“Breathe slow,” Jamal said, with a greater urgency. He had flattened his hand on her sternum. “Breathe into my hand.” No, but it was the eyes, not the bleeding. The eyes bored through Marissa and saw into some other world you want to be where as Ultimo passed she followed him, shaking off Jamal—she didn’t step into the trench Ultimo’s bloody feet continued to deepen, but went on the outside edge of it, imitating the stutter step as best she could, her breath coming hard, like a chant. Hanh a hanh. Where, when, had she tried this step before? Jamal was with her, not touching her now but somehow supporting her without any touch, maybe managing the step a little better than she did actually, though she wasn’t looking at him or anything, blinded by the sun on the western curve of the circle, the sun having ripped its way through the cloud after all, through a tear of glowing hot, metallic edges. The Humvee hulked breathing Hanh a hanh, it was going to get up with its tusks and its trunk it was the train bearing down on her bed it was it was this stutter step was like walking on one leg, the leg like the trunk of a tree with sap running up and running down and the drumming and singing all inside her head pressing everything out, her thought and the self that had thoughts all sinking down through the leg and into the ground
and deeper deeper under the ground Hanh a hanh Ultimo tripped out of the trench his feet had dug and unrolled onto his back with a whumpf, as the breath came out of him, eyes still open and staring upward.
Marissa rocked like a tree in the wind, and Jamal did touch her now, to steady her, and now she felt the touch. The material world came back into focus. All she heard was the breathing of the three of them and the quick cry of a hawk floating overhead. The bats, if there had been bats, were gone, diffused somewhere into the darkening sky. An eye-shaped tear in the cloud spun down a sunset beam that crossed the cave slit and stretched across the desert floor to pool its light on the place where they stood. Ultimo’s eyes stared into the sun, or maybe they didn’t, for only the whites of them now showed.
Marissa drew a bandanna from her back pocket, meaning to cover his eyes from the sun.
“No, don’t.” Jamal caught her wrist. “He won’t be able to come back if you do that. Look.”
She looked. The ray of light was pulling away, leaving Ultimo’s face and drawing away across the sand like a laser knife cutting toward the cliff wall.
Jamal was kneeling beside Ultimo. He had pulled a bottle of fresh water out of his cargo pants and she thought he would clean the man’s bloody face. Instead, Jamal passed his palm over Ultimo’s features, not quite near enough to touch, then sat back on his heels.
“But the bleeding,” Marissa said.
“Not as bad as it looks.” Jamal squinted up at her. “He’s breathing.”
Marissa leaned in to look more carefully. She had the same feeling now as Jamal, not to go so far as to touch the dreamer anywhere, as if a magnetism repelled her. It was true: he breathed without obstruction.
Jamal set the water bottle inside the claw of his heavy right hand, not touching either thumb or forefinger but screwing the bottle into the sand a little so that it would stay upright. He stood up and took a backward step.
“That’s it?” Marissa said. “That’s all we do?”
“That’s it,” Jamal confirmed. “We go our way.”
He reached for her hand and drew her toward her truck. Marissa pulled away from him once, not to go back but only to look. With the sun behind the cliff the light had failed quickly. Ultimo lay in silhouette, the craggy face as if carved. She thought perhaps he had closed his hand on the water bottle. Under the blue plastic cap, light lingered in the clarity of the water.
69
The Humvee, tires mysteriously mended, was locked behind the double gate of Ultimo’s storm fence, but the smaller gate, opposite the trailer door, was not locked. Around the metal posts the chain hung unsecured. The padlock itself was missing. A U-shaped hasp closed over a post was enough to contain the dogs. Unless one of them, the Catahula most likely, knocked up the hasp with his muzzle one time and then they all went out to compete and breed with the coyotes in the desert.
The dogs were not so excited as the first time Jamal had come here. They gathered, jostling at the gate and growling, but they didn’t bark loud, or throw themselves at the diamond mesh. After a while they quieted, but remained on their side of the gate looking at him intently. Jamal watched the trailer door. Its window was dark, opaque as before. There were flickers of TV light as before, with a different soundtrack, not news this time. Above the trailer and the rocky basin where it stood, a fingernail moon had risen, carrying a star in the orb of darkness held in its inner curve.
Jamal opened the gate and went softly through and, having closed it carefully behind him, stood still as a tree with his sneakers rooted to the cracked concrete path to the trailer’s front step. The dogs pressed around him, in silence, and with small aggression, damp noses cold through the thin fabric of his pants legs. Jamal let his hands hang loose and empty, a little forward of his hips, so the dogs could snuffle his open palms. A couple of times he felt a lick, but from which dog he didn’t know because his eyes were fixed on the window, starlight reflected there in the pane. One by one the dogs went away satisfied, each walking a tightening circle before it flumped down with a little grunt in the shadow of the Humvee. Only the big Catahula remained, his growl diminished to a purr. When the growl had gone away altogether, the Catahula relaxed and came nearer, close enough that Jamal could have traced the jaguar stripes on his shoulders, or rubbed the short ears, which were torn from fights.
When the trailer door opened, a noise of gasping and moaning came out, in pain or in pleasure, Jamal wasn’t sure. On the door sill Ultimo appeared, wearing mirrored sunglasses and carrying a carved wooden cane. Seeing himself doubled in the sunglasses, Jamal wondered if maybe Ultimo had been blinded by the desert sun. Ultiimo clucked his tongue at the Catuhula and the dog turned away and lay down beside the trailer steps, head on his front paws and eyes still burning.
Ultimo stepped down and used the tip of his cane to flick a dry twist of dog dung away from the cement. So he could see fine, Jamal thought. He wore sunglasses at night fairly often himself.
“You’ve got a way with a dog,” Ultimo said.
“I wouldn’t put a dog in the pit.”
“No. But you’d go in to get one out, I think.” Ultimo had already turned away from him, the heavy salt-and-pepper braid switching between his shoulder blades like a panther’s tail. Jamal wasn’t so sure that he needed the cane, though he did put weight on it to climb the three steps. In the doorway he turned his head back, with the flash of a silver teardrop lens.
“Coming in, right?”
Inside it was close and mostly dark, and smelled, not too unpleasantly, of dog. Musk, rather; it wasn’t all dog. The moans were of sex pleasure, possibly feigned, and now Jamal was certain the sound was canned; it came from the room off to the right, where light flickered from a big plasma screen.
“You like to watch?” Ultimo said.
“No,” Jamal said. He had a brief image of the girl he’d seen Ultimo drag out of the truck.
“The tape’s copying to disc right now,” Ultimo said. “So you know, it’s gotta be real time. I can shut the noise off, though.”
He reached inside the doorway, found a remote and killed the sound. The screen continued to pulse light, perhaps because there’d have been no light without it. As it was, there wasn’t much where they stood in a space that was less a hallway than a gap between two rooms. Jamal was in hand’s reach of Ultimo, but he couldn’t see where his hands were, or his feet, only the mirrored lenses floating, a head higher than himself.
“You want to hear the bear tape, then?”
“No,” Jamal said. “I don’t want to hear the bear tape.”
“All right,” Ultimo said, and this time he sounded faintly pleased, as he’d sounded slightly apologetic about the porn. “Let’s go in here.”
Ultimo opened a door in th
e back, where the exterior wall of the trailer would normally have been. Jamal was perplexed, but clearly there was another room, this one with firelight in it. He barely glanced through the doorway toward the TV as he passed; the people writhing in silence there might have been anyone.
“Careful,” Ultimo said. “There’s a couple steps down.”
The new space was built as a T-leg of the trailer, a partial dug-out. Stonework came to Ultimo’s hip; the walls above were logs so closely notched and laid they didn’t require any chinking between. Ultimo moved along them, more creakily than usual. With his back to Jamal, he muttered, “Got stiff, lying out on that hard-pack.”
“And digging a trench with your feet, I guess,” Jamal said.
Ultimo propped his cane against the wall and pushed up his sunglasses. Jamal braced himself not to quail at the naked eyes. This look was not so penetrating as others he’d received from Ultimo, though it would have been a stretch to call it friendly.
“You built this,” Jamal said. Obviously the trailer had been dropped here first.
“Oh yeah.” Ultimo said. “I can do this kind of work. Depends what people ask for.”
Jamal looked at the fireplace and chimney. The masonry was no mean skill. And the chimney drew well, leaving behind just a faint redolence of cedar. There were lots of animal skins around, deer hides and a buffalo robe and a great grizzly bear with the head and claws intact spread out on the floor in front of the fireplace. The hip-high stone ledge was decorated with small animal skulls, bobcat and fox, interspersed with candlesticks. Ultimo was lighting a few candles with a long fireplace match. A heavy rifle, a shotgun, and a big compound bow hung on the walls. There was some fishing gear too, but no trophies, other than the hides and bearskin.
“Naturally I work with both hands.” Ultimo was seated before the fire, holding both his heavy hands up, displaying a maze of callus and cracks. “You can’t survive otherwise. I give people whatever they want.”
“I understand,” Jamal said. He sat down cross-legged at the edge of the hearth. Ultimo had folded the sunglasses and put them on the table, but Jamal still had the impression of facing a mirror. A stone wall, or the raw face of a quarry.
Ultimo raised his right hand. “I could take you fishing or build you a house,” he said. “Would you like to go out and kill a big animal?”
“No,” Jamal said.
“You don’t want porn,” Ultimo said. “Dope neither, I don’t think. You don’t want to hear the bear tape. I only listened to it once myself. I give people what they think they want. But it corrupts you, to look at things like that. Or listen to them. It poisons your mind.”
“What are you?”
Ultimo laughed. “What you want me to be.” He reached behind a pelt-draped chair and pulled up a jug of red wine by its ring. “Have a drink?”
Jamal nodded and accepted a clear plastic cupful. They drank without any toast or remark, looking into the shifting blades of firelight.
“I’m a mongrel,” Ultimo said. “If you ask the Census. Or if they ask me, I don’t know what to say. Part French, part Spanish, maybe a touch of African too, for sure the biggest part’s Brulé. Sicháng u I should have said. Brulé is a Frenchman’s word for it.” He drank some wine, and looked at Jamal. “Oh yeah, I qualify for the tribe. I could get on the tit at some casino.”
“Why don’t you,” Jamal said.
“No freedom,” Ultimo said. “In fact there’s nothing there at all. Nothing I want.”
Jamal accepted a new splash of wine in his cup. He didn’t quite know what he wanted to know, or if he was close to finding it out.
“You’re a quiet one,” Ultimo said. “That’s good.” He took out a short black cigar and lit it, offered the tin to Jamal, who declined. “I don’t usually do anything to anybody but I let people do . . . whatever. Sometimes it’s not good for them, what they do. Sometimes— no different from you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been watching you,” Ultimo said. “You’re not so different.”
“Why,” Jamal said.
“Well, that mean-natured punk Marko was worried about you,” Ultimo shrugged. “Not for any real reason, I don’t think. And then—I just got to wondering what you were.”
“So?”
“You gave me water. It’s the right thing to do. Most people don’t know that. It’s the most right thing there is to do.”
“Okay,” Jamal said. “But I don’t understand what you were doing out there.”
“Some people come to me as a healer, still,” Ultimo said.
“Not so many, but they do. And some come looking for a spirit guide. I could say to you now, I’ll take you to the bear. But kid, I think you been closer to the bear than I have. And that girl, she’s all the way inside. Know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Jamal said. “No. Not completely.”
“There’s something out there,” Ultimo said. “In there, I mean. It’s old, and it doesn’t belong to anybody in these little towns around here, or out on the reservation either, and it didn’t belong to Sicháng u. It’s older than any of those people are. But somehow—”
“It belongs to everybody.”
“So you do know what I mean,” Ultimo said. “And the ways to get there, they’re the same, for anybody. I mean the differences don’t count. And I—well, you were there. You saw it. But I want to know that what I saw was real.”
Jamal drank his wine, looking into the coals. The room was tight and the warmth from the fire and the wine was welcome; it had been growing colder at night as time moved into the fall.
“The animals,” Ultimo prompted. “The hands on the wall.”
“It’s there,” Jamal told the fireplace.
“Are they painted on the cave wall?”
“Yes,” Jamal said. “No. They were but they were more . . . 3-D. Like they were floating.” The dark space of the cave surrounded him again; it dizzied him. Maybe it was only the wine.
“Like they were alive,” Ultimo said.
They were silent then, and the black orb of the cave dissipated and Jamal was completely present again in the snug space Ultimo had built behind the several façades he presented to the world. Ultimo offered him the jug again and Jamal shook his head, helping himself to stand with one hand on the stone ledge that ran around the room.
“Better not,” he said. “I’ll dump my bike.”
“Watch yourself, then.” Ultimo’s hand spread briefly across the center of his back, solid and warm. “We don’t want that.”
Outside the trailer door the Catahula got up to sniff at Jamal’s hand and this time Jamal did fondle, briefly, the stubby, ragged ears. Ultimo chuckled deep in his throat. He was carrying the padlock in his left hand, and once Jamal had gone out he snapped it through the links of chain.
“It’s open whenever you come back,” Ultimo said, and then, “What do you want.”
Jamal took a backward step and looked up. The moon was higher in the sky and looked smaller, and that star seemed somehow to have spilled from the crescent. He thought he could make out the moon’s whole circle anyway though most of it was dark.
“I want Julie to come back from wherever she is.”
Ultimo was shaking his head, fingers entwined in the diamond mesh. “I can’t do that one for you.”
Jamal lowered his head from the moon.
“The other girl, on the square that night. The one that was wearing the bison head. Her I brought back. Okay, snatched her back. She had got herself into some fairly bad shit.”
Ultimo now appeared to be smiling; Jamal could see the white tips of his teeth.
“They call it a recovery operation. That kind of thing I can do.”
“Okay,” Jamal said. “Thanks for telling me.” He nodded and started up the slope, but before he had gone more than a couple of steps something made him turn back toward the trailer. Maybe one of the dogs had made a sound.
“Your girl, now. . . .” Ultimo
was studying Jamal from his doorway. “If I knew how to get where she’s at I would be there. But I don’t. It’s up to her.”
70
Marissa ate her supper with Carrie, two microwaved meals at the kitchen table, and she worked on Carrie’s calves and feet and lower back for close to an hour once the table was cleared. When Carrie had drifted off into a grateful, reasonably painfree sleep, Marissa went into Julie’s room and began—
Not an Exercise, because there was no such program, no target for imagination’s eye. The rosary hung from a hook on the back of Julie’s door—for at least a week Marissa had neglected to put it in her pocket when she prepared herself for the day. Julie had a bounteous teenage girl’s supply of candles, many of them with a scent so cloying that Marissa had to open the window, never mind the autumnal cold. Well, she put on one of Carrie’s gruesome sweaters. She had made herself a ring on the floor, arranging Julie’s arrowheads and plastic dinosaurs in some sort of witch’s circle, and if Carrie or anyone saw it all they would probably laugh her out of existence. But Carrie was sleeping and no one would come.
To move the feelings more with the will.
At the moment she thought that nothing was going to happen her eyes rolled back in her head like a pair of marbles and she was no longer where she had been; indeed she was nowhere, floating in a void. There was a rushing sound and a bright light, but she couldn’t remember the word for trtr- and she was only aware of the light by some sensation of its warmth, because her eyes were closed or maybe she had actually gone blind.
“I can’t be here without a guide,” she thought, panicking, but then she saw a warm teardrop of light coming toward her. The roar and rushing had all gone and she was relieved she could see the light now, and Jamal’s mother’s hands cupping the oil lamp as she floated toward her. When she let go the lamp it stayed in the air, suspended. Marissa could see only her face, the soft forgiving oval formed by the hijab, but she could feel the other woman’s hands, strong on her own wrists, pulling her arms out to the cross position, rotating the right hand palm up and the left palm down, and she could feel the other woman’s thought—
Behind the Moon Page 17
