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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.
Mo
ses 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 feel 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.