The road Read Online Free PDF Page B

door standing open. A fold-down table. Old
magazines in the floor. He went through the plywood lockers overhead but they
were empty. There were drawers under the bunk and he pulled them out and looked
through the trash. He climbed forward into the cab again and sat in the driver's
seat and looked out down the river through the slow trickle of water on the
glass. The thin drum of rain on the metal roof and the slow darkness falling
over everything.
     
    They slept that night in the truck and in the
morning the rain had stopped and they unloaded the cart and passed everything
under the truck to the other side and reloaded it. Down the bridge a hundred
feet or so were the blackened remains of tires that had been burned there. He
stood looking at the trailer. What do you think is in there? he said. I dont
know. We're not the first ones here. So probably nothing. There's no way to get
in. He put his ear to the side of the trailer and whacked the sheetmetal with
the flat of his hand. It sounds empty, he said. You can probably get in from the
roof. Somebody would have cut a hole in the side of it by now. What would they
cut it with? They'd find something. He took off his parka and laid it across
the top of the cart and climbed on to the fender of the tractor and on to the
hood and clambered up over the windscreen to the roof of the cab. He stood and
turned and looked down at the river. Wet metal underfoot. He looked down at the
boy. The boy looked worried. He turned and reached and got a grip on the front
of the trailer and slowly pulled himself up. It was all he could do and there
was a lot less of him to pull. He got one leg up over the edge and hung there
resting. Then he pulled himself up and rolled over and sat up.
     
    There was a skylight about a third of the way down
the roof and he made his way to it in a walking crouch. The cover was gone and
the inside of the trailer smelled of wet plywood and that sour smell he'd come
to know. He had a magazine in his hip pocket and he took it out and tore some
pages from it and wadded them and got out his lighter and lit the papers and
dropped them into the darkness. A faint whooshing. He wafted away the smoke and
looked down into the trailer. The small fire burning in the floor seemed a long
way down. He shielded the glare of it with his hand and when he did he could
see almost to the rear of the box. Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude.
Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew
down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a
moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all
was dark again.
     
    They camped that night in the woods on a ridge
overlooking the broad piedmont plain where it stretched away to the south. He
built a cookfire against a rock and they ate the last of the morels and a can
of spinach. In the night a storm broke in the mountains above them and came
cannonading downcountry cracking and booming and the stark gray world appeared
again and again out of the night in the shrouded flare of the lightning. The
boy clung to him. It all passed on. A brief rattle of hail and then the slow
cold rain.
     
    When he woke again it was still dark but the rain
had stopped. A smoky light out there in the valley. He rose and walked out
along the ridge. A haze of fire that stretched for miles. He squatted and
watched it. He could smell the smoke. He wet his finger and held it to the
wind. When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the
boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked
like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but
unaccountable. And so it was.
     
    All the day following they traveled through the
drifting haze of woodsmoke. In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like
mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like stands