Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  The tar of the vortex around her began to separate into colored threads like the rainbow colors of gasoline spilled in water. The threads broke into particles, and now she was spinning in a shower of light looking down on the body of the woman Marissa who lay unconscious with her hair bleeding out on a white pillow and her hands folded over her chest like a corpse. The points of color were painfully bright, and through a gap in the helical curtains of light she looked down on the person of Marissa with pity and fear for her confusion and loss.

  the eye of my intention

  to move the feelings more with the will

  with a crash Marissa fell back into her body and jerked upright from her pillow, her mouth open wide in the form of a scream, though only a desperate panting came out. The dry rattle from the gourd had stopped. The heart of that hard-beating thump was her own.

  54

  Jamal’s mother’s restaurant was installed in a former Wendy’s, Marissa thought, or some other hamburger chain anyway. A portable marquee at the driveway entrance announced The Magic Carpet, and under it in moveable block letters a list of specials ; she didn’t recognize any of the words. The lot was better than half full, many cars with out-of-state plates.

  Inside the smell was rich and delicious. Marissa had been eating very little since she came to this place, mostly yogurts she kept in a Styrofoam cooler in her motel room on the bypass. She sat down at a corner table, or rather a former fast food booth. The menu dizzied her, however, words running away in a blur. A freckled girl about Julie’s age stood over her, slender hip cocked, clicking her pad with her pencil.

  “I don’t know what to get,” Marissa said helplessly.

  “That happens.” The girl shot her a quick smile full of braces, and turned toward the back. Behind the fast food service counter a bead curtain had been dropped, screening the kitchen. All the good smells came from there. The curtain parted, and Jamal peered out; Marissa didn’t recognize him at first because of the white apron and because he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses.

  “Harira,” Jamal said, with a nod. Apparently it was a decision on Marissa’s behalf, because the waitress made a note and took the menu. Presently she brought Marissa a glass of hot sweet tea. A few minutes later, Jamal came and set a white bowl in front of her, redolent with cinnamon and other less familiar spices. He had taken off his apron. He sat down in the booth across from her.

  Marissa tasted. “My God this is good!” she said. “What is it?”

  “People eat it after sundown during Ramadan,” Jamal told her. “When they don’t eat during daylight.”

  “Oh,” said Marissa. “Is it Ramadan?”

  “No,” said Jamal. “It’s good soup any day.”

  Marissa ate steadily and drank her tea. Little had been done to the décor of the place, except that the fluorescent lights were turned off, and a small oil lamp had been set on each formica table. The difference in atmosphere was considerable. By the time she had finished her soup the restaurant had mostly emptied out. Jamal called: “Misty!” and the girl brought her a plate of honey-soaked baklava.

  “Why are you here?” she asked Jamal.

  Jamal shrugged, with his long thin smile. “Because my mother has no daughters. My brothers, they do other work.”

  It wasn’t the question she had meant to ask, but she didn’t elaborate. She could see a hooded shadow moving behind the beaded curtain, amid a clatter of pots and pans and the rush of a dishwashing stream.

  “How’s it going,” Jamal said.

  “With Julie’s—with Mrs. Westover?” Marissa said. “Carrie. I don’t know. We talk . . . but why should she trust me? And—she doesn’t really know anything. Not about what’s happening now. The doctors don’t know—”

  “Nobody knows.” Jamal said. And for a moment they were silent, looking into the flickering light of the lamps. Marissa was reminded—

  “What goes in this Ramadan soup?”

  “A lot of things. It’s supposed to be lamb. But here we use buffalo.” The long crooked smile. “It’s easier to get.”

  She wanted to ask Jamal what he had seen in the cave. There were rumors. He had stayed down there a long time after Julie came out and there must have been some reason for it.

  A small woman came out through the bead curtain, and circled the counter to sit in a corner booth. It was she who wore the dark hood, and her ankle-length skirt made her seem to glide without stepping. In the lamplight her eyes were dark and lustrous. She did not appear to be looking at them, but inward.

  “You can sit with my mother sometimes, if you want,” Jamal said. “She drinks tea in the afternoon when it’s quiet, and sometimes after closing.”

  Marissa glanced at her again, not wanting to stare. “Another time.”

  “She will receive you.”

  “Thank her for me,” Marissa said, struck by this odd formality, and the strangeness of not being directly introduced.

  The parking lot was dark and mostly empty, and the light of the waxing moon spilled in through the plate glass window. Misty was blowing out lamps at the empty tables. One by one those yellow points of warmth disappeared from the surrounding silver glow. Through the glass a shadow fell across their table, and Marissa felt Jamal go on alert. She sensed that they were being watched, like prey. She didn’t want to look but she did: a huge man, straight as a spear shaft, stood with his face almost touching the glass. His face was weathered like wind-worn stone, with his hair pulled back in a snakelike braid. His hands looked hard and heavy as stone. On his forearm Marissa recognized a tattoo that some of her clients had, the ones that had been to prison. He was not looking at her after all, but fixing Jamal with a deep, neutral gaze. Jamal, even without his sunglasses, didn’t let his own eyes turn away.

  When the man had turned to walk slowly away, Marissa felt her breath whooshing out of her. “Who the hell was that?” she asked.

  “Oh, the baddest man in town,” Jamal said. “Ultimo.”

  What’s he got to do with you? she wanted to ask. With us? She couldn’t find a way to say it.

  “They say he’s an Indian, or some kind of half-breed,” Jamal said. “He’s got a place somewhere in the desert, out past the El Fake-o Wild West Town. He does, you know, illegal stuff. Drugs. Porn. Dog-fights.”

  The lamp in the other corner had gone out; Jamal’s mother was no longer there. Jamal leaned forward, scanning the lot and the street beyond.

  “He’s gone,” he said. “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”

  They stopped by the bed of her truck and stood with the moonlight pouring over them. The town closed down early, no one else was about.

  “Jamal,” Marissa said. “Where’s Julie?” And don’t say in the hospital she thought and don’t say . . . don’t. She had no fracture, no brain bleed, no injury to explain why she wouldn’t wake up. Marissa thought of the dream she’d had before Claude died and of that space she’d seemed to fall into, during her first meeting with Carrie, the dark hollow full of wrong.

  Jamal was mumbling, “I don’t know. . . .” But then he looked up and said, “Behind the moon.”

  55

  “Do you want to go up?” Jamal said.

  Marissa craned her neck. They stood below the rock shelter, on the desert floor, with the shadow of the cliff just beginning to reach toward them. She looked at the zigzag pattern of ledges leading up to the cave mouth: an irregular slit in the stone, pinched to a point at bottom and top. The sight of it made her breath come short.

  “If you get close you can see the old pictures,” Jamal said. “They’re like scratched in the stone, underneath all the tags.”

  Marissa took a step forward and stopped. What had Jamal seen in the cave? She wanted to know what was in there, certainly, but she didn’t want to go in. The idea of climbing the ledges dizzied her. Her one step toward the cliff face felt like it had been repulsed, by some kind of magnetic energy.

  “Not—” she said. “Not now.”

  Jamal looked at her; he d
idn’t turn his head but she was aware of his eyes moving inside the bubble sunglasses.

  “You okay?”

  Marissa backed up and steadied herself with a hand on the warm hood of her truck. Jamal moved around her and brought out a bottle of water and a straw hat from behind the passenger seat. Marissa was looking at the shadow of the cliff on the desert floor and thinking it looked like a pool of dark water, or oil, or a bottomless drop into nowhere.

  “Drink some water.” Jamal set the hat on her head.

  Marissa filled her mouth from the bottle and, with a slight effort, swallowed. Without looking she felt Jamal’s concerned regard.

  “I’m all right,” she said, returning the bottle to him. She fanned herself with the hat, put it down on the ticking hood, and smoothed back her hair with both hands, looking up at the puffy graffiti letters, KAOS, that edged the mouth of the cave.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” It was such a stupid question she was that much more surprised by his answer.

  “Sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” Jamal said.

  Marissa turned her face toward him. “Come on. A gang of JD taggers can’t be thinking that.”

  “Probably not.” The crooked half smile as he looked away. “But I am. And so are you.”

  Marissa felt a strain in her face from her widened eyes. “How do you even know something like that?” The schools around here couldn’t be that good.

  Jamal shrugged. “My brother does physics. He gave me a book.”

  “You know, it gets me sometimes.” The memory of Claude pulled at her dizzily, repelling her at the same time it drew her in, like the cliff shadow. She would have told him this part if she’d had time to understand and frame it. “It’s like I never made the choice because I didn’t see there was a choice to be made. Like I just saw one thing to do and so I did the one thing and that was it. And any little thing I did could have made it different.”

  Jamal was listening. The sun was beginning to go down behind the cliff, which made the shadow of the cliff reach farther toward them. She noticed how the upper pinch of the cave opening pointed into the molten core of the setting sun.

  “I was in love with a priest,” she said. “Fuck me! A celibate Catholic priest—of course I didn’t know, I didn’t let myself know what I was feeling. . . .” She didn’t know why she should be telling this to a boy half her age, a child really, she might say.

  “What happened?” Jamal said.

  “He died.” Marissa laughed bitterly. She didn’t cry. “He just—woke up dead one morning, some heart thing nobody knew about. Almost nobody. . . . And it gets me sometimes, how it could have been different. How everything could have all been different. If I didn’t step on a crack.”

  Jamal nodded. “It was like that out here that night.”

  Marissa looked at him. “What?”

  “When I was with Julie, up there.” Jamal raised his chin to the ledges. “It was like something big was going to happen, good or bad, you couldn’t tell, and the least little thing you did would change it. Or like a bazillion things had already happened and all of them were true—And Julie . . . Julie could feel it too. I know she did.”

  Jamal took off his sunglasses and looked Marissa in the eye. They were close to the same height—had she noticed that before? Jamal’s eyes, unlike his mother’s, were a translucent gray.

  “But if you’d done something different back when?” he said. “We wouldn’t even be here. I wouldn’t be me and you wouldn’t be you and there wouldn’t be a person named Julie.”

  “You know this,” Marissa said.

  “How close is your soul to my soul!” Jamal told her. “For whatever thing you are thinking, I know.”

  “Jesus.” Marissa stared. “What is that?”

  “Rumi. A poem by Rumi. He was a Sufi mystic.”

  No, she thought, whatever he was, Jamal was no child. What he must have seen and done to get from wherever there was to here. . . . She shook her head sadly. “My life feels so small.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Jamal said. “The big part’s inside of you.”

  Marissa wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth. She hadn’t known she was going to do it but she wasn’t shocked at what she had done. Jamal relaxed at her touch, shifting their weight against the fender of the truck, and his lips parted slightly, but he didn’t kiss her back. She pushed away and rested her two hands on his shoulders. And he probably doesn’t even know it himself, she was thinking.

  “My God,” she said. “You’re in love with Julie.” A comforting warmth spread through her.

  56

  Aimless and restless, Marissa drove west of town on Highway 14, then turned north on 63, a narrower road that eventually ran into the Cheyenne River Reservation. The land was flat and almost featureless; here and there on either side of the road were a few depressions that held shallow ponds. She passed a pole gateway to a ranch but there were no buildings in sight down the long gravel drive beyond the cattle gap. A mile or so farther on she began to catch a harsh ammoniac smell. Rolling up the truck windows did little to blunt it; she wrapped a cotton scarf around her face.

  A quarter mile ahead she saw a Humvee heeled up on the shoulder, indistinct in the gathering dusk. Above on a low rise was a small ranch house, which she felt sure was the source of the smell: meth lab. She thought of doubling back but that maneuver might attract too much attention if anyone had noticed her from the house or the roadside vehicle. The prospect of pursuit made her stomach flop. Nearing the Humvee, which looked like an army surplus vehicle rather than the commercial version of the car, she pressed the gas and picked up speed. She was aware of a vague silhouette in the driver’s seat, though she had taken care not to really look in that direction.

  Bald peaks blocked the horizon, and the road slipped into a cut between the hills, then emerged and curved around the soft corner of a large plowed field, its plowed earth empty, dust stirring under the wind. The road ran almost due west through another cut in the mountain stone, then opened as it veered to the north. There was a bridge over a branch of the Missouri River, and she stopped short of the crossing. She left the truck without bothering to lock it—there were no vehicles in sight, nor any sign of human activity around three-sixty degrees of the horizon. On the far side of the bridge was a deep expanse of forest.

  Wind whipped her hair across her mouth when she stepped onto the bridge. With one hand she caught it back and used the other to wrap her light jacket more tightly around herself.

  Halfway across she stopped and faced the wind. It seemed to her now that she must have come here supposing she might discover some sign or portent . . . another inscrutable ancient mystic walking toward her out of the wilderness of the rez. Now, though, it seemed wrong to enter; the place was not empty, but empty for her. She was alone here and feeling very small. Small was the word she had used with Jamal. What in the world had possessed her to kiss him like that? The action had overpowered her somehow; she’d done it with no apparent trace of thought. At least he hadn’t seemed to resent it, or embrace it as some sort of cougar come-on. Why should she think that Jamal understood what she was trying to do better than she did?

  In a blue haze near the horizon a cluster of dark specks was circling above the brushy treetops. Squinting didn’t bring them into better focus, but still she could surmise they must be vultures. The light was fading. Time to go.

  Back in the truck, she inspected the GPS to learn that there was no reasonable way back other than the way she had come. Well. In this part of the world the news did not surprise her. And the sun had set; she would pass the lab under cover of darkness, and after all she was only going by on the road.

  A half mile out, she saw the house lights up on the rise, then another light—an orange flare—arching up from the roadbed. In the silence it made her think of a shooting star. When the two lights met, the house caught fire all at once, star-shaped explosions blowing out the windows and front door.
The sound struck a second later, along with a sort of shock wave; by then Marissa had shut off her headlights and pulled to the side of the road. Call someone. No. The house burned furiously, with continuing explosions. A couple of smaller episodes of fire separated from the shell of the building and ran away into the dark. That howling sound could not be human; it must only be the wind screaming through the flaming timbers.

  What was she waiting for?—the wide-set taillights of the Humvee came on. The vehicle lurched up into the road bed and the red lights thank God thank God began to recede. Marissa waited for them to disappear, mentally composing answers to questions from an imaginary cop. Why did you stop here? I wanted to wait for the fire to die down, I was afraid an explosion might hit my car. Did you see anyone around the building? No No it was too dark I was too far away. What were you doing out here anyway? No no no good answer to that one.

  She started her engine and urged the truck forward, eyes rigidly straight ahead as she passed the burning house. Nothing on the road or anywhere, just the white dashes of the centerline furling up under her wheels. She’d gone fifteen miles before she heard sirens, and if her stomach clenched it was for no reason—not cops but a fire truck ripping past her at full speed.

  57

  Marissa coasted her truck past The Magic Carpet. It was somewhere close to midnight—she had stayed with Carrie Westover that late. A single lamp glimmered through a bead curtain. Marissa bumped her brake pedal, a gesture at respecting the stop sign, but made a right turn without breaking the momentum of the truck.

  Two blocks south, where some fast food restaurants and the town’s one bowling alley and bar were still open, there was a steady stream of traffic: teenage cruisers, shouting and laughing and blasting car stereos. Their strength was swelled, on weekend nights, by kids from other towns and ranches scattered over the plain. Residents along the cruise loop didn’t like it, but the police wouldn’t shut it down till 2 a.m. Obnoxious as the cruising might be, it was a sign of some kind of life, and a lot of other towns on the plain had been pithed out completely by methedrine, mortality, and emigration to the cities and the coasts.