They were all day on the long black road, stopping in the afternoon to eat sparingly from their meager supplies. The boy took his truck from the pack and shaped roads in the ash with a stick. The truck tooled along slowly. He made truck noises. The day seemed almost warm and they slept in the
leaves with their packs under their heads.
Something woke him. He turned on his side and lay listening. He raised his head slowly, the pistol in his hand. He looked down at the boy and when he looked back toward the road the first of them were already coming into
view. God, he whispered. He reached and shook the boy, keeping his eyes on the road. They came shuffling through the ash casting their hooded
heads from side to side. Some of them wearing canister masks. One in a biohazard suit. Stained and filthy. Slouching along with clubs in their hands, lengths of pipe. Coughing. Then he heard on the road behind them what sounded like a diesel truck. Quick, he whispered. Quick. He shoved the pistol in his belt and grabbed the boy by the hand and he dragged the
cart through the trees and tilted it over where it would not so easily be seen. The boy was frozen with fear. He pulled him to him. It’s all right, he said.
We have to run. Dont look back. Come on.
He slung their knapsacks over his shoulder and they tore through the crumbling bracken. The boy was terrified. Run, he whispered. Run. He looked back. The truck had rumbled into view. Men standing in the bed looking out. The boy fell and he pulled him up. It’s all right, he said. Come on.
He could see a break through the trees that he thought was a ditch or a cut and they came out through the weeds into an old roadway. Plates of cracked macadam showing through the drifts of ash. He pulled the boy down and they crouched under the bank listening, gasping for breath. They could hear the diesel engine out on the road, running on God knows what. When he raised up to look he could just see the top of the truck moving along the road. Men standing in the stakebed, some of them holding rifles. The truck passed on and the black diesel smoke coiled through the woods. The motor sounded ropy. Missing and puttering. Then it quit.
He sank down and put his hand on top of his head. God, he said. They could hear the thing rattle and flap to a halt. Then just the silence. He had the pistol in his hand, he couldnt even remember taking it from his belt. They could hear the men talking. Hear them unlatch and raise the hood. He sat with his arm around the boy. Shh, he said. Shh. After a while they heard the truck begin to roll. Lumbering and creaking like a ship. They’d have no other way to start it save to push it and they couldnt get it fast enough to start on that slope. After a few minutes it coughed and bucked and stopped
again. He raised his head to look and coming through the weeds twenty feet away was one of their number unbuckling his belt. They both froze.
He cocked the pistol and held it on the man and the man stood with one hand out at his side, the dirty crumpled paintmask that he wore sucking in and out.
Just keep coming.
He looked at the road.
Dont look back there. Look at me. If you call out you’re dead.
He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered
look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy.
Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square
across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance. He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it.
Where are you going?
I was going to take a crap.
Where are you going with the truck. I dont know.
What do you mean you dont know? Take the mask off.
He pulled the mask off over his head and stood holding it. I mean I dont know, he said.
You dont know where you’re going? No.
What’s the truck running on. Diesel fuel.
How much do you have.
There’s three fifty-five gallon drums in the bed. Do you have ammunition for those guns?
He looked back toward the road. I told you not to look back there.
Yeah. We got ammunition. Where did you get it?
Found it.
That’s a lie. What are you eating. Whatever we can find.
Whatever you can find.
Yeah. He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That’s what you think.
You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont.
How do you figure that?
Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain
before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.
Are you a doctor?
I’m not anything.
We got a man hurt. It’d be worth your while. Do I look like an imbecile to you?
I dont know what you look like. Why are you looking at him?
I can look where I want to.
No you cant. If you look at him again I’ll shoot you.
The boy was sitting with both hands on top of his head and looking out between his forearms.
I’ll bet that boy is hungry. Why dont you all just come on to the truck?
Get something to eat. Aint no need to be such a hard-ass.
You dont have anything to eat. Let’s go. Go where?
Let’s go.
I aint goin nowheres. You’re not?
No. I aint.
You think I wont kill you but you’re wrong. But what I’d rather do is take you up this road a mile or so and then turn you loose. That’s all the head start we need. You wont find us. You wont even know which way we went.
You know what I think? What do you think.
I think you’re chickenshit.
He let go of the belt and it fell in the roadway with the gear hanging from it. A canteen. An old canvas army pouch. A leather sheath for a knife. When he looked up the roadrat was holding the knife in his hand. He’d only taken two steps but he was almost between him and the child.
What do you think you’re going to do with that?
He didnt answer. He was a big man but he was very quick. He dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest with the knife at his throat. The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and leveled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead. The boy was lying in his lap with no expression on his face at all. He shoved the pistol in his belt and slung the knapsack over his shoulder and picked up the boy and turned him around and lifted him over his head and set him on his shoulders and set off up the old roadway at a dead run, holding the boy’s knees, the boy clutching his forehead, covered with gore and mute as a stone.
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 everwhere, 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 treelimbs 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.
He sat crosslegged in the leaves at the crest of a ridge and glassed the valley below them with the binoculars. The still poured shape of a river. The dark brick stacks of a mill. Slate roofs. An old wooden watertower bound with iron hoops. No smoke, no movement of life. He lowered the glasses and sat watching.
What do you see? the boy said. Nothing.
He handed the binoculars across. The boy slung the strap over his neck and put them to his eyes and adjusted the wheel. Everything about them so still.
I see smoke, he said. Where.
Past those buildings. What buildings?
The boy handed the glasses back and he refocused them. The palest wisp.
Yes, he said. I see it.
What should we do, Papa?
I think we should take a look. We just have to be careful. If it’s a commune they’ll have barricades. But it may just be refugees.
Like us.
Yes. Like us.
What if it’s the bad guys?
We’ll have to take a risk. We need to find something to eat.
They left the cart in the woods and crossed a railroad track and came down a steep bank through dead black ivy. He carried the pistol in his hand. Stay close, he said. He did. They moved through the streets like sappers. One block at a time. A faint smell of woodsmoke on the air. They waited in a
store and watched the street but nothing moved. They went through the trash and rubble. Cabinet drawers pulled out into the floor, paper and bloated cardboard boxes. They found nothing. All the stores were rifled
years ago, the glass mostly gone from the windows. Inside it was all but too dark to see. They climbed the ribbed steel stairs of an escalator, the boy holding on to his hand. A few dusty suits hanging on a rack. They looked for shoes but there were none. They shuffled through the trash but there was nothing there of any use to them. When they came back he slipped the
suitcoats from their hangers and shook them out and folded them across his arm. Let’s go, he said.
He thought there had to be something overlooked but there wasnt. They kicked through the trash in the aisles of a foodmarket. Old packaging and papers and the eternal ash. He scoured the shelves looking for vitamins. He opened the door of a walk-in cooler but the sour rank smell of the dead
washed out of the darkness and he quickly closed it again. They stood in the street. He looked at the gray sky. Faint plume of their breath. The boy was exhausted. He took him by the hand. We have to look some more, he said.
We have to keep looking.
The houses at the edge of the town offered little more. They climbed the back steps into a kitchen and began to go through the cabinets. The cabinet doors all standing open. A can of bakingpowder. He stood there looking at it. They went through the drawers of a sideboard in the diningroom. They walked into the livingroom. Scrolls of fallen wallpaper lying in the floor
like ancient documents. He left the boy sitting on the stairs holding the coats while he went up.
Everything smelled of damp and rot. In the first bedroom a dried corpse with the covers about its neck. Remnants of rotted hair on the pillow. He took hold of the lower hem of the blanket and towed it off the bed and shook it out and folded it under his arm. He went through the bureaus and
the closets. A summer dress on a wire hanger. Nothing. He went back down the stairs. It was getting dark. He took the boy by the hand and they went out the front door to the street.
At the top of the hill he turned and studied the town. Darkness coming fast. Darkness and cold. He put two of the coats over the boy’s shoulders, swallowing him up parka and all.
I’m really hungry, Papa. I know.
Will we be able to find our stuff? Yes. I know where it is.
What if somebody finds it? They wont find it.
I hope they dont. They wont. Come on. What was that?
I didnt hear anything. Listen.
I dont hear anything.
They listened. Then in the distance he heard a dog bark. He turned and looked toward the darkening town. It’s a dog, he said.
A dog?
Yes.
Where did it come from? I dont know.
We’re not going to kill it, are we Papa? No. We’re not going to kill it.
He looked down at the boy. Shivering in his coats. He bent over and kissed him on his gritty brow. We wont hurt the dog, he said. I promise.
They slept in a parked car beneath an overpass with the suitcoats and the blanket piled over them. In the darkness and the silence he could see bits of light that appeared random on the night grid. The higher floors of the
buildings were all dark. You’d have to carry up water. You could be smoked out. What were they eating? God knows. They sat wrapped in the coats looking out the window. Who are they, Papa?
I dont know.
He woke in the night and lay listening. He couldnt remember where he was. The thought made him smile. Where are we? he said.
What is it, Papa?
Nothing. We’re okay. Go to sleep.
We’re going to be okay, arent we Papa? Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us. That’s right.
Because we’re carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.
In the morning a cold rain was falling. It gusted over the car even under the overpass and it danced in the road beyond. They sat and watched through
the water on the glass. By the time it had slacked a good part of the day was gone. They left the coats and the blanket in the floor of the back seat and went up the road to search through more of the houses. Woodsmoke on the damp air. They never heard the dog again.
They found some utensils and a few pieces of clothing. A sweatshirt. Some plastic they could use for a tarp. He was sure they were being watched but he saw no one. In a pantry they came upon part of a sack of cornmeal that rats had been at in the long ago. He sifted the meal through a section of windowscreen and collected a small handful of dried turds and they built a fire on the concrete porch of the house and made cakes of the meal and cooked them over a piece of tin. Then they ate them slowly one by one. He wrapped the few remaining in a paper and put them in the knapsack.
The boy was sitting on the steps when he saw something move at the rear of the house across the road. A face was looking at him. A boy, about his age, wrapped in an outsized wool coat with the sleeves turned back. He stood up. He ran across the road and up the drive. No one there. He looked toward the house and then he ran to the bottom of the yard through the dead weeds to a still black creek. Come back, he called. I wont hurt you. He was standing there crying when his father came sprinting across the road and seized him by the arm.
What are you doing? he hissed. What are you doing? There’s a little boy, Papa. There’s a little boy.
There’s no little boy. What are you doing? Yes there is. I saw him.
I told you to stay put. Didnt I tell you? Now we’ve got to go. Come on. I just wanted to see him, Papa. I just wanted to see him.
The man took him by the arm and they went back up through the yard. The boy would not stop crying and he would not stop looking back. Come on, the man said. We’ve got to go.
I want to see him, Papa.
There’s no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want? I dont care, the boy said, sobbing. I dont care.
The man stopped. He stopped and squatted and held him. I’m sorry, he said. Dont say that. You musnt say that.
They made their way back through the wet streets to the viaduct and collected the coats and the blanket from the car and went on to the railway embankment where they climbed up and crossed the tracks into the woods and got the cart and headed out to the highway.
What if that little boy doesnt have anybody to take care of him? he said.
What if he doesnt have a papa?
There are people there. They were just hiding.
He pushed the cart out into the road and stood there. He could see the
tracks of the truck through the wet ash, faint and washed out, but there. He thought that he could smell them. The boy was pulling at his coat. Papa, he said.
What?
I’m afraid for that little boy. I know. But he’ll be all right.
We should go get him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. We could take him and we could take the dog. The dog could catch something to eat.
We cant.
And I’d give that little boy half of my food. Stop it. We cant.
He was crying again. What about the little boy? he sobbed. What about the little boy?
At a crossroads they sat in the dusk and he spread out the pieces of the map in the road and studied them. He put his finger down. This is us, he said.
Right here. The boy wouldnt look. He sat studying the twisted matrix of
routes in red and black with his finger at the junction where he thought that they might be. As if he’d see their small selves crouching there. We could go back, the boy said softly. It’s not so far. It’s not too late.
They made a dry camp in a woodlot not far from the road. They could find no sheltered place to make a fire that would not be seen so they made none. They ate each of them two of the cornmeal cakes and they slept together
huddled on the ground in the coats and blankets. He held the child and after a while the child stopped shivering and after a while he slept.
The dog that he remembers followed us for two days. I tried to coax it to
come but it would not. I made a noose of wire to catch it. There were three cartridges in the pistol. None to spare. She walked away down the road. The boy looked after her and then he looked at me and then he looked at the dog and he began to cry and to beg for the dog’s life and I promised I would not hurt the dog. A trellis of a dog with the hide stretched over it. The next day it was gone. That is the dog he remembers. He doesnt remember any little boys.
He’d put a handful of dried raisins in a cloth in his pocket and at noon they sat in the dead grass by the side of the road and ate them. The boy looked at him. That’s all there is, isnt it? he said.
Yes.
Are we going to die now? No.
What are we going to do?
We’re going to drink some water. Then we’re going to keep going down the road.
Okay.
In the evening they tramped out across a field trying to find a place where their fire would not be seen. Dragging the cart behind them over the ground. So little of promise in that country. Tomorrow they would find something to eat. Night overtook them on a muddy road. They crossed into a field and plodded on toward a distant stand of trees skylighted stark and black against the last of the visible world. By the time they got there it was dark of night. He held the boy’s hand and kicked up limbs and brush and got a fire going. The wood was damp but he shaved the dead bark off with his knife and he stacked brush and sticks all about to dry in the heat. Then he spread the sheet of plastic on the ground and got the coats and blankets from the cart and he took off their damp and muddy shoes and they sat there in silence with their hands outheld to the flames. He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the
dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsable entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.
They slept through the night in their exhaustion and in the morning the fire was dead and black on the ground. He pulled on his muddy shoes and went to gather wood, blowing on his cupped hands. So cold. It could be November. It could be later. He got a fire going and walked out to the edge of the woodlot and stood looking over the countryside. The dead fields. A barn in the distance.
They hiked out along the dirt road and along a hill where a house had once stood. It had burned long ago. The rusted shape of a furnace standing in the black water of the cellar. Sheets of charred metal roofing crumpled in the
fields where the wind had blown it. In the barn they scavenged a few
handfuls of some grain he did not recognize out of the dusty floor of a metal hopper and stood eating it dust and all. Then they set out across the fields toward the road.
They followed a stone wall past the remains of an orchard. The trees in their ordered rows gnarled and black and the fallen limbs thick on the ground. He stopped and looked across the fields. Wind in the east. The soft ash moving in the furrows. Stopping. Moving again. He’d seen it all before. Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away. The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes. They wore gold rings in their leather ears and in the wind their sparse and ratty hair twisted about on their skulls. The teeth in their
sockets like dental molds, the crude tattoos etched in some homebrewed woad faded in the beggared sunlight. Spiders, swords, targets. A dragon.
Runic slogans, creeds misspelled. Old scars with old motifs stitched along their borders. The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their
skins and the raw skulls painted and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink like a blueprint for assembly. He looked back at the boy. Standing by the cart in
the wind. He looked at the dry grass where it moved and at the dark and twisted trees in their rows. A few shreds of clothing blown against the wall, everything gray in the ash. He walked along the wall passing the masks in a last review and through a stile and on to where the boy was waiting. He put his arm around his shoulder. Okay, he said. Let’s go.
He’d come to see a message in each such late history, a message and a warning, and so this tableau of the slain and the devoured did prove to be. He woke in the morning and turned over in the blanket and looked back down the road through the trees the way they’d come in time to see the
marchers appear four abreast. Dressed in clothing of every description, all wearing red scarves at their necks. Red or orange, as close to red as they could find. He put his hand on the boy’s head. Shh, he said.
What is it, Papa?
People on the road. Keep your face down. Dont look.
No smoke from the dead fire. Nothing to be seen of the cart. He wallowed into the ground and lay watching across his forearm. An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon.
They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. Shh, he said. Shh. The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. The boy lay with his face in his arms, terrified. They passed two hundred feet away, the ground shuddering lightly. Tramping. Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. All passed on. They lay listening.
Are they gone, Papa? Yes, they’re gone.
Did you see them?
Yes.
Were they the bad guys? Yes, they were the bad guys.
There’s a lot of them, those bad guys. Yes there are. But they’re gone.
They stood and brushed themselves off, listening to the silence in the distance.
Where are they going, Papa?
I dont know. They’re on the move. It’s not a good sign. Why isnt it a good sign?
It just isnt. We need to get the map and take a look.
They pulled the cart from the brush with which they’d covered it and he raised it up and piled the blankets in and the coats and they pushed on out to the road and stood looking where the last of that ragged horde seemed to hang like an afterimage in the disturbed air.
In the afternoon it started to snow again. They stood watching the pale gray flakes sift down out of the sullen murk. They trudged on. A frail slush forming over the dark surface of the road. The boy kept falling behind and he stopped and waited for him. Stay with me, he said.
You walk too fast.
I’ll go slower.
They went on.
You’re not talking again. I’m talking.
You want to stop?
I always want to stop.
We have to be more careful. I have to be more careful. I know.
We’ll stop. Okay?
Okay.
We just have to find a place. Okay.
The falling snow curtained them about. There was no way to see anything at either side of the road. He was coughing again and the boy was shivering,
the two of them side by side under the sheet of plastic, pushing the grocery cart through the snow. Finally he stopped. The boy was shaking uncontrollably.
We have to stop, he said. It’s really cold.
I know.
Where are we? Where are we? Yes.
I dont know.
If we were going to die would you tell me? I dont know. We’re not going to die.
