The Monkey Wrench Gang (25 page)

Bonnie crawled out of her own sack, pulled on jeans and boots, went to the doctor close by. Wrapped in the cozy luxury of his goosedown bag (which could be zipped together with Bonnie’s—but
this time wasn’t—to form a double bag), he seemed reluctant to arise, to face reality again. Bonnie knew why.

She opened the nylon folds of the hood of his bag. By starlight he looked at her. Those bloodshot eyes seemed dim and small without their glasses. The nose had lost its luster. But he smiled.

She kissed him softly on the lips, nuzzled his nose, nibbled at the lobe of his ear. “Doc,” she murmured. “I still love you, you fool. I always will, I guess. How can I help it?”

“Every sugar needs a daddy.”

Their words turned to vapor in the frosty air. His arms came out of the sack and he hugged her.

Aware of Hayduke and Smith in the background, watching, she returned the embrace, kissed him some more. “Get up, Doc,” she whispered in his ear. “Can’t blow up any bridges without you.”

He unzipped his bag, rolled slowly out, awkward, stiff, cradling a grand erection in his hand. “A shame to let this go to waste,” he said. He stood upright now, swaying a little on his hind limbs, a great bulging bear of a man in thermal underwear.

“Later,” she said.

“May never get another one.”

“Oh come on. Put your pants on.”

“Once more into your britches, friends.” He found them, pulled them on, and shambled off to urinate, barefooted on the cold sand. Bonnie sipped her coffee by the picnic table, shivering despite the sweater she wore. Hayduke and Smith were busy reloading the vehicles, rearranging baggage and cargo. The plan of the moment, it seemed, was to take both Doc’s station wagon and Hayduke’s jeep to the site of the objective. Smith’s camper truck would remain here, loaded and locked.

Captain Smith, old Seldom Seen, appeared not quite his usual jolly self. He looked thoughtful, an expression which made him hard to recognize. But Bonnie knew him; she knew the type. Like the doctor, Smith tended to suffer from scruples. Not a useful quality in this line of work. Bonnie wanted to go close to him, as she had to Doc, and whisper comfort in his ear.

As for George Hayduke, the very sight of that shaggy ape turned her stomach. She was glad, thirty minutes later, driving off in the dark with Doc and Smith at her side, to know that Hayduke, following in his jam-packed jeep, was choking on her dust.

She glanced up now and then from her steering wheel to look at one star, bright and alone, off in the velvet purple of the southeast. Words came out of nowhere:
It is a strange courage you give me, lonely star
.

“Turn right up yonder where it says Kaibito,” Smith said. She turned. They glided over the new asphalt trail at a safe and sane eighty per, leaving Hayduke in his laboring jeep far behind. Only the distant yellow blur of his diminishing headlights, seen in the rearview mirror, reminded her of his presence. Soon that too was lost. They were alone at five in the morning on a long deserted highway, rushing galley west through the dark.

We don’t
have
to do this, she thought. We
could
escape that lunatic back there, return to a decent law-abiding way of life with
some
sort of future.

The wind hissed softly swiftly by; the great motorcar plowed almost silently through the edge of night, wired to and guided by the quadruple beam of its powerful lamps. Behind them, over the rim of Black Mesa, the first virescent streaks of dawn appeared, announced by slash of meteor dying into flame and vapor down across the fatal sky.

They rushed ahead on a direct collision course with trouble. The lights of the instrument panel glowing under the hood of the dash illumined three solemn, sleepy faces: Doc’s face grim, she thought, bearded, red-eyed and ruby-prowed; Seldom Seen Smith’s face homely honest incorrigibly bucolic; and mine of course, that
très élégant
profile, that classic loveliness which drives men right out of their gourds. Yeah, sure.

“Right again, honey, about a mile ahead,” Smith mutters. “Watch out for them horses.”

Horses? What horses?

Brakes. Scream of rubber. Two tons of steel, flesh, dynamite
fishtailing down the pike, weaving like a shadow through a band of ponies. Startled eyes big as cueballs gleamed in the dark: painted ponies in camouflage, inbred underfed Indian horses browsing on the weeds, tin cans and rabbit brush along the road. She missed them all.

Doc sighed. Smith grinned.

“Hope I didn’t scare anyone,” she said.

“Hell no,” Smith said. “My asshole kind of puckered up, that’s all.”

“You can’t see those animals till you’re right on top of them,” she explained.

“That’s right,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why they have them Watch Out for Animals Next Twenty Miles signs every two miles.”

“It was pretty good driving,” she said.

“Damned redskin savages,” Doc said. “Too cheap to string up fences. What do we pay them welfare for? You can’t rely on these aborigines to do anything right.”

“That’s right,” Smith said. “Turn there on that dirt road where it says Shonto thirty-five miles.”

They followed a dirt road with a surface like a washboard. Little blue lights stretched across the horizon: the BM & LP all-electric automated railway.

Darkness still surrounded them. They could see little but the road ahead, lined with sagebrush, and a few stars and the blue lights. Something like a tunnel appeared.

“Now,” says Smith, “that’s the railroad. Soon as you get through that underpass hang a hard left.”

She did, leaving the Shonto road for a sandy wagon trail.

“Gun it hard,” Smith says. “Deep sand.”

The big car groaned, gearing down automatically as the tires sank into the sand, and wallowed on, pitching and yawning across sandy hummocks, undersides rasping over the cactus and weeds of the high center.

“Good going, honey,” says Smith. “Keep it going far as you can. That’s right. Now, there, see that fork? Stop there, turn it around. That’s where we start walking.”

She did. Lights off, motor silent (smell of overheated engine in the air), they got out and stretched and saw the dawn flowing toward them, violet clouds lighting up on the east.

“Where are we?”

“About a mile from the bridge. We picked this spot the other day. The car is out of sight of the railroad here and there ain’t even a hogan within five miles. Nobody out here but us kangaroo rats and whip tail lizards.”

Pause. In the silence of the desert, under a sky scattered with stars and tinted with the rush of the approaching sun, they stared—three small weak frightened mortals—at one another. Still time, she thought; still time, they were all thinking. The monster not even in sight yet. Still time for sober thought, order, decorum, sanity, all things good and safe and decent for
Christ’s sake!

They gazed at each other, smiles trembling on their cold lips. Each waited for another to speak the word of sense. But no one would be first.

Dr. Sarvis smiled broadly and opened his huge arms wide. “
Abrazo, compañeros
. Come to me.” They came close and he embraced both—the exiled Jew, the outcast Mormon—in his vast Episcopalian anarcho-syndicalist libertarian tentacles. “Be of good cheer,” he whispered to them. “We are going to face the Power Grid and clip its claws. We are going to be heroes and live in fame.”

She leaned against his wide warm chest. “Yes,” she said, shaking with cold and fear, “you’re goddamn right.”

And Captain Smith: “Why the hell not?”

To work. Smith and Sarvis hoisted each a case of Du Pont’s finest up to shoulder and trudged westward through the sand. Bonnie followed with canteen, spade, pick; on her head the Garbo hat with floppy brim.

Somewhere back in the gloom, over the dunes, came the whine of jeep in four-wheel drive. The demon, following.

He caught up to them near the bridge.

“
Ya-ta-hay hosteen!”

Grinning like a little boy at Hallowe’en, Hayduke swept upon
them. He carried the balance of the necessary equipment: electrical blasting caps, reel of wire, crimpers, blasting machine (that reliable old workhorse the Du Pont No. 50, push-down type). Staggering over the sand in the twilight of morning, he stopped as they stopped and all four stared at the primary objective.

The bridge was the basic stringer type, forty feet long, supported by steel I beams abutted in concrete, grouted into the canyon walls; below the bridge was a chasm two hundred feet deep. Down in the cold and darkness of the bottom, among the slabs of rock and over the spongy quicksand, a trickle of water shone like tin, reflecting the last of the starlight. Willows grew down there, stunted cottonwoods and clumps of grass, horsetail reeds, watercress. Nothing moved below, no sign of animal life, though the stink of sheep was unmistakable.

Beyond the bridge the railway curved out of sight through a deep cut in the ridge. From where the gang stood they could see no more than half a mile of track in either direction.

“Okay, lookouts,” Hayduke said. “Bonnie, you climb up on top of that cutbank”—pointing—“on the other side. Take these binocs. Doc—”

Bonnie said, “You said the train wouldn’t get here till eight.”

“Aha, right, but have you thought of this? The track crew putt-putting down this way on their little car, the nosy motherfuckers, checking out the line ahead of the train. Hey? To your post, lookout. Don’t fall asleep. Doc, why don’t you go back the other way, find a comfortable spot up there under that cedar tree. Me and Captain Smith here will do the dirty work.”

“You always get to do the dirty work,” Bonnie grumbled.

Hayduke smiled like a cougar. “Don’t you start whining already, Abbzug. I have a special treat for you, goddammit, right here in my arms.” He set the blaster on the ground.

“Why are we doing this?” someone asked, one more time. Not Doc. Not Smith.

“Don’t forget your spray paint either.” He shoved the cans at her.

“Why?” she asked again.

“Because,” Hayduke explained, one last time, patiently. “Because somebody has to do it. That’s why.”

Silence. The onward rush of the sun.

Doc scrambled up his hill, leaving tracks like a snowshoe trail in the loose sand. Bonnie climbed through the right-of-way fence and went to work on the beams of the bridge with her handy spray paint, on her way across to the other side.

Hayduke and Smith listened to the morning stillness. They watched the growing flush of light on the eastern horizon. One lizard rattled through the oak brush nearby, the only sound. When both lookouts were in position and gave them the all-clear signal, Smith and Hayduke took pliers, pick, spade and bar and went to work. Having inspected the target two days before, they had a clear idea of what they meant to do.

First, they cut the fence. Then they dug out the rock ballast from beneath the crosstie nearest the bridge, on the side of the train’s scheduled approach. When a hole was cleared the size of an apple box, Hayduke consulted his demolition card (GTA 5-10-9), handy little item, pocket-size, sealed in plastic, which he had liberated from Special Forces during his previous career. He reviewed the formula: one kilogram equals 2.20 pounds; we want three charges 1.25 kilograms each, let’s say three pounds each charge, to be on the safe side.

“Okay, Seldom,” he says, “that excavation’s big enough; you dig another five ties down. I’ll place the charge.”

Hayduke steps off the railway, back to the sealed boxes waiting on the dune. He rips open the first case—Du Pont Straight, 60 percent nitroglycerin, velocity 18,200 feet per pound, quick-shattering action. He removes six cartridges, tube-shaped sticks eight inches long, eight ounces heavy, wrapped in paraffined paper. He makes up a primer by punching a hole in one cartridge with the handle (non-sparking) of his crimping tool, inserting a blasting cap (electrical) into the hole, and knotting the cap’s leg wires. Next he tapes the six sticks together in a bundle, the primed cartridge in the center. The charge is ready. He sets it respectfully in the hole under the first crosstie,
attaches a connecting wire to the leg wires (all wires insulated) and replaces the ballast, covering concealing and tamping the charge. Only the wires are exposed, coiled in their red and yellow jackets, shining on the railway bed. He tucks them under the rail for the time being, where only an observer on foot would be likely to see them.

Checks the lookouts. Bonnie stands on the skyline west of the bridge, watching the curve of the railroad off to the west and north. He looks east. Doc leans against the cedar on the summit of the cutbank, smoking his cigar, and nods reassurance. The line is clear.

Hayduke prepares the second charge, same as the first, and places it in the second hole, which Seldom Seen has now completed. They work together on the third hole, ten crossties back from the bridge.

“Why don’t we just blow the bridge?” Smith says.

“We will,” says Hayduke. “But bridges are tricky, take a lot of time, a lot of H.E. I thought we ought to make sure we get the train first.”

“The train is coming from this side?”

“Right. Downhill from Black Mesa, loaded with coal. Eighty cars with one hundred tons each. We blast the tracks right in front of the locomotive and the whole works goes ass over tincups into the canyon, bridge or no bridge.”

“All of it?”

“It should. At least we’re sure of getting the engine—that’s the expensive item. They’ll be pissed all right, old Pacific Gas and Electric, old Arizona Public Service, they’ll be mighty pissed. Our name will be shit in public power circuits.”

“That’s a good name in them circuits.”

The sun rises, a mighty asterisk of fire. Hayduke and Smith are sweating already. Third hole completed, Hayduke tapes and places the third charge, covers and tamps it. Resting for a moment, they grin at each other, white grins in sweaty faces.

“What the hell’re you grinning about, Seldom?”

“I’m just scared shitless, that’s all. What the hell
you
grinning about?”

“Same thing,
compadre
. Did you hear a hoot owl hoot?”

Bonnie Abbzug’s face is turned their way, arms waving. Doc Sarvis too is sounding the alarm.