He screamed again, a high, incredibly thin note that seemed sharp enough to shatter glass and what he was screaming was:

“My feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-”

“Jesus,” Garraty muttered. “Why doesn’t he stop that?” The screams went on and on.

“I doubt if he can,” McVries said clinically. “The back treads of the halftrack ran over his legs.”

Garraty looked and felt his stomach lurch into his throat. It was true. No wonder the redheaded kid was screaming about his feet. They had been obliterated.

“Warning! Warning 38!”

“-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-”

“I want to go home,” someone behind Garraty said very quietly. “Oh Christ, do I ever want to go home.”

A moment later the redheaded boy’s face was blown away.

“I’m gonna see my girl in Freeport,” Garraty said rapidly. “And I’m not gonna have any warnings and I’m gonna kiss her, God I miss her, God, Jesus, did you see his legs? They were still warning him, Pete, like they thought he was gonna get up and walk-”

“Another boy has gone ober to dat Silver City, lawd, lawd,” Barkovitch intoned.

“Shut up, killer,” McVries said absently. “She pretty, Ray? Your girl?”

“She’s beautiful. I love her.”

McVries smiled. “Gonna marry her?”

“Yeah,” Garraty babbled. “We’re gonna be Mr. and Mrs. Norman Normal, four kids and a collie dog, his legs, he didn’t have any legs, they ran over him, they can’t run over a guy, that isn’t in the rules, somebody ought to report that, somebody-”

“Two boys and two girls, that what you’re gonna have?”

“Yeah, yeah, she’s beautiful, I just wish I hadn’t-”

“And the first kid will be Ray Junior and the dog’ll have a dish with its name on it, right?”

Garraty raised his head slowly, like a punchdrunk fighter. “Are you making fun of me? Or what?”

“No!” Barkovitch exclaimed. “He’s shitting on you, boy! And don’t you forget it. But I’ll dance on his grave for you, don’t worry.” He cackled briefly.

“Shut up, killer,” McVries said. “I’m not dumping on you, Ray. Come on, let’s get away from the killer, here.”

“Shove it up your ass!” Barkovitch screamed after them.

“She love you? Your girl? Jan?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Garraty said.

McVries shook his head slowly. “All of that romantic horseshit… you know, it’s true. At least, for some people for some short time, it is. It was for me. I felt like you.” He looked at Garraty. “You still want to hear about the scar?”

They rounded a bend and a camperload of children squealed and waved. “Yes,” Garraty said.

“Why?” He looked at Garraty, but his suddenly naked eyes might have been searching himself.

“I want to help you,” Garraty said.

McVries looked down at his left foot. “Hurts. I can’t wiggle the toes very much anymore. My neck is stiff and my kidneys ache. My girl turned out to be a bitch, Garraty. I got into this Long Walk shit the same way that guys used to get into the Foreign Legion. In the words of the great rock and roll poet, I gave her my heart, she tore it apart, and who gives a fart.”

Garraty said nothing. It was 10:30. Freeport was still far.

“Her name was Priscilla,” McVries said. “You think you got a case? I was the original Korny Kid, Moon-June was my middle name. I used to kiss her fingers. I even took to reading Keats to her out in back of the house, when the wind was right. Her old man kept cows, and the smell of cowshit goes, to put it in the most delicate way, in a peculiar fashion with the works of John Keats. Maybe I should have read her Swinburne when the wind was wrong.” McVries laughed.

“You’re cheating what you felt,” Garraty said.

“Ah, you’re the one faking it, Ray, not that it matters. All you remember is the Great Romance, not all the times you went home and jerked your meat after whispering words of love in her shell-pink ear.”

“You fake your way, I’ll fake mine.”

McVries seemed not to have heard. “These things, they don’t even bear the weight of conversation,” he said. “J. D. Salinger… John Knowles… even James Kirkwood and that guy Don Bredes… they’ve destroyed being an adolescent, Garraty. If you’re a sixteen-year-old boy, you can’t discuss the pains of adolescent love with any decency anymore. You just come off sounding like fucking Ron Howard with a hardon.”

McVries laughed a little hysterically. Garraty had no idea what McVries was talking about. He was secure in his love for Jan, he didn’t feel in the least self-conscious about it. Their feet scuffed on the road. Garraty could feel his right heel wobbling. Pretty soon the nails would let go, and he would shed the shoeheel like dead skin. Behind them, Scramm had a coughing fit. It was the Walk that bothered Garraty, not all this weird shit about romantic love.

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with the story,” McVries said, as if reading his mind. “About the scar. It was last summer. We both wanted to get away from home, away from our parents, and away from the smell of all that cowshit so the Great Romance could bloom in earnest. So we got jobs working for a pajama factory in New Jersey. How does that grab you, Garraty? A pj factory in New Jersey.

“We got separate apartments in Newark. Great town, Newark, on a given day you can smell all the cowshit in New Jersey in Newark. Our parents kicked a little, but with separate apartments and good summer jobs, they didn’t kick too much. My place was with two other guys, and there were three girls in with Pris. We left on June the third in my car, and we stopped once around three in the afternoon at a motel and got rid of the virginity problem. I felt like a real crook. She didn’t really want to screw, but she wanted to please me. That was the Shady Nook motel. When we were done I flushed that Trojan down the Shady Nook john and washed out my mouth with a Shady Nook paper cup. It was all very romantic, very ethereal.

“Then it was on to Newark, smelling the cowshit and being so sure it was different cowshit. I dropped her at her apartment and then went on to my own. The next Monday we started in at the Plymouth Sleepwear factory. It wasn’t much like the movies, Garraty. It stank of raw cloth and my foreman was a bastard and during lunch break we used to throw baling hooks at the rats under the fabric bags. But I didn’t mind because it was love. See? It was love.”

He spat dryly into the dust, swallowed from his canteen, then yelled for another one. They were climbing a long, curve-banked hill now, and his words came in out-of-breath bursts.

“Pris was on the first floor, the showcase for all the idiot tourists who didn’t have anything better to do than go on a guided tour of the place that made their jam jams. It was nice down where Pris was. Pretty pastel walls, nice modern machinery, air conditioning. Pris sewed on buttons from seven till three. Just think, there are men all over the country wearing pj’s held up by Priscilla’s buttons. There is a thought to warm the coldest heart.

“I was on the fifth floor. I was a bagger. See, down in the basement they dyed the raw cloth and sent it up to the fifth floor in these warm-air tubes. They’d ring a bell when the whole lot was done, and I’d open my bin and there’d be a whole shitload of loose fiber, all the colors of the rainbow. I’d pitchfork it out, put it in two-hundred-pound sacks, and chain-hoist the sacks onto a big pile of other sacks for the picker machine. They’d separate it, the weaving machines wove it, some other guys cut it and sewed it into pajamas, and down there on that pretty pastel first floor Pris put on the buttons while the dumbass tourists watched her and the other girls through this glass wall… just like the people are watching us today. Am I getting through to you at all, Garraty?”

“The scar,” Garraty reminded.

“I keep wandering away from that, don’t I?” McVries wiped his forehead and unbuttoned his shirt as they breasted the hill. Waves of woods stretched away before them to a horizon poked with mountains. They met the sky like interlocking jigsaw pieces. Perhaps ten miles away, almost lost in the heat-haze, a fire tower jutted up through the green. The road cut through it all like a sliding gray serpent.