Exit Kingdom (Reapers 2)

*

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.

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.