At intervals of two hundred or three hundred feet the manzanita lacings would break and he would replace them: he crossed the desert from manzanita to manzanita.
The flats were never flat: it was uphill and downhill always. He would lose sight of the hills for a while and climb to a height from which they were visible and descend through another blind trough.
At normal walking pace a man could cover three miles in the space of an hour. Mackenzie had started walking when darkness came. The moon had risen. Midnight had come and gone. He kept walking. Perhaps he had crossed three or four miles.
There was urgency but it wasn’t the kind that would be assuaged by hurry: if he burned his machinery out too soon it would defeat the purpose. The pace had to be steady but slow enough to conserve the pittance of fuel remaining in the engine. His speed across the desert was that of an infant just learning to walk. But it was enough.
The configuration of the hills became familiar and this informed him he was near the camp. He didn’t know whether he would find anyone alive there. He had no expectations. It was something he had to do; he did it without curiosity.
He found his way to a point of ground a few yards higher than its surroundings. From here he examined the land ahead of him in order to locate the camp: it had to be nearby.
It took time and minute examination but finally he placed the site off to his right. He could see the outline of a ridge and knew it was the high ground over which he had crawled the night he’d crept out of the camp.
Therefore the camp lay beneath it just out of his range of vision: one hump intervened.
He went that way, lurching from foot to burning foot.
Perhaps half an hour later he came up out of a shallow dip and crossed a rising wave of earth and saw the familiar slope before him. Down there to the left they had strung their jackrabbit snares; a bit above and to the right he identified the paired clumps of brush that marked the ravine where they’d dug the still. The ravine snaked up toward the top-that was the route he’d taken when he’d left.
He still had several hundred yards to cross. It was too soon to make out human figures in the moonlight unless they moved. He glanced at the mountain foot: was Duggai watching him now?
He came up into the camp on his tottering raw feet. A twinge of alarm quivered in some distant part of him. He was certain he was going to find them both dead.
There were no snares along the jackrabbit run. He climbed. The pit of the solar still was still there where they’d dug it in the floor of the ravine but the plastic sheet was gone. He went across the ravine toward the foxholes they’d dug: he could see the dark rectangular outlines like shadows on the ground.
The trenches were empty.
He blinked very slowly and looked all around him. There on the ocotillo they’d hung jackrabbit strips to dry. The solitary barrel cactus they’d pulped. The manzanita they’d half destroyed to make splints for Earle’s leg.
Something drew his bleary attention. He moved to one side to get a better view past the greasewood clump.
He found them there.
27
They lay naked, the three of them curled up very close to one another; at first he thought they were dead. Then he saw Jay stir.
Jay?
Jay shot bolt upright with tight expectant eyes, ready to cringe. Then recognition changed the skeletal features behind the dark beard. “My God.…”
It woke Shirley. She blinked and scowled. “Sam?”
“We thought he must have killed you.”
Mackenzie dropped to his haunches, braced a palm against the earth, rolled onto the side of his hip and lay with them. It was the first time he’d taken his weight off his feet since nightfall.
Both of them stared at him as if at an unfamiliar object. Shirley’s eye sockets had gone charcoal black. The flesh had sunk to pits under her cheekbones. She was very old-shriveled. “Sam.”
He’d spent himself. He let his head drop onto his arm. Shirley croaked at Jay: “Get him some water. A cactus-something.”
Gray streaks rippled above the eastern horizon. Mackenzie tried to speak. It came out in a hoarse whisper. “Earle.”
“He’s alive,” she said. “Barely.”
In sleep behind the tufted beard Earle’s mouth was composed into a spasm of clenched teeth and drawn narrow lips. The splinted leg was propped on a bed of creosote boughs.
The cropped red hair lay matted on Shirley’s skull. In the early light her eyes burned like gems. She spoke with difficulty. “He came in the truck. When was it? The night before last it must have been. He took everything. The meat, the hides, the knives you made. He took our shorts and moccasins. And the plastic.”
So Duggai had got suspicious when he’d seen only two of them moving around in camp. He’d come down to find out. He’d stripped them of everything and then he’d taken up the trail. It had taken him thirty-six hours to track them. Over the hills, down the game track, past the water hole, north along the desert. He’d found them and he’d brought them back like truants.
“He came back yesterday. He dumped Jay out of the truck and drove away. He never said a word to any of us.”
Mackenzie’s vision blurred. He closed his eyes. It occurred to him that it was the end of his life and that death was simply the end of a long journey around himself: it had not gone from place to place but merely from one point in time to another. There should be more than that, he thought.
Then he was aware of an important fact.
Duggai had brought Jay back to the others but he’d taken Mackenzie far out on the desert and isolated him there. Why?
Because I’m the one he’s scared of. I’m the one who can beat him. I’m the alter ego of his schizoid fear-I’m the Navajo.
Jay returned, hobbling on the outsides of his feet with bowlegged pain, treasuring in his palms a heap of cactus pulp. “Here.” His eyes were strained with some emotion or other, his mouth was tight and straight, he looked cross and sulky.
While Mackenzie savaged the pulp Jay sat looking at him, twisting his knuckles while his face slowly became a twisted venomous ugly mask of fury.
It was enough to astonish Mackenzie. “What’s the matter with you?”
Jay raised a fist as though to strike him-not as a man ordinarily lifted a fist but high above his head: as though it held a wrathful righteous sword.
Then a great sob burst from Jay and he plummeted away, rolling on the earth until his back was to them. He curled up fetally: his body shook with its outpouring. The sound of his weeping pulsed and shook.
Shirley glanced at Mackenzie. He saw a fleck of something there. Then she went weakly to Jay; she cradled him and Jay subsided into quietude. Stroking Jay’s head she watched Mackenzie-it was almost defiant.
He blames me, Mackenzie thought, and she’s picked her side.
“Why didn’t you build a fire?”
“There didn’t seem any reason to.” Her expression was stained with hopelessness. Prefiguration of death. “Nothing to cook. And we hadn’t the strength.”
“You’ve given up,” he said accusingly.
“We’ve had it.”
“No.”
“What’s the point in lying?”
“One more day,” he said. “Make it through one more day.”
Jay rolled his face toward Mackenzie. “What for?”
“One more day. Please.” He begged them, pleading with his eyes.
Jay averted his face then. He clutched at Shirley and she held him: together they looked as awkward as beings that might have crawled out of a wreck. Neither of them looked at Mackenzie; neither of them responded to his plea. He said again, in desperation, “Just one day more.”