Walk or die
King's novel The Long Walk was published in 1979. According to the Wiki:
While not the first of King's novels to be published, The Long Walk was the first novel he wrote, having begun it in 1966–67 during his freshman year at the University of Maine some eight years before his first published novel
was released in 1974.
It's not Road Work or Salem's Lot or The Stand, but its mixture of adolescent fatalism and easy dystopianism is very slick and smooth. The entrants, all male teenagers, spend the walk kidding themselves, daydreaming, and offering apposite literary references.
There's more than a little "Big Two-Hearted River" to this tale of various appointments in Samarra that cannot be evaded.
"You ever see the end of a Long Walk?"
"No, you?"
"Hell, no. I just thought, you being close to it and all-"
"My father hated them. He took me to one as a what-do-you-call-it, object lesson. But that was the only time."
"I saw."
Garraty jumped at the sound of that voice. It was Stebbins. He had pulled almost even with them, his head still bent forward, his blond hair flapping around his ears like a sickly halo.
"What was it like?" McVries asked. His voice was younger somehow.
"You don't want to know," Stebbins said.
"I asked, didn't I?"
Stebbins made no reply. Garraty's curiosity about him was stronger than ever. Stebbins hadn't folded up. He showed no signs of folding up. He went on without complaint and hadn't been warned since the starting line.
"Yeah, what's it like?" he heard himself asking.
"I saw the end four years ago," Stebbins said. "I was thirteen. It ended about sixteen miles over the New Hampshire border. They had the National Guam out and sixteen Federal Squads to augment the State Police. They had to. The people were packed sixty deep on both sides of the road for fifty miles. Over twenty people were trampled to death before it was all over. It happened because people were trying to move with the Walkers, trying to see the end of it. I had a front-row seat. My dad got it for me. "
"What does your dad do?" Garraty asked.
"He's in the Squads. And he had it figured just right. I didn't even have to move. The Walk ended practically in front of me."
"What happened?" Olson asked softly.
"I could hear them coming before I could see them. We all could. It was one big soundwave, getting closer and closer. And it was still an hour before they got close enough to see. They weren't looking at the crowd, either of the two that were left. It was like they didn't even know the crowd was there. What they were looking at was the mad. They were hobbling along, both of them. Like they had been crucified and then taken down and made to walk with the nails still through their feet."
They were all listening to Stebbins now. A horrified silence had fallen like a rubber sheet.
"The crowd was yelling at them, almost as if they could still hear. Some were yelling one guy's name, and some were yelling the other guy's, but the only thing that really came through was this Go . . . Go . . . Go chant. I was getting shoved around like a beanbag. The guy next to me either pissed himself or jacked off in his pants, you couldn't tell which.
"They walked right past me. One of them was a big blond with his shirt open. One of his shoe soles had come unglued or unstitched or whatever, and it was flapping. The other guy wasn't even wearing his shoes anymore. He was in his stocking feet. His socks ended at his ankles. The rest of them . . . why, he'd just walked them away, hadn't he? His feet were purple. You could see the broken blood vessels in his feet. I don't think he really felt it anymore. Maybe they were able to do something with his feet later, I don't know. Maybe they were."
"Stop. For God's sake, stop it." It was McVries. He sounded dazed and sick.
"You wanted to know," Stebbins said, almost genially. "Didn't you say that?"
No answer. The halftrack whined and clattered and spurted along the shoulder, and somewhere farther up someone drew a warning.
"It was the big blond that lost. I saw it all. They were just a little past me. He threw both of his arms up, like he was Superman. But instead of flying he just fell flat on his face and they gave him his ticket after thirty seconds because he was walking with three. They were both walking with three.
"Then the crowd started to cheer. They cheered and they cheered and then they could see that the kid that won was trying to say something. So they shut up.
He had fallen on his knees, you know, like he was going to pray, only he was just crying. And then he crawled over to the other boy and put his face in that big blond kid's shirt. Then he started to say whatever it was he had to say, but we couldn't hear it. He was talking into the dead kid's shirt. He was telling the dead kid.
Then the soldiers rushed out and told him he had won the Prize, and asked him how he wanted to start."
"What did he say?" Garraty asked. It seemed to him that with the question he had laid his whole life on the line.
"He didn't say anything to them, not then," Stebbins said. "He was talking to the dead kid. He was telling the dead kid something, but we couldn't hear it. "
"What happened then?" Pear-son asked.
"I don't remember," Stebbins said remotely.
No one said anything. Garraty felt a panicked, trapped sensation, as if someone had stuffed him into an underground pipe that was too small to get out of.
Up ahead a third warning was given out and a boy made a croaking, despairing sound, like a dying crow. Please God, don't let them shoot anyone now, Garraty thought. I'll go crazy if I hear the guns now. Please God, please God.
A few minutes later the guns rammed their steel-death sound into the night.
This time it was a short boy in a flapping red and white football jersey. For a moment Garraty thought Percy's mom would not have to wonder or worry anymore, but it wasn't Percy-it was a boy named Quincy or Quentin or something like that.
Garraty didn't go crazy. He turned around to say angry words at Stebbins-to ask him, perhaps, how it felt to inflict a boy's last minutes with such a horror-but Stebbins had dropped back to his usual position and Garraty was alone again.
They walked on, the ninety of them.
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| This sketch, by Ben Steele, a Bataan Death March survivor from Montana, depicts the circumstances that prisoners of war faced during the 65-mile march in spring 1942. The sketch is part of Jan Thompson’s upcoming documentary on the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese and the Bataan Death March. |
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The remarkable thing about The Long Walk is its economical gravitas and hard-boiled control, somewhere between young Hemingway and the black stormclouds of James M. Cain or Jim Thompson.
The Long Walk follows one hundred teenage males as they compete in a government-sanctioned endurance walk. It begins at 9a.m. on May 1at the US-Canadian border. Once the walkers begin, they cannot stop. If they do, and use up their three verbal warnings, a member of a squad of riflemen following the contestants executes them on the spot. There are no breaks or time-outs.
As the number of long-walkers dwindles, a lifetime's worth of emotion, agony, friendship, humor and hysteria are exhausted in three short days. The walkers, other than King's point-of-view character Ray Garraty, begin as cut-outs and are developed through lean and careful expenditure of dialogue. The stream-of-consciousness style King used to good effect in his early novels is kept to a minimum until chapters where characters begin to face their final extremity.
The Long Walk explains little of the nightmare USA it portrays. The long walk's history and justification are anyone's guess.
Only after the remaining walkers are south of Augusta do we read:
They had all pretty much agreed that there was little emotional stretch or recoil left in them. But apparently, Garraty thought tiredly as they walked into the roaring darkness along U.S. 202 with Augusta a mile behind them, it was not so. Like a badly treated guitar that has been knocked about by an unfeeling musician, the strings were not broken but only out of tune, discordant, chaotic.
Augusta hadn’t been like Oldtown. Oldtown had been a phony hick New York. Augusta was some new city, a once-a-year city of crazy revelers, a party-down city full of a million boogying drunks and cuckoo birds and out-and-out maniacs.
They had heard Augusta and seen Augusta long before they had reached Augusta. The image of waves beating on a distant shore recurred to Garraty again and again. They heard the crowd five miles out. The lights filled the sky with a bubble-like pastel glow that was frightening and apocalyptic, reminding Garraty of pictures he had seen in the history books of the German air-blitz of the American East Coast during the last days of World War II....
By this time crowds have started to gather along the long walk's route, many cheering Garraty and his comrades, others more delighted to see executions of stragglers and drop-outs.
At the head of each chapter, King gives us an excerpt from the chatty banter of contemporary TV games shows. Some quotes extol following the rules, others praise sporting carnage.
King passes over without acknowledgement some of the 20th century's real long walks, from the bloodlands of Ukraine and Byelorussia to Bataan. Anyone watching TV and movies in the 1960s and 1970s would have been familiar with those horrors; for kids like King (and later myself) learning about war atrocities was part of the spice of pop culture.
Jay
16 March 2020
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