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.

“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 fingernail: 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.…