Exit Kingdom (12 page)

She stands there in the river,
the water up to her thighs, her arms akimbo, hands on her hips as though she were some kind of perverse schoolteacher. Her language has by now lost all of its
polish and elegance. The Todd brothers say nothing in response. They have been scolded by a naked earth mother in a flowing river. Nature is a curious thing indeed.

All right, she relents finally. I don’t like to cause a fuss. I’ll
go secret myself behind that bush to conclude my ablutions.

She moves down the riverbank a little way until she is just out of sight. But they can still hear her singing happily while she washes herself.

They can hear a big splash at the conclusion of the last verse, and a high cheerful laugh following – as though the girl
were having the gayest time of her life bathing there in the river
in the middle of a deserted mountain range in the middle of a vast corpsedom.

Abraham looks as though his muscles, beneath his skin, are all knotted taut around each other. He picks up a stone from the grassy verge and hurls it into the river, where it makes only the most
pathetic little splash.

I swear to God, Mose,
says Abraham. Things are gonna start gettin rapey around here if that girl don’t leash herself somehow.

Moses kneels down and splashes water in his face. It is cold, like melted ice, and the sound of it running over its rocky riverbed is peaceful.

Stow it, he says to his brother. Come on, let’s take a look at that leg of yours.

So Abraham strips off his pants, and they wash the wound
in the river – but his thigh is still swollen and painful, and there’s an ugly brownish-grey colour in the skin around the
hole where the bullet went in.

Hm, Moses says.

What is it? asks his brother.

I ain’t sure about this.

Forget it, Abraham says, grabbing his leg back and splashing some more water over it. I had worse. Everything heals give it enough time.

Not everything.

Never mind.

So Moses strips naked too and submerges himself in the icy water of the river. When he rises, the water streams out of his beard. He sits in the shallows and plucks the nits from the coarse hair
all over his torso, squeezing them between his fingers and then drowning them in the river and letting them wash away on the current. He must look, he realizes, like a massive infant
– a big
hairy baby or a corrupted orangutan or something else not quite right. It’s one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don’t stand out so much.

When the Vestal Amata wades back from around the bend to where the Todd brothers are, her lower half is sunk in the water and she is wearing a brassiere on her top half – which is
something in the direction
of decency.

Hey, she says and points to Abraham’s wound drying in the sun, that’s not lookin so good. Is it going rotten?

We’ll find somethin for it on the way, Moses replies.

It ain’t anything, Abraham says and begins wrapping it up again to keep it from solicitous eyes.

The three of them stay for a while longer, wading in the small river. They should be travelling, they know,
and yet they are reluctant to leave. Overhead, a breeze rustles the leaves of the
trees, and they shiver in the cold – and still they do not wish to go, as though dozing under some spell of nature, the classical form of the earth itself that they sometimes think of as lost
and gone.

After a while, they emerge from the river and let the air dry them. The Vestal Amata peruses her companions
as they sit in the sun.

Are you sure you two are brothers? she asks. One’s a big hairy bear and the other’s a skinny, runty little thing.

We had different mothers, Moses says.

I guess you did, the girl replies. Maybe not even from the same species. So what were you two up to before you embraced the duties of holy protectorate?

We wandered around a lot, Moses says.

Seein the
world, huh? she says.

There’s a lot of it to see, Abraham says.

One thing a plague of death does, Moses says, is rip down a lot of borders that people used to put up to keep the likes of us out. Now there’s no place that’s off limits to us.

True enough, the Vestal says, nodding her head. The world is wide open now. All those builders and maintainers of society – they’re dead and gone.
So who rushes in? I guess us. The
rules are gone. Is that happymaking or sad-making?

It ain’t either one nor the other, Moses says, rising to his feet and beginning to dress. And the rules ain’t gone – they’ve just took up a new home on the inside of your
brain rather than the outside of it.

He walks back to the car and smokes a cigar while waiting for the others. It’s peaceful here,
all right. So peaceful it makes you long for things you don’t know the names of.

She was beautiful, Moses says, addressing those members of the caravan still awake to hear his story. Some have slunk off and some have fallen asleep on their own arms by the
fire. The sky is deep dark now and no one has spoken for a long while save the large one-eyed man himself. The fire is
lowering. A few listeners toss twigs and brush into the flames, but more for
the brief flashes of consuming light than to keep the fire alive. The face of the large man is becoming difficult to see – but by the momentary light of a handful of burning weeds, it is
possible to make out his features, his grizzled beard, his downturned mouth, his liquid staring eye.

Beautiful, he says again.
That’s what you ain’t able to see. Her face. Her hair. Her body. These things, too, these images – they’re the prisoners of language, and I
ain’t speaker artistic enough to set them free.

He is silent for a while. A coyote howls somewhere on the plain, and it is a reminder of the wild things that roam everywhere around them. But the man seems not to hear the creature –
in fact, seems to
hear nothing save the voice of his own speaking, constant, inexhaustible, evened to a single level as if it were a thing forged in fire and hammered over time into something long
and flat and unbendable. It is a voice that continues even when he has stopped speaking – for him and for the listeners too – a voice of mortar and steel, like the framework that
remains when a building crumbles. It
is a structural element that endures, even though it holds up nothing at all.

Don’t get me wrong, he continues finally. I knew women in my time. Them and their flowery effulgence dropping like pollen on all the world. It’s a powerful dust – like
fairies – it gets in your eyes and blinds you from things. And why have we always got to see anyway? Aren’t there times where we shut our eyes full
willingly? The truth. They used to
say that beauty and truth were the same thing. But from what I seen, the two are at deep odds. You try for the truth, try to fill your heart up with it. It’s the action of an honourable man,
ain’t it?

He is quiet again for a moment, and no one moves.

But this other woman, he says, this redhead, this priestess, this Vestal, whatever she was – she was
beautiful in a different way, like she lived in that beauty the way other people
live in houses. Did the beauty belong to her or did she belong to it? You can’t tell such things. She was all of a beauty, and there was no name invented by human tongue could check her. But
she was other things too.

He pauses as if to line up his words in proper order.

It ain’t exactly right to say she
was a trickster, ain’t exactly right to say she wore masks. Instead it was like one single mask handed off to a whole host of people for each of
them to wear it for a little while. You spoke to her, and you weren’t never sure who it was behind that face. Not that it mattered none. The face itself was the thing. The face was the thing
in the end. It made you love it – and whatever shams it perpetrated,
well, you loved them too.

They drive on. In a place called Shiprock, they see signs for the Four Corners Monument where the miracle is that four states meet at a single point.

Let’s go there, says the Vestal Amata.

You’re just tryin to delay our trip, Moses says.

Maybe I am and maybe I ain’t, but don’t you want to see it?

Moses considers. Eventually, he says:

I reckon I do.

So they drive fifteen miles west and find the monument, which is just a big granite platform in the middle of the desert covered over almost entirely by years of collected dirt and weed.
There’s a corpse half buried in the dirt, in the middle of the platform, its skin mummified black and leathery by the sun. Moses drags the corpse away.

At first they aren’t sure what
they’re looking for, and then Moses kicks away the layers of dirt on the platform where the corpse was until he finds a bronze disc the size of a
saucer embedded in the middle of it. What the disc says is:

And in the middle of the disc is something that looks like an addition sign
with the names of the four states in each of the quadrants: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico.

Here we are, says Moses Todd.

Yep, says his brother.

Sort of makes you feel like you’re at the centre of things, doesn’t it? says the Vestal Amata.

It does at that, says Moses Todd.

Someone went to all that trouble, says the Vestal, to locate that exact point in the dirt.

And
for what? says Abraham. Now it don’t mean anything.

But Moses thinks differently.

It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s
something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do.

The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate
– even maybe admiring.

Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.

And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:

Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.

Part Two

SANCTUARY

Six

Snow » Dolores » Historic Rio Grande Southern » USB » The Trials of Bitchery » Breakdown » A Clearing, a Cabin » A Face from Below
» A Conversation by Starlight » The Ministration of Wounds » ‘Everybody’s Looking for an Entrance’ » A Midnight Baptism

The air grows colder, and soon they begin to see snow on the ground.

I’ll be damned, Abraham says. I ain’t been north in ages.
Does that mean it’s winter then?

January, Moses confirms.

We missed Christmas?

I guess we did.

Abraham looks sincerely disappointed.

Don’t worry, Moses says. It’ll come around again. It always does.

A snow flurry stirs up, and the flakes whip around them as they drive. Moses pulls the car over, and they all get out. Abraham opens his palms to catch the flakes as they fall.
He watches them
melt immediately into his hands, fascinated, perhaps, by the ephemera of nature that shimmer away on contact with humanity.

The Vestal Amata opens her mouth wide to catch the flakes on her tongue, as though she would consume greedily the falling sky itself.

Moses himself remembers the snow from his youth, when he travelled many places. He is and has always been a traveller,
for longing rather than necessity – even before things changed. With
the agitation of the dead the world changed, and what it became suited Moses even more than what it was before. But he does recall a year he spent in the mountains of California, the heavy blades
hitched to the fronts of trucks to push the snow out of the way, the mounds of sooty ice collected by the sides of the road.
Back then, snow was a nuisance, an obstacle, something to be got around
or over. Now the world has slowed down, there is no hurry. You watch the snowflakes fall lazily on their way, and you are reminded of your own floating, your own speedless descent through life.