Shirley went from her knees back onto her buttocks and sat up in unintentional imitation of Jay’s previous pose: she folded her arms around her upraised knees until her breasts flattened against her thighs. She had a long supple body, a fine waist, fashion-model legs. “Four years, five-how long, now? He must have been nursing a fixation about us. It’s long enough for casual hate to turn into an obsession.” She glanced at Jay-wry. “At least we know we didn’t make a mistake calling for his commitment. He’s proving his insanity right now.”
Jay was offended. “Insanity’s a legal term. It means nothing. You know better.” He was barking at her unreasonably.
“Well then, shall we sit and discuss him clinically?”
Mackenzie said, “I don’t think we need to worry about his motives. We need to worry about his intentions. He intends to murder us-or let the desert do it for him, if you want it spelled out. He said he’d be watching and waiting. It’s a Navajo torture-all wrapped up in medicine and witchcraft and I guess some twisted ideas of the heritage that he’s clung to in distorted ways. His uncle was a shaman, remember? He’s got his head full of bits and pieces of the old medicine. Exorcising his own demons by destroying ours. It’s too mystical to make psychiatric sense. What’s the use talking about it? He put us here to die. That’s what we need to worry about.”
Shirley said, “All right, he wants us to die. It doesn’t mean we have to accommodate him.”
Jay laughed-a sour noise of bile. “Looks to me like he hasn’t left us a whole lot of choice.”
Mackenzie half heard them. Their voices trailed off and they were both looking at him, waiting for his verdict, putting the responsibility on him: in a way they trusted him. And, in a way, he resented their trust. He doubted he could reward it.
His words tried to plot the erratic course along which his thoughts moved. “We left the road about six hours ago, I guess. We could be fifty, a hundred miles from the nearest highway.”
Jay kept rubbing his thumb across the pads of his fingers. “So?”
“I guess it doesn’t matter. All it means is we can’t walk out of here.”
Shirley said, “He wouldn’t let us anyway.”
Jay nodded his head up and down like a puppet’s. “It’s hopeless. That’s what I’ve been saying. What’s the use of talking about it?” He threw his head back. “Nice and cool now. Too cold, really. The sun’s going to come up and then we’ll just curl up like strips of frying bacon. Anybody know any prayers? Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.…”
Jay’s voice droned on.
Shirley began silently to weep; her shoulders shook. Mackenzie felt powerless to move. He listened to Jay: “… Thy will be done …”
Silence ran on for a bit afterwards and then with a dry chuckle Jay said, “Dust to dust.”
Shirley shouted at him. “Shut up. You’re no help.”
“Yes, my love.”
“Oh Jay, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. So am I.”
Then-it seemed belated to Mackenzie-Jay hobbled over to her and sat with her and they cradled each other. Mackenzie looked away, his throat hollow, stricken by loneliness. At least they had comfort in each other. Mackenzie thought, I was happy to live alone but how terrible to die alone.
That was the ultimate fear and it kindled inside him a rage that took fire and seared its way into his mind until he bolted to his feet. His voice emerged, constricted, thin against the faint dry wind: “Barefoot creatures of the Stone Age. That’s what he’s reduced us to.” He filled his chest, arched his back, defied the sky. “Well God damn it they survived in the Stone Age.”
Jay heard him and muttered a reply: “In a desert like this?”
“What?”
“Sam, for God’s sake we don’t even know where we are. We don’t know if we’re in Nevada or Utah or Mexico or Arizona or what.”
“We can find out where the hell we are. It’s hardly the pressing problem at the moment.”
“All right. I stand corrected. If it’s any comfort to you.”
“We can live,” Mackenzie roared. “If we want to. We can.”
Jay averted his face. “Sure. For a few hours. A day maybe. How much
Shirley said, “At least listen to him. Don’t you want to know?”
“No,” Jay said. “Yes.”
“We can live.”
Because Mackenzie said it quietly his words had force.
He wished he believed them himself.
“By ten o’clock if you lie naked in this sun you’ll fry.”
Jay straightened. “There’s bushes all around. Creosote, whatever. There’s shade.”
“Not enough to do any good. One day and we’d have third-degree burns.”
“You’re the Indian. You tell us.”
Mackenzie drew a long breath deep into his chest. It shuddered going in; he made fists to conceal the tremor in his fingers. “I don’t know why I should make much effort to help you if you don’t want to listen to me.” The words seemed inadequate, so lame he immediately regretted having said anything at all.
Jay brooded at him. “Tell us.”
Mackenzie pretended to take his time as if thinking it out. His mind raced as if it were a motor that had been turned loose to freewheel: straining at such speed that it felt sure to burn itself out. Thoughts exploded one on top of the other. It was panic, he told himself, and panic was the one thing he had to push away: panic was the one thing he couldn’t show them.
The infection of Jay’s weakness kept unbalancing him. What’s the point after all? We’re naked in a waterless plain, nothing but scrub and rocks and hardpan, no water in forty or a hundred miles; by afternoon it’ll be an oven and two days from now we’ll be clean white bones.…
A chill ravaged him. To cover it he stood straight up and turned a full circle as though absorbing information through his senses and coming to decisions.
Finally he had his voice under control. “First thing’s to put priorities in order. One, counter the heat. Two, water. Three, take care of Earle’s broken leg. Four, food. There’s a lot more but if we can’t handle these four we’ll never have time to worry about any of the others because we’ll be dead. The thing to do is solve one problem at a time. Solve each problem and give ourselves time to solve the next one.”
“He makes it sound so easy. Any child could do it.”
“Any Navajo child probably could,” Shirley said.
Mackenzie said, “Duggai could.”
“Duggai had a truck,” Jay said, “and he had his clothes on. And you’re not an Indian the way Duggai’s an Indian.”
“
Shirley said, “Sam spent summers on the reservation with his father when he was a boy.”
Jay talked through his teeth: “Maybe-maybe, sure, but
Shirley said, “You’re really asking for it, Jay.”
“Why shouldn’t I go out now, standing up? At least I’d enjoy trying to beat his head in. It looks pretty attractive when I think about the alternatives. Shriveling in the sun waiting for the buzzards to eat my eyes. Or crawling out of here somehow after God knows how much suffering only to find Duggai standing there just this side of the water. Watch old Duggai pick us to pieces one bullet at a time until he gets tired of playing cat games and takes pity on us and finishes us off with a hive of ants or a scalping knife or whatever he’s got in his twisted mind.”
Mackenzie’s temper bubbled. “It doesn’t have to go according to Duggai’s scenario. We don’t have to play his game.”
