"The Road" List 2

Late the day following they entered a small town where three men stepped from behind a truck and stood in the road before them. Emaciated, clothed in rags.

The vanished world returned. Kin long dead washed up and cast fey sidewise looks upon him.

He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come.

In the past when he walked out like that and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he’d sometimes see a light.

He looked at the boy out of his sunken haggard eyes.

Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling.

They passed through the site of a roadside hamlet burned to nothing.

The sloughs by the roadside motionless and gray.

Then he found a coin. Or a button. Deep crust of verdigris. He chipped at it with the nail of his thumb. It was a coin.

They stood in front of the house looking at it. There was a gravel drive that curved away to the south. A brick loggia. Double stairs that swept up to the columned portico.

He lit the fire and smoke curled up over the painted wooden lintel and rose to the ceiling and curled down again.

He fanned the blaze with a magazine and soon the flue began to draw and the fire roared in the room lighting up the walls and the ceiling and the glass chandelier in its myriad facets.

At night when he woke coughing he’d sit up with his hand pushed over his head against the blackness. Like a man waking in a grave. Like those disinterred dead from his childhood that had been relocated to accommodate a highway.

Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened.

Along the shore of the cove below them windrows of small bones in the wrack.

He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars.

At the end of the strand their way was blocked by a headland and they left the beach and took an old path up through the dunes and through the dead seaoats until they came out upon a low promontory.

It had been a twin-masted rig of some sort but the masts were broken off close to the deck and the only thing remaining topside were some brass cleats and a few of the rail stanchions along the edge of the deck.

That and the steel hoop of the wheel sticking up out of the cockpit aft.

The steel was gray and saltscoured but he could make out the worn gilt lettering.

A stagnant bilge along the lower bulkhead filled with wet papers and trash.

A stagnant bilge along the lower bulkhead filled with wet papers and trash.

He went through to the forward cabins. Past the galley.

In the second stateroom there were drawers under the berth that were still in place and he lifted them free and slid them out.

Manuals and papers in Spanish. Bars of soap. A black leather valise covered in mold with papers inside.

Still there was something perverse in his searching.

The last thing he found was a square oak box with dovetailed corners and a brass plate let into the lid.

Inside was a brass sextant, possibly a hundred years old.

It occurred to him that he took this windfall in a fashion dangerously close to matter of fact but still he said what he had said before. That good luck might be no such thing.

He held out one hand before him although there was nothing on that salt heath to collide with.

The slow surf crawled and seethed in the dark and he thought about his life but there was no life to think about and after a while he walked back.

They were rotary latches with wings for your thumb.

The road bent its way along the coast, dead sheaves of saltgrass overhanging the pavement.

Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description.

Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark.

His leg was throbbing and he pulled away the dressing and disinfected the wound and looked at it. The flesh swollen and discolored in the truss of the black stitching.

Perhaps in the world’s destruc­tion it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be.

They walked out the long spit of tidal mud where a small boat lay half buried and stood there looking at it. It was altogether derelict.

The man pulled the plastic over himself in a hood and watched the gray sea shrouded away out there in the rain and watched the surf break along the shore and draw away again over the dark and stippled sand.

Old dreams encroached upon the waking world.