think anyone should get to cop out second.”
Garraty burst out laughing. “You’re nuts,” he said.
McVries also laughed. “Now you’re starting to see it my way. Get a little more sun, stew your brain a little more, and we’ll make a real believer out of you.”
The Walk went on.
The sun seemed neatly poised on the roof of the world. The mercury reached seventy-nine degrees (one of the boys had a pocket thermometer) and eighty trembled in its grasp for a few broiling minutes. Eighty, Garraty thought. Eighty. Not that hot. In July the mercury would go ten degrees higher. Eighty. Just the right temperature to sit in the backyard under an elm tree eating a chicken salad on lettuce. Mighty. Just the ticket for belly-flopping into the nearest piece of the Royal River, oh Jesus, wouldn’t that feel good. The water was warm on the top, but down by your feet it was cold and you could feel the current pull at you just a little and there were suckers by the rocks, but you could pick ’em off if you weren’t a pussy. All that water, bathing your skin, your hair, your crotch. His hot flesh trembled as he thought about it. Eighty. Just right for shucking down to your swim trunks and laying up in the canvas hammock in the backyard with a good book. And maybe drowse off. Once he had pulled Jan into the hammock with him and they had lain there together, swinging and necking until his cock felt like a long hot stone against his lower belly. She hadn’t seemed to mind. Eighty. Christ in a Chevrolet, eighty degrees.
Eighty. Eightyeightyeighty. Make it nonsense, make it gone.
“I’d never been so hod id by whole life,” Scramm said through his plugged nose. His broad face was red and dripping sweat. He had stripped off his shirt and bared his shaggy torso. Sweat was running all over him like small creeks in spring flow.
“You better put your shirt back on,” Baker said. “You’ll catch a chill when the sun starts to go down. Then you’ll really be in trouble.”
“This goddab code,” Scramm said. “I’be burd ing ub.”
“It’ll rain,” Baker said. His eyes searched the empty sky. “It has to rain.”
“It doesn’t have to do a goddam thing,” Collie Parker said. “I never seen such a fucked-up state.”
“If you don’t like it, why don’t you go on home?” Garraty asked, and giggled foolishly.
“Stuff it up your ass.”
Garraty forced himself to drink just a little from his canteen. He didn’t want water cramps. That would be a hell of a way to buy out. He’d had them once, and once had been enough. He had been helping their next-door neighbors, the Elwells, get in their hay. It was explosively hot in the loft of the Elwells’ barn, and they had been throwing up the big seventy-pound bales in a fireman’s relay. Garraty had made the tactical mistake of drinking three dipperfuls of the ice-cold water Mrs. Elwell had brought out. There had been sudden blinding pain in this chest and belly and head, he had slipped on some loose hay and had fallen bonelessly out of the loft and into the truck. Mr. Elwell held him around the middle with his work-callused hands while he threw up over the side, weak with pain and shame. They had sent him home, a boy who had flunked one of his first manhood tests, hay-rash on his arms and chaff in his hair. He had walked home, and the sun had beaten down on the back of his sunburned neck like a ten-pound hammer.
He shivered convulsively, and his body broke out momentarily in heat-bumps. The headache thumped sickishly behind his eyes . . . how easy it would be to let go of the rope.
He looked over at Olson. Olson was there. His tongue was turning blackish. His face was dirty. His eyes stared blindly. I’m not like him. Dear God, not like him. Please, I don’t want to go out like Olson.
“This’ll take the starch out,” Baker said gloomily. “We won’t make it into New Hampshire. I’d bet money on it.”
“Two years ago they had sleet,” Abraham said. “They made it over the border. Four of ’em did, anyway.”
“Yeah, but the heat’s different,” Jensen said. “When you’re cold you can walk faster and get warmed up. When you’re hot you can walk slower . . . and get iced. What can you do?”
“No justice,” Collie Parker said angrily. “Why couldn’t they have