The Monkey Wrench Gang (49 page)

“I’m a-comin’, I’m a-comin’. Belay ready?”

“Belay is fucking ready.” Hayduke braced and waiting.

“Testing belay.” Sharp tug on the rope. Hayduke stands firm.

“Give me tension.”

“You got it.”

Smith comes walking up the wall, hand over hand up the rope, feet flat against the stone, joins the crew and drops the rope. Breathing hard but looking relieved.

“What were you doing down there?” Hayduke says.

“Had to take a leak.”

DR. SARVIS PLEASE. DR. SARVIS.

“What the hell
is
that?” Hayduke says.

“Sounds like God,” Bonnie says. “With a country-western accent. Just what I was always afraid of.”

“Gimme the rifle,” Hayduke says. “And the cannon.” Reluctantly, Smith hands them over. “Rest of you start up the slope.” George buckles on his gun belt.

“Now George—”

“Go on!”

DOCTOR SARVIS!

Nobody moves. They stare down the canyon, from which direction the mighty appeal comes. Sound of heavy boots slogging over sand and gravel, busting through brush.

HEY, DOC SARVIS!

“Somebody with a bullhorn,” Hayduke mutters. “Some kind of trick that bishop’s up to.”

“Only it don’t sound quite like the bishop.”

“Watch behind us. They’re pulling something here. Everybody out of sight.” Hayduke holds the rifle aimed down-canyon; nervously he works the bolt, slides a round into the firing chamber, closes the bolt.

Waiting. They stare at the bend of the canyon wall as the tramping feet come near. A man appears, large, heavy, a two-hundred-pound
six-footer, sweating like a hog, unshaven, red-faced, anxious. A big canteen dangles from his shoulder. He stops, holding the battery-powered bullhorn in one hand, a dirty white T-shirt drooping from a stick in the other, and stares at the empty box of the canyon, unaware of the gang ninety feet above, looking down at him. The man looks something like Bishop Love. But not quite. He carries no weapons.

“What’s the bastard want?” Hayduke whispers.

“That ain’t the bishop,” Smith says. “It’s his little brother, Sam.”

Their whispers carry. The man looks up, first to the left, the wrong side, hearing not the original sounds but their echoes. On that side he sees only the shadowy ceiling of the royal alcove arching above his head, two hundred feet high.

“We’re up here, Sam,” Smith says. “What you doin’ anyway? You lost?”

Sam spots them and raises the dirty undershirt in a weary gesture of either surrender or parlay. Parlay: he raises the bullhorn to his mouth.

Smith lifts a hand. “We can hear you without that goddamn thing. What’s on your mind, Sam?”

“We need the doc,” the brother says.

“I knew it,” Hayduke mutters savagely.

“What for?” Smith says.

“I knew it was a trick all along. Watch behind us, Bonnie.”

Bonnie ignores him.

“The bishop’s having a heart attack. Or some kind of stroke. I don’t know just what it is but I think it’s a heart attack.”

Doc lifts his head with interest.

“Call in your helicopter,” Smith says. “Get him to the hospital.”

“The helicopter’s coming but it can’t set down closer’n a mile and we need the doctor right away.”

“Describe the symptoms,” Doc mumbles, reaching for his black bag.

Bonnie puts a hand on his shoulder. “No you don’t.”

The man below addresses himself directly to Dr. Sarvis. “Doctor,”
he shouts, “can you come down off of there? We need you real bad.”

“Of course,” Doc mumbles, blinking, groping around for the bag. Tied to his rear, he can’t get it free. “Be right there.”

“No!” Bonnie cries. “Tell them you don’t make house calls. Office visits only,” she shouts at Sam.

“Be right back,” Doc mumbles, scrabbling to his feet. He pulls the bag to his side. Eyes clearing a bit now. “George,” he says, “the rope …?”

“It’s a trick,” Hayduke growls, stupefied.

“The rope, George?” Doc takes the running end and starts tying a large granny knot around his belly. Hands still too shaky. Puffing on the cigar. “Be right down,” he mumbles to the man below, unheard.

“Doc!”

“Dr. Sarvis,” the man hollers.

“Be right down. Somebody tell him. George, give me a hand here. We need a nonslip suture, right? Can’t remember how you did that one of yours.”

“Christ.” George moves in close, undoes the granny, whips on a bowline. “Listen carefully, Doc,” he begins. “They can’t prove you were in on this.”

“Of course not.”

“No, you listen to me,” Bonnie cuts in. “This is no good. They’ll put you in jail. I’m not going to let you do this. All we have to do”—Bonnies gestures wildly toward the silent rock above, the blasé brooding monuments of stone; that dead city, that Jurassic morgue—“is get up there. Somehow. Then over into the Maze. Seldom says they’ll never find us once we get in there.”

“Now now, Bonnie,” he says, embracing her, “I’ve got a good lawyer. Expensive but very good. We’ll get together later. Can’t go on much more like this anyway. Then there’s the—Be down in a minute!” he shouts to the waiting man. “—You know, my oath and all that rubbish. Can’t hardly be a Hippocratic hypocrite now, can we? I’m ready, George. Lower away.”

“All right,” Hayduke says, getting ready to belay, “but don’t tell
them fuckers anything, Doc. Don’t admit to a goddamn thing. Make them prove it.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Sorry we haven’t time for—well, you know, proper—” Doc nods to Smith. “Good man. Keep these imbeciles out of trouble. Take care, George. Bonnie….”

“You’re not going!”

Doc smiles, shuts his eyes, leans outward and backs
off
over the brink. Struggling down the wall, bag hanging to his belt, both hands clutching desperately, knuckles white, at the rope, he keeps his eyes shut while Hayduke repeats the routine instructions.

“Lean back. Seldom, you better back me up. Lean back, Doc. Lean back. Feet flat on the stone.
Don’t
squeeze the fucking rope to death. Relax. Enjoy it. That’s right. Keep going. Keep going, Doc. That’s the way.”

Bonnie stares in amazement. “Doc …” she moans.

Doc reaches or, more precisely, is lowered to the bottom of the wall. Sam Love unties the medical bag, unties the climbing rope and assists the doctor over the rubble toward the canyon floor. Doc waves good-bye to his comrades, then weaves down the canyon side by side with Sam, who carries the bag.

“We’ll see you soon, Doc,” Smith calls. “You be careful and take care of that sonofabitch the bishop and make sure he pays you in cash. Don’t take any checks.”

Doc waves again, not looking back.

“Let’s get out of here.” Hayduke starts to coil his rope, pulling it up.

“Wait a minute,” Bonnie says. “I’m going down too.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Well, shit. Well, holy sweet motherfuck.”

“No obscenities, please. Just give me a good belay.”

“Well, shit, wait’ll I get the rope up.”

“You don’t have to lower me down like a baby. I’ll rappel down.” Bonnie stuffs something—a wadded bandanna for padding—into the seat of her jeans and steps astride the rope. (That lucky rope,
thinks Smith.) “Just give me a good belay and shut up.” She passes the rope between her legs, across her back, over the shoulder. “Belay me, goddammit.”

“You can’t do it that way. You don’t have the rope right. Where the fuck you think you’re going anyhow?”

“Where does it look like I’m going?”

“You’re my woman now.” Hayduke’s voice slips a notch, sounding almost like a lover’s bleat. “Shit,” he snarls, recovering quickly. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

Bonnie turns to Smith. “Seldom,” she commands, “give me a belay.”

Smith hesitates while Hayduke tugs at the rope, now wound around Abbzug’s fragile frame.

“Hell, Bonnie …” Smith says, and clears his throat.

“Good God,” Bonnie says, “what a pair of wishy-washy mealy-mouthed juveniles you two really are anyhow, I mean
really.”
Rope in corrected rappel position, one end still around Hayduke’s waist, she backs toward the drop-off. “If you don’t give me a good belay you’re coming down with me.”

“Jesus Christ!” Hayduke snorts, stepping back to the solid ledge, planting his boots. “Just a second! Don’t
do
that.” He glowers at her.

“Really I don’t know how you two are going to survive without me. Or how I am going to survive without George’s
brilliant
and
elegant
and oh so
refined
and
tender
conversation.” Pause. “Lout! I’m going with Doc!”

“The hell you are.” Pulling in the rope.

“The hell I’m not.” Backing off.

“George.” Smith speaks. “Let her go.”

“You stay out of this.”

“Let her go.”

“You stay out of this, Seldom,” Bonnie says. “I can handle this punk myself.” Yanking at the line: “Testing belay!”

“Belay ready!” Hayduke replies, automatically bracing himself. Half the rope lies coiled at his feet.

Bonnie starts down over the dome of sandstone, the taut rope
rasping across her jeans and shirt, the pressure of it bending her nearly double. Ninety feet down. Eighty. Seventy. From Hayduke’s position he can see only her hat and head and shoulders. Then only the hat. Then nothing. Out of sight.

“More rope!” comes a terrified small voice from below.

Hayduke pays out the rope. “Should let her hang there. Stubborn little bitch. Nothing but trouble ever since I met her. Goddammit, Seldom, didn’t I say in the very beginning we didn’t need any goddamn
girls
in this goddamn fucking organization? Didn’t I? You’re damn right I did. Nothing but trouble and misery.” The rope vibrates like a bowstring in his hand, a straight Euclidean line from his hipbone to the eyebrow of the canyon wall. “Where are you now?” he bellows. No answer. “Seldom, can you see what that crazy ginch is doing down there?”

A weak and piteous cry from far below: “… end of the rope. Gimme more rope, you bastard….”

Smith peering over the edge. “She’s near all the way, George. Let her down another twenty feet.”

“Christ,” Hayduke goes on, tears leaking down his hog-bristled cheeks, gliding like melted pearls along the flanges of his nose and into the hairy underbrush of jaw and jowl, “when you think of all we did for her too, goddamn her, and just when we’re almost there she has to sneak off like this, just because she feels sorry for Doc. Well to hell with her, that’s all I can say. To hell with her, Seldom, we’ll just go on without her, that’s all. To hell with her.”

The rope goes slack in his hands but he seems unaware of it.

“She’s down now, George,” Smith says. “Pull up your line, she’s cast off. So long, honey,” he yells as Bonnie walks out to the center of the canyon floor, hastening after the departed Doc.

Bonnie stops and blows Seldom a kiss, a big triumphant smile on her lovely face. She looks radiant. Eyes sparkling, sunlight glowing in her hair, she waves at Hayduke. “Good-bye.”

He coils his rope, looking sullen. Makes no reply. Manic-depressive psychopaths are hard to please. He won’t even look at her.

“You too, schmuck,” she calls gaily, blowing Hayduke a rosy
kiss. He shrugs, coiling his precious rope. Bonnie Abbzug laughs and turns and hurries away.

Silence. More silence.

“Now I remember that third precept,” Smith says, smiling at grim, glum, grimy Hayduke: “Never get in bed with a gal that’s got more problems than you have.”

Hayduke’s face relaxes into a grudging but widening grin.

Or almost as many, Seldom adds, speaking to himself only.

Whock whock whock whock
. …

Sunlight flashes on whirling rotor, glances off the Plexiglas bubble, as the recon helicopter passes swiftly, like an afterthought, briefly glimpsed, across the slot of cloudy sky between two towering canyon walls, a mile away. The vibrations sweep toward them, the circles reaching out and closing, a glassy lasso looping down from heaven.

Smith picks up the canteen, Hayduke slings his rifle. They scramble up the stony slope, minute figures on a huge eyeless face of sculptured sandstone, two small human beings lost in an outsize kingdom of towers, walls, empty streets, and abandoned metropolis of rock and more rock and nothing but rock, silent and uninhabited for thirty million years. You can hear their voices in that barren waste from a league away, as they shrink and dwindle far off and far below, buglike micro-busybodies from the vulture’s point of view.

George
, says one tiny voice, incredibly remote but clear,
goldangit George you know I didn’t think you could do it, when it come right down to the nubbin of it. I thought sure you’d wrinkle up like a mountain oyster and just sort of fold in and pizzle down and leak out and piss away like a sick snake
.

Why Seldom Seen you buzzard-beaked Mormon motherfucker I can do anything I want to if I want to do it and what’s more I will and what’s more they’re never I mean never I mean never absolutely NEVER gonna catch me. No. Never. Nor you either if I can help it
.

The micro-voices fade but not completely: the gibberish and laughter go on and on and on, for miles….

The vulture smiles his crooked smile.

*    *    *

“You’re under arrest, Dr. Sarvis. I suppose I ought to tell you that before you look at Dudley.”

Doc shrugs, returning Sam his canteen. “Of course. Where’s the patient?”

“We got him laid out under that cottonwood where those other men are. You too, sister.”

Sister? Bonnie reflects, but only for a moment. “Don’t call me sister, brother, unless you mean it. Also I’m still thirsty and
very
hungry and I demand my rights as a common legal criminal and if I don’t get them there’s going to be nothing but trouble around here.”

“Take it easy.”

“You’ll get no rest whatsoever.”

“All right, all right.”

“Nothing but heartache.”

“All right. Here he is, Doc.”

The patient is sitting up against the bole of the tree, one large and heavy man with square handsome Anglo-Saxon cattleman’s face. J. Dudley Love, Bishop of Blanding. His eyes glitter, his skin has a parboiled tinge, he looks overenthusiastic, agitated, not quite entirely present. “Hello, Doc, where the hell you been? Sam,” he says to his brother, “what’d I tell you? I told you he’d come. Am I gonna be Governor of the great beehive state of Utah or ain’t I? ‘Industry,’ Doctor, that’s our state motto, ‘industry,’ and our state symbol is the golden beehive, solid gold forty-karat goddamn beehive, and by God we
are
busy little bees, ain’t we, Sam? Who’s this girl? Am I gonna be Governor or ain’t I?”