Exit Kingdom (15 page)

No, she replies quiet. I ain’t.

Are you a whore?

I’ve been a whore, she says without flinching. I’ve been lots of things. For a while I just wandered. When you ain’t got a destination, you find yourself going down all kinds
of different roads.

How come you talk like you do? Different
ways.

She shrugs.

I picked it up. I been high and I been low. You learn things when you travel around a lot.

Me, I travelled around a lot more than you, and I ain’t learned any mannered speech.

She shrugs again.

I’m a people pleaser, she says. I like to fit in. It’s different when you’re a woman and you ain’t got a gun. Sometimes your only weapon is a ticklish subterfuge. You,
now you’re like a grizzly walking on two feet – I guess you never had to subtle your way through anything.

I guess not. Subtlety ain’t my strong point.

I recognized that.

She laughs, and Moses chuckles along with her. Then they sit in silence for a while longer. The Vestal leans back on her hands and looks up at the night-time stars. Ever since the world has gone
awry there are
many more of them, and they are brighter – like the shimmering dust left behind after some levelling destruction.

Then Moses begins to talk again.

So, he says slowly, if you ain’t a stranger to whoredom—

Among other things, she reminds him.

Right.

I mean, I never had any whore business cards made up.

Understood, he concedes. Among other things. If you ain’t a stranger to
it, how come you were so intent on keepin me from the girls back there?

She smiles up at the stars.

It’s pretty out here, she says. You do find it sometimes, don’t you – even in a world of death?

That ain’t an answer.

The good thing about being a tricksy bitch, she says, is that you don’t have to tell all your secrets.

True enough, Moses nods. Everyone’s entitled to their secrets,
tricksy bitch or otherwise.

She seems content not to answer for a few minutes, but the question still lingers in the air between them. After a while, she sits forward and brushes the icy dirt from her palms.

If you want to know the truth, she says, it wasn’t anything in particular. It just seemed wrong. I don’t mean
wrong
wrong, not wrong for the world at large. Just wrong for
you. Does
that make sense?

He nods slowly.

I reckon it does. Your life ain’t a target for the world to shoot at. The world is a target for your life to shoot at.

She looks at him and smiles.

Somethin like that, she says.

Again they gaze into the face of the dead man beneath the ice. His clouded eyes blink peacefully.

So then how come? Moses says. How come the dead don’t want you?

The Vestal shakes her head.

I don’t know, she says. Honest to God. All I know is it ain’t my pure soul shining so bright it blinds em.

Moses narrows his eyes at this mystery. They are quiet. The Vestal Amata leans her head on his shoulder, and they sit for a while without saying anything. He can feel her small body
shivering.

Go on back to the cabin, he says. Get warm.

Okay,
she says. You coming?

In a little while. I ain’t quite done stargazing yet.

So she returns to the cabin, and he remains out there in the frozen wild, his only real companion the trapped and pathetic dead.

They stay the next five days in the shelter of the cabin in the woods. They scrawl a sign on a wooden plank and nail it to a tree down by the main road. It says:

And it has an arrow pointing up the path. It is the Vestal’s idea, but Moses knows that bandits frequently use such signs to trap the unwary and that no experienced
traveller would ever follow one. Still, the days are long, and it is something.

Moses hunts squirrels for food, and Abraham cooks them in the fireplace, boiling snow for water.
They do not speak of what is to come, because it feels as though time has stopped dead, as though
they have stumbled into some grand hiatus, a still centre around which the rest of the world rotates.

Abraham tends to the wound in his thigh. He limps around, teeth grit, and sweats at night despite the cold.

Once, while he sits on the floor by the firelight, pouring water over the wound
to clean it, the Vestal looks down at him.

That leg of yours is in bad shape, she says. It stinks.

How do you know that’s my leg and not just me? Abraham replies. I ain’t exactly known for my ambrosial odours.

I know the difference between regular man stink and the stink of flesh rot. You don’t get that taken care of you’re gonna lose that leg. And out here, you lose that leg and the
rest
of you won’t be far behind.

It ain’t nothing, he says. Then he leers up at her and says, It ain’t nothing a quick mouth job couldn’t fix.

She does not flinch nor even give any indication of noticing his lewd suggestion.

I’m serious now, she says. Infection like that spreads.

He waves her away with his hand.

It ain’t nothing, he repeats. I’ll sweat it out.

Then he
goes back to tending to the wound. But he can’t let the girl alone, and that very night Moses hears him hobbling across the creaky floor of the cabin not long after they have
settled in for sleep. Perhaps he believes that Moses is asleep, or perhaps he does not care – but he leans down over where the Vestal lies on the couch.

Hey, he says to her in a soft voice. How bout a little touch?
Just a quick poke like – what do you say?

Shoo, Abraham, she says. Get back to bed.

Come on, he says. You had worse than me, I know it. Me, I’m like a bunny rabbit – quicky dicky. Sweet and simple.

I don’t let stinky dying men poke me, she says. Go to bed.

All the more reason, he says. A dying man’s last wish – would you begrudge him it?

Shoo, Abraham. Go shish-kebab a squirrel.
This pussy just ain’t got your name on it.

Moses sees her turning her back on him, burrowing herself into the couch.

Abraham stands appalled for a moment, balancing on his one good leg.

Well, I’ll be goddamned if it ain’t the
only
name not on it, he says to her, his voice hissing with vitriol. You got the whole phone book down your pants, girl.

Pretending to sleep, Moses waits
to see if his brother will take more action. He is a man who does not react well to rejection of the womanly sort. But Abraham is too aware of his
brother’s presence in the room, so he turns and stumbles with great noise back to the bed he shares with Moses. Moses can hear him cursing a litany in a whisper under his breath.

Goddamn high-falutin whores, he says. What’s everybody keepin themselves
so pure for anyway? Armageddon everywhere you look, and everybody’s still so uppity about a little bump. Like
a goddamn piss in the woods. Who cares? You do it and then you go back to the business of not bein dead. Instead we got ourselves a world of princes and princesses and dukes and dukettes –
and everybody’s wearin white robes and readin bibles and puttin flowers in each other’s
hair. Just once I’d like to meet somebody without such a goddamn fine-tuned moral
compass.

When he gets into the bed beside his brother, Abraham tugs the bristly blanket off Moses and curls up in a sweating ball of curses.

Moses waits. He does not sleep much. The embers in the fireplace pop and glow.

Five days they stay in the cabin. Five days in the woods where, at
night, they can hear the flakes of snow tapping light on the windowpanes, they can hear the branches of the
trees cracking under the weight of the fall. If it snows at night, in the morning Moses clears again the ice from behind which the dead man gazes. Moses hunts, the Vestal cooks, Abraham stumbles
around the clearing and tends to his wound.

What is it if it ain’t a miniature family
we’ve gone and built here? Abraham says.

Five days, Moses thinks. And goddamned if it doesn’t feel, in fact, like they have built something. A something out of nothing. Like a building on an empty lot. A thing that wasn’t
there before but now stands undeniable and true.

Nights, when he can’t sleep, Moses goes and sits by the pond and looks up at the sky along with the dead man. Sometimes
the Vestal Amata joins him, and sometimes she doesn’t. They
talk, and she picks at the ends of her long red hair. She tells him about herself. She was born in Oklahoma City, she was raised by her mother. Her father she doesn’t have much memory of. He
went his own way when things went bad. She was five years old, and for a long time it was her and her mother, finding places to hide from the
hordes of the dead. Then her mother died when she was
nine. Not eaten. She just got sick and kind of faded away. Some stories end that way, the girl explains. After her mother died, she was taken in by a whole lot of different people. Some were okay
and others weren’t. Now she’s twenty-five – which is exactly the same age as Abraham.

For brothers, she says, you two got some age between
you.

Fifteen years, Moses confirms.

That’s a big difference, she says. And it ain’t the only thing different between you.

Moses shrugs.

We got different mothers, he says.

I’d listen to a story, if you’d recount it.

It ain’t much of a story, but I don’t feel like tellin it at the moment. Maybe a different night under different stars. These ones are too hopeful.

Okay,
she says.

He can feel her gaze on him. She does not look away for a long time. He sits up and leans over the ice of the pond.

Everybody’s lookin for their own personal entrance to heaven, Moses says. Mine looks different from my brother’s – and yours different from both.

Moses reaches out a finger and taps on the ice over the dead man’s face.

Him too, he says. Look at him there,
nose pressed up against the window of heaven.

The Vestal Amata leans forward to look. She brushes her palm gently across the surface of the ice. Then she looks up into the night sky as if to see what heaven he might be trying to get
into.

Everyone’s always tryin to find an entrance to the kingdom of heaven, she says. Me, I ain’t so interested in entrances. All I want’s a kingdom of exits.

Moses wonders what she means, and then he thinks he understands. He too has looked this way upon the world at times. He eyes her, the curve of her neck craned upwards, the moonlight catching it
pale as the snow, the auburn of her hair like a tangle of nightwood. And then a smile cracks the cool reflection of her face, and she laughs high and tinkling like a Christmas chime. Suddenly he is
suspicious of the sincerity of her words – as though she is accustomed to being the awed audience of her own performances. He wonders how much, in fact, she believes her own stories.

But she smiles brightly. So, so bright.

She looks down at the dead man in the ice again.

How long do you think he’s been down there? she asks.

Too long, Moses says and rises to his feet.

Where
are you going?

I’ll be back.

He goes to the broken-down porch of the cabin and returns with a rusted red fireman’s pick-axe.

Watch out, he says to the Vestal.

Then he raises the axe over his head and brings the blade down on the ice to the left of the dead man. A crack extends through the surface of the pond, and water splashes out. Then he hefts the
axe twice more – once on
the other side of the dead man and once beyond where the head is. Then he sets the axe down and slides the loosened sheet of ice away leaving a rectangular patch of
water where the dead man is.

Moses kneels in the water at the edge of the pond, before the floating slug. The ripples in the water diminish until the surface is flat and unmoving. Then the dead man begins to rise.

But he
has been underwater for too long. The face, as it rises out of the water, melts away, the loosened flesh slipping off bone, the mush of his features splashing into the water, scalp and
ear floating mildly on the surface like lily pads. The jaw seems to open, too, but it does so by gravity rather than hunger, because the muscles are rotted away as well. The man cannot hold himself
above water,
and as soon as his shoulders clear the surface he falls back again. Again he rises, and again he falls back.

Moses doesn’t know what he expected to happen. Perhaps he thought the man would rise like the body of a saint, held aloft on columns of light, lifted to cloudy heaven. Maybe he thought the
man would emerge dripping, cleansed, baptized, and steal away into the wilderness to encounter
fully his final communion with the earth.

What Moses had wanted was to free the man. But this horror does not look anything like freedom.

He bows his head and sighs as the slug rises again and falls back, the wrinkled flesh of his fingers sloughing off as he reaches for purchase at the edges of the ice.

Then Moses stands and picks up the axe again. He turns it over and uses one hand
only to bring the pick end down and bury it in the dead man’s skull.

The pick slips out as easily as it went in, and then the body sinks again for the last time.

Moses looks to the sky again, but nothing has changed. The stars are the same ones he saw before. They are the same hoot owls that once again commence their haunted calls. He is still thigh deep
in the pond, but he cannot feel
the cold.

He turns to the Vestal Amata who has watched the whole thing in silence. He starts to say something but then trails off:

Well, at least . . .

At least what? the girl asks.

But diminished so to smallness is the world that the least of anything is difficult to determine.

That is their fifth night at the cabin. Moses does not know how he will endure a
sixth – for slowing down means growing blind to promise, and a cessation is the ignoblest
kind of death. So what will a sixth day look like? What sallow universe will be born?