He didn’t hallucinate but his mind jumped the straight track and he frittered hours away on meaningless calculations.
A hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit was what, fifty-one degrees centigrade?
They were in Arizona certainly-but where in Arizona? The state was nearly as big as all of New England.
Brass shells meant aerial gunnery practice but there’d been innumerable training bases in the desert during the Second World War and after. Davis Monthan outside Tucson. Fort Huachuca test range near Tombstone. Another one outside Phoenix-he kept trying to recall the name. A marine air station near Yuma. Another air force thing of some kind near Kingman. Another at Marana. Luke Air Force Gunnery Range. The Kofa Proving Ground. Florence Military Reservation. The Army Proving Ground at Yuma. Williams-that was it, the one near Phoenix: Williams Air Force Base.
Quit wasting time now-you haven’t got it to spare.
There was no saliva in his mouth to be drawn by the rolling pebble. He took it off his tongue and lay back breathing through his nose and tried to push away the tentacles of panic.
Time was so short. It was possible to die very quickly in the desert. The ancient rule of thumb was that a man could live at least three days without water but that was not true in the desert, where the sun and the sand-dry air and the furnace plains leached the body of its moisture. You could die in twenty-four hours. Duggai’s companions five years ago had died in less time than that. Because they’d been overcome by panic: they’d tried to hike, perhaps even tried to run. The desert had consumed them as fire consumes kindling. But even without exertion they’d have died by the second morning.
The ground pit might add an additional twenty-four hours to their lives now but the clock had started running early last evening when Duggai had given them their last drink from the canteen.
We’ll make it through tonight. But if we don’t get water we’ll die tomorrow before the sun goes down.
An early effect of fasting was urinary cleansing. That was a medical fact with which he was familiar. During the day he’d left the trench at least half a dozen times to urinate. He’d heard the others doing the same. By now Earle Dana’s trench probably stank of ammonia because Earle didn’t have the luxury of mobility.
It was tempting to hold it in as long as possible under the delusion that by retaining fluid the body held its grip on life that much longer but he knew that wasn’t the case at all-once the fluid had gone through the organs it was of no further use and the body only damaged itself by locking acid into the tract. So when the impulse overcame him he obeyed it.
But it would strike with ever increasing frequency until in the strong-stinking trickle of their final discharges there would be gritty little green crystals of pure uric acid.
By that time they would be too dehydrated to notice the pain.
If we get that far we’ll never come back from it.
He suspected it was self-delusion to hope they could sustain themselves for more than a few hours on cactus. It contained moisture to be sure. But not much. And it would contain enzymes and bacteria that could produce dysentery-cathartic and dehydrating reactions. Cactus might prolong life but certainly couldn’t improve it. To cheat Duggai’s hell they needed more than survival: they needed strength.
There was something. It caromed through shadows in his mind. Elusive. Maddeningly it shied from the light.
There was something and if he could remember it they might have water, they might live, they might win.
And he couldn’t remember it.
Reviewing the recalcitrance of Jay Painter’s despair, he fanned himself into new anger. Mackenzie had a terrible strong temper which he held under tight control whenever he could and as long as he could: once lost it was hard to regain. He had always envied Shirley the ability to get hot and quickly get over it. She and Jay squabbled all the time.
Audrey had been a woman of moods. In depressed hours she might snap at Mackenzie but it was a keep-away snap, not a preamble to a fight.
Sudden memory kicked in him. The five of them-and Duggai.
Audrey had not always been a somber girl but there’d been shadows here and there. They’d been married nearly ten years by the time he first met Shirley and Jay. By then it had led to the inevitable disenchantment but not beyond it-they’d still liked each other.
Audrey thought she had some Indian blood too: a great-great-grandfather or something. Once they’d gone to a cowboys and Indians movie and she’d winked at him afterward: Well we pret’ near won that one. She’d had a job then as factotum to a producer of TV commercials in San Francisco; Mackenzie had been stationed at Fort Ord. A base chaplain had married them and six months later he’d been transferred to West Germany and she’d had to quit the job. That had been the first obvious wedge.
After that he’d done tours in all parts of the world: Walter Reed and Fitzsimmons; the racketing madness of Tokyo; the shabby drear of Fort Bliss. By the time he came back from Indochina to the Presidio in San Francisco-1970-they weren’t yet estranged but they were like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while and had lost touch. It wasn’t so much that they inhabited different worlds-they inhabited the same world but different aspects of it. The view from beneath was a view in the dark: his last tour in Saigon had been an exercise in hopeless idiocy and he’d lost some of his capacity to enjoy things. They’d gone on trying to behave as if nothing had happened but there was a constraint between them that hadn’t been there before. Mackenzie had changed: his soul viewed things with repugnance, the laughter had gone out of him.
Then they’d assigned Duggai to him.
The army had taken Duggai out of his freshman university year because he was failing most of his courses and couldn’t sustain his draft deferment. To the extent that Mackenzie came to know him-it was never very far-it appeared Duggai must have been an amiable indifferent youth, a kind of red-skinned plowboy whose aspirations tended toward hunting, casual sex and the consumption of beer. A counselor in the reservation high school had inflamed Duggai’s parents with ambitions for the boy-lift him out of the reservation rut, give him a chance to make something of himself in the modern world; Duggai had packed off to Tucson and found himself lost in the academic grind.
Duggai was a born marksman, lifelong hunter, and when he scored at the top of his basic-training rifle class the army put him through a series of combat specialist schools designed to make a wizard killer of him. Race mythology to the contrary Duggai didn’t seem to have any particular warrior instincts; all he had was docile pliability-that and his uncanny skill with a rifle. He was indifferent to the power of authority but tended toward mindless obedience as the line of least resistance.
He had been shipped to Vietnam with a special combat team of saboteurs and snipers. He never exceeded the rank of private first class. He was equipped with a backbreaking assortment of telescopic and infrared accoutrements; his job was to kill people at incredibly long ranges or at night or in monsoons. In one of their sessions he mentioned offhandedly to Mackenzie that he’d assassinated one Cong officer in a fine drizzle at a distance they later stepped off to confirm it: “Eight hundred seventy-five yards. That’s over half a mile, Captain.”
Certain villages in the boonies tended to be friendly during the day and unfriendly at night when the Cong would infiltrate and receive the clandestine embrace of the villagers, sack and pillage whatever supplies the village had conned out of the Americans, then drain away into the jungle before daybreak. To pacify such villages the army assigned mechanics like Duggai to lie in ambush with infrared scope and silenced rifle-to pick off everything that moved in the village after midnight.
In therapy Duggai always skirted the details but Mackenzie forced him to go over the ground innumerable times in the course of several months. He judged that Duggai must have murdered more than a hundred Vietnamese from the night. Vietnamese people were very small to the eyes of a hulk like Duggai; women and men wore the same loose pajamas in the rural areas. Duggai was aware of the fact that a good number of his victims had been women and children and very old people: the heat image on an infrared scope seldom reveals the sex or age of the target.
Duggai had done his work with unquestioning obedience but nothing in his upbringing had steeled him to it and the nights of silent murder had a cumulative effect on even so rudimentary a psyche as Duggai’s. He began to disturb his tentmates with his nightmares. The nightmares trickled across into his waking hours: he hallucinated. As the subconscious rebelled, so the efficiency deteriorated. Finally Duggai was put into a base hospital for observation. The case had been kicked back up the line until finally he had been rotated back to San Francisco for major psychiatric overhaul. The department had implanted him in Mackenzie’s care because all Indian patients were assigned to him: something about empathy.
Duggai had a peculiar intellect. His aptitude tests showed extremely high scores on anything to do with simple logic, practical things, mechanics. Mackenzie tried to teach him chess-he seemed to have the attributes for it-and Duggai learned the game quickly but he played only when Mackenzie badgered him into it. Left to himself Duggai chose isolation. In the ward he could sit in a chair and stare at a point on the wall for hours.
School and army records indicated he had formed no friendships and few acquaintanceships. He was not paranoid; he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. He did not relate to other people at all; he seldom seemed to care what they thought or felt. It was as if they didn’t exist. To an extent he was a textbook psychopath isolated in solipsism. This was the most difficult syndrome to treat because the patient left no bridge open across which the therapist could approach him. There was no inner demand to make contact with another human. Duggai usually seemed aware of the existence of other people only to the extent that they annoyed or offended him or got in his way. He’d been reasonably polite to Mackenzie because he’d seen Mackenzie as his ticket out of the place but that was all.
Such patients had no curiosity about other people; it followed they also lacked any curiosity about themselves. The army’s psychiatric services packed in a great many Duggais-some of them suicidal, some incoherent; you couldn’t brainwash a farm boy into committing atrocities and expect it to have no effect on him afterward. But with a Duggai there was no possibility of goading the patient into insight. Feelings were to be obeyed and indulged but never examined.
There’d been no reaching Duggai. Because of the twitch of a government digit somewhere he’d been discharged-from the hospital and from the army-and Mackenzie had been relieved to see the last of him.
But then Duggai had gone brass-scavenging in the Mohave Desert; men had died; the change of venue brought the trial to San Francisco; and a bored defense attorney, court-appointed, went through the motions by seeking out psychiatric buttresses for his “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense. Mackenzie came forward willingly enough; testified as truthfully as he knew how; again that should have been the end of it.
Duggai-and the appearance at the trial of Earle Dana as an expert witness-had brought the rest of them together. Jay Painter initially came into it as a witness for the prosecution but his examination of Duggai bore out the results of Mackenzie’s and the prosecution declined to call Jay to the stand. When Duggai’s attorney learned of this he brought Jay over to the defense team.
Mackenzie met Jay for the first time in the courtroom.
Jay had asked Shirley to interview Duggai because it had occurred to him that Duggai might open up more with an attractive woman. Duggai hadn’t but the defense attorney, eager for all the help he could get, persuaded her to testify. The three of them were in court that day and afterward they went out to dinner. There was some speculation around the restaurant table about the fourth defense witness-a psychotherapist they’d all heard of, Earle Dana, regarded generally as a publicity hound and a quack. Their own testimony was concluded but they agreed to meet next morning in the courtroom to listen to Earle Dana.
Dana had written six self-help books-How to Get the Most Out of Sex was the one that made them titter the most-and wrote a newspaper column of mental-health advice that was syndicated to several West Coast newspapers. He was not a doctor; apparently he was self-taught. He’d been a minister of some persuasion and had served as an air force chaplain for some years before resigning both his commission and the ministry to join a consciousness-raising cult in Southern California. Then apparently he’d begun to read books for the first time in his life and had been smitten by the relentless reasoning of some of the neo-behaviorists with their Skinner Boxes and conditioned-reflex therapy techniques.
The defense attorney had asked Earle to testify because of his notoriety; Earle had agreed because of the publicity. Most of Earle’s testimony had little to do with Duggai; it was a simpleminded advertisement for his brand of behavior therapy. “In many cases, the point is, other methods fail and our methods work.” And Shirley had whispered in Mackenzie’s ear: “So does torture.”
Then to their horror Earle had buttonholed the three of them on his way out of the courtroom and insisted on standing them to lunch. They’d had to listen to his nonsense for hours before they’d been able to break away.
Audrey met them after work at the St. Francis and the four of them had giggled over recollections of Earle Dana’s prim pomposities. On any psychiatric subject Earle was prepared to rush in where the best minds in medicine feared to tread. His brief appearance in their lives gave fuel for uproarious amusement. And because they laughed together they decided they loved one another; the foursome became an institution for a brief while: Jayandshirley, Samandaudrey.
For Mackenzie it had gone beyond that. Perhaps it was inevitable. Not Audrey’s fault but she’d failed to share too many of the experiences that had changed Mackenzie. Around the Painters’ swimming pool or isolated by crowds at parties, Mackenzie and Shirley had discovered each other. She too was lonely in her marriage; her loneliness followed her into Mackenzie’s life. A few drinks, outpourings of confidences. Jay’s indifference. Audrey’s withdrawn distance. Noncommunication in both marriages.
Mackenzie’s adulterous love for Shirley came to dominate him: a big deep thing that sometimes for no reason made tears well up in him. Even in Jay’s presence he became capable of enjoying happiness in nothing more than sitting for great lengths of time watching her do little things-drying her hair, dusting a room, climbing out of the pool-just witnessing the grace of her face and body.
It never became an affair. They were both prisoners of honor-on occasion they teased one another abrasively about their old-fashioned principles. Mackenzie never allowed them opportunities for clandestine meetings. He wasn’t gaited that way. It would be a complication he wouldn’t be able to handle; he knew that. The love between them was real but physically unconsummated. That was unnatural; inevitably things had to come unraveled.
Jay had been badgering her: he wanted a baby. She was sure they’d be divorced; she didn’t want to inflict that on a child. She kept taking the pill. Jay’s anger took the form of cold-shouldering her. It compounded the frustrations-hers and Sam’s.
The we-can’t-go-on-like-this hour arrived the day before an explosive evening: Earle Dana again the catalyst. Every few weeks Earle found some excuse to gather them around him. He was an expansive host; there was always a vacuous large-breasted blonde or redhead on his arm-sometimes Mackenzie suspected Earle hired them-and the soirees provided fuel for the next month’s cruel laughter, so they always went.
It had been nearly a year by then. Mackenzie never learned what triggered things but it all blew apart at that last party of Earle’s.
He’d seen Jay and Shirley through a gap in the crowd. Hissing at each other. Their bodies twang-taut, every tendon standing out, faces livid. It wasn’t one of their normal spats. Those came and went with metronomic regularity; they were loud and only mock-violent and they passed quickly. This was not anger; this was hate.
Audrey beside him saw the direction and alarm of Mackenzie’s glance. She looked that way; moved closer and gripped his arm. “What on earth?”
People around the Painters were backing away as if from something that frothed with rabies.
Jay spat something at Shirley-a sibilant awful whisper. She rocked back on her heels, went stone-silent and still. Abruptly she wheeled. Her little fists rose and fell with inarticulate rage. She stormed toward the door.
Mackenzie was right in her path.
She touched his hand. “I’m sorry. I blew it. He just got me so mad.… Forgive me.” Then she was gone. The door slammed with a shuddering crash.
And Jay Painter was stalking toward Mackenzie with murderous eyes.
Audrey clutched at his arm. “Sam-”
He tried to get her out of there but all the while Jay was railing at him with a “Keep me away from him I’ll kill him” performance and by the time Mackenzie got Audrey out of the place she’d heard more than enough to fit things together and she’d jumped to the conclusion that was natural if not correct.
She refused to hear his protestation. She didn’t talk to him at all. She locked herself in the bedroom.
The next afternoon when he came home she was slumped in the car inside the closed garage. The engine was still running. She’d been dead for several hours.
A week later Mackenzie left the army and put his M.D. and his psychiatric shingle away in storage. Nothing had forewarned him that Audrey might be that close to the ultimate breakdown. When he looked back he could count off all the classic symptoms as they’d appeared one by one-the shock of his presumed physical betrayal had been only the trigger, not the cause-but the horrible fact was that he hadn’t seen any of it coming.
If I’d been any kind of a shrink at all I’d have been able to head it off.
He was forced to recognize himself as a third-rate shaman, incompetent psychiatrist. If there’d been any real talent he wouldn’t have stayed protectively in the army. The facts had always been there; only the insights had been lacking. And a psychiatrist without insights was like a toxic agent turned loose in a water supply: incalculable the damage it could do.
After a while he realized that sort of thinking was extreme-guilty overreaction-but he never had the impulse to go back to the profession. And until now he’d never had further contact with any of them. They’d had key roles in the disintegration of his life, the destruction of Audrey’s: they were the instruments of his guilt.
And clearly they hated him. Earle rankled still from the things Mackenzie had shouted at him when Earle innocently phoned to offer condolences. Shirley couldn’t help hating him for what she’d done to herself: he’d been her willing accomplice. Jay owned the cuckold’s rage. Duggai-he was the ultimate victim.
In time he had found something new to justify his existence. A love of the forest. He’d been happy. But now Calvin Duggai and the past had returned to deform the present.
He rubbed his forehead fiercely as if that could expunge his memories. He watched the line of sun-shadow move across the north wall of the pit. Its angle grew flatter but when he lifted his head to scent the air he discerned no reduction yet in its stifling heat. He sagged back into the grave to wait it out.
During the morning at intervals he’d heard Jay and Shirley calling across the island between their trenches but since the descent of the day’s heat he hadn’t heard any more of that.
It took no imagination to chart their symptoms; Mackenzie shared them. The tongue had begun to swell: it cleaved to the flesh of his mouth. His eyes had gone dry and it was painful to open them, even to slits. His lips were cracked. His belly had begun to knot. Soon he suspected there would be cramps. Lying still he could feel the solemn stubborn thud of a pulse in his ears: it made a rhythm against the high-frequency whistle there. His head ached.
All that would get worse. But it would be a while before it became incapacitating.
A buzzard drifted overhead, circling lower for a better look; it cruised in and out of the frame of his vision. Finally it skimmed so low over his trench that he felt the breeze of its passage. He sat up. The blood rushed from his head and he felt consciousness flood away; he tightened the band of his stomach muscles against it and through the gray haze on his vision watched the buzzard flap away, startled by his movement. It planed along the flats until it caught an up-draft; he watched it swing aloft. For the next half hour it hovered in vast lazy circles far overhead. After a while several others joined it.
The color of the sky began to change. He drowsed fitfully, rousing himself at intervals to have a look at the buzzards; if they came low again he’d throw something at them to warn them off. He didn’t want to be awakened by a beak drilling into his eye.
It was too easy to envy the buzzards their freedom. With their cambered wings they could slide effortlessly-a hundred miles in a few hours if they wished-to water or to a safe nest.
It made him think of Calvin Duggai. Somewhere on the surrounding heights Duggai was sure to be camped. Every now and then he’d be taking out his field glasses to find out how his victims were getting along.
He went half asleep and didn’t realize it until a sound startled him and he split his eyes open and saw Jay Painter’s silhouette against the sky foreshortened by perspective.
Jay didn’t speak at once. Mackenzie got up slowly, giving the circulation time to adjust. He stood in the hip-deep hole and scanned the desert. The sun, not nearly so strong now, slanted down from a flat angle near the horizon. Dust devils funneled erratically along the flats some distance away, a yellow wheeling of sand and twigs and leaves.
The buzzards were no longer in the sky. Perhaps Jay’s perambulation had discouraged them.
“What now?” Jay’s voice was painfully hoarse.
Mackenzie picked up the brass knives. “We cut open a cactus.”