The Long Walk

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 fish-belly 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,