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“Can we move him into one of the holes without torturing him?”
“Maybe if all three of us carry him. One of us on the broken leg.”
“We’ll splint it tonight.”
“Sam—is there any point? Can he possibly live long enough to care whether it heals?”
“There aren’t any guarantees but we all took the Hippocratic Oath.”
“Earle was never an M.D.”
“Well he hasn’t got a vote anyway, has he.”
She said, “I didn’t think you were putting things to a vote.”
“I had to sound tough. We’d never get anywhere if Jay felt duty bound to dispute every instruction I gave.”
“We almost made it,” she said. He couldn’t tell if there was bitterness in her solemnity. “We were almost finding out how to be content together.”
“I didn’t come back by choice, did I.” He wheeled from her.
He heard her say, “What a grisly waste.” He went a few paces away and put the two brass shells down and beckoned to Jay, who came reluctantly out of the pit and walked forward with his eyes on the ground, toes curled protectively, avoiding stones and stickers.
“We’ll pick him up very carefully and put him in that nearest trench. Shirley takes the bad leg. Jay takes the good leg. I take the head and shoulders.”
“It’ll wake him up,” Jay warned.
“He can’t stay here.”
Even in his unconsciousness Earle Dana’s mouth was pinched into a prim pout. Very gently Mackenzie crouched down and got his hands under the shoulders. “Ready?”
“Wait.” Shirley was testing the leg, trying to find exactly where the break was without disturbing it. He watched her make her decision: she slid one hand in under the calf just below the knee and gripped the ankle with the other hand. “Now I’m only going to hold this leg. I’m not going to support any of his: weight.”
“Understood,” Mackenzie said. “You give the word.”
“All right. Slowly—now. Lift.”
Ever so slowly he pulled Earle’s shoulders up off the ground. Earle’s arms swung wide and flopped like dead wings. Jay had him under the small of the back with his left forearm; Jay’s right hand gripped the underside of Earle’s knee. In that ma
A sharp stone jabbed Mackenzie’s heel when he put his foot down but he couldn’t shift it without breaking the rhythm of their walk. He put his weight on it and went on.
They lowered him with infinite patience into the trench, climbing down one at a time with him.
It was when they put him down that something happened, a twist or pull that shot pain through Earle explosively: he cried out in a bellow that climbed to a scream.
There was instantly: the stink of excrement.
Earle blinked at them, heat-flushed, panting with agony and weakness and disoriented terror. “What—?”
Shirley touched his forehead with her palm. “Take it easy, Earle. Try not to move. Try to relax.”
“You’re burying me!”
“It’s to keep the sun off. Keep you cool.”
“Duggai—”
She said, “You two go on. I’ll talk to him.”
Mackenzie climbed out of the hole. He stood facing Jay across the open grave. Two grown men standing bare-ass naked with their privates dangling ludicrously. “Get under cover, Jay. Stay there until late afternoon. Sleep if you can.”
“And then?”
“Then we’ll find something to drink.”
“I’m already parched beyond belief.”
“You’ll make it.”
“Jay’s mouth twisted. “Sure. Hang in there. Keep on truckin’. Stiff upper lip. Act like a man. Mackenzie, aren’t you even just a little bit terrified?”
Mackenzie walked back to pick up the machine-gun shells. He took them to the farthest trench. He hadn’t finished scooping it out; he picked up his digging stone. The sun, early yet, prickled against his back.
He made himself dig with slow measured movements until it was deep enough. He had husbanded his energy; all the same he was panting in short bursts and oiled with sweat.
He lay down in the pit with the brass cartridge cases and the digging stone. He dug a plate-sized rock out of the wall: it would do for an anvil. He had no idea if it was going to work but it had to be tried because otherwise they’d be trying to chop open spiny cactus with bare hands and pulling Shirley’s hair out by the roots.
Lying back in the trench he squinted at the blazing sky. His tongue and eyelids were gritty. They had at best the chance of a snowball in hell, he thought, but he was a prisoner of his morality. Wonder stabbed him: his grandfather had taught him too well. I guess I’m a good man in spite of myself. A fine discovery now that it was too late to matter. He felt himself smile at the irony.
Leaning up on one elbow he began to work the brass.
9
He had only read about such things and the pit amazed him as the sun climbed. If anything, he felt chilled against the dark moist clay.
He knew it would be best to lie quiet until evening but there was too much that had to be done.
The brass was something he could do without leaving the trench.
The large rock served as his anvil. He stood one .30-caliber shell upright on its base. He upended the second shell and held it on top of the first one with the necks overlapping, slightly askew. He lifted the second rock and pounded it down.
The brass lips crumpled a bit. He hadn’t hit very hard; hadn’t wanted to chance ruining it.
He struck again. The lower rim crumpled more, bending in on itself, but the upper shell began to split and that was what he was after.
He pulled at the split with his fingernails but the metal was too hard for him. He placed the shells muzzle-to-muzzle again and hammered away, stopping after each blow to inspect the work. The split worked its way up the length of the shell, the second shell acting as a wedge driving deeper with each blow.
Each shell was about four inches long. When the split had traveled two-thirds the length of its casing he stopped hammering and tried to pull the two casings apart but they were wedged together and he had to think about that for a long sluggish time before he saw that he was going to need a third shell to finish the job.
He sat up slowly. The molten sun exploded in his face. What time? Nine o’clock? Couldn’t be much later than nine yet. Possibly only half past nine; hard to tell by the angle of the sun—his celestial navigation was rudimentary.
Worth a few minutes’ risk, he decided. He left the hole and went down the slope, remembering where he’d seen the other casings. He gathered three of them before he made his ginger way back onto the slope. In these few minutes the skin of his back had already begun to cook.
Approaching the trench he heard a groan higher along the slope. Earle.
Mackenzie went that way and crouched at the rim of Earle’s pit. The stench of excrement came up out of the hole. Earle was revolted by the fact that he had fouled himself; he wouldn’t look Mackenzie in the face.
Mackenzie climbed down, wedging himself into the narrow trench. “Roll over on your left side just a little, can you? I’ll get this out of here.”
Wordlessly Earle lifted himself on his right elbow until a wince of pain crossed his face.
“That’s high enough. Just hold it there a minute.”
He used the handful of shells as a digging tool to scrape around the moist pool of human manure. He dug in an arc and lifted the crumbling half-ball of earth, sliding it out from under Earle’s upraised knee, lifting it to the rim of the trench and setting it down there. It had taken several minutes and Earle sagged back in exhaustion.