The Long Walk

and a good shit, and that’s all ! And when you get like Fenter and Zuck—”
    “Shut up,” a bored voice said, and Garraty knew it was Stebbins. But when he looked back, Stebbins was only looking at the road and walking along near the left-hand edge.
    A jet passed overhead, trailing the sound of its engines behind it and chalking a feathery line across the night sky. It passed low enough for them to be able to see its running lights, pulsing yellow and green. Baker was whistling again. Garraty let his eyelids drop mostly shut. His feet moved on their own.
    His half-dozing mind began to slip away from him. Random thoughts began to chase each other lazily across its field. He remembered his mother singing him an Irish lullaby when he was very small . . . something about cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o. And her face, so huge and beautiful, like the face of an actress on a movie screen. Wanting to kiss her and be in love with her for always. When he grew up, he would marry her.
    This was replaced by Jan’s good-humored Polish face and her dark hair that streamed nearly to her waist. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit beneath a short beach coat because they were going to Reid Beach. Garraty himself was wearing a ragged pair of denim shorts and his zoris.
    Jan was gone. Her face became that of Jimmy Owens, the kid down the block from them. He had been five and Jimmy had been five and Jimmy’s mother had caught them playing Doctor ’s Office in the sandpit behind Jimmy’s house. They both had boners. That’s what they called them—boners. Jimmy’s mother had called his mother and his mother had come to get him and had sat him down in her bedroom and had asked him how he would like it if she made him go out and walk down the street with no clothes on. His dozing body contracted with the groveling embarrassment of it, the deep shame. He had cried and begged, not to make him walk down the street with no clothes on . . . and not to tell his father.
    Seven years old now. He and Jimmy Owens peering through the dirt-grimed window of the Burr ’s Building Materials office at the naked lady calendars, knowing what they were looking at but not really knowing, feeling a crawling shameful exciting pang of something. Of something. There had been one blond lady with a piece of blue silk draped across her hips and they had stared at it for a long, long time. They argued about what might be down there under the cloth. Jimmy said he had seen his mother naked. Jimmy said he knew. Jimmy said it was hairy and cut open. He had refused to believe Jimmy, because what Jimmy said was disgusting.
    Still he was sure that ladies must be different from men down there and they had spent a long purple summer dusk discussing it, swatting mosquitoes and watching a scratch baseball game in the lot of the moving van company across the street from Burr’s. He could feel, actually feel in the half-waking dream the sensation of the hard curb beneath his fanny.
    The next year he had hit Jimmy Owens in the mouth with the barrel of his Daisy air rifle while they were playing guns and Jimmy had to have four stitches in his upper lip. A year after that they had moved away. He hadn’t meant to hit Jimmy in the mouth. It had been an accident. Of that he was quite sure, even though by then he had known Jimmy was right because he had seen his own mother naked (he had not meant to see her naked—it had been an accident). They were hairy down there. Hairy and cut open.
    Shhh, it isn’t a tiger, love, only your teddy bear, see? . . . Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o . . . Mother loves her boy . . . Shhh . . . Go to sleep . . .
    “Warning! Warning 47!”
    An elbow poked him rudely in the ribs. “That’s you, boy. Rise and shine.” McVries was grinning at him.
    “What time is it?” Garraty asked thickly.
    “Eight thirty-five.”
    “But I’ve been—”
    “—dozing for hours,” McVries said. “I know the feeling.”
    “Well, it sure seemed that way.”
    “It’s your mind,” McVries said, “using the old escape hatch. Don’t you wish your feet could?”
    “I use Dial,” Pearson said, pulling an idiotic face. “Don’t you wish everybody did?”
    Garraty thought that memories were like a line drawn in the dirt. The further back you went the scuffier and harder to see that line got. Until finally there was nothing but smooth sand and the black hole of nothingness that you came out of. The memories were in a way like the road.