Fear in a Handful of Dust

16

Through the hot afternoon he dozed and made periodic surveillances of the hanging food; once it was a near thing but he shouted the buzzards away. The fever had wasted his strength and he felt coltishly fragile-the least muscular requirement meant a willed determination and his mind floated in an eddying pool of unformed anxieties.

The sun tipped over and lost strength. Voices roused him from his stuporous reveries. At first he didn’t attend to the words. He found an obscure fascination in listening to the songs and qualities, the play of sound back and forth among them, the feelings revealed in their tones; it occurred to him that a baby or a dog would listen to human conversation that way and absorb the same meanings from it.

Then the words trickled into his awareness.

“You’re just trying to insist that God doesn’t exist because if God doesn’t exist then your sins don’t exist. But it’s no good denying the obvious. Who made the universe?”

“Aagh. Who made God?”

Mackenzie closed his eyes and found the humor in it.

“If I’d known I was going to be imprisoned out here with this loony defender of the faith I’d have-” Jay’s voice trailed off and then resumed at the same pitch: “I’ll tell you this-God wouldn’t keep his authority long if he was ever around to answer questions. Crap. I’m going-it’s cool enough. You can fend for yourselves until I get back.”

Mackenzie tried to lift himself. “No,” he muttered aloud; he wanted to tell Jay to give it up-Duggai was out there. But he went dizzy and fell back. He heard the crunch of footsteps. Jay called: “Maybe you can find some way to have a rational conversation with the official representative of God here.” The fatuity of it made a reckless laughter bubble in Mackenzie. He tried again to rise but his body was lax and he hadn’t the will. He heard Jay’s slow footsteps diminish. Earle coughed and there was a broken stretch without sound; the light began to change.

Two buzzards slalomed overhead. Mackenzie felt gritty, his head ached, there was a miserable knot in his gut; he pictured himself dismembering Duggai, snarling, pulping Duggai’s big face with his fists. The savage fantasy was vivid.

Sullen and pugnacious, he emerged finally from entombment. Sweating, he surveyed the world around him until it stopped swimming. The sun tumbled out of sight before he got his breath. Near Mackenzie’s hole a crowd of red ants dragged a huge dung beetle stubbornly across the earth. He saw half a dozen jackrabbit pelts hung on bushes near the fire; Shirley was on her haunches, her back to him, working with tinder and kindling. Earle lay with his arms folded across his breastbone like a corpse. The buzzards made lazy portentous circles overhead. A mile away along the flanks of the barren hills a small figure crabbed diagonally toward the skyline-Jay.

There was a bone-clicking racket when Shirley tried to set fire to the kindling. He got down on one knee to fix the lacings of his moccasins and then made his way drunkenly between catclaw and ocotillo along the slope.

Her cheeks were dark and gaunt. Mackenzie said, “Let me take a turn at that.” She gave the rocks up to him. He sat flaking off chips and sparks while Earle muttered incoherently beside them and Shirley’s swollen eyes drifted off toward the skyline to the east where Jay had gone out of sight behind a fold of ground.

Shirley’s expression was fixed, melancholy, imprisoned. “He found a trail last night. He followed it a long way but he didn’t find any salt. He’s going to follow it in the other direction tonight.”

“If he’s not careful he’ll wear himself out. It was stupid going off on his own.”

“Someone had to.”

“What if he twists his ankle five miles from here?” He didn’t mention Duggai.

“I almost wish he would.” She said it with infinite sadness. “I shouldn’t hate him for what this is doing to him. It’s not his fault.” She flicked a tiny stone with her fingernail: it rolled a few feet and stopped, becoming indistinguishable from all the others. “Better off dead.”

“What?”

“All of us. We’re just prolonging this. Duggai’s never going to let us out alive.”

Mackenzie said dryly, “Where there’s life …”

“Don’t patronize me with platitudes.”

“Well you know there’s one Duggai and there are four of us.”

“I’m sure he’s got at least four bullets, Sam.”

“At least we ought to give ourselves a run for our money.”

“It’s so unfair.” She stood up and walked away. Mackenzie didn’t watch her go. He kept scraping the quartz pieces together and after a while the tinder nourished a spark and it grew; he let it take half the kindling before he pushed the thin red logs into it.

When it was burning to his satisfaction he had a look at Earle.

Wire-thin veins made circular smudges on Earle’s wasted cheeks. His belly was swollen but his chest and limbs had shrunk: the skin hung in loose folds and his elbows and shoulders protruded like those of something already dead.

Earle’s face twitched; he looked apologetic. He said, “I suffer, therefore I live,” and grinned maliciously.

“How do you feel?”

“Terrible. But you know it’s a little like being up against a grindstone. Either it grinds you down or it polishes you up. Depends what you’re made of. Spiritually I feel much stronger than I ever did before. Whatever happens, I can take it.”

“Sure you can.”

Earle shivered. “Sorry. Ghost walked over my grave.”

“Jay’s gone looking for a salt lick.”

“I know.”

“If we can find salt you’ll be all right, Earle.”

“I’ll be all right whether we find salt or not. The companions of God are looked after. I really believe that, you know.”

Plainly he was clutching in desperation; but there would be no pleasure in the cruelty of planting doubt in Earle’s mind.

Earle said, “Are you all right now?”

“I expect so.”

“Good. You’re the lifeline for the Painters, you know.”

It made Mackenzie give him a quick direct look but Earle turned his face away; his eyes dulled. He had decided not to confide.

Mackenzie thought, he knows he’s dying but he doesn’t want to depress us. It made Mackenzie angry with Earle’s empty heroics. Better for all of them if Earle simply got it over with.…

Mackenzie winced at his own callousness. He sat furiously blaspheming to himself. Then he faced the truth. “Earle, listen to me.”

“Sure. I’ve got nothing else to do.”

“Don’t let yourself die for our convenience.”

“What makes you think-”

“Suicide is a mortal sin, isn’t it?”

“I’m not Roman Catholic. I’m Anglican-Episcopal.”

“Sorry. I heard you talking about sins before.”

“Hardly a concept exclusive to the Roman church.”

“Earle, I just don’t want to think you’re fooling yourself into some idea of noble self-sacrifice.”

Earle’s eyes turned smoky and hurt. “Have you seen me trying to slit my throat? Have you?”

“I want you to fight, that’s all.”

“I am fighting. I’d have been dead long, ago if I hadn’t.”

“You’ve got to start expecting to get out of this alive.”

“You’ve always detested me,” Earle said with practical sensibility. “Why are you so concerned about my survival?”

“Because there’s got to be a difference between me and Calvin Duggai.”

“Do you want to be cryptic?”

“We’ve got to prove we’re better than Duggai. We’ve got to survive-all of us.”

“So that’s the obsession that’s driving you.”

“Listen, you God damned son of a bitch, I intend to have Duggai’s head in a basket and I expect you to help me get it.”

Earle went all colors at Mackenzie’s profanity. Then abruptly he smiled. “You’re a mystic after all. You believe in that Indian witchcraft just as much as he does.”

“What do you know about that?”

“I know enough to figure out why he left us alive instead of shooting us. Devils and spells and demons. I read up on it when the lawyers asked me to examine him. Thought it might be a key. After all, he’s had cultural implantations a lot different from mine.”

“How the hell do you reconcile your religious faith with that behaviorist dogma?”

“God makes the laws. Our behavior is just obedience to God’s laws. I don’t see any contradiction, do you?” Earle coughed distressingly and then smiled. “You’re trying to change the subject.”

“What was the subject?” He was tired; he honestly didn’t remember.

“Your mystical obsession with proving that your devil power is stronger than Duggai’s.”

Earle fell back exhausted soon after and Mackenzie left him to rest. He’d tried to dismiss Earle’s speculations but their ripples disturbed him for a time.

Shades of lavender and lilac suffused the distance. He fed the fire and turned on his haunches to look for Shirley. He found her in dramatic silhouette: she stood on a boulder searching the horizons. Against the sky she was like a sculpted Diana. The picture was vivid and he held it, not moving, watching her and absorbing the sight: a wild dramatic work of graphic art.

Finally he went uphill toward her. She looked heart-breakingly beautiful.

He put his hands around her ribs and lifted her down off the boulder. She stood against him; she didn’t draw away.

She didn’t smile. “Can you feel my heart?”

“I thought it was mine.”

“Sam-right now I feel about sex roughly the way I feel about eating ground glass. But I want you to squeeze me until it hurts. I want to draw your strength into me.”

They cleaned themselves with wood-ash soap and scraps of rabbit fur; they sponged Earle down and he spoke softly of God’s bounties. Mackenzie built up the fire higher than it had been on previous nights: Jay would want a beacon to find his way back. He went down along the new trapline that Jay had set but it was too early and there were no prizes yet. They drank from the still and bagged the rest of the water, cleaned out the pit and spent half an hour gathering cactus and cutting it up into the hole to provide tomorrow’s water. Mackenzie found the tattered scraps of the moccasins Jay must have used on his expedition of the previous night; apparently Jay had made new moccasins for tonight’s travel. Jackrabbit hide was too thin to last long on this terrain-and Jay was foraging a good many miles out. Mackenzie had an idea what Jay’s feet must have been like by the time he’d returned to camp fourteen hours ago; it spoke of Jay’s courage that he had gone out again tonight. Maybe Duggai would leave him alone again.…

The clay bowls were clumsy but they were serviceable: Shirley improvised a thick soup from meat and blood and water and chopped saltbush. Mackenzie wasted nearly an hour searching a widening area for poles long and thick enough to make a litter but the land didn’t provide anything nearly substantial enough; they would have to carry Earle on their backs until they got into heavier growth somewhere.

When he returned to the fire he said, “We should plan to move out tomorrow night.”

“To where?”

He pointed toward the hills to the northeast. “I’ve heard coyotes up there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’d be water not too far away. Bigger animals. Maybe salt too. That’s the way we’ll go until we find what we need. When we can equip ourselves with more clothes and better footwear. Then we strike out due north. We move all night and hole up by day.”

“Why north?”

“There’s a superhighway.”

“How do you know that?”

“Senita. The little organ pipes. They only grow in Arizona west of the divide.”

“Where does that put us?”

“East of Yuma. Luke Air Force Gunnery Range.” He indicated the compass points. “That’s east, more or less. There’s a road that runs north from the Mexican border through one or two little towns, finally ends up at the highway junction at Gila Bend. We could strike out for that road but it might be a hundred miles from here.”

“That far? My God.”

“This thing probably measures five or six thousand square miles. That way’s the Mexican border. Might not be too far south of us but I don’t think there’s anything down there. Lava beds, craters, a lot of dry mountain ranges. They could have built towns down there in the past twenty years but I doubt it. That country’s even less hospitable than this.” He poked his chin toward the west. “That way we’d hit the Colorado River. Sooner or later. But we’d have to cross the Yuma flats to reach it-sand dunes. And again we don’t know if he put us down east or west of center-it might be only twenty-five miles from here to the river, then again it could be more than a hundred. From Ajo to Yuma it’s about a hundred and forty miles. It’s all gunnery range. No-our best shot’s north. The main highway between Tucson and San Diego. It can’t be more than forty or fifty miles.”

“I didn’t know there was any uninhabited area that big any more.”

“There are no roads, no human existence at all. Travel into these areas is forbidden.”

“And forbidding.”

“Anyhow we’ve got to go north. It won’t be just forty miles. You can’t go ten miles without running up against a range of mountains-they look easy from here but that’s steep rubble and they’re bigger than they look-six or seven thousand feet. You can go around the ranges but it trebles the distance. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Don’t they ever patrol with helicopters?”

“If they’ve got reason to suspect someone’s out here. Now and then I guess they do a routine sweep. But Duggai can reach us with that rifle if he sees a helicopter.”

“If it came to that he probably wouldn’t mind shooting the helicopter to pieces.”

Mackenzie closed his eyes and nodded agreement. “He’s just the one to prove he can do it. He knows ’copters-he’d shoot for the radio first, then the rotor coupling.”

“What chance have we got then? Honestly.”

“What difference does it make? It’s the only shot we’ve got.”

She began to clean out the bowls with a handful of grass. “It’s tempting to get maudlin, isn’t it.” Mackenzie watched the play of muscles under her skin. She sat crosslegged, spine bent in a hunched concentration, breasts pendant, lip between teeth. “If you scrub too hard you disintegrate these things. I ruined one last night.”

Then she looked over her shoulder toward the hills. She held the gaze for a moment. “I keep looking for buzzards up that way.” She went back to work; her voice dropped. “If you want to know the truth he’s amazed me in the past day or two. Before this happened if you’d served him a stringy piece of beef or told him his plane was half an hour late he’d have measured it as a catastrophe.”

“It’s not his fault.”

“I’m not criticizing him. He never had to face this before. I suppose I’m surprised by how brave he’s turned out to be.” She scoured the last bowl and set it aside, making an irked face, rubbed her eyes. Then abruptly she said, “Oh, what difference does it make?”

“Don’t go defeatist.”

She made a little bark of sour laughter.

He said, “We started out hanging from our fingernails-not thinking any farther ahead than the next drop of water. We’ve made a lot of progress. We’re talking about crossing a hundred miles.”

“Well, thank you for the pep talk. But how do I ignore Duggai out there?”

“Think of him as one more hazard. We’ve licked some others.”

“They’re not the same. The desert doesn’t care-it’s indifferent. You can’t say that of Duggai.” Her shudder was theatrical; she apologized for it with a smile that switched on and off peculiarly. “Maybe it’s because we don’t see him. He’s got so much bigger than life-size. He dominates every instant of our lives now. Some mythic malevolent ghost-one of those eternal spirits that can’t die until they get their doomsday revenge. You know I keep picturing him like a childish nightmare-something gigantic with a scythe.” Her head swiveled away; she tossed it as if she still had her long hair.

Neither of them had anything to say after that. Mackenzie didn’t have the strength to keep anything going. The irony touched him; maybe out there Jay was torturing himself with fantasies of what might be transpiring between them.

He found himself listening for the sound of the four-wheel drive but there was no sound at all.