by Alden Bell
She wiggles her toes again, and Moses wants to chop them off and put them in a jar like bloody fireflies.
He goes over to the Vestal, takes her by the arm and lifts her from the laps of the men.
Hey, there, mister, says one of the men, a note of warning in his voice. They have already become possessive of her.
Moses gets ready for a fight, but the Vestal defuses it.
It’s okay, boys, she says. He is my saviour, after all.
I’ll save you, one man says.
Yeah, me too, says another.
The men laugh, and the Vestal laughs with them.
You know the rule, boys, she says. Only one saviour per girl. Let me talk to my Gibraltar in private for just a little sec.
He takes her into a small parlour down the hall and shuts the door behind them.
What the hell was that? he says.
It’s the boys, she says and smiles slyly. Her eyelids are heavy, and she steadies herself against him.
You been drinking, he says.
Only all night.
You were locked in the room.
I pinky promised not to bolt. They gave me my freedom. Said they would watch me. It cost me a groaning or two, but they ain’t a bad bunch.
He looks down at her, horrified. Her toes are still wriggling against the plush rug, and it makes him feel sick.
What’s the matter? she says. You need a little touch, too? I figgered you got enough last night, but p’raps that matronly lady didn’t quite satisfy.
She puts her hand between his legs, and he swats it away disgusted.
But – but, he stutters, the things you said last night . . .
She laughs high and clear, slapping her palms against his chest as though he were a drum, an instrument in her own perverse and ritualistic dance.
Oh hush, she says. You knew we were just playin, ain’t you? Come on, ol Mosey – this girl was raised in establishments of ill repute. I cut my eye teeth on a big-boss cherry picker when I wasn’t hardly twelve years of age. The celebrations of the flesh ain’t nothing new to me. You want to be a bad boy? Well, then I can sure as anything be a bad girl.
He pushes her away from him.
You’re a liar, he says. You ain’t honest.
She stands for a moment looking surprised, but then she wobbles and leans against an oak desk – and a mild smile of resignation grows on her face.
Honey, she says, honest ain’t the half of what I’m not.
He leaves her there and fetches his brother from upstairs. Abraham is sleepy-looking and irritated.
How come it’s so early? he says.
We’re gettin out of here, Moses says. She’s a whore.
Who’s a whore?
Come on. We’re taking her to Colorado Springs and we’re gettin shut of her.
For a moment, in the sitting room, it looks like there will be a fight when the men discover Moses and his brother want to take the Vestal away, but the girl mollifies the men with sickening sweetnesses and they relent.
Out in front, Moses is stopped by the woman who shared his bed the night before.
Go easy on her, she says.
What’s it your business? he says.
It isn’t. I’m just telling you. Womanhood’s a tricky thing. You’re always walking a tightrope between what men want and what they think they want. It’s a long fall either way.
The trials of bitchery ain’t nothing to me, he says. I choose not to excel. I turn my back on em.
And so he does. And on the woman herself. And he does not speak again until he and his brother and the Vestal Amata are well gone out of the small town of Dolores, the frozen highway stretched out before and behind them like a bad thought you can’t escape.
*
Into the mountains they drive, and there are very few dead here. They are buried beneath the snow – dead permanent or frozen in grotesque animation, it makes no difference, for they are no threat. The evergreens are dense here, and the snow is old fall, collected deep. The road is somewhere beneath them, they know because they observe the cut through the trees – but they cannot see the tarmac until it is revealed behind them in parallel tracks from the tyres. Should they get stuck, should they slip off into a ditch, they are aware that they will likely die – too deep into the wilderness are they now to walk their way out.
So Moses drives slowly. Abraham sits beside him in the passenger seat and the Vestal sleeps deeply, curled into a ball across the back seat.
You gonna tell me why we had to get out of that town so quick? Abraham asks. I didn’t do nothing untoward. I was lookin forward to sleeping in.
It wasn’t you, Moses replies. It was her.
He turns to look at her. She is far gone into sleep after her night of carousing.
The girl’s a whore, he goes on.
Who? The Vestal?
She’s a whore’s why she took to that place like it was her foster home. There ain’t a drop of holiness in her. She’s had the purity all sold out of her.
But a whore? Like a professional?
She good as told me it. She ain’t to be trusted.
Abraham cranes his neck to look at the girl sleeping in the back seat.
An honest to God whore, huh? he says. If I’d knowed that before . . . You reckon I could bang her now, Mose? It being her vocation and all?
Moses says nothing in response. The world is a grim and empty place. The appetites of the dead – Moses knows they ain’t nothing to the icy hearts of living men. All gone to naught, like a frozen hand laid over some Eden, all the blossoms of the true and holy shrivelled to sumpy weed and iced over to knotted hard and fragile things. And maybe what happened was that all the pure and good got raptured up while what remains is a populace gone all ugly and cankered at the seams. His own blood, too. His brother not excepted, nor himself neither. For the pursuit of good is a constant labour, and he ain’t always got the strength in his heart.
*
The sun is directly overhead when the car breaks down. They are shaken by an enormous pothole hidden by the snow, and then the car skews a little. Something in the undercarriage knocks loud, and they are stopped dead.
The brothers climb out and Abraham looks under the car.
The axle’s broke, he says. We’re not goin anywhere.
Moses looks up and down the road, but there’s nothing to see.
It’s a goddamn trial is what it is, he says. How do you feel about freezin to death, brother?
Well, Abraham says, it sure ain’t the way I thought I would go. But it seems clean at least.
Clean? You got some mind on you, Abe.
His brother takes this as a compliment and beams wide.
Then the rear door of the car opens and the redhead climbs out, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and yawning.
How come we’re stopped? she asks.
The axle’s broke, Abraham tells her and smiles. We’re dyin clean.
She casts a look of confusion at Moses, but he does not meet her gaze.
Come on, he says to both of them. We might as well go forward cause we know there ain’t anything behind. Don’t take nothing you don’t need.
So they bundle themselves up and walk forward through the deep snow, raising their faces to the noontime sun.
And maybe there are a handful of blessings left in the world after all, because it is only a quarter of an hour before they find a cut through the trees to their left.
What is it? says the Vestal.
Looks like it could be a path, Abraham says. Mose?
Could be, Moses says. Could be there’s something at the end of it. Could be it’s nothin at all. You want to chance it?
Might as well, Abraham says. After all, we can see there ain’t nothing for miles in the direction we’re headed.
So they follow the cut through the trees, climbing up an incline to a plateau where they find a clearing in the woods. In the middle of the clearing is a small cabin with a collapsed chimney and a sagging porch.
Hallelujah, Abraham says. Looks like we found ourselves a place to not freeze to death.
Inside, the cabin looks like it was abandoned many years before. Some of the floorboards are rotted through, but nothing is out of place. It isn’t until an hour later, after they have hauled their things up from the car and while Abraham is on the roof clearing the bricks out of the collapsed chimney and Moses is securing the porch, that the Vestal Amata finds the dead man.
There’s a pond behind the cabin, its surface frozen over. Under the fallen snow, it’s hard to tell how large the pond is, but the trees around it are cleared to the size of a baseball diamond.
I didn’t even know it was there until I slipped on it, the Vestal says.
They can see the place where the Vestal slipped, the snow has been dusted away from the surface of the ice, leaving a clear patch.
Look, she says and points. Slug under glass.
They gather around the cleared patch and look down. The ice is clear, and caught under it, like some kind of horrible fish in an aquarium, is the face of a dead man gazing up at them. His body has gone soft and bloated from being underwater for so long, his eyes milky, his flesh gone pale, nibbled at by fishes, his skin peeled off and floating around him like a nest of seaweed. They could have thought him just straight dead if it weren’t for the fact that his eyes are blinking up at them sluggishly. As they watch, the dead man raises a hand to them, his movements slow, made almost ghostly by the freezing water in which he is entombed. He places his palm against the undersurface of the ice.
Moses knows it to be a grasp of hunger, but because the dead man doesn’t seem to be able to bend his stiffened fingers, the outspread palm looks like a gesture of greeting or welcome. The eyes continue to blink, slowly.
It is pathetic and awful, the slug trapped underwater and undrownable – like a man staring up at them from the very mouth of the void, waving his goodbyes as he descends, floating down peaceful into the great black.
There is a darkness to nature – the unhurried ways of birth and death.
Jesus, Abraham says. If that ain’t a sight. I’m gonna be seeing that for weeks now every time I close my eyes.
It’s sad, says the Vestal Amata. He’s trapped.
I wish I hadn’t of seen it at all, Abraham says. I don’t need my brain haunted like that.
What do we do? asks the Vestal.
Nothing to do, Abraham says. He ain’t gonna hurt anybody. He might thaw out come spring, but we’ll be long gone or long dead by then. Come on, let’s get back.
Abraham turns and head back to the cabin.
Mose? asks Amata.
Moses has been gazing at the man beneath the ice. He wonders how much the dead man can see – how well those eyes still work. What must be the world to him? Shadows of light and fog, fish nibbling at your skin, your eardrums rotted to blissed silence.
It’s like Abraham says, Moses replies. Ain’t nothing to do.
He rises and walks back to the cabin, and the Vestal follows soon after.
Except much later that night, after the sun has set and they have gathered dry wood and started a fire in the fireplace, after they have settled on accommodations – Moses and his brother on the double bed, the Vestal on the couch – after Abraham’s snoring harmonizes with the crackling of the embers in the fireplace, the sap of the tree branches popping and hissing, the firelight casting dramatic shadows on the ceiling, after everything has settled to haunted inaction, then Moses finds he cannot sleep.
He rises in the dark, puts on his boots and overcoat and steals out quietly into the night.
Twenty minutes later, he is still there at the pond, kneeling prayer-like over the ice, when the Vestal Amata finds him.
Don’t be startled, she says and comes up from behind him. It’s just me.
I know, he says.
Well, I didn’t want you shootin me for a slug or anything.
He does not respond, and she stands over him where he kneels. He sees her pull her coat tighter around her.
It’s too cold for you out here, he says. Get on back inside.
I been colder, she says.
When? he asks.
What?
When’ve you been colder? Tell me a story.
She must detect a hostile challenge in his voice, because she doesn’t respond. Instead, she kneels down in the snow beside him and looks at the face, barely visible in the moonlight, staring up at them from beneath the ice.
For a while the two say nothing. There are hoot owls in the trees, and they make a lonely sound.
Finally, Moses speaks, but he does not look at her – nor does she look at him. Instead, they both gaze down at the bloated, cloudy face beneath the water, as though a dead man were the only kind of true hearer of tales.
You ain’t holy, he says.
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 fee
l 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:
SURVIVORS IN NEED OF RIDE
THIS WAY
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.