The Monkey Wrench Gang (50 page)

“You’re gonna be Governor.”

“Am I gonna be Governor this goddamn state or ain’t I?”

“Sure thing, Dud.”

“Okay, now where’s them other boys? I want them all, specially that turncoat renegade jackrabbit Smith. You got him?”

“Not yet, Dudley. But we’re getting help. We contacted the DPS and the SO and the FBI and just about everybody else with jurisdiction here except the Park Service.”

“No, Sam, I don’t want any help. I can catch them boys all by myself. How many times do I have to tell you that?” The next Governor of Utah watches abstractedly as Bonnie, stethoscope hanging from her neck, rolls up his sleeve and wraps the pleats of the blood-pressure cuff snugly around his upper arm. Blood trickles from the bishop’s nostrils. Doc holds a shining hypodermic syringe against the light, a vial impaled on the needle. “You’re a fine-looking young woman. You a doctor too? What’s your name? It hurts right down my left arm. Right down to the fingers. And least of all we don’t want the park rangers bumbling around in here. They don’t even belong here. We’re gonna transfer this whole goddamned so-called national park to state ownership soon as I’m in, mark my words, Sam. What’re you fellas gaping at? Get out of here. Find Smith; tell him he better show up for the next ward Mutual Improvement Society meeting or we’re gonna revise his genealogy. The only thing worse than a gentile is a goddamned jack Mormon. Are you a gentile, young lady?”

“I’m Jewish,” she murmurs, placing the horns of the stethoscope in her ears and reading the pressure gauge. Systole, diastole, mercury and millimeter. “One-sixty over eight-five,” she says to Doc. He nods. She unwraps the cuff.

“You don’t look Jewish even if you are a gentile. You look like Liz Taylor. I mean when she was young like you.”

“You’re so sweet, Bishop. Just relax now.”

Doc moves in with the needle, laying a large, steady, calming hand on the bishop’s damp brow. “This will hurt a bit, Governor.”

“I ain’t Governor yet. I’m only another bishop now. But I soon will be. Are you the—oof!—you the doctor? You look like a doctor. Sam, goddamn, didn’t I tell you the doctor would come? You don’t get many like this anymore. Sam, I like this little girl. What’s your name, cutie pie?
Abbzug?
What the hell kind of a name is that? It don’t sound American somehow. Who stole my tricycle? Sam, get on the radio. All-points alarm. Description: dark-complected, greasy, pimple on the ass, scar on left testicle. Baggy pants. Believed armed and dangerous. Alias Rudolf the Red. Alias Herman Smith. Smith? Where’s that Seldom Seen? Wanted for burglary, armed robbery, kidnapping,
destruction of private property, industrial sabotage, felonious assault, unlawful use of explosives, conspiracy to disrupt interstate commerce, flight across state lines to avoid prosecution for immoral purposes, horse stealing and rolling rocks. Sam? You there, Sam? Sam, where in the name of Moroni, Nephi, Mormon, Mosiah and Omni are you? What? What’d you say, Doctor?”

“Count backward from twenty.”

“From what?”

“From twenty.”

“Twenty? Twenty. Right. Count backward from twenty. Yes sir. Why not. Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen … seventeen … sixteen….”

Obscure and ambivalent gloom of dawn. Sky an unbroken mass of violet
clouds, immanent with storm. What they saw, staring from the rimrock above the Fins toward Lizard Rock, looked neither right nor good. A fresh and bigger helicopter by a smoky fire, four trucks, two big wall tents, bedrolls or men scattered about over the sand and stone, either dead or asleep or both. But that wasn’t the whole of the difficulty.

“Why’d they have to camp there?” Hayduke says. “All that empty beautiful clean desert and they had to camp there. Why right
there?.”

Oughta get back to my alfalfa and my melons, Smith is thinking. Both of them. Green River they need you. Rains a-comin’. Children miss their daddy. Get started on the Big Houseboat. Seldom’s Ark.

The morning star shines in the east through one window in the overcast. Jupiter Pluvius, planet of rain, beaming like chromium in a sky of ivory, lavender dusk, the twilight of liberty.

“Why right there for chrissakes? Right on top of our goddamn fucking food cache?”

“Don’t know, George,” he says. “Dumb luck, I reckon. We got another up near Frenchy’s Spring.”

“We ain’t going that way. We’re going into the Maze.”

“Don’t know about that Maze, George. It’s mighty hard to find a way down into that Maze. And harder to find a way out. There ain’t no permanent water. No slow elk
a
-tall. Hardly no game. I’ve been thinkin’, maybe we ought to climb up to the rim, hike north to Green River.”

“You’re crazy. That must be eighty miles. They’ll have your house staked out night and day. You try to go home you’ll find yourself in jail.”

Smith chews on a stem of grass. “Maybe. Maybe not. My old lady there’s pretty damn smart. She can find a way around Bishop Love.”

“Bishop Love? It’s not gonna be just him and the Team anymore, Seldom. It’ll be the state police. Maybe the FBI. Maybe the CIA, for all I know. We’ve got to hide out for a while. At least through the winter.”

Smith is quiet as they watch the camp below, half a mile away. No sign of movement down there yet. Beyond the camp and Lizard Rock are the many shadowy canyons of the Maze. “Well, George, I don’t know. You might make it down in there. If you could get to the river, you’d have a good chance. There’s plenty of catfish in the Green, I mean channel cat, that’s good eatin’, and generally easy to catch, and there is some deer in the side canyons. Not much but some. And some wild horses and a few bighorns, and now and then of course there’ll be a dead cow floatin’ down the river. Maybe I could send one down to you now and then myself. Along with a fleet of watermelons in late August.”

“You didn’t answer what I said,” Hayduke says.

Smith makes no reply to this. Hayduke continues on the other track.

“If I can get one deer a month I’ll survive. I can jerk the meat. If I can get one every two weeks I’ll be fat and happy as a beaver. I’ll build a smoker for the fish. Besides what’s in the food caches—enough beans there for a month. I won’t need any dead cows. A watermelon
would be nice, I guess, if you want to float some down to me. But you better stay.”

Smith smiles, sadly. “George,” he says, “I already done that kind of thing. Several times. It ain’t the food that’s the problem.”

“Well, fuck, I’m not worried about the winter either. I’ll fix up one of those old Anasazi ruins or a good snug cave in the rock and keep enough juniper and pinyon pine on hand and I’ll be ready for any blizzard you got. When these vigilantes leave the area I’ll hike back and get my pack and bedroll. Not a thing to worry about.”

“It ain’t the winter either.”

Silence. They lie on the rock, watching the enemy. Sleep by day, advance by night. But hunger gnaws at their bellies. Both canteens are empty again. Hayduke, stiff from his wounds and bandages, his clothes in rags, retains only his knife, revolver, rifle and rope, a few matches in his pocket. Smith is gaunt and weary, dirty, starved and homesick, beginning to feel his beginning middle age.

“You think I’ll get lonesome,” Hayduke says.

“That’s right.”

“You think I can’t take the lonesomeness.”

“It can get bad, George.”

A pause. “You could be right, maybe. We’ll see.” Hayduke rubs the gnat bites on his hairy neck. “But I’m going to give it a try. You know, this is something I’ve wanted to do all my life. I mean live on my own, out in the wilderness.” He pats the stock of his rifle. He touches the grip of the Buck Special. “I think we’ll be all right. I just think maybe we’ll be fucking all right, Seldom. And sometime next spring I’ll come up the river and pay you a visit. Or pay your wife a visit. You’ll be in jail, naturally.”

Another wan smile by Smith. “You’re always welcome, George. If I ain’t there you can help with the kids and the housework while Susan drives the tractor. Keep the old place going.”

“I thought you had no use for farming?”

“I’m a river guide,” Smith says. “I’m a boatman. That ranch is only what they call social security. Susan’s the farmer, she’s good at
it; me I’ve got a black thumb. Anyhow I want to get back there for a few days.”

“They’ll be waiting for you.”

“Only a few days. Then maybe I’ll load up one of the boats and come down the river a-lookin’ for you. Let’s say about a couple weeks from now. I’ll bring you some watermelons and the newspapers so you can read all about yourself.”

“What about your other wife?”

“I got
three
wives,” Smith says proudly.

“What about them?”

Smith considers. “Susan’s the one I want to see.” He glances toward the dawning east. “Reckon we oughta hole up now, George, get some sleep. Our friends out there are gonna be lookin’ for us pretty soon.”

“I am so goddamned fucking hungry….”

“You and me both, George. But we got to hole up now.”

“If there was some way we could divert those guys away from their camp down there. Distract them just for a few minutes, sneak in and dig up our cache….”

“Let’s get some rest first, George, and then we’ll think about it. Let’s wait till the rain starts.”

They retreat five hundred yards into the darkness of the Fins, walking on rock, leaving no tracks, and bed down under a deep ledge, hidden by fallen slabs of sandstone from anything but the closest inspection. Mumbling and grumbling, stomachs aching, limbs weak and flabby from lack of protein, throats dry from thirst, they try to sleep, and pass after a while into a twilight consciousness, half awake half asleep, shaking with little nightmares, groaning.

Far off over the plateau, three thousand feet above, lightning whips the pinyon pines, followed by rumbles of thunder rolling across the canyons, through the clouds, into the heavy silence of a sunless dawn. A few drops fall on the slickrock beyond the shelter of their ledge, making damp spots that fade quickly, evaporating into the thirsty air. Finally Smith, curled on his side, falls into deep sleep.

Hayduke schemes and dreams and cannot sleep. Too tired to
sleep. Too hungry, angry, excited and fearful to sleep. It appears to him that only one obstacle remains between himself and a wilderness autumn and winter down in the Maze, down there where he can lose himself at last, forget himself for good, become pure predator dedicated to nothing but survival, nothing but the clean hard bright pursuit of game. That ultimate world, he thinks, or rather dreams, the final world of meat, blood, fire, water, rock, wood, sun, wind, sky, night, cold, dawn, warmth, life. Those short, blunt and irreducible words which stand for almost everything he thinks he has lost. Or never really had. And loneliness?
Loneliness?
Is that all he has to fear?

But there remains the one obstacle: the enemy camp beside his supply cache at Lizard Rock.

A dazzle of sudden light penetrates his closed eyes. Suspense. Then comes the savage crash of thunder, a roar like the splitting of the belly of the sky. Cannonballs bombard the stone. Another flash of blue-white light, scorching the canyon wall. Jolted fully awake, Hayduke waits for the boom, counting the seconds. One … two …

CRACK!KA-POW!

That was close. Two seconds. About twenty-two hundred feet away. A steady fall of rain comes down, shining like a bead curtain beyond the overhang of the ledge. He turns to look at Smith, meaning to speak to him, but checks himself.

Old Seldom Seen lies on his side, fast asleep despite the thunder (for him a familiar and maybe soothing sound), head cradled on his arm, a smile on the homely face. The sonofabitch is smiling. Good dream for a change. He looks so vulnerable at the moment, so helpless and happy and almost human, Hayduke cannot disturb him. He thinks: Why wake him at all? We got to split up anyhow. And Hayduke hates farewells.

He takes off his boots and turns his greasy, worn socks inside out, caressing the hot spots on his feet. No change of socks, no foot powder, no warm bath, those feet will just have to hold up for a few more hours till we get that cache opened. He puts the socks and boots back on. More lightning, another drum roll of thunder cascading off the cliffs. Hayduke finds the effect temporarily stimulating. Invigorating.
The rain comes down, heavily now, like a waterfall, visibility less than a hundred feet. Good, excellent, exactly what they were hoping for.

Hayduke buckles on his gun belt and the holstered .357, slings rifle and rope across his shoulders, takes one of the two remaining (and empty) canteens and slips away. Outside, the rain beats down on his head and shoulders, drips from beak of cap to tip of nose as he forces himself into an uphill trot. In the thick gray light, flaring from moment to moment with blinding swords of lightning, the Fins gleam like old pewter, four-hundred-foot walls of wet silver, hulking in the mist, streaming with water.

He emerges in a few minutes from the defile and pauses to look out at a world much smaller than before, with eerie forms of stone rising through a sheet of rain, plateau walls lost beyond the obscurity, Lizard Rock itself no longer in sight. But he knows the way. Pulling tighter on the cap, he jogs into the storm.

Smith is not surprised to wake and find his buddy gone. Not surprised but a little hurt. Would have liked at least a chance to say good-bye (God be with you) or fare (thee) well or at least so long (for now), old buddy, till we meet once more. Along the river, maybe. Or down in Arizona for the glorious finale to the campaign, the rupturing, removal and obliteration of, of course, that Glen Canyon National Sewage Lagoon Dam. We never did get all together on that one.

Smith wakes slowly, taking his time. No rush at all, now that Hayduke’s gone. The rain pours down in steady monotone beyond the ledge, streams of water trickling into the cave, seeping under his shoulder. It was the water, not the rain or lightning, which finally woke him up. Crawling about for dryer ground he had noticed Hayduke absent, together with Hayduke’s last belongings, and realized without surprise but with some sense of deprivation that he, Smith, was the last one left, from his point of view.