Behind the Moon. Madison Smartt Bell
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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, stopping to free himself and throttling a curse. The reddish desert across which they’d biked in the afternoon was now diffused in a pale, internal glow. Against it Jamal’s little tent sat dully, or no, it 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