Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 19

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

Still carrying the bag of litter by its closed throat, Jamal walked toward the rock shelter wall. With a faint clatter of beer cans he set the bag down and raised a crooked forefinger as he scanned the painted tags from left to right.

“Freakin’ wiggers,” he said. Julie didn’t quite know what he meant by that. Jamal was scanning left to right; then his head stopped moving.

“What?” Julie asked.

“Yeah,” Jamal said. “Come here. You can only see him at just the right angle—depends on the light.”

Julie put her head near his and then she saw it, an image shallowly etched in the stone, just to the left of the dark opening that led who knows where. A round, shapeless body like a small child might draw, stick legs running, an antlered head. If not for the head, the petroglyph reminded her of paramecia she had watched through a microscope in ninth-grade biology class. Jamal had been one of her lab partners then, and they had taken turns lowering their heads to the black ring of the microscope’s upper lens.

“Who did this?” she said.

“Brulé.” Jamal’s voice went guttural as he said it.

“What’s that mean?”

“Burnt Indian,” Jamal said. “No, but they didn’t do it.

I’m just blowing smoke. These things are way older than those guys.”

Julie felt her bare arms stippling up in goose flesh. It was cool here in the shadow of the rock shelter, and a current of colder air seemed to come out of the slit in the stone wall. Jamal crouched over his heels, a finger tracing.

“There’s more down here, I think. There were. But you can’t see much of them now, under the tags.”

“That’s awful,” Julie said.

Jamal squinted up at her. “What?” She saw his gray eyes floating in the yellow bubbles of his lenses.

Julie shrugged. “Kids tagging all over . . . something like that.”

“Yeah . . . I don’t know.” Jamal straightened and took a backward step, still looking at the wall. “Something else’ll come along and cover all this up too, don’t you think?”

Julie looked down, to her knee level. On the stone was spray-painted the letters KAOS, in the lurid red and purple colors of a bruise. A tag for a gang Marko and Sonny had belonged to in high school, it was probably four or five years old. There was indeed something under it too, the pattern Jamal’s fingertip had followed. Her eye could not make out what it was. Jamal caught her right hand with his left, pulling out her forefinger as if it were a pencil. As he guided her finger over the stone she felt that she was beginning to read the image, but the glimmer of understanding spooked her for some reason. She giggled to disguise the feeling, pulled her hand away from Jamal and took a long step back from the wall.

A butterfly lit on the peak of the A in KAOS. Its wings stirred the air, an iridescent, heavenly blue. Julie shivered as the butterfly flew.

“Hey, you’re getting too cold,” Jamal said. He threw an arm over her shoulder, bumping her clumsily into his ribs. “Come on, let’s go find the sun.”