of the girl where she lay. Then the light went out. But the battery would not have died yet. The screen had shut down to conserve the battery.
She thought of turning the phone on again, and yes, a thumb must have pressed a button, for the light reappeared, and now she could see how the body lay where it had fallen, half on its back and half on its side, knees drawn up, the pale face turned sideways, eyes closed now. On the rock where the head rested there was a darkness flowing, more beyond the fan of Julie’s dark hair. Yes, surely this was Julie’s body, but she was not inside that body now.
Would the blood smell attract the bear? But the bear was an illusion, it was painted on the wall, and then there was something else painted there, or not, something she saw now or had seen, a swirl of bright specks in spirals, like a cyclone or the image of a broad-bladed, fleshy leaf that bulged and rippled in the rising wind.
The light of the screen shut down again; she turned away from it and continued along the passage, careful not to brush the wall on either side. She seemed to know where the walls were, although she couldn’t see them. The freshness and sense of movement in the air was receding behind her. Ahead of her the black atmosphere felt increasingly heavy and close, but it was important that she continue to move deeper into the cave.
11
Ascending more gradually now, the ledge wrapped around the cliff wall to the north. At a narrow place where Julie hesitated, Jamal reached back to help her along, and then they had come out into the warmth of sunlight. Jamal let go of her wrist and turned toward the lowering sun, raising one hand to shade his eyes, inside the yellow goggles. On this side of the cliff the horizontally striped stone hills were densely grouped together, with shallow, dry canyons snaking between them. The first phase of the sunset picked the landscape out in bands of turquoise and rose.
“Wow,” said Julie, “We could be on the moon.”
“Except—” Jamal pointed to the horizon. A glint of reflection from a car window as the vehicle turned a loop in a band of blacktop. It was too far away to hear the motor, and when the car turned out of sight Julie couldn’t even pick out the thread of highway any more. The whole desert valley resonated with an airy silence.
Then squeaking, like a hamster in distress, and it grew louder, but there couldn’t be a hamster in mid-air. From below the lip of the ledge where they stood the beating wings of a hawk came into view, flogging the air as it flew to perch on a crag a dozen yards away.
Julie pulled out her phone to take a picture, but felt Jamal’s warm palm, this time on her forearm.
“Don’t,” Jamal said. “Just. . . . Watch it.”
The hawk tightened its talons, and the squeaking abruptly stopped. Julie didn’t know if she wanted to watch, and she wanted to ask what the hawk had caught, but how would Jamal know better than she? It couldn’t be a hamster of course, and it was bigger than a mouse, and furry. A prairie dog. Did they have those here? She watched the hard bright 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
