Finally he went uphill toward her. She looked heart-breakingly beautiful.
He put his hands around her ribs and lifted her down off the boulder. She stood against him; she didn’t draw away.
She didn’t smile. “Can you feel my heart?”
“I thought it was mine.”
“Sam-right now I feel about sex roughly the way I feel about eating ground glass. But I want you to squeeze me until it hurts. I want to draw your strength into me.”
They cleaned themselves with wood-ash soap and scraps of rabbit fur; they sponged Earle down and he spoke softly of God’s bounties. Mackenzie built up the fire higher than it had been on previous nights: Jay would want a beacon to find his way back. He went down along the new trapline that Jay had set but it was too early and there were no prizes yet. They drank from the still and bagged the rest of the water, cleaned out the pit and spent half an hour gathering cactus and cutting it up into the hole to provide tomorrow’s water. Mackenzie found the tattered scraps of the moccasins Jay must have used on his expedition of the previous night; apparently Jay had made new moccasins for tonight’s travel. Jackrabbit hide was too thin to last long on this terrain-and Jay was foraging a good many miles out. Mackenzie had an idea what Jay’s feet must have been like by the time he’d returned to camp fourteen hours ago; it spoke of Jay’s courage that he had gone out again tonight. Maybe Duggai would leave him alone again.…
The clay bowls were clumsy but they were serviceable: Shirley improvised a thick soup from meat and blood and water and chopped saltbush. Mackenzie wasted nearly an hour searching a widening area for poles long and thick enough to make a litter but the land didn’t provide anything nearly substantial enough; they would have to carry Earle on their backs until they got into heavier growth somewhere.
When he returned to the fire he said, “We should plan to move out tomorrow night.”
“To where?”
He pointed toward the hills to the northeast. “I’ve heard coyotes up there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’d be water not too far away. Bigger animals. Maybe salt too. That’s the way we’ll go until we find what we need. When we can equip ourselves with more clothes and better footwear. Then we strike out due north. We move all night and hole up by day.”
“Why north?”
“There’s a superhighway.”
“How do you know that?”
“Senita. The little organ pipes. They only grow in Arizona west of the divide.”
“Where does that put us?”
“East of Yuma. Luke Air Force Gunnery Range.” He indicated the compass points. “That’s east, more or less. There’s a road that runs north from the Mexican border through one or two little towns, finally ends up at the highway junction at Gila Bend. We could strike out for that road but it might be a hundred miles from here.”
“That far? My God.”
“This thing probably measures five or six thousand square miles. That way’s the Mexican border. Might not be too far south of us but I don’t think there’s anything down there. Lava beds, craters, a lot of dry mountain ranges. They could have built towns down there in the past twenty years but I doubt it. That country’s even less hospitable than this.” He poked his chin toward the west. “That way we’d hit the Colorado River. Sooner or later. But we’d have to cross the Yuma flats to reach it-sand dunes. And again we don’t know if he put us down east or west of center-it might be only twenty-five miles from here to the river, then again it could be more than a hundred. From Ajo to Yuma it’s about a hundred and forty miles. It’s all gunnery range. No-our best shot’s north. The main highway between Tucson and San Diego. It can’t be more than forty or fifty miles.”
“I didn’t know there was any uninhabited area that big any more.”
“There are no roads, no human existence at all. Travel into these areas is forbidden.”
“And forbidding.”
“Anyhow we’ve got to go north. It won’t be just forty miles. You can’t go ten miles without running up against a range of mountains-they look easy from here but that’s steep rubble and they’re bigger than they look-six or seven thousand feet. You can go around the ranges but it trebles the distance. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“Don’t they ever patrol with helicopters?”
“If they’ve got reason to suspect someone’s out here. Now and then I guess they do a routine sweep. But Duggai can reach us with that rifle if he sees a helicopter.”
“If it came to that he probably wouldn’t mind shooting the helicopter to pieces.”
Mackenzie closed his eyes and nodded agreement. “He’s just the one to prove he can do it. He knows ’copters-he’d shoot for the radio first, then the rotor coupling.”
“What chance have we got then? Honestly.”
“What difference does it make? It’s the only shot we’ve got.”
She began to clean out the bowls with a handful of grass. “It’s tempting to get maudlin, isn’t it.” Mackenzie watched the play of muscles under her skin. She sat crosslegged, spine bent in a hunched concentration, breasts pendant, lip between teeth. “If you scrub too hard you disintegrate these things. I ruined one last night.”
Then she looked over her shoulder toward the hills. She held the gaze for a moment. “I keep looking for buzzards up that way.” She went back to work; her voice dropped. “If you want to know the truth he’s amazed me in the past day or two. Before this happened if you’d served him a stringy piece of beef or told him his plane was half an hour late he’d have measured it as a catastrophe.”
“It’s not his fault.”
“I’m not criticizing him. He never had to face this before. I suppose I’m surprised by how brave he’s turned out to be.” She scoured the last bowl and set it aside, making an irked face, rubbed her eyes. Then abruptly she said, “Oh, what difference does it make?”
“Don’t go defeatist.”
She made a little bark of sour laughter.
He said, “We started out hanging from our fingernails-not thinking any farther ahead than the next drop of water. We’ve made a lot of progress. We’re talking about crossing a hundred miles.”
“Well, thank you for the pep talk. But how do I ignore Duggai out there?”
“Think of him as one more hazard. We’ve licked some others.”
“They’re not the same. The desert doesn’t care-it’s indifferent. You can’t say that of Duggai.” Her shudder was theatrical; she apologized for it with a smile that switched on and off peculiarly. “Maybe it’s because we don’t see him. He’s got so much bigger than life-size. He dominates every instant of our lives now. Some mythic malevolent ghost-one of those eternal spirits that can’t die until they get their doomsday revenge. You know I keep picturing him like a childish nightmare-something gigantic with a scythe.” Her head swiveled away; she tossed it as if she still had her long hair.
Neither of them had anything to say after that. Mackenzie didn’t have the strength to keep anything going. The irony touched him; maybe out there Jay was torturing himself with fantasies of what might be transpiring between them.
He found himself listening for the sound of the four-wheel drive but there was no sound at all.
17
For a while he dozed. Near morning he worked the skins, made spare sets of moccasins, sewed a water bag with a shoulder strap and lined it with the raincoat sleeve. There were a few pelts left over-not enough for much but he sewed them into brief breechclouts with thong belts: not much protection but better than nothing. He gathered up two brass knives; there was no sign of the third one-Jay must have it. He made a little pocket in his breechclout and tramped the desert for half an hour gathering up a dozen additional.30-caliber shells; they might find uses for them.