“Easy,” he called, because they had got her feet, then her knees by the crooks of them, and they risked pulling her head free of his hands. He turned sideways in the passage, where he also had to crouch, sucking in his gut to make room for Julie’s torso to pass along the furrow in his body, passing almost through his body. He was supporting her head with only one hand now because he couldn’t turn far enough to use both, and now her head with his hand under was out in the open air—Have you got her head? he called, and already he felt other hands basketing under his, and a warm lick of a dog’s tongue on his knuckles, so the dog must have clocked out for the day.
Jamal retracted his arm into the cave.
“Buddy,” the patrolman was saying, “You got her, man! You got her, come on out.”
“I,” Jamal said. “Gotta get.” What? The flashlight, but it was tucked in his waistband now. The ropes and tackle. Not that either really.
“We’ll get that all later,” a search and rescue guy said. “Ja- Jamal? Come on out now.”
There was no reason it should remind him of Sonny and Marko calling for him, night before last, promising they weren’t going to—Jamal was already back in the wider part of the passage. He had already spun himself down on the rope, like a spider, to the place where Julie had lain.
The space was not the same infinitude into which he’d shone the light from above. He knew it, though the flashlight was turned off. He was in the spot where Julie had been, a passage that was deep and long but not so wide. He could brush either side with his fingertips if he reached his arms as far as they would go.
And there was a presence here. Julie and not Julie too. It was more than just that she had recently been here in her body. Something was still here, another. Something lay within the wall Jamal was facing, but with his light extinguished he could not say what. And there was something further down the passage, in the direction of the intermittent currents of cool air caressing his face.
Strange that he was not afraid. He was not simply curious either, but somehow compelled.
The walkie talkie crackled on his hip. Jamal switched it off, and on second thought discarded it. He still had the flashlight, though unlit, as he began slowly and carefully to make his blind way into the greater darkness of the cave.
46
Now the stone was red, warm and elastic; it reshaped her head as her head squeezed through it. That small warm leathery hand was still holding hers in a firm and reassuring grip, and at the same time a hand supported her skull at the base, guiding it through the tight red clasp of the passage. Then with a wet rush she fell into the startling cold of the open air, which was full of a terrible brightness, so that she cried out from the shock.
A liquid whistle answered her cry, and she was gathered into a heartbeat that was hidden in warm fur. She knew it, this heart-drum; she had been listening to it all her life long, she knew. The soothing whistling sound continued, and her mouth stopped crying. Her mouth whimpered now and was at the same time searching, behind her weak insistent hands as they probed through the fur. Her mouth found a rubbery nubbin that released warm milk into her body, and the whistle settled into a sigh. The heart-drum inside her body locked onto the beat of the drum she felt through the warm, milk-giving fur.
She had not yet opened her eyes, but burrowed now, in a warm soft feeding blindness. A part of her that was still Julie thought now with a jolt of surprise, I am my own mother.
47
She rode a skin slung on the mother’s back, her head beside the mother’s head, her eyes beside the mother’s eyes. Her vision was the mother’s vision. Still they shared one heart.
Her hands inside the mother’s hands gathered greens and dug for roots. A green stick was pointed, hardened in the fire to do the digging. There were plants for healing, others for food. There were roots for healing—a brown one forked like the arms and legs of a Person, and roots for eating—a round one with the crisp white taste inside.
Inside the mother’s hands her hands scraped skins with a stone scraper. Her teeth chewed rawhide strings to a serviceable softness. With a stone knife a Person flaked for her she cut up meat for eating. Inside the mother’s heart she knew the names of animal persons who gave such nourishment to the People. The names were shaped in that half-melodious twittering clipped off by quick clicks of the tongue. There was a hawk. There had been a bear. But they were not called so in this tongue and she was too deeply buried in the mother to reach the mother tongue.
There was fire. Water. Fire-drill. Names of the animal persons. Her hands inside the mother’s hands rolled the fire drill until her leathery palms were nearly burning and she crouched and made her lips a flower to huff a spark into the tinder. Fire. Meat. A torch, which she could hold up to the edge of the vertical slit from which her Person had somehow been extracted. But the darkness of the cave was such that it devoured all the light.
Inside the cave there were other times. A time of many lives gone when the People had walked out of the far north through deep crevasses in the vast ice mountain, hunting an animal person with long matted hair and tusks and an angry bellow when stung with a spear and a long snout that moved like a serpent, and it could grasp and hurl a branch or a Person, and many many lives gone before that when fire shot down from the sky like an angry icicle and the People learned how it slept in wood and learned their ways to wake it. Time is not straight like a spear, but round like the moon, and inside the cave time went around and around in a dark spiral that included times of many many lives to come—she knew but she did not know how.
The injured hawk waited, perched on a stone cropping outside the overhang of the cave. It ruffled its feathers and shrugged its wings, except that the hurt wing would not come to the position of the other. Slowly that wing relaxed and fanned out and down over the surface of the rock where the hawk perched, covering the gray-white streaks of its droppings. The yellow eye closed and the hawk’s head tucked down behind the one raised shoulder. Its consciousness stopped.
48
Inside the skin bag, with rawhide strings made supple by the working of her teeth, the mother carried the fire drill everywhere the People traveled. Inside the mother’s heart and hands she was herself fire-bringer. She spun the stick between her hardening palms and puffed a spark from the bloom of her lips into the tinder. Fire grew, meat cooked, the People fed.
Sated she sat by the waterside, in the reddening light of the close of day. The valley, which in many lives to come would be a crumbling, dusty dry place, was full of water now, in this crater of the great moon-shape of time. Channels of turquoise-colored water snaked among the green hilltops, reflecting the fading blue of the sky. A Person walked along the bank, head cocked to watch for a shadow of fish beneath the opaque surface of the water, balancing a light spear in one hand.
To her left a Person was scraping a shaft, to her right a Person was chipping a large flint spearhead, and behind her near the slit of the cave mouth a Person was gathering different colors into little points of horn. She was chewing rawhide strings to soften them, taking sticks of hide from a stiff pile to her left and laying down the chewed strings in a soft pile to her right. The faint flavor of the hide as it relaxed brought back the sensation of the meat she had recently eaten and the texture brought back the feeling of the strip of hide that the Person had wrapped around her forearm, its flesh bonding with the scratches left by the claws of the hawk. The soothing motion of her jaws relaxed her in the direction of dream . . .
. . . again the stone turned soft like clay; she could move through it. She was aware of other women with her, circling through the red stone wall. She did not know them. They were shades. On one side the cave, the other the world.
Her eyes rolled open. It was dimmer now, and some of the People had gone away from the water’s edge. A ghost of moon hung in the opposite side of the sky from the setting sun. She watched the sign of an animal person making its serpentine wave beneath the surface of the water going south, and when the w
ater had stilled again, another animal person arrived, mossy carapace lifting out of the reflection of the moon, but larger, so much larger, and the head emerging with its dark eye in many wrinkled folds, looking at her but without appetite or intention. The eye was simply there, floating calmly in the ancient body of the turtle, and she saw how the curve of the vast shell met its reflection in the water to complete its orb, and there was a meaning in that which eluded her, slipping out of the reach of her mind like a fish shivering away from a thrust of the spear. Something else was happening now: a hawk, circling tight and swooping to claw a bright fish from the darkening water, just at the edge of the turtle’s shell. Rising into the air with a shriek, the hawk turned the fish in his talons to match the fish’s tail to his, dropped it, stooped to catch it again almost before it had broken the water, then carried it to the peak of a boulder to be torn, eviscerated, consumed.
Blood from this small kill staining the stone. All clear in her mind’s eye, clear and real as if she’d seen it with the eyes of her body. But the secret was elsewhere, in the moment hawk twinned with itself, touching its reflected talons, the way the two halves of the turtle’s shell composed a squashed sphere like the gibbous moon.
Inside the rock shelter, the mother slept by the cooling embers, breathing with the faintest whistling sound. She saw how she was apart from the mother now, though the small strong hand that had helped her into this world remained the same, resting on its swollen knuckles, palm up by the fire-pit. The other hawk, the one she fed, slept on the rock cropping outside the cave. This hawk, the one she had brought among the People, could not yet fly, though day by day its injured wing folded and unfolded itself more smoothly.
49
She was coming again to the People, bringing the wounded hawk on her arm, following the stones they piled, coming to them again for the first time. So she was strange among them now, strange as when she first pulled free of the stone, because of this familiar on her forearm, his talons curled around the strip of raw hide bonded to her skin, so that hard as the hawk gripped he dented her flesh but did not break it. The hard grip of hawk’s talons held her in this world.
She fed the hawk with strips of meat, before the meat was tongued by fire. Around them People gathered, watching, whistling and twittering to each other over this strange thing that had arrived among them. Hawk cocked its head as it took the meat, the flat yellow circle of its eye shining on her. Hawk left her forearm and fluttered awkwardly a short distance to a boulder where it perched, fanning out its wings. Now the wing that had been hurt held the same shape as the other. Hawk turned its head to the side, yellow eye shining, the curved beak open. The hooked beak probed the feathers of its wings.
She waited till the wings had folded, till the mica-flat eyes appeared to close. Standing below the boulder she raised her forearm and nudged the back of the hawk’s legs, till the hawk with a feathery sound in its throat stepped back and settled, closing its claws tight on the strip of hide. A murmur went round among the People who were still there watching; by this time some had gone away.
Then when Hawk rose from her arm she fell as if the beating wings had stunned her. The wings had grown enormously larger, with the force to move more air, a rush of wind that flattened her into the grass and held her there, continuing to press her down with a revolution of wings that strobed over the sun. Perhaps she heard a whistling among People who might be coming to her aid, but her eyes had rolled back into her head; she could not see them. She floated in a rain of the horn-point colors: umber, ochre, now a near scarlet red, and there were the three spirals swirling around each other—a triple helix, the dots drawn toward each other but never quite touching, as though a magnetic energy that held them together held them a certain distance apart.
She rose up in the loose skin of the bear, shambling over the rock ledges in the fluid sparkle of spring sunlight. The bear’s own warm intentions warmed her, but the vortex was still drawing her down, so that the bear turned from the light and folded itself into the slit of the cave mouth, descending to the place where horn-point colors melded it into a bulge of cave wall stone—one eye looking backward, raised toward the faraway light.
With a pop like a cork shooting out of a bottle she was released into midair, her sight seated now behind hawk’s eye, widening a circle in its deep blue gyre. Hawk’s eye scanned the ledges for prey, but for the moment there was none. The animal persons etched on the face of the rock shelter wall had been obscured by other colors rolled over them—dark but with an unfamiliar gleam—and on the ledges were warmblooded creatures, surely, but too large to be taken. They must be People of an unfamiliar kind, clothed in skins of the most unnatural colors, with strange colors shining from their lips and claws, and hair as fine and soft as milkweed. Harmless, surely, but too large to be taken. Hawk’s eyes passed over them and on.
50
Ascending more gradually now, the ledge wrapped around the cliff wall to the north. At a narrow place where Karyn hesitated, Julie reached back to urge her along, and then they had come out, giggling, into the warmth of the sunlight. Julie let go Karyn’s wrist and turned toward the lowering sun, raising one hand to shade her eyes, wishing now she’d brought a pair of sunglasses. On this side of the cliff the striped stone hills were densely grouped together, 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.”
“Yeah, you think?” Karyn had slumped back against the rock. Wider in the hips than Julie, she wasn’t quite so nimble on the ledges. Also it seemed she’d already had a pop of something, who knew what, just enough to make her jolly, and a little unstrung in her limbs.
Karyn cocked her head to the sky. “What’s that?”
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 midair. 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 some twenty yards away.
Julie pulled out her phone to take a picture.
“Don’t,” Karyn said. “Oh gross. . . . How can you 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, and there was no way that Karyn would know. 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 emerged with a shuddering strip of bleeding meat. There was something dreadful about it and yet—
Karyn was crowding Julie from behind, using Julie as a shield as she peered over her shoulder, her breasts lowering, heavy and warm, into Julie’s shoulder blades. “It’s disgusting,” she said. “Oooo, I can’t watch this, it’s too awful.”
Karyn covered her eyes with her hands, then peeked out through her laced fingers. A delicious shudder blunted itself on Julie’s back every time she peered out through the finger-lattice. Karyn was just the same in horror movies, Julie realized, punctuating her furtive glances with luscious little shrieks, and getting herself a lot more worried and bothered than she would have if she’d just opened her eyes as wide as Julie’s and watched the splatter scenes straight through.
Dumb. Still, Julie felt an affection for the frightened girly-girl routine, though it had been quite a while since she’d tried it herself, and she had never performed it half as well as her friend. She swung her shoulder under Karyn’s and wrapped one arm around her waist. Karyn clutched at her, still watching the hawk. Julie remembered how Karyn would act this way when she talked about the tape Sonny and Marko supposedly had heard, the one where you could hear bears eating the stupid guy and his girlfriend.
She thought how Karyn didn’t understand the difference, which Julie herself could less underst
and than feel. Karyn had always been the leader, since the friendship first struck up in middle school, first to sneak out at night and first to sneak into R-rated movies, first to go steady, to sneak parents’ liquor and find ways to get pills and pot. She was the first to grow a woman’s body and to have sex and to have steady sex with Sonny. Advanced sex, Karyn claimed sometimes. But that was just about the only area where Karyn was ahead of Julie now, and in other ways, less tangible or clear, Julie saw that she was going to pass Karyn soon, maybe had already started to.
And now she seemed to be looking at the two of them as if from somewhere on the moon. Julie saw that Karyn’s horizons would be shrinking after high school. She’d log a couple of years at community college, then most likely would marry Sonny, assuming Sonny got himself unstuck from Marko (since Karyn had enough sense to know that Marko would be worse and worse news as all of them got older), and the two of them would spend their lives in some small town like the one they were raised in, creating other people like themselves.
As for Julie, she had no idea what her own life would become, and that made her feel dizzy, as if she were falling or as if she might fall, so she tightened her arm around Karyn’s waist. When Karyn squeezed her back, that dislocation turned into a sort of sad warmth, like Julie was already missing Karyn, though Karyn was still right there with her.
The hawk had finished its meal and flown, and Julie and Karyn turned from the death stain on the boulder, set their backs to the wall and looked out toward the horizon. Karyn’s squeeze turned into a nudge.
“Girlfriend,” she said. “Where you sleeping tonight?”
“With you?” Julie forced a laugh.
Behind the Moon Page 10
