Jamal retained a flash of lipstick framing a cell phone. That was it. He looked down at himself: clothes torn and bloody at the knees and elbows, his left hand swollen from cactus venom—there was a good chance nobody would stop for somebody who looked like that, especially now it was beginning to get dark.
He began to walk downhill along the serpentine rubber tracks the car had laid while losing and regaining control. How far it was to the nearest town or village or crossroad or wayside gas pump or ranger station he had no idea at all. Sunset was a red filament burning like forged metal at the horizon’s edge. Julie had been in the cave for almost twenty-four hours, he thought. Maybe there was water in there. Maybe she had survived the fall.
The patrol car came around the bend, revolving blue dome lights flashing but with no siren. The young Smoky hopped out with a hand on his pistol grip. Mirror sunglasses stopped Jamal from being able to tell just how he was being scanned but he had the sense of being compared to a description.
“All right, you. Hands on the roof there. Come on. Give it some weight.” The patrolman hooked one of Jamal’s ankles out so that he practically fell against the car, at the same time he frisked him, quickly finding the swing-blade clipped in his pocket.
“The fuck is this, son?” The patrolman flicked the knife open in one hand, studying the serration and the tanto point, while pressing Jamal’s head down with the other, gripping him by the nape of his neck.
I was camping he wanted to say, but when he opened his mouth he was too parched to make a sound.
“Okay, I’m not gonna cuff you. Get in the back.” Head pressed down by the big bony hand, Jamal obediently climbed into the back seat. The patrolman slapped the door shut and got behind the wheel, twisting to look at Jamal through the wire mesh between them.
“Let’s lose the shades there, boy.”
Jamal took off the yellow sunglasses. To his surprise the patrolman pushed his own glasses to the top of his head. Their eyes met through the diamonds of the wire. Probably there were not too many years between them.
“Got a call about some wild man running around out here. On a bet I’d say that’s gotta be you. You got anything to say for yourself?
Julie. The word wouldn’t come out.
“You don’t start talking some English pretty soon I gotta think you’re one of them Ay-rab terrorists.” The unmasked eyes squinted. “Or you might be a Messcan, I don’t know. Hey. Habla español?”
Jamal tried opening his mouth again. The pebble clicked against the back of his bottom teeth.
“Be that way, then.” The patrolmen lowered his shades and put his hands on the wheel. “Maybe you’ll have something to say at the station.” He popped a U-turn, burning more rubber, and roared back the way that he had come.
Jamal rolled his head against the seatback. He still had the feeling of being watched. Yes, the rearview mirror framed two mirrored teardrops. He coughed the pebble into the palm of his hand.
“Fuck me I’m an idiot,” the patrolman said. The brakes slammed on and the car shuddered to a stop. He reached to the floor and came up with a blue-topped bottle of water. “Here,” he said, sliding back a gate in the mesh between them. “Cut the dust.”
Jamal turned the cap from the clear bottle and held a sip of water in his mouth before he let it trickle down his throat. Much as he would have liked to slam the whole pint at once, he knew it wouldn’t be a good idea. He thought he could feel the parched cells in his tongue and the walls of his mouth expanding. He took a slightly larger swallow.
“Dude.” The patrolman had pushed up his glasses again. “About how long were you out there anyway?”
Jamal shrugged. “A day . . . but Julie.”
“What Julie.” The patrolman’s eyes narrowed.
“Julie,” Jamal said. “She’s still in the cave.”
43
Julie’s mom walked into the police station with a half-smoked Virginia Slim in one hand and a quart of Diet Coke in the other. She wore a smock printed with tiny multicolored teddy bears, long enough to reach halfway down her bowed legs, and over the smock a blue vest with a Walmart name tag pinned to it. She didn’t look right or left when she came into the dim room, but headed straight for Jamal as if her flight path had been programmed to something in his blood.
Jamal was under no restraint, but his only move was to take off his sunglasses and hold them folded in his lap. His neck flexed like green wood but he didn’t let his head turn with the blow, which dragged nail scratches across the line of his jaw. Julie’s mom backhanded him by reversing the same motion, swinging her hips into it like an expert golfer. Her knuckles rebounded from Jamal’s cheekbone; again, his head hadn’t flinched from the blow, and he was looking straight at her with his naked gray eyes. Julie’s mom paused for a moment then, and stood planted, looking into her palm as if to find a fortune.
“Lady!” the desk sergeant said from his high chair behind the grubby counter. “You can’t smoke in here.”
Without glancing up at him, Julie’s mom tossed her cigarette out the open door. She’d discarded the Coke bottle with the first blow; it drooled a semicircle of brown syrup across the linoleum floor. The overhead lights were out except for one flickering fluorescent tube so there was only a wedge of noonish light thrusting in through the doorway, not quite reaching Jamal’s own mother, who sat in the shadows of a far corner, expressionless under her black headscarf, except for the flash of her dark eyes.
Julie’s mom raised her blunt head toward Jamal again, and cocked back her right arm.
“Ms. Westover,” Jamal said. “You can beat me till you break your hand. I wouldn’t blame you.”
44
In the late afternoon light of the desert there was a sort of haphazard conference between highway patrol, Murdo police and a search and rescue team that had choppered a dog in from Sioux Falls. Murdo was such a small town that even a random highway patrolman could pull rank on the chief of police, who was comforting himself by bullying Jamal.
“Little shit-bird,” he said, heavy jowls shivering. “Don’t tell me you were out here all by yourself with your girlfriend.”
Jamal said nothing. He was figuring time, as the shadows lengthened. Forty-four hours, or forty-six, since Julie went into the cave. He inspected his palm, which was pockmarked and still swollen from the venom of the cactus spines. The police chief raised his ringed fist.
“I wouldn’t bother,” said the patrolman who’d found Jamal on the highway. “If anybody could smack it out of him we’d already know.”
The police lowered his hand. “Why didn’t you bike out to get help then?” he said. “Why walk it?”
Jamal shrugged. “Flat tires.” The highway patrolman was looking down at the scooter where it lay dumped on its side in the sand. Marko and Sonny had been subtle, for them. Instead of slashing the tires they’d let the air out and even replaced the valve stem caps when they were done.
“Both of them,” the police chief said. “Yeah, we saw that already.” He gestured broadly. There were long loops of tire tracks all on either side of the dry streambed Jamal had used to crawl to shelter. Marko and Sonny had taken their tent but left a scattering of beer cans and one of the collapsible coolers. The search and rescue dog, who wore a red vest decorated with a five-point star, was sniffing around Jamal’s dome tent, which had stayed in place, weighted down by its rocks.
“Come on,” the police chief said. “There was a party here. It’s obvious. You didn’t just come out for date night.”
“People come out here all the time.” Jamal pointed up to the ledges. “Look at the graffiti.”
“Is that right?” The police chief ’s eyes wouldn’t follow Jamal’s gesture. Jamal found himself looking at the big oval Shriner ring on one of the chief ’s thick fingers. He was squinting a little from his right eye, because his cheekbone had swollen some from Julie’s mother’s backhand.
“Hey kid.” The highway patrolman was beckoning, shaking two cigarettes ou
t of a pack of Camel filters. Feeling he’d been given permission, Jamal walked away from the chief. He accepted a cigarette, though he didn’t normally smoke. The patrolman snapped a Zippo for him. Jamal relaxed a little. The patrolman had made an effort to be nice to him since Julie’s mother popped him in the station. Jamal was not actually under arrest, and the patrolman had even found a chance to slip him back his knife.
The unaccustomed tobacco buzz was making him a little dizzy. He looked around. The police chief had shaded his eyes with one hand to stare up at the ledges where the spray-painted tagging surrounded the cave mouth. At this distance the old animal designs were not apparent. The purple and red KAOS tag stood out brilliantly in the day’s-end light. Invisible beneath it, the bear totem Jamal had once figured out with his fingers like a blind man groping to read Braille.
Twenty yards behind him Jamal could see the silhouette of Carrie Westover behind the tinted windows of a double-cab white pickup the Murdo police chief had driven to the scene. They hadn’t let Jamal’s mother come. However, on the horizon behind the truck, he picked out a matchstick figure he felt sure was one of his older brothers, which comforted him, though he knew his brother would come no closer, and could not affect anything that happened here.
The search and rescue guys were shaggy, mustachioed, dressed in plaid shirts and jeans. Their dog was now whiffing a pair of faded bikini underpants. They’d asked Ms. Westover for some of Julie’s unwashed garments, but Jamal didn’t know why she couldn’t have found a pair of dirty socks.
One of the search and rescue guys was sniggering over the panties, snuffling louder than the dog. He had only just opened his mouth to speak when the patrolman socked him on the upper arm.
“Knock it off,” the patrolman said. The search and rescue guy gave him a sharp glance, but he didn’t say anything more.
The patrolman threw down his cigarette butt and ground it into the sand with his boot toe. “These guys. . . .” he said. “Think they’re Delta Force, I don’t know.”
Smoking had made Jamal’s cottonmouth worse. He’d been dry in the mouth since his day in the desert and no amount of water made any difference. He read the patrolman’s watch upside down. Forty-five hours. Forty-seven.
“I don’t see what the dog’s got to do with it,” he said. “I know where she went. I already told them.”
“Sure,” the patrolman said. “But it looks like the dog agrees with you, at least.”
The dog had led the others up the ledges; by the time Jamal and the patrolman caught up the dog was straining into the slit opening of the cave. He looked back over the desert plain. Carrie Westover had left the truck and stood in front of its cattle-catcher, arms folded across her burly chest, planted on the sand like a gravestone. Probably she was looking up at the party on the ledge, but the afternoon light was slanting so harshly that Jamal could not make out her face. When he checked again where he thought he’d seen his brother he could see nothing but the red blaze of the sun.
The dog wanted to go in the cave. To Jamal it looked something like an Airedale, though not a hundred percent. He’d tried to pet the dog when it first arrived but the search and rescue guys had waved him off. A dog on duty, working, working, it showed no interest in Jamal either. One of the search and rescue guys was studying the old petroglyphs on the wall above or under the tags. The other one held the straining dog by its collar and a fold of loose skin. He grunted and skipped back abruptly, pulling the dog with him, dodging a thin stream of bats that came from the top of the slit like smoke.
“They come out the same time every day,” Jamal said. “Almost. Every day it’s about a minute different. Always around the time the sun goes down.” He wondered why he and Julie hadn’t seen them. They’d been somewhere else on the cliff side, he guessed, admiring the fine wafer of the moon.
The police chief and the patrolman had turned from the cave mouth, to watch the bats scattering like flakes of ash across the dimming sky. The search and rescue guys were both looking intently at Jamal. “You know a lot about this place, don’t you,” one of them said. “Have you ever been in there?”
“No,” said Jamal. “But I’m ready to go.”
45
Folding his elbows and shoulders together, Jamal burrowed into the cave mouth like a mole. Stone edges scraped the back of his forearms and chafed against the top of his scalp. There was a moment when he really felt like screaming. Then the passage opened, a little. He could move his arms out from his body now. He could stand straighter, and had room to turn around.
But for the moment he kept facing forward, into the cave. He touched the flashlight they’d given him, tucked in the front of his waistband, but he didn’t take it out to turn it on.
There was a much larger space in the darkness before him. Air currents, a change of temperature. No, he didn’t know how he was aware of this expansion, but he was.
Somehow he didn’t want to shine a light into it. He thought of calling. Julie. Julie. He didn’t call.
“Hey kid?” It was the police chief, worried. “You in there?”
One of the search and rescue guys snorted and said, “Where else would he be?” The voices echoed, warped as they rounded a bend of the passage, where a weak stain of day’s-end light spilled across the wall. The cord attached to Jamal’s back belt loop tugged. He reached behind himself and yanked back.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Just wait a minute.”
There’d been a few minutes of argument over whether or not Jamal should go into the cave. The police chief, suddenly solicitous, had objected that he was a minor, a civilian, untrained. But there was no one else who could fit. And there was nothing else to do. Jamal had known that he would go, from the moment the idea occurred to him.
He turned and began to reel the cord toward him, pulling in heavier lines, some tackle and a sort of harness that could be used to help get Julie out if she needed it. One of the search and rescue guys had said what everyone had to be thinking. If she were in shape to get out on her own, she would have already done it.
A walkie-talkie crackled from a clip on his belt. The search and rescue guys had given him that too, though they doubted it would work very deep in the cave.
“Kid, you hear me? Testing, over.”
Jamal lifted the gadget and squeezed the talk button. “All right so far. I’m going on in.” He thumbed down the volume dial, reducing the static to a whisper on his belt, and turned into the deep darkness before him. He could feel in his spine how the space expanded, bloomed out before him, like the passage where he stood was a stem and the cavern beyond it its tremendous black flower.
The idea of turning on the flashlight was somehow like the idea of calling Julie’s name . . . his voice would only echo back, he thought, sealing him into solitude. And the light’s beam would only bounce back on him, he felt. But now he had to use it, because—
He panned the beam across the floor until, about fourteen inches in front of his feet, the floor disappeared into inky blackness; the vast, expanding space that he had sensed. Within it the beam simply disappeared; it was like shining a flashlight into the night sky. He tugged on the climbing line to be sure it was made fast outside, and began to inch his way to the lip.
When he turned the beam downward his heart kicked in his chest. Julie was there, about fifteen feet down, and the light seemed to catch her glassy eyes, open, unseeing, so he thought she must be dead.
Hastily he set up the climbing tackle on the rim and rappelled the short way down. Julie was motionless, her eyes closed now (maybe the other thing was some illusion?) Could she actually be sleeping? Her legs curled under her, but not in a way that they had to be broken. The smooth round of her cheek was warm to the touch, though the touch didn’t rouse her. He felt an exhalation stirring the hairs on the back of his wrist. Julie wake up. He didn’t say it. Now he could see that her halo of hair was widened by something spilled over the rock, a paint stain? No, he could smell the blood. Dried blood clotting
the back of her hair when he lifted her head, feeling all around her skull for a fracture, but there wasn’t one, not anyway that he could feel. A hairline crack he wouldn’t have detected.
Julie slumped into him. Warm all over—that was good—and he could feel the rhythm of her breath against his own ribcage. Maybe he shouldn’t have moved her though, maybe—but there was no way he was leaving her here.
He fed her limp arms into the harness. The climbing tackle worked as intended; in a moment he had hoisted her up. Only there was no place down below to fasten his line. He climbed it cautiously, with Julie still dangling over the drop, balancing her weight with his. In a moment he had drawn her away from the lip into the passage and he thought, as he crouched there gasping, that the worst of it was probably over.
The walkie-talkie whined on his hip but Jamal thought he was too close to the aperture to need it. He called out toward the entrance. “I’ve got her. I’m bringing her out.”
The worst part was working her through the passage. No way they would ever fit through together. Jamal would have to drag her, and that wouldn’t be good, or feed her into the tight part from behind. Try that. He soon realized she shouldn’t go head first as he’d first thought, not when she was unconscious and unable to help. Julie wasn’t especially heavy, but there was nothing so awkwardly massive as human dead weight. He threaded her feet into the tightest part of the passage. It reminded him of breech births he’d seen one summer when he’d worked for a vet, but at least this way he could cradle her head, which was cut but probably not broken.
Behind the Moon Page 9
