If I were alone out here, he thought, I’d make it. Duggai and all, I’d make it.
But he wasn’t alone and Jay and Shirley were greenhorns; and the broken leg anchored all of them. Of course Duggai had broken Earle’s leg deliberately with this in mind: Earle had given him the excuse but it might just as easily have been any of them. Duggai wasn’t the sort of avenger who left anything to chance.
Thinking of Duggai as an avenger-it was a turn of phrase that occurred to him now for the first time-made him recall Duggai’s parting speech to them: it had been just over twenty-four hours ago. Now maybe you find out how much of a crime it is. Maybe you find out how crazy you got to be to want to live. I tell you one thing-whatever happens to you out here ain’t half as bad as what they do to a man in them hospitals.
Ordinarily if a man nursed the dream of vengeance on account of his capture and imprisonment he vented the dream against policemen or prosecutors or witnesses who identified him as guilty. Duggai hadn’t gone after any of those. His resentment was aimed at the practitioners who had searched around inside him and concluded that he was not responsible for his actions. By making that statement they diminished him. And they put him away in a place that was to a man like Duggai infinitely less tolerable than a penitentiary. In prison the rule was brutality and Duggai could have lived with that-it would have been a finite sentence, he’d have been able to look forward to parole. For a misfit like Duggai a commitment to the state mental hospital must have looked like a one-way ticket and it wasn’t the kind of place where a man could sustain himself on immediate physical hate: the attendants and doctors would treat him with professional competence rather than contemptuous ruthlessness. There was no object in sight on which to focus rage; therefore it focused on something more distant but less elusive-the four psychiatric witnesses who’d sent him to the place.
But there was more than that. There was the heritage of witchcraft and shamanism.
Mackenzie had felt the glancing edges of it in his own childhood. Now and then there was a witch-hunt-sometimes when someone got sick, sometimes when someone ran amuck. Either way it was the same: sick or drunk he’d been witched; people had a duty to find out who was responsible and deal with the witch. There was only one way and that was to hire a shaman whose powers were stronger than those of the witch. Then you had to bring the witch-by force if necessary-into the presence of the shaman and the shaman would make medicine to drive the spirit out of the witch. They didn’t advertise it but the Navajo were firm believers in exorcism. In a good many cases it wasn’t all that much different from psychiatry. The jargon differed but the objective was the same and the methods were not totally dissimilar.
It was something Grandfather Mackenzie had always tried to combat: his rigid Presbyterian mentality had loathed superstition and psychiatry alike-“They don’t call them headshrinkers for nothing.”
Duggai had been witched. He could escape from the hospital and he might break to freedom-there was always Mexico-but he would remain a doomed man unless he could exorcise the demons from inside him. You didn’t get rid of demons by simply killing the witches who had injected them into you; you had to crush the witches’ power. Only when their power was squashed could you gather enough strength to expel the demons.
That was why Duggai hadn’t simply killed them and dumped the bodies. And it was why Duggai was still out there. Otherwise he’d be deep into Mexico by now. But he was a Navajo and he’d been witched and he had to take care of that first. He had no medicine of his own. He had to rely on nature’s medicine: the gods of the desert: they would provide his justice.
Duggai would not interfere with their attempts to survive but he would wait out there and he would watch and he would terrorize them. If they lived and tried to get past Duggai then he would have to kill them for simple practical reasons-revenge and the prolongation of his own freedom-but if it came to that Duggai would kill them without pleasure because he would know that their power was too strong for him and therefore his demons were still intact; he would know he was doomed.
If Duggai ended up having to kill them with bullets he wouldn’t live long after that. He’d try to shoot up a town or he’d walk into a police station and start a battle. Driven by the demons he’d be forced to precipitate his own destruction.
I lived out there that time because I was Innun. Maybe you can live too. If you make it I’ll be waiting for you, Captain.
No comfort in it but there was the knowledge that if it came to that, Duggai would score a Pyrrhic triumph.
It was the key to Duggai’s tolerance. It was also a weakness they could exploit: Duggai would give them room to move around.
Understanding Duggai’s motives was one thing. Understanding his evil was another. The more he thought about Duggai the more fervid became Mackenzie’s rage. He hated Duggai with all the fury in his soul.
It was no good forgiving the enemy; a raging hatred was necessary: it was the spur to survival. Passions of rage consumed Mackenzie and he made no effort to resist them.
Toward morning the snares netted them a brace of jackrabbits. It was all they could expect from this worked-over patch of ground; the snares would have to be moved to a new hunting ground by tomorrow night.
Shirley volunteered to skin out one of the hares and her initiative shamed Jay into tackling the other. Mackenzie monitored the work, made a monosyllabic suggestion now and then, fought down his reluctance to let them handle the knives: he couldn’t afford botched work but he no longer felt inclined to deny them their authority-his obsession with tyranny had burned itself out. At first he’d undertaken the experiment in benevolent dictatorship with shameful eagerness-not often in a lifetime was a man allowed to decree every move in the lives of his companions-and perhaps it had been necessary or perhaps he had only rationalized its necessity but the subtle brief groan of the pickup truck had changed all that. Duggai.
If Duggai was watching them through some telescopic device then he understood that they were being sustained by Mackenzie’s leadership. If Duggai got a little impatient or a little more desperate he might think about putting a bullet into Mackenzie: kill him or disable him. Mackenzie would be the first target. It was only sensible to share the responsibility out; if he became a casualty the others might still have a chance.
The next time he went out to check the snares he took Jay along and showed him how to set them.
15
In the gray light before dawn they worked with concentrated silent industry. They smashed bones and ate the marrow for its nourishment. Mackenzie made a sack from entrails to hold blood from the night’s kill.