Fear in a Handful of Dust

“Out here in this place without a stitch of clothes or a drop of water-if we’re not playing Duggai’s game then whose the hell game are we playing?”

“Mine.”

“What?”

He was faced away from them. His eyes were squeezed shut against the flood of fear and anger. He had to wait a bit before he could answer. But he needed the rage, needed to nurse it and encourage it because it could provoke him to survive.

“We’ll settle up with Duggai. Well do it our way, not his.”

“And somehow that doesn’t entail our scrabbling in this dirt in some misbegotten attempt to survive?”

“We’ll scrabble,” Mackenzie said. “We’ll survive.” His fingernails cut into his palms.

“That’s exactly what Duggai wants.”

“He wants to win,” Mackenzie said. “He doesn’t want to lose.” He wiped his face and turned, looked at them. “In my game he loses.”

“Mackenzie, all right-all right. What the hell is your game?”

“We start by solving one problem at a time. We dig.”

“Dig what?”

“Our graves.”

“Listen to him, Shirley, he’s cracked.”

“I’m listening to him.”

Mackenzie said, “I’ll keep you alive if I can. But it’s my game now. We’ll play it by my rules. I’m the captain of the team-I don’t put decisions to a vote. Understood?”

It brought Jay halfway to his feet. “Just who do you think you-”

Mackenzie’s voice climbed to an unreasonable pitch: he fought it down. “I’m the one who’s going to keep you alive.”

He saw Jay’s teeth: a rictus grimace or a bitter smile; he couldn’t tell which.

“From this point on talk only when you have to. Talking dries the tissues, makes you thirsty.”

He glanced at the sky. “We’ve got maybe half an hour to first light, less than an hour to sunrise, less than four hours before it’s too hot to move. That’s our deadline. We’ve got to be dug in by four hours from now.”

“Dug in.” Jay parroted it hollowly as if trying to absorb the information through an opaque screen.

“The objective is to keep cool and keep quiet through the heat of the day. We’ve got to conserve body fluids. We’ll dig pits. Three feet deep. A trench for each of us-running from east to west.”

He waited for protest. Shirley only met his stare and in the poor light he couldn’t make out her expression. Jay picked at a toenail. Mackenzie said, “If it’s aligned due east and west the sun will never reach the bottom of the trench. We’ll be in shade all day long. Avoid sunburn and heat dehydration. Three feet below ground level the temperature can remain as much as sixty degrees cooler than it is on the surface.”

“Who told you all this?”

He’d read it somewhere in a book. He didn’t admit it. “It’s something all Navajo daddies teach their children before puberty.”

“What do we use for tools?”

“Rocks. Sticks. Your hands.”

“Straight down? This stuff’s like concrete.”

“Dig.” Mackenzie said it without force.

“Why not start walking? We could head for the mountains. If we’ve got four hours surely we can find good shade. A cliff facing north or a clump of trees or something.…”

“How far could you walk on bare feet, Jay? How much fluid have you got in your body that you could afford to burn up getting there? That’s what kills faster than anything else in this desert.”

“And digging like beavers won’t burn it up?”

“Dig slowly. Don’t work up a sweat.” Mackenzie’s hand described an impatient arc. “Which way would you walk? Forget it. It’s better to dig here-those mountains are solid rock.”

Jay studied him, full of resistance. “How do we know which way to align the trenches?”

Mackenzie found the Dipper, traced it toward Polaris. “That’s the North Star. Guide on that.”

“What about Earle?”

“We dig four trenches.”

“Why not one long one?”

“Body heat. And it’s bad enough to breathe the stink of your own sweat.…” He couldn’t face lying in the same hole with the rest of them.

There was a beat of silence. Jay said, “All right. We’ll dig. But what about water?”

“One thing at a time.”

8

While they still had the stars for a guide they scratched outlines in the earth. Mackenzie found an oblong rock that came to something like a point. He gave it to Shirley and hunted for more; finally they began to dig.

The top layer crumbled easily and took them down three or four inches but after that it was rocks and clay; it was like trying to dig through an adobe wall. He had to force himself not to slam and whack away at it. He used the rock as a pickax, breaking up the surface and then carrying away the loosened clots with his hands.

“Make the pile on the south side of each trench. It’ll help shade us.”

Eight inches down he came on the face of a boulder and wanted to shriek out his frustration. He tried to dig around it but it seemed to have no end. He had to move ten feet away and start again.

The crumpled folds of the mountains that ringed the horizons began to turn blue with shadow. A drop of sweat dripped from his nose onto the back of his hand. He forced himself to relax, slow down, dig with less effort. He remembered a time when he had been lost in the mountains and happy to be lost: he’d had a backpack and a canteen of water and no place in particular to go.

The earnest task occupied his attention and freed him from the obligation to think ahead. It took all his concentration to shape the trench. Keep the walls vertical. Dig carefully around each rock-some of them were the size of a man’s head and weighed seventy-five pounds-and lift it out and place it on the rim of the dig to absorb and deflect the sun.

He worked slowly, on his knees, right hand steadily lifting and falling like the arm of a steam hammer. Break up a layer of clay and lift it out a cupped double-handful at a time. Pack it down on the rim. Lift another. He made rakes of his fingers.

But the thought of water came relentlessly into his mind. What good was it to postpone death a few hours if there were no solution to the second question?

There was a little cactus. Staghorn cholla mostly. No water in that; it was as spindly as rib bones. In the late afternoon when the heat waned they would have to make an expedition in search of fat varieties of cactus: the barrel, the jumper, even the prickly pear could be mashed to pulp for liquid. But he doubted there’d be enough to sustain them for more than a day before they’d cleared this area of moisture-bearing cactus: he doubted there was more than one clump in each quarter acre.

Underground water? No-not within reach of the surface; otherwise there’d have been deciduous trees. He tried to remember the signs: obviously a cottonwood or sycamore meant water close to the surface; but he’d seen none.

The light strengthened. He examined the country.

It was a surrealist landscape. Spotted scrub writhed on the bare tan-yellow plain. The ground was desolated by drought, naked and barren. A few miles away in any direction lilac hills undulated toward mountains that loomed in tilted tiers of gray and blue and cayenne red.

The most common growth he saw was creosote: greasewood bushes with their leaves dark oily green. He remembered desert horseback trips, his father taking him out of Chinle for camping and hunting weekends. A horse