Synopsis:
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's
masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the
ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and
when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast,
although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing;
just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the
clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food — and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in
which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world
entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an
unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate
destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in
the face of total devastation.
The prose is quintessentially McCarthy: spare, desolate, unemotional, reserved of
both unnecessary vocabulary and punctuation (he recognized the necessary evil of
periods denoting the end of a sentence. Some contractions are so designated with an
apostrophe, some not. Exclamation points are avoided with the same vigilance as
would be shown to beanies with propellers). Although most English teachers I've
been a captive audience to would consider him Satan incarnate, he still can turn a
phrase of almost unbearable beauty.
THE ROAD
By
Cormac McCarthy
Copyright © M-71, Ltd. 2006
This book is dedicated to
JOHN FRANCIS MCCARTHY
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to
touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more
gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma
dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He
pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and
blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream
from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the
hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable
swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone
flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth
and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a
great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature
that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with
eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the
water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked
and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its
bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head
from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and
loped soundlessly into the dark.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road
and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He
thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for
years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.
Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the
blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among
the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing
smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and
wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he
just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the
land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of
God God never spoke.
When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him
and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with
their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup.
He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out
and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat
watching the boy sleep. He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried
somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees
toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it
was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he
said.
I'm right here.
I know.
An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy
carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to
abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a
chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted
the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road
was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless
and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The
boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling
through the ash, each the other's world entire.
They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon
a roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should
check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about
them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The
cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of
gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The
pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door
to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one
wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use.
Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A
metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy
stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old automotive manuals,
swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. He
crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the
number of his father's house in that long ago. The boy watched him. What are you
doing? he said.
A quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We're not thinking, he
said. We have to go back. He pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it
could not be seen and they left their packs and went back to the station. In the
service bay he dragged out the steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all
the quart plastic oilbottles. Then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs
one by one, leaving the bottles to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the
end they had almost a half quart of motor oil. He screwed down the plastic cap and
wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to
light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy
said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.
On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn.
Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over
the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles
whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of
meadow-lands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay
abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once
had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and
the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I'm all right, the boy said. The
man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them.
He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain
down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing
sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes.
Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you
see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses. It's raining. Yes, the man said. I
know.
They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope
through the dark poles of the standing trees to where he'd seen a running ledge of
rock and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow
across the valley. It was very cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a
blanket over their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the
dripping in the woods.
When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got
their blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the
hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms
around the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless
dark come to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night's onset
like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they
walked out to the road and he took the boy's hand and they went to the top of the
hill where the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country
to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any
sign of a fire or a lamp. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the
hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything
too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding
with the lamp between them. He'd brought the boy's book but the boy was too tired
for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I'm asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we
can.
He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man.
His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world
thespian. Can I ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we're still going south.
Yes.
So we'll be warm.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That's okay.
And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the
silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and
fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything
uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath,
trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He
rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he
walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he
crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes.
He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at
the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you
eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.
They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to
hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The
city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything
covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway
dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that
the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think
about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to
forget.
There was a lake a mile from his uncle's farm where he and his uncle used to go in
the fall for firewood. He sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold
wake while his uncle bent to the oars. The old man's feet in their black kid shoes
braced against the uprights. His straw hat. His cob pipe in his teeth and a thin drool
swinging from the pipebowl. He turned to take a sight on the far shore, cradling the
oarhandles, taking the pipe from his mouth to wipe his chin with the back of his
hand. The shore was lined with birchtrees that stood bone pale against the dark of
the evergreens beyond. The edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps, gray and
weathered, the windfall trees of a hurricane years past. The trees themselves had long
been sawed for firewood and carried away. His uncle turned the boat and shipped
the oars and they drifted over the sandy shallows until the transom grated in the
sand. A dead perch lolling belly up in the clear water. Yellow leaves. They left their
shoes on the warm painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and set
out the anchor at the end of its rope. A lardcan poured with concrete with an eyebolt
in the center. They walked along the shore while his uncle studied the treestumps,
puffing at his pipe, a manila rope coiled over his shoulder. He picked one out and
they turned it over, using the roots for leverage, until they got it half floating in the
water. Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat
at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly
behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle
of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A
radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of
his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.
They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill
country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate
highway below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and
growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked
out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was
burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and
billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of
the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.
They were days fording that cauterized terrain. The boy had found some crayons
and painted his facemask with fangs and he trudged on uncomplaining. One of the
front wheels of the cart had gone wonky. What to do about it? Nothing. Where all
was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and
dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To
take your life. He held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in
the blackness.
He woke to the sound of distant thunder and sat up. The faint light all about,
quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot. He pulled the tarp
about them and he lay awake a long time listening. If they got wet there'd be no fires
to dry by. If they got wet they would probably die.
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A
blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the
wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic
dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull
cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but
preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness,
counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what?
Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were
common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long
day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet
know it must.
It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest
of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy
said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand
and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom.
They pushed on together with the tarp pulled over them. The wet gray flakes twisting
and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by the roadside. Black water running from
under the sodden drifts of ash. No more balefires on the distant ridges. He thought
the bloodcults must have all consumed one another. No one traveled this road. No
road-agents, no marauders. After a while they came to a roadside garage and they
stood within the open door and looked out at the gray sleet gusting down out of the
high country.
They collected some old boxes and built a fire in the floor and he found some tools
and emptied out the cart and sat working on the wheel. He pulled the bolt and bored
out the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he'd cut to
length with a hacksaw. Then he bolted it all back together and stood the cart upright
and wheeled it around the floor. It ran fairly true. The boy sat watching everything.
In the morning they went on. Desolate country. A boar-hide nailed to a barndoor.
Ratty. Wisp of a tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and
dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said.
There could be some corn or something. Let's go, the man said.
Mostly he worried about their shoes. That and food. Always food. In an old
batboard smokehouse they found a ham gambreled up in a high corner. It looked
like something fetched from a tomb, so dried and drawn. He cut into it with his
knife. Deep red and salty meat inside. Rich and good. They fried it that night over
their fire, thick slices of it, and put the slices to simmer with a tin of beans. Later he
woke in the dark and he thought that he'd heard bulldrums beating somewhere in the
low dark hills. Then the wind shifted and there was just the silence.
In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. Her nipples
pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark
hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile, her downturned
eyes. In the morning it was snowing again. Beads of small gray ice strung along the
light-wires overhead.
He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of
peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. He slept little and he slept
poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he
and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself
from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach
from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough
the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of
it slowly fading from memory.
From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could
remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him
leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall
columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap
and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer
dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
He fashioned sweeps from two old brooms he'd found and wired them to the cart to
clear the limbs from the road in front of the wheels and he put the boy in the basket
and stood on the rear rail like a dogmusher and they set off down the hills, guiding
the cart on the curves with their bodies in the manner of bobsledders. It was the first
that he'd seen the boy smile in a long time.
At the crest of the hill was a curve and a pullout in the road. An old trail that led off
through the woods. They walked out and sat on a bench and looked out over the
valley where the land rolled away into the gritty fog. A lake down there. Cold and
gray and heavy in the scavenged bowl of the countryside.
What is that, Papa?
It's a dam.
What's it for?
It made the lake. Before they built the dam that was just a river down there. The
dam used the water that ran through it to turn big fans called turbines that would
generate electricity.
To make lights.
Yes. To make lights.
Can we go down there and see it?
I think it's too far.
Will the dam be there for a long time?
I think so. It's made out of concrete. It will probably be there for hundreds of
years. Thousands, even.
Do you think there could be fish in the lake?
No. There's nothing in the lake.
In that long ago somewhere very near this place he'd watched a falcon fall down the
long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost
from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and
trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.
The grainy air. The taste of it never left your mouth. They stood in the rain like farm
animals. Then they went on, holding the tarp over them in the dull drizzle. Their feet
were wet and cold and their shoes were being ruined. On the hillsides old crops dead
and flattened. The barren ridgeline trees raw and black in the rain.
And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold
dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for
centuries suddenly exposed to the day.
The weather lifted and the cold and they came at last into the broad lowland river
valley, the pieced farmland still visible, everything dead to the root along the barren
bottomlands. They trucked on along the blacktop. Tall clapboard houses.
Machinerolled metal roofs. A log barn in a field with an advertisement in faded
ten-foot letters across the roofslope. See Rock City.
The roadside hedges were gone to rows of black and twisted brambles. No sign of
life. He left the boy standing in the road holding the pistol while he climbed an old
set of limestone steps and walked down the porch of the farmhouse shading his eyes
and peering in the windows. He let himself in through the kitchen. Trash in the floor,
old newsprint. China in a breakfront, cups hanging from their hooks. He went down
the hallway and stood in the door to the parlor. There was an antique pumporgan in
the corner. A television set. Cheap stuffed furniture together with an old handmade
cherrywood chifforobe. He climbed the stairs and walked through the bedrooms.
Everything covered with ash. A child's room with a stuffed dog on the windowsill
looking out at the garden. He went through the closets. He stripped back the beds
and came away with two good woolen blankets and went back down the stairs. In
the pantry were three jars of homecanned tomatoes. He blew the dust from the lids
and studied them. Someone before him had not trusted them and in the end neither
did he and he walked out with the blankets over his shoulder and they set off along
the road again.
On the outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket. A few old cars in the
trashstrewn parking lot. They left the cart in the lot and walked the littered aisles. In
the produce section in the bottom of the bins they found a few ancient runner beans
and what looked to have once been apricots, long dried to wrinkled effigies of
themselves. The boy followed behind. They pushed out through the rear door. In the
alleyway behind the store a few shopping carts, all badly rusted. They went back
through the store again looking for another cart but there were none. By the door
were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with
a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works
of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder.
He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.
What is it, Papa?
It's a treat. For you.
What is it?
Here. Sit down.
He slipped the boy's knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind
him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and
opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed
it to the boy. Go ahead, he said.
The boy took the can. It's bubbly, he said.
Go ahead.
He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking
about it. It's really good, he said.
Yes. It is.
You have some, Papa.
I want you to drink it.
You have some.
He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let's just
sit here.
It's because I wont ever get to drink another one, isnt it?
Ever's a long time.
Okay, the boy said.
By dusk of the day following they were at the city. The long concrete sweeps of the
interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk. He
carried the revolver in his belt at the front and wore his parka unzipped. The
mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to
tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of
boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like
pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.
They went on. He kept constant watch behind him in the mirror. The only thing that
moved in the streets was the blowing ash. They crossed the high concrete bridge
over the river. A dock below. Small pleasureboats half sunken in the gray water. Tall
stacks downriver dim in the soot.
The day following some few miles south of the city at a bend in the road and half
lost in the dead brambles they came upon an old frame house with chimneys and
gables and a stone wall. The man stopped. Then he pushed the cart up the drive.
What is this place, Papa?
It's the house where I grew up.
The boy stood looking at it. The peeling wooden clapboards were largely gone
from the lower walls for firewood leaving the studs and the insulation exposed. The
rotted screening from the back porch lay on the concrete terrace.
Are we going in?
Why not?
I'm scared.
Dont you want to see where I used to live?
No.
It'll be okay.
There could be somebody here.
I dont think so.
But suppose there is?
He stood looking up at the gable to his old room. He looked at the boy. Do you
want to wait here?
No. You always say that.
I'm sorry.
I know. But you do.
They slipped out of their backpacks and left them on the terrace and kicked their
way through the trash on the porch and pushed into the kitchen. The boy held on to
his hand. All much as he'd remembered it. The rooms empty. In the small room off
the diningroom there was a bare iron cot, a metal foldingtable. The same castiron
coalgrate in the small fireplace. The pine paneling was gone from the walls leaving
just the furring strips. He stood there. He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of
the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago. This is
where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. He turned and looked out at the
waste of the yard. A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold winter
nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and
my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming
him he could not see. We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didnt.
They walked through the diningroom where the firebrick in the hearth was as yellow
as the day it was laid because his mother could not bear to see it blackened. The
floor buckled from the rainwater. In the livingroom the bones of a small animal
dismembered and placed in a pile. Possibly a cat. A glass tumbler by the door. The
boy gripped his hand. They went up the stairs and turned and went down the
hallway. Small cones of damp plaster standing in the floor. The wooden lathes of the
ceiling exposed. He stood in the doorway to his room. A small space under the
eaves. This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against this wall. In the nights in
their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful
such as might offer themselves but never the one to be. He pushed open the closet
door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from
the roof. Gray as his heart.
We should go, Papa. Can we go?
Yes. We can go.
I'm scared.
I know. I'm sorry.
I'm really scared.
It's all right. We shouldnt have come.
Three nights later in the foothills of the eastern mountains he woke in the darkness to
hear something coming. He lay with his hands at either side of him. The ground was
trembling. It was coming toward them.
Papa? The boy said. Papa?
Shh. It's okay.
What is it, Papa?
It neared, growing louder. Everything trembling. Then it passed beneath them like
an underground train and drew away into the night and was gone. The boy clung to
him crying, his head buried against his chest. Shh. It's all right.
I'm so scared.
I know. It's all right. It's gone.
What was it, Papa?
It was an earthquake. It's gone now. We're all right. Shh.
In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their
clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like
ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their
eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like
migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling
issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the
class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time.
But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
He sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon
and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint
concerns. At eight the primrose closes. He watched the boy sleeping. Can you do it?
When the time comes? Can you?
They squatted in the road and ate cold rice and cold beans that they'd cooked days
ago. Already beginning to ferment. No place to make a fire that would not be seen.
They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the
boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a
good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood
between him and death.
Late in the year. He hardly knew the month. He thought they had enough food to get
through the mountains but there was no way to tell. The pass at the watershed was
five thousand feet and it was going to be very cold. He said that everything
depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night he knew that all of this was
empty and no substance to it. There was a good chance they would die in the
mountains and that would be that.
They passed through the ruins of a resort town and took the road south. Burnt
forests for miles along the slopes and snow sooner than he would have thought. No
tracks in the road, nothing living anywhere. The fireblackened boulders like the
shapes of bears on the starkly wooded slopes. He stood on a stone bridge where the
waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in a gray foam. Where once he'd
watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones
beneath. They went on, the boy trudging in his track. Leaning into the cart, winding
slowly upward through the switchbacks. There were fires still burning high in the
mountains and at night they could see the light from them deep orange in the
soot-fall. It was getting colder but they had campfires all night and left them burning
behind them when they set out again in the morning. He'd wrapped their feet in
sacking tied with cord and so far the snow was only a few inches deep but he knew
that if it got much deeper they would have to leave the cart. Already it was hard
going and he stopped often to rest. Slogging to the edge of the road with his back to
the child where he stood bent with his hands on his knees, coughing. He raised up
and stood with weeping eyes. On the gray snow a fine mist of blood.
They camped against a boulder and he made a shelter of poles with the tarp. He got
a fire going and they set about dragging up a great brushpile of wood to see them
through the night. They'd piled a mat of dead hemlock boughs over the snow and
they sat wrapped in their blankets watching the fire and drinking the last of the cocoa
scavenged weeks before. It was snowing again, soft flakes drifting down out of the
blackness. He dozed in the wonderful warmth. The boy's shadow crossed over him.
Carrying an armload of wood. He watched him stoke the flames. God's own
firedrake. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying
words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.
He woke toward the morning with the fire down to coals and walked out to the road.
Everything was alight. As if the lost sun were returning at last. The snow orange and
quivering. A forest fire was making its way along the tinder-box ridges above them,
flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he
stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten.
Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.
It was colder. Nothing moved in that high world. A rich smell of woodsmoke hung
over the road. He pushed the cart on through the snow. A few miles each day. He'd
no notion how far the summit might be. They ate sparely and they were hungry all
the time. He stood looking out over the country. A river far below. How far had they
come?
In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice
but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere
in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other
tale to tell.
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have
taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never
was?
Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the
banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.
People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their
clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others would come to help them. Within a
year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the
murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done?
He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more
punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.
The air grew thin and he thought the summit could not be far. Perhaps tomorrow.
Tomorrow came and went. It didnt snow again but the snow in the road was six
inches deep and pushing the cart up those grades was exhausting work. He thought
they would have to leave it. How much could they carry? He stood and looked out
over the barren slopes. The ash fell on the snow till it was all but black.
At every curve it looked as though the pass lay just ahead and then one evening he
stopped and looked all about and he recognized it. He unsnapped the throat of his
parka and lowered the hood and stood listening. The wind in the dead black stands
of hemlock. The empty parking lot at the overlook. The boy stood beside him.
Where he'd stood once with his own father in a winter long ago. What is it, Papa?
the boy said. It's the gap. This is it.
In the morning they pressed on. It was very cold. Toward the afternoon it began to
snow again and they made camp early and crouched under the leanto of the tarp and
watched the snow fall in the fire. By morning there was several inches of new snow
on the ground but the snow had stopped and it was so quiet they could all but hear
their hearts. He piled wood on the coals and fanned the fire to life and trudged out
through the drifts to dig out the cart. He sorted through the cans and went back and
they sat by the fire and ate the last of their crackers and a tin of sausage. In a pocket
of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy
and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim.
You promised not to do that, the boy said.
What?
You know what, Papa.
He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy's cup and poured
some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back.
I have to watch you all the time, the boy said.
I know.
If you break little promises you'll break big ones. That's what you said.
I know. But I wont.
They slogged all day down the southfacing slope of the watershed. In the deeper
drifts the cart wouldnt push at all and he had to drag it behind him with one hand
while he broke trail. Anywhere but in the mountains they might have found something
to use for a sled. An old metal sign or a sheet of roofingtin. The wrappings on their
feet had soaked through and they were cold and wet all day. He leaned on the cart to
get his breath while the boy waited. There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the
mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was
looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world
are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.
How do you know?
I just know.
Still they came to trees across the road where they were forced to unload the cart
and carry everything over the trunks and then repack it all on the far side. The boy
found toys he'd forgot he had. He kept out a yellow truck and they went on with it
sitting on top of the tarp.
They camped in a bench of land on the far side of a frozen roadside creek. The wind
had blown the ash from the ice and the ice was black and the creek looked like a
path of basalt winding through the woods. They collected firewood from the north
side of the slope where it was not so wet, pushing over whole trees and dragging
them into camp. They got the fire going and spread their tarp and hung their wet
clothes on poles to steam and stink and they sat wrapped in the quilts naked while
the man held the boy's feet against his stomach to warm them.
He woke whimpering in the night and the man held him. Shh, he said. Shh. It's okay.
I had a bad dream.
I know.
Should I tell you what it was?
If you want to.
I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers.
And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but
nobody had wound it up and it was really scary.
Okay.
It was a lot scarier in the dream.
I know. Dreams can be really scary.
Why did I have that scary dream?
I dont know. But it's okay now. I'm going to put some wood on the fire. You go
to sleep.
The boy didnt answer. Then he said: The winder wasnt turning.
It took four more days to come down out of the snow and even then there were
patches of snow in certain bends of the road and the road was black and wet from
the up-country runoff even beyond that. They came out along the rim of a deep
gorge and far down in the darkness a river. They stood listening.
High rock bluffs on the far side of the canyon with thin black trees clinging to the
escarpment. The sound of the river faded. Then it returned. A cold wind blowing up
from the country below. They were all day reaching the river.
They left the cart in a parking area and walked out through the woods. A low thunder
coming from the river. It was a waterfall dropping off a high shelf of rock and falling
eighty feet through a gray shroud of mist into the pool below. They could smell the
water and they could feel the cold coming off of it. A bench of wet river gravel. He
stood and watched the boy. Wow, the boy said. He couldnt take his eyes off it.
He squatted and scooped up a handful of stones and smelled them and let them fall
clattering. Polished round and smooth as marbles or lozenges of stone veined and
striped. Black disclets and bits of polished quartz all bright from the mist off the
river. The boy walked out and squatted and laved up the dark water.
The waterfall fell into the pool almost at its center. A gray curd circled. They stood
side by side calling to each other over the din.
Is it cold?
Yes. It's freezing.
Do you want to go in?
I dont know.
Sure you do.
Is it okay?
Come on.
He unzipped his parka and let it fall to the gravel and the boy stood up and they
undressed and walked out into the water. Ghostly pale and shivering. The boy so
thin it stopped his heart. He dove headlong and came up gasping and turned and
stood, beating his arms.
Is it over my head? the boy called.
No. Come on.
He turned and swam out to the falls and let the water beat upon him. The boy was
standing in the pool to his waist, holding his shoulders and hopping up and down.
The man went back and got him. He held him and floated him about, the boy
gasping and chopping at the water. You're doing good, the man said. You're doing
good.
They dressed shivering and then climbed the trail to the upper river. They walked out
along the rocks to where the river seemed to end in space and he held the boy while
he ventured out to the last ledge of rock. The river went sucking over the rim and fell
straight down into the pool below. The entire river. He clung to the man's arm.
It's really far, he said.
It's pretty far.
Would you die if you fell?
You'd get hurt. It's a long way.
It's really scary.
They walked out through the woods. The light was failing. They followed the flats
along the upper river among huge dead trees. A rich southern wood that once held
may-apple and pipsissewa. Ginseng. The raw dead limbs of the rhododendron
twisted and knotted and black. He stopped. Something in the mulch and ash. He
stooped and cleared it away. A small colony of them, shrunken, dried and wrinkled.
He picked one and held it up and sniffed it. He bit a piece from the edge and
chewed.
What is it, Papa?
Morels. It's morels.
What's morels?
They're a kind of mushroom.
Can you eat them?
Yes. Take a bite.
Are they good?
Take a bite.
The boy smelled the mushroom and bit into it and stood chewing. He looked at
his father. These are pretty good, he said.
They pulled the morels from the ground, small alien-looking things that he piled in
the hood of the boy's parka. They hiked back out to the road and down to where
they'd left the cart and they made camp by the river pool at the falls and washed the
earth and ash from the morels and put them to soak in a pan of water. By the time he
had the fire going it was dark and he sliced a handful of the mushrooms on a log for
their dinner and scooped them into the frying pan along with the fat pork from a can
of beans and set them in the coals to simmer. The boy watched him. This is a good
place Papa, he said.
They ate the little mushrooms together with the beans and drank tea and had tinned
pears for their desert. He banked the fire against the seam of rock where he'd built it
and he strung the tarp behind them to reflect the heat and they sat warm in their
refuge while he told the boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he
remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets and then he stoked the fire
and lay down warm and full and listened to the low thunder of the falls beyond them
in that dark and threadbare wood.
He walked out in the morning and took the river path downstream. The boy was
right that it was a good place and he wanted to check for any sign of other visitors.
He found nothing. He stood watching the river where it swung loping into a pool and
curled and eddied. He dropped a white stone into the water but it vanished as
suddenly as if it had been eaten. He'd stood at such a river once and watched the
flash of trout deep in a pool, invisible to see in the teacolored water except as they
turned on their sides to feed. Reflecting back the sun deep in the darkness like a
flash of knives in a cave.
We cant stay, he said. It's getting colder every day. And the waterfall is an attraction.
It was for us and it will be for others and we dont know who they will be and we
cant hear them coming. It's not safe.
We could stay one more day.
It's not safe.
Well maybe we could find some other place on the river.
We have to keep moving. We have to keep heading south.
Doesnt the river go south?
No. It doesnt.
Can I see it on the map?
Yes. Let me get it.
The tattered oilcompany roadmap had once been taped together but now it was
just sorted into leaves and numbered with crayon in the corners for their assembly.
He sorted through the limp pages and spread out those that answered to their
location.
We cross a bridge here. It looks to be about eight miles or so. This is the river.
Going east. We follow the road here along the eastern slope of the mountains. These
are our roads, the black lines on the map. The state roads.
Why are they the state roads?
Because they used to belong to the states. What used to be called the states.
But there's not any more states?
No.
What happened to them?
I dont know exactly. That's a good question.
But the roads are still there.
Yes. For a while.
How long a while?
I dont know. Maybe quite a while. There's nothing to uproot them so they should
be okay for a while.
But there wont be any cars or trucks on them.
No.
Okay.
Are you ready?
The boy nodded. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and shouldered up his small
pack and the man folded away the map sections and rose and the boy followed him
out through the gray palings of the trees to the road.
When the bridge came in sight below them there was a tractor-trailer jackknifed
sideways across it and wedged into the buckled iron railings. It was raining again and
they stood there with the rain pattering softly on the tarp. Peering out from under the
blue gloom beneath the plastic.
Can we get around it? the boy said.
I dont think so. We can probably get under it. We may have to unload the cart.
The bridge spanned the river above a rapids. They could hear the noise of it as they
came around the curve in the road. A wind was coming down the gorge and they
pulled the corners of the tarp about them and pushed the cart out onto the bridge.
They could see the river through the ironwork. Below the rapids was a railroad
bridge laid on limestone piers. The stones of the piers were stained well above the
river from the high water and the bend of the river was choked with great windrows
of black limbs and brush and the trunks of trees.
The truck had been there for years, the tires flat and crumpled under the rims. The
front of the tractor was jammed against the railing of the bridge and the trailer had
sheared forward off the top plate and jammed up against the back of the cab. The
rear of the trailer had swung out and buckled the rail on the other side of the bridge
and it hung several feet out over the river gorge. He pushed the cart up under the
trailer but the handle wouldnt clear. They'd have to slide it under sideways. He left it
sitting in the rain with the tarp over it and they duckwalked under the trailer and he
left the boy crouched there in the dry while he climbed up on the gastank step and
wiped the water from the glass and peered inside the cab. He stepped back down
and reached up and opened the door and then climbed in and pulled the door shut
behind him. He sat looking around. An old doghouse sleeper behind the seats.
Papers in the floor. The glovebox was open but it was empty. He climbed back
between the seats. There was a raw damp mattress on the bunk and a small
refrigerator with the door standing open. A fold-down table. Old magazines in the
floor. He went through the plywood lockers overhead but they were empty. There
were drawers under the bunk and he pulled them out and looked through the trash.
He climbed forward into the cab again and sat in the driver's seat and looked out
down the river through the slow trickle of water on the glass. The thin drum of rain
on the metal roof and the slow darkness falling over everything.
They slept that night in the truck and in the morning the rain had stopped and they
unloaded the cart and passed everything under the truck to the other side and
reloaded it. Down the bridge a hundred feet or so were the blackened remains of
tires that had been burned there. He stood looking at the trailer. What do you think is
in there? he said.
I dont know.
We're not the first ones here. So probably nothing.
There's no way to get in.
He put his ear to the side of the trailer and whacked the sheetmetal with the flat of
his hand. It sounds empty, he said. You can probably get in from the roof.
Somebody would have cut a hole in the side of it by now.
What would they cut it with?
They'd find something.
He took off his parka and laid it across the top of the cart and climbed on to the
fender of the tractor and on to the hood and clambered up over the windscreen to
the roof of the cab. He stood and turned and looked down at the river. Wet metal
underfoot. He looked down at the boy. The boy looked worried. He turned and
reached and got a grip on the front of the trailer and slowly pulled himself up. It was
all he could do and there was a lot less of him to pull. He got one leg up over the
edge and hung there resting. Then he pulled himself up and rolled over and sat up.
There was a skylight about a third of the way down the roof and he made his way to
it in a walking crouch. The cover was gone and the inside of the trailer smelled of
wet plywood and that sour smell he'd come to know. He had a magazine in his hip
pocket and he took it out and tore some pages from it and wadded them and got out
his lighter and lit the papers and dropped them into the darkness. A faint whooshing.
He wafted away the smoke and looked down into the trailer. The small fire burning in
the floor seemed a long way down. He shielded the glare of it with his hand and
when he did he could see almost to the rear of the box. Human bodies. Sprawled in
every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. The small wad of burning
paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just
a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all
was dark again.
They camped that night in the woods on a ridge overlooking the broad piedmont
plain where it stretched away to the south. He built a cookfire against a rock and they
ate the last of the morels and a can of spinach. In the night a storm broke in the
mountains above them and came cannonading downcountry cracking and booming
and the stark gray world appeared again and again out of the night in the shrouded
flare of the lightning. The boy clung to him. It all passed on. A brief rattle of hail and
then the slow cold rain.
When he woke again it was still dark but the rain had stopped. A smoky light out
there in the valley. He rose and walked out along the ridge. A haze of fire that
stretched for miles. He squatted and watched it. He could smell the smoke. He wet
his finger and held it to the wind. When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was
lit from within where the boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue
shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world.
Something all but unaccountable. And so it was.
All the day following they traveled through the drifting haze of woodsmoke. In the
draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on
the slopes like stands of heathen candles. Late in the day they came to a place where
the fire had crossed the road and the macadam was still warm and further on it began
to soften underfoot. The hot black mastic sucking at their shoes and stretching in
thin bands as they stepped. They stopped. We'll have to wait, he said.
They backtracked and camped in the actual road and when they went on in the
morning the macadam had cooled. Bye and bye they came to a set of tracks cooked
into the tar. They just suddenly appeared. He squatted and studied them. Someone
had come out of the woods in the night and continued down the melted roadway.
Who is it? said the boy.
I dont know. Who is anybody?
They came upon him shuffling along the road before them, dragging one leg slightly
and stopping from time to time to stand stooped and uncertain before setting out
again.
What should we do, Papa?
We're all right. Let's just follow and watch.
Take a look, the boy said.
Yes. Take a look.
They followed him a good ways but at his pace they were losing the day and finally
he just sat in the road and did not get up again. The boy hung on to his father's coat.
No one spoke. He was as burntlooking as the country, his clothing scorched and
black. One of his eyes was burnt shut and his hair was but a nitty wig of ash upon
his blackened skull. As they passed he looked down. As if he'd done something
wrong. His shoes were bound up with wire and coated with roadtar and he sat there
in silence, bent over in his rags. The boy kept looking back. Papa? he whispered.
What is wrong with the man?
He's been struck by lightning.
Cant we help him? Papa?
No. We cant help him.
The boy kept pulling at his coat. Papa? he said.
Stop it.
Cant we help him Papa?
No. We cant help him. There's nothing to be done for him.
They went on. The boy was crying. He kept looking back. When they got to the
bottom of the hill the man stopped and looked at him and looked back up the road.
The burned man had fallen over and at that distance you couldnt even tell what it
was. I'm sorry, he said. But we have nothing to give him. We have no way to help
him. I'm sorry for what happened to him but we cant fix it. You know that, dont
you? The boy stood looking down. He nodded his head. Then they went on and he
didnt look back again.
At evening a dull sulphur light from the fires. The standing water in the roadside
ditches black with the runoff. The mountains shrouded away. They crossed a river
by a concrete bridge where skeins of ash and slurry moved slowly in the current.
Charred bits of wood. In the end they stopped and turned back and camped under
the bridge.
He'd carried his billfold about till it wore a cornershaped hole in his trousers. Then
one day he sat by the roadside and took it out and went through the contents. Some
money, credit cards. His driver's license. A picture of his wife. He spread everything
out on the blacktop. Like gaming cards. He pitched the sweatblackened piece of
leather into the woods and sat holding the photograph. Then he laid it down in the
road also and then he stood and they went on.
In the morning he lay looking up at the clay nests that swallows had built in the
corners under the bridge. He looked at the boy but the boy had turned away and lay
staring out at the river.
There's nothing we could have done.
He didnt answer.
He's going to die. We cant share what we have or we'll die too.
I know.
So when are you going to talk to me again?
I'm talking now.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in
their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay
cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The
figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.
The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low
concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt
answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was
already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and
raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both taps as far as they would go.
She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her
belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I'm not.
Once in those early years he'd wakened in a barren wood and lay listening to flocks
of migratory birds overhead in that bitter dark. Their half muted crankings miles
above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a
bowl. He wished them godspeed till they were gone. He never heard them again.
He'd a deck of cards he found in a bureau drawer in a house and the cards were
worn and spindled and the two of clubs was missing but still they played sometimes
by firelight wrapped in their blankets. He tried to remember the rules of childhood
games. Old Maid. Some version of Whist. He was sure he had them mostly wrong
and he made up new games and gave them made up names. Abnormal Fescue or
Catbarf. Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him
was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What
would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true
either and the telling made him feel bad. The child had his own fantasies. How things
would be in the south. Other children. He tried to keep a rein on this but his heart
was not in it. Whose would be?
No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no
later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's
heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he
whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.
He thought about the picture in the road and he thought that he should have tried to
keep her in their lives in some way but he didnt know how. He woke coughing and
walked out so as not to wake the child. Following a stone wall in the dark, wrapped
in his blanket, kneeling in the ashes like a penitent. He coughed till he could taste the
blood and he said her name aloud. He thought perhaps he'd said it in his sleep.
When he got back the boy was awake. I'm sorry, he said.
It's okay.
Go to sleep.
I wish I was with my mom.
He didnt answer. He sat beside the small figure wrapped in the quilts and
blankets. After a while he said: You mean you wish that you were dead.
Yes.
You musnt say that.
But I do.
Dont say it. It's a bad thing to say.
I cant help it.
I know. But you have to.
How do I do it?
I dont know.
We're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.
Survivors? she said.
Yes.
What in God's name are you talking about? We're not survivors. We're the
walking dead in a horror film.
I'm begging you.
I dont care. I dont care if you cry. It doesnt mean anything to me.
Please.
Stop it.
I am begging you. I'll do anything.
Such as what? I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three
bullets in the gun instead of two. I was stupid. We've been over all of this. I didnt
bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I'm done. I thought about not even
telling you. That would probably have been best. You have two bullets and then
what? You cant protect us. You say you would die for us but what good is that? I'd
take him with me if it werent for you. You know I would. It's the right thing to do.
You're talking crazy.
No, I'm speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us.
They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us
and you wont face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant. She sat
there smoking a slender length of dried grapevine as if it were some rare cheroot.
Holding it with a certain elegance, her other hand across her knees where she'd
drawn them up. She watched him across the small flame. We used to talk about
death, she said. We dont any more. Why is that?
I dont know.
It's because it's here. There's nothing left to talk about.
I wouldnt leave you.
I dont care. It's meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like.
I've taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
Death is not a lover.
Oh yes he is.
Please dont do this.
I'm sorry.
I cant do it alone.
Then dont. I cant help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in
their care and men of danger to themselves. But I dont dream at all. You say you
cant? Then dont do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and
I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to
take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so dont ask for sorrow
now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The
one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I
would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to
cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with
words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.
As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
He didnt answer.
You have no argument because there is none.
Will you tell him goodbye?
No. I will not.
Just wait till morning. Please.
I have to go.
She had already stood up.
For the love of God, woman. What am I to tell him?
I cant help you.
Where are you going to go? You cant even see.
I dont have to.
He stood up. I'm begging you, he said.
No. I will not. I cannot.
She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake
of obsidian. He'd taught her himself. Sharper than steel. The edge an atom thick.
And she was right. There was no argument. The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing
the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to
a madhouse wall. In the morning the boy said nothing at all and when they were
packed and ready to set out upon the road he turned and looked back at their
campsite and he said: She's gone isn't she? And he said: Yes, she is.
Always so deliberate, hardly surprised by the most outlandish advents. A creation
perfectly evolved to meet its own end. They sat at the window and ate in their robes
by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn. A few nights later
she gave birth in their bed by the light of a drycell lamp. Gloves meant for
dishwashing. The improbable appearance of the small crown of the head. Streaked
with blood and lank black hair. The rank meconium. Her cries meant nothing to him.
Beyond the window just the gathering cold, the fires on the horizon. He held aloft the
scrawny red body so raw and naked and cut the cord with kitchen shears and
wrapped his son in a towel.
Did you have any friends?
Yes. I did.
Lots of them?
Yes.
Do you remember them?
Yes. I remember them.
What happened to them?
They died.
All of them?
Yes. All of them.
Do you miss them?
Yes. I do.
Where are we going?
We're going south.
Okay.
They were all day on the long black road, stopping in the afternoon to eat sparingly
from their meager supplies. The boy took his truck from the pack and shaped roads
in the ash with a stick. The truck tooled along slowly. He made truck noises. The
day seemed almost warm and they slept in the leaves with their packs under their
heads.
Something woke him. He turned on his side and lay listening. He raised his head
slowly, the pistol in his hand. He looked down at the boy and when he looked back
toward the road the first of them were already coming into view. God, he whispered.
He reached and shook the boy, keeping his eyes on the road. They came shuffling
through the ash casting their hooded heads from side to side. Some of them wearing
canister masks. One in a biohazard suit. Stained and filthy. Slouching along with
clubs in their hands, lengths of pipe. Coughing. Then he heard on the road behind
them what sounded like a diesel truck. Quick, he whispered. Quick. He shoved the
pistol in his belt and grabbed the boy by the hand and he dragged the cart through
the trees and tilted it over where it would not so easily be seen. The boy was frozen
with fear. He pulled him to him. It's all right, he said. We have to run. Dont look
back. Come on.
He slung their knapsacks over his shoulder and they tore through the crumbling
bracken. The boy was terrified. Run, he whispered. Run. He looked back. The truck
had rumbled into view. Men standing in the bed looking out. The boy fell and he
pulled him up. It's all right, he said. Come on.
He could see a break through the trees that he thought was a ditch or a cut and they
came out through the weeds into an old roadway. Plates of cracked macadam
showing through the drifts of ash. He pulled the boy down and they crouched under
the bank listening, gasping for breath. They could hear the diesel engine out on the
road, running on God knows what. When he raised up to look he could just see the
top of the truck moving along the road. Men standing in the stakebed, some of them
holding rifles. The truck passed on and the black diesel smoke coiled through the
woods. The motor sounded ropy. Missing and puttering. Then it quit.
He sank down and put his hand on top of his head. God, he said. They could hear
the thing rattle and flap to a halt. Then just the silence. He had the pistol in his hand,
he couldnt even remember taking it from his belt. They could hear the men talking.
Hear them unlatch and raise the hood. He sat with his arm around the boy. Shh, he
said. Shh. After a while they heard the truck begin to roll. Lumbering and creaking
like a ship. They'd have no other way to start it save to push it and they couldnt get it
fast enough to start on that slope. After a few minutes it coughed and bucked and
stopped again. He raised his head to look and coming through the weeds twenty feet
away was one of their number unbuckling his belt. They both froze.
He cocked the pistol and held it on the man and the man stood with one hand out at
his side, the dirty crumpled paintmask that he wore sucking in and out.
Just keep coming.
He looked at the road.
Dont look back there. Look at me. If you call out you're dead.
He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the
progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it
where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the
roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of
grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He
wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a
tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their
appearance. He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and
a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the
front of it.
Where are you going?
I was going to take a crap.
Where are you going with the truck.
I dont know.
What do you mean you dont know? Take the mask off.
He pulled the mask off over his head and stood holding it.
I mean I dont know, he said.
You dont know where you're going?
No.
What's the truck running on.
Diesel fuel.
How much do you have.
There's three fifty-five gallon drums in the bed.
Do you have ammunition for those guns?
He looked back toward the road.
I told you not to look back there.
Yeah. We got ammunition.
Where did you get it?
Found it.
That's a lie. What are you eating.
Whatever we can find.
Whatever you can find.
Yeah. He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said.
That's what you think.
You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they'll hear the shot.
Yes they will. But you wont.
How do you figure that?
Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can
hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus
and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They'll just be soup.
Are you a doctor?
I'm not anything.
We got a man hurt. It'd be worth your while.
Do I look like an imbecile to you?
I dont know what you look like.
Why are you looking at him?
I can look where I want to.
No you cant. If you look at him again I'll shoot you.
The boy was sitting with both hands on top of his head and looking out between
his forearms.
I'll bet that boy is hungry. Why dont you all just come on to the truck? Get
something to eat. Aint no need to be such a hard-ass.
You dont have anything to eat. Let's go.
Go where?
Let's go.
I aint goin nowheres.
You're not?
No. I aint.
You think I wont kill you but you're wrong. But what I'd rather do is take you up
this road a mile or so and then turn you loose. That's all the head start we need. You
wont find us. You wont even know which way we went.
You know what I think?
What do you think.
I think you're chickenshit.
He let go of the belt and it fell in the roadway with the gear hanging from it. A
canteen. An old canvas army pouch. A leather sheath for a knife. When he looked
up the roadrat was holding the knife in his hand. He'd only taken two steps but he
was almost between him and the child.
What do you think you're going to do with that?
He didnt answer. He was a big man but he was very quick. He dove and grabbed
the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest with the knife at his
throat. The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and
leveled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a
distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the
hole in his forehead. The boy was lying in his lap with no expression on his face at
all. He shoved the pistol in his belt and slung the knapsack over his shoulder and
picked up the boy and turned him around and lifted him over his head and set him
on his shoulders and set off up the old roadway at a dead run, holding the boy's
knees, the boy clutching his forehead, covered with gore and mute as a stone.
They came to an old iron bridge in the woods where the vanished road had crossed
an all but vanished stream. He was starting to cough and he'd hardly breath to do it
with. He dropped down out of the roadway and into the woods. He turned and
stood gasping, trying to listen. He heard nothing. He staggered on another half mile
or so and finally dropped to his knees and put the boy down in the ashes and leaves.
He wiped the blood from his face and held him. It's okay, he said. It's okay.
In the long cold evening with the darkness dropping down he heard them only once.
He held the boy close. There was a cough in his throat that never left. The boy so
frail and thin through his coat, shivering like a dog. The footsteps in the leaves
stopped. Then they moved on. They neither spoke nor called to each other, the
more sinister for that. With the final onset of dark the iron cold locked down and the
boy by now was shuddering violently. No moon rose beyond the murk and there
was nowhere to go. They had a single blanket in the pack and he got it out and
covered the boy with it and he unzipped his parka and held the boy against him.
They lay there for a long time but they were freezing and finally he sat up. We've got
to move, he said. We cant just lie here. He looked around but there was nothing to
see. He spoke into a blackness without depth or dimension.
He held the boy's hand as they stumbled through the woods. The other hand he held
out before him. He could see no worse with his eyes shut. The boy was wrapped in
the blanket and he told him not to drop it because they would never find it again. He
wanted to be carried but the man told him that he had to keep moving. They
stumbled and fell through the woods the night long and long before dawn the boy
fell and would not get up again. He wrapped him in his own parka and wrapped him
in the blanket and sat holding him, rocking back and forth. A single round left in the
revolver. You will not face the truth. You will not.
In the grudging light that passed for day he put the boy in the leaves and sat studying
the woods. When it was a bit lighter he rose and walked out and cut a perimeter
about their siwash camp looking for sign but other than their own faint track through
the ash he saw nothing. He went back and gathered the boy up. We have to go, he
said. The boy sat slumped, his face blank. The filth dried in his hair and his face
streaked with it. Talk to me, he said, but he would not.
They moved on east through the standing dead trees. They passed an old frame
house and crossed a dirt road. A cleared plot of ground perhaps once a
truckgarden. Stopping from time to time to listen. The unseen sun cast no shadow.
They came upon the road unexpectedly and he stopped the boy with one hand and
they crouched in the roadside ditch like lepers and listened. No wind. Dead silence.
After a while he rose and walked out into the road. He looked back at the boy.
Come on, he said. The boy came out and the man pointed out the tracks in the ash
where the truck had gone. The boy stood wrapped in the blanket looking down at
the road.
He'd no way to know if they'd got the truck running again. No way to know how
long they might be willing to lie in ambush. He thumbed the pack down off his
shoulder and sat and opened it. We need to eat, he said. Are you hungry?
The boy shook his head.
No. Of course not. He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap
and held it out and the boy took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got
his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he
handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and
rummaged through the pack. They ate a can of white beans, passing it between them,
and he threw the empty tin into the woods. Then they set out down the road again.
The truck people had camped in the road itself. They'd built a fire there and charred
billets of wood lay stuck in the melted tar together with ash and bones. He squatted
and held his hand over the tar. A faint warmth coming off of it. He stood and looked
down the road. Then he took the boy with him into the woods. I want you to wait
here, he said. I wont be far away. I'll be able to hear you if you call.
Take me with you, the boy said. He looked as if he was going to cry.
No. I want you to wait here.
Please, Papa.
Stop it. I want you to do what I say. Take the gun.
I dont want the gun.
I didnt ask you if you wanted it. Take it.
He walked out through the woods to where they'd left the cart. It was still lying there
but it had been plundered. The few things they hadnt taken scattered in the leaves.
Some books and toys belonging to the boy. His old shoes and some rags of
clothing. He righted the cart and put the boy's things in it and wheeled it out to the
road. Then he went back. There was nothing there. Dried blood dark in the leaves.
The boy's knapsack was gone. Coming back he found the bones and the skin piled
together with rocks over them. A pool of guts. He pushed at the bones with the toe
of his shoe. They looked to have been boiled. No pieces of clothing. Dark was
coming on again and it was already very cold and he turned and went out to where
he'd left the boy and knelt and put his arms around him and held him.
They pushed the cart through the woods as far as the old road and left it there and
headed south along the road hurrying against the dark. The boy was stumbling he
was so tired and the man picked him up and swung him onto his shoulders and they
went on. By the time they got to the bridge there was scarcely light at all. He put the
boy down and they felt their way down the embankment. Under the bridge he got
out his lighter and lit it and swept the ground with the flickering light. Sand and gravel
washed up from the creek. He set down the knapsack and put away the lighter and
took hold of the boy by the shoulders. He could just make him out in the darkness. I
want you to wait here, he said. I'm going for wood. We have to have a fire.
I'm scared.
I know. But I'll just be a little ways and I'll be able to hear you so if you get scared
you call me and I'll come right away.
I'm really scared.
The sooner I go the sooner I'll be back and we'll have a fire and then you wont be
scared anymore. Dont lie down. If you lie down you'll fall asleep and then if I call
you you wont answer and I wont be able to find you. Do you understand?
The boy didnt answer. He was close to losing his temper with him and then he
realized that he was shaking his head in the dark. Okay, he said. Okay.
He scrambled up the bank and into the woods, holding his hands out in front of him.
There was wood everywhere, dead limbs and branches scattered over the ground.
He shuffled along kicking them into a pile and when he had an armful he stooped and
gathered them up and called the boy and the boy answered and talked him back to
the bridge. They sat in the darkness while he shaved sticks into a pile with his knife
and broke up the small branches with his hands. He took the lighter from his pocket
and struck the wheel with his thumb. He used gasoline in the lighter and it burned
with a frail blue flame and he bent and set the tinder alight and watched the fire climb
upward through the wicker of limbs. He piled on more wood and bent and blew
gently at the base of the little blaze and arranged the wood with his hands, shaping
the fire just so.
He made two more trips into the woods, dragging armloads of brush and limbs to
the bridge and pushing them over the side. He could see the glow of the fire from
some distance but he didnt think it could be seen from the other road. Below the
bridge he could make out a dark pool of standing water among the rocks. A rim of
shelving ice. He stood on the bridge and shoved the last pile of wood over, his
breath white in the glow of the firelight.
He sat in the sand and inventoried the contents of the knapsack. The binoculars. A
half pint bottle of gasoline almost full. The bottle of water. A pair of pliers. Two
spoons. He set everything out in a row. There were five small tins of food and he
chose a can of sausages and one of corn and he opened these with the little army
can opener and set them at the edge of the fire and they sat watching the labels char
and curl. When the corn began to steam he took the cans from the fire with the pliers
and they sat bent over them with their spoons, eating slowly. The boy was nodding
with sleep.
When they'd eaten he took the boy out on the gravelbar below the bridge and he
pushed away the thin shore ice with a stick and they knelt there while he washed the
boy's face and his hair. The water was so cold the boy was crying. They moved
down the gravel to find fresh water and he washed his hair again as well as he could
and finally stopped because the boy was moaning with the cold of it. He dried him
with the blanket, kneeling there in the glow of the light with the shadow of the
bridge's understructure broken across the palisade of treetrunks beyond the creek.
This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.
Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire.
The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He
kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and
he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like
some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else
construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
He woke in the night with the cold and rose and broke up more wood for the fire.
The shapes of the small tree-limbs burning incandescent orange in the coals. He blew
the flames to life and piled on the wood and sat with his legs crossed, leaning against
the stone pier of the bridge. Heavy limestone blocks laid up without mortar.
Overhead the ironwork brown with rust, the hammered rivets, the wooden sleepers
and crossplanks. The sand where he sat was warm to the touch but the night beyond
the fire was sharp with the cold. He got up and dragged fresh wood in under the
bridge. He stood listening. The boy didnt stir. He sat beside him and stroked his pale
and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god. Please dont tell me how the
story ends. When he looked out again at the darkness beyond the bridge it was
snowing.
All the wood they had to burn was small wood and the fire was good for no more
than an hour or perhaps a bit more. He dragged the rest of the brush in under the
bridge and broke it up, standing on the limbs and cracking them to length. He
thought the noise would wake the boy but it didnt. The wet wood hissed in the
flames, the snow continued to fall. In the morning they would see if there were tracks
in the road or not. This was the first human being other than the boy that he'd
spoken to in more than a year. My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those
cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who
has made of the world a lie every word. When he woke again the snow had stopped
and the grainy dawn was shaping out the naked woodlands beyond the bridge, the
trees black against the snow. He was lying curled up with his hands between his
knees and he sat up and got the fire going and he set a can of beets in the embers.
The boy lay huddled on the ground watching him.
The new snow lay in skifts all through the woods, along the limbs and cupped in the
leaves, all of it already gray with ash. They hiked out to where they'd left the cart and
he put the knapsack in and pushed it out to the road. No tracks. They stood listening
in the utter silence. Then they set out along the road through the gray slush, the boy
at his side with his hands in his pockets.
They trudged all day, the boy in silence. By afternoon the slush had melted off the
road and by evening it was dry. They didnt stop. How many miles? Ten, twelve.
They used to play quoits in the road with four big steel washers they'd found in a
hardware store but these were gone with everything else. That night they camped in a
ravine and built a fire against a small stone bluff and ate their last tin of food. He'd
put it by because it was the boy's favorite, pork and beans. They watched it bubble
slowly in the coals and he retrieved the tin with the pliers and they ate in silence. He
rinsed the empty tin with water and gave it to the child to drink and that was that. I
should have been more careful, he said.
The boy didnt answer.
You have to talk to me.
Okay.
You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may
happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I
will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the
good guys? he said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay.
In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd
carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and
gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while
the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps
the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned
and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed
some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle
in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been
carried off by wolves.
He sat crosslegged in the leaves at the crest of a ridge and glassed the valley below
them with the binoculars. The still poured shape of a river. The dark brick stacks of
a mill. Slate roofs. An old wooden watertower bound with iron hoops. No smoke,
no movement of life. He lowered the glasses and sat watching.
What do you see? the boy said.
Nothing.
He handed the binoculars across. The boy slung the strap over his neck and put
them to his eyes and adjusted the wheel. Everything about them so still.
I see smoke, he said.
Where.
Past those buildings.
What buildings?
The boy handed the glasses back and he refocused them. The palest wisp. Yes,
he said. I see it.
What should we do, Papa?
I think we should take a look. We just have to be careful. If it's a commune they'll
have barricades. But it may just be refugees.
Like us.
Yes. Like us.
What if it's the bad guys?
We'll have to take a risk. We need to find something to eat.
They left the cart in the woods and crossed a railroad track and came down a steep
bank through dead black ivy. He carried the pistol in his hand. Stay close, he said.
He did. They moved through the streets like sappers. One block at a time. A faint
smell of woodsmoke on the air. They waited in a store and watched the street but
nothing moved. They went through the trash and rubble. Cabinet drawers pulled out
into the floor, paper and bloated cardboard boxes. They found nothing. All the
stores were rifled years ago, the glass mostly gone from the windows. Inside it was
all but too dark to see. They climbed the ribbed steel stairs of an escalator, the boy
holding on to his hand. A few dusty suits hanging on a rack. They looked for shoes
but there were none. They shuffled through the trash but there was nothing there of
any use to them. When they came back he slipped the suitcoats from their hangers
and shook them out and folded them across his arm. Let's go, he said.
He thought there had to be something overlooked but there wasnt. They kicked
through the trash in the aisles of a foodmarket. Old packaging and papers and the
eternal ash. He scoured the shelves looking for vitamins. He opened the door of a
walk-in cooler but the sour rank smell of the dead washed out of the darkness and he
quickly closed it again. They stood in the street. He looked at the gray sky. Faint
plume of their breath. The boy was exhausted. He took him by the hand. We have to
look some more, he said. We have to keep looking.
The houses at the edge of the town offered little more. They climbed the back steps
into a kitchen and began to go through the cabinets. The cabinet doors all standing
open. A can of bakingpowder. He stood there looking at it. They went through the
drawers of a sideboard in the diningroom. They walked into the livingroom. Scrolls
of fallen wallpaper lying in the floor like ancient documents. He left the boy sitting on
the stairs holding the coats while he went up.
Everything smelled of damp and rot. In the first bedroom a dried corpse with the
covers about its neck. Remnants of rotted hair on the pillow. He took hold of the
lower hem of the blanket and towed it off the bed and shook it out and folded it
under his arm. He went through the bureaus and the closets. A summer dress on a
wire hanger. Nothing. He went back down the stairs. It was getting dark. He took the
boy by the hand and they went out the front door to the street.
At the top of the hill he turned and studied the town. Darkness coming fast.
Darkness and cold. He put two of the coats over the boy's shoulders, swallowing
him up parka and all.
I'm really hungry, Papa.
I know.
Will we be able to find our stuff?
Yes. I know where it is.
What if somebody finds it?
They wont find it.
I hope they dont.
They wont. Come on.
What was that?
I didnt hear anything.
Listen.
I dont hear anything.
They listened. Then in the distance he heard a dog bark. He turned and looked
toward the darkening town. It's a dog, he said.
A dog?
Yes.
Where did it come from?
I dont know.
We're not going to kill it, are we Papa?
No. We're not going to kill it.
He looked down at the boy. Shivering in his coats. He bent over and kissed him
on his gritty brow. We wont hurt the dog, he said. I promise.
They slept in a parked car beneath an overpass with the suitcoats and the blanket
piled over them. In the darkness and the silence he could see bits of light that
appeared random on the night grid. The higher floors of the buildings were all dark.
You'd have to carry up water. You could be smoked out. What were they eating?
God knows. They sat wrapped in the coats looking out the window. Who are they,
Papa? I dont know.
He woke in the night and lay listening. He couldnt remember where he was. The
thought made him smile. Where are we? he said.
What is it, Papa?
Nothing. We're okay. Go to sleep.
We're going to be okay, arent we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.
In the morning a cold rain was falling. It gusted over the car even under the overpass
and it danced in the road beyond. They sat and watched through the water on the
glass. By the time it had slacked a good part of the day was gone. They left the
coats and the blanket in the floor of the back seat and went up the road to search
through more of the houses. Woodsmoke on the damp air. They never heard the
dog again.
They found some utensils and a few pieces of clothing. A sweatshirt. Some plastic
they could use for a tarp. He was sure they were being watched but he saw no one.
In a pantry they came upon part of a sack of cornmeal that rats had been at in the
long ago. He sifted the meal through a section of windowscreen and collected a
small handful of dried turds and they built a fire on the concrete porch of the house
and made cakes of the meal and cooked them over a piece of tin. Then they ate them
slowly one by one. He wrapped the few remaining in a paper and put them in the
knapsack.
The boy was sitting on the steps when he saw something move at the rear of the
house across the road. A face was looking at him. A boy, about his age, wrapped in
an out-sized wool coat with the sleeves turned back. He stood up. He ran across the
road and up the drive. No one there. He looked toward the house and then he ran to
the bottom of the yard through the dead weeds to a still black creek. Come back, he
called. I wont hurt you. He was standing there crying when his father came sprinting
across the road and seized him by the arm.
What are you doing? he hissed. What are you doing?
There's a little boy, Papa. There's a little boy.
There's no little boy. What are you doing?
Yes there is. I saw him.
I told you to stay put. Didnt I tell you? Now we've got to go. Come on.
I just wanted to see him, Papa. I just wanted to see him.
The man took him by the arm and they went back up through the yard. The boy
would not stop crying and he would not stop looking back. Come on, the man said.
We've got to go.
I want to see him, Papa.
There's no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want?
I dont care, the boy said, sobbing. I dont care.
The man stopped. He stopped and squatted and held him. I'm sorry, he said.
Dont say that. You musnt say that.
They made their way back through the wet streets to the viaduct and collected the
coats and the blanket from the car and went on to the railway embankment where
they climbed up and crossed the tracks into the woods and got the cart and headed
out to the highway.
What if that little boy doesnt have anybody to take care of him? he said. What if
he doesnt have a papa?
There are people there. They were just hiding.
He pushed the cart out into the road and stood there. He could see the tracks of
the truck through the wet ash, faint and washed out, but there. He thought that he
could smell them. The boy was pulling at his coat. Papa, he said.
What?
I'm afraid for that little boy.
I know. But he'll be all right.
We should go get him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. We could
take him and we could take the dog. The dog could catch something to eat.
We cant.
And I'd give that little boy half of my food.
Stop it. We cant.
He was crying again. What about the little boy? he sobbed. What about the little
boy?
At a crossroads they sat in the dusk and he spread out the pieces of the map in the
road and studied them. He put his finger down. This is us, he said. Right here. The
boy wouldnt look. He sat studying the twisted matrix of routes in red and black with
his finger at the junction where he thought that they might be. As if he'd see their
small selves crouching there. We could go back, the boy said softly. It's not so far.
It's not too late.
They made a dry camp in a woodlot not far from the road. They could find no
sheltered place to make a fire that would not be seen so they made none. They ate
each of them two of the cornmeal cakes and they slept together huddled on the
ground in the coats and blankets. He held the child and after a while the child
stopped shivering and after a while he slept.
The dog that he remembers followed us for two days. I tried to coax it to come but
it would not. I made a noose of wire to catch it. There were three cartridges in the
pistol. None to spare. She walked away down the road. The boy looked after her
and then he looked at me and then he looked at the dog and he began to cry and to
beg for the dog's life and I promised I would not hurt the dog. A trellis of a dog with
the hide stretched over it. The next day it was gone. That is the dog he remembers.
He doesnt remember any little boys.
He'd put a handful of dried raisins in a cloth in his pocket and at noon they sat in the
dead grass by the side of the road and ate them. The boy looked at him. That's all
there is, isnt it? he said.
Yes.
Are we going to die now?
No.
What are we going to do?
We're going to drink some water. Then we're going to keep going down the road.
Okay.
In the evening they tramped out across a field trying to find a place where their fire
would not be seen. Dragging the cart behind them over the ground. So little of
promise in that country. Tomorrow they would find something to eat. Night
overtook them on a muddy road. They crossed into a field and plodded on toward a
distant stand of trees skylighted stark and black against the last of the visible world.
By the time they got there it was dark of night. He held the boy's hand and kicked up
limbs and brush and got a fire going. The wood was damp but he shaved the dead
bark off with his knife and he stacked brush and sticks all about to dry in the heat.
Then he spread the sheet of plastic on the ground and got the coats and blankets
from the cart and he took off their damp and muddy shoes and they sat there in
silence with their hands out-held to the flames. He tried to think of something to say
but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull
despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names
of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds.
Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than
he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its
referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat.
In time to wink out forever.
They slept through the night in their exhaustion and in the morning the fire was dead
and black on the ground. He pulled on his muddy shoes and went to gather wood,
blowing on his cupped hands. So cold. It could be November. It could be later. He
got a fire going and walked out to the edge of the woodlot and stood looking over
the countryside. The dead fields. A barn in the distance.
They hiked out along the dirt road and along a hill where a house had once stood. It
had burned long ago. The rusted shape of a furnace standing in the black water of
the cellar. Sheets of charred metal roofing crumpled in the fields where the wind had
blown it. In the barn they scavenged a few handfuls of some grain he did not
recognize out of the dusty floor of a metal hopper and stood eating it dust and all.
Then they set out across the fields toward the road.
They followed a stone wall past the remains of an orchard. The trees in their ordered
rows gnarled and black and the fallen limbs thick on the ground. He stopped and
looked across the fields. Wind in the east. The soft ash moving in the furrows.
Stopping. Moving again. He'd seen it all before. Shapes of dried blood in the stubble
grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled
away. The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved
with their taut grins and shrunken eyes. They wore gold rings in their leather ears and
in the wind their sparse and ratty hair twisted about on their skulls. The teeth in their
sockets like dental molds, the crude tattoos etched in some homebrewed woad
faded in the beggared sunlight. Spiders, swords, targets. A dragon. Runic slogans,
creeds misspelled. Old scars with old motifs stitched along their borders. The heads
not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their skins and the raw skulls painted
and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone skull had the plate
sutures etched carefully in ink like a blueprint for assembly. He looked back at the
boy. Standing by the cart in the wind. He looked at the dry grass where it moved and
at the dark and twisted trees in their rows. A few shreds of clothing blown against
the wall, everything gray in the ash. He walked along the wall passing the masks in a
last review and through a stile and on to where the boy was waiting. He put his arm
around his shoulder. Okay, he said. Let's go.
He'd come to see a message in each such late history, a message and a warning, and
so this tableau of the slain and the devoured did prove to be. He woke in the
morning and turned over in the blanket and looked back down the road through the
trees the way they'd come in time to see the marchers appear four abreast. Dressed
in clothing of every description, all wearing red scarves at their necks. Red or
orange, as close to red as they could find. He put his hand on the boy's head. Shh,
he said.
What is it, Papa?
People on the road. Keep your face down. Dont look.
No smoke from the dead fire. Nothing to be seen of the cart. He wallowed into
the ground and lay watching across his forearm. An army in tennis shoes, tramping.
Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist.
Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends
with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like
wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. Shh, he said. Shh.
The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades
hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge up-country. The boy lay with his
face in his arms, terrified. They passed two hundred feet away, the ground
shuddering lightly. Tramping. Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness
and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number,
some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclot...
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