Cormac McCarthy

by The Road

  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 o
f 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 wretchedlooking 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.

  It was a long night anyway. When it was light enough to see he pulled on his shoes and rose and wrapped one of the blankets around him and walked out and stood looking at the road below. The bare ironcolored wood and the fields beyond. The corrugate shapes of old harrowtroughs still faintly visible. Cotton perhaps. The boy was sleeping and he went down to the cart and got the map and the bottle of water and a can of fruit from their small stores and he came back and sat in the blankets and studied the map.

  You always think we’ve gone further than we have.

  He moved his finger. Here then.

  More.

  Here.

  Okay.

  He folded up the limp and rotting pages. Okay, he said.

  They sat looking out through the trees at the road.

  Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

  The country went from pine to liveoak and pine. Magnolias. Trees as dead as any. He picked up one of the heavy leaves and crushed it in his hand to powder and let the powder sift through his fingers.

  On the road early the day following. They’d not gone far when the boy pulled at his sleeve and they stopped and stood. A thin stem of smoke was rising out of the woods ahead. They stood watching.

  What should we do, Papa?

  Maybe we should take a look.

  Let’s just keep going.

  What if they’re going the same way we are?

  So? the boy said.

  We’re going to have them behind us. I’d like to know who it is.

  What if it’s an army?

  It’s just a small fire.

  Why dont we just wait?

  We cant wait. We’re almost out of food. We have to keep going.

  They left the cart in the woods and he checked the rotation of the rounds in the cylinder. The wooden and the true. They stood listening. The smoke stood vertically in the still air. No sound of any kind. The leaves were soft from the recent rains and quiet underfoot. He turned and looked at the boy. The small dirty face wide with fear. They circled the fire at a distance, the boy holding on to his hand. He crouched and put his arm around him and they listened for a long time. I think they’ve gone, he whispered.

  What?

  I think they’re gone. They probably had a lookout.

  It could be a trap, Papa.

  Okay. Let’s wait a while.

  They waited. They could see the smoke through the trees. A wind had begun to trouble the top of the spire and the smoke shifted and they could smell it. They could smell something cooking. Let’s circle around, the man said.

  Can I hold your hand?

  Yes. Of course you can.

  The woods were just burned trunks. There was nothing to see. I think they saw us, the man said. I think they saw us and ran away. They saw we had a gun.

  They left their food cooking.

  Yes.

  Let’s take a look.

  It’s really scary, Papa.

  There’s no one here. It’s okay.

  They walked into the little clearing, the boy clutching his hand. They’d taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I’m sorry, he whispered. I’m sorry.

  He didnt know if he’d ever speak again. They camped at a river and he sat by the fire listening to the water running in the dark. It wasnt a safe place because the sound of the river masked any other but he thought it would cheer the boy up. They ate the last of their provisions and he sat studying the map. He measured the road with a piece of string and looked at it and measured again. Still a long way to the coast. He didnt know what they’d find when they got there. He shuffled the sections together and put them back in the plastic bag and sat staring into the coals.

  The following day they crossed the river by a narrow iron bridge and entered an old mill town. They went through the wooden houses but they fou
nd nothing. A man sat on a porch in his coveralls dead for years. He looked a straw man set out to announce some holiday. They went down the long dark wall of the mill, the windows bricked up. The fine black soot raced along the street before them.

  Odd things scattered by the side of the road. Electrical appliances, furniture. Tools. Things abandoned long ago by pilgrims enroute to their several and collective deaths. Even a year ago the boy might sometimes pick up something and carry it with him for a while but he didnt do that any more. They sat and rested and drank the last of their good water and left the plastic jerry jug standing in the road. The boy said: If we had that little baby it could go with us.

  Yes. It could.

  Where did they find it?

  He didnt answer.

  Could there be another one somewhere?

  I dont know. It’s possible.

  I’m sorry about what I said about those people.

  What people?

  Those people that got burned up. That were struck in the road and got burned up.

  I didnt know that you said anything bad.

  It wasnt bad. Can we go now?

  Okay. Do you want to ride in the cart?

  It’s okay.

  Why dont you ride for while?

  I dont want to. It’s okay.

  Slow water in the flat country. The sloughs by the roadside motionless and gray. The coastal plain rivers in leaden serpentine across the wasted farmland. They went on. Ahead in the road was a dip and a stand of cane. I think there’s a bridge there, he said. Probably a creek.