Fear in a Handful of Dust by Brian Garfield

Author:Brian Garfield [Garfield, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com / Open Road
Published: 2012-04-02T05:35:18+00:00

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

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