The Monkey Wrench Gang (34 page)

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah….” Smith rose in his bed, filmed with cold sweat, turned and clutched at his wife like a drowning man. “Sheila,” he groaned, struggling toward the surface of consciousness, “great almighty Gawd—!”

“Seldom!” She was awake at once. “Wake up, Seldom!”

“Sheila, Sheila….”

“There’s nobody here named Sheila. Wake up.”

“Oh Lord …” He fumbled at her in the dark, feeling a warm hip, a soft belly. “Kathy?”

“You were at Kathy’s last night. You have one more guess and it better be right.”

He groped higher and fondled her breasts. The right one. The left one. Two of them. “Susan?”

“That’s better.”

Vision adapting to the starlit darkness, he found her smiling at him, reaching down for him with both arms from the warmth of their lawful conjugal bed. Her smile, like her sweet eyes, like her bountiful bosom, was rich with love. He sighed in relief. “Susan …”

“Seldom, you are a caution. You are something else. I never.”

And she consoled, caressed and loved him, her trembling, stricken man.

While outside in the fields of desert summer the melons ripened at their leisure in the nest of their vines, and a restless rooster, perched on the roof of the hencoop, fired his premature ejaculation at the waning moon, and in the pasture the horses lifted noble Roman heads to stare in the night at something humans cannot see.

Far away in Utah on the farm, by the side of a golden river called the Green.

He spotted the helicopter at once. It was not, however, pursuing him. Not
yet. Half a mile to the east, circling over something of interest on the ground below, it had its antennae fixed on Bonnie Abbzug.

He crawled to the crest of a sand dune and watched. Bonnie was running toward a cleft or gulch in the slickrock which led like a roofless tunnel to a deeper gulch beyond, and from there into Kaibito Canyon. He understood her plan of escape.

The helicopter landed within fifty yards of the gulch in the nearest open area available. The motor expired. Two men jumped from the Plexiglas cockpit, bending under the free-wheeling arms of the rotor, and ran toward Bonnie. One carried a carbine.

But Bonnie—good girl! She was gone, out of sight down the eroded gulch and running, no doubt, toward the canyon. One of the two men climbed down into the gulch. The other, with the carbine, ran along its rim, trying to head her off. Hayduke saw him stumble, fall on his face and lie there for a moment, stunned. Slowly he got up, picked up his weapon and started off again, running. In a few minutes he was out of sight.

The empty helicopter waited behind them, the big rotor turning slower and slower.

Hayduke drew his revolver, opened the loading gate and pushed a sixth cartridge into the one chamber which, for safety’s sake, he usually left empty in the breech. Leaving the chain saw and pliers under a juniper, he climbed the dune, descended the slip face in three giant leaps and ran toward the helicopter.

He could hear the crewmen shouting in the distance, out of sight. He ran straight for the objective. When he reached it, five minutes later, the first thing he did was tip the muzzle of his gun into the face of the helicopter’s radio transmitter. About to squeeze the trigger, he reconsidered and chose a less noisy implement, a fire extinguisher, wrenching it from its bracket and smashing the radio. A futile gesture perhaps; another helicopter might even now be on the way.

What choice did he have? Had to get Bonnie out of this. Hayduke looked around for a place of concealment. There was nothing much at hand. Certainly not within or behind the helicopter itself, a skeletal machine with transparent three-passenger cabin and no true fuselage at all, sitting high off the ground on its steel skids. There was the usual assortment of junipers nearby, but a juniper, while it can conceal a man from aerial observation, is no good from ground level at close range. The trunk is too small, the foliage too sparse, the branches too thin for hiding. Can’t set up an ambush without a proper bush. Having no alternative, he descended into the same gulch Bonnie had taken, crawled beneath a ledge, pulled in some tumbleweed for camouflage and waited.

Dust. Spider webs. The allergenic Russian thistle in front of his face. A layer of juniper twigs and cactus joints sprinkled with tiny turds covered the floor under his belly—some provident pack rat, years before, had left this behind. Waiting, not patiently, palms sweaty and stomach sick with fear, Hayduke watched a pair of ants climb up the barrel of his revolver. Where’d they come from? The ants clung to the front sight. Before he could flick them off they crawled down the sight and disappeared into the bore. Now there’s the place to hide. What would they make of the groovy rifling and the hollow-pointed bulge of lead blocking the end of the tunnel?

Hayduke wiped his damp hands on his shirt, one at a time, keeping
the revolver out of the dirt. He cleared his throat, as if about to speak, and steadied his grip on the weapon—that comforting, solid and hefty magnum presence in his hand.

Male voices approaching. He reversed the greasy bandanna around his neck and pulled it up to his eyes. What was it Doc always liked to say? To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad? Masked like a frontier outlaw, filled with dread, he waited for his next big moment.

Here they come.

The three approached in single file, for the gulch was narrow. From fifty feet away Hayduke could smell their sweat, feel their weariness. In the lead was the helicopter pilot, a red-faced young man with a big mustache, wearing army-style green fatigues, a long-billed cap, Wellington boots; like a combat pilot he wore a pistol in a shoulder holster under his left arm.

In the rear walked the man with the carbine, which he now carried slung over one shoulder. He was dressed in the uniform of a Burns Agency security guard: tight shirt with tin pawnshop badge and shoulder patch, straw cowboy hat, tight pants, cowboy-style boots with high heels and pointy toes, not good for desert exercises. This man looked older, bigger and brawnier than the pilot and just as tired. He limped. Both were sweating hard. Bonnie had given them a good run.

In the middle walked the captive, not too proudly, looking sullen, frightened and beautiful. Her hat was missing, the long mane of hair hung half across her heat-flushed face. She held her hands clasped together in front of her stomach, the wrists bound with handcuffs.

Hayduke had only a vague notion of what ought to happen next. Should we begin shooting? Shoot to kill or shoot to maim? With that cannon he held in both hands now it would be hard to merely maim; any hit would remove something substantial. Doc and Smith and Bonnie would not approve. So what? He had them covered now, he
had the drop. Should he stop them at once? Or wait until they began the climb up over the slippery sandstone to the rim above?

The trio approached. The pilot was frowning. “That’s right, kid,” he said, looking for a way up out of the gulch, “you don’t have to tell him anything. Name, rank and measurements, that’s all.”

The guard said, “I don’t care what the hell her name is but she got to show me her sex identification. I guess I know my Constitutional rights. Right, girlie?” He poked her in the butt with two large stiff fingers.

Bonnie jerked aside. “Keep your hands off me.” The guard, stumbling, did something painful to his game leg.

“Oh, shit,” he moaned.

The pilot stopped, looking back. “Leave her alone, leave her alone.”

The guard sat down on the ground, massaging his ankle. “Christ, that hurts. You got an Ace bandage in that kit of yours?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. Leave the girl alone.” The pilot looked around—toward the black shadow of the ledge where Hayduke lay crouched twenty feet away, toward the dry watercourse beyond, and up at the rounded hump of sandstone over his head.

“Isn’t this where you came down?” The slickrock, easy enough to descend, not so easy to climb, rose twelve feet at this point above the bottom of the gully. “How about it?” he said to Bonnie.

“I don’t know.” She stared at the ground.

“Well it looks right to me. I don’t see anyplace else unless we go clear back to where the great lover”—jerking a thumb at the guard—“where he came in.” A false smile from the Burns man.

The pilot gave it a try. The rock curved upward at an average angle of 30 degrees. There were some niches big enough for fingers and toes. His leather-soled boots gave him little traction but he was agile. Using all fours, he had climbed halfway up the face of the rock when he heard, everybody heard, loud and clear, the sound of someone cocking a revolver. First click: half cock. Second click: full cock.

Perched uneasily on fingertips and toes, the pilot stopped and looked down. The security guard, surprised but reacting, raised a
hand to unsling the carbine. Hayduke fired a shot over his head, closer than intended; the slug nicked the crown of the guard’s hat. Two ants were launched on ballistic flight into the wild blue yonder.

The discharge made a shocking blast which startled everyone, not least of all Hayduke, and he was familiar with the roar of a .357 magnum. There were no echoes. In the one percent humidity of desert air the sound vanished almost as quickly as the bullet. A clang of hammer on anvil—and the stillness rushed back.

No one moved though all looked toward the dark shadow under the ledge.

Hayduke tried to think of what to do next. The pilot, finely balanced on his rock, was immobilized for the moment. That left the man with the carbine.

“
Bonnie,”
he whispered. It sounded like the rustling of a dead leaf. He clared his throat. “Bonnie,” he croaked, “get that carbine.”

Bonnie stared toward the hidden voice. “Carbine?” she said. “Carbine?”

The guard was alert. His furtive hand began to move again. Hayduke recocked the revolver, firm and businesslike. The hand stopped.

“Get the guy’s gun,” Hayduke said. He glanced up at the perched helicopter pilot. Two keen blue eyes burned back at him through the concealing weed, into his shadow.

Bonnie stepped close to the guard’s shoulder, extending her handcuffed hands toward the forestock of the carbine. His hands, resting on the ground, were doing a nervous finger dance.

“Don’t get between me and him.”

Bonnie gulped. “Right.” Moving behind the guard she stepped, not necessarily meaning to, on the man’s hand with her lug-soled boot.

“Jesus!”

“Sorry.” She took the weapon from his shoulder and backed off. The guard scowled, looking at the waffle-iron imprint on the back of his hand.

Hayduke slid out from under the ledge, rose to his knees and
aimed his revolver up at the pilot’s crotch. “All right. Now you. Unbuckle that holster.”

“I can’t let go,” the pilot said. “I’ll slip.”

“Then slip.”

“Okay, okay, wait a minute.” The pilot raised one hand and fumbled with the buckle. “Man,” he sighed, muscles quivering, calves beginning to tremble from the strain.

Holster, strap and weapon came sliding down the rock. Hayduke stood up a bit shakily, unholstered the pistol and stuck it in his belt. “Bon—Gertrude, you stand over here beside me.” He waited. She came. “All right, now you come on down.” He waved the big revolver at the pilot. The pilot eased himself down. The two men faced Hayduke. What to do now? “I think I’ll kill you both,” he said.

“Wait a minute, friend,” the pilot began.

“He’s kidding,” Bonnie said. She looked more frightened than the men.

“Well goddammit, I don’t know why I shouldn’t,” Hayduke said. The intoxication of absolute power, the power of life and death, was getting to him all right. Despite twelve months in the Central Highlands with the Montagnards, despite his Green Beret and Special Forces rating as demolitions specialist, George Hayduke had never killed a man. Not even a Vietnamese man. Not even a Vietnamese woman. Not even a Vietnamese child. At least, not to the best of his knowledge.

The fury and frustration of those years bubbled up like swamp gas, like an evil methane, to the surface of his consciousness. And here was a helicopter pilot, most despised of all, a real live helicopter pilot, probably from Vietnam, at his mercy. The right age: he looked like a vet. Why not kill the evil bastard? Hayduke like many men had a not-so-secret longing to cut at least one notch on his gun butt. He too wanted a tragic past. At another man’s expense.

Providing, of course, that he could get away with it. Providing of course it was “justifiable homicide.”

“Why shouldn’t I kill the bastard?” he said aloud.

“Well you’re not going to,” his love said, hanging on to his right arm.

He shrugged off her restraining hands. Shifting the revolver to his left hand but keeping it trained on the pilot—“You sit down beside your buddy. Yeah, that’s right. Just sit down there on the rocks”—he took the carbine from Bonnie and checked the action. One in the chamber and a full clip. Both hands full, he reholstered his revolver and leveled the carbine, hip high, point blank, at the two human beings sitting there, twenty feet away, alive and breathing in the fresh air, the cheerful sunlight, of the great American Southwest. A bird sang (rufous-sided towhee) down the gulch somewhere, and life generally looked good. A good day for dying too, no doubt, but all present were willing to put off till tomorrow what they didn’t have to do today.

“How about—” Bonnie began.

“Why the hell shouldn’t I?” Hayduke was dripping sweat, the little carbine shaking in his hairy, white-knuckled hands.

“Don’t be crazy,” she said. “They didn’t hurt me. Now get this thing off me.”

He blinked at the handcuffs. Two bracelets of black plastic, joined by a twelve-inch band of the same. “Where’s the key?” He turned his masked face, red eyes glaring in the shade of the hard hat’s beak, toward the security guard. “Where’s the key?” he roared.

“Ain’t no key,” the man mumbled. “You got to cut it.”

“You dirty liar.”

“No, no, he’s right.” Bonnie’s hands were on his arm again. “They’re plastic throwaways. Get your knife out.”