Fear in a Handful of Dust

15

In the gray light before dawn they worked with concentrated silent industry. They smashed bones and ate the marrow for its nourishment. Mackenzie made a sack from entrails to hold blood from the night’s kill.

A light scatter of cirrus clouds hung very high in the west but the sun would dissipate them early; there was no chance of rain until the brief season of cloudbursts of early autumn. If anything was predictable about the Southwestern desert it was drought and the fact that the early afternoon temperature would reach a minimum of 115 degrees and might go as high as 140 degrees. Equally predictable was a nighttime drop of as much as 70 degrees; by dawn the four of them were chilled through.

While Mackenzie worked the skins he explored possibilities and plans. He’d thought of moving camp late in the day but now he rejected it: once they left they’d have to move fast and keep moving and cover their tracks. During the days they’d have to hide out from Duggai and at night they wouldn’t be able to light a fire. It would require meticulous preparation. Earle had to be considered.

They hung strips of meat on cactus spines. A day in the sun should cure the jerky. With bone needles and sinews and narrow strips of hide they set about sewing moccasins. They fitted patterns by laying the hides out under their feet and tracing oval outlines with chalky stones on the skins; they cut ankle flaps and punched holes all the way around the edges and threaded thong lacings through them. They made the moccasins inside out, hair-lined with the raw flesh out. “Put them on and keep them on as much as you can. It’ll dry out and harden-we want them molded to the shapes of our feet.” And beforehand it was prudent to examine the hair for insects.

It took all the hides; there was nothing left over for clothing. But they’d increased their range of movement.

With the three of them working the job was done quite rapidly; for the first time in Mackenzie’s recent memory Shirley showed that she could smile-the little accomplishment pleased and encouraged her.

Just on sunrise he took Jay with him down along the trapline. They dismantled the snares and carried them away. Mackenzie prowled along the foot of the slope and they had to walk half a mile before Mackenzie found a fresh jackrabbit run. He didn’t speak at first; testing Jay, he waited, and it gratified him when Jay made the discovery for himself. “That’s got to be a trail-look how it’s pounded down.”

They set the snares and climbed back toward the cemetery. The jerry-built moccasins abraded Mackenzie’s ankles and provided inadequate armor against the desert surface; it was still necessary to pick footings with care but at least it was no longer an agony simply to walk.

Midway back Jay stopped him. “I want to say something.”

Mackenzie waited for it. Jay was looking up toward the horizon; he brought his face grudgingly around; the low-level sun licked the surfaces of his eyes, putting a shine on them, rendering his face sinister. “Wed have been dead by now without you.”

“Maybe.” Without me how do you know what resources you might have discovered in yourselves? But he didn’t say it.

“You and Shirley-”

“For God’s sake, Jay, that’s beside the point.”

“It can’t help color our emotions.”

“Stop being a psychiatrist. It won’t help us out here.”

“Mackenzie, there was a time I wanted to kill you.”

“I know.”

“Well, I want to express my gratitude.”

“Sure.” He said it gently with a smile but Jay’s thanks didn’t mean much; he’d been groping toward equilibrium but he hadn’t nearly reached it yet and any setback could spin him right off balance again. Any imagined provocation could turn Jay vicious. In normal constraints he tended to bluster toothlessly: his threats to kill Mackenzie had been empty. But out here the placenta of normality was ruptured. They all were poised on the brink of sanity; trust was in short supply all around; several times Mackenzie had felt his own temper slipping free and the next time he might not contain it. And because he fancied he owned a better degree of stability than Jay’s he found no comfort in this temporary offer of the olive branch.

But he showed Jay his smile and they went on up into the camp; Mackenzie was thinking, If he was sure of those feelings he’d have thanked me in the presence of the others. This way if there was an inconsistency no one would know it but the two of them. He didn’t credit Jay with malicious intent; the bet-coppering shrewdness was unconscious.

They cooked a last small batch of meat over the fire and Mackenzie decided to let it go out; there’d be no point feeding it through the day. Fuel was scarce and too dry to make smoke and in any case he had decided against trying to make any kind of signal. If they were spotted from the air and there were any attempt to rescue them it only meant Duggai would finish them off with the rifle.

It was time to carry Earle to his hole. Earle was twitching in his sleep. His skin was hot and dry. When they picked him up he uttered a low incoherent groan. They cleaned him where he’d soiled himself and lowered him into the trench. Shirley said, “I’m worried about him.”

“He’s suffering from shock trauma,” Mackenzie said. “Can’t expect anything much less.”

“What can we do for him?”

“Not a hell of a lot without antibiotics. If he doesn’t get salt fairly soon he’ll develop violent cramps.”

“Feed him saltbush?”

“Some. It may help. But too much of it, he’d end up worse off for the dysentery.”

“Then what can we do?”

“Go out on a salt hunt tonight,” Mackenzie said. “The odds aren’t too bad. This desert was an ocean floor at one time. There’s plenty of salt. Question is whether there’s any right at the surface.”

Shirley searched the horizon. “How could we possibly find it?”

“If it’s there the animals know where it is. After dark I’ll take a hike, see if I can pick up an animal trail, follow it along and see where it leads.” And try to stay out of Duggai’s sights, he thought dismally.

Churlishly it crossed his mind that they’d be in much better shape if Earle died. The leg was going to take at least six weeks to heal. Duggai wasn’t patient enough to give them six weeks or any significant portion of it; another day or two and Duggai would begin to get nervous, start looking over his shoulder, working out the odds that a plane or helicopter might come by.

They had to find some way to survive not only their nakedness and the desert but Duggai’s high-powered rifle as well. Thinking about that as he sank into his trench, Mackenzie felt a dispiriting wave of hopelessness. It was like a hurricane to a man in a small open boat: even if by extraordinary seamanship he managed to conquer one giant wave there was another right behind it and another behind that.…

Anxiety dumped him into a fitful sleep; exhaustion devoured him.

His face felt dry; it was covered with dust and insect bites. A wind blew sand across the top of the trench. His bowels were knotted. He made it up out of the trench and stumbled toward the futile shade of a bush. He had forgotten the heat; when it hit him he recoiled.

He leaned against a branch weak and sweating. Diarrhea burned him and vomit pain convulsed his stomach: he catted up a bilious stream. Bathed in perspiration, scalp prickling, he reeled out under the merciless orange sun. He felt his hair scorch as if it were hot wire.

Far off in the sky a jet made a faint sound like ripping cloth. He caught a tail-of-the-eye movement imperfectly and turned and discovered a small gecko darting into the shade: the only time you saw a lizard was when it moved. Now it sat under the bush, the pulse beating in its throat.

He lurched back to the trench and collapsed into it. For a while he dozed in feverish discomfort: in the heat time had no meaning. The pains came and went, rumbling uneasily in his belly.

Suddenly it was sundown. He lifted himself on his elbows and saw one pale star. Chills swept him furiously; he sank back. Something thick on his tongue had the residual taste of stale sleep but it was heavy and harsh, a sickening pungency that tasted like death. He was afraid. His pulse was thin, weak, rapid.

Shirley’s sudden silhouette above him: “How do you feel?”

He couldn’t focus on her: his eyes wouldn’t track. He muttered something. She swung her legs over, sat on the rim and dropped to her feet beside him. “You’ve got a fever, Sam.”

He rubbed his face, felt the cracked parchment of his cheeks. “Where’s Jay?”

“He went to look for salt.”

Duggai. He stared off into the twilight. Well, maybe it would be all right-maybe Duggai would let Jay stumble around out there wearing himself out in fruitless search. Maybe.

He saw she was carrying something in both hands and when she brought it closer to his face he recognized it-a small transparent bag cut from the raincoat’s sleeve; pendulous with water.

“Drink it. It’s beautiful. Fresh and clear.”

He took it into his swollen mouth a sip at a time. “Things I need to be doing …”

“Tell me. Jay and I will do what we can.”

If Jay ever returned. “How much water did that thing make?”

“The bag was full. Nearly a gallon, I imagine. It’s astonishing, Sam.”

“It’ll do the same tomorrow but you’ve got to feed it-by now it’s sucked a lot of the moisture out of that ground. Ought to urinate in there-around the cup, not in it. Cut pieces of cactus, dump them in there. Dig moist earth out of the walls of these trenches-put that in too. Every night we drink the fresh water and clean the junk out of the bowl around it. Start over again, feed it for the next day.”

“How does it work?”

“Sun heats the plastic. Draws moisture out of anything in there-the ground, cactus, anything. Principle of evaporation. Water condenses on the underside of the plastic, drips down to the low point, drops into the cup. It’s a solar still-it’ll condense pure distilled water out of any moisture in the hole.”

“It’s incredible.” She was behaving with deliberate composure that betrayed how close she was to wild hysteria: their lifeline was fraying.

He coughed; something dry rattled in his chest. “Listen-use some of that water to make clay pots. Bake them in the fire. Can you make a fire now?”

“It’s already burning. Jay made it before he left.”

“Make mud, shape the pots, bake them slow-not too close to the fire or they’ll crack. Got it?”

“What else, Sam?”

“We’ve got to start making some effort toward hygiene. We’ll end up with festering sores if we can’t clean ourselves. Got to make soap.”

“How?”

“Cooking fats and white wood ashes. Mix it up in a clay pot. There’s potash and soda in the ashes-mix it with grease and you get good soap. Stinks like a bastard but it cleans. Use the hair side of a piece of rabbit skin for a washcloth. Sponge baths.” He ran out of breath.

His consciousness skipped a few segments of time-instants or perhaps hours. When he looked up again she was gone; when he looked yet again he saw thin clouds scudding across the stars; next he awoke and heard echoes of a ranting voice that he recognized as his own and he knew he’d been delirious in his fever.

Shirley plied him with morsels of warm cooked jerky. He couldn’t swallow them. He took several swallows of water and coughed. “Where’s Jay?”

“He hasn’t come back yet. I’m sorry, Sam, I can’t lift you out of here alone.”

He went dizzy and nearly fainted. His eyes rolled shut and he heard her climb out of the trench, heard the muted song of her distracted humming. Why was it so incredibly hot?

Then it went cold-bone-chilling cold that rattled him with a trembling violence: the skin of his chest jerked with a palsied looseness and it radiated out to the farthest reaches of his body.

Shirley was trying to haul him up out of the ground. “Come on-help me, Sam, we’ll get you to the fire.”

But it was no good; he shook uncontrollably. His teeth kept banging. He tried to curl up into a fetal ball, clenched his hands between his thighs, felt the rough cold earth against cheek and shoulder and hip. Faintly he heard her speak, a catch in her throat: “We haven’t got blankets, Sam.” Then she curled soft against him, warm against his back, her knees under his, arms around his chest; she rubbed his chest hard with the flats of her hands. He tried to speak but reality swam away before he could voice his gratitude.

The fever broke and he came out of it as flaccid as protoplasm. At first he thought it was midmorning by the long shadow but then he saw he’d got turned around: that was the north wall and therefore it must be well past noon. Jay-had he returned?

There were ashes beyond his feet and when he looked up he found another dead little fire above him in the head of the pit.

By his hand lay a plastic balloon filled with water, tied shut with woven strands of red hair.

He drank it with slow patience, measuring out the greed of his thirst; he drank it all-at least a pint-and reached gratefully for the jerky that hung spitted against the wall of his grave.

Chewing the thing set up an ache in the weakened muscles of his jaws but he masticated it as fine as he could before he risked swallowing. Afterward he lay with his shoulder propped against the wall trying to gather energy to get up for a look around. He drowsed while random images fled through his uneasy mind. It occurred to him without much force that somewhere in the run of the past few hours he had nearly died and that Shirley’s body and the two fires had kept him alive. He pictured himself rising out of the grave and had an image of Duggai out there watching through field glasses with keen disappointment.

He almost slept again but Shirley’s angry hoarse yelling aroused him. He managed to get his feet under him and stood with his arms on the rim of the pit.

She stood above her trench throwing rocks and yelling at the buzzards that swooped low over the strings of hung jerky. The racket scared them off and they went back toward the hills in long resentful spirals of movement.

Her shoulders slumped; she watched them plane away; then she saw Mackenzie and she came anxiously toward him, the thin moccasins kicking up little whorls of dust.

“How do you feel?”

“Rocky. You’d better not stand in the sun.” The heat was a furnace blast.

She hesitated-still ten feet from him-and stopped; her eyes went toward the farther trenches. Now Mackenzie saw bruises on her face. There was an ugly blue patch under her eye and one cheek was discolored. It wasn’t sunburn.

She saw his face change and she tried to dismiss it. “Do you want more water?”

“I can wait for sundown. Shirley-”

“You’d better not burn energy talking. Get back out of the sun.” She went away too quickly, he thought; furtively.

He spoke to her back: “Get some sleep. I’ll take a turn doing scarecrow.”

He saw her nod quickly as she climbed into her hole. She didn’t look back at him.

So Jay had returned. Jay must have found them pressed together in the pit during the night. And rage had overwhelmed Jay and he’d beaten her.

If he comes after me tonight I won’t have much strength to fight him.

He lay back in the trench and squinted at the sky.