Thunder whacked. A white-purple tine of lightning jabbed the horizon. The comforting sough of the wind in the pines had become a hundred mad ghosts, flapping and hooting.
The guns cracked, a small popgun sound almost lost in the thunder and the wind. Garraty jerked his head around, the premonition that Olson had finally bought his bullet strong upon him. But Olson was still there, his flapping clothes revealing how amazingly fast the weight had melted off him. Olson had lost his jacket somewhere; the arms that poked out of his short shirtsleeves were bony and as thin as pencils.
It was somebody else who was being dragged off. The face was small and exhausted and very dead beneath the whipping mane of his hair.
“If it was a tailwind we could be in Oldtown by four-thirty!” Barkovitch said gleefully. He had his rainhat jammed down over his ears, and his sharp face was joyful and demented. Garraty suddenly understood. He reminded himself to tell McVries. Barkovitch was crazy.
A few minutes later the wind suddenly dropped off. The thunder faded to a series of thick mutters. The heat sucked back at them, clammy and nearly unbearable after the cushy coolness of the wind.
“What happened to it?” Collie Parker brayed. “Garraty! Does this goddam state punk out on its rainstorms, too?”
“I think you'll get what you want,” Garraty said. “I don't know if you'll want it when you get it, though.”
“Yoo-hoo! Raymond! Raymond Garraty!”
Garraty's head jerked up. For one awful moment he thought it was his mother, and visions of Percy danced through his head. But it was only an elderly, sweet-faced lady peeping at him from beneath a Vogue magazine she was using as a rain-hat.
“Old bag,” Art Baker muttered at his elbow.
“She looks sweet enough to me. Do you know her?”
“I know the type,” Baker said balefully. “She looks just like my Aunt Hattie. She used to like to go to funerals, listen to the weeping and wailing and carrying-ons with just that same smile. Like a cat that got into the aigs.”
“She's probably the Major's mother,” Garraty said. It was supposed to be funny, but it fell flat. Baker's face was strained and pallid under the fading light in the rushing sky.
“My Aunt Hattie had nine kids. Nine, Garraty. She buried four of 'em with just that same look. Her own young. Some folks like to see other folks die. I can't understand that, can you?”
“No,” Garraty said. Baker was making him uneasy. The thunder had begun to roll its wagons across the sky again. “Your Aunt Hattie, is she dead now?”
“No.” Baker looked up at the sky. “She's down home. Probably out on the front porchin her rockin' chair. She can't walk much anymore. Just sittin' and rockin' and listenin' to the bulletins on the radio. And smilin' each time she hears the new figures.” Baker rubbed his elbows with his palms. “You ever see a cat eat its own kittens, Garraty?”
Garraty didn't reply. There was an electric tension in the air now, something about the storm poised above them, and something more. Garraty could not fathom it. When he blinked his eyes he seemed to see the out-of-kilter eyes of Freaky D'Allessio looking back at him from the darkness.
Finally he said to Baker: “Does everybody in your family study up on dying?”
Baker smiled pallidly. “Well, I was turnin' over the idea of going to mortician's school in a few years. Good job. Morticians go on eating even in a depression.”
“I always thought I'd get into urinal manufacture,” Garraty said. “Get contracts with cinemas and bowling alleys and things. Sure-fire. How many urinal factories can there be in the country?”
“I don't think I'd still want to be a mortician,” Baker said. “Not that it matters.”
A huge flash of lightning tore across the sky. A gargantuan clap of thunder followed. The wind picked up in jerky gusts. Clouds raced across the sky like crazed privateers across an ebony nightmare sea.
“It's coming,” Garraty said. “It's coming, Art.”
“Some people say they don't care,” Baker said suddenly. “Something simple, that's all I want when I go, Don.” That's what they'd tell him. My uncle. But most of 'em care plenty. That's what he always told me. They say, “Just a pine box will do me fine.” But they end up having a big one... with a lead sleeve if they can afford it. Lots of them even write the model number in their wills.”
“Why?” Garraty asked.
“Down home, most of them want to be buried in mausoleums. Aboveground. They don't want to be underground 'cause the water table's so high where I come from. Things not quick in the damp. But if you're buried aboveground, you got the rats to worry about. Big Louisiana bayou rats. Graveyard rats. They'd gnaw through one of them pine boxes in zip flat.”
The wind pulled at them with invisible hands. Garraty wished the storm would come on and come. It was like an insane merry-go-round. No matter who you talked to, you came around to this damned subject again.
“Be fucked if I'd do it,” Garraty said. “Lay out fifteen hundred dollars or something just to keep the rats away after I was dead.”
“I dunno,” Baker said. His eyes were half-lidded, sleepy. “They go for the soft parts, that's what troubles my mind. I could see 'em worryin' a hole in my own coffin, then makin' it bigger, finally wrigglin' through. And goin' right for my eyes like they was jujubes. They'd eat my eyes and then I'd be part of that rat. Ain't that right?”
“I don't know,” Garraty said sickly.
“No thanks. I'll take that coffin with the lead sleeve. Every time.”
“Although you'd only actually need it the once,” Garraty said with a horrified little giggle.
“That is true,” Baker agreed solemnly.
Lightning forked again, an almost pink streak that left the air smelling of ozone. A moment later the storm smote them again. But it wasn't rain this time. It was hail.
In a space of five seconds they were being pelted by hailstones the size of small pebbles. Several of the boys cried out, and Garraty shielded his eyes with one hand. The wind rose to a shriek. Hailstones bounced and smashed against the road, against faces and bodies.
Jensen ran in a huge, rambling circle, eyes covered, feet stumbling and rebounding against each other, in a total panic. He finally blundered off the shoulder, and the soldiers on the halftrack pumped half a dozen rounds into the undulating curtain of hail before they could be sure. Goodbye, Jensen, Garraty thought. Sorry, man.
Then rain began to fall through the hail, sluicing down the hill they were climbing, melting the hail scattered around their feet. Another wave of stones hit them, more rain, another splatter of hail, and then the rain was falling in steady sheets, punctuated by loud claps of thunder.
“Goddam!” Parker yelled, striding up to Garraty. His face was covered with red blotches, and he looked like a drowned water rat. “Garraty, this is without a doubt—”
“—yeah, the most fucked-up state in the fifty-one,” Garraty finished. “Go soak your head.' Parker threw his head back, opened his mouth, and let the cold rain patter in.
“I am, goddammit, I am!”
Garraty bent himself into the wind and caught up with McVries. “How does this grab you?” he asked.
McVries clutched himself and shivered. “You can't win. Now I wish the sun was out.”
“It won't last long,” Garraty said, but he was wrong. As they walked into four o'clock, it was still raining.
CHAPTER 10
“Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah.”
—The Count, Sesame Street
There was no sunset as they walked into their second night on the road. The rainstorm gave way to a light, chilling drizzle around four-thirty. The drizzle continued on until almost eight o'clock. Then the clouds began to break up and show bright, coldly flickering stars.
Garraty pulled himself closer together inside his damp clothes and did not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. Fickle spring had pulled the balmy warmth that had come with them this f
ar from beneath them like an old rug.
Maybe the crowds provided some warmth. Radiant heat, or something. More and more of them lined the road. They were huddled together for warmth but were undemonstrative. They watched the Walkers go past and then went home or hurried on to the next vantage point. If it was blood the crowds were looking for, they hadn't gotten much of it. They had lost only two since Jensen, both of them younger boys who had simply fainted dead away. That put them exactly halfway. No... really more than half. Fifty down, forty-nine to go.
Garraty was walking by himself. He was too cold to be sleepy. His lips were pressed together to keep the tremble out of them. Olson was still back there; halfhearted bets had gone round to the effect that Olson would be the fiftieth to buy a ticket, the halfway boy. But he hadn't. That signal honor had gone to 13, Roger Fenum. Unlucky old 13. Garraty was beginning to think that Olson would go on indefinitely. Maybe until he starved to death. He had locked himself safely away in a place beyond pain. In a way he supposed it would be poetic justice if Olson won. He could see the headlines: LONG WALK WON BY DEAD MAN!
Garraty's toes were numb. He wiggled them against the shredded inner linings of his shoes and could feel nothing. The heal pain was not in his toes now. It was in his arches. A sharp, blatting pain that knifed up into his calves each time he took a step. It made him think of a story his mother had read him when he was small. It was about a mermaid who wanted to be a woman. Only she had a tail and a good fairy or someone said she could have legs if she wanted them badly enough. Every step she took on dry land would be like walking on knives, but she could have them if she wanted them, and she said yeah, okay, and that was the Long Walk. In a nutshell—”
“Warning! Warning 47!”
“I hear you,” Garraty snapped crossly, and picked up his feet.
The woods were thinner. The real northern part of the state was behind them. They had gone through two quietly residential towns, the road cutting them lengthwise and the sidewalks packed with people that were little more than shadows beneath the drizzle-diffused streetlamps. No one cheered much. It was too cold, he supposed. Too cold and too dark and Jesus Christ now he had another warning to walk off and if that wasn't a royal pisser, nothing was.
His feet were slowing again and he forced himself to pick them up. Somewhere quite far up ahead Barkovitch said something and followed it up with a short burst of his unpleasant laughter. He could hear McVries's response clearly: “Shut up, killer.” Barkovitch told McVries to go to hell, and now he seemed quite upset by the whole thing. Garraty smiled wanly in the darkness.
He had dropped back almost to the tail of the column and reluctantly realized he was angling toward Stebbins again. Something about Stebbins fascinated him. But he decided he didn't particularly care what that something was. It was time to give up wondering about things. There was no percentage in it. It was just another royal pisser.
There was a huge, luminescent arrow ahead in the dark. It glowed like an evil spirit. Suddenly a brass band struck up a march. A good-sized band, by the sound. There were louder cheers. The air was full of drifting fragments, and for a crazy moment Garraty thought it was snowing. But it wasn't snow. It was confetti. They were changing roads. The old one met the new one at a right angle and another Maine Turnpike sign announced that Oldtown was now a mere sixteen miles away. Garraty felt a tentative feeler of excitement, maybe even pride. After Oldtown he knew the route. He could have traced it on the palm of his hand.
“Maybe it's your edge. I don't think so, but maybe it is.”
Garraty jumped. It was as if Stebbins had pried the lid off his mind and peeked down inside.
“What?”
“It's your country, isn't it?”
“Not up here. I've never been north of Greenbush in my life, except when we drove up to the marker. And we didn't come this way.” They left the brass band behind them, its tubas and clarinets glistening softly in the moist night.
“But we go through your hometown, don't we?”
“No, but close by it.”
Stebbins grunted. Garraty looked down at Stebbins's feet and saw with surprise that Stebbins had removed his tennis shoes and was wearing a pair of soft-looking moccasins. His shoes were tucked into his chambray shirt.
“I'm saving the tennis shoes,” Stebbins said, “just in case. But I think the mocs will finish it.”
“Oh.”
They passed a radio tower standing skeletal in an empty field. A red light pulsed as regular as a heartbeat at its tip.
“Looking forward to seeing your loved ones'?”
“Yes, I am,” Garraty said.
“What happens after that?”
“Happens?” Garraty shrugged. “Keep on walking down the road, I guess. Unless you are all considerate enough to buy out by then.”
“Oh, I don't think so,” Stebbins said, smiling remotely. “Are you sure you won't be walked out? After you see them?”
“Man, I'm not sure of anything,” Garraty said. “I didn't know much when I started, and I know less now.”
“You think you have a chance?”
“I don't know that either. I don't even know why I bother talking to you. It's like talking to smoke.”
Far ahead, police sirens howled and gobbled in the night.
“Somebody broke through to the road up ahead where the police are spread thinner,” Stebbins said. “The natives are getting restless, Garraty. Just think of all the people diligently making way for you up ahead.”
“For you too.”
“Me too,” Stebbins agreed, then didn't say anything for a long time. The collar of his chambray workshirt flapped vacuously against his neck. “It's amazing how the mind operates the body,” he said at last. “It's amazing how it can take over and dictate to the body. Your average housewife may walk up to sixteen miles a day, from icebox to ironing board to clothesline. She's ready to put her feet up at the end of the day but she's not exhausted. A door-to-door salesman might do twenty. A high school kid in training for football walks twenty-five to twenty-eight... that's in one day from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. All of them get tired, but none of them get exhausted.”
“Yeah.”
“But suppose you told the housewife: today you must walk sixteen miles before you can have your supper.”
Garraty nodded. “She'd be exhausted instead of tired.”
Stebbins said nothing. Garraty had the perverse feeling that Stebbins was disappointed in him.
“Well... wouldn't she?”
“Don't you think she'd have her sixteen miles in by noon so she could kick off her shoes and spend the afternoon watching the soaps? I do. Are you tired, Garraty?”
“Yeah,” Garraty said shortly. “I'm tired.”
“Exhausted?”
“Well, I'm getting there.”
“No, you're not getting exhausted yet, Garraty.” He jerked a thumb at Olson's silhouette. “That's exhausted. He's almost through now.”
Garraty watched Olson, fascinated, almost expecting him to drop at Stebbins's word. “What are you driving at?”
“Ask your cracker friend, Art Baker. A mule doesn't like to plow. But he likes carrots. So you hang a carrot in front of his eyes. A mule without a carrot gets exhausted. A mule with a carrot spends a long time being tired. You get it?”
“No.”
Stebbins smiled again. “You will. Watch Olson. He's lost his appetite for the carrot. He doesn't quite know it yet, but he has. Watch Olson, Garraty. You can learn from Olson.”
Garraty looked at Stebbins closely, not sure how seriously to take him. Stebbins laughed aloud. His laugh was rich and full - a startling sound that made other Walkers turn their heads. “Go on. Go talk to him, Garraty. And if he won't talk, just get up close and have a good look. It's never too late to learn.”
Garraty swallowed. “Is it a very important lesson, would you say?”
Stebbins stopped laughing. He caught Garraty's wrist in a strong grip. “Th
e most important lesson you'll ever learn, maybe. The secret of life over death. Reduce that equation and you can afford to die, Garraty. You can spend your life like a drunkard on a spree.”
Stebbins dropped his hand. Garraty massaged his wrist slowly. Stebbins seemed to have dismissed him again. Nervously, Garraty walked away from him, and toward Olson.
It seemed to Garraty that he was drawn toward Olson on an invisible wire. He flanked him at four o'clock. He tried to fathom Olson's face.
Once, a long time ago, he had been frightened into a long night of wakefulness by a movie starring - who? It had been Robert Mitchum, hadn't it? He had been playing the role of an implacable Southern revival minister who had also been a compulsive murderer. In silhouette, Olson looked a little bit like him now. His form had seemed to elongate as the weight sloughed off him. His skin had gone scaly with dehydration. His eyes had sunk into hollowed sockets. His hair flew aimlessly on his skull like wind-driven cornsilk.
Why, he's nothing but a robot, nothing but an automaton, really. Can there still be an Olson in there hiding? No. He's gone. I am quite sure that the Olson who sat on the grass and joked and told about the kid who froze on the starting line and bought his ticket right there, that Olson is gone. This is a dead clay thing.
“Olson?” he whispered.
Olson walked on. He was a shambling haunted house on legs. Olson had fouled himself. Olson smelled bad.
“Olson, can you talk?”
Olson swept onward. His face was turned into the darkness, and he was moving, yes he was moving. Something was going on here, something was still ticking over, but—
Something, yes, there was something, but what?
They breasted another rise. The breath came shorter and shorter in Garraty's lungs until he was panting like a dog. Tiny vapors of steam rose from his wet clothes. There was a river below them, lying in the dark like a silver snake. The Stillwater, he imagined. The Stillwater passed near Oldtown. A few halfhearted cheers went up, but not many. Further on, nestled against the far side of the river's dogleg (maybe it was the Penobscot, after all), was a nestle of lights. Oldtown. A smaller nestle of light on the other side would be Milford and Bradley. Oldtown. They had made it to Oldtown.
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