Shirley’s sudden silhouette above him: “How do you feel?”
He couldn’t focus on her: his eyes wouldn’t track. He muttered something. She swung her legs over, sat on the rim and dropped to her feet beside him. “You’ve got a fever, Sam.”
He rubbed his face, felt the cracked parchment of his cheeks. “Where’s Jay?”
“He went to look for salt.”
Duggai. He stared off into the twilight. Well, maybe it would be all right-maybe Duggai would let Jay stumble around out there wearing himself out in fruitless search. Maybe.
He saw she was carrying something in both hands and when she brought it closer to his face he recognized it-a small transparent bag cut from the raincoat’s sleeve; pendulous with water.
“Drink it. It’s beautiful. Fresh and clear.”
He took it into his swollen mouth a sip at a time. “Things I need to be doing …”
“Tell me. Jay and I will do what we can.”
If Jay ever returned. “How much water did that thing make?”
“The bag was full. Nearly a gallon, I imagine. It’s astonishing, Sam.”
“It’ll do the same tomorrow but you’ve got to feed it-by now it’s sucked a lot of the moisture out of that ground. Ought to urinate in there-around the cup, not in it. Cut pieces of cactus, dump them in there. Dig moist earth out of the walls of these trenches-put that in too. Every night we drink the fresh water and clean the junk out of the bowl around it. Start over again, feed it for the next day.”
“How does it work?”
“Sun heats the plastic. Draws moisture out of anything in there-the ground, cactus, anything. Principle of evaporation. Water condenses on the underside of the plastic, drips down to the low point, drops into the cup. It’s a solar still-it’ll condense pure distilled water out of any moisture in the hole.”
“It’s incredible.” She was behaving with deliberate composure that betrayed how close she was to wild hysteria: their lifeline was fraying.
He coughed; something dry rattled in his chest. “Listen-use some of that water to make clay pots. Bake them in the fire. Can you make a fire now?”
“It’s already burning. Jay made it before he left.”
“Make mud, shape the pots, bake them slow-not too close to the fire or they’ll crack. Got it?”
“What else, Sam?”
“We’ve got to start making some effort toward hygiene. We’ll end up with festering sores if we can’t clean ourselves. Got to make soap.”
“How?”
“Cooking fats and white wood ashes. Mix it up in a clay pot. There’s potash and soda in the ashes-mix it with grease and you get good soap. Stinks like a bastard but it cleans. Use the hair side of a piece of rabbit skin for a washcloth. Sponge baths.” He ran out of breath.
His consciousness skipped a few segments of time-instants or perhaps hours. When he looked up again she was gone; when he looked yet again he saw thin clouds scudding across the stars; next he awoke and heard echoes of a ranting voice that he recognized as his own and he knew he’d been delirious in his fever.
Shirley plied him with morsels of warm cooked jerky. He couldn’t swallow them. He took several swallows of water and coughed. “Where’s Jay?”
“He hasn’t come back yet. I’m sorry, Sam, I can’t lift you out of here alone.”
He went dizzy and nearly fainted. His eyes rolled shut and he heard her climb out of the trench, heard the muted song of her distracted humming. Why was it so incredibly hot?
Then it went cold-bone-chilling cold that rattled him with a trembling violence: the skin of his chest jerked with a palsied looseness and it radiated out to the farthest reaches of his body.
Shirley was trying to haul him up out of the ground. “Come on-help me, Sam, we’ll get you to the fire.”
But it was no good; he shook uncontrollably. His teeth kept banging. He tried to curl up into a fetal ball, clenched his hands between his thighs, felt the rough cold earth against cheek and shoulder and hip. Faintly he heard her speak, a catch in her throat: “We haven’t got blankets, Sam.” Then she curled soft against him, warm against his back, her knees under his, arms around his chest; she rubbed his chest hard with the flats of her hands. He tried to speak but reality swam away before he could voice his gratitude.
The fever broke and he came out of it as flaccid as protoplasm. At first he thought it was midmorning by the long shadow but then he saw he’d got turned around: that was the north wall and therefore it must be well past noon. Jay-had he returned?
There were ashes beyond his feet and when he looked up he found another dead little fire above him in the head of the pit.
By his hand lay a plastic balloon filled with water, tied shut with woven strands of red hair.
He drank it with slow patience, measuring out the greed of his thirst; he drank it all-at least a pint-and reached gratefully for the jerky that hung spitted against the wall of his grave.
Chewing the thing set up an ache in the weakened muscles of his jaws but he masticated it as fine as he could before he risked swallowing. Afterward he lay with his shoulder propped against the wall trying to gather energy to get up for a look around. He drowsed while random images fled through his uneasy mind. It occurred to him without much force that somewhere in the run of the past few hours he had nearly died and that Shirley’s body and the two fires had kept him alive. He pictured himself rising out of the grave and had an image of Duggai out there watching through field glasses with keen disappointment.
He almost slept again but Shirley’s angry hoarse yelling aroused him. He managed to get his feet under him and stood with his arms on the rim of the pit.
She stood above her trench throwing rocks and yelling at the buzzards that swooped low over the strings of hung jerky. The racket scared them off and they went back toward the hills in long resentful spirals of movement.
Her shoulders slumped; she watched them plane away; then she saw Mackenzie and she came anxiously toward him, the thin moccasins kicking up little whorls of dust.
“How do you feel?”
“Rocky. You’d better not stand in the sun.” The heat was a furnace blast.
She hesitated-still ten feet from him-and stopped; her eyes went toward the farther trenches. Now Mackenzie saw bruises on her face. There was an ugly blue patch under her eye and one cheek was discolored. It wasn’t sunburn.
She saw his face change and she tried to dismiss it. “Do you want more water?”
“I can wait for sundown. Shirley-”
“You’d better not burn energy talking. Get back out of the sun.” She went away too quickly, he thought; furtively.
He spoke to her back: “Get some sleep. I’ll take a turn doing scarecrow.”
He saw her nod quickly as she climbed into her hole. She didn’t look back at him.
So Jay had returned. Jay must have found them pressed together in the pit during the night. And rage had overwhelmed Jay and he’d beaten her.
If he comes after me tonight I won’t have much strength to fight him.
He lay back in the trench and squinted at the sky.
16
Through the hot afternoon he dozed and made periodic surveillances of the hanging food; once it was a near thing but he shouted the buzzards away. The fever had wasted his strength and he felt coltishly fragile-the least muscular requirement meant a willed determination and his mind floated in an eddying pool of unformed anxieties.
The sun tipped over and lost strength. Voices roused him from his stuporous reveries. At first he didn’t attend to the words. He found an obscure fascination in listening to the songs and qualities, the play of sound back and forth among them, the feelings revealed in their tones; it occurred to him that a baby or a dog would listen to human conversation that way and absorb the same meanings from it.
Then the words trickled into his awareness.