High Plains Tango (22 page)

Chapter Sixteen

O
NE OF THOSE REACHING FOR SUSANNA BENTEEN, AND THERE
had been many who tried and nearly as many who failed, was George Riddick. That was some years before the Avenue of the High Plains was announced.

The nomadic life has its own codes, and those who have traveled loose and free sometime in their lives, with no purpose except looking for one, come to know the signs and symbols. A certain evidence of fatigue brought on by the miles and erratic sleep, the scuffed shoes and the old knapsack beside your chair in a desert caf where the afternoon sunlight angles in through dusty windows. The way you drink your coffee—slowly—and count your cigarettes and count your change—carefully—making sure there is enough, what you need for the bus that will swing open its door with a sigh and take you on to the next place, and the next after that.

In Topock, Arizona, on the California line, Susanna Benteen had waited for a bus that never came. Gracie’s Cafe, where the bus stopped, would close at five, and it was already four. The place was empty except for Gracie and Susanna and the big man with a black beard, who drank coffee and twice looked in Susanna’s direction, noticing the signs and symbols of the road.

A wall phone rang behind the cash register. Gracie answered, then walked over to where Susanna was sitting. “Missy, I’m sorry, but the bus broke down in Kingman and won’t be coming until tomorrow. There’s no place to stay in Topock, but if you can make it over to Needles, you might find a room.”

The road was like that, and Susanna Benteen had learned to roll with it and was trying to think this through. She had been in similar predicaments many times in her life. The overbooked Pan Am flight out of Delhi on a Friday night, with the next available flight not until Tuesday. The train that had stopped at a country station fifty miles south of Brussels, the passengers forced off because the Brussels terminal was already filled with stranded trains during a winter storm. The time her father’s truck had broken down a hundred miles from Olduvai.

The teapot before her was almost empty. Susanna poured the last of the hot water into her cup and considered her options, which were close to zero. Outside, three men sat on an old car, laughing, spitting into the dirt, looking in at her now and then. A winter sundown was only thirty minutes away, the Mojave light dropping fast. Traveling alone had its benefits, but for a woman this kind of situation was not one of them. A man could walk outside, kick a few tires, and offer to pay one of the boys for a ride over to Needles. A woman found risk in that, and with good reason. Unfair, but the way things were. Susanna didn’t like it, but she understood it.

The big man at the counter walked over to her. “Look, I’m headed for Flagstaff, but I’ll be glad to run you over to Needles if you’re stuck.”

She looked up at him. He’d been polite to Gracie when he had ordered coffee. Some risk. She measured it, looked at him again, and said, “Thank you. I’d very much appreciate that. .  .  . I could pay you something for your trouble.”

“No need for that. It’s not far. My name is George Riddick.”

He picked up her knapsack and held the door for her, and they walked to his van. The boys outside kicked their tires, spat, and winked at one another, malignant and knowing. As Susanna and the man walked past, one of them said, in a voice intentionally made loud enough for Susanna to hear, “Good thing you made your move on that cute little piece when you did, beard. We were just one step away from it.”

Riddick put down Susanna’s knapsack, turned to the man, and slapped him hard across the face, hard enough to make him stumble and nearly fall. The other two straightened from where they’d been leaning against the car, the hormones beginning to chug upward: a fallen companion, honor in the desert, all of that. Riddick looked at them, grinned, and waited. When they didn’t move, he picked up the knapsack, opened the van door for Susanna, and put the knapsack by her feet. She was shaking a little. The man had acted with a raw, instant violence that unnerved her.

The van smelled of cigar smoke. Tools were scattered about, old coffee cups tossed on the backseat. He turned the ignition key and looked over at her. “Sorry about that garbage with the yahoos, but I’ve got a short fuse when it comes to smart-asses.”

The tightness in her stomach eased a little, but not much. She clutched her hands in her lap and decided talk might help. “Do you live in Flagstaff?”

“No, south of there in the mountains, near a place called Sedona. Ever hear of it?”

“Yes. I was there once, just passing through. It was quite beautiful.”

“Where you headed?”

“New Haven .  .  . Connecticut. I lived there before my father died, and I have a few estate matters yet to settle.”

“I can take you as far as Flagstaff if you want. You’ll be able to get a bus out of there with no problem.”

Three hours later, they made the turn south outside of Flagstaff, and Susanna went on with George Riddick to his place in the mountains. In the two months she spent there, he did not touch her or even try. George Riddick lived an ascetic’s life born of an anger that never left him, and sex was no longer part of that life.

But through the years, she knew he was out there taking care of the business that mattered to him. She was always aware of a dark presence roaming around behind the occasional newspaper article reporting some horrific violence done to the people and organizations Riddick hated. Neither the rumors nor the articles ever mentioned his name, yet she knew it was him, an avenging wrath from the galaxies in an old Dodge van with balding tires and rust dripping from the fenders. Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun with a shortened barrel and a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol, both wrapped in oilskin and riding behind his driver’s seat where he could reach them easily. Riddick in stained khaki pants and a worn flannel shirt, paratrooper boots, and his black ball cap with “Earth Warrior” hand stitched on the crown. Old army field jacket with a strip of electrician’s tape above the right breast pocket covering the space where his name was stenciled. And the cold cigar in his mouth and the heavy, gray-flecked black beard that grazed his chest when he nodded his head ever so slightly.

Along the thread of environmental radicalism, from quiet protest to civil disobedience to hard violence, George Riddick had no comparison. He was off the scale. Susanna had come to that understanding in the time she knew him, and the savage, relentless intensity with which he pursued his ends had frightened and yet fascinated her in a way that was almost sexual.

The Sierra Club? He called them politicians, Kens and Barbies in $300 Patagonia jackets. How about PlanetFire and their summer rallies, their botched attempts to blow up transmission lines running from power plants in the Southwest? Riddick scorned them as dilettantes, monkey wrenchers who read Edward Abbey and played games in the shadows, assaulting technological manifestations rather than the destroyers themselves.

He once said to Susanna, “I am what comes along when everything else has failed. There’s nothing very admirable about what I do, it just has to be done. If prevention is not possible, then retribution is next best, and if the retribution is certain enough and hard enough when it comes, then eventually it may become a kind of prevention based on fear.”

Riddick had been out there before, putting his life on the line. Two purple hearts and other medals, all of which he had thrown into the garbage years ago. He had been there all right, leeches and snakes and malaria and little men in black who carried their weapons and rice down trails worn smooth beneath the Cambodian jungle canopy. In the early days, the M-16s hadn’t worked right, jamming at critical moments, so Riddick arranged to have a 12-gauge Remington pump shotgun smuggled to him. He sawed the barrel short and used that, crawled through the jungle and became a killing machine, making the world safe for economic development and biotechnology.

George Riddick had no plans beyond the afternoon before him or the night or the day following. Nothing more to do than spend his life running symbolic hoses from the outlet pipes and smokestacks of the defilers of nature back to the executive offices.

He had ways of doing that, George Riddick did. Ever drink a large glass of influenza-green number two from your outlet pipe? Ever breathe plastic bags full of dog-hockey brown taken from the top of your factory’s smokestack, the one you stuck a short way across the border in Matamoros to avoid the tougher U. S. environmental laws?

Ever eat a slice of yellow, maggoty dolphin your tuna-fishing fleet suffocated in its nets a week before? If you had run into George Riddick in the right circumstances, you would have, for certain you would have done that. The executive world of good hotels and neat annual reports would not have prepared you to deal with the malevolent, elemental force that was George Riddick. And you would have been well motivated to drink sincerely, breathe deeply, and chew intently. Motivated by the Beretta poked in your crotch, by the sound of your twelve-cylinder Jaguar being bludgeoned to its original molecules, and by the sight of your wife gagging as she tried to swallow pieces of her mink coat while her head was being shaved.

George Riddick had left behind him a ragged and random trail of traumatized corporate executives and government administrators, many of whom had retired after their only encounter with him. In good resorts of the Caribbean, word about Riddick passed from beach chair to beach chair. The villa at Jumby Bay cost $1,400 a night and kept the native islanders repulsed, but nothing could save you from Riddick if he decided to come. That’s what they said, rum punch in hand, shuddering a little in the warm sunlight.

George Riddick understood that rich people seldom were affected by the problems they created. Others were, people and animals alike, but lawyers fought it out in abstract terms far from the everyday reality of designer executive offices. George Riddick made sure you suffered the consequences of your decisions, physically and emotionally. They said he was an unanticipated echo of the things you had done and that you would think hard before doing them again after his violation of your spirit and your manhood.

As Riddick said to Susanna Benteen, “I simply provide an additional outcome to the bad choices certain people make.”

Yes, George Riddick had been out there, and he was still out there with a sticker pasted across his dashboard that read
PUNISH THE BASTARDS!
If you breached the standards he had raised single-handedly, he would be coming. Not for a while, but he would be coming your way .  .  . eventually. And as he passed through the Mojave from time to time, he remembered Susanna Benteen and wished his mind had been in a place where he could have had such a woman for his own.

Chapter Seventeen

T
HE OLD MAN:

“As I came to find out, Carlisle McMillan and I shared at least one other conviction in addition to liking Gally Deveraux, which was neither of us cared much for flocks of men in matching blazers, calling themselves community representatives or something like that. You know ’em, easy to spot. They’re the guys with shit-eatin’ grins in grainy black-and-white newspaper photographs, always standing behind a mayor or governor or some other suit at ribbon cuttings in honor of recently constructed shrines to human ingenuity, Mammon, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

“I dislike ’em mostly because they’re always so goddamned cheerful. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a severe shortage of happiness in the world, and I’m all for good cheer. But if you look real close at those pictures, you can see l-u-c-r-e printed right across their carefully flossed teeth. It comes through even in bad photographs. Their abundant cheer flows not from seeing a good sunrise over the Little Sal or simply by being given another day of life, but from the sweet dreams of money with which they’ll do something to make even more money. Just what they’re going to do with all this money is not clear to me and maybe even not to them.

“The other thing I notice is that these ribbon cuttings almost always have something to do with the destruction of nature. The little matching-blazer army is ’specially fond of projects such as highways, dams, nuclear waste dumps, and gigantic bridges, real big schemes of any kind that are being paid for by taxpayers other than themselves and seem to do great amounts of damage to nature. They use the word
progress
a lot in talking about these matters, though that’s recently been replaced somewhat by
economic development.

“They only wear their precious blazer outfits when the bag’s outta the cat. That is, when the project has been completed or is too far along to stop. In the early stages, they’re involved in espionage and plotting, so they keep a low profile. That way they’re able to surprise the general population with the wonder of these ventures when the projects emerge full-blown and ready for construction. Moreover, surprise has the value of cannonballing the projects right through the guts and out the other side of anyone having the impertinence to raise questions about the merits of a particular majestic enterprise relative to its cost.”

I smiled at the old man’s words and checked the small tape recorder I had laid next to his breakfast plate. I had seen the blazers. Everyone had.

The old man chewed his over-easy eggs, took a sip of coffee, and continued. “Their main forum for handling opposition of any kind is an exercise in phony democracy called the public hearing. I went to one of these meetings once when they was thinking about putting a big dam across the Little Sal. See, plans are made by bureaucrats, engineers, and selected movers and shakers. After everything’s already been decided, a public hearing is called for the purpose of what’s gracefully labeled ‘soliciting citizen input.’

“But the big thinkers don’t really want input from citizens. If common folks had too much input and asked hard questions about who really stands to benefit from dams and highways, the things might never get built. The hearing is just a slick way of getting people to
think
they’ve had some say, which they have, except their
input
has nothing to do with the final
output
and therefore is of no value, not to mention being useless.

“The planners know this, so it’s kind of a delicate balancing act to con people into thinking they’ve had a voice in the matter without letting ’em screw up the big dreams. That’s why the local leaders sit in the audience at these hearings and pretend they’re just regular citizens. They’re also watching for any real troublemakers so they can identify them and report to the main propeller heads, who are from out of town.

And I can tell you, Carlisle McMillan got their attention right away, because Carlisle, unlike most of the sheep, is not cowed by anybody, seems to me. More than that, he absolutely hates experts. And understand, experts are the key to the entire scam of the type we’re talking about here. At the hearings, ordinary people ask sort of simple questions, like ‘Couldn’t Denver find another source of water rather than damming up the Little Sal and pumping all the way from the high plains to the eastern slope? It’s a pretty good fishing river, and some of us would hate to see it spoiled.’

“At that point, the suits go into high gear. It’s all been intricately choreographed, ’cause there’s too much profit riding on this to leave anything to chance. The moderator of the hearing says something like ‘I’ll turn that question over to our expert, Larry Software, a PhD in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technocracy with two thousand years of experience in such matters, a staff of four hundred and sixty graduates of Ivy League schools, and a computer bigger’n this town.’

“Dr. Larry, who’s at the front of the room, has about twenty volumes bound with plastic spirals within arm’s reach. These are collectively called
The Report.
Expert Larry rises, puts his hand on the stack, and says, ‘I hope all of you have had time to read and consider
The Report.
On pages one sixteen through two ninety of volume twelve is the benefit-cost analysis for the project. Of course, in volumes fifteen and sixteen, along with some useful notes in the two-volume appendix to
The Report,
is our multiple-criteria decision model, in which we have included our set of alternatives, our prioritized criteria, and the utility weights we have assigned to these criteria, along with estimated outcomes of each alternative in light of the criteria. Oh yes, you may also have noticed our discount rate justification in volume eleven. Using all of this, we ran one hundred and eighty-two million simulations on our giant Crawdad 290FXZ computer, constantly adjusting and testing our probability estimates and examining the model’s sensitivity to parameter changes. Clearly, the only feasible alternative is to dam the bejesus out of the Little Sal so the people of Denver can have all the water they need for car washing and theme parks.’ ”

The old man shook his head. “I ask you now: Is the citizen who likes to fish the Little Sal smarter than Larry Software, his Crawdad 290FXZ, and his cast of hundreds? Hell, no. In the course of Larry’s mental enema, our fisherman is more than sorry he ever got to his feet. He hasn’t read
The Report
’cause he didn’t know it existed, and anyway, he’d rather be bass fishing than plowing through that stuff, so he wouldn’t have read it even if he had known it existed. But he stands there, nodding from time to time so he won’t look too stupid, all the while being secretly aware that what Dr. Larry’s really saying is, ‘I’m sticking this project right up your sweet ass, you little toad, so sit down and shut up.’

“Besides that, the governor is all for it, which the moderator mentions about every three minutes, so whatever project we’re talking about must be all right. The governor wouldn’t be governor if he didn’t know what he was doing, right? Also, some folks feel generally uncomfortable in opposing things a smart man like the governor supports, as if it were sort of unpatriotic to behave that way, and they’ll buy the whole shitaree, regardless of what it is, on that basis alone.

“Trouble was, as I said before, Carlisle McMillan was not awed by experts. Quite the opposite. He’d seen these counterfeit proceedings before in California. So when the newspaper our state counts on lifted off in ecstasy about the new highway, Carlisle took one look at the maps on the second page and knew he had trouble. In addition to a general map showing the proposed route from New Orleans to Calgary, our reporter included a series of smaller maps that broke the state down into sections. And there it was: a nice, fat line right through Carlisle’s thirty acres northwest of Salamander and the grove across the road from him.

“Accompanying the maps was some of the most breathless prose you’d care to read, courtesy of the state’s Department of Economic Development, describing in some detail the almost overwhelming benefits the new road would bring us. One main idea underlying the project was to provide a highway link between the terminus of an oil pipeline that would be built from as yet unexplored Arctic oil fields all the way to Calgary. Then tanker trucks would haul the cheap crude from Calgary to refineries in Texas and New Orleans, the economies of which had fallen on hard times. Boy, that was brilliant. Use lots of oil to haul oil, creating your own demand in providing the supply.

“Of course, there were other much advertised benefits, such as getting farmers’ grain and livestock to markets and providing more incentives for giant Tokyo-based electronics corporations to locate plants out here, which, as we all know, they was just itching to do, except for the lack of a modern road system and rattlesnakes crawling around on the sunburnt greens of our nine-hole golf course. Tourism, it was suggested, would explode, as people desiring to visit Salamander and its many attractions, such as Leroy’s and the post office, could now get here more easily.

“Some even mentioned the possibility of putting a collection of boutiques in Lester’s TV and Appliance building, if the old codger—that being me—living on the second floor could be evicted. And these budding entrepreneurs were assured by lawyer Birney that, indeed, residents of Codgerdom have no rights of any kind regarding anything, and eviction was no problem.

“I had that part all figured out, however, and wasn’t worried in case it came to eviction by force. I had a plan. Among the souvenirs collected during my waltz across Europe in the winter of ’44 was a live hand grenade. Did it still work? I was guessing it did. Even if it didn’t, I figured the eyeball shock factor would be almost as good as an actual explosion.

“I could visualize it all, dwelt on it. The plan was as follows. I’d be sitting on the steps to my apartment, grenade concealed in my lap, pin pulled out. I’d be holding down the lever on the grenade, and I’d have a string leading from the grenade to a broomstick hidden behind me. I estimated Fearless Fred Mumblypeg, town cop and eviction master, would be in the lead, coming up the stairs with lawyer Birney right behind him, followed in turn by all the right-thinking commercial wizards about to lose their financial asses on a dumb idea.

“I imagined hearing Fred’s voice, ‘We have a warrant  .  .  .’ Everybody would be packed in the stairwell behind him, looking up at me. Just as he’d get the words going, I’d swing out my little present on the broom handle so it was dangling right in front of them and yell
‘Shit on a stick!’
I also thought about following that with
‘Kill ’em all, let God sort it out!’
My old platoon sergeant used to say that second part, though I admitted to myself it was a little overused, and I was hoping I’d think of something better at the moment of truth when the storm troopers came up my stairs. I figured I would, since I’d be watching Fred go to his knees while lawyer Birney was trampling the fat red blazers behind him, and all of that would have been inspirational, I’ll tell you that.

“But there I go digressing again. The point is that the list of good things expected to flow from this great highway was virtually endless and was repeated almost every day by our state newspaper, supplemented on Wednesdays by a semiliterate piece in the weekly
Salamander Sentinel,
making even more extravagant promises, though it printed the maps upside down two weeks running.

“Now, the local excitement over what they named the Avenue of the High Plains was understandable, since Salamander was dying. I’d been conducting a death watch for fifteen years, though the decline had set in long before I began my observations. The real issue was whether anything could be done to save the patient. My personal opinion, and understand I ain’t no expert at all on these matters, was that nothing could be done. We were too far gone for resuscitation, kind of like a cinder: not quite ashes, but incapable of further combustion.

“And I felt bad about that. Salamander was a pretty good place at one time. Still is, in some ways. But it’d become increasingly clear to me that we’d borrowed our days out here ever since Eble Olson drove a stake into the ground in 1896 and named the town after the Little Sal, which in turn had been named by the horse soldiers. Those latter fellas swept through here waving the flag of Manifest Destiny and pretty much decimating the original inhabitants, clearing things out for the white settlers.

“In terms of historical context, I should point out the Indians were gutsy, but they weren’t no match for the thirty-seven-millimeter revolving cannon invented by one Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss of Watertown, Connecticut, or the rapid-fire gun designed by Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling. On top of the firepower, there were broken treaties and land grabs that’d make Genghis Khan blush, not to mention the missionaries working to convince the heathen that Christianity was their true path to salvation, whatever that was.

“What really got the Indians, finally, was that we just took away their main resource by killing all the buffalo, completely wiping out the last herd of northern bison up on the Cannonball River in 1863 using the combined forces of the military, mercenaries, and the Sioux’s old enemies from the woodlands, the Cree. Heck, the government even gave medals to the buffalo hunters for their role in helping to put down the Indian threat.