The road (10 page)

He woke in the dark of the woods in the leaves
shivering violently. He sat up and felt about for the boy. He held his hand to
the thin ribs. Warmth and movement. Heartbeat.

When he woke again it was almost light enough to
see. He threw back the blanket and stood and almost fell. He steadied himself
and tried to see about him in the gray woods. How far had they come? He walked
to the top of a rise and crouched and watched the day accrue. The chary dawn,
the cold illucid world. In the distance what looked to be a pine wood, raw and
black. A colorless world of wire and crepe. He went back and got the boy and
made him sit up. His head kept slumping forward. We have to go, he said. We
have to go.

He carried him across the field, stopping to rest
each fifty counted steps. When he got to the pines he knelt and laid him in the
gritty duff and covered him with the blankets and sat watching him. He looked
like something out of a deathcamp. Starved, exhausted, sick with fear. He
leaned and kissed him and got up and walked out to the edge of the woods and
then he walked the perimeter round to see if they were safe.

Across the fields to the south he could see the
shape of a house and a barn. Beyond the trees the curve of a road. A long drive
with dead grass. Dead ivy along a stone wall and a mailbox and a fence along
the road and the dead trees beyond. Cold and silent. Shrouded in the carbon
fog. He walked back and sat beside the boy. It was desperation that had led him
to such carelessness and he knew that he could not do that again. No matter
what.

The boy wouldnt wake for hours. Still if he did
he'd be terrified. It had happened before. He thought about waking him but he
knew that he wouldnt remember anything if he did. He'd trained him to lie in
the woods like a fawn. For how long? In the end he took the pistol from his
belt and laid it alongside him under the blankets and rose and set out.

He came upon the barn from the hill above it,
stopping to watch and to listen. He made his way down through the ruins of an
old apple orchard, black and gnarly stumps, dead grass to his knees. He stood
in the door of the barn and listened. Pale slatted light. He walked along the
dusty stalls. He stood in the center of the barn bay and listened but there was
nothing. He climbed the ladder to the loft and he was so weak he wasnt sure he
was going to make it to the top. He walked down to the end of the loft and
looked out the high gable window at the country below, the pieced land dead and
gray, the fence, the road.

There were bales of hay in the loft floor and he
squatted and sorted a handful of seeds from them and sat chewing. Coarse and
dry and dusty. They had to contain some nutrition. He rose and rolled two of
the bales across the floor and let them fall into the bay below. Two dusty
thumps. He went back to the gable and stood studying what he could see of the
house beyond the corner of the barn. Then he climbed back down the ladder.

The grass between the house and the barn looked
untrodden. He crossed to the porch. The porch screening rotted and falling
away. A child's bicycle. The kitchen door stood open and he crossed the porch
and stood in the doorway. Cheap plywood paneling curled with damp. Collapsing
into the room. A red formica table. He crossed the room and opened the
refrigerator door. Something sat on one of the racks in a coat of gray fur. He
shut the door. Trash everywhere. He took a broom from the corner and poked
about with the handle. He climbed onto the counter and felt his way through the
dust on top of the cabinets. A mousetrap. A packet of something. He blew away
the dust. It was a grape flavored powder to make drinks with. He put it in the
pocket of his coat.

He went through the house room by room. He found
nothing. A spoon in a bedside drawer. He put that in his pocket. He thought
there might be some clothes in a closet or some bedding but there wasnt. He
went back out and crossed to the garage. He sorted through tools. Rakes. A
shovel. Jars of nails and bolts on a shelf. A boxcutter. He held it to the
light and looked at the rusty blade and put it back. Then he picked it up
again. He took a screwdriver from a coffee can and opened the handle. Inside
were four new blades. He took out the old blade and laid it on the shelf and
put in one of the new ones and screwed the handle back together and retracted
the blade and put the cutter in his pocket. Then he picked up the screwdriver
and put that in his pocket as well.

He walked back out to the barn. He had a piece of
cloth that he intended to use to collect seeds from the haybales but when he
got to the barn he stopped and stood listening to the wind. A creaking of tin
somewhere high in the roof above him. There was yet a lingering odor of cows in
the barn and he stood there thinking about cows and he realized they were
extinct. Was that true? There could be a cow somewhere being fed and cared for.
Could there? Fed what? Saved for what? Beyond the open door the dead grass
rasped dryly in the wind. He walked out and stood looking across the fields
toward the pine wood where the boy lay sleeping. He walked up through the
orchard and then he stopped again. He'd stepped on something. He took a step
back and knelt and parted the grass with his hands. It was an apple. He picked
it up and held it to the light. Hard and brown and shriveled. He wiped it with
the cloth and bit into it. Dry and almost tasteless. But an apple. He ate it
entire, seeds and all. He held the stem between his thumb and forefinger and
let it drop. Then he went treading softly through the grass. His feet were
still wrapped in the remnants of the coat and the shreds of tarp and he sat and
untied them and stuffed the wrappings in his pocket and went down the rows
barefoot. By the time he got to the bottom of the orchard he had four more
apples and he put them in his pocket and came back. He went row by row till
he'd trod a puzzle in the grass. He'd more apples than he could carry. He felt
out the spaces about the trunks and filled his pockets full and he piled apples
in the hood of his parka behind his head and carried apples stacked along his
forearm against his chest. He dumped them in a pile at the door of the barn and
sat there and wrapped up his numb feet.

In the mudroom off the kitchen he'd seen an old
wicker basket full of masonjars. He dragged the basket out into the floor and
set the jars out of it and then tipped over the basket and tapped out the dirt.
Then he stopped. What had he seen? A drainpipe. A trellis. The dark serpentine
of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise upon a graph.
He stood up and walked back through the kitchen and out into the yard and stood
looking at the house. The windows giving back the gray and nameless day. The
drainpipe ran down the corner of the porch. He was still holding the basket and
he set it down in the grass and climbed the steps again. The pipe came down the
corner post and into a concrete tank. He brushed away the trash and rotted bits
of screening from the cover. He went back into the kitchen and got the broom
and came out and swept the cover clean and set the broom in the corner and
lifted the cover from the tank. Inside was a tray filled with a wet gray sludge
from the roof mixed with a compost of dead leaves and twigs. He lifted out the
tray and set it in the floor. Underneath was white gravel. He scooped back the
gravel with his hand. The tank beneath was filled with charcoal, pieces burned
out of whole sticks and limbs in carbon effigies of the trees themselves. He
put the tray back. In the floor was a green brass ringpull. He reached and got
the broom and swept away the ash. There were sawlines in the boards. He swept
the boards clean and knelt and hooked his fingers in the ring and lifted the
trap door and swung it open. Down there in the darkness was a cistern filled
with water so sweet that he could smell it. He lay in the floor on his stomach
and reached down. He could just touch the water. He scooted forward and reached
again and laved up a handful of it and smelled and tasted it and then drank. He
lay there a long time, lifting up the water to his mouth a palmful at a time.
Nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good.

He went back to the mudroom and returned with two
of the jars and an old blue enameled pan. He wiped out the pan and dipped it
full of water and used it to clean the jars. Then he reached down and sank one
of the jars till it was full and raised it up dripping. The water was so clear.
He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some
slow hydraulic axis. He tipped the jar and drank and he drank slowly but still
he drank nearly the whole jar. He sat there with his stomach bloated. He could
have drunk more but he didnt. He poured the remaining water into the other jar
and rinsed it out and he filled both jars and then let down the wooden cover
over the cistern and rose and with his pockets full of apples and carrying the
jars of water he set out across the fields toward the pine wood.

He was gone longer than he'd meant to be and he
hurried his steps the best he could, the water swinging and gurgling in the
shrunken swag of his gut. He stopped to rest and began again. When he got to
the woods the boy did not look as if he'd even stirred and he knelt and set the
jars carefully in the duff and picked up the pistol and put it in his belt and
then he just sat there watching him.

They spent the afternoon sitting wrapped in the
blankets and eating apples. Sipping the water from the jars. He took the packet
of grape flavor from his pocket and opened it and poured it into the jar and
stirred it and gave it to the boy. You did good Papa, he said. He slept while
the boy kept watch and in the evening they got out their shoes and put them on
and went down to the farmhouse and collected the rest of the apples. They
filled three jars with water and screwed on the two-piece caps from a box of
them he'd found on a shelf in the mudroom. Then he wrapped everything in one of
the blankets and packed it into the knapsack and tied the other blankets across
the top of the knapsack and shouldered it up. They stood in the door watching
the light draw down over the world to the west. Then they went down the drive
and set out upon the road again.

The boy hung on to his coat and he kept to the edge
of the road and tried to feel out the pavement under his feet in the dark. In
the distance he could hear thunder and after a while there were dim shudderings
of light ahead of them. He got out the plastic sheeting from the knapsack but
there was hardly enough of it left to cover them and after a while it began to
rain. They stumbled along side by side. There was nowhere to go. They had the
hoods of their coats up but the coats were getting wet and heavy from the rain.
He stopped in the road and tried to rearrange the tarp. The boy was shaking
badly. You're freezing, arent you? Yes.

If we stop we'll get really cold. I'm really cold
now. What do you want to do? Can we stop? Yes. Okay. We can stop.

It was as long a night as he could remember out of
a great plenty of such nights. They lay on the wet ground by the side of the
road under the blankets with the rain rattling on the tarp and he held the boy
and after a while the boy stopped shaking and after a while he slept. The
thunder trundled away to the north and ceased and there was just the rain. He
slept and woke and the rain slackened and after a while it stopped. He wondered
if it was even midnight. He was coughing and it got worse and it woke the
child. The dawn was a long time coming. He raised up from time to time to look
to the east and after a while it was day.

He wrapped their coats each in turn around the
trunk of a small tree and twisted out the water. He had the boy take off his
clothes and he wrapped him in one of the blankets and while he stood shivering
he wrung the water out of his clothes and passed them back. The ground where
they'd slept was dry and they sat there with the blankets draped over them and
ate apples and drank water. Then they set out upon the road again, slumped and
cowled and shivering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find
their keep.

By evening they at least were dry. They studied
the pieces of map but he'd little notion of where they were. He stood at a rise
in the road and tried to take his bearings in the twilight. They left the pike
and took a narrow road through the country and came at last upon a bridge and a
dry creek and they crawled down the bank and huddled underneath. Can we have a
fire? the boy said. We dont have a lighter. The boy looked away. I'm sorry. I
dropped it. I didnt want to tell you. That's okay. I'll find us some flint.
I've been looking. And we've still got the little bottle of gasoline. Okay.

Are you very cold? I'm okay. The boy lay with his
head in the man's lap. After a while he said: They're going to kill those
people, arent they? Yes.

Why do they have to do that? I dont know. Are they
going to eat them? I dont know. They're going to eat them, arent they? Yes.

And we couldnt help them because then they'd eat
us too. Yes.

And that's why we couldnt help them. Yes.