Fear in a Handful of Dust

something of himself in the modern world; Duggai had packed off to Tucson and found himself lost in the academic grind.

Duggai was a born marksman, lifelong hunter, and when he scored at the top of his basic-training rifle class the army put him through a series of combat specialist schools designed to make a wizard killer of him. Race mythology to the contrary Duggai didn’t seem to have any particular warrior instincts; all he had was docile pliability-that and his uncanny skill with a rifle. He was indifferent to the power of authority but tended toward mindless obedience as the line of least resistance.

He had been shipped to Vietnam with a special combat team of saboteurs and snipers. He never exceeded the rank of private first class. He was equipped with a backbreaking assortment of telescopic and infrared accoutrements; his job was to kill people at incredibly long ranges or at night or in monsoons. In one of their sessions he mentioned offhandedly to Mackenzie that he’d assassinated one Cong officer in a fine drizzle at a distance they later stepped off to confirm it: “Eight hundred seventy-five yards. That’s over half a mile, Captain.”

Certain villages in the boonies tended to be friendly during the day and unfriendly at night when the Cong would infiltrate and receive the clandestine embrace of the villagers, sack and pillage whatever supplies the village had conned out of the Americans, then drain away into the jungle before daybreak. To pacify such villages the army assigned mechanics like Duggai to lie in ambush with infrared scope and silenced rifle-to pick off everything that moved in the village after midnight.

In therapy Duggai always skirted the details but Mackenzie forced him to go over the ground innumerable times in the course of several months. He judged that Duggai must have murdered more than a hundred Vietnamese from the night. Vietnamese people were very small to the eyes of a hulk like Duggai; women and men wore the same loose pajamas in the rural areas. Duggai was aware of the fact that a good number of his victims had been women and children and very old people: the heat image on an infrared scope seldom reveals the sex or age of the target.

Duggai had done his work with unquestioning obedience but nothing in his upbringing had steeled him to it and the nights of silent murder had a cumulative effect on even so rudimentary a psyche as Duggai’s. He began to disturb his tentmates with his nightmares. The nightmares trickled across into his waking hours: he hallucinated. As the subconscious rebelled, so the efficiency deteriorated. Finally Duggai was put into a base hospital for observation. The case had been kicked back up the line until finally he had been rotated back to San Francisco for major psychiatric overhaul. The department had implanted him in Mackenzie’s care because all Indian patients were assigned to him: something about empathy.

Duggai had a peculiar intellect. His aptitude tests showed extremely high scores on anything to do with simple logic, practical things, mechanics. Mackenzie tried to teach him chess-he seemed to have the attributes for it-and Duggai learned the game quickly but he played only when Mackenzie badgered him into it. Left to himself Duggai chose isolation. In the ward he could sit in a chair and stare at a point on the wall for hours.

School and army records indicated he had formed no friendships and few acquaintanceships. He was not paranoid; he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of him. He did not relate to other people at all; he seldom seemed to care what they thought or felt. It was as if they didn’t exist. To an extent he was a textbook psychopath isolated in solipsism. This was the most difficult syndrome to treat because the patient left no bridge open across which the therapist could approach him. There was no inner demand to make contact with another human. Duggai usually seemed aware of the existence of other people only to the extent that they annoyed or offended him or got in his way. He’d been reasonably polite to Mackenzie because he’d seen Mackenzie as his ticket out of the place but that was all.

Such patients had no curiosity about other people; it followed they also lacked any curiosity about themselves. The army’s psychiatric services packed in a great many Duggais-some of them suicidal, some incoherent; you couldn’t brainwash a farm boy into committing atrocities and expect it to have no effect on him afterward. But with a Duggai there was no possibility of goading the patient into insight. Feelings were to be obeyed and indulged but never examined.

There’d been no reaching Duggai. Because of the twitch of a government digit somewhere he’d been discharged-from the hospital and from the army-and Mackenzie had been relieved to see the last of him.

But then Duggai had gone brass-scavenging in the Mohave Desert; men had died; the change of venue brought the trial to San Francisco; and a bored defense attorney, court-appointed, went through the motions by seeking out psychiatric buttresses for his “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense. Mackenzie came forward willingly enough; testified as truthfully as he knew how; again that should have been the end of it.

Duggai-and the appearance at the trial of Earle Dana as an expert witness-had brought the rest of them together. Jay Painter initially came into it as a witness for the prosecution but his examination of Duggai bore out the results of Mackenzie’s and the prosecution declined to call Jay to the stand. When Duggai’s attorney learned of this he brought Jay over to the defense team.

Mackenzie met Jay for the first time in the courtroom.

Jay had asked Shirley to interview Duggai because it had occurred to him that Duggai might open up more with an attractive woman. Duggai hadn’t but the defense attorney, eager for all the help he could get, persuaded her to testify. The three of them were in court that day and afterward they went out to dinner. There was some speculation around the restaurant table about the fourth defense witness-a psychotherapist they’d all heard of, Earle Dana, regarded generally as a publicity hound and a quack. Their own testimony was concluded but they agreed to meet next morning in the courtroom to listen to Earle Dana.

Dana had written six self-help books-How to Get the Most Out of Sex was the one that made them titter the most-and wrote a newspaper column of mental-health advice that was syndicated to several West Coast newspapers. He was not a doctor; apparently he was self-taught. He’d been a minister of some persuasion and had served as an air force chaplain for some years before resigning both his commission and the ministry to join a consciousness-raising cult in Southern California. Then apparently he’d begun to read books for the first time in his life and had been smitten by the relentless reasoning of some of the neo-behaviorists with their Skinner Boxes and conditioned-reflex therapy techniques.

The defense attorney had asked Earle to testify because of his notoriety; Earle had agreed because of the publicity. Most of Earle’s testimony had little to do with Duggai; it was a simpleminded advertisement for his brand of behavior therapy. “In many cases, the point is, other methods fail and our methods work.” And Shirley had whispered in Mackenzie’s ear: “So does torture.”

Then to their horror Earle had buttonholed the three of them on his way out of the courtroom and insisted on standing them to lunch. They’d had to listen to his nonsense for hours before they’d been able to break away.

Audrey met them after work at the St. Francis and the four of them had giggled over recollections of Earle Dana’s prim pomposities. On any psychiatric subject Earle was prepared to rush in where the best minds in medicine feared to tread. His brief appearance in their lives gave fuel for uproarious amusement. And because they laughed together they decided they loved one another; the foursome became an institution for a brief while: Jayandshirley, Samandaudrey.

For Mackenzie it had gone beyond that. Perhaps it was inevitable. Not Audrey’s fault but she’d failed to share too many of the experiences that had changed Mackenzie. Around the Painters’ swimming pool or isolated by crowds at parties, Mackenzie and Shirley had discovered each other. She too was lonely in her marriage; her loneliness followed her into Mackenzie’s life. A few drinks, outpourings of confidences. Jay’s indifference. Audrey’s withdrawn distance. Noncommunication in both marriages.

Mackenzie’s adulterous love for Shirley came to dominate him: a big deep thing that sometimes for no reason made tears well up in him. Even in Jay’s presence he became capable of enjoying happiness in nothing more than sitting for great lengths of time watching her do little things-drying her hair, dusting a room, climbing out of the pool-just witnessing the grace of her face and body.

It never became an affair. They were both prisoners of honor-on occasion they teased one another abrasively about their old-fashioned principles. Mackenzie never allowed them opportunities for clandestine meetings. He wasn’t gaited that way. It would be a complication he wouldn’t be able to handle; he knew that. The love between them was real but physically unconsummated. That was unnatural; inevitably things had to come unraveled.

Jay had been badgering her: he wanted a baby. She was sure they’d be divorced; she didn’t want to inflict that on a child. She kept taking the pill. Jay’s anger took the form of cold-shouldering her. It compounded the frustrations-hers and Sam’s.