The Long Walk

stood beside a battered MG at the bottom of one dip. They were wearing tight summer shorts, middy blouses, and sandals. There were cheers and whistles. The faces of these girls were hot, flushed, and excited by something ancient, sinuous, and, to Garraty, erotic almost to the point of insanity. He felt animal lust rising in him, an aggressively alive thing that made his body shake with a palsied fever all its own.
    It was Gribble, the radical among them, that suddenly dashed at them, his feet kicking up spurts of dust along the shoulder. One of them leaned back against the hood of the MG and spread her legs slightly, tilting her hips at him. Gribble put his hands over her breasts. She made no effort to stop him. He was warned, hesitated, and then plunged against her, a jamming, hurtling, frustrated, angry, frightened figure in a sweaty white shirt and cord pants. The girl hooked her ankles around Gribble’s calves and put her arms lightly around his neck. They kissed.
    Gribble took a second warning, then a third, and then, with perhaps fifteen seconds of grace left, he stumbled away and broke into a frantic, shambling run. He fell down, picked himself up, clutched at his crotch and staggered back onto the road. His tin face was hectically flushed.
    “Couldn’t,” he was sobbing. “Wasn’t enough time and she wanted me to and I couldn’t . . . I . . .” He was weeping and staggering, his hands pressed against his crotch. His words were little more than indistinct wails.
    “So you gave them their little thrill,” Barkovitch said. “Something for them to talk about in Show and Tell tomorrow.”
    “Just shut up!” Gribble screamed. He dug at his crotch. “It hurts, I got a cramp—”
    “Blue balls,” Pearson said. “That’s what he’s got.”
    Gribble looked at him through the stringy bangs of black hair that had fallen over his eyes. He looked like a stunned weasel. “It hurts,” he muttered again. He dropped slowly to his knees, hands pressed into his lower belly, head drooping, back bowed. He was shivering and snuffling and Garraty could see the beads of sweat on his neck, some of them caught in the fine hairs on the nape—what Garraty’s own father had always called quackfuzz.
    A moment later and he was dead.
    Garraty turned his head to look at the girls, but they had retreated inside their MG. They were nothing but shadow-shapes.
    He made a determined effort to push them from his mind, but they kept creeping back in. How must it have been, dry-humping that warm, willing flesh? Her thighs had twitched, my God, they had twitched, in a kind of spasm, orgasm, oh God, the uncontrollable urge to squeeze and caress . . . and most of all to feel that heat . . . that heat.
    He felt himself go. That warm, shooting flow of sensation, warming him. Wetting him. Oh Christ, it would soak through his pants and someone would notice. Notice and point a finger and ask him how he’d like to walk around the neighborhood with no clothes on, walk naked, walk . . . and walk . . . and walk . . .
    Oh Jan I love you really I love you, he thought, but it was confused, all mixed up in something else.
    He retied his jacket about his waist and then went on walking as before, and the memory dulled and browned very quickly, like a Polaroid negative left out in the sun.
    The pace stepped up. They were on a steep downhill grade now, and it was hard to walk slowly. Muscles worked and pistoned and squeezed against each other. The sweat rolled freely. Incredibly, Garraty found himself wishing for night again. He looked over at Olson curiously, wondering how he was making it.
    Olson was staring at his feet again. The cords in his neck were knotted and ridged. His lips were drawn back in a frozen grin.
    “He’s almost there now,” McVries said at his elbow, startling him. “When they start half-hoping someone will shoot them so they can rest their feet, they’re not far away.”
    “Is that right?” Garraty asked crossly. “How come everybody else around here knows so much more about it than me?”
    “Because you’re so sweet,” McVries said tenderly, and then he sped up, letting his legs catch the downgrade, and passed Garraty by.
    Stebbins. He hadn’t thought about Stebbins in a long time. He turned his head to look for Stebbins. Stebbins was there. The pack had strung out coming down the long hill, and Stebbins was about a quarter of a mile back, but there was no mistaking those purple pants and that chambray