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"Sure. Croandelphilis scootamorphulus. No known antidote to the venom," I said. "Of course I remember. One brave snake, she is."
"Makes you realize, after days like this trying to deal with
those slugs in the IRS, how good it is to sit in the desert and deal with a real honest straightforward rattlesnake!"
We flew back to Nevada exhausted, arrived at last in the desert to find the trailer ransacked: door pried open, bookshelves cleared, drawers emptied; everything we had left in our little house-on-wheels was gone.
thirty-eight
LESLIE WAS stunned. She went through the place looking for the friendly tools we had lived with, her dear companions, as though they would suddenly appear in their places. Books, clothes, wooden kitchen-spoons that meant home to her, even her hairbrushes: gone.
"No problem, wook," I soothed. "They're only things, we lost. As long as the IRS won't make up its mind, there's plenty of money to spend. One trip into town and we've bought it all back."
She barely heard, looking up from the empty desk drawer. "Richard, they even took our ball of string. ..."
I was desperate to cheer her. "And we thought we were the last string-savers in the world! Think how happy we've made someone ... a whole ball of string, they got! And burnt wooden spoons! And plates with chips in them!"
"Our plates didn't have chips in them," she said. "We bought those plates together, don't you remember?"
"Well, we'll buy some more plates. How about we get some nice orange and yellow pottery ones, this time? And bigger cups than we had. We can go wild in the bookstore, and we'll need new clothes. ..."
"It's not the things, Richie, it's the meaning of the things. Doesn't it hurt you that strangers broke into our home and took meanings out of our life?"
"It hurts only if we let it," I said. "There's not much we can do about it now; it's happened and it's done and the sooner we move past it the better. If it'd help to feel bad about it, I'd feel bad. What'll help will be to get our minds off it and buy some new things and put some time between us and today. So they take the whole trailer, so what? It's us that matters, isn't it? Better us together in a desert and happy than us apart in palaces full of plates and string!"
She dried a tear. "Oh, you're right," she said. "But I think I'm changing. I used to say if someone broke into my house, they could steal whatever they wanted, I'd never take a chance harming someone to protect my property, or myself. But this is it. I've been robbed three times before, and we've been robbed today, and I've just decided that I have had all the robbing I'm going to have. If we're going to live in the wilderness, it's not fair for you to be the only one to protect us. I'm going to do my part. I'm going to buy a gun!"
Two days later, there was one less fear in her life. All of a sudden she who couldn't stand the sight of a gun now loaded firearms with the ease of a Desert Rat on patrol.
She practiced diligently, hour after hour; the desert sounded like the last battle for El Alamein. I threw tin cans
into the sagebrush and she
hit the things once out of five with a .357 Magnum, revolver, then three of five, then four of five.
While she loaded the Winchester rifle I set a row of empty shell-casings in the sand for targets, then stood back and watched while she aimed and squeezed the trigger. Now gunfire barely blinked her eye, her targets disappeared one after another, left to right, in sharp-hiss booms and brass-glittering sprays of lead and sand.
It was hard for me to understand what had happened to her because of that robbery.
"Do you mean," I said, "that if someone broke into the trailer, you would ..."
"Somebody breaks in wherever I am, they're going to be sorry! If they don't want to get shot, robbing us is the wrong business to get into!" She laughed at the expression on my face. "Don't look at me that way! You say the same thing, you know you do."
"I do not! I say it different."
"How do you say it?"
"I say it's not possible for anybody to die. 'Thou Shall Not Kill' isn't a commandment, it's a promise: Thou couldn't kill if thee tried, because life is indestructible. But thou're free to believe in dying, if thou insisteth.
"If we try to rob the house of somebody waiting for us with a loaded gun," I said, "why, we're telling that person that we're tired of the belief of life on this belief of a planet, we're asking her to do us the favor of shifting our consciousness from this level to a different one, courtesy of a bullet in self-defense. That's how I say it. Isn't it true, don't you think?"
She laughed, levered a fresh cartridge into the chamber of
her rifle. "I don't know which of us is more cold-blooded, Richard, you or me."
With that she held her breath, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. In the desert, another casing screamed and disappeared.
After the robbery, and the generator failure, and the water failure, after the refrigerator broke down and the gas-line to the stove cracked, filling the trailer with explosive gas, there came the dust-devil.
