The Long Walk

himself.
    One head, a little confused and crazied up, but basically okay. Two eyes, grainy. One neck, pretty stiff. Two arms, no problem there. One torso, okay except for a gnawing in his gut that concentrates couldn’t satisfy. Two damn tired legs. Muscles aching. He wondered how far his legs would carry him on their own—how long before his brain took them over and began punishing them, making them work past any sane limit, to keep a bullet from crashing into its own bony cradle. How long before the legs began to kink and then to bind up, to protest and finally to seize up and stop.
    His legs were tired, but so far as he could tell, still pretty much okay.
    And two feet. Aching. They were tender, no use denying it. He was a big boy. Those feet were shifting a hundred and sixty pounds back and forth. The soles ached. There were occasional strange shooting pains in them. His left great toe had poked through his sock (he thought of Stebbins’s tale and felt a kind of creeping horror at that), and had begun to rub uncomfortably against his shoe. But his feet were working, there were still no blisters on them, and he felt his feet were still pretty much okay, too.
    Garraty, he pep-talked himself, you’re in good shape. Twelve guys dead, twice that many maybe hurting bad by now, but you’re okay. You’re going good. You’re great. You’re alive.
    Conversation, which had died violently at the end of Stebbins’s story, picked up again. Talking was what living people did. Yannick, 98, was discussing the ancestry of the soldiers on the halftrack in an overloud voice with Wyman, 97. Both agreed that it was mixed, colorful, hirsute, and bastardized.
    Pearson, meanwhile, abruptly asked Garraty: “Ever have an enema?”
    “Enema?” Garraty repeated. He thought about it. “No. I don’t think so.”
    “Any of you guys?” Pearson asked. “Tell the truth, now.”
    “I did,” Harkness said, and chuckled a little. “My mother gave me one after Halloween once when I was little. I ate pretty near a whole shopping bag of candy.”
    “Did you like it?” Pearson pressed.
    “Hell, no! Who in hell would like a half a quart of warm soapsuds up your—”
    “My little brother,” Pearson said sadly. “I asked the little snot if he was sorry I was going and he said no because Ma said he could have an enema if he was good and didn’t cry. He loves ’em.”
    “That’s sickening,” Harkness said loudly.
    Pearson looked glum. “I thought so, too.”
    A few minutes later Davidson joined the group and told them about the times he got drunk at the Steubenville State Fair and crawled into the hoochie-kooch tent and got biffed in the head by a big fat momma wearing nothing but a G-string. When Davidson told her (so he said) that he was drunk and thought it was the tattooing tent he was crawling into, the red hot big fat momma let him feel her up for a while (so he said). He had told her he wanted to get a Stars and Bars tattooed on his stomach.
    Art Baker told them about a contest they’d had back home, to see who could light the biggest fart, and this hairy-assed old boy named Davey Pop-ham had managed to burn off almost all the hair on his ass and the small of his back as well. Smelled like a grassfire, Baker said. This got Harkness laughing so hard he drew a warning.
    After that, the race was on. Tall story followed tall story until the whole shaky structure came tumbling down. Someone else was warned, and not long after, the other Baker (James) bought a ticket. The good humor went out of the group. Some of them began to talk about their girlfriends, and the conversation became stumbling and maudlin. Garraty said nothing about Jan, but as tired ten o’clock came rolling in, a black coalsack splattered with milky groundmist, it seemed to him that she was the best thing he had ever known.
    They passed under a short string of mercury streetlights, through a closed and shuttered town, all of them subdued now, speaking in low murmurs. In front of the Shopwell near the far end of this wide place in the road a young couple sat asleep on a sidewalk bench with their heads leaning together. A sign that could not be read dangled between them. The girl was very young—she looked no more than fourteen—and her boyfriend was wearing a sport shirt that had been washed too many times to ever look very sporty again. Their shadows in the street made a merge that the Walkers passed quietly over.
    Garraty glanced back over his