Behind the Moon. Madison Smartt Bell
I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything about it. I wouldn’t have told you if you didn’t ask.”
“So it’s my fault.” Julie flared up. “Because I asked.”
“I’m sorry.” Jamal turned half toward her, put his hand on her shoulder again. The touch calmed her. “It’s not like I wanted to talk about it but it seemed better to tell you than make some big mystery about it—which is what Sonny and Marko do, and then it gets a hold on you, just because you don’t know. . . .” Jamal looked off across the peaks and canyons, turned candy colors by the light of the setting sun. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what hooked the girl in, some mysterious mojo the guy made up for her about his bears.”
“And Ultimo has this thing, this tape.”
“I don’t know what Ultimo’s got,” Jamal snapped. “Sorry. . . .” He squeezed her shoulder, let it go. “Sonny and Marko say Ultimo says if it exists somebody wants to buy it, and as long as somebody’ll buy it somebody will sell it. So maybe Ultimo sells copies of the thing, like some kind of snuff-film or whatever. . . .”
“You know him? Ultimo?” Julie felt the syllables of the name between her tongue and her teeth, with a faint illicit thrill.
“If I see him coming, I know who he is.” Jamal laughed briefly. “Then I get on the other side of the street.”
He looked again at the rodent remains smeared over the rock. “Okay, you’re right. It is like the hawk. “
“What do you mean,” Julie asked.
“Like the bears, you know, they were just being bears. It wasn’t the bears. It was the people.”
14
There was light again, but not moon or phone light. Instead it was a warm, reddish light, from a fire or torch. It played over the wall of the passage on her right side, but she couldn’t see the source of it on her left, because she didn’t look in that direction, and because she knew that in fact her eyes were closed; she was seeing what she saw in some other way.
The passage opened into a wider space. She felt that to be so from a change of the air. The warm light had vanished, and the darkness was complete. All directions disappeared, but she kept moving, without hesitation, as if there was a path she could follow, one she knew.
15
Jamal propped his elbows on the stone, leaned and let his head fall back. The mop of dark hair brushed the stone behind him. Julie studied the wedge of his Adam’s apple, thrusting up. There was a little cut just under his jawline, from shaving probably. Jamal’s beard was as heavy as Marko’s although the rest of him was not. The yellow wraparounds, and the angle of the light, made his face look stony, mask-like. He rolled forward suddenly and caught her looking.
The sun had struck into the horizon, shattering like the red yolk of an egg, spilling crimson and violet bands across a cloud bank to the west. In this intense light the colored stone layers of the sand-castle mountains were picked out with a jewel-like clarity. As the red line on the horizon compressed, it grew painfully bright, which was maybe why Jamal still wore his sunglasses, now. Behind his head was the papery moon, gathering ghostly light from the sky as the sun faded. Jamal not moved any nearer to her but she felt a pressure, not necessarily unpleasant, between his face and hers. What did he mean? How would it be to be with Jamal, behind the moon?
It was cooler, and she shivered and wondered if he’d reach for her; maybe he was wondering the same. But instead he slipped his narrow hand into his windbreaker and came out again with the black stone pipe. He packed the bowl and turned the stem toward her, one eyebrow arching.
Julie didn’t know why she should be so skittish about a little herb tonight. She wasn’t usually. Be careful—the voice that seemed to come from some distant adult, one of the tiresome kind. Didn’t Julie know very well what she was doing? They’d planned the escapade with thorough care, so that that Julie’s mom believed that she was spending the night with Karyn, and Karyn’s parents believed the reverse was true, and in case they stayed out more than one night they had a back-up plan for that as well, except there was no phone reception here, but they could ride somewhere to where there was. The idea of the tents popped into Julie’s head again, this time like a word problem in math. Julie, Jamal, Sonny, Karyn and Marko have two tents. Tent A has a volume of X and tent B has a volume of Y. If Y > X, how do the five people divide into the two tents?
If Julie liked the idea of sharing Jamal’s little cozy tent with him, then she didn’t know what she was doing so well after all, because this was the first time she’d let this interest appear to her so openly. It wouldn’t be so cozy anyway, now that the tent was half full of rocks to weight it down. Julie knew Karyn was doing it with Sonny and had been for months (Karyn, without exactly ever talking about it, had let her know in a dozen little ways . . . ) but that tent solution didn’t solve Marko’s position. So she and Karyn might share the smaller tent, lumpy with rocks as it would be, but this seemed like a solution to offer the parents if they’d dared tell the parents they were going off to camp in the desert with the boys; it couldn’t be the real solution. Besides, the idea of Jamal in a tent with Sonny and Marko seemed weird and wrong, like putting two different species of animal in the same cage.
These thoughts ran through her in a rapid blur, in the time it took to wave away the pipe. Jamal snapped his lighter over the bowl, drew the flame down, held it. With his exhale, which was nearly smokeless, he said, “You sure?”
Julie shook her head again. “Your weed’s too trippy.”
Jamal took his wraparounds off and looked at her a little strangely. It wasn’t the look that would lead him to say something like the Jule in the lotus. It was more like he was inspecting around the edges of her eyes. He looked like he was going to say something but he didn’t.
“What,” Julie said. “What?”
“Nothing.” Jamal put his glasses back on, looked down at the stone space inside his crossed ankles. The stitching on his left boot strap had come loose on the inside. “You didn’t drink any of that pink stuff, did you?”
“What, Sonny’s bottle? No, I brought water.” A shock of understanding struck her, like a slap. “Wait a minute, are they trying to dose us?”
Jamal raised his head, but not all the way. He said, “It’s just molly.”
“Just molly!” Julie had jumped to her feet. An unpleasant giddiness swarmed in her head.
Jamal got up and reached one hand toward her; Julie backed away from it. The vermilion sunset band had burned itself out below the horizon, and what light remained was turning dove-gray.
“Karyn’s okay with it,” Jamal said, unhappily. “She’s done it before.”
Karyn’s okay with it. Julie could feel the words in her mouth, as if she’d spit them back at him, sharp and incredulous. But a new kind of problem, with a few different variables, was beginning to shape itself in her mind. She said nothing, only whirled away, rushing back around the ledges the way she had come, aware of Jamal scrambling along behind her, calling to her not to run like that she could fall—
16
Julie kicked Jamal’s sack of cans out of her way as she tore past it. Kicked it into Jamal’s way possibly, for Jamal was coming along behind her, calling to her, but in a strangled whisper, to stop. To talk to him. And she knew that certainly Jamal could have overtaken her on the ledges if he’d wanted to, that he’d decided to try persuasion instead, even when persuasion wasn’t working.
On the eastern side of the cliffs it was quite dark now, the last stains of sunset blocked by the mountain, the wispy moon too frail to throw much light. Behind her she heard Jamal, catching his foot in the bag of old cans,