The Long Walk

been swindled, rooked. But that couldn’t be right, he insisted stubbornly to himself. One of them had not been swindled. One of them was going to swindle everyone else . . . wasn’t that right?
    He licked his lips and drank some water.
    They passed a small green sign that informed them the Maine turnpike was forty-four miles hence.
    “That’s it,” he said to no one in particular. “Forty-four miles to Oldtown.”
    No one replied and Garraty was just considering taking a walk back up to McVries when they came to another intersection and a woman began to scream. The traffic had been roped off, and the crowd pressed eagerly against the barriers and the cops manning them. They waved their hands, their signs, their bottles of suntan lotion.
    The screaming woman was large and red-faced. She threw herself against one of the waist-high sawhorse barriers, toppling it and yanking a lot of the bright yellow guard-rope after it. Then she was fighting and clawing and screaming at the policemen who held her. The cops were grunting with effort.
    I know her, Garraty thought. Don’t I know her?
    The blue kerchief. The belligerent, gleaming eyes. Even the navy dress with the crooked hem. They were all familiar. The woman’s screams had become incoherent. One pinwheeling hand ripped stripes of blood across the face of one of the cops holding her— trying to hold her.
    Garraty passed within ten feet of her. As he walked past, he knew where he had seen her before—she was Percy’s mom, of course. Percy who had tried to sneak into the woods and had snuck right into the next world instead.
    “I want m’boy!” she hollered. “I want m’boy!”
    The crowd cheered her enthusiastically and impartially. A small boy behind her spat on her leg and then darted away.
    Jan, Garraty thought. I’m walking to you, Jan, fuck this other shit, I swear to God I’m coming. But McVries had been right. Jan hadn’t wanted him to come. She had cried. She had begged him to change his mind. They could wait, she didn’t want to lose him, please Ray, don’t be dumb, the Long Walk is nothing but murder—
    They had been sitting on a bench beside the bandstand. It had been a month ago, April, and he had his arm around her. She had been wearing the perfume he had gotten her for her birthday. It seemed to bring out the secret girl-smell of her, a dark smell, fleshy and heady. I have to go, he had told her. I have to, don’t you understand, I have to.
    Ray, you don’t understand what you’re doing. Ray, please don’t. I love you.
    Well, he thought now, as he walked on down the road, she was right about that. I sure didn’t understand what I was doing.
    But I don’t understand it even now. That’s the hell of it. The pure and simple hell of it.
    “Garraty?”
    He jerked his head up, startled. He had been half-asleep again. It was McVries, walking beside him.
    “How you feeling?”
    “Feeling?” Garraty said cautiously. “All right, I guess. I guess I’m all right.”
    “Barkovitch is cracking,” McVries said with quiet joy. “I’m sure of it. He’s talking to himself. And he’s limping.”
    “You’re limping, too,” Garraty said. “So’s Pearson. So am I.”
    “My foot hurts, that’s all. But Barkovitch . . . he keeps rubbing his leg. I think he’s got a pulled muscle.”
    “Why do you hate him so much? Why not Collie Parker? Or Olson? Or all of us?”
    “Because Barkovitch knows what he’s doing.”
    “He plays to win, do you mean?”
    “You don’t know what I mean, Ray.”
    “I wonder if you do yourself,” Garraty said. “Sure he’s a bastard. Maybe it takes a bastard to win.”
    “Good guys finish last?”
    “How the hell should I know?”
    They passed a clapboard one-room schoolhouse. The children stood out in the play yard and waved. Several boys stood atop the jungle gym like sen tries, and Garraty was reminded of the men in the lumberyard a ways back.
    “Garraty!” One of them yelled. “Ray Garraty! Gar-ra- tee !” A small boy with a tousled head of hair jumped up and down on the top level of the jungle gym, waving with both arms. Garraty waved back halfheartedly. The boy flipped over, hung upside down by the backs of his legs, and continued to wave. Garraty was a little relieved when he and the schoolyard were out of sight. That last had been a little too strenuous to bear thinking about for long.
    Pearson joined them. “I’ve been thinking.”
    “Save your strength,” McVries said.
    “Feeble,