Damon Knight - Orbit 20

Farley nodded and left the room.

Gradually the ranch lights went out, until only the dim hallway light in the main house remained; outside, the desert crept closer. From the porch Sam watched the darkness claim the bam area, the yard, the bungalows, until he could feel it there at the bottom of the porch steps. He had dug around one of the desert ghost towns once, where only a juniper mounting post remained. That was what the desert would do here if this small group of people let it.

The moon rose, a half moon. Enough, Sam thought. It was enough.

That was what the old Indian had said. Sam had driven three hours over New Mexico desert roads, gravel roads, dirt and sand roads, to find the shack. It had a tin roof covered with sagebrush. An Indian woman had admitted him silently; inside, the temperature was over a hundred degrees, cooler than it would have been without the sagebrush insulation, but stifling. On a straight chair before one of the two windows sat the Indian man, one arm swathed in bandages where the stump was still not healed. There was a roughly sawn table, two chairs and several stools, a wood-burning stove with a cast-iron pot on it, a rope-spring bed and several rolled-up pallets. The walls were covered with newspapers, carefully cut and pasted up so that the pictures were whole, the stories complete. From outside there was the sound of children’s whispers, a faint giggle. The woman scowled at the window on the opposite side of the cabin, and the sounds stopped.

Sam had seen many such cabins, many worse than this one. He pulled the second chair around to face the man, introduced himself, sat down and drew out his report form. “I’ve been to the mine,” he said. “What I need now is a statement from you so the company can process your claim.”

The Indian did not move, continued to gaze at the desert.

“Sir . . .” Sam looked at the woman. “He was rambling when he was found. Did he suffer head injuries? Can he hear?”

“He hears.”

Sam glanced at the preliminary report. There had been an explosion at the potash mine; an avalanche apparently had carried this man down a ravine where he stayed for two days before he was found. Two days on the desert, in the sun, no water, bleeding from an arm injury, possibly head injuries. “You haven’t filed a claim yet,” he said. He explained the company’s disability pension, the social security regulations, the medical settlement. He explained the need for the claimant’s signature before processing could begin. The Indian never stirred.

Sam looked from him to the woman.

“He won’t sign,” she said.

“I don’t understand. Why won’t he file a claim?”

“He says he should pay the company,” she said, and although her face remained impassive, she spoke bitterly. “He says a man should be happy to give up an arm to see the face of God.”

“He’s crazy!” Sam looked at the Indian for the first time. He had been looking at a claimant, a statistic, one like many others he had seen before and recognized instantly. Now he studied him.

“You have a right . . .” he started, then fell silent.

The Indian shifted to regard him and Sam thought, He has seen the face of God. Harshly he demanded, “Who’s going to take care of your family? Hunt for them, earn money? Who will go up to the mountain to get firewood? You have only one arm!”

“It is enough,” the Indian man said, and turned his gaze back to the desert.

Sam filled out the claim and the Indian woman signed it. He drove away as fast as the company truck could take him. That was the last case he handled; two months later he quit his job.

For seven years, he thought, he had searched for something that would give him what that son of a bitch had. They called him an artist now, and he knew that was a lie. He was a good craftsman, not an artist. He understood the difference. He was using the rocks he found, making something, anything that would permit him to survive, that would give him an excuse to spend days, weeks, months out on the desert. It amused him when others called him an artist, because he knew he was using a skill to achieve something else; he felt only contempt for those he fooled —the critics, the connoisseurs, the buyers.

He would have it, he knew, if he had to risk an arm, both arms, Victoria, Farley, anything else in the world to get it. He would have it.

Farley watched Victoria. She rode reasonably well, held her back straight and trusted her horse to know where to put his feet, but she would have to do a hell of a lot of riding before it looked natural on her. He planned to watch her and if she started to slump, or her hand got heavy on the reins, he would call a halt, walk her up a ridge or down a valley, anything to rest her without suggesting that that was his intention.

Watching Victoria, he thought of Fran, riding like a wild thing, so in tune with her horse, it seemed the impulses from her brain sped through its muscles, in a feedback system that linked them to create a new single creature. The last time she had come back, they had ridden all day.

When they stopped to water the horses at one of the wells on her father’s land, he asked, “You aren’t happy in Portland, are you?”

“I get so I can’t stand it. Begin to feel I’m suffocating, there’s no air to breathe, and a million bodies ready to smother me. So I come back and can’t stand this either. Too much wind, too much sand, too much sun and sky and cold and heat. Too much loneliness. When I start wanting to scream I know it’s time to go back to the big city. Heads I lose, tails I lose.”

Fran was beautiful, more so now at thirty than she had been at fourteen, or eighteen, any of the lost years. He had loved her, and had left her when he went to school. A year later she had married a doctor from Portland. She had two children, and Farley no longer tried to sort out his feelings about her. When she came home they spent days together out on the desert. When she was gone they never corresponded.

“You should have told me you’d leave here with me,” Fran said that day. She tossed rocks down a hole in the ground where an earthquake had opened a fissure ten thousand years before. “We could have made it work, half the time in town, half out here.”

He shook his head. “Then we’d both be miserable, not just one of us.”

“Aren’t you miserable? Aren’t you lonely? Is this goddamn desert all you really want out of life?”

He had not answered. His life was his answer. He had tried to live in town, during, immediately after his college days, and he knew the city would kill him, just as a cage kills. His mother was dying in Bend where she had to remain for daily cancer treatments. His father was dying, too. The small town of Bend was killing him. He was like a caged animal, the luster gone, the sheen, the joy of living, the will to live, all leaving him as surely as her life was leaving her.

Fran was gone the next day. He might see her again in a month, or six months, or never. He continued to watch Victoria.

They skirted an old alfalfa field; it looked as dead as the rest of the desert this time of year. Even the deer passed it up for the greener range high on the mountains. But if the winter rain didn’t come, if the summer persisted into fall, into winter, the cattle, deer, antelope, rabbits would all be here grazing, and they would bring in the coyotes and bobcats. There would be some ranchers who would start yelping about varmint control, bait stations, traps, and he would try to talk them out of it, as he had done before. Farley knew they could never control the coyotes and bobcats; only water or the lack of water could do that. In the desert everything was very simple.

They had reached the trail leading up Goat’s Head Butte, and he called a brief rest to water the horses. He and Sam had inspected this pump and well only last week.