Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 10

In the yellowish gleam of her mind’s eye she saw herself among them, five of them on three motorcycles raising red dust as they came across the desert floor toward the rock shelters. She would have liked to ride with Jamal but he had the smallest, lightest bike—hardly more than a scooter really, and Marko had urged her up behind him, while Karyn and Sonny rode together, and Marko roared out in the lead. Julie sat with her legs uneasily forked around the squat muscles of Marko’s back, and now and then he looked over his shoulder at her in a greedy way she didn’t like, but she liked the rush of air in her face and the way her long black hair streamed in the wind, from under the band of the turned-around ball-cap she was wearing—none of them had helmets.

To savor the speed she closed her eyes. A picture appeared: a tousle-headed little girl in a calico dress, riding behind her father on a bicycle, reaching out for something—rambler roses twined through pickets of a fence the bicycle passed; in this daydream it was springtime. The little girl could never quite get her fingers to touch a rose, but whenever she reached, the rear wheel of the bicycle wobbled, and the father, unaware of the cause, bent more sternly into his pedaling.

“Don’t do that.” Marko’s voice, cutting through the snarl of the engine. “You’ll dump us.”

Julie started out of her reverie. Had she, herself, reached out her hand? There was nothing nearby. They were crossing a long wide flat of the desert and the nearest hillocks of painted sand looked halfway to the horizon.

Sonny pulled level with them, the drone of his engine beating with Marko’s. Karyn’s face smooshed out against his leather back, her mouth a little open, moist, like a sleeping mouth that breathed against a pillow. Sonny shrugged his near shoulder, rolled the throttle with a faint smile. He pulled ahead, and Marko tilted in to the right of his tailpipe. In the roar of the bigger engines Julie couldn’t catch any hint of Jamal’s smaller one. She tried to look back to see where he was, but she couldn’t turn her head far enough without unbalancing the ride.

Now they were coming into the long shadow of the cliffs where the rock shelters were. Marko swung the heavy bike in a long curve that brought them out into the sunlight again, beside a boulder, where Sonny had stopped. He put his heel down and cut the motor. In the quick shock of silence Julie thought she heard the cry of a hawk overhead and she looked up, blinking into the sun, which was still high. There would be several hours of daylight yet, and she thought it must be three, or three-thirty—buzzers would be ringing to let her out of school, if she hadn’t skipped.

Karyn, who might have been thinking a similar thought, gave her a complicit smile as she swung her leg clear of the saddle of Sonny’s bike. Hastily, Julie scrambled down herself. Her legs felt rubbery from the long, shuddering ride. She took a few backward steps away from the others and turned to look in the direction they’d come from. With a distant, crickety sound, Jamal’s smaller bike persisted toward them, leading a plume of the reddish dust. His hair in a cloud around the triangle of his face. Sunlight winked from a yellow lens of his wraparounds.

“Rice-burner,” Sonny said, and turned to spit Skoal Bandit juice in the sand.

Marko winked at Sonny, then pulled the bandanna from his head and used it to wipe grit from his face. “That’s a spaghetti-burner, dude,” he said and grinned aslant at Julie, pushing back the inky waves of his hair. “He’ll get here some day, won’t he?” Marko said. White teeth.