Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Football. People sometimes behaved this way in celebration of football. Didn’t they? But it wasn’t football season. Was it? Marissa’s knowledge of the world she lived in had somehow become unavailable, and for this reason she felt temporarily reassured to recognize the woman who stepped into the halo of light in front of the camera. That KELO TV reporter, who looked less conventionally attractive in real life—her features larger, horsier. Also, she was distinctly too tall. The wide belt of her tight-waisted suit exaggerated her figure in a cartoonish way. The TV box must flatten her somehow, and make her smaller. Janice Something . . . who did the daily countdown for the cave girl. Moved by a pulse of indignation, Marissa stepped forward, but kept herself half hidden behind the cameraman’s back.

  Janice Something smiled inquiringly at the camera, tilting her head to listen to a spidery voice in her invisible earphone. She touched her tongue to her glossy lip, raised the microphone with its KELO logo as if for a toast, and began to speak. Marissa could hear nothing. The scrum behind the reporter and the roar of unintelligible death metal drowned her out, as effectively as a mute button, and Marissa saw only the automatic set of beauty pageant gestures working silently as the reporter shaped and reshaped her mouth around inaudible words, always smiling, never letting her bottom teeth show.

  Painted men wearing animal masks were pressing in around the camera crew now. The masks were synthetic, unlike the bison head that had passed before. Boar’s head, bull’s head, trout-mask replica. A chant had begun. The chant was intelligible. Janice Rivington’s composure began to crack; the flow of her facial gestures was disintegrating.

  Janice! Janice! Show us your tits!

  Her eyes went white, like the eyes of a frightened horse. A heavy hand appeared on the padded shoulder of her suit, jerking her sideways in the frame, and more hands tore at her lapels. Buttons rattled loose from her blouse and there was a flash of peachy skin. The cameraman lurched backward, and his heavy equipment pack almost knocked Marissa off her feet, but someone caught her before she had quite fallen. The intersection had swirled into battle, and she couldn’t retreat the way she had come. Brown shirts were lashing the painted men with black truncheons, cursing, dropping to bind their wrists with plastic ties. A crunch as someone swung a bludgeon at the camera lens. The highway patrol was swinging two-foot-long flashlights. Marissa caught a glimpse of the reporter on her knees, being helped up by a couple of patrolmen, tossing her hair back from her wide, shocked face, clasping her torn clothes together with a hand whose knuckles were bloody from a scrape against the asphalt.

  The grip on Marissa’s upper arm was friendly but firm; it steered her out of the mêlée and up around the perimeter of the square. Jamal, wearing those yellow beetle sunglasses even at night . . . but it was still bright enough, even though the camera lights had gone dark. Bullhorns were crying for the people to disperse, but there was no enforcement since almost all the deputies were still subduing the group who’d attacked the reporter, whose entourage was nowhere to be seen. The cruising circle continued unabated, cars flashing dome lights and headlights and people standing up in them waving neon-colored glow sticks. The parallel circling in Marissa’s head had reached the velocity of a spin. She felt her knees buckling but Jamal’s other hand spread long thin fingers across her back to hold her up. He guided her into the shelter of a doorway, where she could stand supported by the frame on either side and look back at what kept happening across Jamal’s shoulder.

  How had he gotten there, anyway? Attracted by the noise, the shouting, steered by his intuition—who knew, but she felt more secure with his slight body between her and the street, though the vortex in her head had not abated, and she sensed there was more to come. It was coming now: a pickup truck, a monstrous black Dodge Ram, bearing down on them. Marissa saw the winking silver horns on the front of the grille. Driver invisible behind a tinted windshield. Sound stopped, somehow—like a signal failure, or water in Marissa’s ears. The truck turned and brought its cargo alongside them: a naked girl standing transfigured like a warrior queen or a human sacrifice, body streaked with paint and her face with blood . . . from the buffalo head she dangled by a horn in one hand. In the other she whipped a handful of flexible glow sticks like a cluster of phosphorescent snakes and her head was thrown back so her bare breasts lifted and her throat swelled in a cry of silent ecstasy. She passed so near that her eyes met Marissa’s, though seeing what, who could possibly know? The irises were completely erased, leaving luminescent orbs of black.

  Automatically, Marissa tracked her as the truck rolled by, her chin turning over Jamal’s shoulder, concentric circles still revolving in her brain. At the end of the block an enormous figure loomed up from the Humvee parked there with two wheels popped up on the sidewalk; its huge hands snatched the girl bodily out of truck bed, rotating her overhead like a trophy, her arms flailing, legs kicking. Sound snapped back on and Marissa heard the air torn by her screams and the snarling of outraged men—Ultimo rolled the girl in a striped blanket that covered her and also seemed to serve as a straitjacket while the men who had been with her in the truck and others converging from the crowd surged up to reclaim her. Ultimo stopped one of them with a fist, which he seemed to simply hold out in front of him so that the painted man ran his face into it and then fell down—Ultimo also appeared to have two dogs lunging up to the limit of the silver chains he held in his other fist, jaws snapping in the faces of the painted men, who fell back. They were not especially big dogs but their conviction was chilling. The one with a sort of brindled jaguar pattern all over its tightly rippling muscle frightened Marissa more than the other. Still, she made an involuntary motion to go toward the girl as Ultimo pushed her down in the back of the Humvee, but Jamal was already pulling her in the opposite direction—Come on, he said, we’ve got to go.

  67

  Out of the horn-point colors a bear had appeared on the wall of the cave. The bear totem etched in the wall behind the mother was washed in cool moonlight and warmed by the glow of the last coals. The bear stood upright, like a Person, spreading like fingers her curving black claws. She had wanted to stand up like a bear on hind legs and wrest that girl back from her captor. But instead in a dream she shuffled round a post on a chain, and batted down the dogs that leaped at her, jaws wide and white teeth gleaming.

  The fire-bringer must come hurrying to the glade where Mammut had been discovered in Hawk’s eye. Mammut was too vast, he could not be brought back in all his body and bone to the place by the cliff, where his spirit self stayed. But the hunters rolled him up from the bog where he had fallen, where the swamp water was thick and black with his blood. They broke spear shafts and sank into the mud slop. A Person went under right up to his chin, so others had to haul him out by his earlobes. At that, much laughter and shrill whistling.

  In the glade fire-bringer spun sticks in soft wood till the first sparks were born and then blown into curls of dry tinder, into which they added tufts of Mammut’s red-brown hair, acridly burning, while others raised drying scaffolds quickly cut from green wood. The women climbed all over the great body of Mammut’s flesh, singing their praise song as they skinned and butchered. Some of the men had begun stretching new skins on old drums, with reddish brown hair still attached here and there, and still damp on the skin side; men stretched and tempered the drums but it was the women who would beat them. Already the mother who was fire-bringer too was rolling a slow tempo on a new drum, which in its new elastic hairiness resembled one of the mighty legs of Mammut and shook the earth as Mammut had when he walked in the glade. Presently four such drums were rolling, with the high, dry rattle of a shaker behind, around and above them.

  The People brought raw skin bags of heart’s blood still warm and salty from Mammut’s fading heat, the same blood that had dried on their arms and the killing spear. They brought succulent slivers of liver as if they were offerings, and she fed the rawest bits to the hawk that rode the sleeve on her forearm, and accepted the bits cooked
pink for herself. Then there was meat, infinity of roast meat—seized with both hands by the hunters or fed to the drummers on skewers of wood, and the People ate till they were beyond bursting and there was nothing to do but rise up and dance while the drums made the thunder of all four legs of Mammut and the skirl of whistling, the many notes braiding and beating together, into something like the sound of Mammut’s trumpet.

  A hunter came crouching and stomping with a robe and a mask of Mammut’s hide and a thick twist of vine as his trunk. He pranced and stooped and turned and bellowed, and the hunters charged him and retreated, and then they all fell in step behind him as he began to circle the carcass and the fire, where Mammut was being cooked from the inside out. His rib cage had become his oven and before the fire the mother-drummers beat the rhythm, and she fell into the stuttering step of the dancing hunters as if somehow she had always known it. The yellow moon shone down on them above the glade, and everything seemed to be following the path of the moon.

  Hawk had moved to her shoulder now, watching. The yellow eye looked through her as she looked through the eye.

  The dancing hunter’s eye. The Mammut guise was the image of the manbeast that dwelt in the cave, dancing to coax Mammut and all his avatars to follow, to arise and emerge from the crack in the stone surface of the world and walk among the People.

  As the sound of the drums faded she could see drumbeats instead, geometric pinwheels and feather shapes eating into her ordinary sight

  Less and less did she see the other dancers

  but the

  drums were stronger, much much longer

  she was dancing into a trench

  round the fire and carcass and the circular track beat drumming by the dancers

  digging itself deeper into the ground.

  Bear, standing on her hind paws and looking into the circle with not astonishment, but wonder—the old understanding of Bear.

  The drums stronger

  the masked hunter gone, inside the burning cave of

  Mammut’s ribs

  new hunter leading the circle dance weaved and thrust with

  points of the antlers sprouting from his head

  whir of the shaker like a rattlesnake’s tail

  Mammut rising. A line of women carried coals out of the rib oven to add to the glowing bed of coals beneath the drying rack, where strips of flayed meat dripped and sizzled. Hawk was gone from her shoulder and Bear was gone, but in the cave the painter’s hands came loose from the stone where they were embedded. The hands spread color over the stone to shape what happened

  make what happen happen make what

  now her hands had the hairy backs and the thick black pads of Bear though she still had the dexterity of her fingers—she was dancing on one leg, as if she were no longer moving, though somehow she continued to circle around the deepening trench the dancers’ feet, her own, had carved.

  When she left her body, left the circle, she went into the ribbed chamber of fire and caught up coals in big bright handfuls and threw them up beyond the treetops into the sky where they became the stars. The yellow moon had vanished now, as if eclipsed by the same dark veil that was sliding slowly over the stars. She heard the drums changing, and the voices changed, and her nostrils caught the scent of rain.

  68

  What hulked in the sand was a hammered, battle-scarred military vehicle, low and broad and heeled down on the driver’s side, as if it was bowing, awkwardly, before the cliff where the ancient half-hidden pictographs and the new tagging were.

  “Holy—” Jamal said, “I wonder. . . .”

  Marissa stuck the brake, harder than she meant. Her truck slewed sideways and stalled out.

  She thought she saw movement up on the ledges. KAOS.

  Something coming out of the cave. But really it was coming around the edge of the heeled-down Humvee. A . . . a man. It took more than a moment for Marissa to say man to herself about what she saw. Heavyset, dark-skinned and bare to the waist. Indeed he was naked save for a breech-clout. The heavy arms and chest covered with ritual markings, scars, a welt of a brand raised from the skin. He was moving toward them at first, then curving away, as if he had not seen them, did not care. A big man, but not as tall as he should have been. He moved like he was cut off at the knees.

  Jamal, staring through the windshield, exhaled with a faint whistling sound. He reached across and pulled the key from the ignition and pressed it into Marissa’s palm.

  “Come on,” he said, and got out of the truck, pressing the door not quite closed behind him, not making the least further sound. Marissa got out and pushed the key over her hip bone down into the pocket of her jeans. Jamal was moving, quiet as a spider, toward the Humvee and the grooved

  track around it. The bare-skinned man was now concealed behind it, she supposed. Unless he had somehow gone away, but that was hardly possible. The notion of his reappearance filled her with a fascinated dread.

  “Tires are cut,” Jamal said. Marissa saw now that the Humvee’s odd kneeling posture was accounted for by flattened front tires. She looked around; there was nothing, nobody. A cloud above the cliff face was rimmed with the fiery light of the declining sun.

  “Who’d do that?”

  “He did,” Jamal said. “I think. . . .”

  “But why?”

  “It—” Jamal appeared to be thinking hard. That whistling sound still came with his exhalations, or maybe it wasn’t coming from him after all.

  “It makes it so—”

  “What. What?”

  “No way out. Or one way out, just one.”

  The dancer rounded the bumper of the Humvee, petrifying Marissa in her tracks. She recognized that stutter-step, from powwows she’d attended in her teens, was that it? And each step rattled like a snake.

  Those markings were jail tattoos mostly. A crowned skull. A spade-shaped dagger. A flaming circle with something inscribed. A pistol grip tattooed into the waistband. Some, wrapping the arms, looked tribal. What she’d taken for a loincloth was a pair of denim cut-offs. She didn’t know what to make of the brand, which was just a waffle pattern, broad strips of burn crisscrossed on the left pectoral. Her teeth hurt when she looked at it.

  Some sort of script growing out of the eyebrows. Naked eyes which seemed to see nothing, or at any rate nothing of Marissa or Jamal. The whistling sound was more like singing and now she really couldn’t tell where it came from. Were the blind eyes bleeding? She could not face them, dropping her gaze as the eyes stroked across her. The bare feet were bleeding, from dancing a trench in the sand. Ultimo passed. The stiff graying braid tied up in a leather thong jounced with the rhythm of his step, and the rattlesnake sound came, she thought, from the strings of cowries and dull brass bells that were wrapped around the thick swell of his calves. Or did it?

  The ululation, that whistling sound, seemed to come from everywhere. Nowhere. Jamal’s breathing, Ultimo’s cracked and bloody lips, the slit opening into the cave on the cliff above. A drum sound, too. A loose skin drum beating from inside the hulk of the downed Humvee, as if the Humvee had a heartbeat. A pierced heart. Claude told her once he had suffered from auditory hallucinations, voices calling his name, or pronouncing nonsensical fragments of scripture. It used to frighten him, till he learned the experience was not uncommon. Twenty percent of all humanity experience such phenomena occasionally, to some degree.

  You want to be where she is. To move the feelings more with the will.

  “Jesus,” Jamal breathed. “He must have been out here all day.”

  For a moment Marissa was grounded by his voice. She had not spoken to Jamal about what happened the night the cruising had gone crazy. Cruising had since been permanently outlawed, with the local police and the highway patrol augmented by a unit of National Guardsmen to enforce the decree. News and gossip were full of chatter about barbarians, degenerates, primitives. A few, certainly a minority, muttered about police states and black helicopters. Marissa wondered about Jamal’s vie
w of the matter, but she had said nothing about it to him, and certainly she had said nothing to him about her dream—if it had been a dream, which seemed less and less certain. Especially now.

  Ultimo rounded the bumper of the Humvee and the stuttering clash of his leg rattles increased; she heard Jamal’s breath suck in as the vatic eyes raked over them, unaware.

  Ultimo was now bleeding from the nose, and heavily, like an animal shot in the heart. Blood ran in and out of his mouth with his panting breath and the keening song he seemed be singing, or that the air around him sang.

  Marissa’s knees buckled as he passed and Jamal caught her around the shoulders, bearing her up. Her head rocked back across his forearm. Behind her closed eyes she saw the shaman advancing with his shaker, stepping out of a cage of bones, telling her with his mind I am here to deliver you your dreams.

  Her eyes rolled open, or she thought they did. The cloud above the cliff was bulging. It could never pass, could not release the sun. The sun was too big. She saw emerging from the cave slit a mastodon, an enormous bear, bison and elk and a horned, dancing biped. The boom of the drum had grown deafeningly loud. The shaker’s whir whipped her brain like a blender.

  “Bats!” Jamal, said, hugging her to him, maybe just to look at his watch, on the wrist he had flung over her shoulder to stop her fall. Had she cried out? From the tone of his voice she knew she had frightened him, but he continued to speak calmly enough, the calm just slightly forced.

  “They come out every night the same time. The bats. Or not exactly the same time. It changes every night by like a minute. Call the forestry people and they’ll tell you. I think they even have it on their website.”

  Again his voice grounded her. But now Ultimo had rounded the curve and was stuttering his way toward them again. Blood bubbling in and out of mouth and nostrils, like sucking chest wounds Marissa had seen. She called up some nurse-thinking it’s only a nosebleed, not as bad as it looks