ALL THE WAY BACK there had been no real communication between the two of them. Whatever needed to be said was conveyed indirectly through the child, who walked in the middle, holding on to their hands, providing the only tangible connective. It was astonishing, Jay thought, what little adjustment was necessary on both their parts to bring their conversational needs down to the level of the child’s. All that had gone before between them had been articulated in a kind of child’s talk anyhow, and there seemed no good reason why they could not have gone on through life together remarking about the blueness of the sky, the vastness of the day, inquiring if either of them needed to use the potty.
They talked through the child on the way back to the camp, avoiding the shadows of the dunes, attempting to guide each other toward the level spaces where the moonlight shone. Soon he had to carry the little girl; she fell fast asleep clinging to his shoulder and there was not much said between them after that. They concentrated on the walk through the packed sand, absorbed in the simple and immediate need of getting from one place to another, hay-foot straw-foot, over the dunes and away from the shadows and toward the camp. Absorbed in these mechanics, it was some time before Jay realized they were lost.
It suddenly came to him that they had been walking too long a time, a time all out of proportion to the period during which the original party of five had sought and found the rabbits. He looked at his watch and knew that by now they should be well past the camp; beyond, away, to the side or in back of it — there was no way to determine. He stopped on a little rise and shifted the child to his other shoulder.
“We’re lost,” he said.
“What? Are you joking?”
“No. We’re lost. I don’t know where we are.” This last admission reverberated in his head. This sudden acute responsibility seemed unfair. He had got them lost, and now it was up to him to get them back home safely again. Arthur Fenstemaker was nowhere around to instruct him; there was no one to call, no help from any source.
“Well what do we do?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Which direction were we away from the camp?”
“West … A little southwest, maybe.”
“Can’t you look at the stars or something and tell which way we’ve been heading? What about the North Star?”
“I wouldn’t be able to find the North Star — I can’t remember the last time I looked at stars. If I found it even, I’m not sure it’s always in the north.”
Vicki flopped down in the sand, stretched her long legs and kicked off her sandals.
“We’re really lost, then?”
“Yes.”
“I like it. I’m glad we’re lost. I wish Victoria Anne weren’t here, of course. But I like being lost with you.”
“Really?” He had tried for a note of impatience.
“Yes. I want to be lost with you. I want to be lost in you … Do you like that? I think it’s from a line I had.”
Jay looked about in all directions, attempting to get some kind of bearing from the mountains. But only the larger ranges were visible against the purple sky. He finally selected a course he was not at all sure about and set the perspective of the mountaintops in his mind to avoid the possibility of moving in circles.
“Do you want to rest some more?”
“I’m enjoying it. I’m not tired, really. I’m just enjoying it.”
“We’d better get started.”
They moved off again in the direction Jay had chosen. He needed to keep his eyes on the mountains, but occasionally he would slip back into the numbing absorption of every step. Vicki did not falter or weaken or speak out against him. Several times she offered to relieve him of the burden of the child. There were pauses, mounting in frequency, in which he shifted the little girl from one shoulder to another. After half an hour he began to think seriously of spending the night in the dunes.
Soon now, he was certain of it, the others at the camp would begin worrying about them. Sarah and Greg Calhoun would be returning without them, and there were bound to be questions and some concern. Perhaps Hoot Gibson would have returned from town with Shavers, and the two of them would come looking. The Governor might even take charge of a search party. What he needed now was to stay in one place and build a fire so the others would have some signal to guide them. He should stop plodding senselessly across the sand; there was a good possibility he had been heading away from the camp all this time.
It was Vicki who sighted the shack. Even after she called it to his attention it was difficult to tell it from one of the dunes. It was a shapeless, shambled thing, collapsed at one end, with a growth of mesquite bunched all round.
Vicki held the little girl while he pried loose the weathered wooden slabs nailed across the entrance. He examined the dirt floor and then led his wife and child inside.
Afterwards, he built a fire beyond the entrance, testing the direction of the wind to avoid the smoke, building it with cactus leaves and cattle droppings at first, the way wornout pioneer brides had collected buffalo chips on this treeless plain fifty years before, and then with loose planking from the sides of the tumbled shack. When he had the fire roaring in his face, blistering his forehead and singeing the hair on his arms, he sagged against the door in exhaustion while Vicki’s cool hands moved over his cheek, her vacant voice rising and falling in allusions to wiener roasts and toasted marshmallows.
Soon the sounds of her words trailed off in his consciousness and he fell asleep. He lay alone for a period of time and then there was the warmth of Vicki’s body against him. In his sleep he knew it was Vicki and not Vicki; he was aware only of the warmth and the nearness and the smell of her perfume in the desert air. When he came awake suddenly they were together in the half-light of the fire, his face buried against her neck. He stood and began gathering more wood for the fire. Vicki was sitting awake when he returned.
“Please come home,” she said to him.
“What?”
“Please come back with Victoria Anne and me. I want you to live with us again. I know I’ve been bad. I know some of the things I’ve done are nearly unforgivable. But I think of you all the time and I need you all the time. Both of us need you. Do you think you need us?”
“I don’t know. Of course I need Anne. I guess I need you — or something of you — in a way. It’s just — I can’t believe it would be any different than before.”
“I think it would. I think I’m different than before.”
“You probably are. But if there’s any improvement I’m not sure it has any bearing on us.” He lay back in the sand and closed his eyes.
“Hold me like you were.” She was on her knees leaning over him.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You were. You were all over me for a while.”
“I was asleep.”
“What difference does that make? It just shows … something, I don’t know, but it was so nice to be with you again.”
She lay beside him. Jay lay on his back with his eyes closed trying to think of sleep, release, escape, of shaking loose and giving in, of headlong flight and boozy, luxuriant fulfillment. Where were all the gay places? Where were —
“I’m looking forward to the Governor’s party,” Vicki said. “Will you ride up with me?”
Where was all the fun and —
“Will you ride up with me?”
It was out there somewhere, remote and unattainable. It was out here in these landscapes. It was at the Governor’s party it was —
“We can leave day after tomorrow, Jay.”
“Try to sleep,” he finally said. “Lie next to me if you want, the way you were, and try to sleep.”
He could lie next to her here and ride up with her on the day after tomorrow and they could fly home together when the ranch party was ended and — It was all a madness. The whole crazy idea would turn to vinegar once it was daylight. There would be Sarah standing in the sun, the white down on her arms, her skin all glowing …
He liked to think he had been pushed toward Sarah from the beginning, but it was just not true. There had been too much pestilence in his head at the beginning. What stale enthusiasms remained were directed toward his work with Arthur Fenstemaker, and it was some time afterwards that Sarah had begun to poke around in his dead remains.
He had thought, frankly, it would be hopeless, but the capacity for love had not vanished entirely. He loved Sarah; surely he must love her; he had not gone out of the business after all; and it had all been going so perfectly until the evening the week before when they had been together at the apartment. In the dark heat of the room she had just begun to perspire, faintly beneath the softness of hair that shaped her face, lightly through the blouse and along the folds where her exquisite breasts began. They were a little heap in the middle of the bed, and she whispered in his ear I want to yes I think I want to, and from where he was lying he could see the blistered paint on the door facings and the preposterous bathtub with the elaborately gnarled legs. The draperies rustled quietly as she brushed past, folding her clothes carefully over the back of a chair; there were dust motes suspended in the stalks of light coming through the blinds and the fuzz from the bedspread tickled his neck. She had come toward him, her olive skin glistening, pausing and regarding herself with astonishment in the rippled mirror; her back and shoulders made lovely lines in the soft light, and as he moved toward where she was sitting on the side of the bed he could see that she was trembling slightly. It was not until he had kissed the back of her neck that he realized she had the magazine laid out in her lap, open to the picture sequence of Vicki in the haystack, and by then she had begun to sob convulsively.
Afterwards, he could not fix it in his mind just how long they stayed there. Thinking back there was only the shapeless space in his memory: only the two of them in the dark room, in the rumpled bedclothes, with Sarah crying quietly to herself. Sometime during the night he had driven her home, and since then they had not talked about it. They had been together nearly all the waking hours, but it had been impossible to discuss: there had been only the private, hopeless insistence to themselves that it never really happened.
Where was she now? The shifting desert wind reminded him that he had left her with Greg Calhoun, pursuing the phantom rabbits across the sand. Was she back now and had she set out with the others at the camp in search of him? And how was he ever to articulate his feeling for her once she had found him? He felt sleep coming on again, and now in exhaustion he turned toward Vicki, regret and resistance gone out of him, submerging himself in her enormous warmth, remembering nothing in his dreams but the great, swelling, unaccountable pleasure of her presence. His next conscious moment was when he opened his eyes in the daylight and saw Hoot Gibson grinning at him fiercely from the doorway of the shack.