The Taking of Libbie, SD (Mac McKenzie #7)

Shuddup.

Once I got it into my head, I couldn’t shake the thought away—the threat of dehydration. Fluids, in the form of sweat, were going out, yet nothing was coming in. What’s more, my sweat—which was supposed to cool my body—was being dried before it could fulfill its mission by the hard northwest wind that simply would not stop blowing. It was like standing in front of a huge fan for nine and a half hours. The symptoms became too pronounced to ignore—dizziness, headache, stomach pain, nausea, and an unpleasant taste in my mouth. True, these were also the symptoms of chloral hydrate working itself out of my system. Still … Add to it the unrelenting sun. If it wasn’t a hundred degrees, it was close to it. I had turned up the collar of my polo shirt, yet it did little to protect my neck. I could feel my skin burning there, as well as on my arms and on the right side of my face.

If dehydration doesn’t kill you, sunstroke will.

Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine …

I was following my shadow now, the setting sun at my back, the shadow stretching so far in front of me that I could barely see where it ended. Then it disappeared, swallowed by a night that seemed to fall as swiftly as a hammer on an anvil. With it came a wave of cool air that engulfed me and settled around me as if I had just walked into a refrigerator. I had never felt air go from hot to cold so quickly.

I could go no farther, so I sat on the prairie. Hunger clawed at my stomach, yet that did not concern me nearly as much as the parchedness of my throat or the dryness of my tongue as I ran it across my chapped lips.

There were so many times when I should have died and I didn’t.

“Hey,” I told myself. “Don’t talk like that. If you think you’re going to die, you’ll find a way to make it happen. Instead, do you know what you’re going to do? First thing in the morning, you’re going to walk a little ways until you find a road. Then you’re going to hike down that road until you find a farmhouse or hitch a ride with a local. Then you’re going to find a phone, make a few calls, go home, get cleaned up, and then you’re going to take Nina to Paris.”

I settled against the hard ground; the earth was warm against my back. I cupped my hands behind my head and stared up at the night sky. I watched as it slowly turned from a sorrowful blackness into an extravaganza of light. I recognized the North Star immediately, as well as the Big Dipper. That was it. I didn’t know the constellations; I wished I did. Orion, Andromeda, Hercules, Pegasus, Cassiopeia—I knew the names, but not where to find them. An astonishing woman named Renée, who was far too good for the likes of me—just ask her family—had attempted to introduce them to me. Alas, something always seemed to distract us from our stargazing. Oh, well.

Staring up at the starry, starry sky, I had a revelation.

“You gotta believe,” I said aloud. “You just gotta believe.”

It wasn’t a particularly profound thought, I know. Yet it worked for the ’69 Mets. It worked for my ’87 Twins. It worked for the ’07 New York Giants. It would sure as hell work for me.

My eyes closed reluctantly. I slowly fell deeper and deeper through the layers of sleep, sliding effortlessly from dozing to the half-awake confusion that followed to sleep that resembled a coma …

It was a slumber so deep, so profound, that I needed to crawl out of it in stages, reconstructing the events of yesterday, the boredom, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the never-ending walking across the never-ending prairie. The light increased very slightly, flitting across my closed eyelids, then sprang upon me like the opening of a window shade in a dark room.

I was curled into the fetal position and shivering. The cool nighttime temperatures had created dew that covered everything. Why it didn’t wake me I couldn’t say; my clothes were drenched. I uncoiled my body and slowly, painfully stood. It was day in the east, yet still night in the west, and the sky in between varied by degrees from purple to violet to the purest aquamarine. The colors of the dew-soaked grass and shrubs also impressed me—a mosaic of silver, green, blue, red, yellow, and gold. The wind continued to blow, and the air was full of scents I had not encountered before.