Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of night he’d reach out and touch the figure sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. The world that was now barren, silent, godless. Without hope.
Whaddaya mean without Hope? Who do you think has been pushing the damn shopping cart for the last fifteen miles? Shecky Greene?
Yes of course. I’m sorry.
He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. Time no longer had any meaning. It could have been months since the Jack Benny cameo. Or mere days.
So, are we going to die?
Yes we’re going to die. Sometime. Not now.
Worse than we did at the Copa?
Worse than that.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Were they being watched? Surely in this blasted lifeless glen here among the mummied dead no one would be looking for two out-of-work musicians on the run from the mob hoping to stow away on a ship to Rio.
There is no ship is there?
Go to sleep.
Head out west you said.
Be quiet.
We’ll meet a coupla fabulous lookin’ dames.
I’m sorry.
We’re gonna be rich you said. Now I’m eating dog food out of a can.
Hush. They’ll find us.
I tell you who I’d like to find. The chump who sold us this map!
***
They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here. Hope had eaten the last of the food along with the microfilm he’d found in the Chinese fortune cookie. Although why he’d done that was no longer important. They set out along the blacktop in the gun metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.
You got any water?
That broad threw the last of it in my face.
There had been others along the road. The lost, the undead, the diseased and doomed, Peter Sellers as an unhelpful Indian doctor. There were those who would do them harm. Who would come for them while they slept. And there were only so many times they could get away with the old pat-a-cake distraction routine.
Do you remember what you used to call me?
A slope-nosed schnook?
Something like that.
The clocks had stopped at 1.17. A long shear of light and a series of low concussions. Robert Morley’s Girl Bombs had wreaked their terrible vengeance.
There’s nothing. There’s nothing left.
Whaddaya mean? I still have these French postcards.
We need water. We need food.
I need a weekend in Las Vegas!
***
In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. But he did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other tale to tell. At one time he would have cried for her. Now he only wished he had kept some of the fruit piled high atop her head.
***
They came to trees across the road where they were forced to unload the cart and carry everything over the trunks and repack it all on the far side.
This is bad.
What, the script?
But even self-referential one-liners had ceased to have any meaning for them. Too tired even to do the ‘walk this way’ gag they trudged deeper into a dark gorge and came across a bridge collapsed in a dank slow-moving river.
Oh god no. What next?
A rickshaw chase?
This is it. This is where it ends.
But I haven’t been slapped by a single chorus girl.
Just go. Leave me.
What?
It’s all right. You’ll see.
I can’t.
Please.
Not without a song.
All right then.
Heaving his exhausted partner into the cart Hope felt the flaregun snug in the pocket of his filthy coat. Sketched upon a pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim. Bodies melted and black amid corridors of drifting ash. Slumped within the rusting cart Crosby counted them in.
Oh, the earth is scorched,
It’s all been torched,
Ain’t nothin’ gonna be the same.
But like this verse,
It could be worse…
Two guys, one dame!
But there’s broads no more,
No Dottie Lamour,
To help us share the load.
Round every bend a killer,
(Quick hide, it’s Phyllis Diller!)
A post-apocalyptic thriller,
(It’s the whole magilla!)
This picture’s got no filler,
(I wrestled a gorilla!)
As we shuffle on down The Roooooaaaad!
Hey fellas. Am I too late?
Yes Dean, you are.
Okay.
Okay then.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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