Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out
along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a
roadside gas station. They stood in the road and 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 their 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 automotive 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.
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 could not be seen and they
left their packs 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 bottles 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 trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands
of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a
clearing and beyond that a reach of meadow-lands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a
roadworks 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 grayness like a charcoal
drawing 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 through
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 wrapped each in a blanket over their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there
was just the dripping in the woods.
When it had cleared they went down to the cart and 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 an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the
wind. Then they walked out to 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. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a
