"Cormac McCarthy - The Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarthy Cormac)

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 rocks 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 wasnt sure. He hadnt 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 anything 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 only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of
God God never spoke.



When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic 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 was not 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 they 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. Are you okay? he said. The
boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling