Killing of the roadagent

The Killing of the Roadagent is a pivotal, violent confrontation in which the man shoots and kills a marauder who threatens the boy, an event that tests the father's protective resolve and deeply traumatizes the child, marking a turning point in their journey south.

Ambush and Discovery

While the man and the boy are sleeping in the leaves by the roadside, something wakes the man. He turns on his side and sees the first of them already coming into view. They shuffle through the ash, casting their hooded heads from side to side, some wearing canister masks, one in a stained and filthy biohazard suit. They carry clubs and lengths of pipe. The man reaches and shakes the boy, keeping his eyes on the road. He shoves the pistol in his belt, grabs the boy by the hand, and drags the cart through the trees, tilting it over where it will not be easily seen. The boy is frozen with fear. The man pulls him close and whispers, "We have to run." They tear through the crumbling bracken, the boy terrified, the man urging him on. The man looks back and sees a diesel truck rumbling into view, with men standing in the bed looking out. The boy falls, and the man pulls him up. They come out through the weeds into an old roadway with plates of cracked macadam showing through the drifts of ash. The man pulls the boy down, and they crouch under the bank, listening, gasping for breath. The diesel engine on the road runs on God knows what. When the man raises up to look, he can just see the top of the truck moving along the road, men standing in the stakebed, some holding rifles. The truck passes on, black diesel smoke coiling through the woods. The motor sounds ropy, missing and puttering, then it quits. The man sinks down and puts his hand on top of his head. They can hear the thing rattle and flap to a halt, then just the silence. The man has the pistol in his hand, unable to even remember taking it from his belt. They can hear the men talking, hear them unlatch and raise the hood. The man sits with his arm around the boy, shushing him. After a while, they hear the truck begin to roll, lumbering and creaking like a ship. It coughs and bucks and stops again. The man raises his head to look, and coming through the weeds twenty feet away is one of their number, unbuckling his belt. They both freeze.

Confrontation and the Killing

The man cocks the pistol and holds it on the roadagent. The man stands with one hand out at his side, the dirty crumpled paintmask that he wears sucking in and out. The man tells him to keep coming, not to look back there, to look at him. He warns him that if he calls out, he is dead. The roadagent comes forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it mark the progress of his emaciation, and the leather at one side has a lacquered look where he is used to stropping the blade of his knife. He steps down into the roadcut and looks at the gun and then at the boy. His eyes are collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk, like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wears a beard cut square across the bottom with shears and has a tattoo of a bird on his neck. He is lean, wiry, rachitic, dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front. The man questions him about where he is going and what the truck is running on. The roadagent claims he does not know where they are going. The man asks about ammunition for the guns, and the roadagent lies, saying they found it. The roadagent looks at the boy and says, "I'll bet that boy is hungry. Why dont you all just come on to the truck? Get something to eat." The man refuses, and the roadagent calls him chickenshit. He lets go of his belt, and it falls in the roadway with the gear hanging from it—a canteen, an old canvas army pouch, a leather sheath for a knife. When he looks up, the roadagent is holding the knife in his hand. He has taken only two steps but is almost between the man and the child. The man asks what he thinks he is going to do with that. The roadagent does not answer. He is a big man but very quick. He dives and grabs the boy, rolls, and comes up holding him against his chest with the knife at his throat. The man has already dropped to the ground and swings with him, leveling the pistol and firing from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The roadagent falls back instantly and lies with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead. The boy is lying in the man's lap with no expression on his face at all. The man shoves the pistol in his belt, slings the knapsack over his shoulder, picks up the boy, turns him around, lifts him over his head, and sets him on his shoulders. He sets off up the old roadway at a dead run, holding the boy's knees, the boy clutching his forehead, covered with gore and mute as a stone.

Aftermath and Trauma

They come to an old iron bridge in the woods where the vanished road has crossed an all but vanished stream. The man is starting to cough and has hardly breath to do it with. He drops down out of the roadway and into the woods, turns, and stands gasping, trying to listen. He hears nothing. He staggers on another half mile or so and finally drops to his knees and puts the boy down in the ashes and leaves. He wipes the blood from his face and holds him, saying, "It's okay." In the long cold evening with the darkness dropping down, he hears them only once. He holds the boy close. There is a cough in his throat that never leaves. The boy is so frail and thin through his coat, shivering like a dog. The footsteps in the leaves stop, then move on. They neither speak nor call to each other, the more sinister for that. With the final onset of dark, the iron cold locks down, and the boy by now is shuddering violently. No moon rises beyond the murk, and there is nowhere to go. They have a single blanket in the pack, and the man gets it out and covers the boy with it. He unzips his parka and holds the boy against him. They lie there for a long time but are freezing, and finally he sits up. "We've got to move," he says. "We cant just lie here." He speaks into a blackness without depth or dimension. He holds the boy's hand as they stumble through the woods, the other hand held out before him. He can see no worse with his eyes shut. The boy is wrapped in the blanket, and the man tells him not to drop it because they will never find it again. The boy wants to be carried, but the man tells him he has to keep moving. They stumble and fall through the woods the night long, and long before dawn the boy falls and will not get up again. The man wraps him in his own parka, wraps him in the blanket, and sits holding him, rocking back and forth. A single round left in the revolver. "You will not face the truth. You will not." In the grudging light that passes for day, the man puts the boy in the leaves and sits studying the woods. When it is a bit lighter, he rises and walks out, cutting a perimeter about their siwash camp looking for sign, but other than their own faint track through the ash, he sees nothing. He goes back and gathers the boy up. "We have to go," he says. The boy sits slumped, his face blank, the filth dried in his hair and his face streaked with it. The man tells him to talk to him, but he will not. Later, the man washes the dead man's brains out of the boy's hair, kneeling in the glow of the firelight with the shadow of the bridge's understructure broken across the palisade of treetrunks beyond the creek. "This is my child," he says. "I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job." He wraps the boy in the blanket and carries him to the fire. The boy sits tottering, and the man watches him that he not topple into the flames. He kicks holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he will sleep and sits holding him while he tousles his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. "So be it," he thinks. "Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."

The Boy's Question and the Man's Justification

The next day, the boy asks the man, "You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again." The man tells him, "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?" The boy says yes. Then he asks, "Are we still the good guys?" The man says yes, they are still the good guys, and they always will be. The boy says okay. The man carves the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and gives it to him. The boy takes it wordlessly. After a while, he falls back, and after a while the man can hear him playing—a formless music for the age to come, or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turns and looks back at him. He is lost in concentration. The man thinks he seems some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.