Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 14

“Rice-burner.” Sonny smirked, turned his head sideways to spit Skoal Bandit juice in the sand.

Jamal straightened from the tent he was assembling, rested his light knuckles on the black waistband of his jeans. “You dissing my machine, yo?”

“No, man,” Sonny said. “I wouldn’t do that.” He turned to offer Julie the garnet-colored bottle. “Here you go, girl. Cut the dust.”

Jamal stooped over the parts of his tent. Karyn was mugging for Marko’s camera, striking a series of runway poses—chin up, wrist cocked to the ear, giggling into it, ooh la la. A slight heaviness in her movement made Julie wonder if Karyn might have had a shot or so before they started. Not that she’d mind a buzz herself, but then she wasn’t a complete idiot: dehydration was an issue out here, and Julie had one liter of water for herself. She didn’t quite know what the others had brought.

Marko ducked and weaved like a paparazzo, pursuing Karen with the camera’s metallic eye, as Julie took a small sip from the red glowing bottle. There was no bite of vodka or gin. Just vitamin water, something like that—but a sicklier sweet than usual. She took a larger swallow and handed the bottle back to Sonny. Karyn was play-fighting Marko for the camera, gimme gimme lemme see, and Marko held it high over her head, making her stretch for it. Her T-shirt hem rode high and the gold of her navel-stud winked in the sun.

“Damn, don’t break it,” Marko said. He let her have the camera. Karyn gathered it toward her cleavage, wiping her dirty-blond hair from her face as she peered into the camera’s bright screen. Her chipped black fingernails clicked on the camera’s tiny buttons. “Look it, Julie,” Karyn said. “You can practically zoom right down your own throat.”

“Gross,” Julie said, absently; she was admiring the tent, which Jamal had just finished assembling: a silver-gray hemisphere sealed into the sand. Something in the shape of it appealed to her. Something about the way her image of it trembled around the edges. Sonny cracked a beer and gave it to her—where had he found that? The foam was acrid in her mouth, connecting with a bitter aftertaste from the vitamin water she’d had a few minutes before. She took a larger gulp to wash it out.

Two slightly sweating, soft vinyl coolers had appeared beside the pair of Harleys. Sonny pulled out two more beers and dragged the coolers into the shade.

“Don’t be dumping that ice,” Marko said.

“Huh,” said Sonny, “I ain’t drinking it, not out of there.”

“We can cook with it,” Marko said. “We got a pack of freeze-dried stuff.”

“Are we Boy Scouts or what?” Sonny said, and Karyn laughed, elbowed him, let her blond head roll back against the warm stone of the boulder.

Jamal fired up his little stone pipe and sent it round among the others. Julie took the weakest possible hit, then left the circle before the bowl could come to her again. She didn’t want to get too high too early. Maybe at night, when the stars came out, when sleep would be soon to come. The business of the tents would all be sorted out by then, but she didn’t want to think about it now. There was a voice in her head that said be careful, and she especially didn’t want voices to start splitting off and talking to her from somewhere else.

The shadow cast by the cliff wall had grown to about six feet long, and Julie walked into it, feeling perhaps she might disappear. She sat down cross-legged in a niche of the vertically channeled stone. From here the orb of the tent seemed like an object of contemplation, like some meteorite that had embedded itself in the desert floor, and she imagined the other half of the sphere it described, twinning with it beneath the sand. There was a kind of aura around it. The stone behind her was still radiating warmth, like the walls of an oven, from the sun that had been shining on it for most of the day.

Trippy weed Jamal had—she reminded herself to go slow with that, lifting her arms and setting her palms together in a mudra above her head. As her palms touched she felt a spreading warmth below her navel, much stronger than she’d ever been able to get in her half-hearted attempts to practice yoga. A tingle across the smooth-shaved skin of her bare armpits. The tent rippled as a light breeze shivered over it.

Jamal was studying her from behind his yellow lenses, in that way that made her feel no one else could see her, even though the others were all there. On his cat-shaped, sallow face, the buggy glasses made him look like pictures of a space alien, sometimes.

“The Jule in the lotus,” Jamal said; funny, but it wasn’t a joke.

The wind came up and snatched the tent, which flew away across the plain of sand, sometimes skating on its flat bottom, sometimes rolling end over end. The others were laughing, watching Jamal caper after the tent—every time he almost caught it the wind would pull it just out of his reach. Julie was running like you can run in dreams, with a deep, springing, effortless movement, breathing as evenly as in sleep. That was trippy weed for sure. They captured the tent at last and held it still between them. Rippling in the remains of the breeze, the silvery fabric glimmered like snakeskin, and Julie still felt that warmth in her belly, spreading like the onset of happiness.