The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and ley down in their bedding with the lamp between them. He´d brought the boy´s book but the boy was too tired for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I´m asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.
He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can i ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we´re still going south.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay?
Go to sleep.
Okay
I´m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That´s okay.
And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I´d want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried froth again.
Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupposed in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He desdended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he cought for a long time.
Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.

They passed through the city at noon of the day folloing. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimaicng at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you wanna remember and you remember what you wanna forget.

There was a lake a mile from his uncle´s farm where he and his uncle used to go in the fall for firewood. He sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold wake while his uncle bent to the oars. the old man´s feet in their black kid shoes braced against the uprights. His straw hat. His cob pipe in his teeth  and a thin drool swinging from the pipebowl. He turned to take a sight on the far shore, cradling the oarhandles, taking the pipe from his mouth to wipe his chin with the back of his hand. The shore was lined with brichtrees that stood bone pale against the dark of the evergreens beyond. The edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps, gray and weathered, the windfall trees of hurricane years past. The trees themselves had long been sawed for firewood and carried away. His uncle turned the boat and shipped the oars and they drifted over the sandry shallows until the transom grated in the sand. 

A dead perch lolling belly up in the clear water. Yellow leaves. They left their shoes on the warm painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and se out the anchor at the end of its rope. A lardean poured with concrete with an eyebolt in the center. They walked along the shore while his uncle studied the treestumps, puffin at his pipe, a manila rope coiled over hsi choulder. He ppicked on out and they turned it over, using the roots for leverage, until they got it half floating in the water. Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. they tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, kerking the stump slowly beind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack an dshuffle of the oarlock. The lake dark glass and windowlight coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shapre the days upon.

They bore on south in the days and week to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill counry. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the intersate high way below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapres of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up an dblowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk. 

They were days fording that couterized terrain. The boy had found some crayons and pinted his facemask with fangs and he trudged on uncomplaining. One of the front wheels of the cart had gone wonky. What to do about it? Nothing. Where all was burnt to ash before them no fire were to be had andthen nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they´d yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life. he held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in the blackness.

He woke to the sound of distant thuder and sat up. The fain light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of driftin soot. He pulled the tarp about them and he lay awake a long time listening. If they got wet there´d be no fires to dry by. If they got wet they would probably die.

 
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.  

When he got back the boy was steel asleep. He pulled the blue pastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground  and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He´d pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets.
He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This wasn´t a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

I´m right here.
I know

An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case the had to abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty, below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. you okay? he said. They boy nodded. then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling though the ash, each the other´s world entire.

They crossed the river by an old concrete birdge and a few miles on they came upon a roadside gas station. They stood in the road studied it. I think we should check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps.  The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact.
The door to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old auto motive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. he crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father´s house in that long ago. the boy watched him. What are you doing. he said.

When he woke in the woods

When he woke in the woods in the dark the cold of the night he´d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyong the darkness and the days more day each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. 

He pushed away the pastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the sinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he´d wakened he had wadered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playin g over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward part of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. 

And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rock behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn´t sure. He hadn´t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There´d be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.  Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anythinf of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew ony that the child was his warrat.
He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.