pavement, which had now ex­panded to three lanes. The crowd did not seem so loud or quite so terrifyingly close as it had ever since Augusta.

Abraham looked more distressed than ever. " It's a bitch. I just don't know how to say it."

Garraty shrugged, bewildered. " I guess you just say it."

" Well, look. We're getting together on something. All of us that are left."

" Scrabble, maybe? "

" It's a kind of a... a promise."

" Oh yeah? "

" No help for anybody. Do it on your own or don't do it."

Garraty looked at his feet. He wondered how long it had been since he was hun­gry, and he wondered how long it would be before he fainted if he didn't eat some­thing. He thought that Abraham's Oxfords were like Stebbins‑ those shoes could carry him from here to the Golden Gate Bridge without so much as a busted shoe­lace... at least they looked that way.

" That sounds pretty heartless, " he said finally.

" It's gotten to be a pretty heartless situation. " Abraham wouldn't look at him. " Have you talked to all the others about this? "

" Not yet. About a dozen."

" Yeah, it's a real bitch. I can see how hard it is for you to talk about."

" It seems to get harder rather than easier. "

" What did they say? " He knew what they said, what were they supposed to say?

" They're for it."

Garraty opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked at Baker up ahead. Baker was wearing his jacket, and it was soaked. His head was bent. One hip swayed and jutted awkwardly. His left leg had stiffened up quite badly.

" Why'd you take off your shirt? " he asked Abraham suddenly.

" It was making my skin itch. It was raising hives or something. It was a syn­thetic, maybe I have an allergy to synthetic fabrics, how the hell should I know? What do you say, Ray? "

" You look like a religious penitent or something."

" What do you say? Yes or no? "

" Maybe I owe McVries a couple." McVries was still close by, but it was im­possible to tell if he could hear their conversation over the din of the crowd. Come on, McVries, he thought. Tell him I don't owe you anything. Come on, you son of a bitch. But McVries said nothing.

" All right, count me in, " Garraty said.

" Cool."

Now I'm an animal, nothing but a dirty, tired, stupid animal. You did it. You sold it out.

" If you try to help anybody, we can't hold you back. That's against the rules. But we'll shut you out. And you'll have broken your promise."

" I won't try."

" Same goes for anyone who tries to help you."

" Yuh."

" It's nothing personal. You know that, Ray. But we're down against it now."

" Root hog or die."

" That's it."

" Nothing personal. Just back to the jungle."

For a second he thought Abraham was going to get pissed, but his quickly drawn­-in breath came out in a harmless sigh. Maybe he was too tired to get pissed. " You agreed. I'll hold you to that, Ray."

" Maybe I should get all high‑ flown and say I'll keep my promise because my word is my bond, " Garraty said. " But I'll be honest. I want to see you get that ticket, Abraham. The sooner the better."

Abraham licked his lips. " Yeah."

" Those look like good shoes, Abe."

" Yeah. But they're too goddam heavy. You buy for distance, you gain the weight. "

" Just ain't no cure for the summertime blues, is there? "

Abraham laughed. Garraty watched McVries. His face was unreadable. He might have heard. He might not have. The rain fell in steady straight lines, heavier now, colder. Abraham's skin was 6shbelly white. Abraham looked more like a convict with his shirt off. Garraty wondered if anyone had told Abraham he didn't stand a dog's chance of lasting the night with his shirt off. Twilight already seemed to be creeping in. McVries? Did you hear us? I sold you down, McVries. Mus­keteers forever.

" Ah, I don't want to die this way, " Abraham said. He was crying. " Not in public with people rooting for you to get up and walk another few miles. It's so fucking mindless. Just fucking mindless. This has about as much dignity as a mon­goloid idiot strangling on his own tongue and shitting his pants at the same time. "

It was quarter past three when Garraty gave his no help promise. By six that evening, only one more had gotten a ticket. No one talked. There seemed to be an uncomfortable conspiracy afoot to ignore the last fraying inches of their lives, Gar­raty thought, to just pretend it wasn't happening. The groups‑ what pitiful little remained of them‑ had broken down completely. Everyone had agreed to Abra­ham's proposal. McVries had. Baker had. Stebbins had laughed and asked Abra­ham if he wanted to prick his finger so he could sign in blood.

It was growing very cold. Garraty began to wonder if there really was such a thing as a sun, or if he had dreamed it. Even Jan was a dream to him now‑ a sum­mer dream of a summer that never was.

Yet he seemed to see his father ever more clearly. His father with the heavy shock of hair he himself had inherited, and the big, meaty truck‑ driver's shoulders.

His father had been built like a fullback. He could remember his father picking him up, swinging him dizzyingly, rumpling his hair, kissing him. Loving him.

He hadn't really seen his mother back there in Freeport at all, he realized sadly, but she had been there‑ in her shabby black coat, " for best, " the one that showed the white snowfall of dandruff on the collar no matter how often she shampooed. He had probably hurt her deeply by ignoring her in favor of Jan. Perhaps he had even meant to hurt her. But that didn't matter now. It was past. It was the future that was unraveling, even before it was knit.

You get in deeper, he thought. It never gets shallower, just deeper, until you're out of the bay and swimming into the ocean. Once all of this had looked simple. Pretty funny, all right. He had talked to McVries and McVries had told him the first time he had saved him out of pure reflex. Then, in Freeport, it had been to prevent an ugliness in front of a pretty girl he would never know. Just as he would never know Scramm's wife, heavy with child. Garraty had felt a pang at the thought, and sudden sorrow. He had not thought of Scramm in such a long time. He thought McVries was quite grown‑ up, really. He wondered why he hadn't managed to grow up any.

The Walk went on. Towns marched by.

He fell into a melancholy, oddly satisfying mood that was shattered quite sud­denly by an irregular rattle of gunfire and hoarse screams from the crowd. When he looked around he was stunned to see Collie Parker standing on top of the half­track with a rifle in his hands.

One of the soldiers had fallen off and lay staring up at the sky with empty, expressionless eyes. There was a neat blue hole surrounded by a corona of powder burns in the center of his forehead.

" Goddam bastards! " Parker was screaming. The other soldiers had jumped from the halftrack. Parker looked out over the stunned Walkers. " Come on, you guys! Come on! We can‑ "

The Walkers, Garraty included, stared at Parker as if he had begun to speak in a foreign language. And now one of the soldiers who had jumped when Parker swarmed up the side of the 'track now carefully shot Collie Parker in the back.

" Parker! " McVries screamed. It was as if he alone understood what had hap­pened, and a chance that might have been missed. " Oh, no! Parker! "

Parker grunted as if someone had hit him in the back with a padded Indian club. The bullet mushroomed and there was Collie Parker, standing on top of the half­track with his guts all over his torn khaki shirt and blue jeans. One hand was frozen in the middle of a wide, sweeping gesture, as if he was about to deliver an angry philippic.

" God.

" Damn, " Parker said.

He fired the rifle he had wrenched away from the dead soldier twice into the road. The slugs snapped and whined, and Garraty felt one of them tug air in front of his face. Someone in the crowd screamed in pain. Then the gun slid from Par­ker's hands. He made an almost military half‑ turn and then fell to the road where he lay on his side, panting rapidly like a dog that has been struck and mortally wounded by a passing car. His eyes blazed. He opened his mouth and struggled through blood for some coda.

" You. Ba. Bas. Bast. Ba." He died, staring viciously at them as they passed by.

" What happened? " Garraty cried out to no one in particular. " What happened to him? "

" He snuck up on 'em, " McVries said. " That's what happened. He must have known he couldn't make it. He snuck right up behind 'em and caught 'em asleep at the switch. " McVries's voice hoarsened. " He wanted us all up there with him, Garraty. And I think we could have done it."

" What are you talking about? " Garraty asked, suddenly terrified.

" You don't know? " McVties asked. " You don't know? "

" Up there with him?... What?..."

" Forget it. Just forget it."

McVries walked away. Garraty had a sudden attack of the shivers. He couldn't stop them. He didn't know what McVries was talking about. He didn't want to know what McVries was talking about. Or even think about it.

The Walk went on.

By nine o'clock that night the rain had stopped, but the sky was starless. No one else had gone down, but Abraham had begun to moan inarticulately. It was very cold, but no one offered to give Abraham something to wear. Garraty tried to think of it as poetic justice, but it only made him feel sick. The pain within him had turned into a sickness, a rotten sick feeling that seemed to be growing in the hol­lows of his body like a green fungus. His concentrate belt was nearly full, but it was all he could do to eat a small tube of tuna paste without gagging.

Baker, Abraham, and McVries. His circle of friends had come down to those three. And Stebbins, if he was anyone's friend. Acquaintance, then. Or demigod. Or devil. Or whatever. He wondered if any of them would be here by morning, and if he would be alive to know.

Thinking such things, he almost tan into Baker in the dark. Something clinked in Baker's hands.

" What you doing? " Garraty asked.

" Huh? " Baker looked up blankly.

" What're you doing? " Garraty repeated patiently.

" Counting my change."

" How much you got? "

Baker clinked the money in his cupped hands and smiled. " Dollar twenty‑ two, " he said.

Garraty grinned. " A fortune. What you going to do with it? "

Baker didn't smile back. He looked into the cold darkness dreamily. " Git me one of the big ones, " he said. His light Southern drawl had thickened appreciably.

" Git me a lead‑ lined one with pink silk insides and a white satin headpillow. " He blinked his empty doorknob eyes. " Wouldn't never rot then, not till Judgment Trump, when we are as we were. Clothed in flesh incorruptible."

Garraty felt a warm trickle of horror. " Baker? Have you gone nuts, Baker? "

" You cain't beat it. We‑ uns was all crazy to try. You cain't beat the rottenness of it. Not in this world. Lead‑ lined, that's the ticket... "

" If you don't get hold of yourself, you'll be dead by morning."

Baker nodded. His skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones, giving him the aspect of a skull. " That's the ticket. I wanted to die. Didn't you? Isn't that why? "

" Shut up! " Garraty yelled. He had the shakes again.

The road sloped sharply up then, cutting off their talk. Garraty leaned into the hill, cold and hot, his spine hurting, his chest hurting. He was sure his muscles would flatly refuse to support him much longer. He thought of Baker's lead‑ lined box, sealed against the dark millennia, and wondered if it would be the last thing he ever thought of. He hoped not, and struggled for some other mental track.

Warnings cracked out sporadically. The soldiers on the halftrack were back up to the mark; the one Parker had killed had been unobtrusively replaced. The crowd, cheered monotonously. Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind gummed‑ down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.

How would that be? Just how would that be?

And suddenly his roiling, agonized muscles, the sweat running down his face, even the pain itself‑ seemed very sweet and real. Garraty tried harder. He strug­gled to the top of the hill and gasped raggedly all the way down the far side.

At 11: 40 Marty Wyman bought his hole. Garraty had forgotten all about Wy­man, who hadn't spoken or gestured for the last twenty‑ four hours. He didn't die spectacularly. He just lay down and got shot. And someone whispered, that was Wyman. And someone else whispered, that's eighty‑ three, isn't it? And that was all.

By midnight they were only eight miles from the New Hampshire border. They passed a drive‑ in theater, a huge white oblong in the darkness. A single slide blazed from the screen: THE MANAGEMENT OF THIS THEATRE SALUTES THIS YEAR'S LONG WALKERS! At 12: 20 in the morning it began to rain again, and Abraham began to cough‑ the same kind of wet, ragged cough that had gotten Scramm not long before he bought out. By one o'clock the rain had become a hard, steady downpour that stung Garraty's eyes and made his body ache with a kind of internal ague. The wind drove at their backs.

At quarter past the hour, Bobby Sledge tried to scutter quietly into the crowd under the cover of the dark and the driving rain. He was holed quickly and effi­ciently. Garraty wondered if the blond soldier who had almost sold him his ticket had done it. He knew the blond was on duty; he had seen his face clearly in the glare from the drive‑ in spotlights. He wished heartily that the blond had been the one Parker had ticketed.

At twenty of two Baker fell down and hit his head on the paving. Garraty started to go to him without even thinking. A hand, still strong, clamped on his arm. It was McVries. Of course it would have to be McVries.

" No, " he said. " No more musketeers. And now it's real."

They walked on without looking back.

Baker collected three warnings, and then the silence stretched out interminably. Garraty waited for the guns to come down, and when they didn't, he checked his watch. Over four minutes had passed. Not long after, Baker walked past him and McVries, not looking at anything. There was an ugly, trickling wound on his forehead, but his eyes looked saner. The vacuous, dazed look was gone.

A little before two AM they crossed into New Hampshire amid the greatest pan­demonium yet. Cannons went off. Fireworks burst in the rainy sky, lighting a mul­titude that stretched away as far as the eye could see in a crazy feverlight. Competing brass bands played martial airs. The cheers were thunder. A great overhead airburst traced the Major's face in fire, making Garraty think numbly of God. This was followed by the face of the New Hampshire Provo Governor, a man known for having stormed the German nuclear base in Santiago nearly single­handed back in 1953. He had lost a leg to radiation poisoning.

Garraty dozed again. His thoughts grew incoherent. Freaky D'Allessio was crouched beneath the rocking chair of Baker's aunt, curled in a tiny coffin. His body was that of a plump Cheshire cat. He was grinning toothily. Faintly, in the fur between his slightly off‑ center green eyes, were the healed brand‑ marks of an old baseball wound. They were watching Garraty's father being led to an un­marked black van. One of the soldiers flanking Garraty's father was the blond sol­dier. Garraty's father was wearing only undershorts. The other soldier looked back over his shoulder and for a moment Garraty thought it was the Major. Then he saw it was Stebbins. He looked back and the Cheshire cat with Freaky's head had dis­appeared‑ all but the grin, which hung crescently in the air under the rocker like the outside edge of a watermelon...

The guns were shooting again, God, they were shooting at him now, he felt the air from that one, it was over, all over‑

He snapped full awake and took two running steps, sending jolts of pain all the way up from his feet to his groin before he realized they had been shooting at some­one else, and the someone else was dead, facedown in the rain.

" Hail Mary, " McVries muttered.

" Full of grace, " Stebbins said from behind them. He had moved up, moved up for the kill, and he was grinning like the Cheshire cat in Garraty's dream. " Help me win this stock‑ car race."

" Come on, " McVries said. " Don't be a wise‑ ass."

" My ass is no wiser than your ass, " Stebbins said solemnly.

McVries and Garraty laughed‑ a little uneasily.

" Well, " Stebbins said, " maybe a little."

" Pick 'em up, put 'em down, shut your mouth, " McVries chanted. He passed a shaky hand across his face and walked on, eyes straight ahead, his shoulders like a broken bow.

One more bought out before three o'clock‑ shot down in the rain and windy darkness as he went to his knees somewhere near Portsmouth. Abraham, coughing steadily, walked in a hopeless glitter of fever, a kind of death‑ glow, a brightness that made Garraty think of streaking meteorites. He was going to burn up instead of burning out‑ that was how tight it had gotten now.

Baker walked with steady, grim determination, trying to get rid of his warnings before they got rid of him. Garraty could just make him out through the slashing rain, limping along with his hands clenched at his sides.

And McVries was caving in. Garraty was not sure when it had begun; it might have happened in a second, while his back was turned. At one moment he had still been strong (Garraty remembered the clamp of McVries fingers on his lower arm when Baker had fallen), and now he was like an old man. It was unnerving.

Stebbins was Stebbins. He went on and on, like Abraham's shoes. He seemed to be favoring one leg slightly, but it could have been Garraty's imagination.

Of the other ten, five seemed to have drawn into that special netherworld that Olson had discovered‑ one step beyond pain and the comprehension of what was coming to them. They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Gar­raty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.

Just before dawn, three of them went down at once. The mouth of the crowd roared and belched anew with enthusiasm as the bodies spun and thumped like chunks of cut cordwood. To Garraty it seemed the beginning of a dreadful chain reaction that might sweep through them and finish them all. But it ended. It ended with Abraham crawling on his knees, eyes turned blindly up to the halftrack and the crowd beyond, mindless and filled with confused pain. They were the eyes of a sheep caught in a barbed wire fence. Then he fell on his face. His heavy Oxfords drummed fitfully against the wet road and then stopped.

Shortly after, the aqueous symphony of dawn began. The last day of the Walk came up wet and overcast. The wind howled down the almost‑ empty alley of the road like a lost dog being whipped through a strange and terrible place.