6
She could feel a cool, metallic object in her hand; it must be her phone. If she could turn it on, there would be light.
The screen shed a pale luminescence toward her, a pale glowing rectangle, like light caught in a mirror. It contained no image and no word. At first it seemed that she looked down into it, holding it cupped in the palm of her hand, but in the dark of the cave there seemed to be no gravity, and this cup of light might just as well have been beside her, or above, impossibly distant, like that frayed wafer of daylight moon, faint in the washed colors of the evening sky.
7
“Rice-burner.” Sonny smirked, turned his head sideways to spit Skoal Bandit juice in the sand.
Jamal straightened from the tent he was assembling, rested his light knuckles on the black waistband of his jeans. “You dissing my machine, yo?”
“No, man,” Sonny said. “I wouldn’t do that.” He turned to offer Julie the garnet-colored bottle. “Here you go, girl. Cut the dust.”
Jamal stooped over the parts of his tent. Karyn was mugging for Marko’s camera, striking a series of runway poses—chin up, wrist cocked to the ear, giggling into it, ooh la la. A slight heaviness in her movement made Julie wonder if Karyn might have had a shot or so before they started. Not that she’d mind a buzz herself, but then she wasn’t a complete idiot: dehydration was an issue out here, and Julie had one liter of water for herself. She didn’t quite know what the others had brought.
Marko ducked and weaved like a paparazzo, pursuing Karen with the camera’s metallic eye, as Julie took a small sip from the red glowing bottle. There was no bite of vodka or gin. Just vitamin water, something like that—but a sicklier sweet than usual. She took a larger swallow and handed the bottle back to Sonny. Karyn was play-fighting Marko for the camera, gimme gimme lemme see, and Marko held it high over her head, making her stretch for it. Her T-shirt hem rode high and the gold of her navel-stud winked in the sun.
“Damn, don’t break it,” Marko said. He let her have the camera. Karyn gathered it toward her cleavage, wiping her dirty-blond hair from her face as she peered into the camera’s bright screen. Her chipped black fingernails clicked on the camera’s tiny buttons. “Look it, Julie,” Karyn said. “You can practically zoom right down your own throat.”
“Gross,” Julie said, absently; she was admiring the tent, which Jamal had just finished assembling: a silver-gray hemisphere sealed into the sand. Something in the shape of it appealed to her. Something about the way her image of it trembled around the edges. Sonny cracked a beer and gave it to her—where had he found that? The foam was acrid in her mouth, connecting with a bitter aftertaste from the vitamin water she’d had a few minutes before. She took a larger gulp to wash it out.
Two slightly sweating, soft vinyl coolers had appeared beside the pair of Harleys. Sonny pulled out two more beers and dragged the coolers into the shade.
“Don’t be dumping that ice,” Marko said.
“Huh,” said Sonny, “I ain’t drinking it, not out of there.”
“We can cook with it,” Marko said. “We got a pack of freeze-dried stuff.”
“Are we Boy Scouts or what?” Sonny said, and Karyn laughed, elbowed him, let her blond head roll back against the warm stone of the boulder.
Jamal fired up his little stone pipe and sent it round among the others. Julie took the weakest possible hit, then left the circle before the bowl could come to her again. She didn’t want to get too high too early. Maybe at night, when the stars came out, when sleep would be soon to come. The business of the tents would all be sorted out by then, but she didn’t want to think about it now. There was a voice in her head that said be careful, and she especially didn’t want voices to start splitting off and talking to her from somewhere else.
The shadow cast by the cliff wall had grown to about six feet long, and Julie walked into it, feeling perhaps she might disappear. She sat down cross-legged in a niche of the vertically channeled stone. From here the orb of the tent seemed like an object of contemplation, like some meteorite that had embedded itself in the desert floor, and she imagined the other half of the sphere it described, twinning with it beneath the sand. There was a kind of aura around it. The stone behind her was still radiating warmth, like the walls of an oven, from the sun that had been shining on it for most of the day.
Trippy weed Jamal had—she reminded herself to go slow with that, lifting her arms and setting her palms together in a mudra above her head. As her palms touched she felt a spreading warmth below her navel, much stronger than she’d ever been able to get in her half-hearted attempts to practice yoga. A tingle across the smooth-shaved skin of her bare armpits. The tent rippled as a light breeze shivered over it.
Jamal was studying her from behind his yellow lenses, in that way that made her feel no one else could see her, even though the others were all there. On his cat-shaped, sallow face, the buggy glasses made him look like pictures of a space alien, sometimes.
“The Jule in the lotus,” Jamal said; funny, but it wasn’t a joke.
The wind came up and snatched the tent, which flew away across the plain of sand, sometimes skating on its flat bottom, sometimes rolling end over end. The others were laughing, watching Jamal caper after the tent—every time he almost caught it the wind would pull it just out of his reach. Julie was running like you can run in dreams, with a deep, springing, effortless movement, breathing as evenly as in sleep. That was trippy weed for sure. They captured the tent at last and held it still between them. Rippling in the remains of the breeze, the silvery fabric glimmered like snakeskin, and Julie still felt that warmth in her belly, spreading like the onset of happiness.
8
The pattern of dots billowed toward her, stretching and pocketing over the same roll in the wall that had formed the shoulder and hump of the bear. Or maybe she had moved somehow and was now in a different part of the cave. She didn’t know how she could have moved, because she couldn’t feel her body, although she remembered that not long ago she had felt the cool curve of her cell phone, fitting into the cupped palm of her hand.
She watched the pattern; it seemed important somehow to grasp it. A pattern in four dimensions; in her mind she heard those words, like a voice-over in a movie. But she was seeing it only in three. Umber, ochre, now a near-scarlet red, and there were three spirals swirling around each other—a triple helix, the dots drawing toward each other but never quite touching, as if a magnetic energy held them together, held them a certain distance apart.
For a moment she was inside the swirling particles, as if she was standing under rain.
9
She followed Jamal up the ledge that led to the first rock shelter. He climbed magnetically, as if he had suckers on his fingers and toes, and his head looked outsized on his slim body, maybe because of its big cloud of hair. Where the ledge leveled out to a wider shelf there was a vast overhang, three stories high, with a few trails of vine hanging from its upper lip. Because the overhang blocked the setting sun, it was suddenly almost cold. Julie wrapped her arms around herself. She’d left her jacket with the bikes.
On the inside wall there were tags spray-painted by other kids who’d come out from town, fat cushiony three-D letters smushed together like marshmallows crushed in the bag. Jamal pulled a plastic trash bag from his pocket and methodically began to scour up beer cans. After a moment Julie shook off her chill and helped him. There were chip bags and candy wrappers, too.
“Now what?” Jamal opened a crooked smile, hefting the three-quarters-full bag.
Julie shrugged and walked to the outside edge. Away below and to the left, Sonny and Marko were anchoring poles for an umbrella tent—it would be big as a room in a regular house when they were done. Karyn had scrambled to the top of the boulder and lay on her back on an Indian blanket, her white forearm shielding her eyes from the red rays of the declining sun. Julie pictured the turbulence that would follow if she or Jamal dropped the trash bag.
“Nah,�
�� Jamal said. “The bikes won’t carry it. We’ll be doing well to come out with what we brought in.”
Julie turned toward the inner wall. At one end of the puffy chain of tagging, there was a narrow, dark slit in the rock. “In there?”
Jamal shook his head. “You ever think how you can’t throw anything away? I mean, you can throw it. But it doesn’t go away.”
Now Julie was conscious of herself shrugging. “I guess so,” she said, which seemed equally hapless. Still carrying the bag by its closed throat, Jamal walked toward the rock shelter wall.
“Wiggers,” he said, shaking his head as he read the tags, left to right, stopping where the opening pierced the stone. Julie stood a step behind him.
“You ever go in there?” she said.
“No thanks,” said Jamal. “I don’t like tight places.”
Julie looked into the gap in the stone. It seemed flat black, as if painted on the surface like the tags, as if after all there was no interior. She would have had to stoop just a little and turn sideways to get into it. Jamal was almost a head taller, but so skinny he might have folded himself up so he would also fit.
He set the bag down and touched her shoulder with a fingertip; the touch felt faintly electric through the cotton of her shirt.
“Come on,” Jamal said. “Let’s go find the sun.”
10
Seeming somehow to know her way, despite the utter darkness, she moved a little distance along the passage, then turned back. It wasn’t so completely dark after all because there was the light of the phone screen, behind her now; its bluish-white, unnatural luminescence spreading from the cupped hand of the girl where she lay. Then the light went out. But the battery would not have died yet. The screen had shut down to conserve the battery.
She thought of turning the phone on again, and yes, a thumb must have pressed a button, for the light reappeared, and now she could see how the body lay where it had fallen, half on its back and half on its side, knees drawn up, the pale face turned sideways, eyes closed now. On the rock where the head rested there was a darkness flowing, more beyond the fan of Julie’s dark hair. Yes, surely this was Julie’s body, but she was not inside that body now.
Would the blood smell attract the bear? But the bear was an illusion, it was painted on the wall, and then there was something else painted there, or not, something she saw now or had seen, a swirl of bright specks in spirals, like a cyclone or the image of a broad-bladed, fleshy leaf that bulged and rippled in the rising wind.
The light of the screen shut down again; she turned away from it and continued along the passage, careful not to brush the wall on either side. She seemed to know where the walls were, although she couldn’t see them. The freshness and sense of movement in the air was receding behind her. Ahead of her the black atmosphere felt increasingly heavy and close, but it was important that she continue to move deeper into the cave.
11
Ascending more gradually now, the ledge wrapped around the cliff wall to the north. At a narrow place where Julie hesitated, Jamal reached back to help her along, and then they had come out into the warmth of sunlight. Jamal let go of her wrist and turned toward the lowering sun, raising one hand to shade his eyes, inside the yellow goggles. On this side of the cliff the horizontally striped stone hills were densely grouped together, with shallow, dry canyons snaking between them. The first phase of the sunset picked the landscape out in bands of turquoise and rose.
“Wow,” said Julie, “We could be on the moon.”
“Except—” Jamal pointed to the horizon. A glint of reflection from a car window as the vehicle turned a loop in a band of blacktop. It was too far away to hear the motor, and when the car turned out of sight Julie couldn’t even pick out the thread of highway any more. The whole desert valley resonated with an airy silence.
Then squeaking, like a hamster in distress, and it grew louder, but there couldn’t be a hamster in mid-air. From below the lip of the ledge where they stood the beating wings of a hawk came into view, flogging the air as it flew to perch on a crag a dozen yards away.
Julie pulled out her phone to take a picture, but felt Jamal’s warm palm, this time on her forearm.
“Don’t,” Jamal said. “Just. . . . Watch it.”
The hawk tightened its talons, and the squeaking abruptly stopped. Julie didn’t know if she wanted to watch, and she wanted to ask what the hawk had caught, but how would Jamal know better than she? It couldn’t be a hamster of course, and it was bigger than a mouse, and furry. A prairie dog. Did they have those here? She watched the hard bright eye of the hawk as the curved beak dipped, cut and penetrated, then raised a quivering strip of bleeding meat. There was something dreadful about it and yet—
“They’re not cruel,” Jamal said, as if he’d read the half-formed notion from her mind. “They’re just not on our program.”
12
“You ever think how you can’t throw anything away? I mean, you can throw it.” Jamal shook his head. “But it doesn’t go away.”
Still carrying the bag of litter by its closed throat, Jamal walked toward the rock shelter wall. With a faint clatter of beer cans he set the bag down and raised a crooked forefinger as he scanned the painted tags from left to right.
“Freakin’ wiggers,” he said. Julie didn’t quite know what he meant by that. Jamal was scanning left to right; then his head stopped moving.
“What?” Julie asked.
“Yeah,” Jamal said. “Come here. You can only see him at just the right angle—depends on the light.”
Julie put her head near his and then she saw it, an image shallowly etched in the stone, just to the left of the dark opening that led who knows where. A round, shapeless body like a small child might draw, stick legs running, an antlered head. If not for the head, the petroglyph reminded her of paramecia she had watched through a microscope in ninth-grade biology class. Jamal had been one of her lab partners then, and they had taken turns lowering their heads to the black ring of the microscope’s upper lens.
“Who did this?” she said.
“Brulé.” Jamal’s voice went guttural as he said it.
“What’s that mean?”
“Burnt Indian,” Jamal said. “No, but they didn’t do it.
I’m just blowing smoke. These things are way older than those guys.”
Julie felt her bare arms stippling up in goose flesh. It was cool here in the shadow of the rock shelter, and a current of colder air seemed to come out of the slit in the stone wall. Jamal crouched over his heels, a finger tracing.
“There’s more down here, I think. There were. But you can’t see much of them now, under the tags.”
“That’s awful,” Julie said.
Jamal squinted up at her. “What?” She saw his gray eyes floating in the yellow bubbles of his lenses.
Julie shrugged. “Kids tagging all over . . . something like that.”
“Yeah . . . I don’t know.” Jamal straightened and took a backward step, still looking at the wall. “Something else’ll come along and cover all this up too, don’t you think?”
Julie looked down, to her knee level. On the stone was spray-painted the letters KAOS, in the lurid red and purple colors of a bruise. A tag for a gang Marko and Sonny had belonged to in high school, it was probably four or five years old. There was indeed something under it too, the pattern Jamal’s fingertip had followed. Her eye could not make out what it was. Jamal caught her right hand with his left, pulling out her forefinger as if it were a pencil. As he guided her finger over the stone she felt that she was beginning to read the image, but the glimmer of understanding spooked her for some reason. She giggled to disguise the feeling, pulled her hand away from Jamal and took a long step back from the wall.
A butterfly lit on the peak of the A in KAOS. Its wings stirred the air, an iridescent, heavenly blue. Julie shivered as the butterfly flew.
“Hey, you’re getting too cold,” Jamal said. He threw an arm over her shoulder, bumping he
r clumsily into his ribs. “Come on, let’s go find the sun.”
13
The hawk finished eating, shrugged its feathers into a ruff around its neck. Its head pushed back and it shrieked once before it flew. The sharp, harsh sound thrust out of the open beak like a blade. It seemed to linger once the hawk had flown, its cross-shaped shadow briefly stroking over the turning of the canyon below the ledge. Julie shuddered.
“It bother you?”
She turned to find Jamal’s face nearer to hers than she had expected, his own nose a bit hawkish really, but he had taken off his wraparounds and his pale gray eyes looked warm.
“I don’t know,” Julie said, not knowing if she wanted him to come nearer; if he did come nearer their faces would touch. At the base of her neck she felt the faint warmth of the setting sun. To the left of Jamal’s curly head was the frail lace round of the daylight moon. Julie turned away, toward where the—whatever it had been when the hawk had caught it wasn’t much of anything now. A pattern of bones hanging loose in the remains of sinew, a stain of red fluid spread over the stone.
“Have you heard the bear tape?” Julie’s back was still to Jamal.
“What? —what are you talking about?”
Julie looked at him now. She had made him uncomfortable. “Don’t you know?”
“That’s no reason why you should.” Jamal had put the yellow wraparounds back on. “What’s making you think about it, anyway?”
“That, I guess,” Julie tossed her head, a little sulkily, at what the hawk had left. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, then.”
“Don’t be like that—” Jamal cut himself off. He leaned on his elbows, let his head drop back, till his longish dark curls grazed the stone they were sitting on. The white-dusty moon and the reddening sun were at opposite ends of the sky, with the space between them curved like a rainbow.
Behind the Moon Page 2
