“You’re just trying to insist that God doesn’t exist because if God doesn’t exist then your sins don’t exist. But it’s no good denying the obvious. Who made the universe?”
“Aagh. Who made God?”
Mackenzie closed his eyes and found the humor in it.
“If I’d known I was going to be imprisoned out here with this loony defender of the faith I’d have-” Jay’s voice trailed off and then resumed at the same pitch: “I’ll tell you this-God wouldn’t keep his authority long if he was ever around to answer questions. Crap. I’m going-it’s cool enough. You can fend for yourselves until I get back.”
Mackenzie tried to lift himself. “No,” he muttered aloud; he wanted to tell Jay to give it up-Duggai was out there. But he went dizzy and fell back. He heard the crunch of footsteps. Jay called: “Maybe you can find some way to have a rational conversation with the official representative of God here.” The fatuity of it made a reckless laughter bubble in Mackenzie. He tried again to rise but his body was lax and he hadn’t the will. He heard Jay’s slow footsteps diminish. Earle coughed and there was a broken stretch without sound; the light began to change.
Two buzzards slalomed overhead. Mackenzie felt gritty, his head ached, there was a miserable knot in his gut; he pictured himself dismembering Duggai, snarling, pulping Duggai’s big face with his fists. The savage fantasy was vivid.
Sullen and pugnacious, he emerged finally from entombment. Sweating, he surveyed the world around him until it stopped swimming. The sun tumbled out of sight before he got his breath. Near Mackenzie’s hole a crowd of red ants dragged a huge dung beetle stubbornly across the earth. He saw half a dozen jackrabbit pelts hung on bushes near the fire; Shirley was on her haunches, her back to him, working with tinder and kindling. Earle lay with his arms folded across his breastbone like a corpse. The buzzards made lazy portentous circles overhead. A mile away along the flanks of the barren hills a small figure crabbed diagonally toward the skyline-Jay.
There was a bone-clicking racket when Shirley tried to set fire to the kindling. He got down on one knee to fix the lacings of his moccasins and then made his way drunkenly between catclaw and ocotillo along the slope.
Her cheeks were dark and gaunt. Mackenzie said, “Let me take a turn at that.” She gave the rocks up to him. He sat flaking off chips and sparks while Earle muttered incoherently beside them and Shirley’s swollen eyes drifted off toward the skyline to the east where Jay had gone out of sight behind a fold of ground.
Shirley’s expression was fixed, melancholy, imprisoned. “He found a trail last night. He followed it a long way but he didn’t find any salt. He’s going to follow it in the other direction tonight.”
“If he’s not careful he’ll wear himself out. It was stupid going off on his own.”
“Someone had to.”
“What if he twists his ankle five miles from here?” He didn’t mention Duggai.
“I almost wish he would.” She said it with infinite sadness. “I shouldn’t hate him for what this is doing to him. It’s not his fault.” She flicked a tiny stone with her fingernaiclass="underline" it rolled a few feet and stopped, becoming indistinguishable from all the others. “Better off dead.”
“What?”
“All of us. We’re just prolonging this. Duggai’s never going to let us out alive.”
Mackenzie said dryly, “Where there’s life …”
“Don’t patronize me with platitudes.”
“Well you know there’s one Duggai and there are four of us.”
“I’m sure he’s got at least four bullets, Sam.”
“At least we ought to give ourselves a run for our money.”
“It’s so unfair.” She stood up and walked away. Mackenzie didn’t watch her go. He kept scraping the quartz pieces together and after a while the tinder nourished a spark and it grew; he let it take half the kindling before he pushed the thin red logs into it.
When it was burning to his satisfaction he had a look at Earle.
Wire-thin veins made circular smudges on Earle’s wasted cheeks. His belly was swollen but his chest and limbs had shrunk: the skin hung in loose folds and his elbows and shoulders protruded like those of something already dead.
Earle’s face twitched; he looked apologetic. He said, “I suffer, therefore I live,” and grinned maliciously.
“How do you feel?”
“Terrible. But you know it’s a little like being up against a grindstone. Either it grinds you down or it polishes you up. Depends what you’re made of. Spiritually I feel much stronger than I ever did before. Whatever happens, I can take it.”
“Sure you can.”
Earle shivered. “Sorry. Ghost walked over my grave.”
“Jay’s gone looking for a salt lick.”
“I know.”
“If we can find salt you’ll be all right, Earle.”
“I’ll be all right whether we find salt or not. The companions of God are looked after. I really believe that, you know.”
Plainly he was clutching in desperation; but there would be no pleasure in the cruelty of planting doubt in Earle’s mind.
Earle said, “Are you all right now?”
“I expect so.”
“Good. You’re the lifeline for the Painters, you know.”
It made Mackenzie give him a quick direct look but Earle turned his face away; his eyes dulled. He had decided not to confide.
Mackenzie thought, he knows he’s dying but he doesn’t want to depress us. It made Mackenzie angry with Earle’s empty heroics. Better for all of them if Earle simply got it over with.…
Mackenzie winced at his own callousness. He sat furiously blaspheming to himself. Then he faced the truth. “Earle, listen to me.”
“Sure. I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“Don’t let yourself die for our convenience.”
“What makes you think-”
“Suicide is a mortal sin, isn’t it?”
“I’m not Roman Catholic. I’m Anglican-Episcopal.”
“Sorry. I heard you talking about sins before.”
“Hardly a concept exclusive to the Roman church.”
“Earle, I just don’t want to think you’re fooling yourself into some idea of noble self-sacrifice.”
Earle’s eyes turned smoky and hurt. “Have you seen me trying to slit my throat? Have you?”
“I want you to fight, that’s all.”
“I am fighting. I’d have been dead long, ago if I hadn’t.”
“You’ve got to start expecting to get out of this alive.”
“You’ve always detested me,” Earle said with practical sensibility. “Why are you so concerned about my survival?”
“Because there’s got to be a difference between me and Calvin Duggai.”
“Do you want to be cryptic?”
“We’ve got to prove we’re better than Duggai. We’ve got to survive-all of us.”
“So that’s the obsession that’s driving you.”
“Listen, you God damned son of a bitch, I intend to have Duggai’s head in a basket and I expect you to help me get it.”
Earle went all colors at Mackenzie’s profanity. Then abruptly he smiled. “You’re a mystic after all. You believe in that Indian witchcraft just as much as he does.”
“What do you know about that?”
“I know enough to figure out why he left us alive instead of shooting us. Devils and spells and demons. I read up on it when the lawyers asked me to examine him. Thought it might be a key. After all, he’s had cultural implantations a lot different from mine.”
“How the hell do you reconcile your religious faith with that behaviorist dogma?”
“God makes the laws. Our behavior is just obedience to God’s laws. I don’t see any contradiction, do you?” Earle coughed distressingly and then smiled. “You’re trying to change the subject.”
“What was the subject?” He was tired; he honestly didn’t remember.
“Your mystical obsession with proving that your devil power is stronger than Duggai’s.”
Earle fell back exhausted soon after and Mackenzie left him to rest. He’d tried to dismiss Earle’s speculations but their ripples disturbed him for a time.
Shades of lavender and lilac suffused the distance. He fed the fire and turned on his haunches to look for Shirley. He found her in dramatic silhouette: she stood on a boulder searching the horizons. Against the sky she was like a sculpted Diana. The picture was vivid and he held it, not moving, watching her and absorbing the sight: a wild dramatic work of graphic art.