The Monkey Wrench Gang (22 page)

Smith looked quickly around for the nearest exit.

Hayduke waited. There were a few smiles, a few quiet remarks, but no deep, sincere or meaningful response. The truck drivers, cowboys, construction workers, even the barmaid, each little clique in its private intercourse, ignored him. Him, George Washington Hayduke, queer hippie loudmouth.

“I was a sergeant in the Green Berets,” he explained, “and I can bust the ass of any cocksucker in this room.”

This announcement produced a few seconds of respectful silence,
some chilly stares. Hayduke stared back, ready to go on. But again the jukebox interrupted, breaking the spell.

Smith clutched his arm. “Okay, George, you done fine. Now let’s get out of here. Kind of quick.”

“Well, shit,” Hayduke complained. “Gotta piss first.” He turned, training his gaze on the little sign that said
BULLS
, next door to the cows, found the doorknob and shut himself in the cubicle of uric light. The kidney-colored urinal yawned before him (sleepily) like a holy-water font. Pissing heartily—oh, that ecstatic release, that mystic discharge—he read the label on the two-bit vending machine bolted to the wall:

Outside, in the sundown glare, through the roasting heat that floated in planes above the concrete and asphalt, Hayduke again complained.

Smith mollified. “It’s that there
sex
revolution, George,” he explained. “It’s finally come to Page Arizona even. Now even them truck drivers and construction workers they can get some ass whenever they want.”

“Well, shit.”

“Now even cowboys can get laid.”

“Shit….”

“This is your car right here, George. This jeep. Don’t climb in the window. Open the door.”

“Door don’t open.” He climbed in through the window, stuck his awful head out. “I still don’t like it,” he said.

“That’s the way it is, George. They just don’t want to fight anymore. They’re all saving their strength for the night shift.”

“Yeah? Well, shit. Which way out of here?”

“Follow me.”

“Maybe that’s what
I
need.”

“We’ll see her tomorrow, George. Maybe we can get her to go swimming in some Navajo stockpond with her black string bikini.”

“Who cares?” says Hayduke, philosopher and liar.

They shook hands once more, mountaineer’s grip, heavy hand on hairy wrist in reciprocal union, integrated splice of bone, tendon, bloodline and muscle. Then off, up the street, Hayduke spinning the jeep in one complete circle on the supermarket lot before determining his course and launching south, after Smith, with a smart screech of rubber, the stylish burn of blistered asphalt.

Their way out of town led past Jesus Row, the crescent street where Page’s thirteen churches stood ranged in cheek-to-cheek ecumenicism (all Christian, of course), unbroken by any check more secular than junked cars on vacant lots where drunk and abandoned Navajos lay half hidden among the weeds and shattered wine bottles.

Page, Arizona: thirteen churches, four bars. Any town with more churches than bars, that town’s got a problem. That town is
asking
for trouble. And they’re even trying to make Christians out of the Indians. As if the Indians weren’t bad enough already.

Twenty miles from town they turned far off the highway to make camp for the night and cook their supper on the clean passionate fire of juniper coals. Alone out there on the golden plain of the Navajo desert, far from any house or hogan, they ate their beans under the soaring skywide flare of one of God’s better Arizona sunsets.

Tomorrow to Betatakin for rendezvous with Doc and Bonnie. Then on to Black Mesa for a little chat with the Peabody Coal Company, the Black Mesa and Lake Powell Railroad. And then? They preferred
not to speculate. They pissed, belched, farted, scratched, grunted, brushed their teeth, unrolled their bedrolls on the sandy ground and turned in for the night.

Smith was awakened past midnight, with Scorpio down and Orion rising, but muttered moans from the sack nearby. He lifted his head, peering through the starlight darkness, and saw Hayduke twitching, fumbling, heard him cry out.

“No! No! No!”

“Hey, George….”

“No!”

“George….”

“No! No!”

Trapped in nightmare, Hayduke trembled, moaned and fidgeted in his greasy army-surplus mummy bag. Smith, unable to reach him without crawling out of his own sack, threw a boot, hit Hayduke on the shoulder. Instantly the groaning stopped. Eyes adapting to the dim light, Smith saw the dull sheen on the barrel and cylinder of Hayduke’s .357 magnum, suddenly produced from the sleeping bag. The muzzle turned toward him, seeking a target.

“George, it’s me.”

“Who’s that?”

“Me, Smith.”

“Who?”

“For chrissake, George, wake up.”

Hayduke paused. “I’m awake.”

“You was havin’ a nightmare.”

“I know.”

“Put down that goddamned cannon.”

“Somebody threw something.”

“It was me. I tried to wake you up.”

“Yeah. All right.” Hayduke lowered the gun.

“Thought I was doing you a favor,” Smith said.

“Yeah. Well, fuck.”

“Go back to sleep.”

“Yeah. Right. Only Seldom—don’t wake me up that way again.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not safe.”

“So how am I supposed to wake you up?” No immediate response from George Hayduke. “So what is the safe way?” Smith said.

Hayduke thought for a while. “There isn’t any safe way.”

“What?”

“There ain’t any
safe
fucking way to wake me up.”

“Okay,” Smith said. “Next time I’ll just bash you on the head with a rock.”

Hayduke thought. “Yeah. That’s the only safe way.”

Reconnoitering the target, the fearless four drove down from the high-
lands of Betatakin, down from the juniper woodlands and sandstone humpbacks, to the highway at Black Mesa Junction. Ms. Abbzug at the wheel; she trusted no one else to drive Doc’s extravagant new ($9955) Buick station wagon. (Some car, Doc, Smith had said. Doc shrugged: It’s transportation.) They parked at the junction café—despite Bonnie’s objections—for coffee and intellectual refreshment.

Abbzug thought it unwise to appear in a public place so close to the scene of their proposed project.

“We’re criminals now,” she says, “and we’ve got to start
acting
like criminals.”

“That’s right,” Doc says, lighting up his second stogie of the day. “But George needs his chemicals.”

“Shit,” says Hayduke. “The main thing is just to do the fucking job and get the fuck out of here.”

Bonnie stared at him across the sights of her nose and cigarette. She looked lovely that morning: fresh as a primrose, the large violet eyes bright with exuberance and good humor, her mane of hair fragrant and rich, brushed to the gloss of burnished chestnut, glowing with glints of Scots copper.

“Why,” she said, impaling Hayduke the oaf on the beam of her laser stare, her casual scorn, “why is it”—blowing smoke rings into his hairy face—“that you can never speak a single complete English sentence without swearing?”

Smith laughed.

Hayduke, under the hair and sunburned hide, appeared to be blushing. His grin was awkward. “Well, shit,” he said. “Fuck, I don’t know. I guess … well, shit, if I can’t swear I can’t talk.” A pause. “Can’t hardly
think
if I can’t swear.”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” said Bonnie. “You’re a verbal cripple. You use obscenities as a crutch. Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds.”

“Fuck,” said Hayduke.

“Exactly.”

“Fuck off.”

“You see?”

“Now now,” Doc said. “Peace. We have work to do, friends, and the morning is slipping by.” He called the waitress, obtained the check, reached for his wallet and removed the credit card.

“Cash,” muttered Hayduke. “Pay cash.”

“Right,” said Doc.

Outside, they made their way through throngs of hardworking genuine tourists and clusters of genuine nonworking Indians to the big black car with the California license tag. California? During the early morning, Hayduke and Bonnie had “borrowed” the front license plates from tourist automobiles from three different states and attached them (temporarily) to their own vehicles. Assuming, naturally, that the loss would not be noticed for hundreds of miles.

Bonnie driving, they went up the road to the rim of Black Mesa. From a vantage point near the road, armed with binoculars, they examined the layout of the coal transmission system.

To the east, beyond the rolling ridges on the mesa’s surface, lay the ever-growing strip mines of the Peabody Coal Company. Four thousand acres, prime grazing land for sheep and cattle, had been eviscerated already; another forty thousand was under lease. (The lessor
was the Navajo Nation, as represented by the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government.) The coal was being excavated by gigantic power shovels and dragline machines, the largest equipped with 3600-cubic-foot buckets. The coal was trucked a short distance to a processing depot, where it was sorted, washed and stored, some of it loaded into a slurry line for a power plant near Lake Mohave, Nevada, the rest onto a conveyor belt for transportation to storage towers at the railhead of the BM & LP railway, which in turn hauled the coal eighty miles to the Navajo Power Plant near the town of Page.

Smith and Hayduke, Abbzug and Sarvis were especially interested in the conveyor belt, which seemed to be the weakest link in the system. It ran for nineteen miles from mine to railhead. For most of this distance the conveyor was vulnerable, running close to the ground, half concealed by juniper and pinyon pine, unguarded. At the rim of the mesa it descended to the level of the highway, where it rose again, over the highway and into the top of the four storage silos. The belt ran on rollers, the entire apparatus powered electrically.

They sat and watched this mighty engine in motion, conveying coal at the rate of 50,000 tons per day across the mesa and down to the plain and up into the towers. Fifty thousand tons. Every day. For thirty—forty—fifty years. All to feed the power plant at Page.

“I think,” said Doc, “these people are serious.”

“It ain’t people,” said Smith. “It’s a mechanical animal.”

“Now you’ve got it,” Doc agreed. “We’re not dealing with human beings. We’re up against the megamachine. A megalomaniacal megamachine.”

“No sweat,” Hayduke said. “It’s all rigged up for us. We’ll use that fucking conveyor to blow up the loading towers. Nothing could be prettier. Look—it’s so goddamned simple it makes me nervous. We take our shit out in the woods there, close to the belt. We throw it on the belt, light the fuse, cover it up with a little coal, let it ride up over the road and into the tower.
Ka-blam!”

“How do you time it?”

“That’s the mathematical part. We have to figure out the speed
of this thing, measure our distance from the towers, calculate how much fuse we need. Simple.”

“Suppose,” said Doc, “there’s someone working up in those loading towers?”

“That’s just a chance we’ll fucking well have to take,” Hayduke said.

“We’ll who have to take?”

“All right, there won’t be anybody up in that tower but we’ll telephone the company anyway, give them maybe ten minutes to clear out. That’s fair.”

Silence. The slightest of zephyrs leaned upon the dried ricegrass at their feet. There was a smell on the air, a certain smell … a sharp metallic odor—

“I ain’t sure about this,” Smith said.

“I don’t like it either,” Hayduke said. “I’d a hell of a lot rather forget the whole thing and go fly fishing down on West Horse Creek. Let’s forget Black Mesa. Let the coal company tear it up. Who cares if five years from now you can’t see fifteen miles across the Grand Canyon because the air is so fucked up by these motherfucking new power plants? I’d rather be picking columbines up in the mountains above Telluride anyhow. Why the hell should we worry about it?”

“I know, but I don’t like this here fooling around with explosives,” Smith said. “Some folks are gonna get hurt.”

“Nobody’s gonna get hurt. Unless they start shooting at me.”

“It’s a felony and I reckon it’s a Federal offense too, to blow things up. Ain’t that right, Doc?”

“That is correct,” Doc said. “Furthermore”—puffing steadily on his long Marsh-Wheeling, squinting through the smoke first at Hayduke then at Smith then at Hayduke—“it’s unpopular. Bad public relations. Anarchy is not the answer.”

“Doc’s right,” says Smith.

“Goddamn Mormon,” Hayduke muttered. “Why don’t you go back to B.Y.U. where you belong? You L.D.S. motherfucker. Latter-Day Shithead.”

“You can’t insult
my
religion,” Smith said, grinning. “There just
ain’t no way to do it. Besides, what I mean is, I don’t think it’s a good idea. This here dynamite, I mean.”

“It’s dangerous,” Doc said. “We may kill somebody. We may get ourselves killed. It’s not good PR.”

“They tried everything else,” Hayduke grumbled. “They tried lawsuits, big fucking propaganda campaigns, politics.”

“Who’s they?”

“I mean the Hopi elders, the American Indian Movement, the Black Mesa Defense Committee, all the bleeding-heart types.”

“Now hold your horses,” Smith says. “I ain’t saying we should quit. But I say I ain’t sure we need that stuff you got in the back under them sleeping bags. I say we can de-rail the coal train with a couple of steel wedges. We can cut the fences, let the horses and sheep graze over the tracks. We can take Doc’s McCulloch here and saw down the power-line poles along the railway. That’ll stop it. It runs on electricity, don’t it? We can saw down the power line to the strip mines; them big duckfooted ten-story draglines, they run on electricity too. Hauling those five-mile extension cords around. We can shoot a few holes in their transformers with old George’s cannon, let the cooler leak out. We can throw a few logs in that conveyor belt here and there, jam it up good. I don’t like dynamite. We don’t need it.”