The Monkey Wrench Gang (46 page)

Muted grumbles from the shadows below. Sounds of crackling brush, the scuffle of tangled feet.

Hayduke peers down into the gloom. “Untie the knot, Bonnie. Free the rope. Hurry up!” The rope comes slack. He hauls it up. “Okay, Seldom, your turn.”

“How’re you gonna get down, George? Who’s to belay you?”

“I’ll get down, don’t worry.”

“How?” Smith runs the doubled rope between his legs, around one side and over the opposite shoulder, preparing to rappel.

“You’ll see.” Hayduke unslings the rifle. “Take this down for me. Wait a minute.” He stares back the way they’ve come, trying to spot their pursuers. The pallid moonlight lies weak on stone and sand, on juniper and yucca and blackbrush, and on the cliffs beyond, a shifty and deceptive illumination. You can hear men’s voices and the slap of big feet on sandstone. “You see them, Seldom?”

Smith is squinting in the same direction, shading his eyes from the moon. “See two of them, George. Three more way behind.”

“Ought to crack off one little shot, slow ’em down again.”

“Don’t do it, George.”

“Make Christians out of them Saints. Put the fear of Rudolf Hayduke into them. A rifle shot would make them stop and think.”

“Gimme the rifle, George.”

“I’ll shoot over the fuckers’ heads.”

“They might be safer if you aimed at ’em.”

“Those fuckers were shooting at us. Shooting to kill and maim.”

Smith extricates the rifle gently from Hayduke’s hands and slings
it over his free shoulder. “Belay me, George.” He backs to the edge. “Testing belay, George.”

Hayduke takes up the slack, plants his feet, the rope around his hips. “Okay. Belay on.”

Smith backs over the rim and disappears. Hayduke holds the rope lightly in his hands as Smith goes quickly down the pitch. Smith’s weight, transmitted by the rope, is supported by Hayduke’s pelvis and legs. In a moment he feels the rope go slack; the voice of Smith rises from the darkness below. “Okay, George, off belay.”

Hayduke looks back. The enemy is moving closer. And now that hand-carried spotlight is switched on and the dazzling beam turns directly toward him, at once, blind bad luck, no escape.

Nowhere to go. Nothing but air to rappel from.

“How far down there?” Hayduke croaks.

“About thirty feet I’d say,” replies Smith.

Hayduke lets the rope, now useless to him, fall into the canyon. The light beam sweeps over him, goes past. A double take by the glaring Cyclops eye. The beam is jerked back and stops, fixed on Hayduke’s crouching figure, burning into his eyes, blinding him.

“You there,” someone bellows—a vaguely familiar voice, amplified majestically by bullhorn. “You stand
right
there. Don’t you make a move, son.”

Hayduke drops to his belly on the verge of the rock. The light remains on him. Something cruel, silent, swift as thought, sharp as a needle, keen as a snake, whips at the sleeve of his shirt, stinging the flesh beneath. He draws his gun; the light goes out. He hears at the same instant the crack of a second rifle shot. (In the east a crack of dawn.)

He calls down to the others, “That a juniper below me?” The light comes on again, pinning him down.

“Yeah”—Smith’s warm and homely voice—“but I wouldn’t try that if …” His words fade off in doubt.

Hayduke holsters his revolver and slides on his stomach over the edge, facing the wall, feeling the cool unyielding bulge of the stone against his chest and thighs. He hangs for a moment to the last possible
handhold. Friction descent, he thinks, what they call a friction fucking descent. He looks below, sees only shadows, no bottom at all.

“I change my mind,” he says desperately, inaudibly (losing his grip), speaking to nobody in particular—and who is listening?—“I’m not going to do this, this is insane.” But his sweaty hands know better. They release him.

Coming down
, he yells. Thinks he yells. The words never get past his teeth.

This vulture soars above the Fins, the Land of Standing Rocks. Soaring
is the vulture’s life, death his dinner. Evil foul black scavenger of the dead and dying, his bald red head and red neck featherless—the better to slip his greedy beak deep into the entrails of his prey—he feeds on corruption.
Cathartes aura
, his Latin title, derived from the Greek
katharsis
, meaning purification, and
aura
from the Greek for air, emanation or vapor. The airy purifier.

Bird of the sun. The contemplator. The only known philosophizing bird, thus his serene and insufferable placidity. Rocking gently on his coal-black wings, he watches a metallic dragonfly tracking methodically back and forth above the Fins, above the Standing Rocks, making a violent unfitting noise.

The vulture circles higher and tilts his wrinkled head to observe with keener interest, three thousand feet below, the movement of four tiny wingless bipeds who scurry, like mice in a roofless maze, down a winding corridor between towering red walls of stone. They dash furtively from shadow to shade, as if the sand were too hot for their feet, as if hiding from the blaze of the sun or the other searching eyes in the sky.

Something limp and halting in the gait of two of those creatures
suggests to the vulture the thought of lunch, arousing his memory of meat. Although all four appear to be still alive and active, it is nevertheless a well-known truth, the vulture reasons, that where there is life there is also death—that is, hope. He circles round again for a better look.

But they are gone.

“Didn’t know they could fly them goldanged things right down into a little canyon like this’n here,” he says, “and what’s more I say there oughta be a law agin it; it’s bad for the nervous system. Makes my whole system nervous.”

“I’m hungry,” she says. “And my feet hurt.”

“They try that again I’ll drop them,” Hayduke says. He holds his rifle cradled in his arms. Proud sweet weapon. The walnut stock polished with his sweat, hand-rubbed, the sniper scope sooty blue, the bolt, breech and barrel glowing with a silky sheen. Trigger, trigger guard, the checkered pistol grip, the rigorous precision of the action as he opens the bolt and inspects the firing chamber, slams it closed and springs the trigger.
Click
. Chamber empty; seven rounds in magazine.

“Thirsty and hungry and my feet hurt and I’m bored. Somehow it just isn’t much fun anymore.”

“Well I just hope they didn’t spot our tracks. Can they set that thing down in here?” Smith, his hat off, hair plastered down with perspiration, looks out from under the overhang, out of the shade into the heat, the glare, toward the sunbaked stone, the leaning red walls of the gorge. “’Cause if they can I’d reckon we got to find another hole mighty quick. Maybe quicker.” He wipes his shining and unshaven face with a red bandanna that is already dark and greasy from sweat. “How about it, George?”

“Not right here. But maybe up the canyon, around the bend. Or down the canyon. Fuckers might be creeping up on us right now. Shotguns loaded with buckshot.”

“If they seen us.”

“They saw us. If they didn’t they will next time.”

“How many men can they get into that thing?”

“Three in that model.”

“There’s four of us.”

Hayduke grins bitterly. “Yeah, four. With one handgun and one rifle.” He turns to the dozing Dr. Sarvis. “Unless Doc has a pistol in that bag of his.” Doc grunts, a vague but negative reply. “Maybe,” Hayduke adds, “we could shoot ’em with one of Doc’s needles. Give ’em each a shot of Demerol in the ass.” He rubs his bruised limbs and abraded hide, the lacerated palms.

“You’re due for another shot yourself,” Bonnie says.

“Not now,” Hayduke says. “The stuff makes me too groggy. Got to keep awake now.” Pause. “Anyway, you can bet your bottom dollar if they did see us they’ve radioed the Team. That whole crew will be marching down here in an hour.” Another pause. “We have to get out of here.” Shifts the rifle from crook of arm to right hand. “Can’t wait for sundown.”

“I’ll tote that rifle for a while,” Smith says.

“I’ll keep it.”

“How do you feel?” Bonnie asks Hayduke. She gets a mumble for an answer. Bonnie appears on the verge of heat exhaustion herself. Her face is flushed, damp with sweat, eyes a bit dreamy. But she looks better than the battered Hayduke, with his clothes in shreds and his elbows and knees stiff with bandages, so that he walks when he walks like a prefabricated man, Dr. Sarvis’s hand-made monster. “George,” she says, “let me give you another shot.”

“No.” He modifies the growl. “Not right now. Wait till we find a better hole.” He looks at Doc. “Doc?” No response; the doctor lies sprawled on his back in the deepest coolest corner of the alcove under the cliff, eyes closed.

“Let him rest,” she says.

“We ought to get going.”

“Give him ten more minutes.”

Hayduke looks at Smith. Smith nods. They both look up at the narrow strip of blue between the canyon walls. The sun has drifted high into noon. Wisps and horsetails of vapor hang on the planes of
heat. One of these days it’s going to rain. One of these days it’s got to rain.

“I’m not asleep,” Doc says, his eyes shut. “Be up in a minute….” He sighs. “Tell us about the war, George.”

“What war?”

“Yours.”

“That war?” Hayduke smiles. “You don’t want to hear all that. Seldom, where the shit are we anyhow?”

“Well, I ain’t sure, but if we’re in the canyon I think we’re in, then we’re in the middle of what they call the Fins.”

“I thought we were in the Maze,” Bonnie says.

“Not yet. The Maze is different.”

“How so?”

“Worse.”

“That war,” says George Hayduke to nobody in particular and also to nobody in general, “they want to forget it. But I won’t let them. I won’t ever let the bastards forget that war.” Talking like a dreamer, a sleepwalker, talking not to himself but to the stony silence of the desert. “Never,” he says. Silence. “Never.”

The others wait. When Hayduke fails to go on, Bonnie says to Smith, “Do you think we’ll find some water? Pretty soon?”

“Bonnie honey, it ain’t too far now. We’ll find water somewheres up in here, and if we don’t it’s there waitin’ for us on the shady side of Lizard Rock. Water and food.”

“How far?”

“Where?”

“How far to Lizard Rock?”

“Well now, if you mean in miles I’d be kind of hard up to say on account of the way these canyons meander around so. Also I ain’t absolutely sure we can get out of this canyon at the other end because maybe it boxes up. We might have to backtrack some, try to find a way out along the sides.”

“Can we get there tonight?”

“No,” says Hayduke, gazing at the sand between his thick white
knees, bound in layers of filthy gauze. “Never.” He scratches his crotch. “Never.”

Smith is silent. Bonnie stares at him, waiting for the answer. He squints, frowns, grimaces, scratches his sunburnt neck, tilts his green eyes up at the canyon wall. “Well …”he says. Sound of a canyon wren.

“Well?”

“Well I wouldn’t want to lie to you, Bonnie.”

“Don’t.”

“We ain’t gonna get there tonight.”

“I see.”

“Maybe tomorrow night.”

“But we will find water? I mean soon. In this canyon.”

Smith relaxes a bit. “Very likely.” He offers her his canteen. “Have a few good swallers outa there. Plenty left.”

“No thanks.”

“Go ahead.”

He unscrews the cap and shoves it in her hands. Bonnie drinks, hands it back. “We should’ve kept our packs.”

“Maybe,” Smith says. “And if we done that we’d be in Bishop Love’s Fry Canyon icebox now too, waitin’ for the sheriff’s van. And Love, that crazy sonofabitch, he’d be one more step up on his way to the Governor’s mansion, as if the sonofabitch we have squattin’ in there now selling out the state as fast as he can ain’t bad enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean those people like Love and the Governor got no conscience. They’d sell their own mothers to Exxon and Peabody Coal if they thought there was money in it; have the old ladies rendered down for the oil. Them’s the kind of folks we got runnin’ this state, honey: Christians; my kind of folks.”

“Just won’t let ’em,” Hayduke mumbles. “No, I won’t.”

Smith stirs, reaching for his hat. “We oughta get ourselves on our feet, friends, make some tracks north.”

“I was a POW,” mutters Hayduke.

Doc opens his eyes for a moment, sighing.

“I was a VC prisoner,” Hayduke goes on. “Fourteen months in the jungle, always on the move. They’d chain me to a tree at night except when the planes were coming. I was more trouble to those little gooks than a French newspaper correspondent. Fed me moldy rice, snakes, rats, cats, dogs, liana vines, bamboo shoots, whatever we could find. Even worse than what they ate themselves. Fourteen months. I was their unit medic, the little brown bastards. We used to hug each other down in the bunkers, curled up in a heap like fucking kittens, when the B-52s came over. It seemed to help absorb the shocks. We always got word when they were coming but you never heard them, they flew so high. Only the bombs. We were ten feet sometimes twenty feet under the ground but afterwards there’d be these little guys running around with blood coming out of their ears from the concussions. Some of them went crazy. Kids, most of them. Teenagers. They wanted me to help plan their raids. Satchel charges and that kind of thing. I wanted to but I couldn’t quite do it. Not that. So they made me their medic. Some medic. I was sick half the time. Once I watched them shoot down a helicopter with one of those twenty-foot steel crossbows they had. Made out of shot-down helicopters. They all cheered when the sonofabitch crashed. I wanted to cheer myself. Couldn’t quite do that either though. We had a party that night, C rations and Budweiser for all the Charlies and me. The ham and beans made them sick. After fourteen months they threw me out—said I was a burden on them. The ungrateful little Communist robots. Said I ate too much. Said I was homesick. And I was. I sat in that rotting jungle every night, playing with my chain, and all I could think about was home. And I don’t mean Tucson. I had to think about something clean and decent or go crazy, so I thought about the canyons. I thought about the desert down along the Gulf coast. I thought about the mountains, from Flagstaff up to the Wind Rivers. So they turned me loose. Then came six months in Army psycho wards—Manila, Honolulu, Seattle. My parents needed two lawyers and a U.S. Senator to get me out. The Army thought I wasn’t adjusted right for civilian life. Am I crazy, Doc?”