The Monkey Wrench Gang (35 page)

“Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“Please, get your knife.”

The men watched him closely. The pilot, big mustache drooping, grinned a nervous grin, his blue eyes bright and alert. A nice-looking kid, by recruiting-poster standards. He probably had a mother and a little sister back in Homer City, Pennsylvania. Never mind that he was also, in Hayduke’s inflamed imagination, a mass murderer, a burner of huts, a roaster of children.

“Okay, Leopold,” Hayduke said, slightly confused, “you too, fella; both of you lie down. Face down. Yeah. Hands on the back of your head. That’s right. Stay that way. Don’t move.” Hayduke tucked the carbine between his thighs, pulled his knife and sliced apart Abbzug’s bonds. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered. “Quick. Before I kill somebody.”

“Give me the gun.”

“No.”

“Give it to me.”

“No. You climb up there. I’ll hand it up to you.”

Bonnie picked off her manacles. “All right.” She put her lips close to Hayduke’s filthy ear, bit the lobe, whispered, “I love you you crazy bastard.”

“Get up there.”

She scrambled up the slope of stone easily, her Vibram soles gripping the surface like lizard pads.

Hayduke handed up the carbine. “Keep them covered.” He drew his revolver, cocked it. “Okay, you guys, roll over. Right. Now pull off your boots. That’s right. Now throw them up to … to Thelma there.” They obeyed. “That’s right. Now.”

The two men waited, watching him intently, eagerly, with complete undivided attention. As any sane man would, facing the dark hole, bottomless as oblivion, of a .357 magnum held in the shaky hand of an obvious lunatic.

Kill them now? Or later?

“Take off your pants.”

This command drew protest. The guard, with a feeble laugh, perhaps an attempt at levity, said, “There’s a lady present.”

Hayduke raised his gun and squeezed off a shot two feet above the guard’s head, knocking a chunk of stone out of the wall. The dart of flame, the crash of shock waves splitting the air. The invisible bullet, a mangled asteroid of lead, ricocheted off the rock and zigzagged down the gulch. A cascade of pulverized sandstone pattered on the brim of the guard’s hat and into the neck of his shirt.

Hayduke recocked.

Skinner was right; persuasive reinforcement works. Both men pulled off their pants, quickly if not gracefully. The pilot wore, underneath, chic trim purple briefs which he may have been pleased to reveal to Bonnie, watching from above. The guard, older and more conservative, probably a Republican, wore conventional middle-American pee-stained shorts. He had a right to object.

“Okay,” said Hayduke, “now take out your billfolds or whatever—keep that—and throw your pants up on top.” They obeyed, though the guard had to throw his pants up twice before they reached the rim and stayed. “Now lie down again, on your stomach, like before, hands on your necks. Right. Stay that way, please, or I’ll blast both you cocksuckers into eternity.” Hayduke liked that majestic phrase so much he repeated it. “Blast you cocksuckers—into eternity!” he hollered, holstering his gun and creeping up the slope of stone.

On the rim they held a hurried consultation, then Hayduke hustled off to the helicopter with an armload of pants and boots. Bonnie stayed where she was, carbine cradled in her slender arms, watching the prisoners. The sun, plying westward, had only an inch to go to reach the horizon.

Hayduke, at the helicopter, tossed the clothes into the cockpit. He glanced at the smashed-up radio and regretted his haste. Would be nice to know what communications were flying back and forth right now, on the short waves of the air. He considered for a moment the controls of the machine. I wonder…. No, no, there was no time for that. Though he could go back and get the pilot, make him…. No! Not enough time; have to get out of here. Fast.

He drew the pilot’s automatic from his belt and fired a shot into the instrument panel. Messy. He turned to the rotor head and shot up the swash-plate, the lag hinges, the rotor blades, the fucking ball bearings. Only three or four rounds left and he didn’t want to waste any of his own ammunition. He fired the last two rounds into the fuel tanks, mounted on cross plates above the engine, close behind the cockpit. High-octane aviation gasoline streamed down into the works.

He found some flight maps in the cockpit, crumpled them together,
lit them with a match and tossed the flaming ball onto the sand beneath the engine. He backed away. The ball of paper burned, then soared upward in a rich yellow spurt of flame as the first dribbles of fuel got to it.

Hayduke threw the pilot’s gun into the flames and turned and moved off farther, quickly, as the fire spread over the engine and reached toward the fuel tanks. A mushrooming explosion shook the air—
whoomp!
—and the fire leaped upward, casting a violent glare across the sundown scene, paused at apogee and sank back upon the helicopter, draping the entire machine from cockpit to tail rotor in a film of sticky, busy, energetic flames.

Well, surmised Hayduke, feeling satisfied at last, I reckon this one’s had it. Cooked. This fuckin’ fucker’s fucked. Full of goodwill, he turned to Bonnie. “Come on.”

“What about these men?”

“Shoot them, kiss them, what do I care?” he yelled gaily. “Come on, come on.”

Bonnie looked at Hayduke, then down at her two prisoners. She hesitated. “Here’s your gun,” she said, lobbing it down into the twilight of the gulch. The handy little firearm (U.S. Army .30 caliber semiautomatic) clattered brutally on the rocks, breaking. “Sorry. We have to go now. You can—”

“Come on!” barked Hayduke, waving his arm.

“You can get warm at the fire after we leave.” She took off after her lover.

Side by side they ran past the melting helicopter into the shadows of the junipers.

“Where’s the carbine?”

“I gave it back to them.”

“You what!”

“It was their gun.”

“For Christ’s sake.” Hayduke paused to look back. Nobody had yet begun to emerge from the dark cleft in the slickrock. Bonnie stopped too. “You keep going, I’ll catch up.” He drew his revolver and fired a snap shot over the rim of the gulch, just to keep things
quiet and respectful down in there. Nobody replied. They ran on. The sun went down.

“What about your … fingerprints?” he panted.

“What finger … prints?”

“On the carbine.”

“Won’t do them … any good.”

“Oh no? They can … trace anybody … for chrissake.”

“Not me.” Bonnie ran, proud hair streaming, breathing hard but steady. “I have never … been fingerprinted … in … my … life.”

Hayduke was impressed. Well I’ll be fucked, he thought. “Never even once?”

“Not even once.”

All went well. Sun down, the hasty desert twilight darkened swiftly into night. The sky like a purple colander admitted points of starry light from the burning sphere beyond. No aircraft appeared. Hayduke recovered the fencing pliers and chain saw (property of Dr. Sarvis). They walked through the night back to the jeep which they also found, after a number of false ventures, under its Vietnam camouflage net, undisturbed.

As they were removing the net, folding it up and packing it away, they heard the unnecessary sirens, saw the superfluous whirling red lights of a Navajo Tribal Police van charging down the highway toward the bonfire of the helicopter. Standing on the hood of the jeep while Hayduke packed, Bonnie watched the police van stop, turn and charge through a barbed-wire fence and across the dunes toward the fire. The truck advanced a hundred yards before bogging down in the sand. She could see, even by the poor light of the stars, that the van’s rear end was sinking deeper and deeper as the man at the wheel (Officer Nokai Begay) kept on stubbornly gunning his engine while his assistant (Officer Alvin T. Peshlakai) stood outside waving a flashlight in his eyes and shouting instructions. Their wheels were still spinning, their motor howling, their voices still yelling when Hayduke slipped his own vehicle, lights out, quietly back to the highway.

The highway should be swarming with
les flics?
Quite so. Hayduke
kept his lights off and when the first headlights appeared coming his way he turned the keep onto the wagon road which paralleled the highway. Stopped and waited. An unmarked car rushed past, followed immediately by another.

He turned back on the highway and followed it for another ten miles, driving without lights. Dangerous? Perhaps. But not impossible. Hayduke had not too much difficulty staying on the road. Bonnie Abbzug chewed her anxious knuckles and offered plenty of unwanted advice like, “For God’s sake turn the lights on. You want to get us both killed?” His only immediate worry was horses: hard enough to see horses at night even with the lights.

They arrived at the dirt road leading northeast to Shonto and Betatakin. Hayduke turned and once well away from the state road switched on the lights. They made good time, stopping only at a lonely spot out in the desert, between two wind-stripped, dead and silvery junipers to recover the goods, packed in heavy canvas duffel bags, which the Gang had cached there after the railway bridge operation. That had been Hayduke’s idea—he wanted the dynamite in the bags for what he called “sanitary” reasons and for easier backpacking later. Abbzug had salvaged the empty boxes; that was her idea.

As Hayduke loaded the two bulging bags into the rear she again complained, “I’m not going to ride in the same car with
that
stuff!” but again—“Walk then!”—she was overruled. They trundled on. Getting low on fuel. Hayduke stopped near the familiar Park Service campground at Betatakin. He groped under the seats until he found his Oklahoma credit card, a length of neoprene tubing—
My leetle robber hose, señor
, as he called it fondly—and disappeared into the darkness with siphon and two gasoline cans.

Bonnie waited, rehearsing once again all the tedious questions about her own sanity. No question at all about that of her companion, or that polygamous jack-Mormon river guide, or poor mad Doc. But what am
I
doing here? Me, a nice Jewish girl, with an M.A. in Classical
(yech!)
French Lit. With a mother who worries about me and a father who makes 40,000 a year. Forty thousand what? Forty thousand ladies’ foundation garments, what else. Me, Abbzug. A solid, sensible
gril
with a
keppela
on her shoulders. Running around with these crazy
goyim
in the middle of Arabia. We’ll never get away with it. They got laws.

Hayduke came back, two full cans pulling his arms down straight. Groping again under the front seats—copping as he did a free feel between Bonnie’s thighs—he found his spout and poured ten gallons into the tank. Started to walk away again with the empties.

“Where’re you going now?”

“Got to fill the auxiliary tank.”

God! Gone. She waited, cursing herself, wanting to sleep and quite unable, dozing in fits and waking up in terror.

Sound and smell of pouring gasoline. They were off again, into the night, running as Hayduke liked it best, full and cool. With transfigured license plates both fore and aft. “We’re from South Dakota tonight,” he explained.

Bonnie groaned.

“Relax,” he said, “we’re crossing the river soon. We’re getting out of this overdeveloped hypercivilized goddamn fucking Indian country. Going back to the canyons where people like us belong. They won’t find us in a million years.”

“Ought to call Doc,” she mumbled.

“We will. Soon as we get to Kayenta. We’ll stop at the Holiday Inn, have some coffee and pie.”

That thought cheered her for a moment. The image of bright lights. Formica-topped tables, central heating, actual regular dues-paying American citizens with shaves! and haircuts! eating New-York-cut steaks with two vegetables on the side, salad, warm rolls wrapped in a cloth, a split of wine—no! yes!—recalled home, and decency, and hope.

The road passed through a galvanized tunnel underneath the Black Mesa & Lake Powell Railroad. Hayduke stopped.

“Now what?”

“This’ll only take a minute.”

“No,” she cried, “no. I’m tired and I’m hungry and the police are all over the reservation and I’m scared.”

“Only take a minute.” He was gone.

She put her face in her hands and cried a little, then dozed off. In her dreams she heard the click of snapping fence cutters, the vicious whine of something like a tiger in the jungle of the night, sinking its teeth into helpless flesh. She was awakened by the sound of a crash, authoritative, and a cacophonic jangle of falling wire.

Hayduke rushed back, breathing hard, scowling with ill-suppressed delight. He jumped in, jumped the clutch and burned away, turned left at the highway and drove north toward Kayenta, Monument Valley, Mexican Hat, the trackless canyons of Utah—
escape
.

Passing through Black Mesa Junction in a light traffic of summer tourists, Navajo pickups and state police, they saw the lights of the loading depot burning brightly. Separate power source. The coal conveyor, bridging the highway forty feet above their heads, was also moving. Slowing his jeep, Hayduke stared at this critical node of the power complex.

“Keep going,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “Sure.”

But one mile farther and he had to stop. He pulled off on a side road, shut off lights and cut the motor. He looked at Bonnie’s pale face in the dark.

“Now what’s the matter?” she said, coming fully awake.

“Got to,” he muttered.

“Got to what?”

“Take a piss.”

“What else?”

“Finish the job.”

“I thought so. I knew it. Well listen to me, George Hayduke, you’re not going to do it.”

“Got to finish the job.”

“Well I’m not going with you. I’m tired. I need some rest. I’ve had enough explosions and fires and wrecks and guns. I’m sick of it all. Sick of it. Sick of it. Just
sick
of it.”

“I know.” And as he took out his backpack and stuffed it with the food and water and tools he would need, he gave his girl her
working orders. She would drive on and wait for him at the Holiday Inn at Kayenta; who could think of a safer place? How much money did she have? About forty dollars. She could use her father’s Gulf Oil card, good at Holiday Inns. Establish credit and credibility. Never mind the risk. Too late now. Take a hot bath. Call Doc and Smith, arrange a meeting at the abandoned Hidden Splendor Mine, on Deer Flat near Woodenshoe Butte. If he, Hayduke, didn’t make it to Kayenta by night after tomorrow, she should leave the jeep there and go on to Hidden Splendor with Doc and Seldom. Tell Doc not to forget the magnesium. Very important. What else? He removed one of the duffel bags from the jeep, and the chain saw, sharpener and fuel can.