“Come on,” Karyn said. “We’d have stayed at my house if it was gonna be that. You know me’n Sonny—”
“I know,” Julie said quickly, deft as she usually was in forestalling Karyn telling her more on that subject than she wanted to hear. “Only with the tents we got it looks like you and Sonny and Marko.”
“Get out!” Karyn pulled away, but she was laughing. “We’re not freaks like that—Marko’s staying out in the open—says he likes it under the stars. Sonny says so, anyway. So we get some quality alone time out here . . . and you—“
Karyn patted Julie’s cheek. “You must of thought about this before now.”
“Of course,” Julie said, though she hadn’t exactly thought it through.
“Do you like him?” Karyn gave her an elbow nudge. “You like him?”
“What do you think?” Julie said.
“Get serious!” Karyn said, then she herself did. “I dunno. . . . He’s weird. They’re weird. They’re foreigners. My Dad says he can’t figure why anybody would eat the food they fix. Much less pay for it. Dad says they could be Ayrab terrorists the whole pack of them.”
“Come on.”
Karyn looked down thoughtfully. Jamal had climbed to the top of a boulder on the flat sand near the tents. He sat cross-legged, looking out toward the sunset. The yellow bubble sunglasses made his pose more insect-like than it otherwise might have seemed. He was completely contained in himself, Julie thought, like that silver-gray orb of his tent.
“Okay,” Karyn said. “I’ll tell you one thing I like about him is I think he’s strong. He’s not very big but I think . . . he’s strong. You know? And I know he likes you.” Karyn switched her hips, winking her navel stud above her skintight jeans.
Julie thought of Jamal, when the dog had rushed them. He’d put himself between the dog and her right away, but not suddenly. It was like he had always been planted there, like a tree. One hand behind him, palm down to the ground, told her she should be that same kind of still. After a while the dog stopped snarling. Its back relaxed and it walked up to Jamal and sniffed his knees and the fingers of his gently outstretched hand and then it went away. Jamal had made nothing of it all, after the dog had gone. He didn’t say anything about what had happened, and he didn’t walk any closer to Julie than he had been before, although she wouldn’t have minded if he did.
Asked you first, Karyn said.“Okay I like him,” Julie blurted. “Okay I like like him.” At that she knew she would share Jamal’s tent and also that he wouldn’t touch her any more than she wanted him to or not at all if she didn’t want it. She was opening her mouth again to ask if Karyn had brought along any extra protection, because Karyn sometimes showed off Sonny’s favorite types of condom in her purse, but Karyn was staring at the boulder again.
“Oh disgusto,” Karyn said. “Julie, look, Julie, it’s drinking the blood.”
Julie looked. A butterfly had lit on the stain of the hawk’s kill. As it imbibed the blood its wings stirred the air, an iridescent, heavenly blue. Julie shivered as the butterfly took flight.
“I trust him,” she said, and knew it was true.
Out of the darkness where she lay she could still see the butterfly as if at the end of a telescope tube, its wingtips delicately revolving. And yes it could have happened like that. Could have been as innocent and simple as that. But then she would not be in the cave, and it mattered more than anything else that she be in the cave.
51
Jamal piloted Marissa down Highway 15 into the streets of the little town. Faster perhaps if they’d come on I-90. But the two-lane road was calmer. In wind-dried fields along the road were billboards advertising a Wild West Town and presently they passed the attraction itself, or its weathered board gateway, surmounted with quasi-comical mileage arrows and a bleached cow’s skull with horns. Beside the gate, heeled over on a missing wheel, was a remnant of a stage coach.
“It’s fake,” Jamal said as they passed. It was the only remark he had made since leaving the hospital, other than things like turn here.
“They’re on the west side,” Jamal said now. “Turn right up there on Lincoln.”
Marissa made the turn. It seemed a little ludicrous to talk about the “West Side” of a town no better than ten blocks square.
“Left here,” Jamal said. “All right. There’s the house.” He didn’t point, only half turned the yellow bulbs of his glasses to indicate which house he meant. Marissa braked. Beside the little white brick ranch was a flimsy carport with an arched plastic top, empty. When she looked at it she seemed to see it crushed beneath a weight of winter snow.
“Does she have a car?” Marissa said? “I don’t think anybody’s home.”
“She’s got a car.” Jamal turned a thin smile on her as he popped open the passenger door. “You’ll hear it coming. She works at Walmart, down on the bypass.” He glanced at the clock on the truck’s dashboard. “Should be out of work already.”
“Don’t you want a ride somewhere?” Marissa said. “Or—” She was wishing he wouldn’t leave her here alone. But Jamal was already out of the cab, walking around the hood to the driver’s side. Marissa rolled down her window.
“I dunno how pissed she is at me still,” Jamal said. “Probably better if I’m gone when she gets here.” He was offering her a takeout menu he’d pulled from his windbreaker pocket. Marissa looked at it uncomprehendingly. Some kind of Middle Eastern place.
“It’s my mother’s restaurant,” Jamal said. “Stop by when you’re done. You just go down Lincoln and over to—“
“There’s no way I’m not finding it in a town this size,” Marissa said, forcing a short laugh. Jamal laughed also, and waved a hand as he turned from the truck. In a moment he was around the corner, out of sight.
West side. She looked at the little brick house again. A gutter was loose at the corner by the carport. It made a metal scraping sound whenever it caught the wind.
She put the truck in gear, drove half a block to the dead end circle and shut it off. Through the rearview mirror she could see the approach. There was a newspaper on the dash, but she couldn’t concentrate. Her stomach unknotted, knotted again. If she smoked it would pass the time but she hadn’t smoked since that day with Inez.
She got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the asphalt, shading her eyes against the lowering sun. Here civilization ended, at least for now. She thought of the phony ghost town in the opposite direction. Beyond this border there was scrub and dry prairie, a few tumbleweeds. When she looked to her right she could see the sun gleaming red on the rusted railroad track that ran away to the northwest.
Engine noise made her turn. An old blue Toyota with a hole in the muffler turned into the gravel drive of the white house. Under the carport the engine coughed dead. The woman who got out was burly, like a knotted tree trunk, overweight but not morbidly so. A plastic grocery sack was looped around one wrist. She wore a Walmart smock and a black eyeshade whose band confined a wavy tumble of graying blond hair, long enough to spill over her shoulders.
Marissa got her legs to start walking toward the house. Something was wrong with her proprioception: she could feel her heart rhythm but not her feet striking the ragged pavement. Conscientiously, she breathed.
“Mrs. Westover?”
Key in the side door, the woman turned toward her, eyes slitting over puffy red cheeks. But she didn’t look like a drunk, Marissa decided. Just sunburned, or windburned, and why wouldn’t she be suspicious of a stranger?
“You from the hospital?”
“Yes,” Marissa said. It was simpler, and not exactly untrue.
“Do I have to let you in?
“No,” Marissa said. “You don’t have to let me in.”
“Huh,” Carrie Westover said, hefting the bag as she pushed the side door open. “Well, you better come in, I guess.”
They were in the kitchen, a small linoleum square. Carrie Westover unloaded her bag into the fridge. Frozen peas, frozen fries, a
pack of hamburger pale with fat. She pulled a bottle of Diet Coke from its plastic ring before storing the remainder of the six, then squinted at Marissa.
“You want one?”
Marissa shook her head.
“I got beer. I think.” She leaned her torso into the fridge, searching. She’s not a lush anyway, Marissa thought, or she wouldn’t think; she’d know. Unless her taste was not for beer. Carrie Westover unfolded herself from the fridge and handed Marissa a can of Coors Light. She took it, feeling condensation dampening her palm. Carrie’s hand was small considering her overall bulkiness, like a bird’s claw. No rings.
Marissa followed her through the next room, darkly blinded, with leatherette furniture and a hefty TV. The house seemed to have a shotgun plan, like a trailer. Where were the bedrooms? Julie’s room? When Carrie opened a door at the back the dust motes in the interior glowed in rays of sunset light. There was a low wooden deck with web chairs and a metal table, supporting a jumbo ashtray.
“Cooler out here,” Carrie Westover kicked off her Crocs and put her bare feet on the seat of the chair opposite the one she sat in. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m on my dogs all day.”
She lit a cigarette, the same pale brand that Peggy smoked, in the rundown courtyard behind their work. In Marissa’s mind, the count of the vacation days she’d already consumed in this venture lit up. If she didn’t return soon she’d be into sick days also.
From the deck they had a pleasant view of the sunset, across the receding railroad track.
“Are there still trains?” Marissa asked.
“Once in a while.” Carrie blew a smoke ring. “Usually when you just went to sleep.” She pulled off her eyeshade and tossed it onto the table. “You didn’t come out here to ask me that.”
“Julie,” Marissa said, setting her unopened beer on the table. “So. You live alone with her here?”
“Since thirteen years, yeah.” Carrie closed her eyes for a moment. “No, I think it’s fourteen.”
“No siblings.” Marissa practically winced at the word herself. She’d slipped into social worker mode and she didn’t know how to get out of it. “Brothers and sisters?”
“No.”
“She was doing okay in school?”
“College prep. Okay, not great.”
“But it’s good to be in college prep.”
“Best they got.”
“And the um, father?”
“Hey Missy, where’s your clipboard?” Carrie dropped her feet to the board floor and leaned sharply forward, all hackled up like a threatened dog. “You people all keep coming after me like I got the answer—well, I’m looking for the same damn thing myself. I never had any real trouble with Julie—not like some people do with their kids—but come to find out she was hiding things from me and I still don’t know just what. I thought she was spending the night with her girlfriend. I didn’t even know they were running with those two motorcycle punks. If I’d known I’d of put a stop to it. I didn’t know till the call from the cops and after that your guess’s good as mine. I don’t have the first idea what went on out there that night. Docs can’t say why she won’t wake up, and then all you people keep coming around like if you poke me enough I’ll come across and tell you.”
“I’m sorry,” Marissa said.
“Right,” Carrie sat back, exhaled another cloud of smoke. “You’re sorry. You want to show me some ID?”
“I’m—” Marissa said, and stopped. She had to get off the wrong foot somehow and there was no way to do it but jump.
“I’m the biological mother.”
Carrie squinted at her, closing her right eye. “The what?”
“The birth mother. I—Julie’s adopted, I knew that from the start. I had her and I gave her up.”
“You had her and you gave her up.” Carrie broke her half-smoked cigarette stabbing it into the overflowing ashtray. “Why you skinny little snot-nose bitch—who sent for you? You have no right to be here.”
“I have a wrong!” Marissa shouted. She didn’t know how she’d chosen the word but she said it again, more quietly, as she closed her eyes. I have a wrong. A wrong of my own making. She felt herself falling into it, as into a deep well. An inner space, dark and limitless, with no point of orientation and no light. There was no way to get a foot under her or to begin to find her way out.
Behind her black lids she saw the shaman coming toward her out of the thicket, over the scattering of sharp stones, keening and shaking his rattle and looking at her with his sad otherworldly comprehension. It won’t help if you cry, she thought. She didn’t cry.
Carrie Westover didn’t look angry anymore, just tired. No doubt she had every right to be exhausted. Her feet, which she’d put back on the chair seat, were small, small-boned like her hands, and didn’t really go with the gnarled body, which looked as if armored by battering.
Marissa picked up one of Carrie’s feet and began to massage the knot under the instep with her thumb. When she realized what she was doing she thought the other woman would surely pull away, maybe even strike her, but Carrie only sank down in her chair and sighed.
52
He dozed in the green twilight of the hospital room, listening to the click and burble of machines, the steady whisper of Julie’s breathing. A feathery shadow in the white bed, her face turned toward the dark window. She was still, waiting. Now and then the nurses exchanged a few words as they passed in the corridor. From outside he could hear the throttle sound of a big motorcycle engine, idling into the lot. Two engines. First one cut and then the other. Jamal opened his eyes and put on his bubble sunglasses, adding a yellow tint to the green, a different ghostliness to everything, as if he was submerged in an aquarium.
“The drool in the lotus,” Marko said.
He was standing over Julie’s quiet bed. Beside him, Sonny hulked uneasily.
Jamal remembered Julie, aware in her yoga pose, hands in a mudra over her head—how in this flower of her youth she had at the same time seemed ancient. It surprised him that Marko retained some picture in his mind of this. No doubt it was not the same picture. But Marko was not as stupid as he sometimes seemed.
“It’s a problem for you if she doesn’t wake up,” Marko was saying. “A problem for us if she does.”
“I think it’s also a problem for you if she doesn’t,” Jamal said. He was standing now, light on the balls of his feet.
“Yo,” Marko said, more sharply. “We never did anything to her. She just decided to run, that’s all.”
“I wonder,” Jamal said. “Does Karyn tell it all like that?”
White teeth in the shadow of Marko’s smile. “You know, that might not have been Karyn’s first movie. And Karyn’s out of the picture now.”
“She went to her sister’s,” Sonny said hastily. “In Rapid City. She’s gonna finish school over there.”
Jamal, of course, already knew that; impossible not to in a town so small. He wondered if Sonny missed her, how much.
“That’s what the girls do when they’re pregnant,” he said.
“No,” Marko said. “Karyn had an upsetting experience. Which was nobody’s fault. It just happened.”
He reached as if he would touch the fan of Julie’s hair on the pillow. Jamal moved slightly. Marko withdrew his hand.
“This one’s not talking,” he said. “I guess that leaves you.”
“You’re not going to take me down here,” Jamal said. “There’s too many other people around.”
“No,” said Marko. “We’re going to let Ultimo take care of you.”
Jamal reached toward this idea with his mind and couldn’t feel anything about it whatsoever. No surprise, no fear.
“Do that.”
“All right, then,” Marko said, as if the matter had been amicably settled. He flipped his hand idly, moving toward the door. “We’ll see you around, little bro. Unless for some reason we don’t.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Jamal said. He tried again, without succe
ss, to measure the seriousness of the threat. He couldn’t even seem to remember exactly what Ultimo looked like. Ultimo’s silhouette in his mind was like a wormhole into some other universe.
“Jamal?” Marko had turned in the doorway. “What’s in that cave?”
“It’s just a big black hole in the ground,” Jamal said.
“No, man,” Sonny said, with a queer urgency. “The Smokey said you wouldn’t come out—like for an hour. They were calling and calling. They thought you were gone.”
“Bears,” Jamal said.
“Bullshit,” Marko said.
“I don’t mean just bears,” Jamal said. “There were all kinds of animals. And people who were partway animal.” He thought for a second. “I don’t mean like you.”
53
At first there was only the sound in the darkness, damp thump like a heartbeat and a high dry rattle on top of it. The dark enveloped her with the viscosity of tar. She struggled with it, for sight, breath, movement. The heartbeat sound jarred the core of her body and she clawed at the tar with a windmill movement of her hands, stirring it out and around herself in a sort of chocolate whirlpool. Her vision cleared and she saw him sitting cross-legged on a round smooth stone and slapping with one hand at the belly of the gourd, which he shook by its crookneck with the other hand. Here was the rattling sound that sat on the top of her head and resonated with the damp thumping pulse that drove into the hollow at the base of her skull until the matter of her brain began to shatter into pebbles like the ones that made that rattle in the gourd. She was spinning in the opposite direction from the tarry vortex that revolved around her. White hair on the back of the shaman’s hands, not separate hairs but a pelt, and the shaman’s hide vest had a pelt on it too; it hung open to reveal white body hair on the chest or breast through which two black and rubbery nipples protruded. Always the splintering sound of the gourd shaker. The eyes of the shaman were red-rimmed and recessed under heavy brow bones, like the eyes of some ancient androgynous ape, and somehow under their regard her own eyes rolled backward.
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