The road (21 page)

They made a dry camp with no fire. He sorted out
cans for their supper and warmed them over the gas burner and they ate and the
boy said nothing. The man tried to see his face in the blue light from the
burner. I wasnt going to kill him, he said. But the boy didnt answer. They
rolled themselves in the blankets and lay there in the dark. He thought he
could hear the sea but perhaps it was just the wind. He could tell by his
breathing that the boy was awake and after a while the boy said: But we did
kill him.

In the morning they ate and set out. The cart was
so loaded it was hard to push and one of the wheels was giving out. The road
bent its way along the coast, dead sheaves of saltgrass overhanging the
pavement. The leadcolored sea shifting in the distance. The silence. He woke
that night with the dull carbon light of the crossing moon beyond the murk
making the shapes of the trees almost visible and he turned away coughing.
Smell of rain out there. The boy was awake. You have to talk to me, he said.
I'm trying. I'm sorry I woke you. It's okay. He got up and walked out to the
road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low
rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate
and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the
dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What
time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The
silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded
cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones
where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What
will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his
small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable
and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

He went through the cans again one by one, holding
them in his hand and squeezing them like a man checking for ripeness at a
fruitstand. He sorted out two he thought questionable and packed away the rest
and packed the cart and they set out upon the road again. In three days they
came to a small port town and they hid the cart in a garage behind a house and
piled old boxes over it and then sat in the house to see if anyone would come.
No one did. He looked through the cabinets but there was nothing there. He
needed vitamin D for the boy or he was going to get rickets. He stood at the
sink and looked out down the driveway. Light the color of washwater congealing
in the dirty panes of glass. The boy sat slumped at the table with his head in
his arms.

They walked through the town and down to the
docks. They saw no one. He had the pistol in the pocket of his coat and he
carried the flaregun in his hand. They walked out on the pier, the rough boards
dark with tar and fastened down with spikes to the timbers underneath. Wooden
bollards. Faint smell of salt and creosote coming in off the bay. On the far
shore a row of warehouses and the shape of a tanker red with rust. A tall
gantry crane against the sullen sky. There's no one here, he said. The boy
didnt answer.

They wheeled the cart through the back streets and
across the railroad tracks and came into the main road again at the far edge of
the town. As they passed the last of the sad wooden buildings something
whistled past his head and clattered off the street and broke up against the
wall of the block building on the other side. He grabbed the boy and fell on
top of him and grabbed the cart to pull it to them. It tipped and fell over spilling
the tarp and blankets into the street. In an upper window of the house he could
see a man drawing a bow on them and he pushed the boy's head down and tried to
cover him with his body. He heard the dull thwang of the bowstring and felt a
sharp hot pain in his leg. Oh you bastard, he said. You bastard. He clawed the
blankets to one side and lunged and grabbed the flaregun and raised up and
cocked it and rested his arm on the side of the cart. The boy was clinging to
him. When the man stepped back into the frame of the window to draw the bow
again he fired. The flare went rocketing up toward the window in a long white
arc and then they could hear the man screaming. He grabbed the boy and pushed
him down and dragged the blankets over the top of him. Dont move, he said. Dont
move and dont look. He pulled the blankets out into the street looking for the
case for the flarepistol. It finally slid out of the cart and he snatched it up
and opened it and took out the shells and reloaded the pistol and breeched it
shut and put the rest of the loads in his pocket. Stay just like you are, he
whispered. He patted the boy through the blankets and rose and ran limping
across the street.

He entered the house through the back door with
the flare-gun leveled at his waist. The house was stripped out to the wall
studs. He stepped through into the livingroom and stood at the stair landing.
He listened for movement in the upper rooms. He looked out the front window to
where the cart lay in the street and then he went up the stairs.

A woman was sitting in the corner holding the man.
She'd taken off her coat to cover him. As soon as she saw him she began to
curse him. The flare had burned out in the floor leaving a patch of white ash
and there was a faint smell of burnt wood in the room. He crossed the room and
looked out the window. The woman's eyes followed him. Scrawny, lank gray hair.
Who else is up here? She didnt answer. He stepped past her and went through the
rooms. His leg was bleeding badly. He could feel his trousers sticking to the
skin. He went back into the front room. Where's the bow? he said. I dont have
it. Where is it? I dont know. They left you here, didnt they? I left myself
here. He turned and went limping down the stairs and he opened the front door
and went out into the street backward watching the house. When he got to the
cart he pulled it upright and piled their things back in. Stay close, he
whispered. Stay close.

They put up in a store building at the end of the
town. He wheeled the cart through and into a room at the rear and shut the door
and pushed the cart against it sideways. He dug out the burner and the tank of
gas and lit the burner and set it in the floor and then he unbuckled his belt
and took off the bloodstained trousers. The boy watched. The arrow had cut a
gash just above his knee about three inches long. It was still bleeding and his
whole upper leg was discolored and he could see that the cut was deep. Some
homemade broadhead beaten out of strapiron, an old spoon, God knows what. He looked
at the boy. See if you can find the first-aid kit, he said. The boy didnt move.
Get the first-aid kit, damn it. Dont just sit there. He jumped up and went to
the door and began digging under the tarp and the blankets piled in the cart.
He came back with the kit and gave it to the man and the man took it without
comment and set it in the concrete floor in front of him and unsnapped the
catches and opened it. He reached and turned up the burner for the light. Bring
me the water bottle, he said. The boy brought the bottle and the man unscrewed
the lid and poured water over the wound and held it shut between his fingers
while he wiped away the blood. He swabbed the wound with disinfectant and
opened a plastic envelope with his teeth and took out a small hooked suture
needle and a coil of silk thread and sat holding the silk to the light while he
threaded it through the needle's eye. He took a clamp from the kit and caught
the needle in the jaws and locked them and set about suturing the wound. He
worked quickly and he took no great pains about it. The boy was crouching in
the floor. He looked at him and he bent to the sutures again. You dont have to
watch, he said. Is it okay? Yeah. It's okay. Does it hurt? Yes. It hurts. He
ran the knot down the thread and pulled it taut and cut off the silk with the
scissors from the kit and looked at the boy. The boy was looking at what he'd
done. I'm sorry I yelled at you. He looked up. That's okay, Papa. Let's start
over. Okay.

In the morning it was raining and a hard wind was
rattling the glass at the rear of the building. He stood looking out. A steel
dock half collapsed and submerged in the bay. The wheelhouses of sunken
fishingboats standing out of the gray chop. Nothing moving out there. Anything
that could move had long been blown away. His leg was throbbing and he pulled
away the dressing and disinfected the wound and looked at it. The flesh swollen
and discolored in the truss of the black stitching. He dressed it and pulled
his bloodstiffened trousers on.

They spent the day there, sitting among the boxes
and crates. You have to talk to me, he said. I'm talking. Are you sure? I'm
talking now. Do you want me to tell you a story? No.

Why not? The boy looked at him and looked away.
Why not? Those stories are not true. They dont have to be true. They're
stories. Yes. But in the stories we're always helping people and we dont help
people. Why dont you tell me a story? I dont want to. Okay.

I dont have any stories to tell. You could tell me
a story about yourself. You already know all the stories about me. You were
there. You have stories inside that I dont know about. You mean like dreams?
Like dreams. Or just things that you think about. Yeah, but stories are
supposed to be happy. They dont have to be. You always tell happy stories. You
dont have any happy ones? They're more like real life. But my stories are not.
Your stories are not. No. The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad? What do
you think? Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but
we're still here. Yeah.

You dont think that's so great. It's okay.

They'd pulled a worktable up to the windows and
spread out their blankets and the boy was lying there on his stomach looking
out across the bay. The man sat with his leg stretched out. On the blanket
between them were the two pistols and the box of flares. After a while the man
said: I think it's pretty good. It's a pretty good story. It counts for
something. It's okay, Papa. I just want to have a little quiet time. What about
dreams? You used to tell me dreams sometimes. I dont want to talk about
anything. Okay.

I dont have good dreams anyway. They're always
about something bad happening. You said that was okay because good dreams are
not a good sign. Maybe. I dont know. When you wake up coughing you walk out
along the road or somewhere but I can still hear you coughing. I'm sorry. One
time I heard you crying. I know. So if I shouldnt cry you shouldnt cry either.
Okay.

Is your leg going to get better? Yes.

You're not just saying that. No.

Because it looks really hurt. It's not that bad.
The man was trying to kill us. Wasnt he. Yes. He was. Did you kill him? No.

Is that the truth? Yes.

Okay. Is that all right? Yes.

I thought you didnt want to talk? I dont.

They left two days later, the man limping along
behind the cart and the boy keeping close to his side until they cleared the
outskirts of the town. The road ran along the flat gray coast and there were
drifts of sand in the road that the winds had left there. It made for heavy
going and they had to shovel their way in places with a plank they carried in
the lower rack of the cart. They walked out down the beach and sat in the lee
of the dunes and studied the map. They'd brought the burner with them and they
heated water and made tea and sat wrapped in their blankets against the wind.
Downshore the weathered timbers of an ancient ship. Gray and sandscrubbed
beams, old hand-turned scarpbolts. The pitted iron hardware deep lilac in
color, smeltered in some bloomery in Cadiz or Bristol and beaten out on a
blackened anvil, good to last three hundred years against the sea. The
following day they passed through the boarded ruins of a seaside resort and
took the road inland through a pine wood, the long straight blacktop drifted in
pineneedles, the wind in the dark trees.

He sat in the road at noon in the best light there
would be and snipped the sutures with the scissors and put the scissors back in
the kit and took out the clamp. Then he set about pulling the small black
threads from his skin, pressing down with the flat of his thumb. The boy sat in
the road watching. The man fastened the clamp over the ends of the threads and
pulled them out one by one. Small pin-lets of blood. When he was done he put
away the clamp and taped gauze over the wound and then stood and pulled his
trousers up and handed the kit to the boy to put away. That hurt, didnt it? the
boy said. Yes. It did. Are you real brave? Just medium. What's the bravest
thing you ever did? He spat into the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this
morning, he said. Really?

No. Dont listen to me. Come on, let's go.

In the evening the murky shape of another coastal
city, the cluster of tall buildings vaguely askew. He thought the iron
armatures had softened in the heat and then reset again to leave the buildings
standing out of true. The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like
icing on a cake. They went on. In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the
black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs
of birds, the sun.