And what about you? Abraham says. Where would that leave you?
The Vestal shrugs.
Slugs don’t bother me none. You’ve seen it yourself. I would of gone along my merry way.
What’s with the talk anyway? Abraham asks. How come you keep changin the way you talk?
Why, sir, she replies with a sly smile, I can’t possibly imagine what you mean.
They drive north, and the road takes them through an empty desert dotted with dense copses of brushwood. They put Fountain Hills behind them, and the bandits, and the accumulated dead. The Todds made sure, as they always do, that those they killed are killed for good. They will not swell the rout of walking dead on the surface of the earth.
Soon they are in a town called Sunflower, which is a nothing of a place. They take an off-ramp from the highway to find a few untouched buildings, some corpses, long dead, littering the street. Some of the corpses try to pick themselves up when they hear the noise of the engine drive by – but so old are they that their flesh has burned itself to the very tarmac, and when they rise, they pull half their faces off. Then they sit, their energy wasted in the simple act of rising, and poke curiously at their own faces, the exposed skull and the dry eye, now lidless, which will never shut again.
But there is a women’s discount store on the main drag of the tiny town, and the Vestal Amata scrounges for clothes better fitting than those Abraham found for her in the bandits’ inventory. They do not trust her not to run away again, so the Todd brothers go into the store with her. They stay at the front, spreading out a map on the counter and trying to figure out the best way to reach Colorado Springs. The largest freeways are not always ideal, travelling as they do through cities most densely populated with the dead.
As they consult the map, Moses notices that his brother keeps looking away, distracted. It’s the Vestal. She’s walking up and down the aisles pure naked. She tries on garments and slings them over her arm if she likes them or drops them to a pile on the ground if she doesn’t. Her face and hair are still spattered with dried blood, but the rest of her body is a pale white thing like something just crawled out from under a rock and feeling the sunlight for the first time in years. She is freckled all over her chest, and her bosoms are small and pointed. Unselfconsciously, she scratches at her crotch and the bush of red pubic hair until she finds a pair of red underpants that suit her. Moses does not know what kind of textile those underpants are made from, but they are shiny and not at all modest.
She wears a necklace, Moses sees. It’s a small wooden pendant in the shape of a cross.
Stop gawking, Moses says to Abraham to make his own leer feel less criminal.
What’s she gotta walk around like that for? Abraham whispers. She’s testin me, Mose. That nun is testin my mettle.
I told you she ain’t a nun.
Then what is she? She think she’s immune to the appetites of live men like she is to those of the dead?
I don’t know what she thinks. Let’s just take her where she’s gotta go and get our leave of her. That’s all.
*
They continue north, and the road climbs into the evergreen mountains where the slug population is sparse. Where there were very few living, there are very few dead. They come to a small bridge and see a stream running underneath. Moses pulls the car over, and they clamber down the verge, Moses helping his brother, to where the water runs cold and clear.
Thank God, says the Vestal. I’m crusty all over.
She strips off the impractical outfit she got in the last town – a leather skirt and a corset-type top – and wades into the river naked, splashing the water on her skin.
It’s bracing! she cries. You boys have a nose for the good life. Maybe I’ll think twice before running off again. Hey, what’s the matter with Abraham?
Moses looks at his brother. There is an expression on his face of outraged desire – as though he is furious at the girl for making him want so much. Moses has seen that expression before, and it does not bode well.
Moses says, I reckon you best try to keep yourself covered up around us, Vestal. A desperate man’s a sore creature to deal with.
The redhead laughs and splashes water at them.
Silly boys, she says. The world’s gone dead everywhere you look, we’re livin on the opposite side of grand apocalypse, and they’re still Adam-and-Eve-ing it through the corridors of their own shame. They’re just bodies is all. I bet you seen countless dead pussies, but a living one gives you quivers all over. Puzzle that one through for me.
She stands there in the river, the water up to her thighs, her arms akimbo, hands on her hips as though she were some kind of perverse schoolteacher. Her language has by now lost all of its polish and elegance. The Todd brothers say nothing in response. They have been scolded by a naked earth mother in a flowing river. Nature is a curious thing indeed.
All right, she relents finally. I don’t like to cause a fuss. I’ll go secret myself behind that bush to conclude my ablutions.
She moves down the riverbank a little way until she is just out of sight. But they can still hear her singing happily while she washes herself.
Oh, Mademoiselle from Armentare, parlay voo.
Oh, Mademoiselle from Armentare, parlay voo.
She got the Palm and the Craw de Gare,
For washing soldiers’ underwear.
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
You didn’t have to know her long, parlay voo.
You didn’t have to know her long, parlay voo.
You didn’t have to know her long,
To know the reason men go wrong.
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
She’s the hardest working girl in town, parlay voo.
She’s the hardest-working girl in town, parlay voo.
She’s the hardest-working girl in town,
But she makes her living upside down.
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum, parlay voo.
She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum, parlay voo.She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum,
And sometimes for chocolate or chewing gum.
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
The cooties rambled through her hair, parlay voo.
The cooties rambled through her hair, parlay voo.
The cooties rambled through her hair –
She whispered sweetly, ‘Say la gare.’
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
She never could hold the love of man, parlay voo.
She never could hold the love of man, parlay voo.
She never could hold the love of man,
Cause she took her baths in a talcum can.
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
My froggy girl was true to me, parley voo.
My froggy girl was true to me, parley voo.
She was true to me, she was true to you,
She was true to the whole damn army too.
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
You might forget the gas and shells, parlay voo.
You might forget the gas and shells, parlay voo.
You might forget the groans and yells,
But you’ll never forget the mademoiselles.
Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.
They can hear a big splash at the conclusion of the last verse, and a high cheerful laugh following – as though the girl were having the gayest time of her life bathing there in the river in the middle of a deserted mountain range in the middle of a vast corpsedom.
Abraham looks as though his muscles, beneath his skin, are all knotted taut around each other. He picks up a stone from the grassy verge and hurls it into the river, where it makes only the most pathetic little splash.
I swear to God, Mose, says Abraham. Things are gonna start gettin rapey around here if that girl don’t leash herself somehow.
Moses kneels down and splashes water in his face. It is cold, like melted ice, and the sound of it running over its rocky riverbed is peaceful.
Stow it, he says to his brother. Come on, let’s take a look at that leg of yours.
So Abraham strips off his pants, and they wash the wound in the river – but his thigh is still swollen and painful, and there’s an ugly brownish-grey colour in the skin around the hole where the bullet went in.
Hm, Moses says.
What is it? asks his brother.
I ain’t sure about this.
Forget it, Abraham says, grabbing his leg back and splashing some more water over it. I had worse. Everything heals give it enough time.
Not everything.
Never mind.
So Moses strips naked too and submerges himself in the icy water of the river. When he rises, the water streams out of his beard. He sits in the shallows and plucks the nits from the coarse hair all over his torso, squeezing them between his fingers and then drowning them in the river and letting them wash away on the current. He must look, he realizes, like a massive infant – a big hairy baby or a corrupted orangutan or something else not quite right. It’s one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don’t stand out so much.
When the Vestal Amata wades back from around the bend to where the Todd brothers are, her lower half is sunk in the water and she is wearing a brassiere on her top half – which is something in the direction of decency.
Hey, she says and points to Abraham’s wound drying in the sun, that’s not lookin so good. Is it going rotten?
We’ll find somethin for it on the way, Moses replies.
It ain’t anything, Abraham says and begins wrapping it up again to keep it from solicitous eyes.
The three of them stay for a while longer, wading in the small river. They should be travelling, they know, and yet they are reluctant to leave. Overhead, a breeze rustles the leaves of the trees, and they shiver in the cold – and still they do not wish to go, as though dozing under some spell of nature, the classical form of the earth itself that they sometimes think of as lost and gone.
After a while, they emerge from the river and let the air dry them. The Vestal Amata peruses her companions as they sit in the sun.
Are you sure you two are brothers? she asks. One’s a big hairy bear and the other’s a skinny, runty little thing.
We had different mothers, Moses says.
I guess you did, the girl replies. Maybe not even from the same species. So what were you two up to before you embraced the duties of holy protectorate?