by Alden Bell
*
It’s the doctor, Peabody, from Fletcher’s caravan – the one they left tied to a tree.
Moses pulls a gun from his belt and advances on the man, his feet pounding thick and hard through the drifts of snow.
Where’s my brother? he says in a loud, hoarse voice. I’ll kill you if you—
Inside, the doctor says, dropping his mug and splashing hot brown liquid everywhere. Where it falls on the snow, the steam rises in sudden wisps. The doctor holds up his arms before his face, defending himself from the assault that is coming his way across the clearing.
Moses keeps the gun trained on the man’s head and advances onto the bowing porch. He grabs Peabody, gets an arm around his neck and presses the barrel of the gun against his temple. Then he spins and puts his back against the logs of the cabin and, having taken his hostage, waits for the assault of Fletcher’s men.
But that’s when the door of the cabin opens and Abraham emerges, squinting his sleepy eyes against the morning sun.
Abraham spots his brother and yawns, scratching his ass.
Hey, brother, he says. What’re you doin with the doc? You want some coffee? We found some grinds under the floor.
*
When Moses and the Vestal tied him to a tree they thought Fletcher’s men couldn’t fail to notice. But, instead, when Fletcher bolted in pursuit, they did not bother to count heads or look around even. Or perhaps they simply took the doctor’s life for forfeit, given up to the wilderness or the wildness of man. Peabody called out, but none could hear him over the revving of the engines and the cries of the caravaners to move.
Abraham found him later, coming down out of hiding in the woods when he heard the sound of motors die away in the distance. It had been unnecessary to hide – Fletcher was not interested in what might remain at the cabin once the Vestal was no longer there. He heard the doctor’s cries from down by the road. Peabody was calling crazy by then, quite sure he would freeze to death in a few hours, kissed on the lips and tied to a tree by a holy woman, abandoned without regard by his own travelling companions. No one, he was sure, would come for him. The guttural noise from his throat was a keening of grief and despair, hopeless, tuned to the pitches of nature and birdsong – a moribund bleating skyward.
Which is how Abraham found him.
I told him I’d kill him if he tried anything, Abraham says. And you know what the man did? The man laughed. I knew he was okay then. He’d gone past loyalties.
I brung you these, Moses says, giving Abraham the antibiotics. For your leg.
Look, Abraham says and shows Moses the wound in his thigh. It isn’t healed, but the swelling seems to have abated, and it is less burning red at the edges.
It’s gettin better, Moses says.
The doc made a poultice, Abraham says. Out of twigs and pine needles and garbage like that. It helps.
It just calms the wound, Peabody says and nods to the pills. Nothing compared to what a real antibiotic like that will do.
Moses turns to Peabody.
I apologize, he says. For the gun. For tyin you to a tree. We thought . . . Thank you greatly for helpin my brother.
Peabody shrugs it off.
It was a symbiotic relationship, he says. Fletcher kept me safe, I took care of his people. But he wasn’t a good man.
But you didn’t have to save Abraham’s leg. That was a righteous thing for you to do. If things’d gone a shade different, we might of killed you.
Again Peabody shrugs. He runs a hand across his balding pate. Wisps of grey hair fall down nearly to his shoulders. He must be ten or even twenty years older than Moses. Here is a man who lived a good solid chunk of life before the dead started coming back and everything changed. Here is a man with memories – a man who still holds faith that things might change back, because he can hardly help but remember vividly the world before. Perhaps he even believes he could reconstruct it out of the recollections and blueprints he carries in his own aging mind.
So he shrugs, and this is what he says:
Saving or killing. I’ve been a doctor so long – and the world gone topsy-turvy the way it is – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is called for. You have to do some of both if you would be a man in this world. And which end of the act you’re on is the luck of the moment. So no hard feelings.
The three men drink weak coffee made from water heated over the fire. Abraham takes two of the pills, and Peabody looks at his wound.
How’s it look, doc? Abraham asks.
It’s holding, Peabody says. But the jury’s still out. If there were facilities, we could do more about it.
I found a place, Moses says to Peabody. It has what you need. It’s a good place. We’ll drop you there.
Peabody looks first at one brother and then other. He nods and resumes his inspection of Abraham’s leg.
Later, out by the pond where the surface has mended itself in ice and there is no longer any face staring up from below, Moses talks with his brother alone.
You got there? Abraham asks.
I did.
The girl?
She’s there. They’re lookin at her. Trying to figure her. I told her I’d come back once I got you.
You did? How come?
Moses shrugs.
It ain’t exactly safety she feels bein there. She asked me to come back. I told her I would.
Is it safe?
I don’t know. I think so. It’s like a fortress there, Abe. Like the modern world again.
Abraham smiles.
Hot water?
Hot water.
Food?
Food.
They got something to plug this into?
Abraham tugs at the yewess bee around his neck.
I reckon they probably do.
Girls? Are there girls? I ain’t had a right fuck in ages it seems like. Not a right one at least.
Moses says nothing. He looks down at the seam where he chopped open the ice days before. Then he says:
It ain’t a place of brutishness, Abe.
The smile goes away from Abraham’s face. He looks mean in the eyes, like he would spit on something if there was something to spit on.
You reckon me to be a monster, don’t you, Mose?
Moses sighs heavily and strokes his beard. He looks away from Abraham.
Beyond bein my brother, he says, I don’t give a damn what you are.
It’s an ambiguous statement, but one that is just left to hang there between them. Abraham does not ask for more and Moses does not proffer it.
You know, Abraham says after a while. These two nights, I can’t say as I was sure you’d come back for me.
No? Moses says and rubs his eyes against the tiredness he finds there. Then you mistake me, brother. I’m the keeper and the caliper of your life, Abraham. Some- times it seems that’s the beginning and ending of what I am.
*
You are already wondering, the man Moses says, what became of him, this brother of mine. You see me, here in the dark. It’s my voice talkin the night through to all its corners. But it seems I’ve swapped travellin companions.
He points to where the large mute sleeps on the ground, the shape of the man like a desert stone.
Maury, he says, I picked him up later. A child of God, that one – and more trouble to haul around than you might think. But he’s a wonder at keepin his business to himself – which is more than I can say for most. No, he came later.
Moses scratches at his beard and brushes his hair out of his face, exposing, barely visible in the blackness, the pale lumen of his skin crossed diagonal by the eye patch and its strap.
You’re wonderin – is this the story that kills Abraham, that brings him his due which the universe in all its scaled balance, all its holy recompense, owes to him? Is this the story that finishes him and closes the book on the ledger of his accounts? Is that the holiness that drives this story crash bang to its God-spoke end? Or maybe it’s some other story that takes Abraham away fro
m me? That’s what you’re wonderin, ain’t it?
He pauses.
There was a girl, he says. Not even a woman. A little girl. A warrior she was, and she knew about the balance of things. The order . . . What? The girl? She don’t belong here. This ain’t her story. Forget I said anything about her.
Moses picks something from his teeth, but his eyes look at no one – they never stray from the firelight, as though the elements of the earth themselves are his true audience. He speaks to the land, and the land is nourished by his breath.
One story or another, Moses says, it makes no difference. All men find their ends in stories told by firelight. My end, too, when it comes – it’ll be spoke by someone, and my death’ll persist a little while on the planet.
Then he looks again at the shape of his travelling companion.
Or, he says, it’ll just keep mute.
*
They are on the road. Moses has now travelled back and forth over this same length of highway more times than he has ever done just about anything in his singular life. The road begins to have an aspect of familiarity that makes him queasy in the pit of his stomach. As though time has stopped dead – as though the progress of the earth has wound down, entropy coming to bear all over, everything gone flaccid and spent. The rote repetition of days and action. He recalls it from the time before – when it was known simply as life. The things you might do were shoved to the side, he recalls, in favour of the things you could manage to do in the brief hiatuses between doing all the same things you did the day before and all the same things you would do again tomorrow.
Yes, life. Life is what they called it.
And Moses supposes he could do worse than an exis- tence filled with equal parts death and discovery – when the alternative is life and listlessness.
He will be happy to be off this road at last. Happy to be forging ahead.
They are two hours from Colorado City when they come across a wreckage that Moses doesn’t remember from before. Perhaps he has got the roads mixed up and they are now on a different route. Perhaps he has become blinded to the nuances of the world now that he is locked in the repetition of it.
Moses brings the car to a stop.
Abraham starts to complain about his leg and doesn’t mind the break from riding folded up in the passenger seat.
The leg’s stiff as hell, he says. I got to stretch it. Plus, I need to piss.
So they climb out of the car. It is dark again already – the days are shuffling by quickly now, as though in the agile hands of a professional card sharp. And maybe God is a gambler after all.
Peabody helps Abraham stand, and the two begin to limp in circles around the car.
Moses takes the stub of a cigar out of his pocket and lights it with a match. The road is a cut through the hills, and he gazes around him at the trees. The road looks familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The wreckage blocking their way, though, doesn’t look new. He puffs thoughtfully on his cigar.
I’m going up to that ridge, he says to the others. Take a look around.
He climbs the slope, pulling himself up using tree branches that pop and snap in his mammoth grip. He is out of breath by the time he crests the ridge. Down below there is nothing. It’s possible that they are on the cusp of the Colorado City grid, but it makes no difference. The hill on which he stands is just one rib of many on a cage of ridges that ripple the landscape. He can only see the dipping distance between one line of hills and the next – and there is only emptiness in that unlit valley.
He sits for a moment to recover from the climb. He listens to his own heavy breathing, the rasp of air in his throat. He looks at the fat cigar between his thick fingers. He is a brute, he knows, and there should be laws and cages for such as he. But sometimes he is surprised to discover that he has found a home in the wild black of what America has become. He belongs on the edges of the world – but now the world is all edges. Margins without centre for ever and ever.
Then he hears a shout from down below, indistinct and panicked, back in the direction of the car where he left Abraham and Peabody. Then other noises. The sound of scuffle and event, followed by two thunderous screeches of pain – voices Moses doesn’t recognize. Then another shout – his name:
Mose!
It’s his brother’s voice. And then Moses is running, crashing down through the trees, an ursine monster smashing through the underbrush, calling out, Abe! Abe!
He hears the sound of an engine below – a car speeding away. And then he bursts through the scrub at the edge of the road and sees the mess in the pool of light cast by the headlights of the car they have been driving. It’s a body, but not Abraham’s and not the doctor’s. Moses kneels over it.
It’s a man, grimy-faced and ugly. He wears a leather jacket with studs on it, and there’s a baseball bat still gripped tight in his dead right hand. He lies in a wide pool of jugular blood that is still pumping with weak persistence from the wound in his neck. Struck through his neck, from one side to the other like some horrible mockery of a bow tie, is a bowie knife that Moses recognizes as his brother’s.
Abe! Moses calls. Abe!
There is no response, but when he hushes he can hear a guttural choke from the ditch by the side of the road. He rushes over to find the doctor, Peabody, holding his hands over a puncture wound in his chest. The blood seeps through his fingers, leaking insistently through his pathetic grip.
Who? Moses says. Fletcher?
Peabody coughs wetly. He shakes his head.
Highwaymen, he struggles to say through his gasps. Fletcher, he put a bounty on your heads. Three men. Abraham got one. Wounded another. But they took him.
Dead or no?
Peabody coughs again, cringes in his breathing.
Dead or no? Moses says again, almost angry.
No, Peabody says. Fletcher’ll want to.
Okay, Moses says and begins to lift Peabody. Come on, I’ll get you to help.
But Peabody coughs a spray of blood over Moses’ face, shakes his head and pushes Moses away. There are reddish-brown smears all over his bald pate, the thin strands of long white hair plastered to his skull with drying blood.
I’m dead, Peabody says. It’s about time, right?
The doctor’s body seizes up with some internal organic fluttering, as of his organs all retching moribund against their own expiration. Then Peabody calms as Moses watches him, his breathing going slack and the grip on his chest wound loosening. He can see the man’s slowing heartbeat in the weak surges of blood coming between his fingers.
It’s about time for all of us, old man, says Moses.
But by that point, he is fairly certain that Peabody is already dead.
Nine
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Moses does not delay. He takes a small knife from his pocket and drives it up underneath the doctor’s jaw and into his brain. There is no time to give him greater service than this. Then he goes quickly to the car, but before he gets in something occurs to him. He walks around to the front where the body of the brigand is lying dead, his brain still intact. He does not want to put an end to this man who would messenger his brother to death. Instead he wants to hurt, to maim. So he raises his leg high and brings his heavy boot down onto the corpse’s face. There is a brittle wet crunch as the jaw bone shatters and dislocates from the skull. When Moses raises his foot again, there is an awful gaping smile on the dead man’s face. But the brain is unharmed. He will come back – he will be unable to eat.
Have a nice death, you bastard, says Moses Todd to the corpse.
Then he climbs into the car and backs it up. There is no time to finesse his way around the blockade before him, no time to search for another car on the road beyond. He will ram his way through, and it will either work or it won’t. The impact will either destroy the car or it won’t. But he is large with rage, he feels his brute, animal
self in the very heat that rises from his skin. He will not be stopped.
He backs up far enough to get the speed he needs, locks the safety belt over his heaving torso, then accelerates quickly towards the blockade that consists of two burned-out cars positioned diagonally across the road. He draws his own car as far to the left as possible, two wheels onto the shoulder of the road.
When the collision comes, it comes hard and expected. He clips the back end of one of the cars and it spins, letting him past but also roostering his own car into a screeching spin that sends him out of control and off the road on the opposite side. The spinning car collides sidelong into the trunk of a tree – glass shatters and the passenger door crumples inward with an aching twist of metal.
When everything is still once more, Moses releases his grip on the wheel and checks himself for broken bones. There is blood all over his face and hands, but he does not know who it belongs to. Some of it could be his – but the ownership of blood is a sucker’s guess in such a sanguine world. It does not hurt much to move his arms and legs, and he figures that is enough to keep going forward.
The engine is still running, which is a good sign – and even though one of the headlights has been smashed to nothing along with the whole right front of the car, the vehicle still functions well enough to scrape itself away from the tree trunk and huff its way back to the road.
Moses drives. He looks forward, grim and inexhaustible, and the night unfolds before him. He looks for tail lights in the distance but there is only black – no sign of the car that stole his brother away from him.
No matter. He will find where they took him. He will find Fletcher and his band of thieves. And then there will be a surfeit of death – and Moses does not much care whose.
*
He drives through the evening. He does not know where else to go, so he continues to the citadel in Colorado Springs where he left the Vestal. It is still hours before dawn when he arrives. But the place looks different. The front gate looks like it has been driven through with a large truck. There is a whole battalion of soldiers there who all point their guns at him when he arrives.