Behind the Moon. Madison Smartt Bell
eye of the hawk as the curved beak dipped, cut and penetrated, then raised a quivering strip of bleeding meat. There was something dreadful about it and yet—
“They’re not cruel,” Jamal said, as if he’d read the half-formed notion from her mind. “They’re just not on our program.”
12
“You ever think how you can’t throw anything away? I mean, you can throw it.” Jamal shook his head. “But it doesn’t go away.”
Still carrying the bag of litter by its closed throat, Jamal walked toward the rock shelter wall. With a faint clatter of beer cans he set the bag down and raised a crooked forefinger as he scanned the painted tags from left to right.
“Freakin’ wiggers,” he said. Julie didn’t quite know what he meant by that. Jamal was scanning left to right; then his head stopped moving.
“What?” Julie asked.
“Yeah,” Jamal said. “Come here. You can only see him at just the right angle—depends on the light.”
Julie put her head near his and then she saw it, an image shallowly etched in the stone, just to the left of the dark opening that led who knows where. A round, shapeless body like a small child might draw, stick legs running, an antlered head. If not for the head, the petroglyph reminded her of paramecia she had watched through a microscope in ninth-grade biology class. Jamal had been one of her lab partners then, and they had taken turns lowering their heads to the black ring of the microscope’s upper lens.
“Who did this?” she said.
“Brulé.” Jamal’s voice went guttural as he said it.
“What’s that mean?”
“Burnt Indian,” Jamal said. “No, but they didn’t do it.
I’m just blowing smoke. These things are way older than those guys.”
Julie felt her bare arms stippling up in goose flesh. It was cool here in the shadow of the rock shelter, and a current of colder air seemed to come out of the slit in the stone wall. Jamal crouched over his heels, a finger tracing.
“There’s more down here, I think. There were. But you can’t see much of them now, under the tags.”
“That’s awful,” Julie said.
Jamal squinted up at her. “What?” She saw his gray eyes floating in the yellow bubbles of his lenses.
Julie shrugged. “Kids tagging all over . . . something like that.”
“Yeah . . . I don’t know.” Jamal straightened and took a backward step, still looking at the wall. “Something else’ll come along and cover all this up too, don’t you think?”
Julie looked down, to her knee level. On the stone was spray-painted the letters KAOS, in the lurid red and purple colors of a bruise. A tag for a gang Marko and Sonny had belonged to in high school, it was probably four or five years old. There was indeed something under it too, the pattern Jamal’s fingertip had followed. Her eye could not make out what it was. Jamal caught her right hand with his left, pulling out her forefinger as if it were a pencil. As he guided her finger over the stone she felt that she was beginning to read the image, but the glimmer of understanding spooked her for some reason. She giggled to disguise the feeling, pulled her hand away from Jamal and took a long step back from the wall.
A butterfly lit on the peak of the A in KAOS. Its wings stirred the air, an iridescent, heavenly blue. Julie shivered as the butterfly flew.
“Hey, you’re getting too cold,” Jamal said. He threw an arm over her shoulder, bumping her clumsily into his ribs. “Come on, let’s go find the sun.”
13
The hawk finished eating, shrugged its feathers into a ruff around its neck. Its head pushed back and it shrieked once before it flew. The sharp, harsh sound thrust out of the open beak like a blade. It seemed to linger once the hawk had flown, its cross-shaped shadow briefly stroking over the turning of the canyon below the ledge. Julie shuddered.
“It bother you?”
She turned to find Jamal’s face nearer to hers than she had expected, his own nose a bit hawkish really, but he had taken off his wraparounds and his pale gray eyes looked warm.
“I don’t know,” Julie said, not knowing if she wanted him to come nearer; if he did come nearer their faces would touch. At the base of her neck she felt the faint warmth of the setting sun. To the left of Jamal’s curly head was the frail lace round of the daylight moon. Julie turned away, toward where the—whatever it had been when the hawk had caught it wasn’t much of anything now. A pattern of bones hanging loose in the remains of sinew, a stain of red fluid spread over the stone.
“Have you heard the bear tape?” Julie’s back was still to Jamal.
“What? —what are you talking about?”
Julie looked at him now. She had made him uncomfortable. “Don’t you know?”
“That’s no reason why you should.” Jamal had put the yellow wraparounds back on. “What’s making you think about it, anyway?”
“That, I guess,” Julie tossed her head, a little sulkily, at what the hawk had left. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, then.”
“Don’t be like that—” Jamal cut himself off. He leaned on his elbows, let his head drop back, till his longish dark curls grazed the stone they were sitting on. The white-dusty moon and the reddening sun were at opposite ends of the sky, with the space between them curved like a rainbow.
Jamal sat up and shook his head, as if to dissipate the sourness of their last exchange. “I’ll tell you if you want to know,” he said. “I guess it’s even dumber not to.”
“It’s just—”
Jamal took off his glasses, and looked at her again with that warmth.
“Karyn talks about it?”
“Karyn?”
She could see the widening whites of Jamal’s eyes. “I mean she talks about Sonny and Marko talking about it.”
“Right,” said Jamal. “I guess that figures.” He looked away, up toward the moon, then quickly back at her.
“Well so there was this guy, you might have heard, who got a notion he could live with grizzly bears. A long way from here, off on the edge of the world, I guess. Somewhere you needed a ski-plane to get there. A nut-job, this guy, if I have to say it. Anyway he kept going up to wherever it was to hang with the bears, whatever, and he would shoot video of all this. Him and his bear buddies. And he talked this girl, a girlfriend, I guess, into going up there with him for a couple of weeks. . . .”
Jamal dropped his head between his knees. “That’s the part I really don’t get . . . why the girl played into this. She was good-looking, and she seemed plenty smart, so why she’d go off in the boonies with this loser lunatic—”
“You’ve seen this?”
Jamal picked up his head and looked at Julie. “You can rent it if you want. Some director got hold of the nut-job’s video and turned it into a docu-drama. But the part you’re talking about’s not in that. . . .”
“The part I’m—”
Jamal began to hurry the story, words rattling together like cars on a speeding train. “It went wrong one day with the bears, it seems, and—the bears ate them. Both of them. All gone. Then a few days later a plane came in to take them out and all they found was bones. And the camera. That’s the part you heard about. There’s no picture I guess, or not much picture, because the nut-job dropped the camera and it’s just getting pawed around in the weeds, but you can hear them. You can hear them screaming