Fear in a Handful of Dust

Jay spat something out. “Where you going?” His suspicion had the querulousness of incipient panic.

“Splints. Go on, Jay.”

Only the manzanita had any approximation of solid wood-gnarled, stunted, its bark the color of ripe cherries. He found a suitable branch and put his entire weight on it to split it loose from the twisted trunk; the limb broke but the bark refused to let go: it resisted him with ropy tenacity. He twisted and pulled and cursed, dragged the branch all the way around the tree, finally broke it free, taking a long curling strap of bark with it. He tried to slice this off with the cartridge knife but the metal was neither strong nor sharp enough; it hardly scored the bark. Finally he held it down under the ball of his foot and pulled up, tearing off most of the length of the limb. He stripped the twigs off one by one until he had a pole a few feet long.

It took half an hour’s hobbling about the slope before he found and stripped four branches of suitable size: two on each side of the leg ought to be sufficient. He carried them back toward what he had begun to think of as the cemetery.

The sun fell; the plain filled with twilight.

The gravity of Shirley’s glance disturbed him. He had the feeling Jay had told her he meant to use her hair to bind Earle’s splints and he had a fair idea of the tone and choice of words Jay must have used.

They sat on the rim above Earle. He looked up at them, his mouth pinched into a small line. When Mackenzie came up he was assaulted by the stink of urine.

Earle said, “Why don’t you just fill the hole in. With me in it.”

“You’ll make it, Earle.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve made my peace with God.”

Mackenzie glanced at Jay. They got down in the hole and Mackenzie laid the poles out beside Earle. “First we’ll splint you up. Then we’ll get you out of here.”

“I’m cold.”

“It’s warmer topside. The sun’s had a chance at the ground.”

“That won’t last. Going to be a cold night.”

“We made it through last night, didn’t we?”

Earle licked a shred of cactus pulp off his chapped lower lip. “You’re the doctors. I’m not a doctor, you know.”

“That’s all right. There’s enough doctors here.”

“Well if you insist on trying to make repairs I don’t mind. Get on with it.”

Mackenzie looked up. Shirley sat crosslegged at the rim, the small tight breasts shadowing her rib cage. Her shoulders were beet-red. Bits of earth clung to her skin.

“Jay told you what we’re going to do?”

“I’d just about decided to cut off all my hair anyway. A week ago.” She lied listlessly.

Mackenzie tested the knives and selected one. “I honed this one as sharp as I could.” He offered it to Jay. “You want to do it?”

“No. But I suppose we’ve got to.”

“Nothing else we can use out here. The plants are too brittle.”

Shirley said, “For God’s sake stop talking about it. Do it.”

It took several hands. Mackenzie had to help. Jay kept scowling at him, the air whistling expressively through his nose.

They sawed through Shirley’s hair, plaited the strands and made their twine. It took a great deal of time; it left Shirley with a ragamuffin thatch.

She ran her hands experimentally through the tomboy remains that tufted her scalp. Then she turned her face away from them. “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Mackenzie doubted it would be given time ever to grow back.

Jay said, “I guess we’ll have to palpate Earle’s leg.”

It had to be pulled and twisted to set the bone in place. Mackenzie was the heaviest of them and practicality required that he be the one to hold Earle down.

He crouched above Earle’s head and pinned down both biceps. Then the high ring of Earle’s scream stabbed through his skull and he almost lost his grip when Earle convulsed.

“Okay Earle. Gentle down. It’s over.”

“Dear sweet Jesus help me.” Earle’s voice broke.

With braided ropes of human hair they tied the splints in place. If the swelling began to go down they’d have to retie it; Mackenzie cautioned them to tie bow knots.

Finally Shirley collapsed back against the wall of the pit. “It’ll have to do.”

Sweat stood beaded on Earle’s flaccid skin. The last twinge of acute pain faded across his face. His earsplitting outcry still seemed to echo.

Jay removed something from his ear and examined it. “All this high-priced medical talent and that’s the best we can do.”

“It should heal as straight as it ever was,” Shirley said.

They lifted Earle from the pit and took him down the slope and scooped an earth bed for him in the lee of one of the manzanitas. At least it would cut some of the wind.

Dusk waned; darkness condensed. Decisions needed taking. A score of things needed doing. But Mackenzie had sunk into a constraining ennui and he stood listless.

Shirley’s furious scowl: with her hair cropped she had a pouting-child look: she gave both of them sour up- from-under looks. Jay crabbed his way closer to her as if her public nakedness still embarrassed him. Parched and famished and abraded to raw sores, Mackenzie had no carnal drives left and would have been astonished if Shirley had indicated anything like passion toward him but Jay was going through reflex motions and possibly that was because it was a peg of reality to cling to.

Mackenzie roused himself fretfully. “I hope you had some sleep during the day. We’ve got a lot to do. We don’t need to have me deliver a theatrical harangue, do we?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“We can’t keep thinking in stopgap terms an hour at a time. We’re going to be here a while-we’ve got to plan it out.”

“How long can we stay here and live, Mackenzie?”

“Earle can’t be moved any distance.”

Earle spoke with drunken thickness. “Leave me. If there’s a chance you can get out-”

“Shut up, Earle.” He wished there were some way to avert Earle from feeding in the trough of his guilt: things were bad enough without having to dissuade Earle from martyrdom at every turning.

“We’ll get out in time,” Mackenzie said. “We’ll need clothes on our backs-shoes on our feet.”

There was a burst of inverted laughter from Jay. “Where’s the department store out here? I must have missed it on the way in.”

“You’ve got to stop fighting me.” Mackenzie’s head ached. He fought to concentrate. “This isn’t dead ground. Things live in it. Animals, birds, plants. We’ve got to be predators, that’s all.”

“We’re plastic people from a transistorized civilization two thousand years removed from all this,” Jay said with stubborn cynicism. “I don’t see how we can wipe that out overnight.”

Shirley began to speak but Mackenzie held up a restraining hand. Jay’s last words rattled around in his head- something vitally important: he reached for it, chased it around his mind. An answer was there-he had to find it. The same answer that had eluded him all through the day. What?

Plastic.… Then he had it and he bolted to his feet.

Jay’s head rocked back. He stared at Mackenzie in sudden terror.

Mackenzie was turning, searching the slope, reconstructing last night’s scene. The truck had been- there. He walked toward it as swiftly as he could. Something jabbed his heel and he almost turned his ankle; it made him stop and proceed more cautiously-all they needed was another cripple.

Jay limped after him. “What is it, man?”

“That blessed beautiful plastic God damn raincoat.”