“Take it easy now. We’ll get you splinted up tonight when it’s cool enough to move around. You’re going to be all right.”
“Any damn fool knows a man needs water to survive.” The clarity of Dana’s voice surprised him.
“We’ll get water. Where things grow there’s always water. Get some sleep.” And he left because he couldn’t stand talking to the man. He carried the earthen tray of excrement away and threw it up the slope and limped back to his trench and lay absolutely still until his pulse slowed and his breathing lengthened and the sweat cooled on his body.
He used one of the new shells to pry the split cartridge apart far enough to remove the case that had been wedged into it. Then he began to work with the split case. He hooked a new shell over it and worked it slowly back and forth. He lay back to do this work and expended his effort with miserly sloth. After a long time metal fatigue set in and the bent side broke off.
He laid the split shell on the anvil rock and began to hammer, using the second shell as a punch, flattening the long side of the split shell. He kept working until he was satisfied, not hurrying. In the end he had a knife.
Now he began to hone the blade against the rock.
He made three knives before he ran out of material—the fourth and fifth shells had been crumpled beyond repair in the workings. When he was satisfied with their sharpness he put them aside and looked up over the edge of the pit.
Far away to the north he saw the thin streamer of a high jet contrail. A small cactus wren flitted from shrub to shrub down on the flats. They would have to set out some sort of signals to attract aircraft. They could watch what the birds ate and eat it too; he knew of nothing in the desert that a bird could digest that would harm a man.
And the bird itself was food if you could catch it.
By the sun it was early afternoon. He lay back in his cool shelter and closed his eyes against the brightness of the sky; he tried to blank his mind because he needed to sleep but anxiety overcame him and he went pawing frantically around in his memories trying to find clues to survival.
He had camped out numerous times with his father on the reservation but it was nonsense to rely on atavistic mythology. He was no more a primitive wilderness-dweller than any of them. His last camping trip on the reservation had taken place thirty-six years ago when he was twelve years old; after that his father had gone into the army and two years after that had been killed by a Stuka in North Africa. His mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland who had run the church at Window Rock, had moved with Sam to Denver after the war and he had been back to the reservation only three or four times in all the years since, never for more than a day or two.
For all he knew there could be more survival knowledge in any of their heads than there was in his. Jay had done three years in the army in Korea; Earle Dana had been an air force chaplain; either of them might have been a Boy Scout. Even Shirley was something of an outdoor girl: her father had been a fanatical trout fisherman and the family had gone off far into Canada on angling expeditions that lasted weeks.
But I’m half Navajo by blood and I work in the forest nowadays and that’s supposed to endow me somehow with the powers of a Moses to lead them through this wilderness.
It was farce. The fall of a coin. He must have made some snappish remark, forgotten now, that had caught all of them—himself included in that crazy first moment—in the grip of the notion that Mackenzie had the answers. Mackenzie had the blood and the instincts. Mackenzie had been born in the desert. Mackenzie was invincible. Mackenzie would save their lives.
I’m older than any of them—a good twelve or thirteen years on Shirley, for God’s sake—it ought to be up to them to look after me, not the other way around.
But they’d abdicated. They’d embraced despair: it had been their first thought. Hopelessness. Surrender and die. He’d been the only one to fight it and that made him the leader.
For better or for worse until death do us part.
But what the hell do we do now?
10
He didn’t hallucinate but his mind jumped the straight track and he frittered hours away on meaningless calculations.
A hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit was what, fifty-one degrees centigrade?
They were in Arizona certainly—but where in Arizona? The state was nearly as big as all of New England.
Brass shells meant aerial gunnery practice but there’d been innumerable training bases in the desert during the Second World War and after. Davis Monthan outside Tucson. Fort Huachuca test range near Tombstone. Another one outside Phoenix—he kept trying to recall the name. A marine air station near Yuma. Another air force thing of some kind near Kingman. Another at Marana. Luke Air Force Gunnery Range. The Kofa Proving Ground. Florence Military Reservation. The Army Proving Ground at Yuma. Williams—that was it, the one near Phoenix: Williams Air Force Base.
Quit wasting time now—you haven’t got it to spare.
There was no saliva in his mouth to be drawn by the rolling pebble. He took it off his tongue and lay back breathing through his nose and tried to push away the tentacles of panic.
Time was so short. It was possible to die very quickly in the desert. The ancient rule of thumb was that a man could live at least three days without water but that was not true in the desert, where the sun and the sand-dry air and the furnace plains leached the body of its moisture. You could die in twenty-four hours. Duggai’s companions five years ago had died in less time than that. Because they’d been overcome by panic: they’d tried to hike, perhaps even tried to run. The desert had consumed them as fire consumes kindling. But even without exertion they’d have died by the second morning.
The ground pit might add an additional twenty-four hours to their lives now but the clock had started running early last evening when Duggai had given them their last drink from the canteen.
We’ll make it through tonight. But if we don’t get water we’ll die tomorrow before the sun goes down.
An early effect of fasting was urinary cleansing. That was a medical fact with which he was familiar. During the day he’d left the trench at least half a dozen times to urinate. He’d heard the others doing the same. By now Earle Dana’s trench probably stank of ammonia because Earle didn’t have the luxury of mobility.
It was tempting to hold it in as long as possible under the delusion that by retaining fluid the body held its grip on life that much longer but he knew that wasn’t the case at all—once the fluid had gone through the organs it was of no further use and the body only damaged itself by locking acid into the tract. So when the impulse overcame him he obeyed it.
But it would strike with ever increasing frequency until in the strong-stinking trickle of their final discharges there would be gritty little green crystals of pure uric acid.
By that time they would be too dehydrated to notice the pain.
If we get that far we’ll never come back from it.
He suspected it was self-delusion to hope they could sustain themselves for more than a few hours on cactus. It contained moisture to be sure. But not much. And it would contain enzymes and bacteria that could produce dysentery—cathartic and dehydrating reactions. Cactus might prolong life but certainly couldn’t improve it. To cheat Duggai’s hell they needed more than survival: they needed strength.
There was something. It caromed through shadows in his mind. Elusive. Maddeningly it shied from the light.
There was something and if he could remember it they might have water, they might live, they might win.
And he couldn’t remember it.
Reviewing the recalcitrance of Jay Painter’s despair, he fanned himself into new anger. Mackenzie had a terrible strong temper which he held under tight control whenever he could and as long as he could: once lost it was hard to regain. He had always envied Shirley the ability to get hot and quickly get over it. She and Jay squabbled all the time.
Audrey had been a woman of moods. In depresse
d hours she might snap at Mackenzie but it was a keep-away snap, not a preamble to a fight.
Sudden memory kicked in him. The five of them—and Duggai.
Audrey had not always been a somber girl but there’d been shadows here and there. They’d been married nearly ten years by the time he first met Shirley and Jay. By then it had led to the inevitable disenchantment but not beyond it—they’d still liked each other.
Audrey thought she had some Indian blood too: a great-great-grandfather or something. Once they’d gone to a cowboys and Indians movie and she’d winked at him afterward: Well we pret’ near won that one. She’d had a job then as factotum to a producer of TV commercials in San Francisco; Mackenzie had been stationed at Fort Ord. A base chaplain had married them and six months later he’d been transferred to West Germany and she’d had to quit the job. That had been the first obvious wedge.
After that he’d done tours in all parts of the world: Walter Reed and Fitzsimmons; the racketing madness of Tokyo; the shabby drear of Fort Bliss. By the time he came back from Indochina to the Presidio in San Francisco—1970—they weren’t yet estranged but they were like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while and had lost touch. It wasn’t so much that they inhabited different worlds—they inhabited the same world but different aspects of it. The view from beneath was a view in the dark: his last tour in Saigon had been an exercise in hopeless idiocy and he’d lost some of his capacity to enjoy things. They’d gone on trying to behave as if nothing had happened but there was a constraint between them that hadn’t been there before. Mackenzie had changed: his soul viewed things with repugnance, the laughter had gone out of him.
Then they’d assigned Duggai to him.
The army had taken Duggai out of his freshman university year because he was failing most of his courses and couldn’t sustain his draft deferment. To the extent that Mackenzie came to know him—it was never very far—it appeared Duggai must have been an amiable indifferent youth, a kind of red-skinned plowboy whose aspirations tended toward hunting, casual sex and the consumption of beer. A counselor in the reservation high school had inflamed Duggai’s parents with ambitions for the boy—lift him out of the reservation rut, give him a chance to make something of himself in the modern world; Duggai had packed off to Tucson and found himself lost in the academic grind.
Duggai was a born marksman, lifelong hunter, and when he scored at the top of his basic-training rifle class the army put him through a series of combat specialist schools designed to make a wizard killer of him. Race mythology to the contrary Duggai didn’t seem to have any particular warrior instincts; all he had was docile pliability—that and his uncanny skill with a rifle. He was indifferent to the power of authority but tended toward mindless obedience as the line of least resistance.
He had been shipped to Vietnam with a special combat team of saboteurs and snipers. He never exceeded the rank of private first class. He was equipped with a backbreaking assortment of telescopic and infrared accoutrements; his job was to kill people at incredibly long ranges or at night or in monsoons. In one of their sessions he mentioned offhandedly to Mackenzie that he’d assassinated one Cong officer in a fine drizzle at a distance they later stepped off to confirm it: “Eight hundred seventy-five yards. That’s over half a mile, Captain.”
Certain villages in the boonies tended to be friendly during the day and unfriendly at night when the Cong would infiltrate and receive the clandestine embrace of the villagers, sack and pillage whatever supplies the village had conned out of the Americans, then drain away into the jungle before daybreak. To pacify such villages the army assigned mechanics like Duggai to lie in ambush with infrared scope and silenced rifle—to pick off everything that moved in the village after midnight.
In therapy Duggai always skirted the details but Mackenzie forced him to go over the ground innumerable times in the course of several months. He judged that Duggai must have murdered more than a hundred Vietnamese from the night. Vietnamese people were very small to the eyes of a hulk like Duggai; women and men wore the same loose pajamas in the rural areas. Duggai was aware of the fact that a good number of his victims had been women and children and very old people: the heat image on an infrared scope seldom reveals the sex or age of the target.
Duggai had done his work with unquestioning obedience but nothing in his upbringing had steeled him to it and the nights of silent murder had a cumulative effect on even so rudimentary a psyche as Duggai’s. He began to disturb his tentmates with his nightmares. The nightmares trickled across into his waking hours: he hallucinated. As the subconscious rebelled, so the efficiency deteriorated. Finally Duggai was put into a base hospital for observation. The case had been kicked back up the line until finally he had been rotated back to San Francisco for major psychiatric overhaul. The department had implanted him in Mackenzie’s care because all Indian patients were assigned to him: something about empathy.
Duggai had a peculiar intellect. His aptitude tests showed extremely high scores on anything to do with simple logic, practical things, mechanics. Mackenzie tried to teach him chess—he seemed to have the attributes for it—and Duggai learned the game quickly but he played only when Mackenzie badgered him into it. Left to himself Duggai chose isolation. In the ward he could sit in a chair and stare at a point on the wall for hours.
School and army records indicated he had formed no friendships and few acquaintanceships. He was not paranoid; he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. He did not relate to other people at all; he seldom seemed to care what they thought or felt. It was as if they didn’t exist. To an extent he was a textbook psychopath isolated in solipsism. This was the most difficult syndrome to treat because the patient left no bridge open across which the therapist could approach him. There was no inner demand to make contact with another human. Duggai usually seemed aware of the existence of other people only to the extent that they annoyed or offended him or got in his way. He’d been reasonably polite to Mackenzie because he’d seen Mackenzie as his ticket out of the place but that was all.
Such patients had no curiosity about other people; it followed they also lacked any curiosity about themselves. The army’s psychiatric services packed in a great many Duggais—some of them suicidal, some incoherent; you couldn’t brainwash a farm boy into committing atrocities and expect it to have no effect on him afterward. But with a Duggai there was no possibility of goading the patient into insight. Feelings were to be obeyed and indulged but never examined.
There’d been no reaching Duggai. Because of the twitch of a government digit somewhere he’d been discharged—from the hospital and from the army—and Mackenzie had been relieved to see the last of him.
But then Duggai had gone brass-scavenging in the Mohave Desert; men had died; the change of venue brought the trial to San Francisco; and a bored defense attorney, court-appointed, went through the motions by seeking out psychiatric buttresses for his “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense. Mackenzie came forward willingly enough; testified as truthfully as he knew how; again that should have been the end of it.
Duggai—and the appearance at the trial of Earle Dana as an expert witness—had brought the rest of them together. Jay Painter initially came into it as a witness for the prosecution but his examination of Duggai bore out the results of Mackenzie’s and the prosecution declined to call Jay to the stand. When Duggai’s attorney learned of this he brought Jay over to the defense team.
Mackenzie met Jay for the first time in the courtroom.
Jay had asked Shirley to interview Duggai because it had occurred to him that Duggai might open up more with an attractive woman. Duggai hadn’t but the defense attorney, eager for all the help he could get, persuaded her to testify. The three of them were in court that day and afterward they went out to dinner. There was some speculation around the restaurant table about the fourth defense witness—a psychotherapist they’d all heard of, Earle Dana, regarded generally as a publicity hound and a quack. Their
own testimony was concluded but they agreed to meet next morning in the courtroom to listen to Earle Dana.
Dana had written six self-help books—How to Get the Most Out of Sex was the one that made them titter the most—and wrote a newspaper column of mental-health advice that was syndicated to several West Coast newspapers. He was not a doctor; apparently he was self-taught. He’d been a minister of some persuasion and had served as an air force chaplain for some years before resigning both his commission and the ministry to join a consciousness-raising cult in Southern California. Then apparently he’d begun to read books for the first time in his life and had been smitten by the relentless reasoning of some of the neo-behaviorists with their Skinner Boxes and conditioned-reflex therapy techniques.
The defense attorney had asked Earle to testify because of his notoriety; Earle had agreed because of the publicity. Most of Earle’s testimony had little to do with Duggai; it was a simpleminded advertisement for his brand of behavior therapy. “In many cases, the point is, other methods fail and our methods work.” And Shirley had whispered in Mackenzie’s ear: “So does torture.”
Then to their horror Earle had buttonholed the three of them on his way out of the courtroom and insisted on standing them to lunch. They’d had to listen to his nonsense for hours before they’d been able to break away.
Audrey met them after work at the St. Francis and the four of them had giggled over recollections of Earle Dana’s prim pomposities. On any psychiatric subject Earle was prepared to rush in where the best minds in medicine feared to tread. His brief appearance in their lives gave fuel for uproarious amusement. And because they laughed together they decided they loved one another; the foursome became an institution for a brief while: Jayandshirley, Samandaudrey.
Fear in a Handful of Dust Page 7