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 and you can hear the bears—”
Julie’s stomach shrunk to a cold wavy kernel. “You’ve heard this?”
“Hell no, and 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
