Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 16

She followed Jamal up the ledge that led to the first rock shelter. He climbed magnetically, as if he had suckers on his fingers and toes, and his head looked outsized on his slim body, maybe because of its big cloud of hair. Where the ledge leveled out to a wider shelf there was a vast overhang, three stories high, with a few trails of vine hanging from its upper lip. Because the overhang blocked the setting sun, it was suddenly almost cold. Julie wrapped her arms around herself. She’d left her jacket with the bikes.

On the inside wall there were tags spray-painted by other kids who’d come out from town, fat cushiony three-D letters smushed together like marshmallows crushed in the bag. Jamal pulled a plastic trash bag from his pocket and methodically began to scour up beer cans. After a moment Julie shook off her chill and helped him. There were chip bags and candy wrappers, too.

“Now what?” Jamal opened a crooked smile, hefting the three-quarters-full bag.

Julie shrugged and walked to the outside edge. Away below and to the left, Sonny and Marko were anchoring poles for an umbrella tent—it would be big as a room in a regular house when they were done. Karyn had scrambled to the top of the boulder and lay on her back on an Indian blanket, her white forearm shielding her eyes from the red rays of the declining sun. Julie pictured the turbulence that would follow if she or Jamal dropped the trash bag.

“Nah,” Jamal said. “The bikes won’t carry it. We’ll be doing well to come out with what we brought in.”

Julie turned toward the inner wall. At one end of the puffy chain of tagging, there was a narrow, dark slit in the rock. “In there?”

Jamal shook his head. “You ever think how you can’t throw anything away? I mean, you can throw it. But it doesn’t go away.”

Now Julie was conscious of herself shrugging. “I guess so,” she said, which seemed equally hapless. Still carrying the bag by its closed throat, Jamal walked toward the rock shelter wall.

“Wiggers,” he said, shaking his head as he read the tags, left to right, stopping where the opening pierced the stone. Julie stood a step behind him.

“You ever go in there?” she said.

“No thanks,” said Jamal. “I don’t like tight places.”

Julie looked into the gap in the stone. It seemed flat black, as if painted on the surface like the tags, as if after all there was no interior. She would have had to stoop just a little and turn sideways to get into it. Jamal was almost a head taller, but so skinny he might have folded himself up so he would also fit.

He set the bag down and touched her shoulder with a fingertip; the touch felt faintly electric through the cotton of her shirt.

“Come on,” Jamal said. “Let’s go find the sun.”