The Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

other over the din.
    Is it cold?
    Yes. It’s freezing.
    Do you want to go in?
    I dont know.
    Sure you do.
    Is it okay?
    Come on.
    He unzipped his parka and let it fall to the gravel and the boy stood up and they undressed and walked out into the water. Ghostly pale and shivering. The boy so thin it stopped his heart. He dove headlong and came up gasping and turned and stood, beating his arms.
    Is it over my head? the boy called.
    No. Come on.
    He turned and swam out to the falls and let the water beat upon him. The boy was standing in the pool to his waist, holding his shoulders and hopping up and down. The man went back and got him. He held him and floated him about, the boy gasping and chopping at the water. You’re doing good, the man said. You’re doing good.
    They dressed shivering and then climbed the trail to the upper river. They walked out along the rocks to where the river seemed to end in space and he held the boy while he ventured out to the last ledge of rock. The river went sucking over the rim and fell straight down into the pool below. The entire river. He clung to the man’s arm.
    It’s really far, he said.
    It’s pretty far.
    Would you die if you fell?
    You’d get hurt. It’s a long way.
    It’s really scary.
    They walked out through the woods. The light was failing. They followed the flats along the upper river among huge dead trees. A rich southern wood that once held may-apple and pipsissewa. Ginseng. The raw dead limbs of the rhododendron twisted and knotted and black. He stopped. Something in the mulch and ash. He stooped and cleared it away. A small colony of them, shrunken, dried and wrinkled. He picked one and held it up and sniffed it. He bit a piece from the edge and chewed.
    What is it, Papa?
    Morels. It’s morels.
    What’s morels?
    They’re a kind of mushroom.
    Can you eat them?
    Yes. Take a bite.
    Are they good?
    Take a bite.
    The boy smelled the mushroom and bit into it and stood chewing. He looked at his father. These are pretty good, he said.
    They pulled the morels from the ground, small alien-looking things that he piled in the hood of the boy’s parka. They hiked back out to the road and down to where they’d left the cart and they made camp by the river pool at thefalls and washed the earth and ash from the morels and put them to soak in a pan of water. By the time he had the fire going it was dark and he sliced a handful of the mushrooms on a log for their dinner and scooped them into the frying pan along with the fat pork from a can of beans and set them in the coals to simmer. The boy watched him. This is a good place Papa, he said.
    They ate the little mushrooms together with the beans and drank tea and had tinned pears for their desert. He banked the fire against the seam of rock where he’d built it and he strung the tarp behind them to reflect the heat and they sat warm in their refuge while he told the boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets and then he stoked the fire and lay down warm and full and listened to the low thunder of the falls beyond them in that dark and threadbare wood.
    He walked out in the morning and took the river path downstream. The boy was right that it was a good place and he wanted to check for any sign of other visitors. He found nothing. He stood watching the river where it swung loping into a pool and curled and eddied. He dropped a white stone into the water but it vanished as suddenly as if it had been eaten. He’d stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool, invisible to see in the teacolored water except as they turned on their sides to feed. Reflecting back the sun deep in the darkness like a flash of knives in a cave.

    We cant stay, he said. It’s getting colder every day. And the waterfall is an attraction. It was for us and it will be for others and we dont know who they will be and we cant hear them coming. It’s not safe.
    We