The Long Walk

fading until hope itself was a darkness, and above all of it the nodding chapel-bell voice of the priest and the impatient, shuffling feet of mourners anxious to be off into the warm May sunshine. Then, over-mastering that, the sighing, shuffling chorus of the bugs and the beetles, squirming their way through the earth, come for the feast.
    I could go crazy, Garraty thought. I could go right the fuck off my rocker.
    A little breeze soughed through the pines.
    Garraty turned around and urinated. Stebbins moved over a little, and Harkness made a coughing, snoring sound. He was walking half-asleep.
    Garraty became acutely conscious of all the little sounds of life: someone hawked and spat, someone else sneezed, someone ahead and to the left was chewing something noisily. Someone asked someone else softly how he felt. There was a murmured answer. Yannick was singing at a whisper level, soft and very much off-key.
    Awareness. It was all a function of awareness. But it wasn’t forever.
    “Why did I get into this?” Olson suddenly asked hopelessly, echoing Garraty’s thoughts not so many minutes ago. “Why did I let myself in for this?”
    No one answered him. No one had answered him for a long time now. Garraty thought it was as if Olson were already dead.
    Another light spatter of rain fell. They passed another ancient graveyard, a church next door, a tiny shopfront, and then they were walking through a small New England community of small, neat homes. The road crosshatched a miniature business section where perhaps a dozen people had gathered to watch them pass. They cheered, but it was a subdued sound, as if they were afraid they might wake their neighbors. None of them was young, Garraty saw. The youngest was an intense-eyed man of about thirty-five. He was wearing rimless glasses and a shabby sport coat, pulled against him to protect against the chill. His hair stuck up in back, and Garraty noted with amusement that his fly was half-unzipped.
    “Go! Great! Go! Go! Oh, great!” he chanted softly. He waved one soft plump hand ceaselessly, and his eyes seemed to burn over each of them as they passed.
    On the far side of the village a sleepy-eyed policeman held up a rumbling trailer truck until they had passed. There were four more streetlights, an abandoned, crumbling building with EUREKA GRANGE NO. 81 written over the big double doors at the front, and then the town was gone. For no reason Garraty could put a finger on, he felt as if he had just walked through a Shirley Jackson short story.
    McVries nudged him. “Look at that dude,” he said.
    “That dude” was a tall boy in a ridiculous loden-green trenchcoat. It flapped around his knees. He was walking with his arms wrapped around his head like a gigantic poultice. He was weaving unsteadily back and forth. Garraty watched him closely, with a kind of academic interest. He couldn’t recall ever having seen this particular Walker before . . . but of course the darkness changed faces.
    The boy stumbled over one of his own feet and almost fell down. Then he went on walking. Garraty and McVries watched him in fascinated silence for perhaps ten minutes, losing their own aches and tiredness in the trenchcoated boy’s struggle. The boy in the trenchcoat didn’t make a sound, not a groan or a moan.
    Finally he did fall over and was warned. Garraty didn’t think the boy would be able to get up, but he did. Now he was walking almost with Garraty and the boys around him. He was an extremely ugly boy, with the number 45 pressure-taped to his coat.
    Olson whispered, “What’s the matter with you?” but the boy seemed not to hear. They got that way, Garraty had noticed. Complete withdrawal from everything and everyone around them. Everything but the road. They stared at the road with a kind of horrid fascination, as if it were a tightrope they had to walk over an endless, bottomless chasm.
    “What’s your name?” he asked the boy, but there was no answer. And he found himself suddenly spitting the question at the boy over and over, like an idiot litany that would save him from whatever fate was coming for him out of the darkness like a black express freight. “What’s your name, huh? What’s your name, what’s your name, what’s—”
    “Ray.” McVries was tugging at his sleeve.
    “He won’t tell me, Pete, make him tell me, make him say his name—”
    “Don’t bother him,” McVries said. “He’s dying, don’t bother him.”
    The boy with 45 on his