1
When the lights go off Calvin Duggai lies still and gapes straight up into the darkness while he absorbs the night through his ears.
He hears the slap of the bolt and the male nurse’s footsteps pocking away down the corridor; he hears the squeak of springs, the rustle of bedclothes along the ward. He hears Joley’s fear-of-darkness whimpering and someone’s catarrhal snort arid the empty bitter cough of an inmate’s laughter.
Duggai’s stomach churns. A tight ache spans his skull. Air conditioning pushes the rancid air around but does not leach it of the sick smells of fear-sweat and incontinence and incipient nausea.
Hate spins through him—just now it is unfocused, directionless. Its only restraint is purpose: he must will chaos away. He pushes the pain far back out of his awareness because everything needs to be precise now and he has no leeway for the carelessness that rage could cause.
He reviews the steps, isolating each move in his mind, visualizing, seeking weaknesses—here a point of risk, there a need for swiftness and silence. The rain came suddenly this evening: until then he wasn’t quite ready; the pumping of blood through his temples has been very fast during the past few hours and now he must double his caution because the impatience of weariness may betray him otherwise. If anything comes awry then the entire scheme will collapse because they won’t merely put him back in here, they’ll take him back to the other place with its armed male nurses and its concrete walls from which there is no escape.
When he judges them to be all asleep Duggai lifts his legs off the bed and sits up until his bare feet touch the cold floor. The air conditioning rumbles and he listens beyond it, judging the sounds of men’s breathing, turning his head slowly to catch every angle against the flats of his eardrums. There must be no alarm.
He puts his weight on his feet and strips the blanket slowly off the bed. He folds it because he can’t have a loose edge drag against someone’s foot in the dark. He pads down the length of the ward and carries the blanket into the bathroom, closes the door tight, shutting himself in, dropping the folded blanket to one side.
The silence is abrupt. In the absence of the numerous sounds of human life he now hears the drift of rain upon the roof overhead.
He moves confidently without needing light; long ago his feet memorized the dimensions. The faint hint of illumination defines the high vent window—heavier vertical stripes are the steel bars set into the opening. Even without its bars it would be too small for Duggai to wriggle through.
He crouches. Under the third sink his hands move with quick familiarity: a deft spanning and twisting of the wide fastenings until the elbow of drainpipe comes free. He upends it into his palm and the kitchen knife drops into his hand, a reassuring weight. He lays the pipe elbow aside on the floor with silent care; to replace it would take time and he has examined each step carefully from all directions and determined that there is no need to replace the pipe because they will know about the breakout anyway. It has taken him years in the other place and months in this one to work out the plan and fix each detail in his mind; this is the night he has aimed for and he moves swiftly without waste.
Four paces take him to the outside wall. With the blade he unscrews the four screws that hold the plywood panel over the cavity in the wall (access to the incoming hot and cold water pipes). It has taken several months’ nightly work with fingers and the table knife to cut through the outside paneling and scrape through the stucco. Eight nights ago the knife went through free to the outside of the building and he knew he’d cut his way close enough. Since then it has been a matter of waiting: he has waited for a night black with rain.
He hikes himself up to the window, hanging on the ledge by his fingers, peering out. The rain is opaque. In his imagination he can see the lawn, the high fence, the trees beyond the fence. To the left he can see rain slanting into yellow light from a window farther along the building but that is a safe distance away.
On the floor he lies back and kicks the wall out.
The months of digging have weakened it. The three-foot segment of stucco gives way neatly to his barefoot kick.
He hears it break apart when it strikes the lawn fourteen feet below. A damp soft thudding of pieces. He lies absolutely still now, ears keening the night. The fresh smell of rain seeps in through the hole, dispelling the bathrooms disinfectant air. Duggai feels around the hole with his fingers, finds a jutting edge of stucco and breaks it off, sets it aside and puts the knife in his teeth and wraps the blanket around his shoulders; and goes out feet first.
He wriggles out belly-down and blind, his back to the night. Raindrops soak the pajamas to his legs. The cold rain makes him wince. He grips a pipe and lowers his body until he hangs full length against the outside wall, toes touching the rough surface. Without hurry he gathers himself. When he is balanced for it he lets himself drop.
But he didn’t push out far enough away from the wall and the ground-floor windowsill cracks his knee just before he hits the ground. It upsets him and he sprawls, banging his knee again on a stone in the lawn. He lies still and breathes shallowly through his mouth and fights down the scream of pain. No one must hear him now. He must not be interrupted. He has four people to kill.
In the ticking dark rain he hears only the pneumatic swish of a car on the road some distance away. His eyes track it by the moving reflections of its lights on the underbellies of the clouds.
Pain slams through him in great battering waves. He waits for them to roll back. At the bright hot center of his thoughts is the plan, the next step; he tries to focus everything on that. But images of his enemies keep distracting him. The four hated ones. The doctors.
Now he moves experimentally to find out if he has broken the knee. The pain brings out his tears but he doesn’t feel the grating of anything shattered. He is able to get to his feet and with a rough uncaring need to know he puts his weight on the bad knee. It holds. He limps, dragging the right leg across the grounds, carrying the knife and the blanket: these, and his pajamas, are his only possessions.
Near the end of the building behind him two windows are alight. None of the light reaches this far but even so the lawn is vaguely phosphorescent and his feet leave dark matted prints. He keeps turning his head, searching.
The knee is a great frightful agony. Rhythms of faintness beat through him. Now he is afraid for the first time—not afraid of men but afraid because he isn’t at all sure he has the strength for the fence: can he do it on one good leg?
He does not see the fence at first but the sibilance of the rain gives way to a faint pinging and this sound, felt if not heard, determines the location of the fence for him. He extends a hand before him and gimps forward step by step until his splayed fingers penetrate the mesh.
He looks up but cannot see. Raindrops make him blink. Rut he knows this fence. Twelve feet high, heavy steel chainlink, and there are five strands of barbed wire running parallel at three-inch intervals, canted inward at the top. For all these months he has measured it in his mind and known that he can do it but that was counting on two good legs and now his fear takes the form of a great rage and he has to stifle a roar.
At the far end of the building a shadow passes across one of the lighted windows and Duggai’s breath stops in his throat. He waits for the siren and the floodlights but knows this is only unreasoning fear: there won’t be a bed check on the ward until dawn unless one of the crazies starts to demolish a bed or attack another inmate. On these wards such occurrences are not nearly as likely as they were in the old place, the Maximum Security Hospital. Rut the distinction has not made this ward any more bearable. They ought to kill a man rather than put him in a place like that. They do not understand, and their failure to understand is hilariously funny in its way because they are the ones who keep talking about understanding. We want to understand, Duggai, so that we can help you.
You can help me by setting me free of this place. This place is not fit for a human man. Such a place sucks the spirit from a human man. Put me in prison if you want: if I’m guilty by your law then punish me in prison. A man in a prison only needs to close himself off and wait out the time. Prison is not personal, it is just time to be passed. This place, all the picking and prying and understanding, this place with its machines and the needles and the pills and the lunatic inmates—the examinations of my blood, my breath, my urine, my feces—you are like shamans using my waste in a clay pot to foretell things as if I were a goat, you leave a man no dignity.
You are turkey buzzards picking over carrion; you make me into carrion for your pickings. That is not life. That is not what a man can endure. Life is dignity. I come from a line of people who tortured our enemies as a matter of course but we tortured them in good faith and allowed them to die, in the end, with dignity intact. We did not dismantle their insides and poke around their manure while they were still alive to watch us do it.
We want to understand, Calvin. You want to understand by destroying. You put the needle in my arm to draw blood and study it but what you really want to do is put the needle in my brain and study my spirit: you want to draw me out of the skull into your syringe and study it in a laboratory beaker, a curiosity, like something people stare at in a zoo.
You’ve tried every way you know to destroy my dignity. Dignity is a man’s only possession in the end. You have failed to destroy mine but if you keep me here long enough I will lose strength and you will succeed after all. I will be worse than dead. A man can die but dignity can continue to inhabit his spirit.
And I am not dead yet anyway. I have things to do first.
Hate keeps him moving. He clamps his jaw with the anguish of the knee. He folds the blanket carefully over again and then rolls it neatly and drapes it around his neck. He gets the knife back into his teeth and crouches twice and straightens, experimenting. It is possible to mask the pain with hate: just think about the four of them. The muscles are working and that is what matters. He hooks his fingers through the chainlink mesh, testing it; he puts his toes into the wire and allows himself to sag, putting his weight on fingers and toes, feeling the metal cut into his flesh.
He knows it will have to be fast because he can’t hold long; the wire cuts too fast. He releases the fence and steps back a pace, secures the blanket around his shoulders and goes into his crouch, spreading his hands until the palms touch the wet grass.
There is a flicker of light along the cloud bellies and he hears the hiss of another car going up the road on the hill. He feels chilled in the wet; his toes curl in the grass.
He makes the leap with all his strength. The stab of agony in the knee shocks him faint; he hears his own grunt of pain and clamps his lips shut on the knife, cutting his lip. His stretching fingers fumble against the mesh and he scrabbles for holds with his toes. The wire cuts into him. All his two hundred pounds are distributed on a few pieces of narrow steel wire and the effect is that of razor blades.
Pain is his existence, complete now. It does not increase when he removes one hand from the wire.
With the hand he snakes the blanket off his shoulders, shakes it out, unfurls it to its four-thickness fold, swings it overhead, slaps it blindly down, feels it drape over the barbed wire above him, feels across the blanket until through the cloth he finds a taut strand—the point of a steel barb bursts through the padding into his finger. He shifts his hand an inch to the left, between barbs, and clenches his grip.
He frees the other hand and both feet. Now he hangs full length by one hand from the blanket-padded barbed wire.
The rain beats against him. He gets the left hand up and gropes between the barbs. When he has his grip he heaves his left leg high, hooks his heel against the blanket and feels it slide over the barbed wire. A prick of steel rakes his calf but he drags himself up with his weight on the puncture, thinking of the free earth beyond, propelled by his hate, visualizing the four faces.
For a moment he is poised on top of the wire, tangled in folds of the sodden blanket, and he flashes on a monkey he saw high in a tree in montagnard country with fragmentation bombs exploding all around. Then he is rolling, switching his handgrips frantically, his legs swinging off into space.
He hangs free. His toes bang against the outside of the mesh and he swings his feet out and lets himself drop.
He tries to land mainly on the good left leg but the battered knee takes part of the fall and he cries out faintly. The knife drops from his mouth. He is on both hands and one knee, holding the injured knee protectively off the earth; he sobs, his agony beyond control.
The four of them. They put me in here. They could have sent me to prison but they sent me here. When men invade your spirit and trample your dignity they must be destroyed. That is the Old People’s law and I am still one of them, one of the people of the high desert. They must be destroyed and I must be the instrument of their destruction and it must be appropriate to their offense. You do not simply kill such people because that would leave their spirits intact to follow you forever. You must cripple their spirits first by dominating them, by proving to their spirits that yours is the stronger spirit, by inflicting upon them tortures that you yourself can withstand.
Duggai lets himself down onto his left side and scrabbles with his hand in the wet weeds but he cannot find the knife.
The need for speed and distance overpowers everything else now. He leaves the knife behind, drags himself one-legged across the gravel and stickers, makes for the trees.
He looks back. The lamplit windows are only faint smudges of light.
Freedom.
But to keep it he must make distance. Against the twisting needles of pain he hobbles over the top of the hill and into the forest beyond. Twigs and stones lacerate his bare soles.
Finally there is the road.
He remembers coming through the town manacled in the back seat of the Department of Corrections sedan seven months ago. It is not more than two miles to the edge of town. If he keeps moving he can be there in an hour even on one leg.
He puts his good foot onto the road and limps into the drenching darkness.
2
Mackenzie’s corded forearms wrestled the steering wheel. Insects crashed into the Jeep’s windshield, leaving smears; on the highway ahead lay a black watery heat mirage. A roadside sign flashed past: “Industry we do desire.… Interested? Please Inquire!” The painted letters had been faded gray by the sun.
He left the blacktop at the head of the pass. The Jeep rattled across the rails of the cattle-guard and Mackenzie put it recklessly down the washboard ruts of the dirt road. Everything shook; there was a clattering din. Impelled by haste he didn’t let up until he passed the turnoff to the Recreation Area. Then the road narrowed and began to twist and he was forced to drop it into second gear.
He went grinding on up into the pines; the Jeep humped painfully over roots and rocks. Finally in thinning air he reached the fork. Little shingle signs pointed both ways: RANGER STATION. CAMPGROUND. He went through the trees toward the station.
Smyley was at the foot of the fire tower waiting. “Heard you coming a mile back. You trying to wreck the Jeep or just set a new land-speed record?”
Mackenzie got out. The dog came out from under the cabin and stretched lazily and came forward to have her ears scratched. Mackenzie said, “Good pooch,” and started to unload the supplies from the back of the Jeep.
Smyley waddled over. “Let me give you a hand.”
Mackenzie didn’t want help but there was no way to get rid of the relief man until the Jeep was unloaded. They hauled the grocery sacks inside the cabin.
Smyley put his fists in the small of his back and flexed his spine, rearing far back. “Want some help putting it away?”
“No thanks.”
“Just talk a blue streak, don’t you, Sam.”
“Sure.” Mackenzie went outside and waited until Smyley gave it up and came out.
Smyley gave him an accusing look. “Some of us take kindly to company when we get a chance at it.”
“Sorry, Smyley. I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m in a solitary mood, that’s all.”
“What’s bugging you, Sam?”
“This and that. Never mind.”
“Tell me one thing, will you?”
“What?”
“Where do you go on your days off?”
“Here and there.”
“Jesus Christ.” Smyley rubbed his big belly and glanced down at Mackenzie’s feet. “Nice old dog. She got a name?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she did at one time.”
Smyley got into the Jeep. “Somebody was telling me—did you used to be a doctor or something? Psychiatrist, they said.”
“Yes.”
“What the hell are you doing up here then?”
“My job.” Mackenzie watched him shake his head in disgust and drive away. Then he went inside the cabin and unpacked the supplies. He gave the dog a Milk Bone and went up the ladder into the tower and did a binocular sweep of the mountain forests. He recorded the sweep in the log and checked the radio, broke open the new decks of cards and laid out a double-pack board of solitaire.
The newspaper story kept intruding on his contentment. Finally he climbed down to the cabin and read the story again.
The dog heaved herself on ancient limbs to the larder and he gave her another Milk Bone. She didn’t eat it. She took it outside, perhaps to bury it.
Once every three weeks I see a newspaper, he thought, and I had to pick this one. Odds of twenty to one.
He read it twice. Duggai was a sort of bad tooth that Mackenzie seemed compelled to keep biting and prodding with his tongue.
He went outside and the dog brought him a stick; Mackenzie spent ten minutes throwing it for the dog to fetch; the dog was too old to do more than trot after it. Afterward MacKenzie went back up to the tower, moving up the ladder with a grace that betrayed quite well-tuned muscular coordination for a physique barely shy of fifty years’ age. It was just about all he had to do—calisthenics and isometrics. Otherwise sedentary in the fire tower he’d have gone to atrophy—constant head colds and bellyaches like Wilder or flaccid fat like Smyley, the relief man. Smyley was a reader; doing the circuit from tower to tower he always had his knapsack filled with paperbacks. Wilder was a deep thinker who worried a great deal about ecology and the world; with nothing to do in the towers but worry about Armageddon it wasn’t surprising Wilder had heartburn and sinus trouble. And me? I just get musclebound—in body and mind.
Nevertheless he never could wait to get back to his isolated cocoon after a weekend’s liberty. It was the frantic impulse toward his safe hermitage that always brought him home at top speed in the Jeep. Comes right down to it, I’m happy here and how many can make that claim? He had to smile.
He still had the Sacramento newspaper; he tossed it on the desk and did a sweep of the mountains, searching through the glasses in a deliberate grid pattern until he’d completed the circuit. Down at the foot of the tower the dog was excavating to bury the Milk Bone at the foot of one of the stilts that supported the rickety fire tower. Mackenzie leaned out over the railing. “You’re digging so close you’ll knock the whole thing over, you stupid twirp.” The dog wagged her tail briefly to acknowledge she knew he was talking to her. Mackenzie went back inside the glass enclosure and down with the newspaper.
KILLER SOUGHT AFTER ASYLUM ESCAPE
San Francisco, July 11 (API). Calvin Duggai, 27, committed to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane since his trial in 1972 on five counts of manslaughter, escaped Tuesday night from the California State Hospital at Cochino, in Marin County north of San Francisco.
In making his escape Duggai apparently tunneled through a second-story exterior wall and climbed over a 12-foot steel fence.
Dogs employed in the search failed to trace Duggai because of Tuesday night’s heavy rain, which had washed the spoor away by the time the escape was discovered yesterday morning.
According to Highway Patrol Lt. Richard Loomiston, Duggai allegedly broke into a house one mile from the prison hospital before dawn Wednesday. He may have stolen guns as well as clothing and food from the house. Duggai’s fingerprints were found on several objects in the house, which has been unoccupied for several days, its owners vacationing.
Lt. Loomiston stated that all leads are being pursued. A dark brown camper-body pickup truck, California license plates XVZ237W, was stolen at some time before dawn from a residence on the outskirts of Cochino, and the theft may be connected with Duggai’s disappearance.
Police are emphasizing that if seen, Duggai should not be approached. “He is extremely dangerous and may be armed. Anyone having information about his whereabouts should immediately call local police or the Highway Patrol,” Lt. Loomiston said.
Calvin Duggai is described by police as a Navajo Indian, height 6′ 1″, weight 205 pounds. Hair black, eyes brown, complexion swarthy. The fugitive has a three-inch scar on the back of his left hand extending from the wrist to the center knuckle.
Tracks left in the wet ground at the hospital indicate that Duggai may be limping as a result of his leap to freedom. Color and description of his clothing are unknown pending the return of the householders from whose wardrobe it was stolen.
In 1971 Calvin Duggai, a Vietnam combat veteran, was arrested and charged in Barstow after five men died in the Mohave Desert collecting spent shells on the Randsburg Wash Test Range during the Independence Day weekend.
Tire tracks and other evidence led police to Duggai’s Barstow shack, where his pickup truck still contained 17 buckets filled with empty brass cartridge cases.
According to evidence presented at Duggai’s trial, the six men—described as “scavengers”—had driven into the restricted Randsburg Wash range in the pickup for the purpose of collecting shell casings ejected from Air Force planes during gunnery practice. Such brass casings can be sold to scrap dealers for 55¢ a pound.
For several months prior to the incident, Duggai allegedly had operated similar scavenger hunts on various artillery and gunnery ranges throughout the Southwest.
During the hunt for brass in the desert, an altercation apparently occurred among the scavengers, after which Duggai drove away in the pickup truck, abandoning the five men in a desert area about 40 miles from the nearest road. The high recorded for July 3 was 123° Fahrenheit, and in his summation San Bernardino County Prosecutor Everett Sellas pointed out, “Those temperatures are measured at the weather station in the shade, and in the middle of the Mohave Desert there is no shade.”
Tracks indicated the five victims tried to walk out of the desert. Four of them managed to cross about 5½ miles.
The fifth victim, Gilbert Rodriguez, 15, of Victorville, made his way several miles farther, surviving the first night by breaking open cactus with rocks and squeezing the pulp through his shirt. The desert heat claimed him before noon of the following day.
The five bodies were found by an Air Force helicopter after Mrs. Carlos Rodriguez of Victorville called police to say her son had not returned from a brass-collecting expedition led by Calvin Duggai.
In testimony at Duggai’s trial, San Bernardino County Medical Examiner Dr. Philip Rawson stated that when the bodies were found, “They’d been picked fairly clean by buzzards and ants but we were able to piece the story together. Life expectancy in that desert is extremely brief, even for a healthy adult, if he isn’t a trained expert in the techniques of survival. People’s cars break down out there, they make the mistake of trying to walk out for help, and quite often they’re dead in just a few hours.”
Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are blamed for most summer desert fatalities of this kind. Dr. Rawson stated, “The blood almost literally comes to a boil.”
It was established at the trial that Duggai had deliberately abandoned the five men without water.
In the absence of clear evidence of motive, Duggai was charged with five counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of the five scavengers.
Rumors that Duggai’s motives involved Indian witchcraft and intertribal rivalry led Duggai’s court-appointed defense attorney to successfully petition for a change of venue from Barstow. The trial was held in San Francisco in March, 1972.
A prosecution witness, Oro Copah, testified that his brother, Taxco Copah, one of the five victims and a member of the Yuma Indian tribe, had argued several times with Duggai about Indian “medicine” or witchcraft, each man claiming greater power for the spirits and demons of his own tribe. On two prior occasions, Oro Copah recalled, the arguments had led to blows. According to Oro Copah, the argument had not been resolved between them when the two men—Duggai the Navajo, Taxco Copah the Yuma—set out on July 3 in the pickup truck with their three companions.
According to the testimony of the surviving brother, one topic of argument between the two men had been whether Yuma medicine or Navajo medicine provided greater protection against the “demons” of the desert. In his summation at the trial, San Francisco Prosecuting Attorney Edwin Garraty suggested that the motive for the crime was probably to be found in this dispute. “Essentially what must have happened,” Mr. Garraty told the jury, “is that Duggai and Taxco continued their argument throughout the trip into the proving ground, and finally Duggai must have said words to the effect, ‘All right, let’s find out just how powerful your medicine really is.’ And left the five men to survive as best they could.”
Duggai was found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity. He was remanded to the custody of the psychiatric division of the State Department of Corrections for an indeterminate period.
At the time of his escape Tuesday night, Duggai had spent five years and four months in two successive state hospitals, having been moved to Cochino nine months ago on recommendation of psychiatrists who judged that it was no longer necessary to confine him in the maximum security facility at Sacramento.
Duggai was born and grew up on the Window Rock Navajo Indian Reservation in northeastern Arizona. He is a graduate of an Arizona high school and attended the University of Arizona at Tucson for one semester. He was drafted in 1969 and served as an infantryman in Vietnam in 1969–1971. Prior to his medical discharge in early 1972 he underwent psychiatric treatment at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco for a condition that was described at his trial by Army psychiatrist Captain Samuel Mackenzie as “combat disorientation caused by an experience of involuntary participation in atrocities.” According to the testimony of Capt. Mackenzie and three other expert psychiatric witnesses, Duggai was “not capable of distinguishing right from wrong,” and was not legally responsible for his actions, and thus met the legal definition of insanity.
By last night police had widened the dragnet for Duggai to include San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Mackenzie looked at the grainy wirephoto at the bottom of the newspaper column. Like most mug shots it was barely recognizable: there was no life in the face depicted—it might have been a photograph of a death mask. It was a face that had closed up completely. He saw no sign of the bewildered pleading he remembered.
Mackenzie hoped they’d nail him. Maybe it wasn’t Duggai’s fault but Mackenzie disliked him nonetheless: he remembered Duggai as a figure of sinister menace.
He stayed in the tower until nightfall; every twenty minutes he swept for smoke with the glasses. When it was dark he climbed down and went into the cabin to eat. The dog followed him inside.
He didn’t like the glare of a gas lamp; his light came from the cookfire and from a candle he’d stuck in the neck of a whisky bottle. He ate something that had come out of a can—five minutes afterward he couldn’t remember what it was. He mixed the remains of it into a bowl of Rival and Friskies and fed the dog; afterward he went back up the dark ladder and had a look around for fires. He spotted three or four campfires on the campground but nothing disturbing. At midnight he made another sweep and then went to bed.
When he was half asleep he heard the dog stretch, her claws scratching the floor. He thought of the pneumatic brunette who’d wandered into the station two weeks ago wearing a knapsack and chewing a string of jerky out of a cellophane pack—wide-eyed and full of college-girl enthusiasm for ecological conservation and the healthy outdoor simplicities. She wanted to apply to the Forest Service when she graduated: she saw no reason why fire rangers had to be men.
She wanted to know everything about the job. He’d answered her eager questions with a monosyllabic reluctance that only convinced her he was a lovable eccentric. She was ready to believe him heroic: she saw his isolation as a tremendous sacrifice. He did not disabuse her.
She fixated on the whisky-bottle candlestick as a symbol of his resourceful conservationist ingenuity. That amused him—he’d never thought of it as anything but a lazy whim—and he had laughed at her. His laughter in turn struck her as true communication and she was tearfully passionate, delighted she had been able to bring him out of his hermit shell, and he made love to her four times in the one night—the only time in his life he’d ever accomplished that.
In the morning she’d told him breathlessly that he had the great charm of one who didn’t fit into an acquisitive society.
When she was ready to leave she became shy. “You are an Indian, aren’t you?”
“Why?”
“You look like an Indian. You talk like one.”
“Navajo,” he told her, although it was only half true.
She left to go back to summer school at Pomona. Mackenzie had been relieved to see her go.
Where do you go on your days off?
Smyley, you stupid oaf, I go to whorehouses. Where the hell do you think a man goes after he’s spent three weeks on top of a Sierra Nevada mountain in a fire-lookout tower?
Finally he fell asleep.
The dog woke him. He heard the thump of her tail against the floor.
It triggered all his warning systems.
Pitch dark. Nothing to make a dog wag her tail—unless there was someone else in the cabin.
A voice spoke.
“Yah’a’teh.”
He recognized the Navajo greeting, the deep big voice in the darkness. The phrase meant Hello or It is good or just Nice day ain’t it but it had been spoken in an irony of vicious rage and he knew that voice.
A match struck explosively. In its light he saw Calvin Duggai’s big face and the huge revolver.
“Half your brains on the wall if you blink, Captain.”
The dog lay drowsily with her head rising slowly. She stopped wagging her tail.
The breath hung in Mackenzie’s throat. He watched Duggai light the candle in the whisky bottle. Duggai shook the match out slowly. The gesture was redolent with menace.
“Some watchdog you got.”
Mackenzie watched him.
“What kind of a dog is he? Beagle?”
“She. Retriever.”
“Looks like a beagle to me.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t humor me, you son of a bitch.” Duggai spat the words out like insects that might have flown into his mouth. His thumb drew back the revolver’s hammer. The click of sound was abrupt and loud. With a taste of coppery fear on his tongue Mackenzie noticed, with bleak pointless recognition, that the handgun was a .44 Magnum. Big enough to smash an engine block.
Duggai gaped at him. It brought a great many things rushing back through Mackenzie’s memory. That way Duggai had of staring sightlessly with his mouth slack.
The mahogany skin was suspended from massive cheekbones; Duggai had small haggard eyes high in his face and they were buried deep in their sockets like those of a sick dying man. Mackenzie saw pinched lines of strain around the corners of the open mouth. Duggai wore Levi’s and a quilted hunting jacket and heavy boots but he wore them uneasily as if unaccustomed to wearing clothes at all. They didn’t really fit; the Levi’s were too big at the waist, cinched in like a mailbag by a tight belt, and the jacket was tight on Duggai’s shoulders.
“How the hell did you find me here?”
“Made a few phone calls to San Francisco.” Duggai moved away from the candle—limping a bit. “It wasn’t hard at all. Not as if you was really trying to hide or anything.”
“I wasn’t.”
“It don’t matter much.” Duggai picked up the khakis where Mackenzie had left them draped across the table. Mackenzie watched him go methodically through the pockets, one-handed. Duggai emptied everything out and then tossed the trousers on the bed. He made the same search through the pockets of the tunic. Then he threw all the clothes on the bed and stepped back toward the candle, staying to one side so that his shadow didn’t fall across Mackenzie.
“Put them on.”
“You want help, Calvin? Is that why you came to me?”
Duggai pushed the muzzle of the .44 Magnum toward Mackenzie’s face. It mesmerized Mackenzie.
“Put your clothes on, Captain.”
When he was dressed he waited for the next instruction. Duggai saw the way his eyes wandered toward the candle. “Don’t think about it.”
The dog was sitting up watching. She hadn’t moved from the spot—doubtless the tones of the two men’s voices had warned her. She was a very old dog and she had learned to stay out of trouble. It was one of the things Mackenzie had discovered about her in the months since she had wandered up to the cabin and adopted him.
It was occurring sluggishly to Mackenzie that Duggai didn’t have it in mind to kill him right away. Otherwise why have him get dressed?
“What do you want, Calvin?”
“Be daylight in a little while. We go then.”
“Go where?”
“A place.”
“How long will we be gone?”
“Long enough to settle things.” Duggai looked at him, open-mouthed.
Mackenzie said, “I asked because of the dog. The dog’s got to be fed.”
“The dog gets hungry, he can wander on down to the campground. Somebody’ll feed him down there.”
“Or shoot her.”
“Captain, shut up your mouth a minute.”
Mackenzie tried to judge Duggai’s intentions but he had no inkling. One of his many failures was that he’d never been able to get inside that mind.
The dog moved tentatively, shifting her hindquarters, finally getting to her feet. When that failed to alarm the newcomer she waddled slowly toward the bed where Mackenzie sat. She thumped her rump down to the floor and put a forepaw on his knee. Mackenzie scratched her throat. Anger of all sorts ricocheted through him but the most acute anger was on the dog’s behalf. He said a silent so-long to her and wished her luck.
The candle was down to a stub, guttering in the bottleneck. But gray light came in through the window.
“We wait till the sun’s up,” Duggai said. “They’d have noticed us on the road at night. Down by the campground. They’d have wondered.”
“Calvin, what do you want?”
Duggai’s eyes seemed to mirror disgust and impatience. “What the hell do you think, beligano?”
Beligano. White man. The Navajo word rattled around his skull with all its associations. But none of them connected with anything that told him what Duggai might have in mind.
“Calvin …”
“Shut up your mouth.”
The light grew. Duggai blew the candle out. For a little while the dead-candle stink filled the room. Duggai opened the rickety wardrobe cabinet and took a wire coathanger out. He stepped on the hook and pulled the wire out straight and tossed it on the blanket beside Mackenzie.
“Twist one end around your right wrist. Fasten it good and tight.”
“Why?”
“Do it, Captain. Just do it.” Duggai’s voice trembled with rage.
Duggai watched him wrap the stiff wire around his right wrist. He twisted the end around the stem and held his arm up to show Duggai it was secure. The long piece of wire dangled stiffly from his wrist.
“Lie down belly flat now. Turn your face to the wall. Put both hands behind your ass.”
“Calvin, I don’t think this is going to …”
“Shut up,” Duggai roared. In his fist the Magnum trembled.
He felt his wrists being slammed together and wired tight. Then Duggai rolled him over on his back. Mackenzie looked up at him, past the massive revolver. “What now?”
“Now we go.”
The dog walked a little way with them until Duggai got angry about it. Mackenzie said, “Stay,” and the dog watched them go. From the bottom of the road Mackenzie saw her trot over to the foot of the tower to dig up yesterday’s Milk Bone.
About a quarter mile down past the fork Duggai turned him off the road into the trees. They walked forty or fifty feet and a brown camper-body pickup truck came in sight parked back in the woods. To get this far off the road it had to be four-wheel drive. Mackenzie saw that it had Nevada license plates. Duggai must have pinched the plates somewhere. Clever enough. He couldn’t see through the camper windows because red-and-white checkerboard curtains were down across them inside.
Mackenzie stopped, not sure what was expected of him; the muzzle of the Magnum dug into his back. “Keep going.”
“Where?”
“Back of the truck.”
The chill in the thin early air came through his tunic and made him shiver involuntarily. Duggai mistook the meaning of it. “You going to be a lot more scared after a while, Captain.”
Mackenzie wanted it to be over with, whatever it was Duggai had in store for him. But Duggai was right: he was afraid. I’m damn well terrified, he admitted to himself.
He watched the big Navajo dig keys out of his pocket and run through three of them until he found the one that unlocked the back door of the camper. Duggai swung it open and gestured.