Fear in a Handful of Dust

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 underpi

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 approach 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.