And now you’re here doin this.
Moses shakes his head, commiserating.
The woman recoils a bit in her expression, as if bitten. She moves to the window of the room and puts her back against it, folds her arms over her front.
You think I regret it? she says. Living didn’t used to amount to much. Now it counts. I used to be a secretary for a real estate attorney. Now I’m a survivor of the apocalypse and a whore. I endure where others don’t. It matters. Just breathing means something now. Have you got a problem with whores?
Moses cringes, chastened. He looks down at his dirty, brutish hands.
Not as a general rule, he says.
Then the woman softens a bit. She comes and sits on the edge of the bed, where Moses lies on his back looking at the ceiling.
You and that redhead, she says. You two are together somehow?
Me and the Vestal? Huh-uh. She’s just my charge is all.
You’re a hired gun?
Somethin like that.
So what are you being paid?
Moses goes silent. He gazes at the ceiling. He ponders when was the last time he laid beneath a roof and called it home. The world, for him, just keeps going on and on and on, long after he thought it ever would.
Come on, he says and reaches for the woman. Lay here and just let me get some shut-eye for a bit. Then we’ll get down to business.
*
When he wakes in the morning, there is a tumult downstairs. He rushes down thinking that his brother has got into trouble again – but this time it’s not the riot of threat but rather the riot of laughter.
In the sitting room, on a burgundy couch, he finds the Vestal Amata making merry with a passel of men. Townsmen – a number of the faces Moses recognizes as those of the men who were holding their rifles at the ready when they rolled into town. The redhead herself is lying across two of their laps, her bare feet resting on the arm of the couch, her toes wiggling playfully.
Here he is, she says of Moses to the men. My Rock of Gibraltar. Come on in, Gibraltar. The boys and I have had quite a night.
A couple of the other girls sit in the room also, but Moses sees that they are distinctly unhappy with this redheaded interloper.
Brucie there gave my feet a nice hot salt bath, says the Vestal and points to a tough-looking man who nonetheless flushes when she says his name. Men are lovely, she continues. You try to pay them back in kindness, but they just give so much it’s difficult to keep up.
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.