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He wished he believed them himself.
“By ten o’clock if you lie naked in this sun you’ll fry.”
Jay straightened. “There’s bushes all around. Creosote, whatever. There’s shade.”
“Not enough to do any good. One day and we’d have third-degree burns.”
“You’re the Indian. You tell us.”
Mackenzie drew a long breath deep into his chest. It shuddered going in; he made fists to conceal the tremor in his fingers. “I don’t know why I should make much effort to help you if you don’t want to listen to me.” The words seemed inadequate, so lame he immediately regretted having said anything at all.
Jay brooded at him. “Tell us.”
Mackenzie pretended to take his time as if thinking it out. His mind raced as if it were a motor that had been turned loose to freewheel: straining at such speed that it felt sure to burn itself out. Thoughts exploded one on top of the other. It was panic, he told himself, and panic was the one thing he had to push away: panic was the one thing he couldn’t show them.
The infection of Jay’s weakness kept unbalancing him. What’s the point after all? We’re naked in a waterless plain, nothing but scrub and rocks and hardpan, no water in forty or a hundred miles; by afternoon it’ll be an oven and two days from now we’ll be clean white bones.…
A chill ravaged him. To cover it he stood straight up and turned a full circle as though absorbing information through his senses and coming to decisions.
Finally he had his voice under control. “First thing’s to put priorities in order. One, counter the heat. Two, water. Three, take care of Earle’s broken leg. Four, food. There’s a lot more but if we can’t handle these four we’ll never have time to worry about any of the others because we’ll be dead. The thing to do is solve one problem at a time. Solve each problem and give ourselves time to solve the next one.”
“He makes it sound so easy. Any child could do it.”
“Any Navajo child probably could,” Shirley said.
Mackenzie said, “Duggai could.”
“Duggai had a truck,” Jay said, “and he had his clothes on. And you’re not an Indian the way Duggai’s an Indian.”
“I can try, at least.”
Shirley said, “Sam spent summers on the reservation with his father when he was a boy.”
Jay talked through his teeth: “Maybe—maybe, sure, but Sam’s still forgetting one thing. Sam’s forgetting how pointless it is. Seems to have slipped his mind that Calvin Duggai’s waiting right out there with that elephant gun just in case we manage not to die of thirst or heat or snakebite or exposure. So what’s the point—Sam?”
Shirley said, “You’re really asking for it, Jay.”
“Why shouldn’t I go out now, standing up? At least I’d enjoy trying to beat his head in. It looks pretty attractive when I think about the alternatives. Shriveling in the sun waiting for the buzzards to eat my eyes. Or crawling out of here somehow after God knows how much suffering only to find Duggai standing there just this side of the water. Watch old Duggai pick us to pieces one bullet at a time until he gets tired of playing cat games and takes pity on us and finishes us off with a hive of ants or a scalping knife or whatever he’s got in his twisted mind.”
Mackenzie’s temper bubbled. “It doesn’t have to go according to Duggai’s scenario. We don’t have to play his game.”
“Out here in this place without a stitch of clothes or a drop of water—if we’re not playing Duggai’s game then whose the hell game are we playing?”
“Mine.”
“What?”
He was faced away from them. His eyes were squeezed shut against the flood of fear and anger. He had to wait a bit before he could answer. But he needed the rage, needed to nurse it and encourage it because it could provoke him to survive.
“We’ll settle up with Duggai. Well do it our way, not his.”
“And somehow that doesn’t entail our scrabbling in this dirt in some misbegotten attempt to survive?”
“We’ll scrabble,” Mackenzie said. “We’ll survive.” His fingernails cut into his palms.
“That’s exactly what Duggai wants.”
“He wants to win,” Mackenzie said. “He doesn’t want to lose.” He wiped his face and turned, looked at them. “In my game he loses.”
“Mackenzie, all right—all right. What the hell is your game?”
“We start by solving one problem at a time. We dig.”
“Dig what?”
“Our graves.”
“Listen to him, Shirley, he’s cracked.”
“I’m listening to him.”
Mackenzie said, “I’ll keep you alive if I can. But it’s my game now. We’ll play it by my rules. I’m the captain of the team—I don’t put decisions to a vote. Understood?”
It brought Jay halfway to his feet. “Just who do you think you—”
Mackenzie’s voice climbed to an unreasonable pitch: he fought it down. “I’m the one who’s going to keep you alive.”
He saw Jay’s teeth: a rictus grimace or a bitter smile; he couldn’t tell which.
“From this point on talk only when you have to. Talking dries the tissues, makes you thirsty.”
He glanced at the sky. “We’ve got maybe half an hour to first light, less than an hour to sunrise, less than four hours before it’s too hot to move. That’s our deadline. We’ve got to be dug in by four hours from now.”
“Dug in.” Jay parroted it hollowly as if trying to absorb the information through an opaque screen.
“The objective is to keep cool and keep quiet through the heat of the day. We’ve got to conserve body fluids. We’ll dig pits. Three feet deep. A trench for each of us—ru
He waited for protest. Shirley only met his stare and in the poor light he couldn’t make out her expression. Jay picked at a toenail. Mackenzie said, “If it’s aligned due east and west the sun will never reach the bottom of the trench. We’ll be in shade all day long. Avoid sunburn and heat dehydration. Three feet below ground level the temperature can remain as much as sixty degrees cooler than it is on the surface.”
“Who told you all this?”
He’d read it somewhere in a book. He didn’t admit it. “It’s something all Navajo daddies teach their children before puberty.”
“What do we use for tools?”
“Rocks. Sticks. Your hands.”
“Straight down? This stuff’s like concrete.”
“Dig.” Mackenzie said it without force.
“Why not start walking? We could head for the mountains. If we’ve got four hours surely we can find good shade. A cliff facing north or a clump of trees or something.…”
“How far could you walk on bare feet, Jay? How much fluid have you got in your body that you could afford to burn up getting there? That’s what kills faster than anything else in this desert.”
“And digging like beavers won’t burn it up?”
“Dig slowly. Don’t work up a sweat.” Mackenzie’s hand described an impatient arc. “Which way would you walk? Forget it. It’s better to dig here—those mountains are solid rock.”
Jay studied him, full of resistance. “How do we know which way to align the trenches?”
Mackenzie found the Dipper, traced it toward Polaris. “That’s the North Star. Guide on that.”
“What about Earle?”
“We dig four trenches.”
“Why not one long one?”
“Body heat. And it’s bad enough to breathe the stink of your own sweat.…” He couldn’t face lying in the same hole with the rest of them.
There was a beat of silence. Jay said, “All right. We’ll dig. But what about water?”
“One thing at a time.”
8
While they still had the stars for a guide they scratched outlines in the earth. Mackenzie found an oblong rock that came to something like a point. He gave it to Shirley and hunted for more; finally they began to dig.
The top layer crumbled easily and took them down three or four inches but after that it was rocks and clay; it was like trying to dig through an adobe wall. He had to force himself not to slam and whack away at it. He used the rock as a pickax, breaking up the surface and then carrying away the loosened clots with his hands.