The road (6 page)

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.