The hazy white of the spring horizon promised parching sun in a few hours beyond the thin, damp rain of the early morning. Mixed with Stebbins' sweat the rain turned to oil and salt. He could feel an itch forming on his cheekbone where the beginnings of stubble had formed, but was sure he looked much better than his competitor.
He turned over his shoulder and felt the muscle pop as he looked back. Ray Garraty continued to hobble along. Now that there was only the two of them the road seemed ever so wide, an endless plain of concrete shiny with the rain that had kept on from the day Peter McVries had bought it. Mud and wet road dust filled up porous cracks in the asphalt. Garraty's steps were haggard and military. Oddly, Stebbins noticed that Garraty was looking ahead, yet Garraty did not seem to see him. The day would make a Hank Olson out of him yet, he thought, somewhat morbidly. Yet in Garraty's glazed brown eyes Stebbins saw a flicker of recognition at the few dogged RAY-RAY-ALL-THE-WAY signs on the roadside. If Stebbins squinted he could conjure up McVries at Garraty's side. Garraty looked awfully small without McVries's hulking form walking beside him.
Stebbins sighed. Blood and pus had begun to cake the insides of his mocassins. The plush lining had dried into a brittle pulp. A slight breeze swept over the unchanging plain of the road. Garraty was still behind him. No warnings. Stebbins wondered what Garraty had in mind for The Prize; he'd seen how primally Garraty had pawed for his girl at the side of the road in Freeport, the humility and wonder he'd gazed at his mother at the edge of the crowd with. Garraty and his fucking mother. What a blessing it was to really have a mother, or to have had a father for that matter. Stebbins wondered if you could have a mother without having a father, or a father without having a mother. Or if it really meant anything to have a father at all. It was just a word after all—the same word that made up the words paternalism, pattern, paternity, patriarchy, patricide. Pattern. Now there was an interesting one. He couldn't fathom what the Romans had thought fatherhood had to do with patterns. Father was just a word for a man, just as The Major was just a title for a coward. He reached up and wiped his nose.
The fractured suburbia he had grown up in had been characterized by constant noise. Overlapping chatter from the technicolor on the television, babbling about the latest brand of sneakers or the latest American military efforts in Chile. The gurgle of the washing machine, which he never let touch his green sweater because he knew it needed to be dry-cleaned and didn't dare ask his mother for the money to go out to the dry-cleaners. The rattle of the dish-washer. The incessant whir of the fan in the summer. The space heater in the winter. The door slamming shut when he came home with aching legs and the pounding of the stairs under his feet when he ran up to vomit and gasp water out of the faucet. The bathwater when he laid his aching muscles in an ice bath and examined the bulging purple of the veins on the backs of his knees. His mother saying it's better this way. The sound of the word bastard, the harshness in the back of his throat,the first time he said it about himself.
He drank in the silence of the road.
Beyond all of the miles he'd walked from Dover, Delaware up to the state line against New Jersey, he was particularly proud of the fact that he had learned to do almost anything on an empty stomach. He knew boys like Garraty called what it felt like when mommy dearest ran out of Lays and Ovaltine and you had to wait until somebody went out to the corner store to eat an "empty stomach." But Stebbins' stomach was little more than a void underneath his ribcage. Its acidity had become a wet numbness. The peanut butter and jelly had long passed through it. Stebbins' organs sat stacked comfortably and emptily on top of each other. Mechanical flesh. If only Hank Olson had been so lucky.
Garraty was plodding closer now. Stebbins could hear the asthmatic rhythm of his breathing. He was brought back to before his flesh had been mechanical, the chill of ice cream in the back of his throat when the teenage baby-sitter with the jet-black hair that shimmered in the sunlight had driven him to the beach. The grainy burn of the sand between his toes. The damp spot his wet, salty hair made on the seat of her car when she drove him home and he assured her that his mother was around. The ice cream became a driveling stream of bile he expelled into the toilet before he went out for the evening to walk down South, walk up to the Virginia border, stride along the interstate, touch the sign post, turn around. The sand on his between his toes washed away with packaged soap from the Rite Aid so they wouldn't gum up his tennis shoes. He wrote back later on the note-pad on the fridge, and walked off into the summer dark, the junebugs humming in the air.
But now there were no more junebugs, the air hung quiet and heavy with death, and there was nothing left inside him to vomit away, there would never be another TV dinner tray left for him while his mother worked the night shift at the diner. She had been right. It was better this way. This was where he belonged. Suddenly he found himself supremely happy. He circled his line of sight across the wanly observing crowd. Nine-to-one on him, nobody knew his name, he was hardly Delaware's Own. No state. No name. He was nothing more than his feet, the blessed size tens that had turned him into a victor. Those were the feet of nine-to-one Vegas odds. He remembered wanting to see The Major's eyes. Staring into those mirrored sunglasses and seeing a distortion his own pallid face. Major buggers his mother before breakfast. What was it behind those goddamn glasses? He saw The Major on the sanitized white of a staircase descending from a private plane, his hand raised in salute. The Major's face turned to Peter McVries' mug, his white scar curving along his cheekbone, Ray Garraty laughing despite the shadows underneath his eyes.
If Garraty bought it, it would all be over. Garraty was closer now. Stebbins thought about the GED exam his mother had suggested he try for, the way she had done herself. He remembered the baby-sitter taking him to the drive-through. He remembered the night he thought to himself that he wasn't really human, that he had stopped jerking off—libido came from the ability to dream and imagine, and Stebbins only dreamed of the road, imagined the white line in front of him-dreaming when he slept at night—he had a theory that dreams came from the sugar and corn syrup humans had become accustomed to eating—or being hungry for anything. McVries' hand on Garraty's back, pulling him away from the crowd, the tears on Garraty's face, how McVries dragged him down the road. Garraty begging the squads to shoot him instead.
Garraty was beside him now. Stebbins turned dully to look at him. His face, stubbly and dusty, was still round and earnest. The corners of his eyes were red with fresh tears. There was nothing behind The Major's sunglasses. Pull away the curtain and The Wizard of Oz is just a man. Stebbins saw in his mind's eye Ray Garraty tugging on Peter McVries' arms as McVries sat monk-like on the road. This was what McVries had not been able to bear to see, Stebbins realized. McVries had not wanted to see the sweetness in Garraty's face when there were only two of them, how desperately Ray Garraty seemed to want to win and how Garraty, of all people, seemed to know what lay ahead of him beyond the walk when for Stebbins the horizon line of The Prize blended with the road like a charcoal drawing left out in the rain. There was nothing behind The Major's sunglasses. There was no end to the highway. It was better this way. The sobs in Ray Garraty's voice. The rabbit, flesh and blood.
"Oh, Garraty!" Stebbins cried, as the shredded muscles of his legs and the raw pain in the back of his throat and the throbbing in his chest surged through his body. Everything passed in front of him now, a movie on hi-speed fast forward, the voices of the crowd suddenly audible. Stebbins clawed for Garraty's shirt, his fingers glancing along the skin of Garraty's neck, the suggestion of his warm pulse, of the place where his girl had placed her lips and where Peter McVries had jostled and comforted him. Stebbins fell. The concrete welcomed his back. The air above the soles of his mocassins was a new emptiness. With nothing below them, his feet felt strange and unnatural. There was nothing behind The Major's sunglasses. Garraty called his name. The sun was coming out behind the cotton-ball clouds in the sky. Stebbins did not hear the guns. He had been taken into his father's house.
I really wanted to know what was going on in Stebbins' head in the last couple pages. So there you go.