The Monkey Wrench Gang (31 page)

The truck driver swung his mixer to the curb with squealing brakes, opened the door on the driver’s side and wallowed out. Doc bounced up on the sidewalk and pedaled smoothly by on the right, sitting up straight like a gentleman. He shifted into third. The truck driver ran a few steps after him, stopped and retreated to his cab as a chorus of horns began to sound,
tutti fortissima
, behind the truck.

Still on Iron, for him the most convenient route for another mile, Doc became unpleasantly aware that he was being pursued. A glance over the shoulder and he saw the cement truck gaining again, bearing down like Goliath. Heart beating fast, chewing desperately on his smoldering stogie, Doc made plans. The corner he had in mind, one block ahead, featured a vacant lot with a giant high-legged two-faced steel-beamed billboard already in view.

Doc slowed the bicycle a bit, pedaling as close to the curb as he could, and allowed a couple of cars to pass. The cement truck was now directly behind him. Doc glanced back once more and threw the driver another two-pronged unspeakable Calabrian insult. The air horn replied with a bray of rage. Doc stepped up the speed, shifting
into sixth as the cement truck thundered at his rear. The corner came close; he focused on the narrow opening in the curb where a dirt driveway led to the billboards. (Doc and Bonnie had edited those signs before.) Giving the driver a sporting chance, Doc courteously signaled the oblique right turn he was about to make. Finger extended, of course.

The moment arrived. Doc banked gracefully into the turn, losing not a stroke at the pedals. Swift and sleek, sitting sedately upright on the tiny saddle of his bike, he passed between the steel posts and under the lower edge of the double billboard. The top of his hat cleared the steel crossbeam by six inches. The cement truck followed.

When he heard the crash, Doc slowed and circled, surveying the damage: spectacular but not serious. Both billboards were down, sprawled all over the cab and still-revolving mixer of the cement truck. Out of the midst of the tangled wreckage rose a spout of steam, hissing like a geyser from the ruptured radiator of Unit #17 Duke City Reddy-Mix Cement & Gravel Co.

Doc watched the driver crawl from his cab into the shade of the billboards. Except for a bleeding nose and minor contusions, lacerations and shock, the man appeared not seriously injured. The Dopplerian moan of sirens approached, arrived and died with the slamming of doors. The police took charge of the scene. Satisfied, Doc pedaled harmlessly away.

Supper was not quite so facile. Dr. Sarvis loved to eat but hated to cook. After banging about for a while up and down his kitchen with a package of pork chops, hard as quartzite from four weeks in the freezer, he settled—where in the
hell
is my
Bonnie?
—for a can of string beans, some old leftover Abbzug chicken salad, and a bottle of beer. He turned on the TV to watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite and his friends. He sat down at the table and studied once again the postcard he’d found in the mailbox.

The card was postmarked Jacob Lake, Arizona, and showed on its picture side a view of mountain meadow, mule deer, and aspens in summer green.

He ate his lonesome bachelor supper, feeling as cold and glum as the chicken salad. He missed the gang. He missed the vivid air, the wastelands, the little yellow flowers, the smell of juniper smoke, the feel of sand and sandstone under his hands. He missed the pleasures, the action, the satisfaction of the good work. (Support Your Local Eco-Raiders.) But most he missed his Bonnie. The bonniest Abbzug who ever lived.

He watched the news. Same as yesterday’s. The General Crisis coming along nicely. Nothing new except the commercials full of sly art and eco-porn. Scenes of the Louisiana bayous, strange birds in slow-motion flight, cypress trees bearded with Spanish moss. Above the primeval scene the voice of Power spoke, reeking with sincerity, in praise of itself, the Exxon Oil Company—its tidiness, its fastidious care for all things wild, its concern for human needs.

Coming back from the refrigerator, second beer in hand, Doc paused for a moment in front of the television screen. Long shot of an offshore drilling rig. Music rising on concluding phrase. The words “We thought you’d like to know” passing across the screen. Too much for Doc. All of a sudden it was all too much. He drew back his big booted right foot and kicked the picture tube square in the eye. It imploded-exploded with a sound like the popping of a grandiose light bulb. A blue glare filled the kitchen and then died in the instant of its birth; shards and flakes of fluorescent glass slid down the walls.

Doc paused to contemplate the awful thing he had done. “Thus I refute McLuhan,” he muttered.

He sat down again at the table. The smell of zinc sulfide floated on the air. He finished his supper and dumped the dishes onto the pile of dirty dishes already overflowing the dishwashing machine. He crammed them down, leaning heavily on the lid. A crunch of splintering
glass. He fed Bonnie’s cat and threw it out, left the kitchen, sat down in the living room and lit a cigar, gazing out through the big west window at the sullen magnificence, like a bed of embers, of the city. Above the city and beyond the Rio Grande, the crescent moon hung pale as platinum in the evening sky, shining down on city, river and desert plain.

Doc thought of his friends out there somewhere, far away to the north and west, among the rocks, under that simple light, doing their necessary work while he idled away his middle age. The devil finds work for idle hands. Dr. Sarvis reached for the newspaper. Saw the full-page ad on the back. Boat Show, Duke City Ice Arena. He thought he might go have a look at the new houseboats. Tomorrow, or the next day. Soon.

Hayduke parked his jeep out of sight among the pines near the entrance
to the logging area and stationed Bonnie on the hood with instructions to keep her eyes open and ears clean. She nodded impatiently.

He put on hard hat, coveralls, gun and gun belt, work gloves, took a small flashlight and his other tools and disappeared from Bonnie’s ken into the deep twilight of the cut-over site, fading like a shadow among the giant machines. She wanted to read but it was already too dark. She sang songs for a while, softly, and listened to the cries of birds, unknown and unseen birds, off in the forest, retreating to their nests for the night, heads nestled under fold of wing, retiring into the simple harmless dreams of avian sleep. (A bird has no cerebrum.)

The forest seemed eternal. The winds had stopped some time ago and the stillness, as the birds settled down, became finer and deeper. Bonnie was aware of tall presences around her, the brooding yellow pines, the somber shaggy personalities of the Engelmann spruce and white fir, their high crowns pointing like cathedral spires, at variant angles (for everything which rises must diverge), toward that luxurious fireball array of first-magnitude stars which ornament, as they illuminate, doing the best they can, the vast interior of our
expanding universe. Bonnie though had seen it before: she rolled and lit a joint.

Meanwhile under the belly of a bulldozer George W. Hayduke was tugging at an oversize spanner, trying to open the drain plug in the crankcase of an Allis-Chalmers HD-41. Merely the biggest tractor Allis-Chalmers makes. His wrench was three feet long—he’d taken it from the tractor’s toolbox—but he couldn’t turn that square nut. He reached for his cheater, a three-foot length of steel pipe, fitted it like a sleeve over the end of the wrench handle and tugged again. This time the nut gave, a fraction of a millimeter. All he needed; Hayduke yanked again and the nut began to turn.

So far he’d done nothing dramatic, merely following routine procedures. Where possible, as in the case of this HD-41, he decided to drain the crankcase oil, planning to start up the engine just before leaving. (Noise factor.) He had no keys but assumed he would find what was needed by breaking into the office trailer.

Another turn on the plug and the oil would begin to drain. Hayduke eased his body out of the way, regripped his pipe-handled wrench. And froze.

“How you doin’, pard?” said a man’s voice, deep and low, not more than twenty feet away.

Hayduke reached for his sidearm.

“Naw, don’t do that.” The man flicked a switch, training the beam of a powerful electric torch directly into Hayduke’s eyes. “I got this,” he explained, pushing the muzzle of what certainly looked to be a twelve-gauge shotgun into the light, where Hayduke could see it. “Yeah, it’s loaded,” he said. “And it’s cocked and it’s touchy as a rattlesnake.”

He paused. Hayduke waited.

“Okay,” the man said, “now you go ahead and finish what you’re a-doin’ under there.”

“Finish?”

“Go ahead.”

“I was looking for something,” Hayduke said.

The man laughed, an easy, pleasant laugh, but not without menace. “Is that right?” he said. “Now what the hell you a-lookin’ for under the crankcase guard of a goldang bulldozer after dark?”

Hayduke thought carefully. It
was
a good question. “Well,” he said, and hesitated.

“You think it over now. Take your time.”

“Well …”

“This oughta be pretty good.”

“Yeah. Well, I was looking for—well, I’m writing a book about bulldozers and I thought I ought to see what they look like. Underneath.”

“That ain’t very good. How do they look?”

“Greasy.”

“I coulda told you that, pard, saved you all the trouble. What’s that three-foot end wrench for you got in your hands? That what you write your book with?”

Hayduke said nothing.

“Okay,” the man said, “go ahead and finish your job.” Hayduke hesitated. “I mean it. Turn that plug. Let the oil out.”

Hayduke did as he was told. The shotgun, after all, like the flashlight was aimed straight at his face. A shotgun at close range is a powerful argument. He worked, loosened the plug; the oil streamed out, sleek, rich and liberated, onto and into the churned-up soil.

“Now,” the man said, “drop the wrench, put your hands behind your head and kinda sidewind outa there on your back.”

Hayduke obeyed. Wasn’t easy, wriggling out from under a tractor without using the hands. But he did it.

“Now roll over on your face.” Again Hayduke obeyed. The man rose from his squatting position, came close, unholstered Hayduke’s gun, stepped back and hunkered down again. “Okay,” he said, “you can turn over now and sit up.” He examined Hayduke’s piece. “Ruger, .357 mag. That’s power all right.”

Hayduke faced him. “You don’t have to shine that light right in my eyes.”

“You’re right, pard.” The stranger switched off the light. “Sorry about that.”

They faced each other in the sudden darkness, each wondering, perhaps, who had the quicker and better night vision. But the stranger had his forefinger on the trigger of the shotgun. They could see each other well enough in the high-plateau starlight. Neither made a move for some time.

The stranger cleared his throat. “You sure work slow,” he complained. “I been watchin’ you for seems like an hour.”

Hayduke said nothing.

“But I can see you do a good job. Thorough. I like that.” The man spat on the ground. “Not like some of them half-assed dudes I seen up on the Powder River. Or them kids down around Tucson. Or them nuts that derailed—What’s your name?”

Hayduke opened his mouth. Henry Lightcap? he thought. Joe Smith? How about—

“Forget it,” the man said, “I don’t want to know.”

Hayduke stared harder at the face before him, ten feet away in the starlight, gradually becoming clear. He saw that the stranger was wearing a mask. Not a black mask over the eyes but simply a big bandanna draped outlaw-style over the nose, mouth and chin. Above the mask one dark right eye, vaguely shining, peered at him from under the droopy brim of a black hat. The other eye stayed closed in what appeared to be a permanent wink. Hayduke finally realized that the man’s left eyeball was gone, long gone, lost and forgotten no doubt in some ancient barroom quarrel, some legendary war.

“Who are you?” Hayduke said.

The masked man spoke in a tone both surprised and hurt. “You don’t want to know that. That’s not a nice question.”

Silence. They stared at each other.

The stranger chuckled. “Bet you thought I was the night watchman, didn’t you? Made you sweat a little, huh?”

“Where is the watchman?”

“In there.” The stranger jerked a thumb toward the nearby office
trailer, where a pickup truck stood parked, company decals on the doors.

“What’s he doing?”

“Nothin’. I got him hogtied and gagged. He’s all right. He’ll keep till Monday morning. The loggers’ll be back then and turn him loose.”

“Monday morning is tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, I reckon I oughta mosey on outa here.”

“How’d you get here?”

“I like to use a horse for this kind of work. Not so fast, maybe, but quieter.”

Another pause.

“What do you mean?” Hayduke said, “by ‘this kind of work’?”

“Same thing you’re doin’. You sure ask a lot of questions. You wanta see my horse?”

“No. I want my gun back.”

“Okay.” The stranger handed it back. “Next time you better keep your lookout a little closer.”

“Where is she?” Hayduke reholstered his weapon.

“Right on that jeep where you left her, puffin’ on one of them little Mary Jane cigarettes. Or she was.” The stranger paused to look at the surrounding night, then turned back to Hayduke. “Here’s somethin’ else you want too,” he said, fishing in his pocket and handing over a bunch of keys. “Now you can start them engines and burn ’em up real good.”

Hayduke jingled the keys; he looked toward the office trailer. “You certain that watchman is secure?”

“I got him handcuffed, hogtied, gagged, dead drunk and locked up.”