Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Jamal sat up and shook his head, as if to dissipate the sourness of their last exchange. “I’ll tell you if you want to know,” he said. “I guess it’s even dumber not to.”

  “It’s just—”

  Jamal took off his glasses, and looked at her again with that warmth.

  “Karyn talks about it?”

  “Karyn?”

  She could see the widening whites of Jamal’s eyes. “I mean she talks about Sonny and Marko talking about it.”

  “Right,” said Jamal. “I guess that figures.” He looked away, up toward the moon, then quickly back at her.

  “Well so there was this guy, you might have heard, who got a notion he could live with grizzly bears. A long way from here, off on the edge of the world, I guess. Somewhere you needed a ski-plane to get there. A nut-job, this guy, if I have to say it. Anyway he kept going up to wherever it was to hang with the bears, whatever, and he would shoot video of all this. Him and his bear buddies. And he talked this girl, a girlfriend, I guess, into going up there with him for a couple of weeks. . . .”

  Jamal dropped his head between his knees. “That’s the part I really don’t get . . . why the girl played into this. She was good-looking, and she seemed plenty smart, so why she’d go off in the boonies with this loser lunatic—”

  “You’ve seen this?”

  Jamal picked up his head and looked at Julie. “You can rent it if you want. Some director got hold of the nut-job’s video and turned it into a docu-drama. But the part you’re talking about’s not in that. . . .”

  “The part I’m—”

  Jamal began to hurry the story, words rattling together like cars on a speeding train. “It went wrong one day with the bears, it seems, and—the bears ate them. Both of them. All gone. Then a few days later a plane came in to take them out and all they found was bones. And the camera. That’s the part you heard about. There’s no picture I guess, or not much picture, because the nut-job dropped the camera and it’s just getting pawed around in the weeds, but you can hear them. You can hear them screaming and you can hear the bears—”

  Julie’s stomach shrunk to a cold wavy kernel. “You’ve heard this?”

  “Hell no, and I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything about it. I wouldn’t have told you if you didn’t ask.”

  “So it’s my fault.” Julie flared up. “Because I asked.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jamal turned half toward her, put his hand on her shoulder again. The touch calmed her. “It’s not like I wanted to talk about it but it seemed better to tell you than make some big mystery about it—which is what Sonny and Marko do, and then it gets a hold on you, just because you don’t know. . . .” Jamal looked off across the peaks and canyons, turned candy colors by the light of the setting sun. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what hooked the girl in, some mysterious mojo the guy made up for her about his bears.”

  “And Ultimo has this thing, this tape.”

  “I don’t know what Ultimo’s got,” Jamal snapped. “Sorry. . . .” He squeezed her shoulder, let it go. “Sonny and Marko say Ultimo says if it exists somebody wants to buy it, and as long as somebody’ll buy it somebody will sell it. So maybe Ultimo sells copies of the thing, like some kind of snuff-film or whatever. . . .”

  “You know him? Ultimo?” Julie felt the syllables of the name between her tongue and her teeth, with a faint illicit thrill.

  “If I see him coming, I know who he is.” Jamal laughed briefly. “Then I get on the other side of the street.”

  He looked again at the rodent remains smeared over the rock. “Okay, you’re right. It is like the hawk. “

  “What do you mean,” Julie asked.

  “Like the bears, you know, they were just being bears. It wasn’t the bears. It was the people.”

  14

  There was light again, but not moon or phone light. Instead it was a warm, reddish light, from a fire or torch. It played over the wall of the passage on her right side, but she couldn’t see the source of it on her left, because she didn’t look in that direction, and because she knew that in fact her eyes were closed; she was seeing what she saw in some other way.

  The passage opened into a wider space. She felt that to be so from a change of the air. The warm light had vanished, and the darkness was complete. All directions disappeared, but she kept moving, without hesitation, as if there was a path she could follow, one she knew.

  15

  Jamal propped his elbows on the stone, leaned and let his head fall back. The mop of dark hair brushed the stone behind him. Julie studied the wedge of his Adam’s apple, thrusting up. There was a little cut just under his jawline, from shaving probably. Jamal’s beard was as heavy as Marko’s although the rest of him was not. The yellow wraparounds, and the angle of the light, made his face look stony, mask-like. He rolled forward suddenly and caught her looking.

  The sun had struck into the horizon, shattering like the red yolk of an egg, spilling crimson and violet bands across a cloud bank to the west. In this intense light the colored stone layers of the sand-castle mountains were picked out with a jewel-like clarity. As the red line on the horizon compressed, it grew painfully bright, which was maybe why Jamal still wore his sunglasses, now. Behind his head was the papery moon, gathering ghostly light from the sky as the sun faded. Jamal not moved any nearer to her but she felt a pressure, not necessarily unpleasant, between his face and hers. What did he mean? How would it be to be with Jamal, behind the moon?

  It was cooler, and she shivered and wondered if he’d reach for her; maybe he was wondering the same. But instead he slipped his narrow hand into his windbreaker and came out again with the black stone pipe. He packed the bowl and turned the stem toward her, one eyebrow arching.

  Julie didn’t know why she should be so skittish about a little herb tonight. She wasn’t usually. Be careful—the voice that seemed to come from some distant adult, one of the tiresome kind. Didn’t Julie know very well what she was doing? They’d planned the escapade with thorough care, so that that Julie’s mom believed that she was spending the night with Karyn, and Karyn’s parents believed the reverse was true, and in case they stayed out more than one night they had a back-up plan for that as well, except there was no phone reception here, but they could ride somewhere to where there was. The idea of the tents popped into Julie’s head again, this time like a word problem in math. Julie, Jamal, Sonny, Karyn and Marko have two tents. Tent A has a volume of X and tent B has a volume of Y. If Y > X, how do the five people divide into the two tents?

  If Julie liked the idea of sharing Jamal’s little cozy tent with him, then she didn’t know what she was doing so well after all, because this was the first time she’d let this interest appear to her so openly. It wouldn’t be so cozy anyway, now that the tent was half full of rocks to weight it down. Julie knew Karyn was doing it with Sonny and had been for months (Karyn, without exactly ever talking about it, had let her know in a dozen little ways . . . ) but that tent solution didn’t solve Marko’s position. So she and Karyn might share the smaller tent, lumpy with rocks as it would be, but this seemed like a solution to offer the parents if they’d dared tell the parents they were going off to camp in the desert with the boys; it couldn’t be the real solution. Besides, the idea of Jamal in a tent with Sonny and Marko seemed weird and wrong, like putting two different species of animal in the same cage.

  These thoughts ran through her in a rapid blur, in the time it took to wave away the pipe. Jamal snapped his lighter over the bowl, drew the flame down, held it. With his exhale, which was nearly smokeless, he said, “You sure?”

  Julie shook her head again. “Your weed’s too trippy.”

  Jamal took his wraparounds off and looked at her a little strangely. It wasn’t the look that would lead him to say something like the Jule in the lotus. It was more like he was inspecting around the edges of her eyes. He looked like he was going to say something but he didn’t.

  “What,” Julie said. “What
?”

  “Nothing.” Jamal put his glasses back on, looked down at the stone space inside his crossed ankles. The stitching on his left boot strap had come loose on the inside. “You didn’t drink any of that pink stuff, did you?”

  “What, Sonny’s bottle? No, I brought water.” A shock of understanding struck her, like a slap. “Wait a minute, are they trying to dose us?”

  Jamal raised his head, but not all the way. He said, “It’s just molly.”

  “Just molly!” Julie had jumped to her feet. An unpleasant giddiness swarmed in her head.

  Jamal got up and reached one hand toward her; Julie backed away from it. The vermilion sunset band had burned itself out below the horizon, and what light remained was turning dove-gray.

  “Karyn’s okay with it,” Jamal said, unhappily. “She’s done it before.”

  Karyn’s okay with it. Julie could feel the words in her mouth, as if she’d spit them back at him, sharp and incredulous. But a new kind of problem, with a few different variables, was beginning to shape itself in her mind. She said nothing, only whirled away, rushing back around the ledges the way she had come, aware of Jamal scrambling along behind her, calling to her not to run like that she could fall—

  16

  Julie kicked Jamal’s sack of cans out of her way as she tore past it. Kicked it into Jamal’s way possibly, for Jamal was coming along behind her, calling to her, but in a strangled whisper, to stop. To talk to him. And she knew that certainly Jamal could have overtaken her on the ledges if he’d wanted to, that he’d decided to try persuasion instead, even when persuasion wasn’t working.

  On the eastern side of the cliffs it was quite dark now, the last stains of sunset blocked by the mountain, the wispy moon too frail to throw much light. Behind her she heard Jamal, catching his foot in the bag of old cans, stopping to free himself and throttling a curse. The reddish desert across which they’d biked in the afternoon was now diffused in a pale, internal glow. Against it Jamal’s little tent sat dully, or no, it had the faintest surface sheen, gathered from the light of the silver stars beginning to appear. The larger tent had a light within it, concentrated and surprisingly bright; like a will-of-the-wisp caught between the fabric walls, it kept moving along the inner surfaces, casting dark, large, eerie shadows, but Julie couldn’t make out what they signified. It seemed to her she could hear the whole tent purring like a large contented animal, but maybe that was the effect of Jamal’s pipe.

  She dropped to the level sand and walked toward the big tent softly. Jamal was hissing from the edge of the cliff, beckoning her to come back to him, but he seemed to want not to make too much noise, maybe because of whatever was going on in the tent, and so Julie herself was careful to be quiet, setting each of her red high-tops down like a cat’s paw on the sand. Something tingling, a soft expansion in her throat (if it was fear or excitement she didn’t really know) was making it slightly hard for her to breathe. The same sensation prickled below her navel. How were you supposed to knock on a tent, anyway? She could hear Jamal now, padding up behind her over the cooling sand, not wanting to call to her because—

  So she wouldn’t call to the people inside. She caught hold of a big black zipper at the top of the curving tent door.

  17

  In the darkness there was a sound of drumming, warm broad hands slapping loose skins (skin maybe still growing on some animal’s hollow flank, not yet stretched over the dug-out wooden round of a drum). With the drumming the light returned, warm like torchlight, though there were no torches nor torchbearers to be seen, as if the hands that drummed were fanning flames. Like a river of pulsing fire away and down to her left, illuminating the gallery wall to the right of her and above . . . and the gallery was big, enormously hollow, like the halls of cathedrals in other countries maybe, that she might have seen in photos, on TV.

  On the right wall and spreading up onto the ceiling above were bison, such a stampede of bison as she had never seen (even if she was really only seeing them projected on the lids of her closed eyes), magnificent in umber and ocher, humping their weighty shoulders out of the natural curve of the rock, bigger too, it seemed to her, than the ordinary buffalo still to be found here and about on the ranches or even ground up and packaged in the meat counters of the groceries around where Julie lived her daylight life. Among them too were antlers, not deer, she thought, but elk. And they looked at her in the same way as the bear had done before (where had the bear gone, then?). The eye of each animal person was upon her, like it knew her. Even though there were so many of them in this procession, which seemed at times perfectly orderly, as if every animal knew and followed the same purpose, and at other times seemed completely anarchic, as though all of them were caught up in a flood.

  As the light faded, the panorama fractured into the pattern of brightly branching dots she’d seen before, though now and then from the vortex she could still pick out a horn, an antler or a clear bright eye. She moved beside the stream, her bare heels (what had happened to her shoes?) sinking into heel prints made by others long ago in what had once been clay. She was hurrying, before the light failed entirely, toward another narrow opening at the lower end of this great hall, into which the animal persons also seemed to swirl, and she felt somehow certain that on the other side of the slit portal there would be a human being, its head sprouted with horns.

  18

  Jamal took his wraparounds off and looked at her a little strangely, like he was inspecting around the edges of her eyes. His own gray eyes looked knowing, and a little hard. He seemed like he was going to say something but he didn’t.

  “What,” Julie said. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Jamal put his glasses back on, looked down at the stone space inside his crossed ankles. With one hand he fidgeted with the brass ring on his left boot strap, where the stitching had come loose on the inside. “How much did you drink out of Sonny’s bottle?”

  “What, that vitamin water?” Julie shrugged. “Just a taste. I was thinking it might be spiked but it wasn’t.”

  “Not with—oh. . . .” Jamal ripped the ring completely free of the loosened strap and twirled it around his finger. The brusque destructiveness wasn’t like him, and that upset Julie more at first than whatever it was he wasn’t telling. That peculiar warmth and softness in her belly when they’d chased and captured the tent was still there, or it had always been there and she was now again aware of it. And with it a sort of crenellation around the edges of her vision. When she turned her head to stare at Jamal, the early stars drew lingering pale lines, like jet-trails, across the darkening sky.

  “Did they dose us?” Julie heard her voice go all cracked and screechy—maybe this too was the effect of a drug, if it wasn’t suspicion making her feel it. She was on her feet with her white hands balled into fists on her hips. “Jamal—what was in that bottle?”

  “I don’t . . . don’t know anything for sure.” Jamal had also gotten to his feet, fidgeting with his sunglasses and the brass ring torn from his boot, but somehow he wouldn’t look at her with his bare eyes.

  “What do you think, then? God damn it!” Julie felt some of her mother’s bitchiness coming out of her mouth, didn’t care.

  “Molly, maybe.” Jamal looked away toward the horizon, where the last red line of sunset was like a razor cut. “I don’t know anything really, Julie—they might’ve candy-flipped it.”

  “Candy—Jamal, talk English.”

  “They’ll cut it sometimes, you know, with acid. . . .” Jamal looked at her straight on now; the subject had gone abstract for him and so now he could explain it. For a second she thought she saw a little snail-shaped op-art graphic vibrating on the side of his face that was in shadow. “Or really the idea is to cut the acid with some X—less chance of a bad trip that way, they say.”

  “Who the hell is they?” Julie shouted at him. “Some stoner committee advisory board? Or is it just Sonny and Marko? Marko!” Her voice had climbed at the end, as if she was calling Marko, but tha
t was something she definitely did not want to do . . . and Jamal seemed to have the same thought. He took a step toward her, one hand outstretched, as if that would calm her—Jamal’s long-fingered, slender, rather beautiful hand, delicate and assured as the hand of a musician (though she’d never seen Jamal play any instrument), and it seemed almost a golden color against the rock floor below, which was taking on a milky bluish tinge as the light continued to fade.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Jamal said, in that soothing voice—she remembered Jamal was good with animals. Once when they were walking a dry creek bed in town a big stray dog had approached them, growling, hackles up, but Jamal had been cool then, calmed the dog, eluded it, sent it on a different way from them.

  “You didn’t take much, whatever it is,” Jamal was saying. “I’ll walk you through it, it’ll be okay. There’s no reason to think it’ll go bad on you anyway. And I’ll be here if—”

  “Karyn.” Julie snapped, feeling droplets flying wild from her lips with the name—she was getting that far out of control. “We just leave her there to drink the whole dose then, and be with those two Neanderthals—”

  Jamal’s hand swirled down to his waistband, like a falling leaf. He’d tucked his wraparounds in the collar of his shirt; the ring from his boot hung from the index of finger his other hand.

  “Karyn’s okay with it.” He hesitated. “It’s not her first time.”

  There was something hidden behind the words, inside them. For a moment Julie seemed to see his head break open like the hollow moon’s cracked crystal, and there inside was the hidden thing, purling like a feather of dark smoke. Jamal was blocking her way back to the tents and the others, perhaps just by chance, but she dodged past him before he could react and began to run over the ledges. She could hear him skittering along behind her, calling out, but in a hoarse stage-whisper—Julie, come on, don’t run like that! You’re gonna fall and break your neck—