The Monkey Wrench Gang (36 page)

“I wish you wouldn’t do this,” she said. “You need rest too.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be under a tree somewhere tomorrow and I’ll sleep all day.”

“You haven’t had a decent meal since noon.”

“I got enough gorp and jerky in the pack to last me a week. Also we got a cache near here. Take off.”

“Tell me what you’re going to do.”

“You don’t want to know. You’ll read about it in the papers.”

She sighed. “Give me a kiss.” He gave her an impatient kiss.

“Do you love me?” she asked. He said he did.

“How much?” she wanted to know.

“Will you get the fuck out of here!” he roared.

“All right all right, you don’t have to yell.” Sitting now behind the wheel of the jeep, she started the motor. Her eyes shone with moisture in the dim glow from the dashboard. He didn’t care. She raised a knuckled forefinger to her cheeks and rubbed away the preliminary leakage. Exchanging his hard hat for the salt-rimed leather sombrero, he didn’t even notice. She raced the engine. “Can I have your attention for a moment?”

“Yeah?” Pulling on gloves, he stared at the bright lights of the loading towers.

“Just one thing I want to say to you, Hayduke, before I go. Just in case I never see you again.”

He looked everywhere but at her. “Try to make it short.”

“Bastard. You sonofabitch. What I wanted to say is I love you, you ugly sonofabitch.”

“Fine.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What did I say?”

“You love me and I’m glad. Now get the hell out of here.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye!”

Eyes blurred, she drove away. Alone, buzzing down the asphalt trail to Kayenta, heart beating, her pistons leaping madly up and down, Bonnie Abbzug relapsed into the sweet luxury of tears. Hard to see the road. She turned on the windshield wipers but that didn’t help much.

Alone at last (Jesus
Christ
what a relief) Hayduke unbuttoned the fly of his jeans and fumbled it out and staled proudly, like a stallion, upon the hard ground, the beer cans and pop bottles, the squashed aluminum and broken glass, the plastic six-pack carriers and forgotten wine jugs of Navajoland USA. (Jesus Christ what a
relief.)
As he pissed he saw particulated images of stars a hundred thousand light years beyond our solar system glittering briefly, but bravely, on the trembling mirrors of his golden dew. He pondered for a moment the oceanic unity of things. Like the witch doctors say, we are truly all one. One what? What difference does that make?

The grandeur of his reflections gave him solace as he bent to his lonely and ill-rewarded labors. Reconstituted, the chain saw in one hand, the loaded duffel bag in the other hand and an eighty-pound pack on his broad mortal back, George W. Hayduke tramped forward—a staunch and unplacated force—toward the clanking apparatus the tough red eyes the armored jaws the tall floodlit and brazen towers of … the Enemy. His enemy? Whose enemy? The Enemy.

Bonnie raised her stick from the juniper coals and checked the cremated
marshmallow impaled on the tip. She pulled it off with her teeth and swallowed it down in one gulp, like a burnt oyster.

“I always thought only little childern ate them things,” Smith said.

“Well, I like them,” Bonnie said, “and I’m an old crone of twenty-eight. Doc, hand me some more.”

He tossed her the bag; she put another on the stick. Sun going down behind the Henry Mountains. Cool shadows sweeping down from Elk Ridge. Below, a thousand feet down and five miles south by line of sight, the nude rock of Natural Bridges National Monument shone dull gold in the waning evening light.

Waiting.

She sighed. “Let me see those newspapers.” Munching on her crisp black marshmallow, she read for the fourth time—or was it the tenth?—the account, on page eleven, of recent depredations in the Black Mesa area. Authorities Reveal Widespread Sabotage. Coal Train Derailed Second Time. Steel wedges found near tracks. Mysterious explosion blows top offloading and storage towers. Name scrawled in sand: “Rudolf the Red, Native Avenger.” Investigations continue.
Police suspect large-scale organized band known as “Crazy Dogs.” Renegade clan from Shoshone tribe. Coal conveyor destroyed by explosives in four different places. Gem of Arizona, world’s largest dragline excavator, partly destroyed by fire in engine room. Damage estimated at one and a half million dollars. Only clue: “Rudolf Knows.” Power line leading to strip mine cut for second consecutive night. Message scrawled in sand: “Rudolf the Red Knows.” Cooling fins riddled with bullet holes, 80,000-volt transformer ruined. Pipe fitters strike in third week. Railway and power lines patrolled by aircraft. Coal company officials mystified and angered by wave of vandalism, “Work of idiots,” says Arizona Public Service Company Environmental Coordinator. Secret monitoring device installed on coal conveyor. Pipe fitters’ union denies allegation of industrial sabotage. “Remember Fort Sumner—Rudolf.” Tribal Council promises inquiry into secret Navajo dissident group known as Ch’indy Begays (Sons of the Devil). “Remember Wounded Knee—Rudolf the Red.” American Indian Movement denies any knowledge of Black Mesa incidents. Arizona Department of Public Safety, Navajo Tribal Police and Coconino County Sheriff’s Office request assistance from FBI.

Bonnie folded the paper in disgust. “I don’t see why they have to bury us in the back pages. We worked hard.” She extended a hand to Doc. “Let me see that other paper. No, the old one. Last week’s.”

She opened last week’s paper (the
Arizona Republic
, Phoenix) to page seventeen and looked at her picture again, an “artist’s conception” based on verbal descriptions by the helicopter pilot and the Burns security guard. A poor likeness, she thought. Her hair too dark, her chest much too prominent. “Why do they have to make me look like Liz Taylor?” she complained.

“What’s wrong with that?” Doc said.

“It’s not just, that’s what’s wrong with it. Liz Taylor is an overweight, double-chinned, middle-aged matron. I am a petite and strikingly beautiful young woman.”

“I’d call the drawing an idealization.”

“You would.” She looked at Hayduke’s picture. The drawing showed simply the head and bulky shoulders of a man wearing a construction
worker’s helmet and a bandanna which covered all of his face but the eyes.

HELICOPTER DESTROYED IN FIRE
. Pilot and guard assaulted and robbed by saboteur and female companion. (“Female companion” indeed.) Discovered near site of power-line sabotage, girl fled when approached for questioning. Caught by pilot and security guard, abducted at gunpoint by construction worker wearing handkerchief as mask, both wanted for questioning by authorities. (“Abducted!”) Armed and dangerous. Pipe fitters deny any involvement. Rudolf the Red is not an Indian, asserts Navajo Tribal Chairman. Rudolf the Red
is
an Indian, insists Jack Broken-Nose Watahomagie, self-styled “war chief” of the Shoeshine Crazy Dogs. Speculations rife. Indian or non-Indian, these depredations are the work not of one man but of a well-organized and large-scale conspiracy, informed sources disclosed privately. Coal company has long history of labor troubles.

Bonnie refolded the paper. “What rubbish.” She made as if to toss it in the fire. “Do we need this anymore?”

“Save it for George,” Doc said. “He’ll get a big kick out of it.”

“Don’t put anything more on the fire,” Smith said. “Gettin’ too dark. Gotta let that fire die out. Don’t want ol’ J. Dudley Love to spot us from down below there, do we now.”

“He’s looking for all of us, eh?” says Doc.

“Well, we’re what they call wanted for questioning.”

“How did he get my name?”

“I figure he must of got it from that pilot picked you up at Fry Canyon that time.”

“That pilot is a friend of mine.”

“No comment.”

Bonnie studied her watch in the coagulating dusk. “That George,” she said, “is now exactly four days and five hours late.”

Nobody said anything. They watched the dying fire and thought each his own and her own thought. And that thought which each thought secretly was: Maybe we’ve gone far enough. Maybe George has gone too far. Maybe it’s time to stop. But only Doc would confess it.

“You know what I’ve been thinking,” he said. The others waited. He took a puff on his stogie, savored the smoke, expelled it in a flat blue stream. Poorwills called from the oak brush. Bats gathered and dispersed, out hunting under the blue-gold sky. “I’ve been thinking that after we finish this bridge job …”—if George ever gets here, that is, but he did not speak the thought—“that perhaps we should, well, give ourselves a bit of vacation. Say for a few months, at least. Only a few months,” he added quickly, as he noticed Bonnie appear to stiffen. “Then, when things are quiet again and this area is not so hot, we can, so to speak, resume.”

They considered the proposition in silence, a long pause following Dr. Sarvis’s remarks. The coals of the fire shone on. Waves of darkness moved westward over the plateaus. Nighthawks patrolled for supper.

“We’re not deciding anything until George gets here,” Bonnie said. Chin set, lips compressed, she stared darkly into the remains of the fire.

“Of course,” Doc said. “But the rest of us have to make contingency plans all the same.”

“Doc, you know what I found yesterday down there at the mine works?” Smith said. “You see that big tank sets up above the road, on that wooden frame? That thing is half full of diesel fuel. Yessir. Five hundred gallons of diesel fuel in that thing if there’s a drop.”

Doc failed to reply.

“You just think what we can do with that, Doc.”

Doc thought. “I see. But let me tell you something, Seldom Seen Smith. The kind of houseboat you want would cost me at least forty-five thousand dollars. I went to the boat show last week.”

“We need four. Four sixty-footers,” Smith said.

“That’s only a hundred and eighty thousand,” Bonnie said. “Doc can afford that, can’t you, Doc?”

Doc smiled, a thin smile, around his cigar.

“Well, Doc,” Smith said, “I’m gonna save you about a hundred and seventy-nine thousand and six hundred dollars, right here and now.” He waited. No response. “We don’t have to buy any houseboats.
We rent them at Wahweap Marina for a hundred a day. We take them up Wahweap Bay past Lone Rock, clear out all the cabin space and load ’em up with ammonium nitrate. That’s powerful fertilizer, Doc. I got all we need at the watermelon ranch. Then we pour on the diesel and seal the windows tight and our boy here … there … wherever he is, old George he fixes them up with a detonator charge and late at night we go down the bay and through the channel and cut that cable boom acrost the water and then we get that dam.”

“I see,” Doc said. “I’m supposed to walk into the marina office and I’m supposed to say to the clerk, ‘Look here, lad, I want to hire four houseboats for the day; I’ll take those big ones over there, four of them please, that one, that one, that one and that one.’ That’s what I’m supposed to do?”

Seldom smiled. “We’ll all go in with you, Doc, the four of us together, and you can say, ‘I need a houseboat for my friends here, one for the gal too, that’ll be sixty-footers, please.’ The man at the desk he’ll be kind of surprised but he’ll oblige. Them people’ll do anything for money. You’d be surprised. They ain’t like us, Doc. They’re Christians.”

“You’re both insane,” Bonnie said.

“Well,” Smith said, “we could go to four different marinas, Wahweap, Bullfrog, Rainbow Bridge and Hall’s Crossing. That’ll take a few days longer, but we could do it that way. Then we turn ’em around and head down the lake.”

“Renting a forty-five-thousand-dollar houseboat is not quite as simple as renting a car,” Doc said.

“And then,” Smith concluded, “we can take that vacation. We’ll go to Florida, see the alligators. My Susan always wanted to see what them scaly bastards look like. Stop in Atlanta on the way.” Seldom grinned. “We’ll plant some watermelon seeds on old Martin Luther King’s grave.”

“Oh, mother,” Bonnie groaned, raising her head to the velvet sky, the lavender night, the first faint pinpoints of the stars. “What am I
doing
here?” She looked at her watch.

“Try to relax,” said Doc. “Drink your Ovaltine and stop whining.”

A pause.

Bonnie stood up. “I’m taking a walk.”

“Take a long walk,” Doc said.

“I think I’ll do just that.” She left.

Smith said, “The poor little gal’s in love, Doc. Worryin’ herself sick, that’s why she’s so touchy.”

“Seldom, you are a penetrating observer of human nature. And why am
I so
touchy?”

“You’re the doctor, Doc.”

They stared at the fading fire. One small bed of dying coals, like the lights of a lonely desert town, after dark, lost in the wastes of the great Southwest. Doc thought of New Mexico, of his empty house. Smith thought of Green River, Utah.

Change the subject, doctor.

“First the bridgework,” he said, “then maybe the dam. Then we quit for a while. No matter what George says.”

“You think we can get them houseboats lined up all right?”

“All we need is to make one little crack in it, Doc. One crack in that dam and nature she’ll take care of the rest. Nature and God.”

“Whose side is God on?”

“That’s something I wanta find out.”

Far away and below, down in the purple gloom, a pair of headlights made one convergent light in the dark, thin as a pencil flashlight’s beam—some late-arriving tourist, no doubt, searching for the campground. They watched the light move slowly on its curving track, vanish under the trees, reappear, vanish again, go out for good.

Northeast and above, high on the slopes of North Woodenshoe Butte, a coyote barked at the fading sunset. The last bark, finely modulated,
andante sostenuto
, became a prolonged archaic and anarchic howl. The desert wolf, his serenade, his nocturne.

Waiting.

Doc removed the chewed-up stub of the stogie from his teeth. He looked at it. The Conestoga cigar, hand-rolled in the wagon seat,
westward bound. He flipped it into the coals. “You think he’ll make it?”