Exit Kingdom (27 page)

Abraham does
not very frequently bring up the topic of the Vestal, having seemed to identify it as out of bounds. The first time is while they are still at the citadel.

So the girl’s lost? he says.

Yep, says Moses.

Not dead?

Could be. Moses shrugs. Dead’s a kind of lost. But last I saw her she was amongst the livin.

I reckon we should look for her.

I reckon so.

I would of thought
she’d come back here.

Girl like that, Moses says with a wave of his hand, you can’t figure her. You can’t project what she’ll do.

The next time the topic arises they are on the road. It is night, and the headlights illuminate the tall trees between which they drive.

We could trace our path back, Abraham says. To look for her, the Vestal, you know.

We could do that.

Abraham
does not seem to be aware that this is exactly what they are already doing.

What happened, Mose? Between the two of you, I mean.

I just lost her is all.

So it’s guilty feelins that’ve got you all puckered up about it?

I ain’t puckered. I just lost her. She was lookin to be lost anyway – you and me, we were just fightin it from the very beginning. Nature takes its course is what
happens.

They drive. Abraham sleeps in the passenger seat. Moses keeps his eyes wide, his fingers clenched on the wheel.

On another occasion, Abraham raises the topic again but only indirectly. He asks Moses if he thinks much any more about his wife who went missing. He liked Moses’ wife, he says. She was an
okay woman. Women for the most part, he says, are a dodgy bunch – but he guesses
he can’t blame them what with all the men taking aim at them.

Moses says nothing. He agrees that women are dodgy, but his mind is so full of lost ones now that he wishes his memories could take refuge elsewhere than in his sleepless head. He looks deep
into the tree trunks, hoping to see there another vision of the naked girl darting back and forth behind them.

But there is nothing,
and they drive on. At night, when they stop to rest, Moses hears his brother’s snoring and hopes he is dreaming among his dolphins.

They return to the town of Dolores where the whorehouse is, but the inhabitants have not seen hide nor hair of the Vestal.

They drive south, out of the snow, over the mountains and down into the valley, where the arid desert lays claim to the
land.

It is just after dawn when they arrive at the Mission San Xavier del Bac and ring the bell at the gate. The mute woman who opens the door recognizes the brothers from the last time they were
here, and she ushers them inside. The monk Ignatius greets them in the chapel and feeds them eggs gathered from their own coops in the rear of the community.

The brothers know they must not
speak, not here among the parishioners, and so they eat silently. Moses and Ignatius gaze at each other, and Moses tries to tell the man the entire story with his
eyes – for maybe that mode of communication is less treacherous. But soon Moses realizes there are untruths even in looks, so he stops trying and sits meditatively at the table.

Later, while Abraham plays some version of soccer
with the children of the place, the children trying to teach him without words, making wide explanatory gestures with their hands – Moses
and the monk leave through the front gate and climb the hill behind the mission and sit on an outcropping of stones, squinting their eyes against the desert sun.

Did you make it to the citadel? Ignatius asks.

We did. We got her there.

Did they
examine her?

They did. You ain’t gonna like it, friar.

My liking it is beside the point.

She’s got a disease. A hereditary one. It’s in her blood. That’s why the slugs don’t bother with her. She’s already half dead.

Ignatius nods and smiles benignly at the horizon.

So what’s bestowed on her, Moses continues, it ain’t a blessing.

Ignatius shrugs.

Disease or blessing,
who can say? he asks. If a disease helps you survive in the world, then it’s no longer a disease but an adaptation. Evolution would tell you as much.

But it’s more than that, friar. The girl, she ain’t a holy woman. She put on pretences.

I know that, too. I never saw her other pretences – but the one she put on here was a righteous one, so I pretended along with her. Sometimes a thing
becomes true through enacting it.
Sometimes you perform faith in order to gain faith. Do you believe that?

I don’t know. I don’t believe in nothin right now.

See, now there’s a pretence you just uttered. Do you say it because you wish it were true? Because you would try to incant it?

I won’t spar with you, says Moses as he raises his hands in surrender and smiles gently, on the field
of philosophy.

I would be a fool, my friend, to spar with you on any other.

They are quiet for a time. Then sun is low on the horizon now, the sky lit up all shock red and streaky white.

Then Moses speaks, this time very quiet, as though his words were really meant for the wind to carry them away.

She sacrificed herself, friar. Not her life, but in another way. She said it was
for me.

Do you believe her?

I didn’t, not when she told me.

And now?

Now I think I do. We got separated. I thought – I thought she might be here. Now I don’t know what . . .

You suspect she was in love with you?

Moses does not respond. His eyes are gone far out over the horizon.

You suspect, maybe, you are in love with her?

I’m lost, friar, Moses says, his eyes
gone suddenly wet. I can’t – I can’t see the colours of anything any more. It used to be I was a man, but what am I now? I lost my
way somewhere.

Moses Todd looks into the face of the monk Ignatius, and the holy man smiles back. It is a smile full of blustery optimism.

Look, he says to Moses and points to the sunset. Look out there. What do you see?

The desert, Moses says.

No,
you have to look wider. Open your eyes more. Do you see that? It’s America. No one’s ever lost in America. It’s all destination. Every corner of it. Even right here, on
this rock, with me. You’ve arrived. Do you see it?

And then, suddenly, Moses
can
see it. America. The fertile fields of the republic stretched taut from ocean to ocean, populated with ambling souls, dead or alive, it makes
no difference
as long as they are moving, as long as their hands still work to grasp and pull and reach and tear. A destiny manifest in every rock and ruin, a loamy soil of faith where God’s work is done
one way or the other – because every creation winds its way towards destruction and every destruction wipes clean a canvas for creation.

A place, indeed, poxed by calamitous treasures
like Abraham’s blue-roofed pancake houses – gigging itself forward in a frenzy of speed (yes, this is what Moses hasn’t seen
before – the country, not stopped dead, but spinning in such mazy motion the blur might be taken for stasis), galloping ahead of life and ahead of death too, and back into life, the two
masquerading as each other, unable to keep up, as though time were a circuit rather than
a line.

And if time is a circuit – if our paths only bring us back to where we begun, well then proclaim it holy, holy, because the friar is right – ain’t nothing is ever lost but
it’s just on a different road, and it’s all of it, the whole country, just one big road attached to itself in different ways – and so are all travellers kin, and so are all people
travellers through life.

And, yes, he can see her dancing again, naked, that white body on the sunset plain, a vision if ever there was one, holy woman and whore, never lost but she dances America to its sleep every
night – and you can hear her laughter, that voice both tricksy and true, clamouring America in all its broken bells. And you are glad.

Was her name really Mattie? Moses says now to the
caravaners, those who remain awake.

Now, in the distance, the sky is empurpled by dawn. The stars have dimmed against the lightening void, and the horizon becomes invisible as a sharp-cut silhouette – something you might
trace with pencil and compass.

I like to believe Mattie was her name – that she told me it true, even if just that one time. It’s passed my lips enough times, maybe
more like a prayer than a rightful name.
Mattie. Mattie, you out there somewhere? Mattie – where’d you get to, girl? It’s just a word is all it is, a word spoke to the darkness. But so are all words. Goodness, purity,
truth, God. You build somethin with your eyes closed. You speak it to life. Then you open your eyes – and what kind of tower? Where’s it reach to? Maybe nowhere. Maybe all the way
to
heaven.

He pauses. There is rustling movement among the listeners. Perhaps some of them are waking to his voice, the same voice they fell asleep to, and are now wondering what a thing is a story with
just a beginning and an end. Perhaps some of them are just antic against the dawn.

We searched her out for a long time, Moses continues, Abraham and me. Sometimes we’d hear stories
that sounded like they could of been her – but we never saw her again. Ten years
now. Could be I’m cursed to tail women my whole life. My wife and daughter – they got away from me. Mattie the Vestal – who ran when I sent her runnin.

He stops again and seems to consider how long he has been chasing people who refuse to be found.

It was only one girl I had any talent for huntin, he says.
She – well, she cost me my eye, and the price of my brother, finally, in exchange for Maury there.

He gestures with a nod of his chin to the large mute sleeping at the perimeter of the group.

Just a young girl, that one. I bear her no grudge. One thing you could say about her, she balanced the log books like a true accountant of life. She – yeah, she got away from me
too.

He pauses
one last time – and this time the silence feels like a bottomless chasm everyone, all the listeners and the teller too, stands on the precipice of.

But that’s a different story altogether, Moses Todd says finally. I guess this story here’s found its finish.

He and his companion travel with the caravan one more day. When the night falls again, he is silent – as though his story of the previous
night has exhausted him in a profound way. One
of the children, a toddler, approaches him sleepily. The one-eyed man reaches out his hand as if to tousle the child’s blond hair, but at the last moment he pulls his arm back – as
though afraid his touch could never be light enough to keep the youngster from shattering harm.

In the morning, both men are gone.

The caravan continues its
slow progress over the plain in the direction of many Americas – more than can be counted. Three days later, it is attacked by marauders. The caravaners manage
finally to repel the attack, but not without significant losses. Half the travellers are killed, but half survive.

The Reapers Are The Angels

Set in the same bleak world as
Exit Kingdom
, but at a different time, there was
The Reapers Are The Angels
. . .

Older than her years and completely alone, Temple is just trying to live one day at a time in a post-apocalyptic world, where the undead roam endlessly, and the remnants of
mankind who have survived seem, at times, to retain little humanity themselves.

Temple has known nothing else. This is the world she was born into. Her journey takes her to far-flung places, to people struggling to maintain some semblance of civilization – and to
those who have created a new world order for themselves.

When she comes across the helpless Maury, she attempts to set one thing right. If she can just get him back to his family then maybe it will bring
forgiveness for some of the terrible things
she’s done in her past. Because Temple has had to fight to survive; along the road she’s made enemies – and one vengeful man is determined that, in a world gone mad, killing her
is the only thing that makes sense . . .

One

GOD IS a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe.

Like those fish all disco-lit in the shallows. That was something, a marvel with no compare that she’s been witness to. It was deep night when she saw it, but the moon was so bright it
cast hard shadows everywhere on the island. So bright it was almost brighter
than daytime because she could see things clearer, as if the sun were criminal to the truth, as if her eyes were eyes of
night. She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patterwaves tickled her
ankles. And that’s when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting around
like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They
came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing
under
the moon and
in
the moon at the same time. And that was
something she hadn’t seen before. A decade and a half, thereabouts, roaming the planet earth, and
she’s never seen that before.

And you could say the world has gone to black damnation, and you could say the children of Cain are holding sway over the good and the righteous – but here’s what Temple knows: she
knows that whatever hell the world went to, and whatever evil she’s perpetrated her own self, and whatever series of cursed misfortunes brought her down here to this island to be
harboured
away from the order of mankind, well, all those things are what put her there that night to stand amid the Daylight Moon and the Miracle of the Fish, which she wouldn’t of got to see
otherwise.