Fear in a Handful of Dust

Jay stood up in his hole. “Maybe we should run?”

“No.”

“I’m frightened.”

Jay’s head disappeared. Mackenzie got down behind the creosote. He made himself small and clutched both knives. Maybe this could work after all. Maybe this would end it.

He waited for the truck.

He heard the straining engine and then he saw it come. It emerged over the last ridge and lurched right toward him. When it was still a hundred feet away he made out Duggai’s big face through the dusty windshield.

They’d made a confusion of tracks in the area with their digging and eating and exploring. The truck went right on across it, right to the top of the ridge. For a moment Mackenzie thought it would keep going right by. But Duggai stopped the truck.

Mackenzie shrank. The truck’s door opened. Duggai stepped out, shook one leg out and pulled the Levi’s down from his crotch; he hitched at them with the flats of his wrists and reached into the truck. Mackenzie saw him lift out the rifle.

A pair of binoculars hung by a strap from Duggai’s thick neck. His filthy shirt clung to him like the skin of a prune. His dark wax face was neither angry nor anxious: it had a strange vacancy. The eyes were opaque. The desert had exacted a price from Duggai as well.

It was dazzling hot. Mackenzie itched horribly. He squatted motionless against the bush. Through its tangle of little leaves he had a fragmentary picture as Duggai walked to the tailgate of the truck and examined the area. Duggai took his time, knowing they were right around here somewhere.

He must have seen those open trenches we left. He must have picked up our tracks by the water hole.

One more day and we’d have beat him to the highway.

Duggai went back toward the driver’s door. It heartened Mackenzie: he waited for Duggai to get into the truck.

But Duggai only opened the door to toss the rifle inside. Then Mackenzie saw him lock the door. Duggai came away from the truck lifting the big Magnum revolver out of his belt.

He knows we’re not far enough away for him to need the rifle.

Duggai went prowling around very slowly. He didn’t go near any bushes from which he might be jumped. He stayed in the open and kept moving around to see things from new angles. He took his time: he had plenty of it. He tipped the hat back on his head.

The silence made it that much more unbearable—that and the flat expressionlessness of Duggai’s high cheeks. The twanging stillness brought the hairs erect on Mackenzie’s neck. The knives grew slippery in his fists.

Duggai would stand motionless for minutes at a time, jaw slack agape, nothing moving but the eyes set back in their deep weathered folds. Then he would move ten feet and search again. He would examine the earth right around his boots and then he would enlarge the circle.

Mackenzie breathed shallowly in and out through his open mouth. He remembered attacking the javelina. Just give me one chance, Duggai. One chance is all I need.

Terror got all mixed up in him with raging hate. He was willing, eager to kill.

Duggai moved so slowly. He was reading the things that the earth had to tell him. Sorting out tracks. By now obviously he knew exactly where the dugout pits were. He hadn’t approached within twenty feet of Jay yet. But he knew the excavations were there: he kept looking back at them.

The slow circles of Duggai’s progress hadn’t brought him near Mackenzie; Duggai now stood beyond the pits. He was looking the other way. If I had a gun I could blow his head off.

Mackenzie glanced at the truck. The rifle.… But he’d seen Duggai lock the door and pocket the key. What about the other door? No—Duggai wasn’t careless.

Get around behind the truck, he thought. Duggai’s got to come back to the truck eventually. Jump him then.

But Duggai would spot him if he moved.

Now Duggai turned and searched again, facing Mackenzie. After a time he seemed to satisfy himself that he knew the placement of things. He walked straight over to the pits and aimed the revolver down. Mackenzie thought he was going to fire.

Duggai jerked the barrel in a peremptory upward gesture and reluctantly Jay appeared, head and shoulders. His trembling was visible. Duggai jerked again. Jay, never taking his eyes off the gun, climbed quaking out of the pit and stood up.

Duggai came around the pit and jammed the revolver against Jay’s neck.

Then he spoke. His voice was matter-of-fact. “All right Captain, show yourself.”

There was nothing to do but obey.

He walked forward in slow defeat and tossed the brass knives to the ground and waited for Duggai to do whatever he intended to do. Mackenzie’s mind had gone blank now: he thought of nothing—he only watched.

“Good try, Captain. Real good.”

Jay pulled his head around toward Mackenzie, showing his tears. The fists at Jay’s sides were clenched like a child’s.

“You think I want to shoot you?” Duggai said. “That ain’t the way this works. Get on over to the truck now.” The Magnum came away from Jay’s neck and waggled toward the camper.

He wasn’t sure his legs would bear him. He staggered toward the truck: all muscular control was gone and his consciousness served only as a vessel for the reception of impressions. There was no will.

Duggai said, “Now strip.”

Mackenzie sat on the tail bumper of the truck and pulled the moccasins off. He had trouble untying the bow knot in the stiffened thong of the breechclout. When it came off he saw distractedly that it had left a deep red welt around his waist.

Duggai still had the coathanger wire with which he’d trussed them before. “I guess you know the drill by now. Right wrist.”

Mackenzie went blank then and was not aware of anything until he came half awake in the stifling box of the closed camper. He was sitting where he had sat before and Jay was on the cot beside him and they were tied to the truck hands and feet as they had been before. They were not gagged this time. Nor were they clothed. The truck was a furnace and it pitched him hard against his wire lashings but he didn’t feel the pain. He felt nothing at all. After a brief semiconscious interval he passed out.

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.