Exit Kingdom

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 establishmentsof 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 againstan 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 andwe’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 andthe 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 aredense 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 walktheir 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 goneinto 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 sleepingin 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 theblossoms 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