Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  If the butterfly waggled its wings again, then it could be different in another way. Take away the coffee shop and put her on the path to a conventional confessional, the carved wooden phone booth in a corner of the church, and behind the screen was only Claude’s shadow. He wouldn’t be Claude at all, only Father. And she, Marissa . . . well you might as well take away the master’s and the college degree and the faded ambition to somehow better people’s lives, take away the Exercises too while you’re at it and leave her an ordinary nondescript little nurse turned social worker, alone in her early thirties except for her work and of course the Church, bearing into the confessional her burden of guilt for an action cast off when she was in her teens. The guilt itself a Catholic thing, so carefully inculcated in her, like some pale and mildly toxic flower cultivated from the stubborn soil of the plains. So easily the words would have bloomed through her lips and blown through the screen to his forgiving ear.

  I abandoned her. I abjured her. And worst of all I forgot her. For years I forgot that she ever existed. TillUntill I saw that spark going down in the dark.

  Marissa had stopped crying now. She dragged a sleeve across her face, piloting the little truck through a cloverleaf to bomb eastward across I-90. Her mind mercifully quiet for a moment, she listened to the pistons pump in the engine. Every part on this vehicle had been replaced and some more than once, so that now it was invincible, the same as her own dented heart. She was going toward the hunger now, full tilt. Or the hollow. Whereas for half of her life, until today, she’d been trying to go away from whatever it was. Now she meant to do what the shaman had told her, though as yet she didn’t quite know how.

  The signs for Wall Drug began to whip past her now. Her mind started to work again, if-then-if. If Claude had never entered the priesthood—no, not that one. Go further back. If the Jesuits hadn’t got sucked into the I Ching when they went to China. Or if the Jesuits in the western territories had adapted to Lakota ways as they had done with the Chinese. Her mind tumbled out of the sequence. Back to where she started.

  If she hadn’t lied to her parents to go camping—that was wrong. But she had so wanted to go with Georgie to the grasslands south of Pierre. The truck was new then, or new to her—the big gift for her sweet sixteen. It had a cap and they brought a tent with them, but they never put it up. It was late summer and the sky soft and clear to the horizon. Georgie beat down a pallet of the sweet-smelling grass and laid a tarp over it, then an Indian blanket. If they hadn’t been fifty miles from a drugstore. If she hadn’t fudged on her count of the days. If the sunset light in Georgie’s brown eyes hadn’t melted her, why then they might have stopped at the other, not-quite things they did when there was no protection.

  Had she not been surprised and pierced by her own desire? The same quickening, though more equivocal in the latter case, that she felt when looking down on Claude’s bowed head (as she would never, ever do again). How fleeting the pleasure, compared to the long, slow battering of its consequence. To be sure, the Church had always taught so. She had nine months to contemplate it—no, it was less, because for the first month she hadn’t known at all and for most of the second she wasn’t quite sure.

  If I had only done otherwise then. But now she was coasting down the ramp into Pierre. The town had grown since she’d last been there, in a disagreeable way with which she was familiar. It took her twenty minutes to pick her way through newly rundown shopping strips to the parking lot of St. Mary’s Hospital. These buildings too had been expanded. There was a new façade, adobe brown, and an abstract cross resembling a glint of starlight splintered by a lens.

  She walked down to the Missouri River and stood on the edge of Griffin Park, smoking another Marlboro and staring across the water at the yellowing leaves on the trees of Framboise Island. There was a little boat basin not far off, and when the wind rose she could hear hardware ringing against metal masts. Most of the streets hereabout had the names of long-gone Indian tribes. Marissa had spent six penitential months of her junior year in high school here in Pierre, with a friend of her mother’s who’d agreed to take her in. She kept up her schoolwork with a correspondence course. Her mother’s friend was wearily devout and escorted Marissa to mass almost daily. Back home her absence had been represented as a semester abroad, though she doubted many had really been fooled.

  Later on when she went away to college it seemed like a peculiarly quaint way to do things at the end of the twentieth century, even in the remote place where it all had occurred. She told no one she met in her new life, though more from embarrassment than shame. The taste of tobacco made her think of Inez—that was how unwanted pregnancies were managed nowadays. Marissa had come here, stood near this same spot, on that afternoon half her lifetime ago. She hadn’t smoked, though, because of the baby.

  Back at the hospital, she walked into the general reception area and sat in a chair for a few minutes, watching the traffic; there was more of it than she remembered. Presently she got up and walked through the double doors at the back. No one prevented her. The floor plan had changed, or she didn’t remember it. There was no reason she should remember it; she hadn’t been here long.

  Orderlies in blue scrubs passed her, then an intern came by at an urgent trot, the tails of his lab coat flapping. Marissa realized she was still wearing her own white coat from work, and that it served her as a sort of camouflage. Her mind bifurcated—in one part she was painfully conscious that she didn’t know what she was doing and that this was not at all the way one set about doing the thing she was trying to do. In the other part she only heard the richly textured sound of the shaman’s gourd shaker, which drove her forward as if through a dream.

  She got onto an elevator at random and got off when it stopped to admit another passenger. Deliberately, she walked toward the nurses’ station. A nurse was coming the other way, in a smock festooned with cartoon animals, carrying a clipboard in one hand. She was a good thirty pounds overweight and had a remarkably pretty face, from which she looked at Marissa with a flicker of suspicion.

  “May I help you?”

  Marissa settled back on her heels. “I had a baby here.”

  The nurse cocked her free hand on her hip. “Well. Congratulations.”

  “Seven. . . .” The rattle in Marissa’s head was like surf. “Seventeen years ago.”

  The nurse was not exactly looking around for rescue, but Marissa recognized something like her own body language when a troublesome client approached the border of self-control. “Miss, I—“

  “July sixteenth,” Marissa said desperately. “Nineteen ninety-three.”

  The nurse’s plump lips parted, but instead of saying whatever it was she glanced down at the chart in her hand.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I think she’s here.”

  Now Marissa knew that she had gone insane. “She can’t still be here.”

  “I mean, she’s here again.” The nurse turned her head slightly, and fixed Marissa with one puzzled green eye. “You didn’t know? She’s the girl from the cave.”

  36

  The stone was blue now, the color of turquoise, but soft like clay; she could move through it. She was aware of other women with her, circling through the blue stone wall. She did not know them. They were shades. On one side the cave, the other the world.

  The blue clay substance sucked at her calves. Really it was softer, more liquid than clay. She was free of it now, completely free, standing by herself on the ledge. What had become of the blue shade women she didn’t know, but they were no longer with her. She knew they were her kin, her guardians, but they had gone away somewhere and she was standing alone on the ledge, looking out over a world she did not know.

  Below the ledge was a green meadow, sprinkled with stars of white and yellow flowers. Water lapped at the edge of the grass. The water was wide, a metallic gray color, and it went all the way back to the horizon. Something moved in it, an enormous sleek black rubbery creature, grazing on weeds that floated
on the water. The weeds had purple trumpet-shaped flowers and the animal person was eating the flowers too. There were more than one of them she saw now; animal persons whose name she did not know.

  Something else should have been down there. A different scene, with different persons present. She could not quite remember what it was. A shadow passed over her, a shadow with wings fleeting over the rock, and she remembered the hawk, watching the hawk. The hawk had been feeding. The shadow was gone.

  She turned to look behind her. The wall of stone was no longer blue, but a grayish brown, with a vertical black slit in it where she had come out. Must have come out. She had the vaguest recollection of going in that way. Not from this exterior. On the back of her eyes was an image of the blue women, passing through the wall in a misty dawn light, as if they were wading a stream.

  That antlered shape now looked as if it were bursting out of the opening to the cave. She had seen that before, before, and there were other images too on the rock shelter wall, but it hurt her head to try to recall them. There was more to the antlered-shaped form than before. The crudely incised outline was still there, but now it had been enhanced with colors, fat cinnamon brown and a bloody red, and the colors gave it a quick animation, so that it was no longer one thing but two: a stag that was becoming a man, or a man turning into a stag.

  And her eyes went dark. She had looked at this image, a part of it, with someone, another person, not an animal. She could not—the bear. In the cave, the bear had been looking at her. As if they shared one eye. . . .

  Now the blue women were near her again, circling her with that sort of stuttering step, sort of a dance step they used to wade through and through the molten rock stream. Then black darkness, nothing she could see, but a sawing gasping sound all around her. A growl. Two syllables spoken into her blind ear. Oo. Ee. Oo. Ee. A voice was calling, but she would not come. She would stay here.

  Her vision cleared. She rocked on her heels, then steadied herself. The moment’s dizziness had now passed. She turned away from the cave’s opening to follow the shadow of the hawk around the ledges.

  37

  Hunger was a star in her belly, radiating fronds of light. She had been heavy, squeezing into the cave, heavy, cold and somnolent. The mouth of the cave was rimed with a dagger-like frost. Afterward a long time was blank, till the star was born in her slack gut, its fronds reaching through her like tentacles of a jellyfish. It was this hunger star that had awakened her.

  In the darkness she clutched at her face, but something was wrong; it was not her face, something covered it. A long proboscis, a mask, a muzzle. Covered with fur and full of white teeth. The darkness was full of a gravelly snarling. She clawed at the mask and rolled her head from side to side.

  The walls of the passage squeezed tight on her flanks. Strange, for she must be leaner after the long sleep. But it was so. Light blazed ahead. She was coming free, out of the rock and onto the ledge.

  In the high distance, in the darkness she was now leaving behind, a voice.

  Jesus! She’s torn off the ventilator!

  And another calmer tone

  Wait, it’s all right. It’s all right. She’s breathing on her own.

  But she was going away from those words, which were only syllables; they soothed and meant nothing.

  On the ledge she straightened to stand a little unsteadily on her hind legs, and wrinkled her nostrils to read the spring air. Her cinnamon pelt hung on her, loose as a robe. Below, a tangle of white and yellow blossoms in the meadow. Every year it seemed to her it had been so. Black beings were splashing in the water at the meadow’s edge. She had eaten one once. A smaller one. Slick skin and rubbery fat encased the meat—an agreeable blend of textures on her white teeth, and the blood running salty over her chops. With curved black claws she grazed her muzzle. It was clearly hers; she fit into it, smooth and tight.

  But these black beings were too big, and she was too weak and too giddy for hunting now. She must feed the hunger star something easier. Beneath the snarl of flowers there were roots to dig. She dropped to all fours and loped toward them.

  38

  The ledge wrapped around the cliff wall to the north. There was a narrow place and she closed her eyes and pressed her face against the rock as she inched across it. The sun-warmed stone grateful against her smooth cheek. When the ledge had widened she opened her eyes. On the boulder opposite she expected to see something: the stain of the small death that had fed the hawk. It was not there.

  On the horizon there had been a r—. A r—. The word would not come. Even the idea would not come. Would not quite come. It had been a surface on which people traveled in—. The word would not come. Hard shiny things that beetled along.

  No, everything had changed since last she passed this way. Now the dried-mud hills were green, and some were wooded, and in the low places there was water everywhere, so that some of the hilltops looked like islands. With the glistening of the water she was assailed by sudden thirst. She began to head down the slope of the ledge into the valley.

  Here and there were scatterings of stones . . . not along the ledges she descended, but farther away, on the hillsides and the hummocks that rose out of the water. The stones were flat, for the most part. Something about them seemed unaccidental. But she could not think clearly about that.

  The water on valley floor was still, or moved with a syrupy slowness. Its color was a brownish green. Behind her thirst was a dim understanding that still water was not safe to drink. She could hear running water too, somewhere under the ledge where she now stood. The still water at the foot of the cliff was rippling where it was fed by the spring.

  She lay on her belly on the ledge and reached over with both arms, hanging her head. The cold shocked her wrists and hands before she saw the upside-down crevice in the rock from which the clear, bright water sprang. She cupped water to her face, spilling most of it, and drank, then lay and rested. It seemed that all the flesh of her body was opening and expanding to receive this water, like a sacred thing. Now her thoughts became more clear.

  She wet her hands again, and as she sat back on her heels she rubbed cold water into the hollow between the tendons of her neck. Now when she looked at the stones piled on the green hillside across the water it seemed obvious they had been gathered by hands.

  It was not far down now to the water’s edge, and it was a narrow channel, moving slowly. How deep? Almost to the tops of her thighs when she waded in, opaque emerald water swirling in question marks at her movement. She crossed quickly and came out on the other side and looked back. The spring water fell onto a flat rock, then purled over it into the green water of the spring and rippled out. There was another ripple there too, not the expanding half circle from the falling water, but a zigzag with some other cause. An enormous snake, three times the length of her own body, was swimming up against the faint green current. She had been in the water with it moments ago. But the snake did not seem interested in her. It swam steadily upstream; she watched it away.

  From the flat rock where the water fell there were stones that crossed the stream, set close enough together that she could have walked over on them without even wetting her feet. Set. For some reason she looked up toward the top of the cliff, high above where the cave mouth would be, around the bends of the ledges. There, rocks had been piled to represent a Person, legs set apart like an archway, arms stretched wide and flat like the wings of a p—. . . the word would not come. Again the peculiar doubling in the space between her eyes, as if there was some other awareness there, which could not find its words.

  So there were People here. Had been. And in that other time there had been other people, whom she knew. Who. . . . Where were they now? The sun had dried her legs. She walked along the stream’s edge, sometimes passing a scattering of stones. Surely there was something deliberate in their gathering. Maybe they had not yet been finally arranged or maybe they had fallen down from that arrangement.

  It was bewildering, thoug
h, the windings of this stream among so many hummocks that looked so much alike. Did it matter if she could find her way back? She tried to note the scatters of the stones as she passed them, but these looked too much like one another.

  At the bend of the stream was an archway of piled stones. No arms, no head, only the arch, about her waist height, so she had to go down on one knee to look through it. She looked back through the archway the way she had come. Within it was framed a single standing stone, a long way off, perhaps farther downstream from where she had crossed, for she didn’t remember passing it when she came this way.

  Moss grew on the near side of the stones of the arch. She touched it thoughtfully with a fingertip. It was green, velvety, a little damp. At the sound of a bird’s cry she turned her head, a little startled. She couldn’t find the bird.

  She stood up and walked around the arch and looked in the direction she had been going. Yes, another standing stone was framed, equally far away. The second stone was nowhere near the stream bank, but far distant in a dry cleft between the hummocks and the wooded hills. She rose and began to follow the line that had so been drawn.

  39

  Ahead of her something flickered and moved in the tangled grass. A bird, but not the one she had heard before. She remembered the shadow of a hawk passing over her on the ledges, and the thought that she had followed in the same direction. But that was not this hawk. One of its wings was folded up properly but the other was fanned out in an odd angle over the grass, and it dragged as the hawk hopped forward.