Fear in a Handful of Dust

by Brian Garfield

  Mackenzie lay stunned with disbelief and watched Duggai move toward Shirley Painter. Starlight raced along the knife blade.

  Duggai destroyed their clothes methodically. He took their wristwatches and rings and shoes and pulled their socks off. He threw everything into the truck. Then he dragged them naked, one by one, about twenty feet from the truck. Mackenzie’s hands were still wired together and took a great deal of punishment as Duggai dragged him across the rocky ground by one foot.

  Matter-of-fact and without much show of feeling Duggai stood above them. He folded the knife and put it away in his pocket and walked back to the truck. Mackenzie heard the door open; he didn’t hear it shut. A moment later Duggai came in sight again unzipping the long rifle case. He tossed the case into the truck and walked toward them working the bolt of the rifle. It was a big-game weapon with a large telescope screwed on top of it.

  Duggai balanced the rifle in his left hand while he used his right hand to untwist the wire that bound Mackenzie’s hands together. Duggai left him and crouched by Shirley. Mackenzie rolled up on one elbow and gently rubbed his wrists. His hands had no feeling in them.

  Duggai removed the wire from Shirley’s wrists and then from Jay’s; he stepped back and leveled the rifle.

  Mackenzie kept trying to clear his throat.

  At last Duggai spoke. “Now maybe you find out how much of a crime it is. Maybe you find out how crazy you got to be to want to live. I tell you one thing—whatever happens to you out here ain’t half as bad as what they do to a man in them hospitals. You remember this—at least I’m gonna let you die in dignity. But I’m gonna watch it happen.”

  Mackenzie saw Jay try to speak. Nothing came out of his mouth.

  Duggai’s rifle pivoted toward Mackenzie and he watched it bleakly. “You’re half Innun. I lived out there that time because I was Innun. Maybe you can live a while too. If you make it I’ll be waiting for you, Captain.”

  It was all Duggai had to say. He walked back to the pickup. Mackenzie saw him toss the twisted pieces of wire inside and close the back of the pickup. Then Duggai got behind the wheel and the camper lurched away. It was still running without lights and the night quickly absorbed it. Sound carried back for a while but then that was gone too.

  A low wind soughed in Mackenzie’s ears; there was no other sound.

  He was thinking, by two in the afternoon it’ll be a hundred and thirty degrees out here.

  7

  For an endless lethargic time Mackenzie sat shifting his naked buttocks on the hard ground and listening to the dwindling growl and rattle of the truck until finally the night absorbed it and there was nothing.

  He looked slowly at the others.

  Jay Painter was sitting up. A muscle worked at the back of his jaw. His thin body was a patchwork of tangled hair.

  A gust of dry air spun Shirley’s long hair around her face. She combed it away with her fingers and tossed it back with a shake of her head, an unconsciously impatient gesture. She was watching the darkness where the truck had disappeared.

  Earle Dana writhed slowly, chrysalis-like, not really conscious.

  Mackenzie slowly picked his way across the earth. Sharp stones made him hobble. He crouched by Earle. The man’s face, drawn with pain, was swollen on the left cheek where he’d fallen. The eye was puffy and closed, the flesh sickly dark. The leg—well, at least it wasn’t a compound fracture. No bone showed.

  Jay Painter began to cough. When the coughing subsided the silence became so intense that Mackenzie heard the crack of his own knee joint as he stirred. He stood up, feeling lances of pain here and there.

  Shirley spoke, her voice husky and cracked, hardly a voice at all. “He broke his leg.”

  “I know.” Speaking the words made him cough.

  Jay stared out into the night, brows lowered as if he were peering into strong light: with his head down and his eyes narrowed. Refusing to look at any of them. In a strange way it amused Mackenzie: they sat in deadly peril and they were reluctant to look directly at one another because of the embarrassment of nakedness. He fought down the impulse to laugh because if he began it could tip him over the edge of hysteria.

  He coughed again; he felt along the ground and found a pebble. When he straightened up he put the pebble in his mouth and sucked on it in an attempt to get the saliva flowing. He kept rolling it around with his tongue.

  Shirley said, “Shouldn’t we make a splint?”

  Jay’s head came up. “What’s the use?” The painful grating of his voice set Mackenzie’s teeth on edge. Jay went into a fit of coughing, recovered and finally spoke again: “What does he want from us?”

  “I guess he wants us dead,” Mackenzie said. He peered at the landscape, trying to decipher the dark terrain. Scrub sloped up along a series of eroded cuts toward higher ground. There was scattered vegetation: greasewood, catclaw, tufts of brittle grass, cactus in various configurations. Each bit of growth stood in lonely isolation, ten or thirty feet from its neighbors. For the most part the ground was hardpan and stones, cracked clay, alkali.

  “Sam.” Jay Painter’s voice hit him like the flat of a hand. He turned.

  Little pale patches of hate glowed around Jay’s nostrils. “You know a little about the desert, right? How long have we got?”

  “I don’t know, Jay. I guess it depends.”

  “That’s a crock.” Jay’s chin crept forward, querulous like an old man’s. Naked he looked a bit spavined. His torso was long and too narrow—like that of a fast-growing teenager who hadn’t filled out yet. Wiry hairs coiled on his shoulders and chest and belly and legs.

  Mackenzie thought, We’ve got to keep control. He moved closer to Jay because it was more difficult to appear calm when you had to raise your voice across a distance. Fragments of stone chewed at his soles. “We’re not carrion yet,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  Jay pushed a boyish lock of hair back from his eyes. He stared at his wife for a moment. Mackenzie followed the line of Jay’s glance. Shirley was brooding toward the earth ten feet ahead of her: she was standing upright now, fists clenched at her sides. Mackenzie thought how many times he’d coveted that body. Even now—cutting right through his terror—she had the power to excite him; he looked away, ashamed.

  Jay said, “How long can we last? Come on, Sam, what’s the point of lying? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight?”

  Mackenzie’s scalp contracted. In a bitter part of him he felt contempt for Jay’s despair. He regarded the desert disdainfully until Jay stumbled to his feet hefting a small rock in his fist.

  Mackenzie stepped back. “Easy. Easy. Gentle down, Jay, this may not be your last chance to die.”

  Shirley’s voice struck into it, small and crisp like a spark falling into gunpowder. “Put it down. You look ridiculous.”

  Jay’s face crumpled. He dropped the stone. Shirley was down on her knees now; she pressed her hands to her temples.

  Mackenzie turned away. For a moment he thought perhaps it was because he saw himself reflected too closely in Jay’s weakness. Then he realized that was no cause for shame. They were all human.

  Shirley kept looking at him—staring, he was sure, at his gnarled stomach muscles. After a moment her fiery eyes shifted toward her husband’s narrow caved-in body, hunched as he sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, genitals dragging ludicrously. He had sat down like that; now he stood up again. Every flicker of emotion was mirrored transparently on his long face. Something—an anguish of memory?—drove him striding away in inarticulate rage until he stamped on a sharp edge and fell, breaking the fall with the flat of a hand, sitting down hard, turning his head balefully to stare over his shoulder at Mackenzie and Shirley. “Why did he do this to us?”

  Mackenzie said, “We’ve always got reasons for killing each other, haven’t we?”

  Shirley went from her knees back onto her buttocks and sat up in unintentional imitation of Jay’s previous pose: she folded her arms around her upraised knees until her bre
asts flattened against her thighs. She had a long supple body, a fine waist, fashion-model legs. “Four years, five—how long, now? He must have been nursing a fixation about us. It’s long enough for casual hate to turn into an obsession.” She glanced at Jay—wry. “At least we know we didn’t make a mistake calling for his commitment. He’s proving his insanity right now.”

  Jay was offended. “Insanity’s a legal term. It means nothing. You know better.” He was barking at her unreasonably.

  “Well then, shall we sit and discuss him clinically?”

  Mackenzie said, “I don’t think we need to worry about his motives. We need to worry about his intentions. He intends to murder us—or let the desert do it for him, if you want it spelled out. He said he’d be watching and waiting. It’s a Navajo torture—all wrapped up in medicine and witchcraft and I guess some twisted ideas of the heritage that he’s clung to in distorted ways. His uncle was a shaman, remember? He’s got his head full of bits and pieces of the old medicine. Exorcising his own demons by destroying ours. It’s too mystical to make psychiatric sense. What’s the use talking about it? He put us here to die. That’s what we need to worry about.”

  Shirley said, “All right, he wants us to die. It doesn’t mean we have to accommodate him.”

  Jay laughed—a sour noise of bile. “Looks to me like he hasn’t left us a whole lot of choice.”

  Mackenzie half heard them. Their voices trailed off and they were both looking at him, waiting for his verdict, putting the responsibility on him: in a way they trusted him. And, in a way, he resented their trust. He doubted he could reward it.

  His words tried to plot the erratic course along which his thoughts moved. “We left the road about six hours ago, I guess. We could be fifty, a hundred miles from the nearest highway.”

  Jay kept rubbing his thumb across the pads of his fingers. “So?”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter. All it means is we can’t walk out of here.”

  Shirley said, “He wouldn’t let us anyway.”

  Jay nodded his head up and down like a puppet’s. “It’s hopeless. That’s what I’ve been saying. What’s the use of talking about it?” He threw his head back. “Nice and cool now. Too cold, really. The sun’s going to come up and then we’ll just curl up like strips of frying bacon. Anybody know any prayers? Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.…”

  Jay’s voice droned on.

  Shirley began silently to weep; her shoulders shook. Mackenzie felt powerless to move. He listened to Jay: “… Thy will be done …”

  Silence ran on for a bit afterwards and then with a dry chuckle Jay said, “Dust to dust.”

  Shirley shouted at him. “Shut up. You’re no help.”

  “Yes, my love.”

  “Oh Jay, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. So am I.”

  Then—it seemed belated to Mackenzie—Jay hobbled over to her and sat with her and they cradled each other. Mackenzie looked away, his throat hollow, stricken by loneliness. At least they had comfort in each other. Mackenzie thought, I was happy to live alone but how terrible to die alone.

  That was the ultimate fear and it kindled inside him a rage that took fire and seared its way into his mind until he bolted to his feet. His voice emerged, constricted, thin against the faint dry wind: “Barefoot creatures of the Stone Age. That’s what he’s reduced us to.” He filled his chest, arched his back, defied the sky. “Well God damn it they survived in the Stone Age.”

  Jay heard him and muttered a reply: “In a desert like this?”

  “What?”

  “Sam, for God’s sake we don’t even know where we are. We don’t know if we’re in Nevada or Utah or Mexico or Arizona or what.”

  “We can find out where the hell we are. It’s hardly the pressing problem at the moment.”

  “All right. I stand corrected. If it’s any comfort to you.”

  “We can live,” Mackenzie roared. “If we want to. We can.”

  Jay averted his face. “Sure. For a few hours. A day maybe. How much time have we got?” His voice was muffled against Shirley’s shoulder. “False hopes. You’re a sadistic bastard, Sam Mackenzie.”

  Shirley said, “At least listen to him. Don’t you want to know?”

  “No,” Jay said. “Yes.”

  “We can live.”

  Because Mackenzie said it quietly his words had force.

  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?”

&nbs
p; 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—running from east to west.”