26
He had been in a dark place. The sudden daylight whip-lashed his eyes. He was aware of it when he was dragged from the truck and pitched to the ground on flank and shoulder and the back of his head: aware but as if it were in a nightmare—divorced from physical sensation. A boot in his kidney rolled him over on his face and he knew the texture of hard ground against his cheek. His eyes were opened to slits—he saw the blazing earth, out of focus. His wrists and ankles were freed. Footsteps tramped away: heavy boots treading hard. The mesh and whine of an engine. Cluttering, it drove away. Then there was silence.
He rolled over and the pebbled ground was agony against the charred flesh of his back. That was what woke him: the pain.
The sun was straight overhead. It filled the sky, blinding him. His head lolled to the side. He saw the desolate earth—sand, clay, rock, scrub, cactus. A flat plain stretching miles. Dry weathered mountains. Pale haze of sky.
How long had he lain unconscious in the noon sun?
The rage to survive pried its way into him. It propelled him across the desert on elbows and knees to the shade of a bush. His arrival spooked a tiny lizard: it scooted away.
Dig, Mackenzie.
No thought of past or future; no awareness of the cause of his presence here. He thought only of life. He searched the ground and found a stone and began to scrape unthinkingly at the soil.
Dusk; but the intolerable heat lingered. He lay on his belly, his cheek on his bicep—the arm had gone to sleep and tingled when he stirred.
He dragged a hand across his mouth and felt the prickly beard and mustache. His eyes had no moisture in them: he lifted himself and peered through painful wedges.
The empty land stretched away in all directions. He turned a full circle. It seemed he had seen this landscape before. Was it familiarity or only the fraud of déjà vu?
The rusty brain began to function after a fashion. Duggai dumped me out here. Alone. Dumped Jay somewhere else. So that we can’t help each other. Punishment for our attempted escape. We’ll die quickly now—Duggai must be losing patience.
Shirley—Earle. What’s he done with them?
What difference does it make?
Lie back, Mackenzie. You may as well die fast.
He blinked rapidly, trying to moisten his eyes. Yawned. It worked a bit; he was able to keep them open. In the fading light he inspected the horizons.
In the west the twilight silhouetted a sawtooth skyline he knew he’d never seen before. In the south nothing—flats fading away into darkness. To the north some nondescript mountain clumps, nothing to distinguish them. To the east—he gazed that way a long time. Something nudged his memories. It was only a range of hills five or six miles away but it held his scowling attention.
It took the sluggish mind a long time to work it out. There—the summit dotted with boulders; there beside it the adjoining summit that sloped up to a flat crown and fell away steeply on the far side. The angle of view made the contours different, foreshortened them; but he looked again—finally he was certain. That was the place where Duggai had his camp. Swing around to the south and it would assume the shape of a human foot. The one beside it was the summit that had resembled a hogan-studded village.
It stood to reason. Duggai wanted to keep his victims in range.
So he brought me all the way back.
It meant Shirley’s camp was east-by-southeast from here. Four or five miles.
The burned skin of his back had been tightened by the sun until it felt as crisp as fried bacon: every movement was shockingly painful. His buttocks were too raw to sit on and the sole of his right foot had been exposed as well because of the position in which he’d fallen.
He stood on one foot in his cramped foxhole and closed his eyes tight: he had to fasten his will like steel hoops around his emotions—he had to drive fear and pain from him.
Then he climbed out of the hole and began to walk.
In an ungainly manner he lurched across the desert without thought. He was no longer rational. He simply hated. Any object excluded all others from the space it occupied: there wasn’t room for anything else: his hate filled every crevice. It kept him alive.
Dimly it occurred to him there was no campfire ahead. But he kept going.
His feet were puffy and splitting. He trod pebbles and spines. Moonrise and a tracery of clouds behind him gave a hint of time’s passage. He walked toward the moon.
After a while he realized he’d been talking out loud—he didn’t know how long he’d been doing it; he heard the steady lackluster monotone, rhythmic blasphemous oaths—a dark fugue of profanity, a dirge. He didn’t silence himself. The metered curses were like a drummer’s pace.
Intransigent rigidity kept him upright and moving. He had no objective and no defined purpose—journey for its own sake. He knew the objective would make itself known to him when its time came.
Thirst swelled his tongue. Now and then he stumbled. He moved slowly but he moved. The moon climbed; its light changed the hills—their shadows settled and shifted; now and then he looked up at the summits and marked his progress by the disappearance of another star behind the hills.
The prints he left behind were darker now: his feet were bleeding.
From a low well of instinctive information came the realization that the organism had to be sustained—that self-destruction was not an acceptable answer. He stopped.
He knelt at the altar of a barrel cactus with a stone in his hands: it was large and heavy, requiring both hands and the remaining strength in his arms to lift it overhead. He slammed it down, crushing the top of the cactus, pulverizing it. Gently with his fingers he plucked the big hooked spines out of the mess. Then he scooped up cupped handfuls of pulp and sucked the juice from them.
He broke fronds off a creosote bush until he had an armful of them. He carried them twenty feet to a scrubby manzanita and began to wrench small branches off the red-barked bush, twisting and tearing them. He was able to strip lengths of bark off the branches and he used these cords of bark to bind the creosote fronds to the soles of his feet. The small oval leaves of greasewood were brittle but they crushed quickly underfoot and the fronds filled with dusty clay as he walked, cushioning the ravaged feet: the fronds flapped like snowshoes and every so often he would pick-up a jagged pebble which he would have to remove.
At intervals of two hundred or three hundred feet the manzanita lacings would break and he would replace them: he crossed the desert from manzanita to manzanita.
The flats were never flat: it was uphill and downhill always. He would lose sight of the hills for a while and climb to a height from which they were visible and descend through another blind trough.
At normal walking pace a man could cover three miles in the space of an hour. Mackenzie had started walking when darkness came. The moon had risen. Midnight had come and gone. He kept walking. Perhaps he had crossed three or four miles.
There was urgency but it wasn’t the kind that would be assuaged by hurry: if he burned his machinery out too soon it would defeat the purpose. The pace had to be steady but slow enough to conserve the pittance of fuel remaining in the engine. His speed across the desert was that of an infant just learning to walk. But it was enough.
The configuration of the hills became familiar and this informed him he was near the camp. He didn’t know whether he would find anyone alive there. He had no expectations. It was something he had to do; he did it without curiosity.
He found his way to a point of ground a few yards higher than its surroundings. From here he examined the land ahead of him in order to locate the camp: it had to be nearby.
It took time and minute examination but finally he placed the site off to his right. He could see the outline of a ridge and knew it was the high ground over which he had crawled the night he’d crept out of the camp.
Therefore the camp lay beneath it just out of his range of vision: one hump intervened.
He went that way, lurching from fo
ot to burning foot.
Perhaps half an hour later he came up out of a shallow dip and crossed a rising wave of earth and saw the familiar slope before him. Down there to the left they had strung their jackrabbit snares; a bit above and to the right he identified the paired clumps of brush that marked the ravine where they’d dug the still. The ravine snaked up toward the top—that was the route he’d taken when he’d left.
He still had several hundred yards to cross. It was too soon to make out human figures in the moonlight unless they moved. He glanced at the mountain foot: was Duggai watching him now?
He came up into the camp on his tottering raw feet. A twinge of alarm quivered in some distant part of him. He was certain he was going to find them both dead.
There were no snares along the jackrabbit run. He climbed. The pit of the solar still was still there where they’d dug it in the floor of the ravine but the plastic sheet was gone. He went across the ravine toward the foxholes they’d dug: he could see the dark rectangular outlines like shadows on the ground.
The trenches were empty.
He blinked very slowly and looked all around him. There on the ocotillo they’d hung jackrabbit strips to dry. The solitary barrel cactus they’d pulped. The manzanita they’d half destroyed to make splints for Earle’s leg.
Something drew his bleary attention. He moved to one side to get a better view past the greasewood clump.
He found them there.
27
They lay naked, the three of them curled up very close to one another; at first he thought they were dead. Then he saw Jay stir.
Jay?
Jay shot bolt upright with tight expectant eyes, ready to cringe. Then recognition changed the skeletal features behind the dark beard. “My God.…”
It woke Shirley. She blinked and scowled. “Sam?”
“We thought he must have killed you.”
Mackenzie dropped to his haunches, braced a palm against the earth, rolled onto the side of his hip and lay with them. It was the first time he’d taken his weight off his feet since nightfall.
Both of them stared at him as if at an unfamiliar object. Shirley’s eye sockets had gone charcoal black. The flesh had sunk to pits under her cheekbones. She was very old—shriveled. “Sam.”
He’d spent himself. He let his head drop onto his arm. Shirley croaked at Jay: “Get him some water. A cactus—something.”
Gray streaks rippled above the eastern horizon. Mackenzie tried to speak. It came out in a hoarse whisper. “Earle.”
“He’s alive,” she said. “Barely.”
In sleep behind the tufted beard Earle’s mouth was composed into a spasm of clenched teeth and drawn narrow lips. The splinted leg was propped on a bed of creosote boughs.
The cropped red hair lay matted on Shirley’s skull. In the early light her eyes burned like gems. She spoke with difficulty. “He came in the truck. When was it? The night before last it must have been. He took everything. The meat, the hides, the knives you made. He took our shorts and moccasins. And the plastic.”
So Duggai had got suspicious when he’d seen only two of them moving around in camp. He’d come down to find out. He’d stripped them of everything and then he’d taken up the trail. It had taken him thirty-six hours to track them. Over the hills, down the game track, past the water hole, north along the desert. He’d found them and he’d brought them back like truants.
“He came back yesterday. He dumped Jay out of the truck and drove away. He never said a word to any of us.”
Mackenzie’s vision blurred. He closed his eyes. It occurred to him that it was the end of his life and that death was simply the end of a long journey around himself: it had not gone from place to place but merely from one point in time to another. There should be more than that, he thought.
Then he was aware of an important fact.
Duggai had brought Jay back to the others but he’d taken Mackenzie far out on the desert and isolated him there. Why?
Because I’m the one he’s scared of. I’m the one who can beat him. I’m the alter ego of his schizoid fear—I’m the Navajo.
Jay returned, hobbling on the outsides of his feet with bowlegged pain, treasuring in his palms a heap of cactus pulp. “Here.” His eyes were strained with some emotion or other, his mouth was tight and straight, he looked cross and sulky.
While Mackenzie savaged the pulp Jay sat looking at him, twisting his knuckles while his face slowly became a twisted venomous ugly mask of fury.
It was enough to astonish Mackenzie. “What’s the matter with you?”
Jay raised a fist as though to strike him—not as a man ordinarily lifted a fist but high above his head: as though it held a wrathful righteous sword.
Then a great sob burst from Jay and he plummeted away, rolling on the earth until his back was to them. He curled up fetally: his body shook with its outpouring. The sound of his weeping pulsed and shook.
Shirley glanced at Mackenzie. He saw a fleck of something there. Then she went weakly to Jay; she cradled him and Jay subsided into quietude. Stroking Jay’s head she watched Mackenzie—it was almost defiant.
He blames me, Mackenzie thought, and she’s picked her side.
“Why didn’t you build a fire?”
“There didn’t seem any reason to.” Her expression was stained with hopelessness. Prefiguration of death. “Nothing to cook. And we hadn’t the strength.”
“You’ve given up,” he said accusingly.
“We’ve had it.”
“No.”
“What’s the point in lying?”
“One more day,” he said. “Make it through one more day.”
Jay rolled his face toward Mackenzie. “What for?”
“One more day. Please.” He begged them, pleading with his eyes.
Jay averted his face then. He clutched at Shirley and she held him: together they looked as awkward as beings that might have crawled out of a wreck. Neither of them looked at Mackenzie; neither of them responded to his plea. He said again, in desperation, “Just one day more.”
Through the suppurating day he lay half awake in the pit. The pit had become the familiar chamber of his environment: it was as if he had always lived in it—a troglodyte in the exclusiveness of his castaway cave of pain.
Degraded to cave-floor essentials his body did nothing more than absorb oxygen and send halfhearted signals of agonies along the nerves. The mind, reduced to its underpinnings, groped toward occasional contact with existence and cognition.
Now and then lucidity welled up in him like a seismic bubble in a sulfur pool. It stretched its skin and burst; he waited then for the next one. In such moments he had bemused visions of himself. He pictured himself as something with primitive claws and no eyes—scrabbling blindly at the hot stone walls that confined it. In a fantasy he felt himself adrift: the floor of the pit became a raft on which he floated gently across calm water until it was drawn into the tubular eye of a whirlpool—then it fell and he continued to lie on it and above him the sky dwindled to a dot of pleasantly pale blue light. Another time he saw himself as a half-crushed dung beetle with half its legs crippled dragging an immense burden across an endless barnyard.
In a moment of sanity he reflected on the passage of images through his mind and it occurred to him that in all these fantasies there was a common aspect: in each of them he had pictured himself as life.
Rickety with weakness he climbed from the pit into starlight with no recollection of the passage of evening. It was not yet late: the moon hadn’t risen.
There was a heavy breeze. It whipped sand against him, stinging the sunburned flesh. He repaired his creosote shoes. Somewhere inside the rigid cloture of his mind a purpose had been provoked: he knew what it was with such intimate completeness that it didn’t need articulation and never lifted to the surface of his consciousness. It was simply the engine that drove him and it was not to be questioned.
In the sound of the wind he didn’t hear Shirley’s approac
h and he was startled when she said, “Sam?”
The wind batted the tufted remains of hair around her forehead. She kept pushing it back with her hand. He could almost see the bones of her fingers and wrist.
She said, “You’re alive.”
“I am.”
“Can you have a look at Jay? I’m worried about him.”
He crossed the slope with her. Jay lay in his hole and it was too dark down there to see anything. Mackenzie climbed down and lifted Jay by the shoulders.
Jay’s head rocked back loosely. He stared at the sky, his eyes comatose.
“Is he—?”
“He’s breathing.”
He did not have the strength to lift Jay bodily out of the foxhole. He left him propped there sitting against its interior. He climbed out and went off a few paces. Shirley followed him until he put out a detaining hand. Then he turned and spoke: he kept his voice right down. “Keep them alive.”
“How?”
“Build a fire. Cut cactus. Do what needs to be done.”
“What for?” she wailed.
“Do it. Look at me when I’m talking to you.” It was a savage whisper.
“I can’t. I just can’t any more.” Her eyes came up; her mouth worked—she was screaming soundlessly. Arms dangling, she cut a shabby hunched figure.
“Do it. Stay alive. Keep them alive until I get back.”
“It’s no use.”
“Do it.” He walked away from her.
He found his way to the dugout where Earle had interred himself. Earle had hiked himself up by his hands and sat on the rim of the pit with his bad leg outstretched along the ground. Somehow he lived. The fair skin was mottled with open sores; the small mouth was cracked away from the teeth; loose flesh hung without resilience from throat and belly and arms; yet he looked upon Mackenzie with recognition.
“Want you to stay alive, Earle.”
“It’s God’s will, I believe.”
“That’s right—that’s right. Maybe you can help Shirley build a fire.”
Fear in a Handful of Dust Page 19
