The Monkey Wrench Gang (39 page)

“I don’t need any help,” the bishop said. “I got a deputy’s commission and I aim to use it. I’m gonna take care of that hairy little hoodlum up there and I’ll do it all by myself if I have to. You fellas can go home if that’s what you want to do.”

“Hold it, Bishop,” the motel operator said, “don’t get your back up. We’re all goin’ with you.”

“That’s right,” the bean-ranch manager said.

“Just what do you have in mind when we get him, Dudley?” his brother said.

The bishop grinned and tenderly, gingerly, touched his inflamed face. “Well first I’ll take my needle-nose pliers and remove a couple of his toenails. Then his back teeth. Then I’m gonna ask him where Seldom Seen is, and that Dr. Sarvis and that little whore of a girl they transport around with ’em. We might get them all on the Mann Act, come to think of it—crossing the state line for immoral purposes. Then we’ll bring in the whole bunch ourselves and we won’t need no sheriff’s department or state police to help neither. I don’t have anything else I have to do today. You fellas with me?”

They all nodded, except the brother.

“How about you?” the bishop said.

“I’m coming,” he said. “Somebody has to keep a rein on you, J. Dudley, or next thing we know you’ll be running for Governor.”

The men smiled, including the bishop himself.

“I’ll get around to that later. Right now let’s go jump that rabbit out of his bush.”

They climbed back in their machines and advanced as planned. Within a mile of the objective Love stopped and got out. The others joined him. All were well armed—pistols, carbines, shotguns. Love issued his orders and the Team spread out laterally toward the sides of the ridge. He raised his field glasses to check on the quarry but the rise of the land prevented direct observation. He looked to either side;
his men were ready, watching him. He made a forward motion with his right arm, the squad leader’s signal to advance. All began to walk forward, crouching, keeping in the cover of junipers and pinyon pines, holding their weapons at port. The bishop’s brother Sam stayed close by the bishop: where each wanted the other.

A fierce hot high noon in San Juan County—thunder on the air, some more than decorative clouds in the southeast quarter of the sky, dazzling sunlight on the stone, the trees, the bayonetlike leaves of the yucca. No one noticed the desert marigolds, purple asters, mule-ear sunflowers in bloom here and there, in the sandy basins in the rock. The Team had better game.

“Did you take your digitalis today, Dudley?”

“Yes, I took my digitalis today, Sam.”

“Just asking.”

“Okay. Then shut up.”

Bishop Love jacked a cartridge into the firing chamber of his carbine and lowered the hammer. He was enjoying himself; hadn’t felt so good since mopping-up days on Okinawa. He was Lieutenant Love then, platoon leader, Bronze Star, building a good war record for later use. Heart expanding, the bishop even felt for a moment a trace of sympathy for the trapped Jap, the loser out there on land’s end, cowering behind his jeep, pants stinking with fear.

The Search and Rescue Team advanced tactically, two dodging forward while the others stood ready to provide covering fire if needed. But there was no shooting from the fugitive’s position. The Team advanced, crouching low, for the rim was less than four hundred yards away and the trees were scattered. The six men crept forward in plain view of one another, halted, waited, listened.

“I heard a motor,” the brother said.

“That ain’t possible, Sam,” the bishop replied. He wanted to use his field glasses but so close to the enemy hesitated to put down his weapon. “I don’t hear nothin’.”

They listened intently. There was no sound, no sound whatsoever but the faintest sighing of the breeze in the juniper boughs and the occasional irrelevant twittering of birds.

“I thought I did,” the brother said. “You say he’s behind that last tree?”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t see the jeep.”

“It’s there, don’t worry about that.” The bishop looked left then right at his men. They waited, watching him. All were sweating, all looked red-faced but resolute. The bishop turned toward the point of the ridge, the last juniper tree, which was obscured by other trees and barely visible from where he stood. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “You up there! Rudolf, whatever your name is! You hear me?”

No answer but the passing air, the distant jabbering of pinyon jays, the soft hoot of one great horned owl from beyond and below the rim.

The bishop yelled again. “You better come down outa there, Rudolf. There’s six of us. You answer or we’re gonna shoot.” He waited.

No response except a second useless taunt from the owl.

The bishop cocked his weapon, nodded to his men. They took aim and fired, all but the brother, in the general area of the tall juniper, which shook visibly from the blast of buckshot and bullets.

The bishop raised his hand. “Hold your fire!” The echoes of the gunnery rolled away, down the monocline and off across the Valley of the Gods, dying out against the walls and promontories of the plateau, five, ten, twenty miles away.

“Rudolf?” the bishop shouted. “You comin’ down?” He waited. No reply but the birds. “Keep me covered,” he said to his brother. “I’m gonna root that devil outa there.”

“I’m going with you.”

“Stay here.” Whispering: “That’s an order.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit, Dudley. I’m going with you.”

Bishop Love spat on the ground. “All right, Sam, get yourself killed.” He yelled at the other four men, “Keep us covered.” To his brother: “Let’s go.”

They dodged from tree to tree up the last rise of land and hit the
dirt—but there was no dirt—hit the rock within plain view of the ultimate tree, the rim of the drop-off.

Nobody there.

No question about it now, he was gone. Rudolf had disappeared. His jeep had disappeared too. Nothing remained but the lone juniper, a cracked plate of sandstone lying near its base and a few spots of grease, a few slivers of steel scattered about on the ground.

“He’s not here,” the brother said.

“It ain’t possible.”

“Even the jeep’s not here.”

“I can see that. I ain’t blind, goddammit.” Bishop Love rose to his knees, staring at the positive, definite, almost tangible, almost palpable presence of nothing. Sweat dripped from his nose. “But it ain’t possible.”

They walked to the edge and looked over. All they saw was what was there: the bench of bare stone a hundred feet or so below, the corroded badlands, the gulches, draws and arroyos draining their arid beds of sand and rubble toward Comb Wash, the high sheer façade of Comb Ridge beyond the wash, the mountains beyond the ridge.

Sam smiled at his brother. “Well, Governor …?”

“Shut up. I’m trying to think.”

“First time for everything.”

“Shut up. Hunker down in the shade here and let’s figure this out.”

“Maybe now you’ll radio the sheriff.”

Bishop Love plucked a stem of grass and stuck it in his teeth. Squatting on his broad hams he scratched at the ground with a stick. “I’ll call the sheriff when I catch this bastard,” he said. “Him and his evil crew. That’s when I call the sheriff. Not before.”

“Okay. Fine. Let’s catch them. How?”

The bishop squinted at the sun and frowned at his brother and looked again at the tree and back at the stony ground between his boots. He chewed and he scratched and he thought. “I’m workin’ on it.”

“
Gee, then what happened?” She stared at him with awestruck eyes
, mouth agape in mock astonishment.

“There you were,” Doc said, “trapped on the edge of a hundred-foot cliff …”

“There I was.”

“With the bishop and his fanatic henchmen coming toward you, armed to the teeth and black vengeance in their hearts …”

“That’s about it.” George popped the top from his fourth can of Schlitz within the last thirty minutes.

“No way down and no way out …”

“That’s right.”

“Six of them against one of you …”

“Six of them against only one of me. Yeah. Shit.” He tilted the can to his grimy muzzle. They heard these awful schlurping sounds, watched his hairy Adam’s apple bobbing. Smith, turning the spit on which their supper was impaled, smiled thoughtfully, gazing at the flames. Dr. Sarvis sipped at his Wild Turkey and pothole water, while Bonnie Abbzug smoked her “Ovaltine.”

Back in the evening shadows, under the dappled light and shade cast by the camouflage net draped from the pinyon pines, Smith’s
truck stood parked; snug against it the blanched, blue and wrinkled jeep, its hood, top, seat and tarp-covered load all coated with an inch of auburn dust. There was a jagged, star-shaped hole big as a football in the windshield.

“Well?”

“Well, shit.”

“Well, what did you do?”

“When?”

“Come on, George.”

George lowered the can of beer. Smith was looking at him; he winked at Smith. He looked at Bonnie and Doc. “Oh, Christ, it’s a complicated story. You don’t want to hear it all. Let’s just say I got down off of there and drove up Comb Wash and hit the road and what the fuck here I am. Give me a hit on that.”

They stared at him in silence. Bonnie passed the weed. Doc lit up a fresh Marsh-Wheeling. Seldom Seen turned the spit.

“Okay,” Bonnie said, “forget it. Let’s talk about something else. What shall we talk about?”

“But if you insist—”

“No, that’s all right.”

“If you insist—”

Smith said, “You winched her down.”

“Of course. How else.” George grinned proudly at them all and in the short pause which followed elbowed the beer once more up to his face. He looked gaunt, filthy, starving, his eyes bloodshot from sun glare and strain, ringed like a raccoon’s with dark circles of exhaustion. Nevertheless he wasn’t ready to crash. Too tired to sleep, he had explained.

“What’s this about a wench?” Bonnie wanted to know.

“The winch,” Hayduke said. “That thing on the front. Got a hundred and fifty foot of cable there. Nothing to it.”

“Now wait a minute,” Doc said. “Are you trying to tell us you winched that jeep down over the cliff?”

“Yeah.”

“An overhanging cliff?”

“Wasn’t easy.”

“That’s what us rock climbers call a free rappel,” Smith explained.

“Free repel?” says Doc. “What you mean, free repel?”

“Rappel, rappel.
Rappel de corde,”
Bonnie explains. “
C’est un moyen de descendre une roche verticale avec une corde double, récupérable ensuite”

“Exactly,” says Hayduke.

“We do it all the time,” Smith said. “Only not with a jeep very often. In fact nobody never done it with a jeep before, far as I know, and if I didn’t know George here was an honest man I’d be inclined to suspect he was maybe stretching the truth a
little
bit. Not exactly lying, mind you, I’d never suspect George of anything like that, but maybe just, well—”

“Simplifying the truth,” Bonnie suggested.

“That’s right, or maybe even oversimplifying it some.”

“Yeah,” Hayduke said. “Well, shit, don’t believe me if you don’t want to. But there’s the jeep, right before your goddamned eyes.” He passed Bonnie’s little custom-made back to her.

“It looks like the same jeep,” Smith admitted. “But it don’t have to be. It could be one of them what they call reasonable fact-similes. But I ain’t saying it ain’t possible. I’ve winched my truck up and down some pretty steep pitches. But I got to admit I hain’t never done a free rappel with a truck.”

“Very well,” Doc said, “let’s assume, if only for the novelty of it, that George is not lying. But I have some technical questions. I didn’t know, for one thing, that a winch can be operated in reverse.”

“Wouldn’t be much use if it couldn’t,” Hayduke said.

“And you anchored the cable to that juniper tree?”

“That’s right.”

Bonnie started to interrupt. “But—”

Hayduke set down his beer can, already empty, and reached for another. “Listen,” he said, “do you want to hear the whole story or not? Okay, then shut up and I’ll tell you exactly what I did. When I saw the bishop and his men were going to give me enough time, the
first thing I did was get out my rock rope and measure the descent. My rope is a hundred and twenty feet long. The drop was about one hundred and ten feet. That meant problems. If the descent was seventy-five feet or less I could’ve done a true rappel with the jeep. There’s one hundred and fifty feet of cable on the winch, remember. I could’ve doubled the cable around the tree trunk and hooked the running end to the frame and drove the jeep down to the bottom—”

“And sawed off the tree,” said Smith.

“Right. Maybe. And when I got to the bottom I could’ve unhooked the running end and retrieved the cable without any trouble. But it was too far down. That meant I had to leave the running end of the cable on top, hooked around the tree. That meant I had to figure some other way to get it down after the jeep was down.”

“Why couldn’t you detach the cable from the winch,” says Doc, “after you reached bottom?”

“I didn’t think I’d have time. Besides it’s against climber’s ethics to leave aids in place after you finish a descent. Also I didn’t want Bishop Love to know where I was, or how I got down, or
if
I got down. I wanted to give him something to think about for the next few years. So I
had
to get the cable off the tree and retrieve it. The only question was how. While I was thinking about that I secured everything tight inside and jockeyed the jeep between the tree and the cliff, back end at the edge. All this time the bishop and the Team were coming up the ridge but it looked to me like I still had at least five minutes. They were taking their time. And then they stopped about a mile below and got out and palavered awhile and started to walk up the ridge, deployed for combat but not too good; I could’ve killed every one of them if I wanted to. But—pass me that joint again—you know … bad PR.”

“Finish the goddamn story,” Bonnie said, “and let’s eat.”

“So I had the time. I hooked the winch cable around the bottom of the juniper. I tied one end of my rope to the cable hook—that’s a big open slip hook, if you want to look at it. Since you don’t believe me.”