Fear in a Handful of Dust

by Brian Garfield

  He went outside and the dog brought him a stick; Mackenzie spent ten minutes throwing it for the dog to fetch; the dog was too old to do more than trot after it. Afterward MacKenzie went back up to the tower, moving up the ladder with a grace that betrayed quite well-tuned muscular coordination for a physique barely shy of fifty years’ age. It was just about all he had to do—calisthenics and isometrics. Otherwise sedentary in the fire tower he’d have gone to atrophy—constant head colds and bellyaches like Wilder or flaccid fat like Smyley, the relief man. Smyley was a reader; doing the circuit from tower to tower he always had his knapsack filled with paperbacks. Wilder was a deep thinker who worried a great deal about ecology and the world; with nothing to do in the towers but worry about Armageddon it wasn’t surprising Wilder had heartburn and sinus trouble. And me? I just get musclebound—in body and mind.

  Nevertheless he never could wait to get back to his isolated cocoon after a weekend’s liberty. It was the frantic impulse toward his safe hermitage that always brought him home at top speed in the Jeep. Comes right down to it, I’m happy here and how many can make that claim? He had to smile.

  He still had the Sacramento newspaper; he tossed it on the desk and did a sweep of the mountains, searching through the glasses in a deliberate grid pattern until he’d completed the circuit. Down at the foot of the tower the dog was excavating to bury the Milk Bone at the foot of one of the stilts that supported the rickety fire tower. Mackenzie leaned out over the railing. “You’re digging so close you’ll knock the whole thing over, you stupid twirp.” The dog wagged her tail briefly to acknowledge she knew he was talking to her. Mackenzie went back inside the glass enclosure and down with the newspaper.

  KILLER SOUGHT AFTER ASYLUM ESCAPE

  San Francisco, July 11 (API). Calvin Duggai, 27, committed to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane since his trial in 1972 on five counts of manslaughter, escaped Tuesday night from the California State Hospital at Cochino, in Marin County north of San Francisco.

  In making his escape Duggai apparently tunneled through a second-story exterior wall and climbed over a 12-foot steel fence.

  Dogs employed in the search failed to trace Duggai because of Tuesday night’s heavy rain, which had washed the spoor away by the time the escape was discovered yesterday morning.

  According to Highway Patrol Lt. Richard Loomiston, Duggai allegedly broke into a house one mile from the prison hospital before dawn Wednesday. He may have stolen guns as well as clothing and food from the house. Duggai’s fingerprints were found on several objects in the house, which has been unoccupied for several days, its owners vacationing.

  Lt. Loomiston stated that all leads are being pursued. A dark brown camper-body pickup truck, California license plates XVZ237W, was stolen at some time before dawn from a residence on the outskirts of Cochino, and the theft may be connected with Duggai’s disappearance.

  Police are emphasizing that if seen, Duggai should not be approached. “He is extremely dangerous and may be armed. Anyone having information about his whereabouts should immediately call local police or the Highway Patrol,” Lt. Loomiston said.

  Calvin Duggai is described by police as a Navajo Indian, height 6′ 1″, weight 205 pounds. Hair black, eyes brown, complexion swarthy. The fugitive has a three-inch scar on the back of his left hand extending from the wrist to the center knuckle.

  Tracks left in the wet ground at the hospital indicate that Duggai may be limping as a result of his leap to freedom. Color and description of his clothing are unknown pending the return of the householders from whose wardrobe it was stolen.

  In 1971 Calvin Duggai, a Vietnam combat veteran, was arrested and charged in Barstow after five men died in the Mohave Desert collecting spent shells on the Randsburg Wash Test Range during the Independence Day weekend.

  Tire tracks and other evidence led police to Duggai’s Barstow shack, where his pickup truck still contained 17 buckets filled with empty brass cartridge cases.

  According to evidence presented at Duggai’s trial, the six men—described as “scavengers”—had driven into the restricted Randsburg Wash range in the pickup for the purpose of collecting shell casings ejected from Air Force planes during gunnery practice. Such brass casings can be sold to scrap dealers for 55¢ a pound.

  For several months prior to the incident, Duggai allegedly had operated similar scavenger hunts on various artillery and gunnery ranges throughout the Southwest.

  During the hunt for brass in the desert, an altercation apparently occurred among the scavengers, after which Duggai drove away in the pickup truck, abandoning the five men in a desert area about 40 miles from the nearest road. The high recorded for July 3 was 123° Fahrenheit, and in his summation San Bernardino County Prosecutor Everett Sellas pointed out, “Those temperatures are measured at the weather station in the shade, and in the middle of the Mohave Desert there is no shade.”

  Tracks indicated the five victims tried to walk out of the desert. Four of them managed to cross about 5½ miles.

  The fifth victim, Gilbert Rodriguez, 15, of Victorville, made his way several miles farther, surviving the first night by breaking open cactus with rocks and squeezing the pulp through his shirt. The desert heat claimed him before noon of the following day.

  The five bodies were found by an Air Force helicopter after Mrs. Carlos Rodriguez of Victorville called police to say her son had not returned from a brass-collecting expedition led by Calvin Duggai.

  In testimony at Duggai’s trial, San Bernardino County Medical Examiner Dr. Philip Rawson stated that when the bodies were found, “They’d been picked fairly clean by buzzards and ants but we were able to piece the story together. Life expectancy in that desert is extremely brief, even for a healthy adult, if he isn’t a trained expert in the techniques of survival. People’s cars break down out there, they make the mistake of trying to walk out for help, and quite often they’re dead in just a few hours.”

  Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are blamed for most summer desert fatalities of this kind. Dr. Rawson stated, “The blood almost literally comes to a boil.”

  It was established at the trial that Duggai had deliberately abandoned the five men without water.

  In the absence of clear evidence of motive, Duggai was charged with five counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of the five scavengers.

  Rumors that Duggai’s motives involved Indian witchcraft and intertribal rivalry led Duggai’s court-appointed defense attorney to successfully petition for a change of venue from Barstow. The trial was held in San Francisco in March, 1972.

  A prosecution witness, Oro Copah, testified that his brother, Taxco Copah, one of the five victims and a member of the Yuma Indian tribe, had argued several times with Duggai about Indian “medicine” or witchcraft, each man claiming greater power for the spirits and demons of his own tribe. On two prior occasions, Oro Copah recalled, the arguments had led to blows. According to Oro Copah, the argument had not been resolved between them when the two men—Duggai the Navajo, Taxco Copah the Yuma—set out on July 3 in the pickup truck with their three companions.

  According to the testimony of the surviving brother, one topic of argument between the two men had been whether Yuma medicine or Navajo medicine provided greater protection against the “demons” of the desert. In his summation at the trial, San Francisco Prosecuting Attorney Edwin Garraty suggested that the motive for the crime was probably to be found in this dispute. “Essentially what must have happened,” Mr. Garraty told the jury, “is that Duggai and Taxco continued their argument throughout the trip into the proving ground, and finally Duggai must have said words to the effect, ‘All right, let’s find out just how powerful your medicine really is.’ And left the five men to survive as best they could.”

  Duggai was found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity. He was remanded to the custody of the psychiatric division of the State Department of Corrections for an indeterminate period.

  At the time of his esca
pe Tuesday night, Duggai had spent five years and four months in two successive state hospitals, having been moved to Cochino nine months ago on recommendation of psychiatrists who judged that it was no longer necessary to confine him in the maximum security facility at Sacramento.

  Duggai was born and grew up on the Window Rock Navajo Indian Reservation in northeastern Arizona. He is a graduate of an Arizona high school and attended the University of Arizona at Tucson for one semester. He was drafted in 1969 and served as an infantryman in Vietnam in 1969–1971. Prior to his medical discharge in early 1972 he underwent psychiatric treatment at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco for a condition that was described at his trial by Army psychiatrist Captain Samuel Mackenzie as “combat disorientation caused by an experience of involuntary participation in atrocities.” According to the testimony of Capt. Mackenzie and three other expert psychiatric witnesses, Duggai was “not capable of distinguishing right from wrong,” and was not legally responsible for his actions, and thus met the legal definition of insanity.

  By last night police had widened the dragnet for Duggai to include San Francisco and the Bay Area.

  Mackenzie looked at the grainy wirephoto at the bottom of the newspaper column. Like most mug shots it was barely recognizable: there was no life in the face depicted—it might have been a photograph of a death mask. It was a face that had closed up completely. He saw no sign of the bewildered pleading he remembered.

  Mackenzie hoped they’d nail him. Maybe it wasn’t Duggai’s fault but Mackenzie disliked him nonetheless: he remembered Duggai as a figure of sinister menace.

  He stayed in the tower until nightfall; every twenty minutes he swept for smoke with the glasses. When it was dark he climbed down and went into the cabin to eat. The dog followed him inside.

  He didn’t like the glare of a gas lamp; his light came from the cookfire and from a candle he’d stuck in the neck of a whisky bottle. He ate something that had come out of a can—five minutes afterward he couldn’t remember what it was. He mixed the remains of it into a bowl of Rival and Friskies and fed the dog; afterward he went back up the dark ladder and had a look around for fires. He spotted three or four campfires on the campground but nothing disturbing. At midnight he made another sweep and then went to bed.

  When he was half asleep he heard the dog stretch, her claws scratching the floor. He thought of the pneumatic brunette who’d wandered into the station two weeks ago wearing a knapsack and chewing a string of jerky out of a cellophane pack—wide-eyed and full of college-girl enthusiasm for ecological conservation and the healthy outdoor simplicities. She wanted to apply to the Forest Service when she graduated: she saw no reason why fire rangers had to be men.

  She wanted to know everything about the job. He’d answered her eager questions with a monosyllabic reluctance that only convinced her he was a lovable eccentric. She was ready to believe him heroic: she saw his isolation as a tremendous sacrifice. He did not disabuse her.

  She fixated on the whisky-bottle candlestick as a symbol of his resourceful conservationist ingenuity. That amused him—he’d never thought of it as anything but a lazy whim—and he had laughed at her. His laughter in turn struck her as true communication and she was tearfully passionate, delighted she had been able to bring him out of his hermit shell, and he made love to her four times in the one night—the only time in his life he’d ever accomplished that.

  In the morning she’d told him breathlessly that he had the great charm of one who didn’t fit into an acquisitive society.

  When she was ready to leave she became shy. “You are an Indian, aren’t you?”

  “Why?”

  “You look like an Indian. You talk like one.”

  “Navajo,” he told her, although it was only half true.

  She left to go back to summer school at Pomona. Mackenzie had been relieved to see her go.

  Where do you go on your days off?

  Smyley, you stupid oaf, I go to whorehouses. Where the hell do you think a man goes after he’s spent three weeks on top of a Sierra Nevada mountain in a fire-lookout tower?

  Finally he fell asleep.

  The dog woke him. He heard the thump of her tail against the floor.

  It triggered all his warning systems.

  Pitch dark. Nothing to make a dog wag her tail—unless there was someone else in the cabin.

  A voice spoke.

  “Yah’a’teh.”

  He recognized the Navajo greeting, the deep big voice in the darkness. The phrase meant Hello or It is good or just Nice day ain’t it but it had been spoken in an irony of vicious rage and he knew that voice.

  A match struck explosively. In its light he saw Calvin Duggai’s big face and the huge revolver.

  “Half your brains on the wall if you blink, Captain.”

  The dog lay drowsily with her head rising slowly. She stopped wagging her tail.

  The breath hung in Mackenzie’s throat. He watched Duggai light the candle in the whisky bottle. Duggai shook the match out slowly. The gesture was redolent with menace.

  “Some watchdog you got.”

  Mackenzie watched him.

  “What kind of a dog is he? Beagle?”

  “She. Retriever.”

  “Looks like a beagle to me.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Don’t humor me, you son of a bitch.” Duggai spat the words out like insects that might have flown into his mouth. His thumb drew back the revolver’s hammer. The click of sound was abrupt and loud. With a taste of coppery fear on his tongue Mackenzie noticed, with bleak pointless recognition, that the handgun was a .44 Magnum. Big enough to smash an engine block.

  Duggai gaped at him. It brought a great many things rushing back through Mackenzie’s memory. That way Duggai had of staring sightlessly with his mouth slack.

  The mahogany skin was suspended from massive cheekbones; Duggai had small haggard eyes high in his face and they were buried deep in their sockets like those of a sick dying man. Mackenzie saw pinched lines of strain around the corners of the open mouth. Duggai wore Levi’s and a quilted hunting jacket and heavy boots but he wore them uneasily as if unaccustomed to wearing clothes at all. They didn’t really fit; the Levi’s were too big at the waist, cinched in like a mailbag by a tight belt, and the jacket was tight on Duggai’s shoulders.

  “How the hell did you find me here?”

  “Made a few phone calls to San Francisco.” Duggai moved away from the candle—limping a bit. “It wasn’t hard at all. Not as if you was really trying to hide or anything.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “It don’t matter much.” Duggai picked up the khakis where Mackenzie had left them draped across the table. Mackenzie watched him go methodically through the pockets, one-handed. Duggai emptied everything out and then tossed the trousers on the bed. He made the same search through the pockets of the tunic. Then he threw all the clothes on the bed and stepped back toward the candle, staying to one side so that his shadow didn’t fall across Mackenzie.

  “Put them on.”

  “You want help, Calvin? Is that why you came to me?”

  Duggai pushed the muzzle of the .44 Magnum toward Mackenzie’s face. It mesmerized Mackenzie.

  “Put your clothes on, Captain.”

  When he was dressed he waited for the next instruction. Duggai saw the way his eyes wandered toward the candle. “Don’t think about it.”

  The dog was sitting up watching. She hadn’t moved from the spot—doubtless the tones of the two men’s voices had warned her. She was a very old dog and she had learned to stay out of trouble. It was one of the things Mackenzie had discovered about her in the months since she had wandered up to the cabin and adopted him.

  It was occurring sluggishly to Mackenzie that Duggai didn’t have it in mind to kill him right away. Otherwise why have him get dressed?

  “What do you want, Calvin?”

  “Be daylight in a little while. We go then.”

  “Go where?”
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  “A place.”

  “How long will we be gone?”

  “Long enough to settle things.” Duggai looked at him, open-mouthed.

  Mackenzie said, “I asked because of the dog. The dog’s got to be fed.”

  “The dog gets hungry, he can wander on down to the campground. Somebody’ll feed him down there.”

  “Or shoot her.”

  “Captain, shut up your mouth a minute.”

  Mackenzie tried to judge Duggai’s intentions but he had no inkling. One of his many failures was that he’d never been able to get inside that mind.

  The dog moved tentatively, shifting her hindquarters, finally getting to her feet. When that failed to alarm the newcomer she waddled slowly toward the bed where Mackenzie sat. She thumped her rump down to the floor and put a forepaw on his knee. Mackenzie scratched her throat. Anger of all sorts ricocheted through him but the most acute anger was on the dog’s behalf. He said a silent so-long to her and wished her luck.

  The candle was down to a stub, guttering in the bottleneck. But gray light came in through the window.

  “We wait till the sun’s up,” Duggai said. “They’d have noticed us on the road at night. Down by the campground. They’d have wondered.”

  “Calvin, what do you want?”

  Duggai’s eyes seemed to mirror disgust and impatience. “What the hell do you think, beligano?”

  Beligano. White man. The Navajo word rattled around his skull with all its associations. But none of them connected with anything that told him what Duggai might have in mind.

  “Calvin …”

  “Shut up your mouth.”

  The light grew. Duggai blew the candle out. For a little while the dead-candle stink filled the room. Duggai opened the rickety wardrobe cabinet and took a wire coathanger out. He stepped on the hook and pulled the wire out straight and tossed it on the blanket beside Mackenzie.

  “Twist one end around your right wrist. Fasten it good and tight.”

  “Why?”

  “Do it, Captain. Just do it.” Duggai’s voice trembled with rage.