Behind the Moon. Madison Smartt Bell
had the faintest surface sheen, gathered from the light of the silver stars beginning to appear. The larger tent had a light within it, concentrated and surprisingly bright; like a will-of-the-wisp caught between the fabric walls, it kept moving along the inner surfaces, casting dark, large, eerie shadows, but Julie couldn’t make out what they signified. It seemed to her she could hear the whole tent purring like a large contented animal, but maybe that was the effect of Jamal’s pipe.
She dropped to the level sand and walked toward the big tent softly. Jamal was hissing from the edge of the cliff, beckoning her to come back to him, but he seemed to want not to make too much noise, maybe because of whatever was going on in the tent, and so Julie herself was careful to be quiet, setting each of her red high-tops down like a cat’s paw on the sand. Something tingling, a soft expansion in her throat (if it was fear or excitement she didn’t really know) was making it slightly hard for her to breathe. The same sensation prickled below her navel. How were you supposed to knock on a tent, anyway? She could hear Jamal now, padding up behind her over the cooling sand, not wanting to call to her because—
So she wouldn’t call to the people inside. She caught hold of a big black zipper at the top of the curving tent door.
17
In the darkness there was a sound of drumming, warm broad hands slapping loose skins (skin maybe still growing on some animal’s hollow flank, not yet stretched over the dug-out wooden round of a drum). With the drumming the light returned, warm like torchlight, though there were no torches nor torchbearers to be seen, as if the hands that drummed were fanning flames. Like a river of pulsing fire away and down to her left, illuminating the gallery wall to the right of her and above . . . and the gallery was big, enormously hollow, like the halls of cathedrals in other countries maybe, that she might have seen in photos, on TV.
On the right wall and spreading up onto the ceiling above were bison, such a stampede of bison as she had never seen (even if she was really only seeing them projected on the lids of her closed eyes), magnificent in umber and ocher, humping their weighty shoulders out of the natural curve of the rock, bigger too, it seemed to her, than the ordinary buffalo still to be found here and about on the ranches or even ground up and packaged in the meat counters of the groceries around where Julie lived her daylight life. Among them too were antlers, not deer, she thought, but elk. And they looked at her in the same way as the bear had done before (where had the bear gone, then?). The eye of each animal person was upon her, like it knew her. Even though there were so many of them in this procession, which seemed at times perfectly orderly, as if every animal knew and followed the same purpose, and at other times seemed completely anarchic, as though all of them were caught up in a flood.
As the light faded, the panorama fractured into the pattern of brightly branching dots she’d seen before, though now and then from the vortex she could still pick out a horn, an antler or a clear bright eye. She moved beside the stream, her bare heels (what had happened to her shoes?) sinking into heel prints made by others long ago in what had once been clay. She was hurrying, before the light failed entirely, toward another narrow opening at the lower end of this great hall, into which the animal persons also seemed to swirl, and she felt somehow certain that on the other side of the slit portal there would be a human being, its head sprouted with horns.
18
Jamal took his wraparounds off and looked at her a little strangely, like he was inspecting around the edges of her eyes. His own gray eyes looked knowing, and a little hard. He seemed 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. With one hand he fidgeted with the brass ring on his left boot strap, where the stitching had come loose on the inside. “How much did you drink out of Sonny’s bottle?”
“What, that vitamin water?” Julie shrugged. “Just a taste. I was thinking it might be spiked but it wasn’t.”
“Not with—oh. . . .” Jamal ripped the ring completely free of the loosened strap and twirled it around his finger. The brusque destructiveness wasn’t like him, and that upset Julie more at first than whatever it was he wasn’t telling. That peculiar warmth and softness in her belly when they’d chased and captured the tent was still there, or it had always been there and she was now again aware of it. And with it a sort of crenellation around the edges of her vision. When she turned her head to stare at Jamal, the early stars drew lingering pale lines, like jet-trails, across the darkening sky.
“Did they dose us?” Julie heard her voice go all cracked and screechy—maybe this too was the effect of a drug, if it wasn’t suspicion making her feel it. She was on her feet with her white hands balled into fists on her hips. “Jamal—what was in that bottle?”
“I don’t . . . don’t know anything for sure.” Jamal had also gotten to his feet, fidgeting with his sunglasses and the brass ring torn from his boot, but somehow he wouldn’t look at her with his bare eyes.
“What do you think, then? God damn it!” Julie felt some of her mother’s bitchiness coming out of her mouth, didn’t care.
“Molly, maybe.” Jamal looked away toward the horizon, where the last red line of sunset was like a razor cut. “I don’t know anything really, Julie—they might’ve candy-flipped it.”
“Candy—Jamal, talk English.”
“They’ll cut it sometimes, you know, with acid. . . .” Jamal looked at her straight on now; the subject had gone abstract for him and so now he could explain it. For a second she thought she saw a little snail-shaped op-art graphic vibrating on the side of his face that was in shadow. “Or really the idea is to cut the acid with some X—less chance of a bad trip that way, they say.”
“Who the hell is they?” Julie shouted at him. “Some stoner committee advisory board? Or is it just Sonny and Marko? Marko!” Her voice had climbed at the end, as if she was calling Marko, but that was something she definitely did not want to do . . . and Jamal seemed to have the same thought. He took a step toward her, one hand outstretched, as if that would calm her—Jamal’s long-fingered, slender, rather beautiful hand, delicate and assured as the hand of a musician (though she’d never seen Jamal play any instrument), and it seemed almost a golden color against the rock floor below, which was taking on a milky bluish tinge as the light continued to fade.
“I’ll stay with you,” Jamal said, in that soothing voice—she remembered Jamal was good with animals. Once when they were walking a dry creek bed in town a big stray dog had approached them, growling, hackles up, but Jamal had been cool then, calmed the dog, eluded it, sent it on a different way from them.
“You didn’t take much, whatever it is,” Jamal was saying. “I’ll walk you through it, it’ll be okay. There’s no reason to think it’ll go bad on you anyway. And I’ll be here if—”
“Karyn.” Julie snapped, feeling droplets flying wild from her lips with the name—she was getting that far out of control. “We just leave her there to drink the whole dose then, and be with those two Neanderthals—”
Jamal’s hand swirled down to his waistband, like a falling leaf. He’d tucked his wraparounds in the collar of his shirt; the ring from his boot hung from the index of finger his other hand.
“Karyn’s okay with it.” He hesitated. “It’s not her first time.”
There was something hidden behind the words, inside them. For a moment Julie seemed to see his head break open like the hollow moon’s cracked crystal, and there inside was the hidden thing, purling like a feather of dark smoke. Jamal was blocking her way back to the tents and the others, perhaps just by chance, but she dodged past him before he could react and began to run over the ledges. She could hear him skittering along behind her, calling out, but in a hoarse stage-whisper—Julie, come on, don’t run like that! You’re gonna fall and break your neck—