The road by Cormac McCarthy Page B

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.