Too Far to Walk Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY

  BLUES

  THE CALL

  THE WALNUT DOOR

  THE PRESIDENT

  MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  THE CONSPIRACY

  LETTER TO THE ALUMNI

  THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT

  UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM

  TOO FAR TO WALK

  WHITE LOTUS

  HERE TO STAY

  THE CHILD BUYER

  THE WAR LOVER

  A SINGLE PEBBLE

  THE MARMOT DRIVE

  THE WALL

  A BELL FOR ADANO

  INTO THE VALLEY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1966 by John Hersey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1966, and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ebook ISBN 9780593081068

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Book Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Book Three

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  BOOK ONE

  1

  THEY were speeding along the new throughway down the valley at three in the morning under a wet full moon. Breed drove, hunched over, steering with a wary grip as if the wheel itself were a ring of sleep. John Fist sat in back, on the right, watching the long wrapper-tobacco barns float past, which he knew to be red by day, but were black now in the silver night mist, their red pigment lying in wait against the wood for another day’s illusions.

  The four had given up talking. For the first few miles they had raked over the girls at the stupid mixer. John felt cold. The engine, behind him, had a high alien whine.

  On the right, a wooded rise, some hemlocks running in a pack, dark gowns flying; then the shapes were gone….

  For a time John shut his eyes, and on the screen of his lids he made out a glow, like an afterimage of the sort that would come when he rubbed his eyes and kept them closed—was it face-shaped? The girl at the dance in a black turtleneck and coral necklace, with a voice all hints, offers, fugues? Her parents had given her an acetylene torch for her birthday, and she said she was going to make metal constructions “like you never saw.” Her hands were a pair of Vise-Grip wrenches, real rod-benders. Idiocy to go so far for a lousy affair like that in the middle of the week. They had been spurred by a dare of Breed’s.

  John shivered. The vague luster had faded from his eyes, and he opened them to another radiance, up front, over Wagner’s shoulder: the needle trembling on the rind of numbers, at seventy.

  Breed was way over in the leftmost of the three lanes, and he had that little sewing machine of an engine really stitching. He wasn’t even supposed to keep a car at college; it was in somebody else’s name, a senior’s name, but it was Breed’s.

  They flew past toll signs, Breed down-shifted, the car crept toward the single open slot in the toll gates. A VW bus, ahead of them, stood in the chute the longest time. At last it started away, and Breed pulled his car forward, rolling down the window on his side.

  Wagner, handing Breed change, said: —— Here, Chum.

  As Breed reached out to the tollgatherer, Wagner sat up straight: —— Hey, look at that hombre.

  The VW bus, gaining speed, had seemed to lurch from one lane to another. Now an oversteadying hand swerved it more than back.

  —— That boy is really sloshed.

  Gibbon, beside John: —— Don’t pass him, Breed.

  Breed was soon up to sixty; he stayed close behind the bus, which veered again.

  Wagner said: —— Wild.

  Gibbon, tensely leaning forward: —— Come on, Breed, don’t tailgate the son of a bitch.

  Breed said it would take all night this way, but he let some space open up. Not that he slowed down—the VW was going faster.

  Up ahead John could see the string of lights of a service center, and against their glare the little bus seemed to be coursing like a frantic dog on the hunt for some wavering quarry. The boxlike shape, bounding forward, would suddenly sheer to one side, until at last the driver’s sluggish reflexes would pull it back, just in time, it seemed. Breed chafed but gave plenty of room, more than a hundred yards now.

  Gibbon, both hands on the front seats: —— I can’t watch. (But he did.)

  They came up under the arching lights. Just there the bus, on the right lane, yawed once more and headed on a crazy angle to the left.

  Wagner, the athlete, sharply, as if to wake the man up: —— Watch it!

  The wheels of the bus hung a moment at the edge of the left lane, then, at more than sixty-five, they moved onto the dirt of the wide center strip, throwing up a thin dust into the showering candlepower of the high lamps. John had time to see that there was an anti-pedestrian chain-wire fence along this stretch of the grass divider. The bus went into the beginning of a big skid toward the fence, began to bounce, tripped, rolled over twice, burst through to the other side as though the fence were made of paper, stood up catlike on its wheels on the opposite lanes in the lights of an oncoming car, and coasted gently to a stop. The door opened. The driver stepped sedately out as if he had reached his destination in a normal way, began to run flapping toward the gas station on the far side, and then, washed with light, fell on
the pavement. There was a long shriek of skidding tires. John couldn’t see out the small back window what happened.

  Wagner: —— Holy cow, Breed, aren’t you going to stop?

  Breed: —— I have an eight-ten in the morning.

  John: —— Brother.

  But that was all John said or did.

  2

  HE put out a hand to cut the alarm. Then he pulled the covers all the way up over his head, and he floated in the sac of his own warmth.

  At some point he realized that he had decided to cut Orreman’s nine-ten lecture; he might never go to Orreman’s class again. Flooded with a delicious sense of relief, he shifted position under the covers.

  Almost at once he stirred more restlessly, having begun to feel a bruise on his consciousness—the accident of the night before. Something made him think of steak. The old mother-remedy, press a beefsteak on a mouse?

  He remembered then that he and his friends had not had time for any dinner driving up to Greenway, and he had skipped lunch the day before, too; the last he had eaten had been a glazed doughnut and a cup of coffee after his first class the previous morning.

  Next he was standing in the center of the room, a belt of hunger tight at his waist. He swayed. Flack was up and gone, his bed ferociously unmade. Flack was tidier than John, and perhaps this was what made the rumpled bed so annoying now. The whole floor was a clutter beyond John’s belief, and most of the mess was his own: his dirty underwear and socks, his slacks, loafers, sweaters, jackets, strewn on the rug, dripping from chairs. Not that Flack was all that fastidious. Flack’s can opener, dangerous to bare feet, in the middle of the floor, Flack’s incredible squash racket, Flack’s record albums: “Ella Sings Gershwin,” a Getz-Gilberto anthology. Right at John’s feet (his toes seemed to him to be pale, bloodless, thin, and greatly distant) lay a two-day-old New York Times: Tshombe flies to Paris to seek backing, Vietcong ambush kills seven Americans.

  There was still time to make Orreman’s lecture, but John knew he was not going. Along with the hunger there was a knot of elation, at the solar-plexal seat of some sort of pleasant opening-up in him.

  John Fist stood just under six feet in pajama pants and T-shirt, shivering in a momentary pause of indecision. He saw in his chiffonier mirror: a young face. He frowned. Did a somber look give him any seniority? His light-brown hair, slightly curly, was negligently full at ears and nape and now also hung in a loose twist over his forehead. He flapped it back with a hand that might have been going up in a military salute, and he moved with a slight stagger of his slow-starting energies to his dresser and banged the upper-right drawer with the heel of this same hand. Sheldon College made a big ado about a forty-one-thousand-dollar endowment standing behind each undergraduate, but the shitty drawers stuck. Shaking the whole chest, he worked the drawer open, only to find no undershorts left.

  He groaned. He stooped to pick over some of the clothes on the floor. With a sudden burst he threw a few things on the foot of his bed, intending to do, then and there, a fantastic cleanup job. He felt very angry with Flack. The tidying impulse quickly spent itself, and he dropped onto the straight chair at his desk.

  John had just about had Flack. Metlin T. Flack was one of those characters who seem perfectly fascinating for about two weeks in the spring term of freshman year, and John had signed up to room with him during that bughouse fortnight. Flack was a geographic-distribution beneficiary—from a high school in Helena, Montana, a test-passer, a knobby, innocent boy, as hardy and humble as bunch grass, son of a Pontiac dealer, descendant of sheep-raisers and of missionaries who had settled at Last Chance Gulch in the gold days. Would have gone to Carroll College, right at home, but had had a brainstorm and applied to Sheldon with his eyes closed, and had got in. As a freshman he had been rather bewildered, and had had to struggle to keep up with his courses; and he had seemed to flower in struggle. But now as a sophomore he had suddenly gone Deke, Ivy, Eastern. Flack now had a closetful of charcoal, Oxford, hopsack, classic, Glen, drip-dry. Flack now played squash, the gentleman’s sport. Flack in the shower sounded like a surfacing porpoise. Would wind up as a big personnel executive or something in a big detergent manufactorium or something; you could hear his efficient mind click as a pine borer clicks, at more or less regular intervals. Breed despised him.

  John surveyed the heap on his desk. What a drift of paperbacks, postponements, sore points of incompletion in longhand draft, far too much reading, indigestible assignments (Daedalus: “A New Europe?”), signs of straying from the pressure path (Playboy, Evergreen Review: “The Hair-Despoiling Perversion in Classical Literature”), records not returned to their albums, doodles, notes, scraps, addresses, snapshots.

  Underneath, in the way of his feet, lay a mover’s carton of books; he and Flack had planned at the beginning of the year to get some bricks and boards and make shelves.

  His eye fell on some unopened letters. The big thing was not to open mail. Let it ripen. John never knew whether to laugh or throw up at the sight of the guys in the college post office, bent over, twirling the combinations on their boxes, pulling out letters, and, still stooped down, snatching at the flaps like famished crows pecking at carrion.

  Idly John picked up and turned over in his hand a special-delivery. Maybe it would be O.K. to open a special-delivery letter—might have a check in it, though there was no particular reason to think it should; it must be a couple of weeks old by now, anyhow. He slit the envelope with a ball-point pen.

  My darling Johnnycake:

  Just a note to tell you we finally had to put poor dear old Ptolemy away. Dr. Vinton said his other eye was about to go, and his arthritis was so bad. Your father says Ptolemy was solid gold, about five thousand in vet’s bills alone, but I say he was worth every cent of it—just to see him in bed with you, the way he used to nibble at you though he could have eaten you alive, goodness, my big Sheldon sophomore, that was nine-ten years ago, you couldn’t have been more than a fifth-grader or so. You and Ptolemy were about the same size. And to see you two walk down the hill together toward the Parminters’ in the snow. Blue parka, black dog—I can see it now! Funny the way he chose you. Never had much to do with either Siever or Lisa, did he. You had such a loving nature.

  Well the annual trip. I think we will go to a place called Virgin Gorda, it’s in the British Virgin Islands. They say there’s a hat full of flying, San Juan then change planes to Saint Thomas then a tiny private thing to a spit of land and a boat trip on top of that. Your father wanted to try Mexico City but I feel he should go really tropical. He gets so used up, he needs sun.

  As naturally we want to include you, please let me know IMMEDIATELY the dates of your spring vacation. I realize you haven’t even thought about Christmas yet, but you know I like to plan early. You can find out the dates from the college calendar or whatever. We wouldn’t want to write the dean’s office to find out a minor thing like that.

  I always think of the Varadero trip. Remember how happy we all were at that time?

  Your father says if you have forgotten how to write you can always phone. I don’t know whether he would accept reversed charges but I would my Johnny cake! I suggest therefore you make it some time during the day.

  Snuggles and hugs.

  Mummy

  John made a paper airplane of the letter, but its first flight was only a halfhearted couple of feet onto the mound of confusion and procrastination on the desk. Abruptly John stood up and wheeled around, as if his mother had entered the room. He gets so used up. How completely she gave herself away, even in such a short letter! John crossed his arms over a melancholy ache pouring into his chest; he thought it must have had to do with Ptolemy.

  Or with Varadero. The glory of the trip had been having all that time with Grampa Newson. Exuberance! That morning in the Club de Oficiales (it was long before Castro) at Matanzas, waiting to meet the cruise boat with Gramps’s frie
nds aboard, whatever-their-names, and Gramps doing that handstand on the dock as the launch came alongside, a salute, a greeting with a septuagenarian’s wild flair—his gold watch sliding down out of his vest and hanging safe on its chain; his white suede shoes, caked with whiting which came off on everything, hovering in the air in total relaxation; his inverted face, purple with love of life and joy at seeing upside-down friends and delight in showing off.

  —— Hey, Fist!

  John went to the windows, a pair of casements with diamond-shaped lights set in lead sash bars—windows that had once struck him as the perfectly fitting outlook of Higher Education as She Is Diddled at Sheldon Coll.—and he saw, on the path in the courtyard three flights down, Breed with his sleek face turned up, Breed impeccable, sporting a knitted tie, cheerful-looking, crisp, impatient.

  John cranked open one of the windows, and Breed called up:

  —— How about a bite?

  —— O.K. I’ll get dressed.

  —— Shake a leg. I’ll go on over.

  —— Emil’s?

  —— Where else?

  —— Order me some scrambled eggs.

  3

  AS John took a stool next to Breed’s at the counter, he became vaguely aware of an odor of ozone, a faint suggestion of short circuits, Lionel trains, old sparking electric fans.

  Hadn’t he noticed the same weak smell the night before? In the car? Was it impacted in his own sinuses? Hell, probably just a toaster here, or a big electric coffee machine, in the chrome tank of one of which John now saw himself attenuated, a dozen feet tall.