You can help me by setting me free of this place. This place is not fit for a human man. Such a place sucks the spirit from a human man. Put me in prison if you want: if I’m guilty by your law then punish me in prison. A man in a prison only needs to close himself off and wait out the time. Prison is not personal, it is just time to be passed. This place, all the picking and prying and understanding, this place with its machines and the needles and the pills and the lunatic inmates-the examinations of my blood, my breath, my urine, my feces-you are like shamans using my waste in a clay pot to foretell things as if I were a goat, you leave a man no dignity.
You are turkey buzzards picking over carrion; you make me into carrion for your pickings. That is not life. That is not what a man can endure. Life is dignity. I come from a line of people who tortured our enemies as a matter of course but we tortured them in good faith and allowed them to die, in the end, with dignity intact. We did not dismantle their insides and poke around their manure while they were still alive to watch us do it.
We want to understand, Calvin. You want to understand by destroying. You put the needle in my arm to draw blood and study it but what you really want to do is put the needle in my brain and study my spirit: you want to draw me out of the skull into your syringe and study it in a laboratory beaker, a curiosity, like something people stare at in a zoo.
You’ve tried every way you know to destroy my dignity. Dignity is a man’s only possession in the end. You have failed to destroy mine but if you keep me here long enough I will lose strength and you will succeed after all. I will be worse than dead. A man can die but dignity can continue to inhabit his spirit.
And I am not dead yet anyway. I have things to do first.
Hate keeps him moving. He clamps his jaw with the anguish of the knee. He folds the blanket carefully over again and then rolls it neatly and drapes it around his neck. He gets the knife back into his teeth and crouches twice and straightens, experimenting. It is possible to mask the pain with hate: just think about the four of them. The muscles are working and that is what matters. He hooks his fingers through the chainlink mesh, testing it; he puts his toes into the wire and allows himself to sag, putting his weight on fingers and toes, feeling the metal cut into his flesh.
He knows it will have to be fast because he can’t hold long; the wire cuts too fast. He releases the fence and steps back a pace, secures the blanket around his shoulders and goes into his crouch, spreading his hands until the palms touch the wet grass.
There is a flicker of light along the cloud bellies and he hears the hiss of another car going up the road on the hill. He feels chilled in the wet; his toes curl in the grass.
He makes the leap with all his strength. The stab of agony in the knee shocks him faint; he hears his own grunt of pain and clamps his lips shut on the knife, cutting his lip. His stretching fingers fumble against the mesh and he scrabbles for holds with his toes. The wire cuts into him. All his two hundred pounds are distributed on a few pieces of narrow steel wire and the effect is that of razor blades.
Pain is his existence, complete now. It does not increase when he removes one hand from the wire.
With the hand he snakes the blanket off his shoulders, shakes it out, unfurls it to its four-thickness fold, swings it overhead, slaps it blindly down, feels it drape over the barbed wire above him, feels across the blanket until through the cloth he finds a taut strand-the point of a steel barb bursts through the padding into his finger. He shifts his hand an inch to the left, between barbs, and clenches his grip.
He frees the other hand and both feet. Now he hangs full length by one hand from the blanket-padded barbed wire.
The rain beats against him. He gets the left hand up and gropes between the barbs. When he has his grip he heaves his left leg high, hooks his heel against the blanket and feels it slide over the barbed wire. A prick of steel rakes his calf but he drags himself up with his weight on the puncture, thinking of the free earth beyond, propelled by his hate, visualizing the four faces.
For a moment he is poised on top of the wire, tangled in folds of the sodden blanket, and he flashes on a monkey he saw high in a tree in montagnard country with fragmentation bombs exploding all around. Then he is rolling, switching his handgrips frantically, his legs swinging off into space.
He hangs free. His toes bang against the outside of the mesh and he swings his feet out and lets himself drop.
He tries to land mainly on the good left leg but the battered knee takes part of the fall and he cries out faintly. The knife drops from his mouth. He is on both hands and one knee, holding the injured knee protectively off the earth; he sobs, his agony beyond control.
The four of them. They put me in here. They could have sent me to prison but they sent me here. When men invade your spirit and trample your dignity they must be destroyed. That is the Old People’s law and I am still one of them, one of the people of the high desert. They must be destroyed and I must be the instrument of their destruction and it must be appropriate to their offense. You do not simply kill such people because that would leave their spirits intact to follow you forever. You must cripple their spirits first by dominating them, by proving to their spirits that yours is the stronger spirit, by inflicting upon them tortures that you yourself can withstand.
Duggai lets himself down onto his left side and scrabbles with his hand in the wet weeds but he cannot find the knife.
The need for speed and distance overpowers everything else now. He leaves the knife behind, drags himself one-legged across the gravel and stickers, makes for the trees.
He looks back. The lamplit windows are only faint smudges of light.
Freedom.
But to keep it he must make distance. Against the twisting needles of pain he hobbles over the top of the hill and into the forest beyond. Twigs and stones lacerate his bare soles.
Finally there is the road.
He remembers coming through the town manacled in the back seat of the Department of Corrections sedan seven months ago. It is not more than two miles to the edge of town. If he keeps moving he can be there in an hour even on one leg.
He puts his good foot onto the road and limps into the drenching darkness.
2
Mackenzie’s corded forearms wrestled the steering wheel. Insects crashed into the Jeep’s windshield, leaving smears; on the highway ahead lay a black watery heat mirage. A roadside sign flashed past: “Industry we do desire.… Interested? Please Inquire!” The painted letters had been faded gray by the sun.
He left the blacktop at the head of the pass. The Jeep rattled across the rails of the cattle-guard and Mackenzie put it recklessly down the washboard ruts of the dirt road. Everything shook; there was a clattering din. Impelled by haste he didn’t let up until he passed the turnoff to the Recreation Area. Then the road narrowed and began to twist and he was forced to drop it into second gear.
He went grinding on up into the pines; the Jeep humped painfully over roots and rocks. Finally in thinning air he reached the fork. Little shingle signs pointed both ways: RANGER STATION. CAMPGROUND. He went through the trees toward the station.
Smyley was at the foot of the fire tower waiting. “Heard you coming a mile back. You trying to wreck the Jeep or just set a new land-speed record?”
Mackenzie got out. The dog came out from under the cabin and stretched lazily and came forward to have her ears scratched. Mackenzie said, “Good pooch,” and started to unload the supplies from the back of the Jeep.