No way to foresee what form it might take. Adventure came in many ways. Duggai’s weren’t the only demons: there-was an endless variety against which a man could pit himself.
But he couldn’t go back to forestry. Or psychiatry. Or even to Shirley.
Shirley. That had been another world. In any case she’d decided at the last to make her peace. She and Jay had found each other again. Mackenzie had left them comforting each other like children in the dark: holding hands while the world ended. If it didn’t end after all-if they lived-they would go out of this place fused into unity. They weren’t Navajos, they weren’t built to play Duggai’s games, but they were whole, within themselves. Mackenzie had seen them grow stronger. The final setback had shocked them into temporary surrender-they’d given up, accepted the fate Duggai had decreed, but they’d resolved to do it together and that was the thing they’d remember when it was over.
It’s not that I don’t want her. Maybe I always will.
But the memory of all this would make it impossible. The same experience that had welded Shirley and Jay together would pry Shirley and Mackenzie apart. She would look at Jay and remember how it had brought them together, how they’d found the strength in each other; then she would look at Mackenzie and remember how he had come between them; and any warm feeling she had for Mackenzie would be destroyed, in time, by the awkwardness of gratitude. It would get in the way of anything deeper.
In his dank grave, waiting silently, Mackenzie felt eased by fatalism.
There’ll be another woman somewhere, sometime.
He could wait.
He was getting good at waiting.
When the truck came he listened to it with critical attention. His body was lax in the shaded hole. Messages of pain from his feet threatened to drive everything else from his awareness and he had to force pain from the arena. There was no leeway now for anything but the two contestants: gladiators in the sand.
He sat up until the top of his head lodged against the branches of the catclaw. He couldn’t see the truck from here; he hadn’t expected to; but his ears placed it and in his mind’s vision he watched the truck.
It went along past him, below his level. Growling slowly along the uneven ground. A dry axle-spring creaked dis-rhythmically. At its closest point it probably wasn’t more than twelve feet away from where Mackenzie sat hidden. It went on, went as far as it could and then stopped. The engine switched off. In the sudden silence he heard the metal ping with heat contractions.
The truck door opened. Springs creaked. The door chunked shut. Mackenzie heard a dull click-Duggai locking the door?
He was neither surprised nor gratified that Duggai had obeyed his prediction. The luxury of such emotion was far behind him: he had room left now only for pragmatic objectivity.
When he turned his head he could see the sun and he judged the time: probably around eight o’clock. Not hot yet. He heard Duggai’s footsteps. They didn’t alarm him; Duggai wouldn’t come this way. Coming to this spot Mackenzie had eradicated every footprint behind him. In any case he’d left no spoor on the rock. There’d been a smear of blood but he’d scrubbed it off.
A wave of faint dizziness toppled him against his shoulder; he rested against the wall of his foxhole and drew long deep breaths. He felt the engine skip a few beats, then pick up again. Not yet, he thought. Not just yet.
Duggai made random noises; it wasn’t possible to tell what he was doing. Mackenzie waited in mindless patience.
When he heard the splash he made his move.
He pushed the catclaw aside and got out of the hole and sculled on elbows and knees and toes to the rim of the cliff. Inch by inch he lifted his head until he could see down the face of the sheer rock.
Beneath him and to his left was the water hole. The salt lick threw scattered reflections at him; the pool itself was out of the sunlight. Insects jazzed around above the
Duggai was naked in the pool, floating, paddling.
The truck was in the shade under the cliff, its tailgate overhanging the
Mackenzie hadn’t realized Duggai would be able to get the truck that close to the pool.
Bleak realization desolated him. The truck was in Duggai’s sightline. There was no way to get to it without being seen.
He looked at the pool again.
Duggai was looking right at him.
Mackenzie let his breath trickle out slowly through his mouth. It occurred to him after a moment that with the bright sky in his eyes Duggai couldn’t see him. Duggai floated around, splashing lazily, benign. By the bank of the pool his clothing was heaped and the Magnum’s blue gleam came from the top of the pile of clothes. Duggai was within arm’s reach of it.
Duggai stiffened and listened to something and then relaxed, having identified and dismissed it.
The rifle wasn’t there.
So the rifle was in the truck. But the truck was visible to Duggai and probably the door was locked.
When Duggai rolled over in the water and began to wash his face Mackenzie backed away from the rim, moving by inches. He had to fight a cough down. He slithered back along the slope until he was concealed from below. The sun blasted him into the ground but he found his feet and got upright and swayed when the last strength tried to run out of him as if a drainplug had been pulled.
He tightened everything. Massive effort. Down to raw quivering nerve ends he walked the tangential incline to the point where he’d ambushed the
Rich light streamed across the desert, its color too bright: it made his head swim. Hot wind soughed through the brush. Mackenzie feebly went up along the game trail in a silent crippled crouch.
He went past a dispirited mesquite and around the jutting rock. The truck came in sight, its snout facing him. Beyond it he heard splashing in the pool.
He put his shoulders against the cliff and inched toward the truck until he could see the far rim of the
Duggai, he thought, all this time through all this anguish we have dueled with each other at long range until now and I’ve longed to get within reach of you, you God damned cocksucking motherfucking miserable pissing son of a bitch, and now we stand within thirty feet of each other and I can’t get at you.
He sagged back against the wall of the cliff and brooded at the dusty drab hood of the truck. Through the windshield he could see a pillow scrunched up in the slot behind the driver’s seat. Duggai probably used it for dozing through the heat of the day, sitting in the cab with the air conditioner running.
Mackenzie worked forward another foot, stepped out in front of the truck, put his palms lightly on the hood and stretched forward on tiptoe trying to see if the rifle was in the cab. The bulk of the truck blocked him from Duggai’s view but if he stepped on either side he’d be seen.
He saw the front sight and the muzzle, tipped up against the inside of the passenger door. So Duggai hadn’t slung it in its rack under the camper roof. He’d kept it in the cab. It stood, no doubt, with its buttplate on the floor, the stock wedged firmly between seat and door so that it wouldn’t carom around inside the cab. If Mackenzie could only get that passenger door open the rifle would fall right out into his hands.
It was that easy. And that impossible. The rifle might as well have been in Texas. The lock buttons on the sills of both doors were punched down in the locked positions; and the windows were shut.
He backed silently away from the truck and leaned against the cliff and tried to think.
Beyond the rock lip he heard Duggai grunt with pleasure and splash gleefully, slapping the surface of the water like a child learning to swim. Mackenzie scowled at the distraction and tried to focus his thinking on the truck, the problem of the truck, the Chinese box puzzle dilemma of the truck. Then something tickled his foot and when he looked down he saw the scorpion.
It was a small one not more than half an inch high with the whiptail stinger curled up over its golden back. It’s the little ones that kill, he thought dispassionately. The little ones had the most virulent poison. He watched it
