Fear in a Handful of Dust

“Roll over, Captain. Roll off the rags.”

He rolled onto his back and lay stark naked in the night, his hands still wired behind him, his mouth still gagged. The hulking silhouette above him moved: Duggai picked up the shreds of Mackenzie’s clothes and threw them into the camper.

Mackenzie lay stunned with disbelief and watched Duggai move toward Shirley Painter. Starlight raced along the knife blade.

Duggai destroyed their clothes methodically. He took their wristwatches and rings and shoes and pulled their socks off. He threw everything into the truck. Then he dragged them naked, one by one, about twenty feet from the truck. Mackenzie’s hands were still wired together and took a great deal of punishment as Duggai dragged him across the rocky ground by one foot.

Matter-of-fact and without much show of feeling Duggai stood above them. He folded the knife and put it away in his pocket and walked back to the truck. Mackenzie heard the door open; he didn’t hear it shut. A moment later Duggai came in sight again unzipping the long rifle case. He tossed the case into the truck and walked toward them working the bolt of the rifle. It was a big-game weapon with a large telescope screwed on top of it.

Duggai balanced the rifle in his left hand while he used his right hand to untwist the wire that bound Mackenzie’s hands together. Duggai left him and crouched by Shirley. Mackenzie rolled up on one elbow and gently rubbed his wrists. His hands had no feeling in them.

Duggai removed the wire from Shirley’s wrists and then from Jay’s; he stepped back and leveled the rifle.

Mackenzie kept trying to clear his throat.

At last Duggai spoke. “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. You remember this-at least I’m gonna let you die in dignity. But I’m gonna watch it happen.”

Mackenzie saw Jay try to speak. Nothing came out of his mouth.

Duggai’s rifle pivoted toward Mackenzie and he watched it bleakly. “You’re half Innun. I lived out there that time because I was Innun. Maybe you can live a while too. If you make it I’ll be waiting for you, Captain.”

It was all Duggai had to say. He walked back to the pickup. Mackenzie saw him toss the twisted pieces of wire inside and close the back of the pickup. Then Duggai got behind the wheel and the camper lurched away. It was still running without lights and the night quickly absorbed it. Sound carried back for a while but then that was gone too.

A low wind soughed in Mackenzie’s ears; there was no other sound.

He was thinking, by two in the afternoon it’ll be a hundred and thirty degrees out here.

7

For an endless lethargic time Mackenzie sat shifting his naked buttocks on the hard ground and listening to the dwindling growl and rattle of the truck until finally the night absorbed it and there was nothing.

He looked slowly at the others.

Jay Painter was sitting up. A muscle worked at the back of his jaw. His thin body was a patchwork of tangled hair.

A gust of dry air spun Shirley’s long hair around her face. She combed it away with her fingers and tossed it back with a shake of her head, an unconsciously impatient gesture. She was watching the darkness where the truck had disappeared.

Earle Dana writhed slowly, chrysalis-like, not really conscious.

Mackenzie slowly picked his way across the earth. Sharp stones made him hobble. He crouched by Earle. The man’s face, drawn with pain, was swollen on the left cheek where he’d fallen. The eye was puffy and closed, the flesh sickly dark. The leg-well, at least it wasn’t a compound fracture. No bone showed.

Jay Painter began to cough. When the coughing subsided the silence became so intense that Mackenzie heard the crack of his own knee joint as he stirred. He stood up, feeling lances of pain here and there.

Shirley spoke, her voice husky and cracked, hardly a voice at all. “He broke his leg.”

“I know.” Speaking the words made him cough.

Jay stared out into the night, brows lowered as if he were peering into strong light: with his head down and his eyes narrowed. Refusing to look at any of them. In a strange way it amused Mackenzie: they sat in deadly peril and they were reluctant to look directly at one another because of the embarrassment of nakedness. He fought down the impulse to laugh because if he began it could tip him over the edge of hysteria.

He coughed again; he felt along the ground and found a pebble. When he straightened up he put the pebble in his mouth and sucked on it in an attempt to get the saliva flowing. He kept rolling it around with his tongue.

Shirley said, “Shouldn’t we make a splint?”

Jay’s head came up. “What’s the use?” The painful grating of his voice set Mackenzie’s teeth on edge. Jay went into a fit of coughing, recovered and finally spoke again: “What does he want from us?”

“I guess he wants us dead,” Mackenzie said. He peered at the landscape, trying to decipher the dark terrain. Scrub sloped up along a series of eroded cuts toward higher ground. There was scattered vegetation: greasewood, catclaw, tufts of brittle grass, cactus in various configurations. Each bit of growth stood in lonely isolation, ten or thirty feet from its neighbors. For the most part the ground was hardpan and stones, cracked clay, alkali.

“Sam.” Jay Painter’s voice hit him like the flat of a hand. He turned.

Little pale patches of hate glowed around Jay’s nostrils. “You know a little about the desert, right? How long have we got?”

“I don’t know, Jay. I guess it depends.”

“That’s a crock.” Jay’s chin crept forward, querulous like an old man’s. Naked he looked a bit spavined. His torso was long and too narrow-like that of a fast-growing teenager who hadn’t filled out yet. Wiry hairs coiled on his shoulders and chest and belly and legs.

Mackenzie thought, We’ve got to keep control. He moved closer to Jay because it was more difficult to appear calm when you had to raise your voice across a distance. Fragments of stone chewed at his soles. “We’re not carrion yet,” he said. “Take it easy.”

Jay pushed a boyish lock of hair back from his eyes. He stared at his wife for a moment. Mackenzie followed the line of Jay’s glance. Shirley was brooding toward the earth ten feet ahead of her: she was standing upright now, fists clenched at her sides. Mackenzie thought how many times he’d coveted that body. Even now-cutting right through his terror-she had the power to excite him; he looked away, ashamed.

Jay said, “How long can we last? Come on, Sam, what’s the point of lying? Twenty-four hours? Forty- eight?”

Mackenzie’s scalp contracted. In a bitter part of him he felt contempt for Jay’s despair. He regarded the desert disdainfully until Jay stumbled to his feet hefting a small rock in his fist.

Mackenzie stepped back. “Easy. Easy. Gentle down, Jay, this may not be your last chance to die.”

Shirley’s voice struck into it, small and crisp like a spark falling into gunpowder. “Put it down. You look ridiculous.”

Jay’s face crumpled. He dropped the stone. Shirley was down on her knees now; she pressed her hands to her temples.

Mackenzie turned away. For a moment he thought perhaps it was because he saw himself reflected too closely in Jay’s weakness. Then he realized that was no cause for shame. They were all human.

Shirley kept looking at him-staring, he was sure, at his gnarled stomach muscles. After a moment her fiery eyes shifted toward her husband’s narrow caved-in body, hunched as he sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, genitals dragging ludicrously. He had sat down like that; now he stood up again. Every flicker of emotion was mirrored transparently on his long face. Something-an anguish of memory? — drove him striding away in inarticulate rage until he stamped on a sharp edge and fell, breaking the fall with the flat of a hand, sitting down hard, turning his head balefully to stare over his shoulder at Mackenzie and Shirley. “Why did he do this to us?”

Mackenzie said, “We’ve always got reasons for killing each other, haven’t we?”