Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  So it could not fly. Something pulled at her other awareness. She had seen meadowlarks behaving this way, feigning hurt and flightlessness, hopping and fluttering over the hay field to draw a person away from the nest. But hawks did not nest on the ground.

  She followed it. The hawk hastened as best it could, scrambling forward with it talons, beating the one good wing against the grass. The wing would lift off the ground a little, not very far. She stopped pursuing to let the hawk rest. When she moved again, the hawk hurried forward. She allowed a constant distance to remain between them.

  The color of the light was reddening, deepening. The sun had begun to sink toward the hills and higher ranges to the west. There was something ominous in that, the coming dark. She wanted to feed, and to find fire. There was hunger but it seemed to be outside of her, ahead of her. She moved toward the hunger, where she felt that it was. The new urgency of her progress seemed to alarm the hawk. With a great effort it fluttered and clawed its way to the top of the standing stone they had been heading toward.

  She stopped for a moment to let it settle. One flat round yellow eye looked at her always. When she began to move again she paused with every step. This hawk was speckled on the front, its back and wings a deep reddish brown. Not so different from others she had known in that cloudy elsewhere that came before, or maybe a little bigger.

  The stone was not so high after all; it came up to her clavicle. She and the hawk were eye to eye. But it was not as it had been with the bear. The two eyes didn’t merge to one. The hawk’s iris was yellow, glowing like a ring of translucent shell. She looked away, keeping the hawk just barely in the edge of her vision as she came almost near enough to touch, not knowing how she knew it would calm the hawk, but knowing that it would. She could look directly at the talons clasping the stone, the big, bright yellow hooks of them.

  When she was near enough to touch she rolled her left forearm up the stone and rubbed against the backs of the hawk’s legs. She didn’t know where this idea came from either, but after one quick swivel of its head the hawk stepped backward onto her wrist. Heavy. She took a backward step from the stone and carefully bent her elbow to bring the surprising weight of the bird to the central line of her chest. The hawk was settling, flexing its talons. A drop of blood where a claw had pierced her purled along the tendon of her inner arm.

  She bent her legs to sight along the top point of the stone. They’d lost the sun already, behind a wooded hill to the west. In the twilight she thought she could just make out another arch, framed in what looked like a pass between two hillocks.

  She walked that way, adjusting her balance to the new weight of the hawk rocking on her forearm. Now the hawk must feed, and she must feed. The hunger was outside of her, ahead of her somewhere. She felt that she must move toward it. When she stopped for a moment and flared her nostrils, she caught an odor of blood on the wind. Blood and maybe a thread of smoke too. She balanced the hawk and walked on, farther into the hunger.

  40

  By the time she reached the next arch of piled stones it was fully dark. No moon, and the stars that swam overhead were unfamiliar. She could not find the next standing stone she had seen framed in the arch. The hawk was quiet; perhaps it was sleeping where it rocked on her forearm.

  The blood smell and the hunger were nearer now. In the dark, she was not so confident about going toward those sensations. But they defined a direction, and she went that way.

  Ahead was a whistling sound like a bird, but not a bird. Up hill from where she walked in the declivity between two hummocks. The birds had gone to roost by now. She’d heard their voices stop, an hour since.

  The whistle stopped and now she heard a tapping, chinking, of stone on the stone. That was intentional, that sound. Also the blood smell was that way. Near. She climbed toward it. Behind a rock there was a fire glow too.

  A Person whistled to her over the rock.

  There was meaning in the whistle. What did it mean? It was a greeting, or an invitation, she knew.

  She could not get a very good look at the black silhouette of head before he ducked down again out of sight. Still, she went there. The chink sound of stone on stone continued. The grass ended and it was a rocky ascent but her feet automatically found the same footholds that the Person’s must have done.

  When she first saw him her breath caught, for he seemed crowned with horns. The antlered beast-half-human whose image she had seen, exploding from the slitway to the cave. Then the Person shifted his head to look at his work and the illusion vanished; it was only that he had happened to set the antlers of his kill on a stone just above where he was working. He was using a heavy stone pestle to flake a new edge on a knife of pale flint.

  There were strips of meat drying on a stone the fire. Her belly rolled. She must feed the hawk first, though.

  She made some sort of sound with her voice and the Person put down his tools and looked at her. The Person was young, she felt, not so much older than herself. His nose was flat and his face was round, or almost heart-shaped, framed in thick dark bristles of hair. There were crests of hair on his arms and legs and his sex was hidden in a swatch of it, she supposed. He was well clothed in his own hair, for summer weather anyway. Only the face and the belly and chest showed leathery bare skin. Although expression was hard to read in the strange face, he did not seem surprised to see her. It was as though she was expected. He must be a dreamer like herself, one who walked in dream.

  She looked at the unbutchered leg of the stag and the Person, understanding, took up the flint he had been chipping and cut two or three bloody strips of meat. The hawk arched its head back to receive them. Her own hunger had moved inside her now. The Person was now offering her something else—a band of leather from his kill, with the hair still in it. She didn’t understand and then she did, shifting the hawk from one arm to another as he wrapped the raw leather, hair side in, around her forearm where the talons had raked. The raw side of the skin molded to the wounds on her forearm like a balm. The hawk settled on the gauntlet.

  The Person took a strip of meat from the hot stone above the fire, and fed it to her as she’d fed the hawk. This meat was not dried yet but mostly cooked and it was good, and juicy. The Person kept feeding her strips of it and smiling, until she shook her head, though still feeling the shape of a smile on her own face. Then his smile drained and he crouched down, behind the sheltering rocks, and presently picked up a stone-tipped lance.

  She herself had at first heard nothing, but then she felt it. Whatever it was. The presence. The other awareness that tugged at her mind from time to time. Cautiously she peered up over the rim of the fire stone. What she saw was herself, girl with a hawk, edged red with firelight, half hidden behind a sheltering stone. She saw this with the eye she shared with the bear standing just at the tree line as it rose to enormous height on its hind legs as if to greet her. Eye to eye across that distance. Or just one eye.

  The Person was beside her now. He was empty-handed, no longer holding the lance. He breathed a whistle into her ear, and though she still didn’t understand what it meant, she knew he understood what was happening, and probably better than she did.

  The bear dropped four paws onto the ground and lumbered off into the trees. Did it look once more over its high shoulder with the reddish yellow eye?

  The Person had curled on a pelt to sleep. She sat beside him, back to the warm stone, hand on her knee to brace the arm that held the sleeping hawk, feeling her gaze and the bear’s still entwined as she lowered herself deeper into dreaming.

  41

  They called her Julie. Whoever they were. Julie Westover was the name heading the chart that hung from the foot of the hospital bed. The room was full of clicks and beeps, blanketed by a leisurely sighing sound. The ventilator, sucking and sighing. In a high corner near the door a bracket held a television chattering aimlessly; local news.

  Marissa went to the window. Fortunate for Julie that there was one, if she had been able to
see it. The window overlooked a tattered greensward of the park, and beyond, the slow brown progress of the river. In the park, a man pushed a small child in a swing.

  Southern exposure. The room was suffused with amber light. Marissa worked her way through a grove of hospital machinery to the bedside. The girl was wrapped in cable and tubes, like tentacles of an octopus. On a monitor, hiccups of a traveling, beeping green dot marked out her heartbeat. Steady enough. The ventilator masked her face, flex tube curling out of it like an elephant’s proboscis. Her hair was dark, with little round patches shaved out of it here and there to bring electrodes to the skin of her skull.

  Something from the TV snagged Marissa’s attention. She glanced up. The anchorwoman had a handsome, horsey face, framed by two wings of orange-blond hair that curved from a center parting to not quite meet again at the point of her chin. The hair had a metallic sheen that pixelated on the screen, jumbling with her shimmering green suit jacket.

  Reception poor. The glossy lips worked against a faint screen of static—and for cave girl Julie Westover it’s the thirteenth day in a coma. Doctors cannot expl—Marissa somehow had found the remote and switched the television off.

  Julie. The cave girl. What name had Marissa imagined for her? None. There was none. The counselors at the adoption service had advised her not to name the baby, not if she really meant to give her up. For similar reasons she had never really looked at this child before today.

  She can’t see you.

  Julie’s eyes had opened. No recognition in them, certainly. That is, she didn’t recognize another human presence, or any other object in this room. Her eyes were cinnamon brown, like Marissa’s own. After a moment, they slipped shut.

  Marissa turned again toward the window. The angle of the sun had changed, and a rage of autumn light rushed over her like a wave. She closed her eyes and leaned into it. Through the plate glass, the light warmed the surface of her skin. For a moment she thought she was going to faint. She popped her eyes open, regaining the reality of the room.

  Routine noise through the open door. Someone was pushing an empty gurney down the hallway. It passed. In the room across the corridor a voice repeated in a dead monotone, callmyson, callmyson, callmyson, callmyson. There was a quality Marissa recognized from time she’d served in other hospitals: void syllables of dementia.

  Someone was sitting in one of the mint-green molded plastic chairs by the door. Squatting, rather; he’d caught his boot heels on the edge of the seat, long legs folded up like a mantis’s. White wires to an iPod ran off his dark shaggy mass of hair. There was some sort of textbook balanced on his knees, the cover scrawled over and the corners frayed to feathers of gray cardboard. Marissa couldn’t tell if he was reading the book or not. His head was tilted over it slightly, but he wore wraparound sunglasses with bulbous yellow lenses, like the eyes of a fly. The sun, still pouring in from the glass, reflected from those lenses so harshly she couldn’t tell if he was looking at the book or at Julie or at her; he might have been staring at her the whole time.

  She can’t see you—had this person said that? Could he have been in the room all along? Certainly she had not heard anyone come in. When she looked at the battered textbook it occurred to her that Julie’s world must be full of such objects. But the impenetrable eyes unnerved her. She felt defensive, almost frightened, and thus angry. Pulling the front of her lab coat straight, she rapped out sharply, “Who are you?”

  42

  Jamal could hear Karyn, still screaming and sobbing somewhere back behind him, but it was hysteria, no more than that. Screams had a completely different timbre when someone was doing the screamer material harm—he remembered that sound from another life. And no one was molesting Karyn right now because Marko and Sonny were both after him, or in fact Jamal was leading them away from Karyn and Julie, the way a bird, pretending to be wounded, decoys predators from the nest.

  In the half-light of the moon he was quicker than they were on the ledges, which he had explored a number of times before this afternoon. Beyond the boulder where he and Julie had watched the hawk feeding, there was a spot where he could drop down from one ledge to another below. He pressed silently against the stone, into a crevice that hid him from the moon. Marko, probably Marko, passed over him. The white beam of the big mag light played over random patches of the stone. Jamal had his ear flat against the rock face and for a moment he thought the mountain had a heartbeat, then understood it must be his own heart he was hearing.

  Now he could hear Marko coming back from the point where the higher ledge petered out into thin air. Where was Sonny? Karyn wasn’t screaming anymore, so maybe Sonny had gone back to calm her. But the silence unnerved Jamal. Marko would be going back in the direction where Julie was, where Julie had gone into the cave, and Jamal thought maybe he should have tried to follow her in there. He thought he could just squeeze in, and he was sure enough that Marko couldn’t, but—

  He caught up a piece of shale and flung it against the boulder opposite the ledge where he was crouching, and heard it shatter against the harder stone. That stopped Marko. The mag light beam played over the boulder, lighting up the stain where the hawk’s kill had bled, but maybe Jamal only imagined he saw that, and out of the corner of his eye. He was already scuttling down the ledge to the desert floor.

  The moon seemed to brighten as it climbed, and Jamal wondered just how visible he was, a ragged black shadow hovering over pale sand. Too visible. Marko shouted, and picked him out with the mag light beam. Almost at once one of the Harleys growled to life and Jamal saw the headlight surging toward him across the sand-pack. Sonny, then, had gone back to the bikes. If Karyn was making noise now he couldn’t hear it over the engine. And he was already running, dodging in and out of two cones of light, then just one, for Marko must be trying to find his way down the ledges to come after him too.

  No cover here on the open sand. Before, he used to go out with his brothers and some slingshots to hurl rocks at tanks and jeeps, and then they’d scatter through the boulders of another desert, with the large clumsy vehicles lurching after them. Another world. In this one he had two hundred yards to go before he’d reach the first high hummocks of painted mud, and the motorcycle was gaining on him fast. By dumb luck he tripped into some sort of ditch, dry streambed maybe. It was shallow but he’d lost the headlight beam and right away he began crawling, worming rather, over gravel and sharp shale. No point worrying about snakes. His left palm landed on a flat cactus, filling itself up with spines, and he crawled over it, still keeping low.

  Sonny’s bike shot over the ditch and went on without stopping. But the other engine had started now. Marko was a little brighter than Sonny and when he hit the ditch he stopped. The motor eased to idle. Jamal waited for the mag light beam. If he picked up his head he could see he didn’t have far to go to the first channel winding into the hummocks, but it was better to lie dead still. Marko was a long way off and the light beam was diffuse by the time it reached the heels of Jamal’s boots, which must have only looked like more cactus or debris. After a moment the beam shifted away, and Jamal got up and dashed the remaining distance to the first clay hill and began to climb it, scrambling on his hands and knees, working his way across the steep slope at a diagonal until he dropped into a pocket, almost like a foxhole.

  Marko had mounted the bike again and was systematically working his way along the dry gulch with the headlight. Farther out on the desert plain, Sonny’s headlight swooped around and began to return. Marko stopped at the foot of the hill and played his flashlight up the slope. Fortunately he was no tracker. By then Sonny had pulled up beside him. The engines died.

  Jamal was so close he could hear them muttering, though he couldn’t make out what they said. Then Sonny raised his voice.

  “Jamal? You out there? Jamal, come on back, man. We’re not gonna hurtcha!”

  Good-cop-bad-cop, Jamal thought, picking cactus spines out of his palm by feel. It hurt when he mouthed the words; he’d popp
ed his lip against something, crawling low.

  Marko was muttering again, then Sonny, louder: “Jamal? Man, we can cool this out. Come on out, man. We need to take care of the girls.”

  Marko’s lines, in Sonny’s voice. Jamal kept quiet and low. Then Marko’s voice boomed.

  “Jamal? Jamal!” Then in a slightly lower tone, “Well fuck it. If he wants to die out here by himself we’ll let him.”

  For twenty more minutes he watched headlights looping and searching in figure-eight patterns over the sand. Then they joined and went back in the direction they’d come.

  By dawn he’d worked his way northwest about half the distance to where he thought the road cut through—maybe, it was only a guess. He didn’t want to go back to the campsite. Marko and Sonny would have disabled his bike or got Karyn to ride it out of there. Or if they were waiting for him, maybe, there’d be no escape.

  When the light was full he climbed a north slope and studied the distance for the sheen of asphalt. He had to wait for a car to pass before he could spot the road. He memorized the contours of two crazy sand-drip peaks that had framed the car and then he climbed down and started for that spot, only it was near impossible to go straight in the right direction, unless he wanted to climb every hill in the way. They were crumbly and it was illegal to walk on them too—not that he cared in this situation but—

  Walking the old dry channels between the hills made it easy to lose his sense of direction. A compass would be a nice thing to have, and water. Especially water. In a time before history these hills must have been islands in a land of lakes. He put a pebble in his mouth, to build saliva.

  The sun was tilting, reddening at his back, before he climbed over the lip of the road and crouched, exhausted, on the balls of his feet and the knuckles of one hand. He had no warning of the first car coming. It arrived around the bend at high speed and in eerie silence: one of the new hybrids that got by without combustion most of the time. When Jamal jumped up swinging his arms the car swerved sharply, first toward the mountain wall, then over-correcting to the edge of the precipice he had just climbed, where it just managed not to hurtle over. Then it was gone around the bend.