Brian Garfield - Fear in a Handful of Dust

“God is keeping us alive. I don’t know why.”

“If you want to talk let’s talk about something else.”

“There’s nothing else to talk about.”

“Then shut up.”

Shirley said, “Jay,” with quiet reproach. Mackenzie caught a sour whiff of Jay’s sweat.

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.

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.”