The Monkey Wrench Gang (6 page)

“Suppose your prayer is answered,” the girl was saying in the silence. “Suppose you have your earthquake at the dam. What happens to all the people here?”

“That there dam,” Smith replied, “is twelve miles upriver through the crookedest twelve miles of canyon you ever seen. It’d take the water an hour to get here.”

“They’d still drown.”

“I’d warn ’em by telephone.”

“Suppose God answers your prayer in the middle of the night. Suppose everybody at the dam is killed and there isn’t anybody left alive up there to give warning. Then what?”

“I ain’t responsible for an act of God, honey.”

“It’s your prayer.”

Smith grinned. “It’s His earthquake.” And he held up a harkening finger. “What’s that?”

They listened. The cliffs towered above. The silent evening flowed around them. Below, hidden deep in its dark gorge, the brawling river moved among rocks in complicated ways toward its climax in the Grand Canyon.

“I don’t hear anything but the river,” she said.

“No, listen….”

Far off, echoing from the cliffs, a rising then descending supernatural wail, full of mourning—or was it exultation?

“A coyote?” she offered.

“No….”

“Wolf?”

“Yeah….”

“I never heard of wolves around here before.”

He smiled. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s absolutely right.
There ain’t supposed to be no wolves in these parts anymore. They ain’t supposed to be here.”

“Are you sure it’s a wolf?”

“Yup.” He paused, listening again. Only the river sounded now, down below. “But it’s a kind of unusual wolf.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s one of them two-legged-type wolves.”

She stared at him. “You mean human?”

“More or less,” Smith said.

They drove on, past the ranger station, past the pink water tower, across the Paria River to the launching ramp on the muddy banks of the Colorado. Here Smith parked his truck, tailgate toward the river, and began unloading his boats. The girl helped him. They dragged the three inflatable boats from the truck bed, unfolded them and spread them out on the sand. Smith took a socket wrench from his toolbox, removed a spark plug from the engine block and screwed in an adapter on the head of an air hose. He started the motor, which inflated the boats. He and the girl pulled the boats into the water, leaving the bows resting on the shore, and tied them on long lines to the nearest willow tree.

The sun went down. Sloshing about in cutoff jeans, they shivered a little when a cool breeze began to come down the canyon, off the cold green river.

“Let’s fix something to eat before it gets completely dark,” the girl said.

“You bet, honey.”

Smith fiddled with his field glasses, looking for something he thought he had seen moving on a distant promontory above the gorge. He found his target. Adjusting the focus, he made out, a mile away through the haze of twilight, the shape of a blue jeep half concealed beneath a pedestal rock. He saw the flicker of a small campfire. A thing moved at the edge of the field. He turned the glasses slightly and saw the figure of a man, short and hairy and broad and naked. The naked man held a can of beer in one hand; with the other
hand he held field glasses to his eyes, just like Smith. He was looking directly at Smith.

The two men studied each other for a while through 7 × 35 binocular lenses, which do not blink. Smith raised his hand in a cautious wave. The other man raised his can of beer as an answering salute.

“What are you looking at?” the girl asked.

“Some kind of skinned tourist.”

“Let me see.” He gave her the glasses. She looked. “My God, he’s naked,” she said. “He’s waving it at me.”

“Lee’s Ferry is gone to hell,” Smith said, rummaging in their supplies. “You can’t argue that. Where’d we put that goddanged Coleman stove?”

“That guy looks familiar.”

“All naked men look familiar, honey. Now sit down here and let’s see what we can find to eat in this mess.”

They sat on ammo boxes and cooked and ate their simple supper. The Colorado River rolled past. From downstream came the steady roar of the rapids where a tributary stream, the Paria, has been unloading its rocks for a number of centuries in the path of the river. There was a smell of mud on the air, of fish, of willow and cottonwood. Good smells, rotten and rank, down through the heart of the desert.

They were not alone. Occasional motor traffic buzzed by on the road a hundred yards away: tourists, boaters, anglers bound for the marina a short distance beyond.

The small and solitary campfire on the far-off headland to the west had flickered out. In the gloom that way Smith could see no sign of friend or enemy. He retreated into the bushes to urinate, staring at the gleam of the darkened river, thinking of nothing much. His mind was still. Tonight he and his friend would sleep on the shore by the boats and gear. Tomorrow morning, while he rigged the boats for the voyage down the river, the girl would drive back to Page to pick up the paying passengers scheduled to arrive by air, from Albuquerque, at eleven.

New customers for Back of Beyond. A Dr. Alexander K. Sarvis, M.D. And one Miss—or Mrs.?—or Mr.?—B. Abbzug.

No relation to the Senator, she always said. Which was mostly true. Her
first name was Bonnie and she came from the Bronx, not Brooklyn. Furthermore, she was half Wasp (white anglo sexy Protestant); her mother’s maiden name was McComb. That strain perhaps accounted for the copper glints in Ms. Abbzug’s long, rich, molasses-colored hair, draped in glossy splendor from crown of head to swell of rump. Abbzug was twenty-eight years old. A dancer by training, she had first come to the Southwest seven years earlier, member of a college troupe. She fell in love—at first sight—with mountains and desert, deserted her troupe in Albuquerque and continued at the university there, graduating with honors and distinction into the world of unemployment offices, food stamps and basement apartments. She worked as a waitress, as a teller trainee in a bank, as a go-go dancer, as a receptionist in doctors’ offices. First for a psychiatrist named Evilsizer, then for a urologist named Glasscock, then for a general surgeon named Sarvis.

Sarvis was the best of a sorry lot. She had stayed with him and after three years was still with him in the multiple capacities of office clerk, nurse-aide and chauffeur (he was incapable of driving a car in city traffic, though perfectly at home with scalpel and forceps slashing
about in another man’s gallbladder or excising a chalazion from someone’s inner eyelid). When the doctor’s wife died in a meaningless accident—plane crash during takeoff from O’Hare Field—she watched him stumble like a sleepwalker through office, ward and eight days until he turned to her with a question. In his eyes. He was twenty-one years older than she. His children were grown up and gone.

Ms. Abbzug offered him what consolation she could, which was much, but refused the offer of marriage that followed a year after the accident.

She preferred (she said) the relative independence (she thought) of female bachelorhood. Though she often stayed with the doctor in his home and accompanied him on his travels, she also retained her own quarters, in a humbler part of Albuquerque. Her “quarters” was a hemisphere of petrified polyurethane supported by a geodetic frame of cheap aluminum, the whole resting like an overgrown and pallid fungus on a lot with tomato patch in the wrong or southwestern sector of the city.

The interior of Abbzug’s dome glittered like the heart of a geode, with dangling silvery mobiles and electric lanterns made of multiperforated No. 8 tin cans hanging from the ceiling, and crystalline clusters of mirrors and baubles attached at random to the curved interior. On sunny days the translucent single wall admitted a general glow, filling her inner space with pleasure. Beside her princess-size water bed stood a bookshelf loaded with the teenybopper intellectual’s standard library of the period: the collected works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Carlos Castaneda, Hermann Hesse, Richard Brautigan,
The Whole Earth Catalog
, the
I Ching, The Old Farmer’s Almanack
and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
. Spiders crawled upon the wisdom of Fritz Perls and Prof. Richard (“Baba Ram Dass”) Alpert, Ph.D. Lonesome earwigs explored the irrational knots of R. D. Laing. Silverfish ate their way through the cold sludge of R. Buckminster Fuller. She never opened any of them anymore.

The brightest thing in Abbzug’s dome was a brain. She was too wise to linger long with any fad, though she tested them all. With an intelligence too fine to be violated by ideas, she had learned that she
was searching not for self-transformation (she liked herself) but for something good
to do
.

Dr. Sarvis detested geodesic domes. Too much of the American countryside, he thought, was being encysted with these giant sunken golf balls. He despised them as fungoid, abstract, alien and inorganic structures, symptom and symbol of the Plastic Plague, the Age of Junk. But he loved Bonnie Abbzug despite her dome. The loose and partial relationship which was all she would give him he accepted with gratitude. Not only was it much better than nothing but in many ways it was much better than everything.

Likewise, she thought. The fabric, she said, of our social structure is being unraveled by too many desperately interdependent people. Agreed, said Dr. Sarvis; our only hope is catastrophe. So they lingered together, the small dark arrogant slip of a girl and the huge pink paunchy bear of a man, for weeks, months, a year…. Periodically he repeated his marriage proposal, as much for form’s sake as out of love. Is one more important than the other? And regularly she turned him down, firmly and tenderly, with open arms, with prolonged kisses, with her mild and moderate love.

Love me little, love me long….

Other men were such obscene idiots. The doctor was an aging adolescent but he was kind and generous and he needed her and when he was with her he was really there, with her. Most of the time. It seemed to her that he withheld nothing. When he
was with
her.

For two years she had lived and loved, off and on, with Dr. Sarvis. There was this tendency simply to drift. Millions were doing it. It irritated Abbzug a bit that she, with her degree in French, her good healthy strong young body, her restless and irritable mind, was fulfilling no function more demanding than that of office flunky and lonely widower’s part-time mistress. And yet, when she thought about it, what did she really want to do? Or be? She had given up dancing—
the dance
—because it was too demanding, because it required an almost total devotion which she was unwilling to give. The cruelest art. She could certainly never go back to the night world of the cabaret, where all those vice squad detectives, claims adjusters and fraternity boys sat
in the murk with their blues, their beers, their limp lusts, straining their eyeballs, ruining their eyesight for a glimpse of her crotch.

What then? The maternal instinct seemed to be failing to function so far as she was concerned, except for her role as mother to the doctor. Playing mother to a man old enough to be her father. The generation gap, or vice versa? The cradle robber? Who’s a cradle robber? I’m the cradle robber; he’s in his second childhood.

She had built most of the dome herself, buying assistance only for the plumbing and wiring. The night before she moved into the thing she held a ceremony, a consecration of the house, a “chant.” She and her friends formed a circle round a small and burning coal-oil lamp. They twisted their long, awkward American legs into overhand knots—the lotus posture. Then the six middle-class college-educated Americans sitting under an inflated twenty-first-century marshmallow of plastic foam intoned a series of antique Oriental chants which had long ago been abandoned by educated people in the nations of their origin.

“
Om
,” they chanted. “
Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Om mani padma ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
….”

Or as Doc Sarvis liked to say, “
Om
sweet
om:
be it ever so humble …” and he hung a needlework sampler on the curvispatial wall:
God Bless Our Happy Dome
.

But he seldom entered there. When she was not with him, at his place or on their frequent travels, she lived alone in her fungus. Alone with her cat, tending her potted plants, her tomato patch in the backyard, playing her recorder, dusting her unread and unreadable books, brushing her marvelous hair, meditating, exercising, lifting her lovely and longing face toward the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her time, through space, through all the concatenate cells of her unfolding self. Where to now, Abbzug? You’re twenty-eight and a half years old, Abbzug.

For diversion she joined the good doctor on his nighttime highway beautification projects, assisting him in the beginning as driver and lookout. When they tired of fire she learned to hold her own at one
end of a crosscut saw. She learned how to swing an ax and how to notch the upright posts of a billboard so as to fell it in any desired direction.

When the doctor acquired a lightweight McCulloch chain saw she learned how to operate that too, how to start it, how to oil and refuel it, how to adjust the chain when it became too tight or too loose. With this handy tool they were able to accomplish much more work in limited time although it did raise the ecological question, whatever that meant, of noise and air pollution, the excessive consumption of metal and energy. Endless ramifications….

“No,” the doctor said. “Forget all that. Our duty is to destroy billboards.”

They proceeded, furtive figures in the night, the sinister black Lincoln with the silvery caduceus on the license tag, the big car parked with motor running on obscure side roads near major highways, the huge man, the short woman, climbing fences, shuffling through the weeds lugging their chain saw and fuel can. They became familiar shapes and smells to the ground squirrels and hoot owls, a major and irritating mystery to the outdoor advertising agencies and the Special Investigation Squad of the Bernalillo County sheriff’s department.