The road (15 page)

Long before they reached the coast their stores
were all but gone. The country was stripped and plundered years ago and they
found nothing in the houses and buildings by the roadside. He found a telephone
directory in a filling station and he wrote the name of the town on their map
with a pencil. They sat on the curb in front of the building and ate crackers
and looked for the town but they couldnt find it. He sorted through the
sections and looked again. Finally he showed the boy. They were some fifty
miles west of where he'd thought. He drew stick figures on the map. This is us,
he said. The boy traced the route to the sea with his finger. How long will it
take us to get there? he said. Two weeks. Three. Is it blue? The sea? I dont
know. It used to be. The boy nodded. He sat looking at the map. The man watched
him. He thought he knew what that was about. He'd pored over maps as a child,
keeping one finger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his
family in the phone directory. Themselves among others, everything in its
place. Justified in the world. Come on, he said. We should go.

In the late afternoon it began to rain. They left
the road and took a dirt drive through a field and spent the night in a shed.
The shed had a concrete floor and at the far end stood some empty steel drums.
He blocked the doors with the drums and built a fire in the floor and he made beds
out of some flattened cardboard boxes. The rain drummed all night on the steel
roof overhead. When he woke the fire had burned down and it was very cold. The
boy was sitting up wrapped in his blanket. What is it? Nothing. I had a bad
dream. What did you dream about? Nothing.

Are you okay? No.

He put his arms around him and held him. It's
okay, he said. I was crying. But you didnt wake up. I'm sorry. I was just so
tired. I meant in the dream.

In the morning when he woke the rain had stopped.
He listened to the slack drip of water. He shifted his hips on the hard
concrete and looked out through the boards at the gray country. The boy was
still sleeping. Water dripped in puddles in the floor. Small bubbles appeared
and skated and vanished again. In a town in the piedmont they'd slept in a
place like this and listened to the rain. There was an oldfashioned drugstore
there with a black marble counter and chrome stools with tattered plastic seats
patched with electrical tape. The pharmacy was looted but the store itself was
oddly intact. Expensive electronic equipment sat unmolested on the shelves. He
stood looking the place over. Sundries. Notions. What are these? He took the
boy's hand and led him out but the boy had already seen it. A human head
beneath a cakebell at the end of the counter. Dessicated. Wearing a ballcap.
Dried eyes turned sadly inward. Did he dream this? He did not. He rose and
knelt and blew at the coals and dragged up the burned board ends and got the
fire going.

There are other good guys. You said so. Yes.

So where are they? They're hiding. Who are they
hiding from? From each other. Are there lots of them? We dont know. But some.
Some. Yes. Is that true? Yes. That's true. But it might not be true. I think it's
true. Okay.

You dont believe me. I believe you. Okay.

I always believe you. I dont think so. Yes I do. I
have to.

They hiked back down to the highway through the
mud. Smell of earth and wet ash in the rain. Dark water in the roadside ditch.
Sucking out of an iron culvert into a pool. In a yard a plastic deer. Late the
day following they entered a small town where three men stepped from behind a
truck and stood in the road before them. Emaciated, clothed in rags. Holding
lengths of pipe. What have you got in the basket? He leveled the pistol at
them. They stood. The boy clung to his coat. No one spoke. He set the cart
forward again and they moved to the side of the road. He had the boy take the
cart and he walked backwards keeping the pistol on them. He tried to look like
any common migratory killer but his heart was hammering and he knew he was
going to start coughing. They drifted back into the road and stood watching. He
put the pistol in his belt and turned and took the cart. At the top of the rise
when he looked back they were still standing there. He told the boy to push the
cart and he walked out through a yard to where he could see back down the road
but now they were gone. The boy was very scared. He laid the gun on top of the
tarp and took the cart and they went on.

They lay in a field until dark watching the road
but no one came. It was very cold. When it was too dark to see they got the
cart and stumbled back to the road and he got the blankets out and they wrapped
themselves up and went on. Feeling out the paving under their feet. One wheel
on the cart had developed a periodic squeak but there was nothing to be done
about it. They struggled on for some hours and then floundered off through the
roadside brush and lay shivering and exhausted on the cold ground and slept
till day. When he woke he was sick.

He'd come down with a fever and they lay in the
woods like fugitives. Nowhere to build a fire. Nowhere safe. The boy sat in the
leaves watching him. His eyes brimming. Are you going to die, Papa? he said.
Are you going to die? No. I'm just sick. I'm really scared. I know. It's all
right. I'm going to get better. You'll see.

His dreams brightened. The vanished world
returned. Kin long dead washed up and cast fey sidewise looks upon him. None
spoke. He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where
he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table
a small lamp burned. On the table books and papers. It had begun to rain and a
cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the cafe
awning. There was a woman at a table there with her head in her hands. Years
later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in
pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their
thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the
heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing
predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these
things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last
look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.

Three days. Four. He slept poorly. The racking
cough woke him. Rasping suck of air. I'm sorry, he said to the pitiless dark.
It's okay said the boy.

He got the little oillamp lit and left it sitting
on a rock and he rose and shuffled out through the leaves wrapped in his
blankets. The boy whispered for him not to go. Just a little ways, he said. Not
far. I'll hear you if you call. If the lamp should blow out he could not find
his way back. He sat in the leaves at the top of the hill and looked into the
blackness. Nothing to see. No wind. In the past when he walked out like that
and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where
the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he'd sometimes see a light. Dim and
shapeless in the murk. Across a river or deep in the blackened quadrants of a
burned city. In the morning sometimes he'd return with the binoculars and glass
the countryside for any sign of smoke but he never saw any.

Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough
men. The boy's age. A little older. Watching while they opened up the rocky
hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of
serpents perhaps a hundred in number. Collected there for a common warmth. The
dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like
the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on
them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of
it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some
crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker
recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched
them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves and they
disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home
to their suppers.

One night the boy woke from a dream and would not
tell him what it was. You dont have to tell me, the man said. It's all right.
I'm scared. It's all right. No it's not. It's just a dream. I'm really scared.
I know. The boy turned away. The man held him. Listen to me, he said. What.

When your dreams are of some world that never was
or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have
given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you.

When they set out again he was very weak and for
all his speeches he'd become more faint of heart than he had been in years.
Filthy with diarrhea, leaning on the bar handle of the shopping cart. He looked
at the boy out of his sunken haggard eyes. Some new distance between them. He
could feel it. In two day's time they came upon a country where firestorms had
passed leaving mile on mile of burn. A cake of ash in the roadway inches deep
and hard going with the cart. The blacktop underneath had buckled in the heat
and then set back again. He leaned on the handle and looked down the long
straight of way. The thin trees down. The waterways a gray sludge. A blackened
jackstraw land.

Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began
to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago.
Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled
shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the
tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half
mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling. He put his hand on
the boy's shoulder. Take my hand, he said. I dont think you should see this.
What you put in your head is there forever? Yes.

It's okay Papa. It's okay? They're already there.
I dont want you to look. They'll still be there. He stopped and leaned on the
cart. He looked down the road and he looked at the boy. So strangely
untroubled. Why dont we just go on, the boy said. Yes. Okay. They were trying
to get away werent they Papa? Yes. They were. Why didnt they leave the road?
They couldnt. Everything was on fire.

They picked their way among the mummied figures.
The black skin stretched upon the bones and their faces split and shrunken on
their skulls. Like victims of some ghastly envacuuming. Passing them in silence
down that silent corridor through the drifting ash where they struggled forever
in the road's cold coagulate.

They passed through the site of a roadside hamlet
burned to nothing. Some metal storage tanks, a few standing flues of blackened
brick. There were gray slagpools of melted glass in the ditches and the raw
lightwires lay in rusting skeins for miles along the edge of the roadway. He
was coughing every step of it. He saw the boy watching him. He was what the boy
thought about. Well should he.

They sat in the road and ate leftover skilletbread
hard as biscuit and their last can of tunafish. He opened a can of prunes and
they passed it between them. The boy held the tin up and drained the last of
the juice and then sat with the tin in his lap and passed his forefinger around
the inside of it and put his finger in his mouth. Dont cut your finger, the man
said. You always say that. I know. He watched him lick the lid of the tin. With
great care. Like a cat licking its reflection in a glass. Stop watching me, he
said. Okay.

He folded down the lid of the can and set it in
the road before him. What? he said. What is it? Nothing.

Tell me. I think there's someone following us.
That's what I thought. That's what you thought? Yes. That's what I thought you
were going to say. What do you want to do? I dont know. What do you think?
Let's just go. We should hide our trash. Because they'll think we have lots of
food. Yes.

And they'll try to kill us. They wont kill us.
They might try to. We're okay. Okay.

I think we should lay in the weeds for them. See
who they are. And how many. And how many. Yes. Okay.

If we can get across the creek we could go up on
the bluffs there and watch the road. Okay.

We'll find a place. They rose and piled their
blankets in the cart. Get the tin, the man said.

It was late into the long twilight before the road
crossed the creek. They trundled over the bridge and pushed the cart out
through the woods looking for some place to leave it where it would not be
seen. They stood looking back at the road in the dusk. What if we put it under
the bridge? the boy said. What if they go down there for water? How far back do
you think they are? I dont know. It's getting dark. I know. What if they go by
in the dark? Let's just find a place where we can watch. It's not dark yet.

They hid the cart and went up the slope among the
rocks carrying their blankets and they dug themselves in where they could see
back down the road through the trees for perhaps half a mile. They were
sheltered from the wind and they wrapped themselves in their blankets and took
turns watching but after a while the boy was asleep. He was almost asleep
himself when he saw a figure appear at the top of the road and stand there.
Soon two more appeared. Then a fourth. They stood and grouped. Then they came
on. He could just make them out in the deep dusk. He thought they might stop
soon and he wished he'd found a place further from the road. If they stopped at
the bridge it would be a long cold night. They came down the road and crossed
the bridge. Three men and a woman. The woman walked with a waddling gait and as
she approached he could see that she was pregnant. The men carried packs on
their backs and the woman carried a small cloth suitcase. All of them wretched
looking beyond description. Their breath steaming softly. They crossed the
bridge and continued on down the road and vanished one by one into the waiting
darkness.