The road (2 page)

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.