The Long Walk

three of his warnings were gone now.
    “ You relax,” Baker said. “See what it gets you.”
    “You’ve got no right to hate the Major. He didn’t force you.”
    “ Force me? FORCE me? He’s KILLING me, that’s all!”
    “It’s still not—”
    “Shut up,” Baker said curtly, and Garraty shut. He rubbed the back of his neck briefly and stared up into the whitish-blue sky. His shadow was a deformed huddle almost beneath his feet. He turned up his third canteen of the day and drained it.
    Baker said: “I’m sorry. I surely didn’t mean to shout. My feet—”
    “Sure,” Garraty said.
    “We’re all getting this way,” Baker said. “I sometimes think that’s the worst part.”
    Garraty closed his eyes. He was very sleepy.
    “You know what I’d like to do?” Pearson said. He was walking between Garraty and Baker.
    “Piss on the Major,” Garraty said. “Everybody wants to piss on the Major. When he comes through again we’ll gang up on him and drag him down and all unzip and drown him in—”
    “That isn’t what I want to do.” Pearson was walking like a man in the last stages of conscious drunkenness. His head made half-rolls on his neck. His eyelids snapped up and down like spastic windowblinds. “It’s got nothin’ to do with the Major. I just want to go into the next field and lay down and close my eyes. Just lay there on my back in the wheat—”
    “They don’t grow wheat in Maine,” Garraty said. “It’s hay.”
    “—in the hay, then. And compose myself a poem. While I go to sleep.”
    Garraty fumbled in his new foodbelt and found nothing in most of the pouches. Finally he happened on a waxpack of Saltines and began washing them down with water. “I feel like a sieve,” he said. “I drink it and it pops out on my skin two minutes later.”
    The guns roared again and another figure collapsed gracelessly, like a tired jack-in-the-box.
    “Fordy fibe,” Scramm said, joining them. “I don’t thing we’ll even get to Pordland ad this rade.”
    “You don’t sound so good,” Pearson said, and there might have been careful optimism in his voice.
    “Luggy for me I god a good codstitution,” Scramm said cheerfully. “I thing I’be rudding a fever now.”
    “Jesus, how do you keep going?” Abraham asked, and there was a kind of religious fear in his voice.
    “Me? Talk about me ?” Scramm said. “Look at hib ! How does he keep going? Thad’s what I’d like to know!” And he cocked his thumb at Olson.
    Olson had not spoken for two hours. He had not touched his newest canteen. Greedy glances were shot at his foodbelt, which was also almost untouched. His eyes, darkly obsidian, were fixed straight ahead. His face was speckled by two days of beard and it looked sickly vulpine. Even his hair, frizzed up in back and hanging across his forehead in front, added to the overall impression of ghoulishness. His lips were parched dry and blistering. His tongue hung over his bottom lip like a dead serpent on the lip of a cave. Its healthy pinkness had disappeared. It was dirty-gray now. Road-dust clung to it.
    He’s there, Garraty thought, sure he is. Where Stebbins said we’d all go if we stuck with it long enough. How deep inside himself is he? Fathoms? Miles? Light-years? How deep and how dark? And the answer came back to him: too deep to see out. He’s hiding down there in the darkness and it’s too deep to see out.
    “Olson?” he said softly. “Olson?”
    Olson didn’t answer. Nothing moved but his feet.
    “I wish he’d put his tongue in at least,” Pearson whispered nervously.
    The Walk went on.
    The woods melted back and they were passing through another wide place in the road. The sidewalks were lined with cheering spectators. Garraty signs again predominated. Then the woods closed in again. But not even the woods could hold the spectators back now. They were beginning to line the soft shoulders. Pretty girls in shorts and halters. Boys in basketball shorts and muscle shirts.
    Gay holiday, Garraty thought.
    He could no longer wish he wasn’t here; he was too tired and numb for retrospect. What was done was done. Nothing in the world would change it. Soon enough, he supposed, it would even become too much of an effort to talk to the others. He wished he could hide inside himself like a little boy rolled up inside a rug, with no more worries. Then everything would be much simpler.
    He had wondered a great deal about what McVries had said. That they had all