A quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We´re not thinking, he said. We have to go back. He pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it couldn´t be seen and they left their pack and went back to the station. In the service bay he dragged out the steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all the quart plastic oilbottles. Then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs one by one, leaving the bottle to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the end they had almost a half quart of motor oil. He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy said. cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunk of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the saggin hands of blind wire strung from the blacked lightpoles whilning thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadownlands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a road works lay abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I´m all right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them. He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the graness like a charcoal sketched across the waste. Nothing to see.

No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses. It´s raining. Yes, the man said. I know.

They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope though the dark poles of the standing trees to where he´d seen a running ledge of rock and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across the valley. It was very cold. They sat huddled together wapped each in a blanket over their coats and ofter a chile the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the woods.

When It had cleared they went down to the cart an pulled away the tarp and got their blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night´s onset like a apparition and he lit the  little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they walked out of the road and he took the boy´s hand and they went to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp. There was nothing.