Brian Garfield - Fear in a Handful of Dust

“I didn’t know there was any uninhabited area that big any more.”

“There are no roads, no human existence at all. Travel into these areas is forbidden.”

“And forbidding.”

“Anyhow we’ve got to go north. It won’t be just forty miles. You can’t go ten miles without running up against a range of mountains-they look easy from here but that’s steep rubble and they’re bigger than they look-six or seven thousand feet. You can go around the ranges but it trebles the distance. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Don’t they ever patrol with helicopters?”

“If they’ve got reason to suspect someone’s out here. Now and then I guess they do a routine sweep. But Duggai can reach us with that rifle if he sees a helicopter.”

“If it came to that he probably wouldn’t mind shooting the helicopter to pieces.”

Mackenzie closed his eyes and nodded agreement. “He’s just the one to prove he can do it. He knows ’copters-he’d shoot for the radio first, then the rotor coupling.”

“What chance have we got then? Honestly.”

“What difference does it make? It’s the only shot we’ve got.”

She began to clean out the bowls with a handful of grass. “It’s tempting to get maudlin, isn’t it.” Mackenzie watched the play of muscles under her skin. She sat crosslegged, spine bent in a hunched concentration, breasts pendant, lip between teeth. “If you scrub too hard you disintegrate these things. I ruined one last night.”

Then she looked over her shoulder toward the hills. She held the gaze for a moment. “I keep looking for buzzards up that way.” She went back to work; her voice dropped. “If you want to know the truth he’s amazed me in the past day or two. Before this happened if you’d served him a stringy piece of beef or told him his plane was half an hour late he’d have measured it as a catastrophe.”

“It’s not his fault.”

“I’m not criticizing him. He never had to face this before. I suppose I’m surprised by how brave he’s turned out to be.” She scoured the last bowl and set it aside, making an irked face, rubbed her eyes. Then abruptly she said, “Oh, what difference does it make?”

“Don’t go defeatist.”

She made a little bark of sour laughter.

He said, “We started out hanging from our fingernails-not thinking any farther ahead than the next drop of water. We’ve made a lot of progress. We’re talking about crossing a hundred miles.”

“Well, thank you for the pep talk. But how do I ignore Duggai out there?”

“Think of him as one more hazard. We’ve licked some others.”

“They’re not the same. The desert doesn’t care-it’s indifferent. You can’t say that of Duggai.” Her shudder was theatrical; she apologized for it with a smile that switched on and off peculiarly. “Maybe it’s because we don’t see him. He’s got so much bigger than life-size. He dominates every instant of our lives now. Some mythic malevolent ghost-one of those eternal spirits that can’t die until they get their doomsday revenge. You know I keep picturing him like a childish nightmare-something gigantic with a scythe.” Her head swiveled away; she tossed it as if she still had her long hair.

Neither of them had anything to say after that. Mackenzie didn’t have the strength to keep anything going. The irony touched him; maybe out there Jay was torturing himself with fantasies of what might be transpiring between them.

He found himself listening for the sound of the four-wheel drive but there was no sound at all.

For a while he dozed. Near morning he worked the skins, made spare sets of moccasins, sewed a water bag with a shoulder strap and lined it with the raincoat sleeve. There were a few pelts left over-not enough for much but he sewed them into brief breechclouts with thong belts: not much protection but better than nothing. He gathered up two brass knives; there was no sign of the third one-Jay must have it. He made a little pocket in his breechclout and tramped the desert for half an hour gathering up a dozen additional.30-caliber shells; they might find uses for them.

Dusk, then dawn; and Jay had not returned. He built up the fire to provide Jay a homing beacon.

Earle said, “It feels cooler this morning. Maybe the sun won’t be so bad today.”

“Sun hasn’t changed. You have-you’re in better shape today.”

“I thought I was supposed to die without salt.”

“We put a lot of saltbush in that soup last night. Maybe it was enough for the time being.”

“Those extra moccasins-”

“We’ll be moving out tonight. They wear out pretty fast.”

There was fresh rabbit meat from the night’s snares. They ate up the marrow of briefly cooked bones and the ashes of charred ones, drank the last of the blood from the clay bowl, drank plentifully of the still’s bounty of clear water. Mackenzie mucked out the still and carved segments of cholla into it, sealed the plastic coat down and squinted obliquely toward the rising sun: that was where Jay would appear but there was no sign of movement.

He went down into each of the trenches and dug out a few inches of soil from the bottom to expose a new underlayer of cool damp earth. Shirley was taking down the dried strings of jerky from the ocotillo racks and packing them into rabbit-hide folds. The sun began to drill into them and Mackenzie had another long look at the horizon. “He probably went too far during the night. Got caught short and dug a hole for himself.”

“Or Duggai stopped him,” Shirley said.

“We haven’t heard gunshots.”

It seemed to reassure her. They lowered Earle into the ground; he managed to smile. “Might not hurt if we all prayed for him.”

Shirley went a few strides away toward her bunker; she waited for Mackenzie and dropped her voice so that it carried no farther than his ears. “Duggai wouldn’t have needed to shoot him. Jay’s no match for him. All he’d have to do would be break his leg the way he broke Earle’s. Or hamstring him with a knife. Leave the inevitable to those horrible desert spirits of his.”

“Most likely Jay’s holed up somewhere to ride out the heat.”

“Is that what you really think?”

“Yes. If Duggai got close enough to ambush him then he’d see Jay wasn’t carrying enough water or food to make a run for help. As long as we stay in the area we’re no threat to Duggai-he’ll let us scramble.”

“I wish I knew whether you believed that.”

“It doesn’t much matter what I believe. We’ve got to search for him tonight.”

“Of course.”

“He knows enough not to expose himself to the sun. We’ll probably meet up with him an hour after dark.”

“Sam-what if Duggai’s crippled him?”

“Let’s try to face one thing at a time.”

“That’s evasive.”

“No. We’ve got to be practical. What’s the sense wasting time worrying about catastrophes that may not have happened?”

“All right.” She gave him a long level glance and Mackenzie saw irony creep into her eyes. It was directed inward. “Did you want to get laid last night?”

“No.”

“But the thought did cross your mind.”

“Yes.” Put it down to that ancient biological impetus to procreate in time of stress.

“It crossed my mind too,” she said, “but if we’d found out that Jay was out there dying while we were screwing.…”

“Never mind,” Mackenzie said.

She touched the back of his hand with her fingers: there was gentle gratitude and a good deal of warmth in the gesture. She went away then and Mackenzie looked around the horizon, confused by feelings he sensed but could not identify. Out there he saw no buzzards and no sign of Jay. When he turned back she was descending into the earth. He felt the heat of the early sun against the raw burnt flesh of his shoulders; he got into his own trench and hunkered to keep his body out of the light-and sat that way watching the hills until his muscles began to cramp. There was no further likelihood of Jay’s appearing; the sun was too high. Finally Mackenzie lay back, feeling the tremors of weakness when he lowered himself, resenting the residue of his fevered illness. He knew there was little remaining stamina. Throughout the night he’d tried to do everything with conservative torpor; nevertheless he felt rickety and drained. He wondered how far he could possibly carry Earle.