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

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