The road by Cormac McCarthy Page A

head. Look at me, the man said. He turned and looked. He looked like he'd
been crying. Just tell me. We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we? No. Of course
not. Even if we were starving? We're starving now. You said we werent. I said
we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving. But we wouldnt. No. We
wouldnt. No matter what. No. No matter what. Because we're the good guys. Yes.
    And we're carrying the fire. And we're carrying
the fire. Yes. Okay.
     
    He found pieces of flint or chert in a ditch but
in the end it was easier to rake the pliers down the side of a rock at the
bottom of which he'd made a small pile of tinder soaked in gas. Two more days.
Then three. They were starving right enough. The country was looted, ransacked,
ravaged. Rifled of every crumb. The nights were blinding cold and casket black
and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn
before battle. The boy's candlecolored skin was all but translucent. With his
great staring eyes he'd the look of an alien.
     
    He was beginning to think that death was finally
upon them and that they should find some place to hide where they would not be
found. There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin
to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about
but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he'd no
longer any way to think about at all. They squatted in a bleak wood and drank
ditchwater strained through a rag. He'd seen the boy in a dream laid out upon a
coolingboard and woke in horror. What he could bear in the waking world he
could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
     
    They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses
they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a
basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a livingroom partly
burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard.
Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it
back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light
it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he
saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless
circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun
in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two
hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and
borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
     
    At the edge of a small town they sat in the cab of
a truck to rest, staring out a glass washed clean by the recent rains. A light
dusting of ash. Exhausted. By the roadside stood another sign that warned of
death, the letters faded with the years. He almost smiled. Can you read that?
he said. Yes.
    Dont pay any attention. There's no one here. Are
they dead? I think so. I wish that little boy was with us. Let's go, he said.
     
    Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from.
Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire.
Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin
rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do
some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on.
So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or
not.
     
    They walked through the streets wrapped in the
filthy blankets. He held the pistol at his waist and held the boy by the hand.
At the farther edge of the town they came upon a solitary house in a field and they
crossed and entered and walked through the rooms. They came upon themselves in
a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered.
It's us.
     
    He stood in the back door and looked out at the
fields and the road beyond and the bleak country