The Monkey Wrench Gang (43 page)

The third vehicle does not follow the others. It diverges to the driver’s left, off the main road down some alternate route. Advancing slowly but steadily
this way
. Disappears.

“Well, shoot,” mutters Smith, who has left the jeep and is leaning against the front fender of his truck.

Hayduke pulls out his short piece. Loaded, naturally. “What’s wrong?”

“That third party thinks he’s playing it pretty smart. Put that iron back where you got it. He’s a-comin’ right down this road.”

“Well,” Hayduke says, “I guess we’ll just have to ram the fucker head on. Crush him like a grape.”

Smith stares into the darkness, his wise and wrinkled coyote eyes scanning the immediate terrain. “Here’s what we’ll do. He has to come over that hump in front there so he won’t see us till he’s on top of us. But he won’t see us for certain then neither ’cause just about that time we turn on our lights and we charge right past him on the left there, through the blackbrush, before he figures out who we are.”

“What blackbrush?”

“That blackbrush. You just follow me, George old horse. Lock your hubs and put her in all four and turn that spotlight on him and keep it right in his eyes till we both get past. Then we cut out for the canyons hell bent for election. Just follow me.” Smith goes back to the jeep.

Hayduke gets out and locks the front wheel hubs, gets back in, shifts into four-wheel drive, revs the engine.

“What spotlight?” Bonnie says. “This it?”

“That’s the control handle.” He shows her how to train it forward. “Beam it on the man beside the driver. He’s the one that’ll be doing the shooting.”

“What shall
I
do?” Doc says.

“Take this.” Hayduke hands him the .357 magnum.

“No.”

“Take it, Doc. You’re gonna be on the hot side.”

“We agreed a long time ago,” Doc says, “that we’d have no bodily violence.”

“I’ll do it,” Bonnie says.

“No you won’t,” Doc says.

“Hang on,” Hayduke says, “we’re ready to go.”

“Caltrops!” Doc cries.

“What?”

“They’re in the back of the camper. That’s what I can do—sow the caltrops.” The truck is already moving. “Let me out of here.”

“Use the crawl hole, Doc.”

“The what?”

“Never mind.”

Smith in front has switched on the jeep headlights and is climbing the far bank of the arroyo. Hayduke follows through the swirl of dust, switching on his own lights.

“Turn on the spotlight, Bonnie.”

She flips the switch; the powerful beam lies hard on Smith’s neck.

“Get it off him. Just a hair to the right.”

Bonnie swivels the light so that it pours beyond the jeep directly between the pair of lights coming up the other side.

They top the rise. Lights glare in their faces. Hayduke swings the truck to the left, out of the path of the oncoming vehicle. The spotlight blinds the driver—Hayduke has a glimpse of Bishop Love’s scowling face—and then the man beside him, hat brim down over his eyes. Crackle of smashing brush, clatter of stones against the skid plate. Love has stopped his Blazer, unable to see.

“Dim your goddamn lights!” the bishop howls as they storm past him. Glint of gunmetal, sound of unholy curses, clash and click of gunlock meshing. Even above the whine of the engines, the snap of breaking branches, Hayduke hears and recognizes that slight but unmistakable noise.

“Everybody down!” he yells.

Something hot, heavy and vicious, magnum and hollow-pointed, whips through the space of the truck cab, leaving in its quick wake a pair of matched stars in the camper’s rear window and the windshield, a ragged tear in the crawl-hole canvas. Tailed one microsecond later by the crash of muzzle blast—the gun’s report.

“Keep your heads down.” Hayduke reaches for the spotlight control, turns the beam 180 degrees into the eyes of the men behind. A second star appears like a miracle in the shatterproof glass of the windshield, this one six inches nearer Hayduke’s right ear. The cobweb pattern of fractures overlaps the pattern of the first shot. Hayduke shifts into second, double-clutching, gas pedal jammed to the floor, almost overrunning Smith in the tired jeep.

He glances in the rearview mirror and sees, through the dense billow of dust floating in the spotlight’s column, the lights of the bishop’s
vehicle backing, attempting a turn, jockeying back and forth in the narrow roadway.

Well, thinks Hayduke, they’re coming after us. Naturally. Radios busy back there. That herd down by the bridge, coming across, getting the word, coming this way. Certainly. What else? So: the chase begins. Begins again. What else did you expect, flowers, ribbons, medals? Doc said something about caltrops. Caltrops?

Yes, caltrops, medieval weapons from the Age of Faith. Dr. Sarvis tries
to explain to George Hayduke what he is talking about, then gives it up and crawls into the back. His head disappears; his shoulders, trunk, wide bottom; his legs; his boots. They hear him rummaging around in the camper as the truck rocks, sways, rumbles and rattles down the dirt road hard on the tail of Smith in the jeep.

A glance in the mirror. Hayduke sees the entire Search and Rescue Team now on the trail: eight pairs of blazing headlights not half a mile behind. He steps harder on the gas but has to ease up almost immediately to avoid running into the jeep. Maybe I should give him a boost anyhow; and he pulls closer, eases the front of the truck into the rear of the jeep, accelerates against the drag. Smith in the jeep feels that buoyant lift in the hinder end, as if the jeep were launching into overdrive, spreading wings, taking off.

Doc’s burnished head reappears through the drapery of the crawl hole. “Need a light.”

They give him a flashlight; he disappears.

“Whatever they are he better find ’em quick,” says Hayduke, watching those dazzling high-beam lights in the mirror.

“He can’t hear you,” Bonnie says.

“Keep that spotlight trained on the lead car back there,” George says. “Blind the bastards.”

“I am but they’re gaining anyhow.”

Hayduke hands the girl his revolver. “If they get too close use that.”

She takes it. “I don’t want to kill anybody, though. I don’t think I do.” She turns the weapon over in her hands, looking into the muzzle. “Is it loaded?”

“Of course it’s loaded. What the fuck good is a gun if it’s not loaded? What are you doing? Don’t do that! Jesus Christ. Aim at their lights. Shoot out their tires.”

Jeep and tailgating truck bound over the curves, in and out of ruts and chuckholes, over rocks, across washouts, through a drift of blow sand. Bumpers clang, clash, engage and lock. Hayduke realizes suddenly, in deep disgust, that the two vehicles are now coupled. One flesh. That settles the question of splitting up at the Dirty Devil.

Their pursuers are coming closer, closer, through the fog of dust, up the long rise before the descent to the gorge of the Colorado.

Bonnie points the gun out the window at her side, aiming perhaps at the mountains, and tries to pull the trigger. Nothing happens. She can’t pull it. “What’s the matter with this gun?” she hollers. “It won’t work.” She pulls it back in, letting the heavy barrel sag toward Hayduke’s groin.

“Nothing’s wrong with it and for chrissakes keep it pointed away.”

“I can’t pull the trigger. See?”

“Single action, single action, good God! You have to thumb the hammer back first.”

“Hammer? What hammer?”

“Give me that thing.” Hayduke snatches it back. “Here, get over here, slide over me. You drive.”

At that moment the dirt road ends, succeeded by pavement. They are nearing the Colorado bridge. The rattle, bang and clatter of jostled equipment abruptly stops. No more dust, no more mechanical clamor—and no chance of escape.

“Hurry up!” Hayduke commands.

“All right!”

“Wait!”

Hayduke notices that the back door of the camper is open and that Doc, a black tuberous bulk against the lights of the Team, is tossing out handfuls of something like oversize jackstones. He looks like a man feeding pigeons in the park. He shuts the door, crawls toward the cab over a chaotic jumble of hardware and canoe paddles, peanut butter and blasting caps, and pokes his head into the cab. From Hayduke’s point of view the doctor appears as a disembodied head—bald, sweating, bearded, teeth and spectacles gleaming, an apparition made tolerable only by familiarity.

“I think I’ve stopped them,” he says.

They look. The lights are still back there and still coming closer.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Bonnie says.

“In a moment. Be patient.” Doc turns his head to see through the bullet-shattered window in the rear door.

Presently, within a few more seconds, it becomes clear that the Team is indeed falling back. Their light beams wobble, turning erratically aside to the shoulder of the road. There is a confused cluster of lights—white, red, amber—merged in the middle of the road. Plainly the pursuers have halted, apparently regrouping for conference.

Hayduke and Smith, in pickup and jeep, bumpers locked, rumble together like Siamese twins over the asphalt between the great arches of the central bridge. They do not pause but continue on for another mile to the turnoff leading north, the jeep road to the Maze and whatever lies beyond. Off the pavement a short distance Hayduke stops the truck, forcing Smith to stop as well. They shut off their lights and get out for relief and study, staring back at the collection of headlights beyond the middle bridge, where the whole Team for some reason has come to a halt.

“They couldn’t all of run outa gas at the same time,” says Smith. He turns suspiciously to Hayduke. “Was you shootin’ at them boys, George?”

“No.”

“Flats,” says the doctor. “They’ve all got flats.”

“What?”

“Flat tires.” Doc unwraps a fresh Marsh-Wheeling, gazing with satisfaction at the havoc he has wrought.

“You mean they all got flat tires at the same time?”

“Precisely.” He rolls the stogie in his mouth, bites off the tip, spits, lights up. “Perhaps not all.”

“How’d that happen?”

“Caltrops.” Doc reaches in his pocket and removes an object the size of a golf ball with four projecting spikes. Crown-of-thorns starfish. He gives it to Smith. “An ancient device, old as warfare. Anti-cavalry weapon. Drop it on the ground. Right. You will notice that, however it comes to rest, one spike points up. These will puncture any tire up to ten ply, steel-belted or whatnot.”

“Where’d you get these things?”

Doc smiles. “Made to order by a fiendish friend.”

“Pongee stakes,” says Hayduke. “Let’s get these fucking bumpers unhooked, men, and get the hell out of here.”

Bonnie and the doctor bounce on the jeep bumper while Smith and Hayduke lift on the other. The vehicles are freed from their unnatural conjugation. A transfer of drivers; Hayduke resumes control of his jeep, Smith goes back in the truck, to the great relief of Dr. Sarvis, who will ride with him. Bonnie gets in with Hayduke.

“That boy makes me nervous sometimes,” Doc admits to Smith.

“George he’s kind of crazy,” Smith agrees, “ain’t no question about that, which makes me mighty glad he’s on our side and not the bishop’s, all things considered. Though if you wanted to look at this business from a strickly practical kind of way you might think maybe it’d be better to stay as far away from both of them as a man could get. Better fasten that seat belt, Doc; mighty rough road ahead.”

“An excess of a rather desperate …
panache”

“Exackly, Doc. What’s he waitin’ for?” Smith looks back toward the bridge. Two pairs of lights have detached themselves from the immobilized group and are coming on. “Head out, George,” Smith says softly, revving his engine up to an important roar.

Hayduke gets the jeep going. Without lights, following the pale path of the trail road by starlight, the two vehicles proceed northward, slow and cautious in the dark, over a road which makes the former dirt road seem like a ribbon of silk.

“Will this work?” Doc asks. “Why not turn on the lights and go as fast as we can?”

“Maybe it will and prob’ly it won’t,” says Seldom. “Old Love, he’ll stop and find our tracks back there at the turnoff and be right on our tails again in five minutes. But you can’t drive much faster than this on this road anyhow.”

“What road? I don’t see any road.”

“Well I don’t neither, Doc, but I know it’s there.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“A few times. It was only three weeks ago, you’ll recollect, me and George led our friend Love up here. When George rolled the rock on him and smashed the bishop’s Blazer flat as a flapjack. From what I hear Love is still sore as a boil about that. No sense of humor, that bishop. Mean as a junkyard dog when you cross him.
Watch
out!”

Billows of dust rise in the starlight as Hayduke and jeep drop into a deep pothole in the road. Smith is forced to step on his brake pedal for a moment, sending a bright red signal through the dark. Hayduke stops, wanting to talk.

“Break anything?” Smith asks.

“Don’t think so. See any lights behind us yet?”

“Not yet. Love prob’ly went on down to the marina for some hot patches for his boys’ tires. But he knows we’re up this way. He’s stupid, but he ain’t near as stupid as we are.”

“Should we try that old mine road we took last time?”

“Not unless you want to spend half the night moving your rocks off it. Besides, you want to hide in the Maze.”

“Right. Okay. But how do we know the bishop hasn’t got a squad of state troopers and sheriff’s deputies coming down the Flint Trail to meet us? Or a couple of eager-beaver park rangers from up at Land’s End?”

“We don’t know, George, but it’s the chance we got to take. If
it’s anybody but the Park Service they’ll have to come all the way from Green River or Hanksville, so we’ll beat ’em to the Maze junction easy, unless the sons of bitches are riding in them goldamn heliclopters. Besides, old Love is too stiff-necked to call for help; he wants to catch us all by hisself, if I know that burr-headed bastard like I think I do. What’re we standin’ here for?”