It was too easy to envy the buzzards their freedom. With their cambered wings they could slide effortlessly-a hundred miles in a few hours if they wished-to water or to a safe nest.
It made him think of Calvin Duggai. Somewhere on the surrounding heights Duggai was sure to be camped. Every now and then he’d be taking out his field glasses to find out how his victims were getting along.
He went half asleep and didn’t realize it until a sound startled him and he split his eyes open and saw Jay Painter’s silhouette against the sky foreshortened by perspective.
Jay didn’t speak at once. Mackenzie got up slowly, giving the circulation time to adjust. He stood in the hip-deep hole and scanned the desert. The sun, not nearly so strong now, slanted down from a flat angle near the horizon. Dust devils funneled erratically along the flats some distance away, a yellow wheeling of sand and twigs and leaves.
The buzzards were no longer in the sky. Perhaps Jay’s perambulation had discouraged them.
“What now?” Jay’s voice was painfully hoarse.
Mackenzie picked up the brass knives. “We cut open a cactus.”
11
Jay and Shirley watched his work with dubious expectation, reserving hope. Resentment deformed their features.
The barrel cactus had heavy fishhook spines and he had to cut them out one by one with the clumsy short-bladed tool. He heard Jay’s mutter: “Come on, come on,” and ignored it. It would have been faster to smash the cactus with a rock but that would have wasted half its precious juice. He denuded a collar band around the plant and sawed through it and lifted the lid neatly off the cactus. Then he dug inside with his fingers, scooping out pulp.
He turned, proffering. Shirley took the handful of moist dark substance from him like an addict snatching an overdue fix.
Mackenzie could have let them dig for themselves but by bestowing water upon them with his hands he maintained his fragile leadership. He withheld his thirst; he drank last-because anarchy would kill them faster than anything else. The one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind: fuehrer of the dung heap.
Jay shoveled the stuff out of his cupped hands: lips peeled back in a simian grimace, jaws working.
“God,” Shirley croaked. “It’s horrible.”
“It’s wet.” Mackenzie cut out a section of pulp and sucked on it. His throat and tongue absorbed the bitter liquid greedily. The spasmodic constrictions of his swallowings were ferocious and painful. And all for a few drops of moisture the taste of which was as tart as the smell of new-mown grass.
He scooped out more of the plant’s innards. “Take it to Earle.” Jay held his hands out and looked at it greedily: a dark soggy fibrous substance as unappetizing as compost. Mackenzie swung away.
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 scowclass="underline" 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.