The Monkey Wrench Gang (21 page)

There was nothing much more he could do with his bare hands. If he had thermite he could burn the legs off the drill tower; if he had explosives he could blow it up. He had neither.

Hayduke left his signature in the sand: NEMO. He took a drink of water from his canteen and looked about. The desert world appeared empty of all human life but himself. Black-throated sparrows sang reedily in the sagebrush. The edge of the sun flamed at the rim of the Hole-in-the-Rock. Holy country; which is exactly why he had to do the work he had exactly done. Because somebody had to do it.

He walked toward the canyon and cliffs, angling toward the road that Smith had taken. (The drill-rig engines whined in the rear,
dying.) As he walked he plucked sprigs of sagebrush and crushed the powdery leaves, silver-blue and gray-green, between his fingers. He loved the spicy fragrance of sage, that rare and troubling odor which evoked, in itself, the whole Southwestern world of canyon, mesa and mountainside, of charged sunlight and visionary vistas.

Okay big-foot, all right wise-ass, here’s the jeep trail; now we’re entering the vagina of the canyon into the womb of the plateau and where’s our asshole buddy Seldom Smith?

The answer appeared around the bend after next: the tail-end geophone of a half-mile string of geophones, property of Standard Oil of California, lying in the dust and rocks. He gathered them up as he walked, following the string into a grove of jack pine to the truck. Nobody there. But the smell of cowboy coffee boiled to its rich embittered essence, the smell of frying bacon, gave away Smith’s location.

“You forgot something,” Hayduke said, dragging the immense tangle of cable and geophones into camp.

Smith rose from the fire. “Jesus Christ!” The bacon sizzles. The coffee smokes. “Plumb dumb forgot,” he said.

They stashed the stuff in the lee of a boulder in the wash below, where the next flash flood would bury it all under tons of sand and gravel.

After breakfast, still feeling not quite immune from discovery and interrogation, they drove to the summit of the plateau, a rolling woodland of yellow pine and scrub oak, high and cool. They turned off the main road onto a dead-end side road (erasing their track with broom and bough) and lay down in the sunlight, on pine needles, indifferent to the busy ants, the scrabbling squirrels, the crested jays, the galaxies of midges dancing in the sunrays, and slept.

They rose at the crack of noon and lunched on longhorn cheese and crackers, washed down the gullet with a good cheap working-man’s beer. Not Coors. On the road again, driving through the woods, they munched apples for dessert.

Hayduke, who had never been on the Kaiparowits Plateau before, who had never seen it except from below and across various canyon systems, was surprised to discover what a vast, forested, fragrant
and lovely island of land it really is. However, protected only by that limber reed that supple straw that trembling twig the U.S. Department of the Interior, and coveted by several consortia of oil companies, power companies, coal companies, road builders and land developers, the Kaiparowits Plateau, like Black Mesa, like the high plains of Wyoming and Montana, faced the same attack which had devastated Appalachia.

Into other parts. The clouds passed, in phrases and paragraphs, like incomprehensible messages of troubling import, overhead across the forested ridges, above the unsealed cliffs, beyond the uninhabited fields of lonely mesas, followed by their faithful shadows flowing with effortless adaptation over each crack, crevice, crease and crag on the wrinkled skin of the Utahn earth.

“We’re still in Utah?”

“That’s right, pardner.”

“Have another beer.”

“Not till we cross that Arizona line.”

The road clung to the spine of the ridge, sidewinding in sinuous loops toward the blue smokes of Smoky Mountain where deposits of coal, ignited by lightning some long-gone summer afternoon a thousand—ten thousand?—years before, smoldered beneath the surface of the mountain’s shoulders.

There seemed to be no pursuit. But why should there be? They hadn’t done anything wrong. So far they had done everything right.

Down on the alkali flats where only saltbush, cholla and snakeweed grew, they met a small herd of baldface cows ambling up to the higher country. Beef on the hoof, looking for trouble. What Smith liked to call “slow elk,” regarding them with satisfaction as a reliable outdoor meat supply in hard times. How did they survive, these wasteland cattle? It was these cattle which had
created
the wasteland. Hayduke and Smith dallied several times to get out the old pliers and cut fence.

“You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence,” Smith would say. “Especially sheep fence.”
(Clunk!)
“But cow fence too. Any fence.”

“Who invented barbed wire anyhow?” Hayduke asked.
(Plunk!)

“It was a man named J. F. Glidden done it; took out his patent back in 1874.”

An immediate success, that barbwire. Now the antelope die by the thousands, the bighorn sheep perish by the hundreds every winter from Alberta down to Arizona, because fencing cuts off their escape from blizzard and drought. And coyotes too, and golden eagles, and peasant soldiers on the coils of concertina wire, victims of the same fat evil the wide world over, hang dead on the barbed and tetanous steel.

“You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence,” repeated Smith, warming to his task.
(Pling!)
“Always cut fence. That’s the law west of the hundredth meridian. East of that don’t matter none. Back there it’s all lost anyhow. But west, cut fence.”
(Plang!)

They came to Glen Canyon City, pop. 45 counting dogs. The single store in town was closed and the hopeful sign now hung by one rusty nail to the doorjamb, swinging with the wind. It would soon fall. Only the café and a gasoline station remained open. Smith and Hay duke stopped to refuel.

“When you gonna get that forty-million-dollar power plant built, Pop?” Hayduke asked the old man at the pump. (Texaco, 55¢ per gallon; a rip-off at half the price.) The old man, lank of jaw and phlegmy-eyed, looked at him with distrust. Hayduke’s shaggy beard full of wildlife, his wild hair, the greasy leather sombrero: enough to inspire suspicion in anyone.

“Don’t exackly know yet,” the old man says. “Them goldamn envirn-meddlers is a-holdin’ things up.”

“They won’t let you degrade the quality of the fucking air, is that the trouble?”

“Why them ignorant sonsabitches. Why we got more air around here’n ary man can breathe.” He waves one skinny arm at the sky. “Looky up there. More air’n you could shake your pecker at. How much you want?”

“Fill her up.”

The old man wore his green and white pinstripe official Texaco uniform. An original, it appeared to have been last washed during the heavy rains of August 1972. He wore the red star of the Texas Company
on the sleeve, and over the shirt pocket his name in red piping—
J
.
Calvin Garn
. (You can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.) The pants drooped slack and baggy in the area of that part of his frame where the buttocks would ordinarily be found, if you were looking for them. Calvin seemed to have none. An old man, embittered, and no wonder—lacking hams.
You can trust your car to the man who wears the star
but not if his ass has fallen off.

“Yeah, but maybe you oughta save some for all the people that got to breathe that city air back east and out in California.”

“Well I don’t know about all that,” the old man says. His rheumy eyes leaked: gasoline fumes are getting to him. “This here’s ahr air and I reckon we know best what we want to do with it. We don’t like them outsiders from the Sahara Club tryin’ to tell us what we can do with ahr air.”

“Okay, but look at it this way, Calvin. Keep your fucking air here halfways clean and you can sell it to them city dudes by the jugful, like pure-spring drinking water.”

“We already think of that. There ain’t enough money in it.”

“You could put meters on their noses when they cross the state line.”

“We thunk of that but there ain’t no money to it. There’s the shippin’ costs and all them permits you gotta buy from the goldamn state. You want the oil checked?”

They drove on to Wahweap Marina, across the line in Arizona, where Hayduke had left his jeep weeks earlier. He decided now he wanted it, especially the hardware inside. Getting it started, he followed Smith to the Glen Canyon Bridge. They parked, got out and walked to the middle of the bridge to pray.

“Okay, God, I’m back,” Seldom Seen began, on his knees, head bowed. “It’s me again, Smith, and I see you still ain’t done nothing about this here dam. Now you know as well as me that if them goddamn Government men get this dam filled up with water it’s gonna flood more canyons, suffocate more trees, drown more deer and generally ruin the neighborhood. Why that there water’s gonna back right
up under Rainbow Bridge itself if you let them sonsabitches fill this dam. You gonna let them do that?”

Some tourists stopped to stare at Smith; one raised a camera. Hayduke, standing guard, put a hand on the pommel of his sheathed knife and glared. They went away. The rangerette did not appear.

“How about it, God?” Smith asked. He paused, cocking an eye upward to the sky where a procession of clouds in stately formation, like an armada of galleons, floated eastward on the prevailing winds, out of the sunrays of the west toward approaching night.

Again no immediate reply. Smith bowed his head and went on with his supplication, knees on the cold cement, the temple steeple of his brown hands pointing heavenward.

“All we need here, God, is one little
pre-
cisión earthquake. Just one surgical strike. You can do it right now, right this very second; me and George here we don’t mind, we’ll go down with the bridge and all these innocent strangers come here from every state in the Union to admire this great work of man. How about it?”

No response, so far as eye, ear or any other sense could tell.

After another minute Smith stopped his useless Mormon mumbling and rose to his feet. He leaned on the parapet of the bridge beside Hayduke and stared at the concave immensity of the face of the dam.

After a period of meditation Hayduke spoke. “You know, Seldom,” he says, “if we could just get into the heart of that motherfucker….”

“That dam don’t have a heart.”

“Okay, if we could just get into the guts of it. If I got a haircut and a shave and put on a suit and necktie and a slide rule and a shiny new yellow hard hat like all the Reclamation engineers wear, why maybe—just maybe—I could get right down into the control center with a satchel full of good shit, TNT or something….”

“You can’t get in there, George. They got guards. They keep every door locked. You have to have a ID badge. They got to know you; the security is tight. And even if you made it all the way down in there, one little satchelful of dynamite ain’t gonna do much good.”

“I’m thinking of the control center. Maybe force our way in there. Open the diversion tunnels, let all the water out of the reservoir. Blow up the controls so they can’t close the tunnels.”

Smith smiled sadly. “That’s a nice thought, George. But it ain’t enough. They’d fill it again. Now what we really need is about three-four jumbo-size houseboats, the kind millionaires use, them sixty-five-footers. We pack them full of fertilizer and diesel fuel. Then we head down the lake toward the dam, slow and easy, in broad daylight, with your girl friend Miz Abbzug layin’ around on deck in her black string bikini—”

“Yeah. The girl on the houseboat with the big tits.”

“That’s the idea. So it’ll look natural. Then we sort of sidle up to that boom out there—you can see it from here—that’s supposed to keep boats away from the dam, and we cut it. In broad daylight.”

“How?”

“Goddammit, I don’t know how. You’re the Green Beret; cutting that boom is your job. Then we head the boats toward the dam, and when we’re about the right distance we scuttle the boats and kind of let them sink down toward the base of the dam, still moving forward under the water with the momentum so they come to rest against the cement.”

“And what about us? What about Bonnie and her black string bikini?”

“We’ll be busy paddling our canoes to shore and unreeling the blasting wire as we go.”

“In broad daylight.”

“Make it two o’clock in the morning, on a stormy night. So we get ashore, we connect up the wire from all the houseboats to an electric blaster and we set off the charge.”

“And the charge is tamped by a million tons of water.”

“That’s right, George. Good-bye and so long, Glen Canyon Dam. Welcome back Glen Canyon and the old Coloraddy River.”

“Beautiful, Captain Smith.”

“Thank you, George.”

“It won’t work.”

“Prob’ly not.”

They returned to their vehicles and charged up the hill to the Big Pig supermarket to replenish provisions. That done, meat and vegetables packed in ice chests, they checked in for a quick one at the nearest bar, feeling friendly, fun-loving and feisty. Nobody there but construction workers in hard hats, some truck drivers in sweaty T-shirts, a number of cowboys in salt-encrusted sombreros.

Hayduke gulped down the first shooter of Jim Beam and chased it with a schooner of Coors. Wiping his beard, he turned to face the crowd, his back to the bar, his buddy old Seldom Seen beside him facing the other way.

When the jukebox—Tennessee Ernie Ford, Engelbert Humperdinck, Hank Williams, Jr., Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck et al.—lapsed for a moment into silence, Hayduke spoke, addressing the patrons of the bar, loudly.

“Hello,” he said. “My name’s Hayduke. I’m a hippie.”

Smith stiffened, staring at the mirror behind the bar.

A few of the cowboys, truck drivers and construction workers glanced at Hayduke, then returned to their quiet conversations. Hayduke ordered a second boilermaker. He drank it. When the jukebox paused between records he again spoke out. Clearly.

“My name’s Hayduke,” he roared, “and I’m a queer. I go barefoot in the summertime. My mother is a welfare chiseler and I want to tell you men I’m glad to be here. Because if it wasn’t for men like you I’d have to work for a living myself. All
I
do is read dirty books, push dope and screw little girls.”