Fear in a Handful of Dust

by Brian Garfield

  Jay said, “I’ve always resented living in a society that requires me to profess a belief in a nonexistent God in whose name people can justify any heinous crime they choose to commit. Now we’re out here away from all that—a whisker away from dying and this idiot’s trying to lay that crap on me. It’s something I damn well don’t need right now.”

  Earle withered a little.

  Mackenzie discovered a second animal out along another vector from the fire—he saw the pink reflections of its eyes.

  Shirley had seen them; now Jay turned to watch.

  A kit fox came in plain sight and sat fascinated by the fire twenty yards from them.

  Opposite the fox the pink-eyed one moved into view more cautiously, materializing tentatively: an antelope jackrabbit, huge ears erect, nose twitching. It sat up like a kangaroo and emitted a series of faint guttural barks. Its big feet drummed a fast tattoo: Mackenzie could feel the vibration.

  It was talking: inviting others to come see the fire. Mackenzie began to smile.

  “There are answers for everything.” Jay kept his voice right down but it was harsh. “It happens we have very few of them but that’s no reason to be an abject fool about it.”

  The fox sat still, no bigger than a squirrel, far too small to threaten the jackrabbit: the herbivore and the carnivore sat in the same circle of light and studied the mystery of fire.

  Jay’s monotone droned fitfully. “The thing that boggles the mind is how every religious fanaticism has to be so hostile to all the other fanaticisms. So you have endless atrocities committed by one fanaticism against another. Even if you were stupid enough to concede that one of them might be true—out of all those thousands of idiotic faiths not more than one could possibly be true. So all the others are false.”

  Shirley looked away as if Jay’s maunderings embarrassed her: they seemed to reveal too much about Jay. He was reverting to banalities: attacking Earle, who was the most defenseless of them—and Mackenzie, when he felt a wave of anger against Earle, realized they were like a flock of mindless chickens who would suspend their pecking order just to hammer a sick member of the flock to death.

  Mackenzie’s square brick of a hand lifted against the fire and splayed, drawing their attention. “Quiet down, Jay.”

  The big jack thumped several times, patterns of sound. Something swept past over their heads—owl or bat. For a while it was a studied tableau: four naked humans, the fire; fox and hare watching from the edge of the circle of firelight.

  There was bile in Mackenzie’s throat; his stomach knotted with the hot sour pain of acute hunger. He watched the flux and flow of Jay’s expressions—Jay’s grip on reason was failing; he was swaying with the conflicting pressures of raw feelings. It was inevitable and Mackenzie felt the same temptations in himself: the physical reduction to elemental atavism demanded a parallel reduction in emotional behavior but it was something they had to fight because if they gave in to it they were lost.

  Jay laughed dispiritedly. “What difference does it make. I’m sorry, Earle—I’m taking it all out on you. Forgive me.”

  “I don’t mind, Jay. It’s circumstantial influence.”

  “What?”

  “The Pavlov experiments.” Earle’s eyes were shut; his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. “Present an animal with an insoluble problem—put a rat in a maze that’s got no exit. He’ll hallucinate eventually. Isn’t that what Duggai’s doing to us?”

  “How the hell do you ever reconcile religious nonsense with that behaviorist nonsense? Seems to me the two are mutually exclusive.”

  “Never mind.” Earle’s head rolled back. “I’m too tired.”

  Mackenzie heard the frightened squeal when something hit one of the noose snares.

  Jay gathered his legs.

  “Keep quiet,” Mackenzie murmured.

  The squeal from the darkness had agitated the fox; it backed away to the very rim of darkness so that the bright dots of its eyes were surrounded by nothing more than shadows suggestive of its outline. The jackrabbit sat up alert, ears twisting.

  Mackenzie kept his face averted from the fire and his eyes squinted down to slits: he didn’t want night blindness. What had the snare trapped? Rabbit—or only a mouse?

  He pushed two small logs deeper into the fire. There was the distinct hoot of an owl not far away. He watched the jackrabbit. It carried its forepaws high and limp-wris-ted; the nostrils and ears kept wiggling. Irrationally Mackenzie kept listening for the truck again.

  Shirley murmured, “We ought to be telling ghost stories.”

  Silence again and then it was broken when the jackrabbit made its heel-and-toe tattoo. It made Mackenzie think of the ceremonial dances: the repetitive hypnotic chant, shuffling horny feet stamping the beaten earth, heads jerking, arms pumping, outcries to the knee-high gods of the pantheistic world.

  For Mackenzie’s paternal grandfather, whom he’d never known, it had been a twenty-five-mile walk to the trading post; the old folks had to carry water in buckets from a well half a mile away from the hogan. And their son, Mackenzie’s father, the silversmith, had never been a citizen: in Arizona Indians only got the vote in 1948. Tsosi was dead by then.

  Why am I thinking about all that?

  He heard the swoop of movement in the air, a brief falsetto squeak; the labored beating of wings. The owl had nailed something.

  The night was alive all around them: things grunted and moved through the brush. Through hooded eyes he watched the lone jackrabbit. It hadn’t moved from its hypnotized place.

  Then there was the definite smash of something big enough to make a racket in the bush: a sudden scrabbling—something had been hooked. It scratched to get loose. Not far away.

  The racket was enough to break the jack’s spell: it bolted away into the night.

  Mackenzie gripped the knife and walked away from the fire.

  14

  One of the snares had been torn away, nothing left but a broken branch. Perhaps the owl had taken the catch. But there was a half-strangled jackrabbit twenty yards down the trail and there was a bonus nearby: another noose had trapped a half-grown one. He killed them both with the knife and carefully removed the loops and reset his snares. Then he heard something struggling and he went down the path to search out the source of the noise.

  He couldn’t identify it at first. Its struggle with the snare had sent it into the thicket of the manzanita’s center and Mackenzie was reluctant to reach blindly through the tangle. He moved around the bush until starlight picked up the scaly shine—a lizard, a very big one, as big as his forearm. If it was a Gila Monster he wanted no part of its poisons. He spread branches apart carefully to get a better look and the lizard thrashed until its face came into the light.

  Chuckwalla—eight or nine pounds in weight. Mackenzie’s hand shot in through the spiny twigs; he killed the lizard with the blade and untangled the snare with precise caution because one of them had already been ripped away and he had no more string.

  He carried the three carcasses to the fire. Earle was awake again. The three of them looked upon his booty; he caught a telltale dart of Shirley’s tongue, a twitch of Earle’s cheek muscle. Jay only watched empty-eyed.

  Mackenzie skinned the lizard and cut chunks of meat, skewered them on green twigs and passed them out. “Make sure it’s cooked before you eat it.”

  Shirley regarded it with revulsion.

  “And forget your prejudices,” Mackenzie added mildly. He attended to the two hares: he lined a little pit with the lizard skin and drained the blood into it; then he disemboweled the jackrabbits and skinned them with slow care to retain the hide. He took the meat off the bones carefully and sliced it into strips; he cut seams in the ears and opened the skins out flat; he broke leg bones and ribs off and threw them directly on the fire.

  He gathered up the lizard skin cupped in his hands. “Drink.” Nothing in the world was more nourishing than fresh blood.

  He sent them foraging and they ret
urned with a harvest of salad makings: grass tips and saltbush—they would need a great deal of that; until they found an animal lick it would be their only source of salt—and maguey greens mashed to pulp on rocks.

  Savaged by hunger they consumed the three pounds or so of meat on the chuckwalla in the course of an hour, cooking it spitted over the fire a bite at a time.

  Mackenzie poked around in the fire with a stick, found the burnt rabbit bones, scraped them out into a maguey leaf. “We eat these bone ashes. Dysentery preventive.”

  “All that rabbit meat—it’ll spoil, won’t it?”

  “We’ll hang it dry.”

  “Don’t you need salt to cure meat?”

  “The sun does the job.”

  They stripped the spines off an arm of Senita and quenched their thirsts on its pulp.

  Earle ruminated on a mouthful of chuckwalla. “Tastes like curried chicken. You set a good table, Sam.”

  He felt mildly pleased with himself.

  His belly churned: unaccustomed food, unaccustomed fullness after long hunger. The satisfaction of simple bodily needs made room for an awareness of other hurts and it was his feet that concerned him most. With the edge of one of the splintered quartz fire-rocks he scraped the rabbit hides as clean as he could; then while they were still pliably soft he sliced narrow strips off them lengthwise to use for lacings later on. He showed Shirley and Jay how to hang the meat where the sun would dry it; he was back at work on the skins while they did that job and gathered more firewood; then he heard again the twang of a tripped snare, the angered lungings of something in the brush, and he lurched out of the fire’s circle to retrieve the catch.

  Another jackrabbit: a small one no more than a few months old. It told him he’d made a mistake and he set all the snares a few inches higher so that the loops hung nine or ten inches above the ground; possibly he’d missed catching several full-grown jacks because his snares had been set too low.

  Before he skinned out the new catch he had to sharpen the knives again. The brass alloy took a fairly good edge but wouldn’t hold it long. He’d bent one of them doing something; he didn’t straighten it—a bent knife was preferable to a weak one.

  Tidbits of memory kept drawing him along the path of knowledge like crumbs scattered before a pecking bird: he visualized his father’s moccasin-work and the beaded rabbit-skin jackets they’d made forty years ago and this time he remembered to remove the hare’s sinews intact and to clean out the insides of the ears without slitting them open; once the flesh was removed it was possible to turn them inside out, scrape them clean, hang them for a sun cure. It was the most rudimentary curing system and would leave them with unsatisfactorily hard leathers but these would be far better than bare-ass nakedness—it was a matter of protection, not prudery. If they could keep the snares working for a few more nights they’d accumulate enough skins for essential clothing. It would be stiff and it would stink but if they were to have a chance of outwitting Duggai they needed to have mobility and that meant shoes, hats to keep the glare off, clothes to protect their privates from injury and their skins from the sun: there were things you simply couldn’t do at night, you had to be able to move about in daylight more than they’d done today—otherwise this might take months and none of them was going to survive that long on rabbit meat and cactus: if nothing else they’d die on account of the simple lack of salt. You could eat saltbush until you were stuffed and it would do about as much good as a pinch of table salt.

  If I were alone out here, he thought, I’d make it. Duggai and all, I’d make it.

  But he wasn’t alone and Jay and Shirley were greenhorns; and the broken leg anchored all of them. Of course Duggai had broken Earle’s leg deliberately with this in mind: Earle had given him the excuse but it might just as easily have been any of them. Duggai wasn’t the sort of avenger who left anything to chance.

  Thinking of Duggai as an avenger—it was a turn of phrase that occurred to him now for the first time—made him recall Duggai’s parting speech to them: it had been just over twenty-four hours ago. 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.

  Ordinarily if a man nursed the dream of vengeance on account of his capture and imprisonment he vented the dream against policemen or prosecutors or witnesses who identified him as guilty. Duggai hadn’t gone after any of those. His resentment was aimed at the practitioners who had searched around inside him and concluded that he was not responsible for his actions. By making that statement they diminished him. And they put him away in a place that was to a man like Duggai infinitely less tolerable than a penitentiary. In prison the rule was brutality and Duggai could have lived with that—it would have been a finite sentence, he’d have been able to look forward to parole. For a misfit like Duggai a commitment to the state mental hospital must have looked like a one-way ticket and it wasn’t the kind of place where a man could sustain himself on immediate physical hate: the attendants and doctors would treat him with professional competence rather than contemptuous ruthlessness. There was no object in sight on which to focus rage; therefore it focused on something more distant but less elusive—the four psychiatric witnesses who’d sent him to the place.

  But there was more than that. There was the heritage of witchcraft and shamanism.

  Mackenzie had felt the glancing edges of it in his own childhood. Now and then there was a witch-hunt—sometimes when someone got sick, sometimes when someone ran amuck. Either way it was the same: sick or drunk he’d been witched; people had a duty to find out who was responsible and deal with the witch. There was only one way and that was to hire a shaman whose powers were stronger than those of the witch. Then you had to bring the witch—by force if necessary—into the presence of the shaman and the shaman would make medicine to drive the spirit out of the witch. They didn’t advertise it but the Navajo were firm believers in exorcism. In a good many cases it wasn’t all that much different from psychiatry. The jargon differed but the objective was the same and the methods were not totally dissimilar.

  It was something Grandfather Mackenzie had always tried to combat: his rigid Presbyterian mentality had loathed superstition and psychiatry alike—“They don’t call them headshrinkers for nothing.”

  Duggai had been witched. He could escape from the hospital and he might break to freedom—there was always Mexico—but he would remain a doomed man unless he could exorcise the demons from inside him. You didn’t get rid of demons by simply killing the witches who had injected them into you; you had to crush the witches’ power. Only when their power was squashed could you gather enough strength to expel the demons.

  That was why Duggai hadn’t simply killed them and dumped the bodies. And it was why Duggai was still out there. Otherwise he’d be deep into Mexico by now. But he was a Navajo and he’d been witched and he had to take care of that first. He had no medicine of his own. He had to rely on nature’s medicine: the gods of the desert: they would provide his justice.

  Duggai would not interfere with their attempts to survive but he would wait out there and he would watch and he would terrorize them. If they lived and tried to get past Duggai then he would have to kill them for simple practical reasons—revenge and the prolongation of his own freedom—but if it came to that Duggai would kill them without pleasure because he would know that their power was too strong for him and therefore his demons were still intact; he would know he was doomed.

  If Duggai ended up having to kill them with bullets he wouldn’t live long after that. He’d try to shoot up a town or he’d walk into a police station and start a battle. Driven by the demons he’d be forced to precipitate his own destruction.

  I lived out there that time because I was Innun. Maybe you can live too. If you make it I’ll be waiting for you, Captain.

  No comfort in it but there was the knowledge that if it cam
e to that, Duggai would score a Pyrrhic triumph.

  It was the key to Duggai’s tolerance. It was also a weakness they could exploit: Duggai would give them room to move around.

  Understanding Duggai’s motives was one thing. Understanding his evil was another. The more he thought about Duggai the more fervid became Mackenzie’s rage. He hated Duggai with all the fury in his soul.

  It was no good forgiving the enemy; a raging hatred was necessary: it was the spur to survival. Passions of rage consumed Mackenzie and he made no effort to resist them.

  Toward morning the snares netted them a brace of jackrabbits. It was all they could expect from this worked-over patch of ground; the snares would have to be moved to a new hunting ground by tomorrow night.

  Shirley volunteered to skin out one of the hares and her initiative shamed Jay into tackling the other. Mackenzie monitored the work, made a monosyllabic suggestion now and then, fought down his reluctance to let them handle the knives: he couldn’t afford botched work but he no longer felt inclined to deny them their authority—his obsession with tyranny had burned itself out. At first he’d undertaken the experiment in benevolent dictatorship with shameful eagerness—not often in a lifetime was a man allowed to decree every move in the lives of his companions—and perhaps it had been necessary or perhaps he had only rationalized its necessity but the subtle brief groan of the pickup truck had changed all that. Duggai.

  If Duggai was watching them through some telescopic device then he understood that they were being sustained by Mackenzie’s leadership. If Duggai got a little impatient or a little more desperate he might think about putting a bullet into Mackenzie: kill him or disable him. Mackenzie would be the first target. It was only sensible to share the responsibility out; if he became a casualty the others might still have a chance.

  The next time he went out to check the snares he took Jay along and showed him how to set them.

  15

  In the gray light before dawn they worked with concentrated silent industry. They smashed bones and ate the marrow for its nourishment. Mackenzie made a sack from entrails to hold blood from the night’s kill.