The Long Walk

wanted if I’d take the April 31st backout. I told her that would make me feel like an opportunist and a heel, and she got mad at me and said it was better than feeling dead, and then she cried a lot. And begged me.” Garraty looked up at McVries. “I don’t know. Anything else she could have asked me, I would have tried to do it. But this one thing . . . I couldn’t. It was like there was a stone caught in my throat. After a while she knew I couldn’t say Yes, okay, I’ll call the 800 number. I think she started to understand. Maybe as well as I did myself, which God knows wasn’t—isn’t—very well.
    “Then Dr. Patterson started in. He’s a diagnostician, and he’s got a wicked logical mind. He said, ‘Look here, Ray. Figuring in the Prime group and the backups, your chance of survival is fifty-to-one. Don’t do this to your mother, Ray.’ I was polite with him for as long as I could, but finally I told him to just kiss off. I said I figured the odds on him ever marrying my mother were pretty long, but I never noticed him backing off because of that.”
    Garraty ran both hands through the straw-thatch of his hair. He had forgotten about the two-second margin.
    “God, didn’t he get mad. He ranted and raved and told me if I wanted to break my mother ’s heart to just go ahead. He said I was as insensitive as a . . . a wood tick, I think that’s what he said, insensitive as a wood tick, maybe it’s a family saying of his or something, I don’t know. He asked me how it felt to be doing the number on my mom and on a nice girl like Janice. So I countered with my own unarguable logic.”
    “Did you,” McVries said, smiling. “What was that?”
    “I told him if he didn’t get out I was going to hit him.”
    “What about your mother?”
    “She didn’t say much at all. I don’t think she could believe it. And the thought of what I’d get if I won. The Prize—everything you want for the rest of your life—that sort of blinded her, I think. I had a brother, Jeff. He died of pneumonia when he was six, and—it’s cruel—but I don’t know how we’d’ve gotten along if he’d’ve lived. And . . . I guess she just kept thinking I’d be able to back out of it if I did turn out to be Prime. The Major is a nice man. That’s what she said. I’m sure he’d let you out of it if he understood the circumstances. But they Squad them just as fast for trying to back out of a Long Walk as they do for talking against it. And then I got the call and I knew I was a Walker. I was Prime.”
    “I wasn’t.”
    “No?”
    “No. Twelve of the original Walkers used the April 31st backout. I was number twelve, backup. I got the call just past 11 PM four days ago.”
    “Jesus! Is that so?”
    “Uh-huh. That close.”
    “Doesn’t it make you . . . bitter?”
    McVries only shrugged.
    Garraty looked at his watch. It was 3:02. It was going to be all right. His shadow, lengthening in the afternoon sun, seemed to move a little more confidently. It was a pleasant, brisk spring day. His leg felt okay now.
    “Do you still think you might just . . . sit down?” he asked McVries. “You’ve outlasted most of them. Sixty-one of them.”
    “How many you or I have outlasted doesn’t matter, I think. There comes a time when the will just runs out. Doesn’t matter what I think, see? I used to have a good time smearing away with oil paints. I wasn’t too bad, either. Then one day—bingo. I didn’t taper off, I just stopped. Bingo. There was no urge to go on even another minute. I went to bed one night liking to paint and when I woke up it was nowhere.”
    “Staying alive hardly qualifies as a hobby.”
    “I don’t know about that. How about skin divers? Big-game hunters? Mountain climbers? Or even some half-witted millworker whose idea of a good time is picking fights on Saturday night? All of those things reduce staying alive to a hobby. Part of the game.”
    Garraty said nothing.
    “Better pick it up some,” McVries said gently. “We’re losing speed. Can’t have that.”
    Garraty picked it up.
    “My dad has a half-ownership in a drive-in movie theater,” McVries said. “He was going to tie me and gag me down in the cellar under the snack concession to keep me from coming, Squads or no Squads.”
    “What did you do? Just wear him down?”
    “There was no time for that. When the call came, I had just ten hours. They laid on an airplane and a rental car at the Presque Isle airport. He ranted and