Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Try it,” he said.

  Marissa clasped the handle and the door opened easily. The other stranger went down one knee, peered under the dash below the steering column, and pulled out a set of alligator clips connected by a wire.

  “You got the key?” he said. “See if it’ll start.”

  Obediently Marissa climbed in and cranked the engine. She let it idle for a moment and then shut it off.

  “Beauty,” one of the strangers said, patting the truck’s fender as though it were the flank of a sound horse.

  “Not so bad,” said the other, with the same trace of accent. “Bring it in tomorrow, if you want. We’ll knock the dents out for you.”

  “Bring it where?” Marissa got out of the cab and stood facing the two men. They looked alike, one just a little taller and beakier than the other. They both had their hair cropped extremely short, although their beards were left untrimmed.

  “Shifty’s, out on the highway,” Jamal said. “They work on cars and bikes over there. Not body work usually, but they’ll do this for you.”

  “They will?” Marissa said.

  “My brothers,” Jamal said, a little awkwardly now. “Omar,” he said, lifting his chin toward the taller one, who still held the little pry bar lightly in one hand. “Ramin. This is . . . my friend, Marissa.”

  “Of course,” Omar said. He and Ramin both inclined their heads to her. The movement was slight, but the formality was such that they might both have bowed to their knees.

  “Thank you,” Marissa said. “Thanks for your help.” She must have known before, without really thinking about it, that all the strangers here must know who she was and why she was there. They’d know as much of the story as she did.

  “Where’d you get the Trans Am?” Jamal said.

  Marissa looked around. Events of the night began swirling in her head, so that she had to prop herself sideways on the truck seat. There was no Trans Am in view.

  “Shop,” Ramin said.

  “Shifty won’t like that,” said Jamal.

  “It’s a test drive, brother,” Omar said. “That’s not the problem.”

  Marissa looked at the three of them together. They did in fact all resemble each other, except for differences of style. Jamal dressed and groomed as an American teenager, more or less. Omar and Ramin somehow managed to wear their loose shirts and painters’ pants in a way that made them look like kaftans.

  “The problem is Marko,” Omar said. “And that . . . degenerate Indian.”

  “Look,” said Jamal, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Ramin said something in a language Marissa didn’t understand. Liquid, guttural. She couldn’t even pick out a word but it sounded to her like a proverb or something from scripture.

  “I know you do,” Jamal said. “But just . . . let it alone.”

  “He tried to kill you,” Omar said. “Brother, it’s gone too far.”

  “He’s trying to scare me,” Jamal said.

  “What?! Get out!” Marissa said, suddenly angry. “He’d have crushed you like a bug if not for those meter posts.”

  “Oh,” Jamal said. “So three people saw it.”

  Omar and Ramin and Marissa all looked at each other and then at Jamal, who had clasped his fingers to the bridge of his nose, as if to pinch back a headache.

  “Marko’ll kick back and think about that,” he said. “If we don’t do anything, he won’t either. It only makes it worse if he does, and Marko’s not stupid all the time.”

  Omar laughed, low in his throat like a growl. “I understand you, brother,” he said. “Let Marko lose the sleep.”

  “What about Ultimo,” Ramin said.

  Jamal dropped his hand from his face. “I don’t know what Ultimo wants,” he said, and stopped a moment, thinking. “I don’t think it’s the same thing as Marko.”

  65

  “You’re kidding,” Marissa said, when Jamal motioned her onto the back of his scooter’s saddle. A tear in the black vinyl had recently been closed with duct tape. Below the amber sunglasses was Jamal’s half quizzical smile.

  “In my country they use them as taxis,” he said.

  “But not in this country. They don’t. They don’t use things like this as taxis.”

  Jamal’s smile briefly became the grin of an older, more confident man, a challenge. He patted the duct tape on the seat with his long fragile-looking fingers. “I bet you don’t weigh any more than Julie,” he said. “Get on already.”

  My country, Marissa thought, with the wind in her face, whipping back her hair like a flag. What country was that? It was the first time Jamal had said anything of that sort. Deft the way he’d got her into the saddle. When he grew up a little more he’d be a caution, that was clear. No helmets. She was in Julie’s place, cementing herself to Jamal’s bony back on the turns. Yet he seemed to drive safely enough. What did Marissa have to keep herself whole for? In fact she was enjoying the ride: speed and wind and her tearing eyes and the solid feel of her chin hooked over Jamal’s shoulder. She could have said something into his ear but she didn’t. She hadn’t ridden pillion on a motorbike since before . . . oh, never mind.

  They passed Shifty’s without slowing, though it had been their destination. It might have been Omar or Ramin who glanced up at them from one of the gas pumps but he went by in such a blur, Marissa couldn’t be sure. The station was west of town on Highway 16, and just short of the interstate cloverleaf, Jamal throttled back and eased the bike off the shoulder. Marissa could have said into his ear what are you doing, but she didn’t.

  They were headed toward the mountain range of junk cars that stood behind Shifty’s, blocking a good chunk of the horizon. As the shadows of mounded wrecks loomed over them, Marissa felt a gain of foreboding. She could hear a car crusher pounding metal, out of sight but not far off. Then Jamal threaded their way unerringly to a tin-roofed lean-to, beneath which her little truck awaited her, pristine.

  In the space of three days, most of which Marissa had spent in the Saint Mary’s hospital room, Omar and Ramin had not only undone the most recent damage but erased every scratch and dent she had ever put into the thing since she’d received it at the age of sixteen. The truck was repainted its original deep blue, and now had a red racing stripe running all the way around it: a line like a razor cut before it starts bleeding.

  “Why would they do this?” Marissa said. “You know I can’t—I don’t—”

  “Because you’re my friend,” Jamal said. He found the key under the floor mat and held it out to her.

  She didn’t reach for it right away. What does friend mean in your language? What do I owe? It came to her then that her old life had completely dissolved and that she might give or receive anything in this new one. She didn’t know what the limits were or even if there were any.

  “I thought you said your brother did physics,” she said.

  “That’s Ramin,” Jamal said, waggling the key toward her nose. “He’s over at Brookings half the year but he earns the money for it at Shifty’s. Take the key.”

  Marissa took the key.

  “Catch a lift with you?”

  Marissa nodded, and Jamal opened the tailgate and propped up a plank. With an easy balance he rode the scooter up into the bed and secured it with bungee cords he seemed to have ready in the pockets of his cargo pants. Marissa meanwhile had started the engine and noticed that it was running much more smoothly than before.

  “What did they—” she started, as Jamal climbed in beside her. She was going to say again that she couldn’t possibly. . . .

  “Also we like this kind of truck,” Jamal said, reaching through the open window to pat the outside door panel. “Don’t see so many of them around here, but before . . . they’re tough. They’re good cross-country. You could mount a belt machine gun in the bed and fire it over the top of the cab.”

  “I never tried that,” Marissa said. Jamal utterly failed to register her tone.

  “Do you want me to take you bac
k to the restaurant?” she asked.

  Jamal shrugged. “We could drive around.”

  “Drive around?”

  “Test drive, you know. See how that tune-up flies.”

  Marissa drove clear of the junked-car mountains, then turned behind them into the open desert. She had an inkling that it would be better not to take the truck out in direct view of Shifty’s office area. In the distance, opposite the highway, a range of mountains closed the horizon. It occurred to her that in the thoroughness of their repair, Omar and Ramin had erased the evidence of what Marko had tried three nights before.

  “Let’s go that way,” Jamal said. “See how she four-wheels.”

  Marissa let out the clutch and the truck rolled out smoothly over packed sand.

  “Why won’t you tell me what happened out there?” she said. Jamal didn’t answer. He might have been asleep behind the sunglasses, except that she was sure he was scanning the horizon, where the crooked line of faint, misty mountains was hardening into a more concrete blue.

  “Jamal?”

  He turned to her then, across the cab, pushing the sunglasses up his brow, so they swept back his long frizz like a hair-band.

  “I already told you,” he said. “It’s hard to say exactly what happened. I’m not sure if anything did. And. . . .”

  “And?”

  “Julie had nothing to do with it.”

  Marissa could feel her knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. She made an effort not to speed up. There were rocks and spines to be dodged in the desert, along with detritus from other off-road vehicles.

  “She falls in a cave and comes out in a coma. And still she has nothing to do with it.”

  “I mean she didn’t bring it on.” Jamal was still looking at her with his naked eyes. “She had nothing to do with bringing it down, that’s what I mean.”

  This thing that didn’t happen. Maybe didn’t happen. I don’t know the code here, Marissa was thinking, as she twisted the wheel this way and that to navigate a path between rock hillocks that looked like inverted ice cream cones, traveling some prehistoric streambed was her guess. She’d met the same difficulty with patients and clients, especially the ones who still lived on the rez, and often she had been able to crack it—not always, though. You had to learn to think the way the other person did, and sometimes you just didn’t know enough to make that possible. It occurred to her now that if she’d raised Julie herself she would have been trying to decipher her words, her gestures, discover the underlying pattern, understand what she meant by them. With Jamal it was much harder because there were those other layers, and no way to guess how deep or how numerous they were.

  “—then why is Marko trying to kill you?”

  “He’s trying to scare me. Like I said.”

  Can’t you just be scared and he’ll leave you alone? Marissa thought.

  “You could—” she began, “We could—”

  Jamal, now looking through the windshield, was shaking his head. “It’s two different things, anyway. We go to the law, or the police. Then they start looking at my mother and my brothers, which people already do around here after all the sh—the stuff they see on TV. People around here, they look at Omar’s beard and hair and they see. . . . You know. We could get the short end of all that. Most likely we would.”

  Most likely he’s right, Marissa thought. “What’s the other thing?”

  Jamal’s thin smile, a slight shake of his head. “With Omar and Ramin it’s the duties of brotherhood. Pure and simple and . . . very strict. Anybody touches a hair on my arm even, they’ll disembowel that person and string him up like a sheep.” He turned his gray eyes on her across the space between the bucket seats. “That extends to my friends also, of course.”

  “They did a first-class job on the truck,” Marissa said. The engine was purring like a panther. Tires gripping loose sand and gravel like tracks.

  “It’s enough for them to do, right?” Jamal said. “I mean, we’ve been in tighter spots before now, my brothers and I.”

  In your country, Marissa thought. Wherever that is.

  “But here there’s law,” Jamal said, as if he’d heard what she was thinking. “It doesn’t mean you have to go to it every time. Sometimes it’s enough for it to exist. The best thing is to do nothing and watch. We’ve seen plenty of people like Marko before and mostly. . . .”

  “What?”

  “One way or another,” Jamal shrugged, “they take care of themselves.”

  “Would Marko hurt Julie?”

  Jamal uttered part of a syllable, then pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes. “Go over that way,” he said. “I think. . . .”

  Marissa turned the wheel. The line of cliffs was becoming clearer ahead. Something peculiar hulked on the open sand, like a cluster of outsize bones, and for a moment she thought there was a train roaring toward her but then there was nothing like that all. She wondered where they were going, what Jamal thought about where they were going, but she didn’t ask.

  “Jamal,” she said, and he turned his face to her, eyes hidden again behind the yellow sunglasses.

  “You don’t like to lie to me, do you?”

  “No.” Jamal faced forward. “I don’t.”

  66

  Two oblong rings revolved in her mind, one inside the other. A grindstone. Some edge being ground. She sat up sharply in the dark, a hand at her throat, located herself in Julie’s bed, and with an effort stilled her heart.

  Outside it was still, calm starlight glinting on the empty train tracks, glowing on the refurbished surfaces of her truck. She opened the door, pushed the clutch with her right foot and slipped the stick into neutral. Half in, half out of the cab, shoulder against the forward frame of the door, she pushed off with her left foot and when the truck began to roll, swung herself all the way inside.

  Like sneaking out. Marissa watched Carrie’s dark house receding in the rearview mirror, as inertia carried the truck silently through the first intersection. When momentum began to fail she started the engine, and put it in gear. The idle was enough to carry her forward. In her head the concentric rings continued to turn.

  The truck drove to The Magic Carpet, like a horse headed for the barn. Or at least it seemed that way to Marissa, although she knew she must have influenced the direction with subtle movements of her hands on the wheel. Fingertips on a Ouija board planchette.

  Her vehicle moved with a buttery smoothness. She slid by the windows of the restaurant without stopping. Jamal’s mother was there in her usual spot—yes, but so was Jamal. The glasses of tea and the oil lamp between them. She pulled the wheel and the truck slipped almost silently around the corner. Jamal’s brothers had gotten the engine running very smooth indeed. The truck was nosing its slow way around the block and Marissa wished she could know the conversation between Jamal and his mother, but she couldn’t enter it without altering it and besides, it was probably taking place in that other language she didn’t know. Or maybe it had no words in it all.

  In her head the rings grated against each other, without pain exactly, but a kind of annoyance. A fit that couldn’t quite find itself. Before she passed the restaurant again she hauled on the wheel and sent the truck down one of the streets toward the center of town, where the cruising went on. There was something more hectic about it tonight. The lights were brighter, the music louder, the hollering more desperate and insistent.

  She pulled the wheel to the right and began to circle the circle of the cruising from a block’s distance outside of it. She could only see the rotating parade of pickups and convertibles and jalopies if she turned her head to the left passing through an intersection but she could feel the movement all the time. The cruising circled inside her circle in the opposite direction, repeating that turning of the rings in her brain in a way she began to find frightening. And the music was wrong, wrong! Deep beating of a loose-skinned drum that seemed to erupt from the bottom of her brain stem, and around this column of sound the fizz of the
shaker revolved like a mushroom cloud’s halo.

  When she looked to the left a diamond-bright light almost blinded her. With her eyes closed she coasted through the intersection and let the truck drift to the roadside, cutting the motor when she felt the tires graze the curb. The moment she popped the door open, the music in her head vanished and was replaced by whatever the cruisers were listening to. She could not exactly place it, but it belonged to the present, which reassured her. But her compulsion to continue circling the inner circle had not gone away, and she continued on foot. The throb of subwoofers in the cruisers’ trunks molded her movement into an unfamiliar sort of stutter step. This sense of being shaped and controlled dismayed her too, but it felt impossible to shake free of it. When she passed her parked truck for the second time, the roar intensified, and with an effort she broke the ring of her own movement and turned toward the center of the blinding white light.

  A TV news crew was responsible for the blaze of illumination. Marissa skulked behind the cameraman, who panned the long snout of his lens back and forth between two beams of probing light. Cruisers had posted big stereo speakers in the beds of trucks or open trunks of cars . There was an improbable unison to the loud, angry music. Marissa understood that they must have all tuned to the same death metal station, something like that. Many of the people standing up screaming in truck beds or convertibles seemed to be mostly naked and had painted themselves in streaks of red and blue. One was crowned with a bison’s head, brown wooly head and black horns circling by, a bloody discharge from the eyeholes as they swept past. Marissa kept to the shadows behind the pair of spotlights. Although she thought she was not likely to be noticed, she still felt a shudder as the bison’s head rolled by. Thinking had become difficult: a slow viscous process. A surprising number of women were bare-breasted and daubed with the same dense colors, as if preparing for some savage ritual, or to set out for war. Men in brown uniforms (and without any paint) stood around the perimeter, waiting quietly in doorways of offices or shops. Highway patrolmen. They did not intervene. Maybe there was no reason that they should.