The Long Walk

it.
    “Is little uggy-wuggy gonna tell Mommy?” Quince called back. “Ahhhh, Barkovitch, ain’t that too bad ?”
    Leave him alone, Garraty screamed out in his mind, leave him alone, you have no idea how bad he’s hurting. But what kind of lousy hypocritical thought was that? He wanted Barkovitch to die. Might as well admit it. He wanted Barkovitch to crack up and croak off.
    And Stebbins was probably back there in the dark laughing at them all.
    He hurried, caught up with McVries, who was ambling along and staring idly at the crowd. The crowd was staring back at him avidly.
    “Why don’t you help me decide?” McVries said.
    “Sure. What’s the topic for decision?”
    “Who’s in the cage. Us or them.”
    Garraty laughed with genuine pleasure. “All of us. And the cage is in the Major ’s monkey house.”
    McVries didn’t join in Garraty’s laughter. “Barkovitch is going over the high side, isn’t he?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “I don’t want to see it anymore. It’s lousy. And it’s a cheat. You build it all around something . . . set yourself on something . . . and then you don’t want it. Isn’t it too bad the great truths are all such lies?”
    “I never thought much about it. Do you realize it’s almost ten o’clock?”
    “It’s like practicing pole-vaulting all your life and then getting to the Olympics and saying, ‘What the hell do I want to jump over that stupid bar for?’ ”
    “Yeah.”
    “You almost could care, right?” McVries said, nettled.
    “It’s getting harder to work me up,” Garraty admitted. He paused. Something had been troubling him badly for some time now. Baker had joined them. Garraty looked from Baker to McVries and then back again. “Did you see Olson’s . . . did you see his hair? Before he bought it?”
    “What about his hair?” Baker asked.
    “It was going gray.”
    “No, that’s crazy,” McVries said, but he suddenly sounded very scared. “No, it was dust or something.”
    “It was gray,” Garraty said. “It seems like we’ve been on this road forever. It was Olson’s hair getting . . . getting that way that made me think of it first, but . . . maybe this is some crazy kind of immortality.” The thought was terribly depressing. He stared straight ahead into the darkness, feeling the soft wind against his face.
    “I walk, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked,” McVries chanted. “Shall I translate into Latin?”
    We’re suspended in time, Garraty thought.
    Their feet moved but they did not. The cherry cigarette glows in the crowd, the occasional flashlight or flaring sparkler might have been stars, weird low constellations that marked their existence ahead and behind, narrowing into nothing both ways.
    “Bruh,” Garraty said, shivering. “A guy could go crazy.”
    “That’s right,” Pearson agreed, and then laughed nervously. They were starting up a long, twisting hill. The road was now expansion-jointed concrete, hard on the feet. It seemed to Garraty that he felt every pebble through the paper-thinness of his shoes. The frisky wind had scattered shallow drifts of candy wrappers, popcorn boxes, and other assorted muck in their way. At some places they almost had to fight their way through. It’s not fair, Garraty thought self-pityingly.
    “What’s the layout up ahead?” McVries asked him apologetically.
    Garraty closed his eyes and tried to make a map in his head. “I can’t remember all the little towns. We come to Lewiston, that’s the second-biggest city in the state, bigger than Augusta. We go right down the main drag. It used to be Lisbon Street, but now it’s Cotter Memorial Avenue. Reggie Cotter was the only guy from Maine to ever win the Long Walk. It happened a long time ago.”
    “He died, didn’t he?” Baker said.
    “Yeah. He hemorrhaged in one eye and finished the Walk half-blind. It turned out he had a blood clot on his brain. He died a week or so after the Walk.” And in a feeble effort to remove the onus, Garraty repeated: “It was a long time ago.”
    No one spoke for a while. Candy wrappers crackled under their feet like the sound of a faraway forest fire. A cherry bomb went off in the crowd. Garraty could see a faint lightness on the horizon that was probably the twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn, the land of Dussettes and Aubuchons and Lavesques, the land of Nous parlons francais ici . Suddenly Garraty had a nearly obsessive craving for a stick of gum.
    “What’s after