The Monkey Wrench Gang (12 page)

“Okay, gloves, hats, wire cutters, signals, Now: Karo syrup, four quarts each. Matches. Flashlights—be careful with those: keep the light close to your work, don’t swing it around, shut it off when you’re moving. Maybe we should work out light signals? Naw, later. Water. Jerky. Hammer, screwdriver, cold chisel—okay, I got them. What else?”

“We’re all set,” Smith said. “Let’s get a move on.”

They shouldered their packs. Hayduke’s pack, with most of the hardware in it, weighed twice as much as anyone else’s. He didn’t care. Seldom Seen Smith led the way through the sundown gloom. The others followed in single file. Hayduke at the rear. There was no trail, no path. Smith picked the most economic route among the scrubby trees, around the bayonet leaves of the yucca and the very hairy prickly pear, across the little sandy washes below the crest of the ridge. As much as possible he led them on the rock, leaving no tracks.

They were headed south by the stars, south by the evening breeze, toward a rising Scorpio sprawled out fourteen galactic worlds
wide across the southern sky. Owls hooted from the pygmy forest. The saboteurs hooted back.

Smith circumvented an anthill, a huge symmetric arcologium of sand surrounded by a circular area denuded of any vestige of vegetation. The dome home of the harvester ants. Smith went around and so did Bonnie but Doc stumbled straight into it, stirring up the formicary. The big red ants swarmed out looking for trouble; one of them bit Doc on the calf. He stopped, turned and dismantled the anthill with a series of vigorous kicks.

“Thus I refute R. Buckminster Fuller,” he growled. “Thus do I refute Paolo Soleri, B. F. Skinner and the late Walter Gropius.”

“How late was he?” Smith asked.

“Doc hates ants,” Bonnie explained. “And they hate him.”

“The anthill,” said Doc, “is sign, symbol and symptom of what we are about out here, stumbling through the gloaming like so many stumblebums. I mean it is the model in microcosm of what we must find a way to oppose and halt. The anthill, like the Fullerian foam fungus, is the mark of social disease. Anthills abound where overgrazing prevails. The plastic dome follows the plague of runaway industrialism, prefigures technological tyranny and reveals the true quality of our lives, which sinks in inverse ratio to the growth of the Gross National Product. End of mini-lecture by Dr. Sarvis.”

“Good,” Bonnie said.

“Amen,” said Smith.

The evening gave way to night, a dense violet solution of starlight and darkness mixed with energy, each rock and shrub and tree and scarp outlined by an aura of silent radiation. Smith led the conspirators along the contour of the terrain until they came to the brink of something, an edge, a verge, beyond which stood nothing tangible. This was not the rim of the monocline, however, but the edge of the big man-made cut
through
the monocline. Below in the gloom those with sufficient night vision could see the broad new roadway and the dark forms of machines, two hundred feet down.

Smith and friends proceeded along this new drop-off until they reached a point where it was possible to scramble down to the crushed
rock and heavy dust of the roadbed. Looking northeast, toward Blanding, they saw this pale raw freeway leading straight across the desert, through the scrub forest and out of sight in the darkness. No lights were visible, only the faint glow of the town fifteen miles away. In the opposite direction the roadbed curved down between the walls of the cut, sinking out of view toward the wash. They walked into the cut.

The first thing they encountered, on the shoulder of the roadbed, were survey stakes. Hayduke pulled them up and tossed them into the brush.

“Always pull up survey stakes,” he said. “Anywhere you find them. Always. That’s the first goddamned general order in the monkey wrench business. Always pull up survey stakes.”

They walked deeper into the cut to where it was possible, looking down and west, to make out though dimly the bottom of Comb Wash, the fill area, the scattered earth-moving equipment. Here they stopped for further consultation.

“We want our first lookout here,” Hayduke said.

“Doc or Bonnie?”

“I want to wreck something,” Bonnie said. “I don’t want to sit here in the dark making owl noises.”

“I’ll stay here,” Doc said.

Once more they rehearsed signals. All in order. Doc made himself comfortable on the operator’s seat of a giant compactor machine. He toyed with the controls. “Stiff,” he said, “but it’s transportation.”

“Why don’t we start with this fucker right here?” Hayduke said, meaning Doc’s machine. “Just for the practice.”

Why not? Packs were opened, tools and flashlights brought out. While Doc stood watch above them his three comrades entertained themselves cutting up the wiring, fuel lines, control link rods and hydraulic hoses of the machine, a beautiful new 27-ton tandem-drummed yellow Hyster C-450A, Caterpillar 330 HP diesel engine, sheepsfoot rollers, manufacturer’s suggested retail price only $29,500 FOB Saginaw, Michigan. One of the best. A dreamboat.

They worked happily. Hard hats clinked and clanked against the
steel. Lines and rods snapped apart with the rich
spang!
and solid
clunk!
of metal severed under tension. Doc lit another stogie. Smith wiped a drop of oil from his eyelid. The sharp smell of hydraulic fluid floated on the air, mixing uneasily with the aroma of Doc’s smoke. Running oil pattered on the dust. There was another sound, far away, as of a motor. They paused. Doc stared into the dark. Nothing. The noise faded.

“All’s clear,” he said. “Carry on, lads.”

When everything was cut which they could reach and cut, Hayduke pulled the dipstick from the engine block—to check the oil? not exactly—and poured a handful of fine sand into the crankcase. Too slow. He unscrewed the oil-filler cap, took chisel and hammer and punched a hole through the oil strainer and poured in more sand. Smith removed the fuel-tank cap and emptied four quart bottles of sweet Karo syrup into the fuel tank. Injected into the cylinders, that sugar would form a solid coat of carbon on cylinder walls and piston rings. The engine should seize up like a block of iron, when they got it running. If they could get it running.

What else? Abbzug, Smith and Hayduke stood back a little and stared at the quiet hulk of the machine. All were impressed by what they had done. The murder of a machine. Deicide. All of them, even Hayduke, a little awed by the enormity of their crime. By the sacrilege of it.

“Let’s slash the seat,” said Bonnie.

“That’s vandalism,” Doc said. “I’m against vandalism. Slashing seats is petty-bourgeois.”

“So okay, okay,” Bonnie said. “Let’s get on to the next item.”

“Then we’ll all meet back here?” Doc said.

“It’s the only way back up on the ridge,” Smith said.

“But if there’s any shit,” Hayduke said, “don’t wait for us. We’ll meet at the truck.”

“I couldn’t find my way back there if my life depended on it,” Doc said. “Not in the dark.”

Smith scratched his long jaw. “Well, Doc,” he said, “if there’s any kind of trouble maybe you better just hightail it up on the bank
there, above the road, and wait for us. Don’t forget the hoot owl. We’ll find you that way.”

They left him there in the dark, perched on the seat of the maimed and poisoned compactor. The one red eye of his cigar watched them depart. The plan was for Bonnie to stand watch at the far west end of the project, alone, while Hayduke and Smith worked on the equipment down in the wash. She murmured against them.

“You ain’t afraid of the dark, are you?” Smith asked.

“Of course I’m afraid of the dark.”

“You afraid to be alone?”

“Of course I’m afraid to be alone.”

“You mean you don’t want to be lookout?”

“I’ll be lookout.”

“No place for women,” Hayduke muttered.

“You shut up,” she said. “Am I complaining? I’ll be lookout. So shut up before I take your jaw off.”

The dark seemed warm, comfortable, secure to Hayduke. He liked it. The Enemy, if he appeared, would come loudly announced with roar of engines, blaze of flares, an Operation Rolling Thunder of shells and bombs, just as in Vietnam. So Hayduke assumed. For the night and the wilderness belong to
us
. This is Indian country. Our country. Or so he assumed.

Downhill, maybe a mile, in one great switchback, the roadway descended through the gap to the built-up fill across the floor of Comb Wash. They soon reached the first group of machines—the earthmovers, the big trucks, the landscape architects.

Bonnie was about to go on by herself. Smith took her arm for a moment. “You stay close, honey,” he told her, “only concentrate on looking and listening; let me and George do the hard work. Take the hard hat off so you can hear better. Okay?”

“Well,” she agreed, “for the moment.” But she wanted a bigger share of the action later. He agreed. Share and share alike. He showed her where to find the steps that led to the open cab of an 85-ton Euclid mountain mover. She sat up there, like a lookout in a crow’s nest, while he and Hayduke went to work.

Busywork. Cutting and snipping, snapping and wrenching. They crawled all over a Caterpillar D-9A, world’s greatest bulldozer, the idol of all highwaymen. Put so much sand in the crankcase that Hayduke couldn’t get the dipstick reinserted all the way. He trimmed it short with the rod-and-bolt cutter. Made it fit. Sand in the oil intake. He climbed into the cab, tried to turn the fuel-tank cap. Wouldn’t turn. Taking hammer and chisel he broke it loose, unscrewed it, poured four quarts of good high-energy Karo into the diesel fuel. Replaced the cap. Sat in the driver’s seat and played for a minute with the switches and levers.

“You know what would be fun?” he said to Smith, who was down below hacking through a hydraulic hose.

“What’s that, George?”

“Get this fucker started, take it up to the top of the ridge and run it over the rim.”

“That there’d take us near half the night, George.”

“Sure would be fun.”

“We can’t get it started anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“There ain’t no rotor arm in the magneto. I looked. They usually take out the rotor arm when they leave these beasts out on the road.”

“Yeah?” Hayduke takes notebook and pencil from his shirt pocket, turns on his flashlight, makes notation:
Rotor arms
. “You know something else that would be fun?”

Smith, busy nullifying all physical bond between cylinder heads and fuel injection lines, says, “What?”

“We could knock a pin out of each tread. Then when the thing moved it would run right off its own fucking tracks. That would really piss them.”

“George, this here tractor ain’t gonna move at all for a spell. It ain’t a-goin’
nowheres.”

“For a spell.”

“That’s what I said.”

“That’s the trouble.”

Hayduke climbed down from the cab and came close to Smith,
there in the black light of the stars, doing his humble chores, the pinpoint of his flashlight beam fixed on a set screw in an engine block the weight of three Volkswagen buses. The yellow Caterpillar, enormous in the dark, looms over the two men with the indifference of a god, submitting without a twitch of its enameled skin to their malicious ministrations. The down payment on this piece of equipment comes to around $30,000. What were the men worth? In any rational chemico-psycho-physical analysis? In a nation of two hundred and ten million (210,000,000) bodies? Getting cheaper by the day, as mass production lowers the unit cost?

“That’s the trouble,” he said again. “All this wire cutting is only going to slow them down, not stop them. Godfuckingdammit, Seldom, we’re wasting our time.”

“What’s the matter, George?”

“We’re wasting our time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we ought to really blast this motherfucker. This one and all the others. I mean set them on fire. Burn them up.”

“That there’s arson.”

“For chrissake, what’s the difference? You think what we’re doing now is much nicer? You know damn well if old Morrison-Knudsen was out here now with his goons he’d be happy to see us all shot dead.”

“They ain’t gonna be too happy about this, you’re right there. They ain’t gonna understand us too good.”

“They’ll understand us. They’ll hate our fucking guts.”

“They won’t understand why we’re doin’ this, George. That’s what I mean. I mean we’re gonna be misunderstood.”

“No, we’re not gonna be misunderstood. We’re gonna be hated.”

“Maybe we should explain.”

“Maybe we should do it right. None of this petty fucking around.”

Smith was silent.

“Let’s
destroy
this fucker.”

“I don’t know,” Smith said.

“I mean roast it in its own grease. I just happen to have a little siphon hose here in my pack. Like I just happen to have some matches. I mean we just siphon some of that fuel out of the tank and we just sort of slosh it around over the engine and cab and then we just sort of toss a match at it. Let God do the rest.”

“Yeah, I guess He would,” Smith agreed. “If God meant this here bulldozer to live He wouldn’t of filled its tank with diesel fuel. Now would He of? But George, what about Doc?”

“What about him? Since when is he the boss?”

“He’s the one bankrolling this here operation. We need him.”

“We need his money.”

“Well, all right, put it this way: I like old Doc. And I like that little old lady of his too. And I think all four of us got to stick together. And I think we can’t do anything that all four of us ain’t agreed to do beforehand. Think about it that way, George.”

“Is that the end of the sermon?”

“That’s the end of the sermon.”

Now Hayduke was silent for a while. They worked. Hayduke thought. After a minute he said, “You know something, Seldom? I guess you’re right.”

“I thought I was wrong once,” Seldom said, “but I found out later I was mistaken.”

They finished with the D-9A. The siphon hose and the matches remained inside Hayduke’s pack. For the time being. Having done all they could to sand, jam, gum, mutilate and humiliate the first bulldozer, they went on to the next, the girl with them. Smith put his arm around her.