The Monkey Wrench Gang (41 page)

“But if the people want this road?” asks Bonnie.

“The only folks want this road,” says Smith, “are the mining companies and the oil companies and people like Bishop Love. And the Highway Department, which their religion is building roads. Nobody else ever heard of it.”

“Just thought I’d ask,” says Bonnie.

“Are we through with this fucking philosophizing?” says Hayduke. “Okay. Now let’s get to work. Doc and Bonnie, you two see if you can’t find something we can make signs with. We’re gonna need four large
ROAD CLOSED: BRIDGE OUT
signs. Don’t want any tourists in Winnebagos taking nosedives into the Dirty Devil River. Wouldn’t want the Search and Rescue Team flying ass over tincups down into White Canyon Gorge, would we? Or would we? Do you have enough paint?”

“Why do I always get the dull uninteresting jobs?” whines Bonnie.

“We got a full case of Day-Glo spray paint,” Smith says.

“Good. Me and Seldom we’ll get to work on the thermite crucibles. We’re going to need, let’s see, about—”

“Why?” she whines.

“Because you’re a woman. About four cardboard drums. Maybe six. Where’s the stuff?”

“In the cache.”

“That’s what I thought,” she says.

“Look,” says Hayduke patiently, “Jesus Christ, would you really rather crawl around under the bridges? Down there with the rats and rattlers and scorpions.”

“I’ll paint signs.”

“Then shut up and get to work.”

“But I won’t shut up.”

“Okay. Who’s going to wash the dishes?”

“It always comes down to that in the end,” says Doc. “I’ll wash the dishes. A surgeon should always keep his hands clean … somehow.”

“We’re going to hide this camp,” says Hayduke, “so no one will ever know we were here.”

“Which vehicle?” says Smith.

Hayduke thinks. “Better take both. Then we can split up if we get chased. Or have a backup if one breaks down. Gonna have a lot of stuff to haul.”

Out of chaos, order. All hands falling to, they packed their gear into the camper of Smith’s truck, leaving the giant camouflage net till last. They burned and flattened their tin cans and dropped them in a pit beside the remains of the campfire. (Good for the soil.) They buried the ashes of the fire in the same pit, filled it in, swept burial site and fire site with juniper boughs. The blackened stones which had formed their fire circle they threw over the rim.

Bonnie and Doc went off to the old mining camp, claw hammer and spray paint in hand. There they found sheets of plywood and fiberboard and made their signs, big ones, six feet by ten, lettered so:

They salvaged some two-by-fours, knocked together props to hold the signs erect and lashed the signs to the roll bars of Hayduke’s jeep.

Hayduke and Smith dug out the thermite materials from the cache under the trees: 45 pounds of iron oxide flakes, 30 pounds of aluminum powder, 10 pounds of powdered barium peroxide and 2½ pounds of powdered magnesium, all of it packed in round cardboard containers with metal ends.

“This all there is?” says Hayduke.

“Ain’t that enough?”

“Hope so.”

“Whaddaya mean you hope so?”

“I mean I don’t really know how much it’ll take to burn through those bridge members.”

“Why don’t we blow them?”

“We’d need ten times the dynamite we’ve got.” Hayduke picks
up two cartons. “Let’s get this stuff into the jeep. We’ll need some kind of big can with a lid to mix the stuff in.”

“Them cache tins will be okay, won’t they?”

“They’ll do.”

“Why don’t we mix the stuff here?”

“Be safer to mix it on the job,” Hayduke says.

They loaded as much as would fit into Hayduke’s jeep—the powders, the fuses, the last of the leftover dynamite—and the rest into the back of Smith’s truck. The sun was gone, the sunset fading behind a dull gray overcast. They took down the camouflage net. Hayduke took his juniper broom and swept away the last footprints.

“Let’s go,” he says.

Smith and Doc leading in the pickup, they drove very slowly without lights down the ten miles of trail road to the highway. Hayduke and Bonnie followed in the overloaded jeep. Communications had been prearranged. If either party ran into trouble the other would be warned by light signals.

Bonnie felt the heavy fatalism coming on again, that flu-like feeling in her heart, her stomach. She was glad, exceeding glad, that tonight’s raid would be the last for a long time to come. I fear nothing but danger, she quoted to herself. She glanced aside at Hayduke, caught in the reflex act of tossing a beer can out the window. She heard the tinkle of aluminum on the pavement. You slob, she thought, you filthy, foul-mouthed slob. She remembered the night and the morning in their zipped-together sack: other sensations. Did I take my pill today? Good God! Brief moment of panic. One thing we don’t need now, a little bungle from heaven. She fumbled through her beaded medicine pouch, found the dispenser, popped a tiny tab in her mouth and reached for the fresh can of beer Hayduke had already opened. His hand—the sensitive plant—yielded the can reluctantly.

“What’re you popping?” he asked, suspicious.

“Just a little Sunshine,” she said, washing it down with Schlitz.

“You better be kidding.”

“Worry.”

“I got more important things to worry about.”

Evil fanatic. Nobody had yet told George about the Larger Plan. The plan to suspend operations after tonight’s assault on the Power Complex. Not terminate—but suspend. No one had dared. And now, certainly, was not the time.

There was also the question of interpersonal relations. Bonnie couldn’t help it, pill or no pill: she thought about the days and weeks, even the months and years to come. Something inside, deep within her, longed for a sense of what lay ahead. For the gestation of something like a home, if only in her mind. With whom? With whom indeed? Abbzug liked living alone, part of the time, but never imagined for a moment that she might spend the rest of her life in such unthinkable exile.

We are lonely. I am lonely, she thought. Only her need and love kept loneliness at bay—the darkness surrounding a forest campfire, that bitter misery of loss. George … if only the bastard would talk to me.

“Say something,” she said.

“Gimme back my beer.”

Vast walls of sandstone rose on their left, south of the road. The pavement ended; they drove into the dust of Smith’s pickup, following him westward over the forty miles of dirt road that led to the three bridges. No traffic on this lonesome byway tonight, though ore haulers from the uranium mines had left the surface beaten and corrugated like a washboard. The noise of the jeep and its rattling cargo made conversation uncomfortable, but since there was no conversation anyway she knew he wouldn’t mind, the moody brooding sonofabitch.

They passed Fry Canyon gas station and food store, bathed in the ghastly blue glow of its mercury vapor “security lights.” Nobody there. And drove onward down the winding bench of desert scrub and sand toward Glen Canyon, Narrow Canyon, the slickrock wilderness.

Stars appeared, a few of them, dim beyond the cloudy veil. She could barely see the road.

“Shouldn’t you turn on the lights?”

He ignored her or didn’t hear her. Hayduke was staring at something
ahead, away from the road. Bulky black silhouettes of steel against the green glow of sunset lingering in the sky. He switched his headlights on and off four times. Halt signal. He pulled the jeep off the road and parked it behind a clump of trees. When he shut off the engine she heard at once, off in the distance, the dreary chanting of a poorwill.

“Now what?” she said.

“Bulldozers.” Alive again, animated, his moroseness gone. “Two of them. Big mothers.”

“Well?”

“Better check them out.”

“Oh no. Not now, George. What about the bridges?”

“They’ll keep. This won’t take long.”

“You always say that. And then you disappear for seven days. Shit.”

“Bulldozers,” he muttered hoarsely, eyes glittering, leaning toward her, stinking of Schlitz. “It’s our duty.” He pulled the boxes of rotor arms from beneath the seat, kissed her square and fair on the mouth, then scrambled out.

“George!”

“Be right back.”

She sat and waited in furious despair, watching his blue-lensed light dancing about in the operator’s compartment of a bulldozer that looked to be about forty hands high. The iron tyrannosaurs.

Smith approached. “What’s wrong?”

She nodded toward the bulldozers.

“Thought so,” Smith says. “I hoped—”

He was interrupted by the roar of a twelve-cylinder Cummins turbo-charged diesel, starting up.

“Excuse me.” Smith disappears. She hears a consultation: two men shouting at one another under the raving of the mighty engine. Smith climbs down from Hayduke’s tractor, makes his way to the second; she sees his flashlight wink on briefly near the control panel and hears the second motor revving up.

After a minute’s delay both tractors rumble off on parallel course,
into the gloom. They are about fifty feet apart. Between them is a tanker truck, a BLM public-relations billboard on posts and a sort of metal shed mounted on a sledge. These objects come suddenly alive, wrenched into movement by an unseen force, and move away between the two tractors, as if pulled by invisible bonds. The billboard topples, the shed sways, the truck rolls on its side, as all diminish steadily toward the rim (as she will later learn) of Armstrong Canyon nearby.

Twilight silhouettes, blurred by dust, Hayduke and Smith stand at the controls of their tractors, peering forward. Then very quickly they climb off. The tractors go on without human hands, clanking like tanks toward the canyon, and drop abruptly from sight. The tanker, the shed, the billboard follow.

Pause for gravitational acceleration.

A bright explosion flares beyond the rimrock, a second and a third. Bonnie hears the thunderous barrage of avalanching iron, uprooted trees, slabs of rock embraced in gravity, falling toward the canyon floor. Dust clouds rise above the edge, lit up in lurid hues of red and yellow by a crescendo of flames from somewhere below.

Hayduke comes back to the jeep, his smoky eyes alight with happiness. On his head he wears a billed cap of yellow twill with a harmless legend stitched on the forepeak:

“I want it!” She grabs the cap and tries it on. It slumps over her eyes.

He opens another beer. “Adjust the band in back.” He starts the engine, pulls back to the road and drives into the cool darkness.

“Okay,” she says, “so what was going on out there? Where’s Seldom?”

Hayduke explained. They had stumbled onto a tree-chaining project. The two bulldozers had been joined to each other by a fifty-foot
length of navy anchor chain, strong enough to uproot trees. By this simple means the Government was clearing hundreds of thousands of acres of juniper forest in the West. With the same chain, by the same method, Hayduke and Smith had simply cleared away into the canyon the support equipment which had been assembled for protection and convenience between the two bulldozers. As for Seldom, he was up ahead in his truck.

“Okay,” Bonnie says, “but I’m not sure that stunt was so smart.” She looks back. A flower of fire burns under the canyon rim, growing brighter as the night descends. “Anybody can see that fire for fifty miles. You’ll bring the Team down on us for sure now.”

“Naw,” says Hayduke. “They’ll be too busy investigating the fire. And while they’re busy at that we’re thirty miles beyond, down by the black lagoon, melting their bridges in front of them.”

They came to the first bridge. Finally. Smith and Doc waited for them in the darkness. Below the bridge was the apparently bottomless gorge of White Canyon. Leaning over the steel parapet Bonnie heard water gurgling below but could see nothing. She picked up a rock and lugged it, two handed, to the rail, let it teeter over and fall. She listened and heard only the water churning down below. She was about to turn away when the sound of colliding rock, exploding sandstone and small assorted splashes came up from the gorge. Prone to acrophobia, Bonnie shivered.

“Abbzug!”

A blue light danced before her, painting phosphorescent figure-eights on the velvet dark. She turned her head aside, blinking away the retinal afterimage, which lingered like a fading stain of color.

“Yeah?”

“Give us a hand, kid.”

She found Hayduke and Smith mixing their powders, rolling them back and forth in a big closed canister: three parts iron oxide to two parts pulverized aluminum equals thermite. Then the igniting mixture: four parts barium peroxide to one part magnesium powder. A potent dish. Doc Sarvis stood nearby, cigar smoldering in his teeth.
Bonnie was appalled by this display of reckless nonchalance. Her boys seemed unaware of danger, stoned on their delusions of power.

“Who’s standing watch?” she demanded.

“Waiting for you, my sweet,” says Doc. “You are the catalytic agent in this unprecipitated
mélange
. This retort malign of dissident chemicals.”