The implication was twofold. On the one hand, this was a heavily armed (with uranium-tipped explosives and armor-piercing bullets, Tasers, proton disrupters, and every other kind of infernal killing device) military detachment that was not to be trifled with; on the other hand, the captain and Rafferty had achieved an understanding. The substance of the understanding was that the federal rules did not apply. The ability of the government to enforce its dictates was understood to be limited. The government could threaten. But in the desert a certain casual feeling about the rule of law was the law, and order was best maintained through a system of mutual interdependencies, these being based upon a seesawing of trust, distrust, and money.
Rafferty, understanding the request, immediately hauled one of the computer chassis out of the back of his truck, set it at the feet of the captain, and remarked that he’d kind of been hoping “to put the thing on the wall” in his trailer. Some busted-down private shone a lamplight in the truck and plucked out some wiring. The men then had a laugh, before the captain reminded Rafferty that he had been ordered to evacuate and that this order was serious, given “the nature of what we’re dealing with.”
“Which is what?” Rafferty said.
“You’re liable to find out before long, and that’s all I can say to you at present. But I’m asking you to observe this request, seriously, because it’s not only for yourself, but for all the people who live here in the valley. We don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with yet, but we have a large population in this county, and a very fluid one, and we don’t want whatever was in this crash site getting out into that large population. Your silence on the subject is also appreciated. Now, I don’t have to worry any further, am I right?”
The ranking officers present as well as the enlisted men all remember the conversation as recounted here, and so there can be little doubt. Rafferty was warned. Rafferty, with the sangfroid of a seasoned low-stakes gambler, had turned back some computer junk to the personnel involved in the salvage operation with the intention of keeping the severed arm, which was, as yet, wrapped in the old advertising circular and lying, at this moment, in the foot well of his flaking, rusting pickup truck.
It is reasonable to surmise that Rafferty chuckled to himself upon climbing back into the front of the truck and turning on the satellite radio, which he had dialed to a station that played country and western and Native American music. He threw the vehicle into drive. He looked down at the arm and repeated aloud his belief, in his impaired state, that he had heard the arm moving earlier, though it now seemed quite still.
The drive across the prairie in the direction of the Forsaken Mining Corp. and its attendant home office, which Rafferty had no intention of evacuating, was a short one, since the operator was running the vehicle on algaenated fumes. And yet it was even shorter than usual. For it was only seconds after Rafferty took his eyes off the arm that it began using a creeping technique that involved grasping with its rather long fingernails for surfaces onto which it could find a secure handhold, moving up onto the seat and toward Rafferty; that is, the arm ventured across the bench-style front seat of the cab of Rafferty’s pickup truck (more than 200,000 miles on the odometer), and its arachnid-style scuttling was slow and circumspect at first, as if it might possibly have understood that it needed to move imperceptibly to avoid detection. It dug in its nails, into the vinyl surface of the banquette — plainly evident to forensics experts upon the scene later — and in this way it propelled itself quietly forward, leaving behind a drizzled trail of caked, congealed blood.
Rafferty was wearing, that night, a heavily stained mechanic’s jumpsuit, one he may have purchased secondhand at one of the many used-clothing outlets of Rio Blanco. He had nothing on underneath except a T-shirt. There were some old black work shoes found on the body later, and some grimy athletic socks. The arm, through dead reckoning, launched itself on the nearest fleshy site, and that was the right thigh of the miner, the thigh that was, at the moment of the assault, controlling the accelerator of the truck. Apparently, the arm had no idea of the import of its actions, because jeopardizing the operation of the truck, in which the arm was itself carried, right alongside Bix Rafferty, was not something that was in the arm’s interest. And yet the arm went straight for the thigh, and even more the arm seemed intent, according to the forensics experts, on passing over the thigh, traversing the thigh, on the way to harrying the unprotected groin of Bix Rafferty. The arm clawed at the leg of Bix Rafferty, who was driving, and who was whistling along with some country and western song about lost women and found whiskey, and Rafferty, at that blinding moment, took his eyes off the dirt track. And he saw that the arm was now upon him. With an arm of his own, he attempted to seize the bloody stump end of the severed arm and to fling it from him. Rafferty, in a condition of mortal dread, his veins now sluices of adrenal fluid, was powerfully alert to the necessities of self-preservation. And yet the severed arm too was breathtakingly strong. The severed arm had no purpose but its intention to grasp, and so it had no reason not to give this task its personal best. When it dug its longish nails into something, it really dug them in, and in this case, the nails were puncturing the jumpsuit, pinching the inner thigh of Rafferty, and attempting, moreover, to make probing, stabbing motions in the direction of his genitals, and he was kicking wildly and screaming and attempting to dislodge the arm, to no avail, and now the arm was attempting to climb the front of Rafferty, up along the rusty zipper of the jumpsuit, as though the zipper were one of the freight rails that bisected Rio Blanco and the arm were intent on walking alongside it. The variety of curses uttered by Rafferty would be too numerous to include, and a catalogue of these oaths would distract from his understanding of the danger he was in. In effect, the arm sobered him, cleared his head, so that he could see what a mistake he had made by spiriting away the arm, and perhaps this was his last thought, before the truck, which had long since left the comfort of the unpaved road that led to Rafferty’s operation and was now teetering in a wash, encountered a toppled saguaro or rock, lifted up on one side, and then rolled. The truck went twice over in the wash.
The further bad news for Rafferty was that in the wash, he and the arm were now gathered together in one corner of the cab, a position in which the arm would have easy access to the neck of Bix Rafferty and could engage in another variation on grasping that it longed for. Restriction of airways, compression of circulation, starving of the brain of oxygen. It takes a couple of minutes, usually. The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt. Rafferty offered some opposition, naturally. He grabbed at the forearm and yanked on it, but he had trouble getting a good purchase because of the slick, rank hair that grew upon the thing. In short, Rafferty could not successfully arm-wrestle away the arm. And because he could not arm-wrestle it, he could not keep it from ending his life.
Newspaper accounts indicated that Bix Rafferty once had a family in the Midwest, and though financial reversals had sent him west, he had intended one day to return to his family. It was through a seismic encounter with bad luck that he came to his solitary end, though perhaps it was the sort of bad luck that might have been repelled. His family didn’t know of his privation, his long hours of solitary mining, and they expressed many regrets. He had done what he wanted to do, which was to try to repair his circumstances through rugged individualism, and he had done a mediocre job at it, and now he was gone.