The Monkey Wrench Gang (44 page)

“Where’s the icebox?”

“Why?”

“I need a beer. I need two beers. How far to the Maze anyhow?”

“About thirty miles by air and about forty-five by road.”

“I see lights,” Bonnie says.

“So do I, honey, and I’d say that’s kind of a hint we ought to head on up the trail.”

Hayduke is already moving. Switching the headlights on, Smith follows the taillights of the jeep, which wink back, two bloodshot eyes, as Hayduke steps lightly, now and then, on his brake.

The road becomes steadily worse. Sand. Rock. Brush. Chuck-hole, rut, washout, high center, gully, gulch and ravine. Forty-five miles of
this?
thinks Doc. After the easy victory of the caltrops, he now feels fatigue reaching for his eyelids, brain cells, spinal column. Smith talking….

“What’s that?” Doc says.

“I said,” says Seldom Seen, “it’s a damn good thing we all had an easy day back in the shade up on Deer Flat. What time you reckon it is, Doc?”

Doc checked the chronometer on his wrist. The instrument reported 1635 hours, Rocky Mountain Standard Time. That can’t be right. He held it to his ear. Of course, he’d again forgotten to wind the thing. Bonnie’s birthday gift, The kid must have saved a month’s pay for this trinket. He winds it.

“Don’t know,” he tells Smith.

Smith stuck his head out the open window at his side and saw the glow of moonrise. “About midnight,” he says. He looks back. “Them fellers are hangin’ on. You got any more of them calitropes?”

“No.”

“Sure could use some more,” Smith says and starts humming a tune.

This is madness, thinks the doctor. A delirium, an insane dream. Pinch yourself, Doc. Okay. This is me, Sarvis, M.D., Fellow, American College of Surgeons. Well-known if not generally liked member of the medical fraternity. Tolerated though distrusted resident of Twenty-second Precinct, Duke City, New Mexico. A mourning widower with two fool-grown sons launched in full career. Rakes and no-goods, both of them. Like their father,
el viejo verde
. When I am old and bald and fat and impotent, will you still love me then, my moxie-doxie? But that’s been clearly settled, has it not?

Doc stares at the dust-covered rear of Hayduke’s jeep laboring ahead, the boy and the girl concealed by the pile of baggage under a lashed-down tarpaulin. He looks to the side, out his window, and sees furtive clumps of blackbrush and rabbit brush passing slowly amid a dim expanse of rock and dust and sand. He looks back and sees two pairs of headlights, one well in front of the other, glowing faint as fireflies through the floating dust, far behind but creeping onward, neither gaining nor losing distance.

What of it? says Doc to himself. What is it I fear? If death is truly the worst that can happen to a man there is nothing to fear. But death is not the worst.

He dozes off, wakes, dozes and wakes again.

They rattle ahead, mile after mile, over the stones and ruts. The adversary follows at a discreet distance, far back but seldom out of sight. Smith, studying the stubborn lights in the rearview mirror, says, “You know something, Doc, I don’t think them fellas are trying to catch us right now. I think they’re just trying to keep us in sight. Maybe they do have somebody coming down from Flint Trail to meet us. Which means I wouldn’t be too surprised to find somebody laying for us up ahead about dawn.”

“You said we could beat them to the Maze turnoff.”

“That’s right, but them fellas don’t think we’re headin’ for the Maze.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Maze is a dead end, Doc. The end of the road. The big jump-off. Nobody ever goes to the Maze.”

“And that’s why we’re going?”

“Doc, you figured it out.”

“And why does nobody ever go to the Maze?”

“Well, because there’s no gasoline there, no roads, no people, no food, most of the time no water and no way out, that’s why. Like I told you, it’s a dead end.”

Lovely, thought the doctor. And that is where we are going to hide for the next ten years.

“But
we
got some food there,” Smith went on. “We cached some at Lizard Rock and some over at Frenchy’s Spring. We’ll be all right if we can get to it before the Team gets to us. We might have a little trouble finding water right away, though if we get rain tonight or tomorrow, and it sure smells like rain, then we’ll be all right for a few days. If the Team don’t press us too hard.”

Not bad, thought Doc. Not half bad. We are four jokers on a dead limb. I’m afraid this night will never end. I’m afraid it will. He looks east at the rising waning sick oblate and gibbous moon. Not much hope there. He sees a jackrabbit scuttle across the roadway through the dusty columns of the light beams. Smith swerves to avoid it. Doc realizes that he has not seen cattle or horses now for many miles. Why so? he asks.

“No water,” Smith replies.

“No water? But the whole Colorado River is over there on our right somewhere. Can’t be more than a couple of miles to the east.”

“Doc, the river is down in there all right but unless you was a butterfly or a buzzard you couldn’t get down to it. Unless you feel like doing a two-thousand-foot swan dive off the rimrock.”

“I see. There’s no way down.”

“Hardly any, Doc. I know one old trail down from Lizard Rock to Spanish Bottom but I never found any others.” Smith checks the rearview mirror again. “Still doggin’ our tail. Them fellas don’t give up easy. Think maybe we ought to hide these here vehicles and take off afoot.”

Doc turns in his seat, peering back through the crawl hole and the bullet-shattered window in the rear door of the camper. A mile, perhaps five miles, in their rear—impossible to gauge the distance in the night—comes a pair of headlights, rising and falling on the rocky road. He is about to face forward again when he sees a streak of green fire glide upward, higher and higher, reach apogee and turn back to earth, trailing a wake of phosphorescent, slowly fading coals.

“Did you see that?”

“I seen it, Doc. They’re signaling somebody again. We better have a look around.”

Smith blinks his headlights. Hayduke stops, shutting off headlights but not motor. Smith does the same. All four get out.

“What’s up?” says Abbzug.

“They’re shooting flares again.”

“Where the fuck are we anyhow?” Hayduke says. He looks tired and depressed, his eyes bloodshot, hands shaky. “I need a beer.”

“Kind of parched myself,” says Smith, gazing ahead toward the dark walls of the plateau, then back at their pursuers. The lights have stopped for the moment. “Get me one too, George.” He looks into the sky, hooding his eyes with his hands, toward the north, northeast, east. “There it is. Forget the beer, George, we ain’t got time.”

“Whaddaya see?”

“A plane, I guess.”

They follow the line of his pointing arm and finger. One tiny red light blinks up there in the violet night, passing through the handle of the Big Dipper. Still too far away to be heard, it quarters across the northeastern sky.

“It’s a helicopter,” Hayduke says. “I can feel the vibrations. It’ll be coming this way in a minute. You’ll hear it.”

“So what do we do?”

“I’m having a beer,” says Hayduke, opening the rear of the camper.

He takes a warm six-pack from the icebox. No ice for days now. “Anybody else?”

A second Very light soars skyward from their enemy in the rear,
at some indeterminate range, and rises to its zenith, hesitates and sinks, an elegant parabola of green flame. All watch, momentarily paralyzed.

“Why flares? Why don’t they use their radios?”

“Don’t know, honey. Different frequencies maybe.”

Pop!
goes the top. A fountain of warm Schlitz rises over the truck, mimicking the flare, and showers down on Doc, Bonnie and Smith in a fine, diffuse spray. Hayduke cuts off the throbbing jet of beer by clamping his mouth over the bunghole. Sound of earnest suckling.

“Well,” Bonnie says, “let’s do something.” Silence. “Anything.”

“It appears to me—” the doctor commences.

Whock whock whock whock:
rotating blades chop at the air. Coming this way, comrades.

“We better head out on foot,” Smith says. He gropes with both arms into the tumbled baggage in the rear of his camper and pulls out packs, day packs, six-packs, backpacks, all loaded with food and gear. Somebody thought of that (Abbzug); at least one thing has been done right this time. He throws out canteens, a half dozen of them, mostly full. He finds one small hiking boot and tosses it at Bonnie. “There’s your boot, honey.”

“I have two feet.”

“Here’s the other.”

Hayduke gapes stupidly at Bonnie sitting down to put on her boots, at Doc struggling into his sixty-pound pack, at Smith closing the back of the camper. Hayduke holds his foaming can of beer in one hand, the other five cans—bound together in a plastic collar—in the other hand. What to do? In order to function he must put down the beer. But in order to function he has to drink the beer. A cruel bind. He tilts the open beer to his mouth, chugalugs it all down, tries to jam the remaining five into the top of his backpack. Can’t be done. No room. He ties them on the outside.

“We got to hide these vehicles,” he says to Smith.

“I know, but where?”

Hayduke waves vaguely toward the black gulf of Cataract Canyon. “Down that way.”

Smith glances up at the helicopter, now cutting a big circle in the sky a few minutes to the north. Hunting for somebody.

“Don’t know as we have the time, George.”

“But we got to. All our shit in there—guns, dynamite, chemicals, peanut butter. We’ll need that stuff.”

Smith looks again at the circling helicopter, sinking toward the road a few miles to the north, and at the lights approaching from the opposite direction, now less than two or three miles away. Ambush in preparation: the closing jaws.

“Well, let’s get them as far off the road as we can. Down that way, over the slickrock so we don’t leave tracks. Maybe we can find a deep gulch we can drive into.”

“Okay, let’s go.” Hayduke squeezes the beer can in his hand. “You and Bonnie wait here,” he says to Doc.

“We’re staying together,” Bonnie says.

Hayduke tosses his crumpled beer can onto the road where Bishop Love can pick it up conveniently. “Then back in the truck, quick.”

“No need for panic,” Doc says, sweating already, “no need for panic.”

All aboard once again. Smith leads the way with his truck, pulling around Hayduke and the jeep, off the road and over the rocks between clumps of desert shrubbery to the open surface of the sandstone. Hayduke follows. Without lights, edging forward, they drive downslope toward the dark gulfs of space beyond the canyon rim. In the faint light from the moon, distances and depths become ambiguous, deceptive, offering shadows and obscurity but little cover, little safety.

No cover, thinks Hayduke, looking for the helicopter; we’re caught in the open again. Now comes the napalm. Smith eases to a stop in front of him. Unwilling to step on the brake pedal and flash a red signal to the enemy, Hayduke pulls his hand brake and lets the jeep bump gently into the rear of Smith’s truck.

Smith gets out to examine the lay of the land. Looks, comes back, drives on. Hayduke follows close, grinding ahead in low gear. They creep toward someplace to hide. The helicopter, apparently set down on the road with lights switched off, can no longer be seen.

Good, thinks Hayduke. They’re waiting for us up there. Good. Let the fuckers wait. He pops the top one-handed from another Schlitz. When you’re out of Schlitz you’re out of Schlitz. Long dry march ahead, got to keep that old kidney stone built up, can’t have it dissolving on us in a lather of sweat and pothole water.

What else? He does a rapid inventory in his mind. What to carry: packs; the .357 and twenty rounds in his gun belt; the .30-.06 with variable sniper scope slung on his back, under the Kelty—“for deer, of course” (anticipating Bonnie’s question and Doc’s objections)—the Buck Special on his belt; carabiners, rope, chock nuts … what else? what else? Now, above all, must not forget something essential. Survival is the question coming up now. Survival with fucking honor, of course. With fucking honor at all costs. What else?

Smith stops again. Again Hayduke brakes by hand, bumping bumpers. Letting his engine idle, he gets out, walks to the lean arm hanging from the driver’s side of the pickup cab. Six eyes and a red cigar confront him from the dark interior of Smith’s truck.

“Yeah?”

Smith points. “Right down in there, old horse.”

Hayduke looks where Seldom indicates. Another ravine divides the slickrock, this one maybe ten or maybe thirty feet deep, hard to tell in the moonlight. Sandy floor. Much brush—scrub oak, juniper, sage. Overhanging wall on the outside of the curve, a rounded incline on this side. It might go, Hayduke thinks. It might.

“You think we can hide them down in there?”

“Yep.”

Pause. In the silence they hear only … more silence. No lights visible anywhere. All jeeps, Blazers, trucks, helicopters have been stopped and shut off. The Team will not so easily be outflanked this time. Over there in the dark, in those shadows under the plateau wall, the Searchers and Rescuers are waiting. Or not waiting; perhaps a
scouting party has already been sent out, up the road, down the road, looking, listening.

“Too quiet,” Bonnie says.

“They’re still a mile away, at least,” Hayduke says.

“You hope.”

“I hope.”

“We hope,” says Doc, red eye glowing.

“Okay,” Hayduke says, “let’s drop ’em down in the gulch. Want me to winch you down?”

“No,” says Smith, “can’t have no motors running now, they might hear us. I’ll ride the brake down.”

“Use your hand brake.”

“Too steep. Can’t trust it.”

“Your brake lights will show,” Hayduke says.

“Smash ’em.”

Done. Smith eases his truck down the bulge of rock, twenty feet to the sandy bottom, and noses it into the shadows under the oak brush and juniper. Hayduke follows in the jeep. Dim moonlight falls on the wall above, that flowing curvature of stone stained with oxides of manganese and iron, but down in the bottom under the overhang all is dark. They unfold the camouflage net, stretch it over the trees and tie it down; concealing truck and jeep from aerial observation. Hayduke cases his extra firearms and hides them in a grotto in the wall, above the high-water line.