The Monkey Wrench Gang (30 page)

“Fucking fat Jewish bitch.”

“You red-neck honky uncircumcised swine of a goy.”

“Fucking bitch.”

“High school dropout. Verbal paraplegic. Unemployed veteran.”

“I want it.”

“No good at Scrabble.”

“Right now!”

“All right. So all right.” But she was on top. “Your head’s in a pile of cowshit, you know. You don’t care. Of course not. All right. Okay. Where is it? Can’t find it. This? You mean
this?
Hello, Mom, is that you? This is Sylvia. Yeah. Listen, Mom, I won’t be able to make it for Chanukah. Yeah, that’s what I said. Well, because my boyfriend—remember Ichabod Ignatz?—he blew up the airport. He’s some kind of a—oooh!—a nut….”

He plunged into her. She ingulfed him. The winds wailed through the yellow pines, the aspens shivered, leaves dancing with a sound like many minor waterfalls. The discreet chatter of little birds, the barking of a gray fox, the swish of tires on the distant paved road, all such normal, sane, moderate sounds were swept away over the edge of the world, lost in the rush.

Up and down, in and out of forest and meadow, past sinks and pits and bowls in the rolling terrain of the limestone plateau (riddled like a sponge with endless cavern systems), he piloted the jeep on, southward, toward the logging industry, its hopes and fears. She nestled against him, half upon him, long hair streaming like a banner in the wind.

They paused once again, near the north end of a meadow called Pleasant Valley, to edit and beautify an official U.S. Forest Service Smokey Bear sign. The sign was a life-size simulacrum of the notorious ursine bore, complete with ranger hat, blue jeans and shovel, and it said what these signs always say, to wit, “Only
YOU
can prevent forest fires.”

Out with the paints again. They added a yellow mustache, which certainly improved Smokey’s bland muzzle, and touched up his eyeballs
with a hangover hue of red. He began to look like Robert Red-ford as the Sundance Kid. Bonnie unbuttoned Smokey’s fly, pictorially speaking, and painted onto his crotch a limp pet-cock with hairy but shriveled balls. To Smokey’s homily on fire prevention Hayduke attached an asterisk and footnote: “Smokey Bear is full of shit.” (Most fires of course are caused by that vaporous hominoid in the sky, God; disguised, i.e., as lightning.)

Very funny. However, in 1968, the United States Congress made it a Federal offense to desecrate, mutilate or otherwise improve any official representation of Smokey the Bear. Aware of this legislation, Bonnie bullied Hayduke back into the jeep and out of there before he could carry out his urge to hang Smokey by the neck to any nearby tree, such as a
Pinus ponderosa
, and elevate likewise the bear’s penis from flaccid pendency to full
in rigor extremis
erection.

“Enough,” explained Abbzug, and she was right, as usual.

Four miles north of the entrance to the North Rim District of Grand Canyon National Park, they came to an intersection in the road. The sign said W
ATCH FOR
T
RUCKS
. Hayduke turned left at this point, onto the unpaved but broad logging road which led eastward into the forest, and a new scene.

During the entire forty-mile drive from Jacob Lake they had seen nothing so far but green meadows decorated with herds of cattle and deer, and beyond the meadows the aspen, pine, spruce and fir of what appeared to be, uncut and intact, a people’s national forest. Façade. Behind the false front of standing trees, a fringe of virgin growth a quarter mile deep, was the real business of the national forest: timber farms, lumber plantations, field factories for the joist, board, pulp and plywood industry.

Bonnie was astonished. She had never seen a clear-cut logging operation before.

“What happened to the trees?”

“What trees?” says Hayduke.

“That’s what I mean.”

He stopped the jeep. In silence they looked around at a scene of
devastation. Within an area of half a square mile the forest had been stripped of every tree, big or small, healthy or diseased, seedling or ancient snag. Everything gone but the stumps. Where trees had been were now huge heaps of slash waiting to be burned when the winter snows arrived. A network of truck, skidder and bulldozer tracks wound among the total amputees.

“Explain this,” she demanded. “What happened here?”

He attempted to explain. The Explainer’s lot is not an easy one.

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls “weed trees,” and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster and tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole.

“You see?” he said.

“Well yes and no,” she said, “except that, like if this …”—she waves her hand and bangled wrist at the surrounding wasteland—“I mean like if all that was a national forest—a
national
forest—then it belonged to us, right?”

“Wrong.”

“But you said—”

“Can’t you understand anything? Goddamned cocksucking New York Marxist liberal.”

“I ain’t no New York Marxist liberal.”

Hayduke drove on past the clear-cut area. Although there was little natural forest remaining in the Kaibab it still looked, by and
large, like a woods. The clear-cutting was only getting started. Though much was lost, much remained—though much was lost.

Still troubled, Bonnie asked, “They pay us for our trees, don’t they?”

“The loggers bid for the right to log an area, sure. The top bidder writes a check to the U.S. Treasury. The Forest Service takes the money, our money, and spends it building new logging roads like this one, all banked and graded for the loggers to run their timber-hauling rigs on to see how many deer, tourists and chipmunks they can kill. A deer is ten points, chipmunk five, tourist one.”

“Where are the loggers now?”

“Sunday. They’re off.”

“But America does need the lumber. People need some kind of shelter.”

“All right,” he said, “people need shelter.” He said it grudgingly. “Let them build their houses out of rock, for chrissake, or out of mud and sticks like the Papagos do. Out of bricks or cinder blocks. Out of packing crates and Karo cans like my friends in Dak Tho. Let them build houses that will last a while, say for a hundred years, like my great-granpappy’s cabin back in Pennsylvania. Then we won’t have to strip the forests.”

“All you’re asking for is a counter-industrial revolution.”

“Right. That’s all.”

“And how do you propose to bring it about?”

Hayduke thought about that question. He wished Doc were here. His own brain functioned like crankcase sludge on a winter day. Like grunge. Like Chairman Mao prose. Hayduke was a saboteur of much wrath but little brain. The jeep meanwhile sank deeper into Kaibab National Forest, into the late afternoon. Pine duff rose on dusty sunbeams, trees transpired, the hermit thrushes sang and over it all the sky (having no alternative) flourished its borrowed sundown colors—blue and gold.

Hayduke thought. Finally the idea arrived. He said, “My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving. That’s simple, right?”

“Simpleminded,” she said.

“Good enough for me.”

They came to the work site Hayduke had been seeking. It was a clear-cut in progress with hulking machines standing around, nothing to do, in the evening twilight. Bulldozers, loaders, skidders, tankers, everything was waiting but the haulers, which had made their last run loaded down off the plateau to the sawmill in Fredonia the Friday before.

“Where’s the watchman?”

“There won’t be any,” Hayduke said. “They’re not on to us.”

“Well if you don’t mind I’d like to make sure.”

“We’ll do that.”

Hayduke stopped his jeep, got out and locked the hubs, transferred into four-wheel drive. They drove up and down the skid trails, through mud and muck, around stacked logs and slash heaps, through the acreage of mutilated stumps. Massacre of the pines—not a standing tree within an area of two hundred acres.

They found the work-site office, a small house trailer locked and dark, nobody home.
GEORGIA-PACIFIC CORP.
,
SEATTLE, WASH
., said the tin sign on the door. Them boys a long way from home, seems like, thought Hayduke.

He got out. He knocked on the padlocked door, rattled the hasp. Nobody answered; nothing answered. A squirrel chattered, a blue jay squawked off in the trees beyond the stumps, but nothing was stirring nearby. Even the wind had stopped, and the forest lay still as the death site it surrounded. Bonnie thought of the Traveler. Tell them he returned. Tell them he remembered, etc. Hayduke came back.

“Well?”

“I told you. There’s nobody here. They all went to town for the weekend.”

She turned her head, gazing over the battlefield at the inert but powerful machines close by, the defenseless trees beyond the clearcut. Then back to the machines.

“There must be a million dollars’ worth of equipment here.”

Hayduke surveyed the layout with appraising eyes. “About two
and a half million,” he said. One guess as good as another. They were both silent for a minute.

“What to do?” she said, feeling the chill of evening.

He grinned. The fangs came out, gleaming in the gloom. The big fists rose, thumbs up. “Time to do our chores.”

A hard day at the shop. First, thoracic surgery, a tricky lobectomy on the
left lung inferior lobe of a teenage boy who’d come to the Southwest ten years too late, after the old-fashioned nineteenth-century air had been replaced by modern scientific thinking, and had managed to contract pneumonitis compounded by the scars of bronchiectasis (rare in young mammals) compounded in turn, a few years later, by that most typical of Southwestern ailments, coccidioidomycosis or valley fever, a fungus infection associated with alkaline soils and carried far and wide by the winds wherever the desert surface is disturbed by agriculture, mining or construction. In the boy this expanding economy disease led in due course to severe hemorrhaging; there was no recourse but removal, suturing the bronchus, stitching up the lad’s hide.

Second, for relaxation, Doc performed a hemorrhoidectomy, a simple operation—like coring an apple—that he always enjoyed, especially when his patient was the red-necked white-assed blue-nosed persecutor of topless dancers W. W. Dingledine (not
the
W. W. Dingledine? aye, the same!), District Attorney of Bernal County, New Mexico. Doc’s fee for the ten-minute rectal reaming would be, in this
case, a flat $500. Exorbitant? Of course; of course it was exorbitant; but, well, the D.A. had been warned: Prosecutors will be violated.

Finished, he dropped his blood-spattered gown, pinched the wrong nurse on the right buttock and shambled on shaky hind legs out the side door up the alleyway through the photochemical glare of the dimmed but unrelenting Albuquerque sun down a short flight of steps into the feel-your-way and padded darkness of the nearest bar.

The cocktail waitress came and went and came and went again, a disembodied smile gliding through the gloom. Doc sipped his martini and thought of the boy with the eight-inch cut now stitched and burning underneath the left shoulder blade. The Southwest had once been the place where Eastern physicians sent their more serious respiratory cases. No more; the developers—bankers, industrialists, subdivides, freeway builders and public utility chiefs—had succeeded with less than thirty years’ effort in bringing the air of Southwestern cities “up to standard,” that is, as foul as any other.

Doc thought he knew where the poison came from that had attacked the boy’s lungs, the same poison eating into the mucous membranes of several million other citizens including himself. From poor visibility to eye irritation, from allergies to asthma to emphysema to general asthenia, the path lay straight ahead, pathogenic all the way. They were already having afternoons right here in Albuquerque when schoolchildren were forbidden to play outside in the “open” air, heavy breathing being more dangerous than child molesters.

He ordered a second martini, following with his gaze the movement of the girl’s structurally perfect thighs as she withdrew in sinuous meander among the tables back to the chrome-plated rails of the service bar. He thought as she walked of those inner surfaces caressing one another in frictionless intimacy, how they led and where and why. He thought, with a pang as poignant as morning dreams, of Bonnie.

Enough. Enough of that.

Doc blundered forth into the fat sunshine, the traffic’s rising involuntary roar, the unreal reality of the city. Found his bicycle, actually Bonnie’s, where he had parked it (crookedly) in the rack near the
entrance to the surgical ward. Wobbling badly at first, Dr. Sarvis piloted his ten-speed craft in first gear up the long grade of Iron Avenue. (“Wearing his legs out,” the country boys would say, “to give his ass a ride.”)

Mad motorists in arrogant chariots of iron brushed him by dangerously close. He struggled on, heroic and alone, holding up traffic all by himself. A contractor’s menial at the controls of an oversize cement mixer honked his air horn immediately in the doctor’s rear, nearly blasting him into the gutter. Doc refused to yield; pumping on he raised one hand, the big general-purpose finger rigidly extended—
Chinga!
—in direct retort. The truck driver pulled around him and passed, leaning recklessly far to the right in his cab to stick a beefy forearm, fist and finger out and up:
Chinga tu madre!
Doc replied with the well-known Neapolitan double thrust, little finger and forefinger extended like the prongs of a meat fork:
Chinga stugatz!
(Untranslatable and unnatural obscenity.) Oh-oh! Too much: went too far that time.