Jay said, “How long can we last? Come on, Sam, what’s the point of lying? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight?”
Mackenzie’s scalp contracted. In a bitter part of him he felt contempt for Jay’s despair. He regarded the desert disdainfully until Jay stumbled to his feet hefting a small rock in his fist.
Mackenzie stepped back. “Easy. Easy. Gentle down, Jay, this may not be your last chance to die.”
Shirley’s voice struck into it, small and crisp like a spark falling into gunpowder. “Put it down. You look ridiculous.”
Jay’s face crumpled. He dropped the stone. Shirley was down on her knees now; she pressed her hands to her temples.
Mackenzie turned away. For a moment he thought perhaps it was because he saw himself reflected too closely in Jay’s weakness. Then he realized that was no cause for shame. They were all human.
Shirley kept looking at him-staring, he was sure, at his gnarled stomach muscles. After a moment her fiery eyes shifted toward her husband’s narrow caved-in body, hunched as he sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, genitals dragging ludicrously. He had sat down like that; now he stood up again. Every flicker of emotion was mirrored transparently on his long face. Something-an anguish of memory? — drove him striding away in inarticulate rage until he stamped on a sharp edge and fell, breaking the fall with the flat of a hand, sitting down hard, turning his head balefully to stare over his shoulder at Mackenzie and Shirley. “Why did he do this to us?”
Mackenzie said, “We’ve always got reasons for killing each other, haven’t we?”
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 time have we got?” His voice was muffled against Shirley’s shoulder. “False hopes. You’re a sadistic bastard, Sam Mackenzie.”
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 freewheeclass="underline" 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.”