Exit Kingdom

between doing all the same things you did the day before and all the same things
you would do again tomorrow.
    Yes, life. Life is what they called it.
    And Moses supposes he could do worse than an exis- tence filled with equal parts death and discovery – when the alternative is life and listlessness.
    He will be happyto be off this road at last. Happy to be forging ahead.
    They are two hours from Colorado City when they come across a wreckage that Moses doesn’t remember from before. Perhaps he has got the roads mixed up and they are now on a different route.
Perhaps he has become blinded to the nuances of the world now that he is locked in the repetition of it.
    Moses brings the car to a stop.
    Abraham starts to complain about his leg and doesn’t mind the break from riding folded up in the passenger seat.
    The leg’s stiff as hell, he says. I got to stretch it. Plus, I need to piss.
    So they climb out of the car. It is dark again already – the days are shuffling by quickly now, as though in the agile hands of a professional card sharp. And maybe God is a gambler after
all.
    Peabody helps Abraham stand, and the two begin to limp in circles around the car.
    Moses takes the stub of a cigar out of his pocket and lights it with a match. The road is a cut through the hills, and he gazes around him at the trees. The road looks familiar and unfamiliar at
the same time. The wreckage blocking their way, though, doesn’t look new. He puffs thoughtfully on his cigar.
    I’m going up to that ridge, he says to the others. Take a look around.
    He climbs the slope, pulling himself up using tree branches that pop and snap in his mammoth grip. He is out of breath by the time he crests the ridge. Down below there is nothing. It’s
possible that they are on the cusp of the Colorado City grid, but it makes no difference. The hill on which he stands is just one ribof many on a cage of ridges that ripple the landscape. He can
only see the dipping distance between one line of hills and the next – and there is only emptiness in that unlit valley.
    He sits for a moment to recover from the climb. He listens to his own heavy breathing, the rasp of air in his throat. He looks at the fat cigar between his thick fingers. He is a brute, he
knows, and thereshould be laws and cages for such as he. But sometimes he is surprised to discover that he has found a home in the wild black of what America has become. He belongs on the edges of
the world – but now the world is all edges. Margins without centre for ever and ever.
    Then he hears a shout from down below, indistinct and panicked, back in the direction of the car where he left Abraham andPeabody. Then other noises. The sound of scuffle and event, followed by
two thunderous screeches of pain – voices Moses doesn’t recognize. Then another shout – his name:
    Mose!
    It’s his brother’s voice. And then Moses is running, crashing down through the trees, an ursine monster smashing through the underbrush, calling out, Abe! Abe!
    He hears the sound of an engine below – a carspeeding away. And then he bursts through the scrub at the edge of the road and sees the mess in the pool of light cast by the headlights of
the car they have been driving. It’s a body, but not Abraham’s and not the doctor’s. Moses kneels over it.
    It’s a man, grimy-faced and ugly. He wears a leather jacket with studs on it, and there’s a baseball bat still gripped tight in his dead righthand. He lies in a wide pool of jugular
blood that is still pumping with weak persistence from the wound in his neck. Struck through his neck, from one side to the other like some horrible mockery of a bow tie, is a bowie knife that
Moses recognizes as his brother’s.
    Abe! Moses calls. Abe!
    There is no response, but when he hushes he can hear a guttural choke from the ditch by the sideof the road. He rushes over to find the doctor, Peabody, holding his hands over a puncture wound
in his chest. The blood seeps through his fingers, leaking insistently through his pathetic grip.
    Who? Moses says. Fletcher?
    Peabody coughs wetly. He shakes his head.
    Highwaymen, he struggles to say through his gasps. Fletcher, he put a bounty on your heads. Three men. Abraham got one.Wounded another. But they took him.
    Dead or no?
    Peabody coughs again, cringes in his breathing.
    Dead or no? Moses says again, almost angry.
    No, Peabody says. Fletcher’ll want to.
    Okay, Moses says and begins to lift Peabody. Come on,