Hayduke Lives! Read online

  “You don’t have to do it.”

  “I don’t?”

  “I mean you don’t have to tell me the fuckin’ goddamn truth. I know what you mean for chrissake, you don’t have to spell it out.”

  “Maybe you don’t. The truth is, George, I wanta stay out of trouble. But the real truth is I’m afeerd of them nucular power people. They’re something different. They ain’t like ol’ Bishop Love and his comical Search and Rescue Team. They ain’t like him or us. They ain’t even human. They ain’t even people. They ain’t even alive. They — I mean It — It comes from some other world, George. Saturn, maybe. Maybe Pluto. You understand what I’m a-tryin’ to explain, George? They scare me. It scares me.”

  Hayduke was silent, gazing in something like astonishment upon the solemn, sober, serious, incorrigibly bucolic and irredeemably honest face — homely as a hound dog — of Seldom, his old comrade Seldom Seen Smith. The name acquired, at that very moment, a whole new world of significance.

  As Hayduke failed to respond, Smith made further attempt at explanation. “The way I see it, George, if we don’t fight It anymore why then maybe when It takes over It won’t hurt us. Maybe It won’t even notice us if we lay low, you see what I mean? Stay out of sight? Keep real quiet? You know what I’m talkin’ about, George?”

  Hayduke cracked a wan and crooked smile. “Can’t believe this,” he muttered. “Can’t believe my own fuckin’ ears.”

  “The way I got it figured, George, It’ll leave us alone if we leave It alone. Won’t even see us, most likely. Well, anyhow, I can loan you a twenty? That help some?”

  Hayduke turned his eyes again, looking left and right, over and about. Maybe the government did have its sensors out here now, even in the wilderness, and Smith knew it. Looking around, he held out his right paw.

  Smith fished through his pockets, pulled out matches, a rawhide string, a greenish penny, three .44 shells, a crumpled pack of M&Ms. Even good jack Mormons have the sweet tooth. “Well, sheet, guess I don’t have it on me, George. Left my billfold in the truck. Back at trailhead. Meet me there about four days from now, we’ll be a-comin’ up outa here then.”

  “Maybe. Not fuckin’ likely.”

  “Sorry I can’t help anymore, George. But you know how it is.” Seldom held out his hand for the parting handshake. Hayduke took and clasped his hand but without the usual rough vigor, without warmth, and without sliding on down to his wrist and the mountain soul-brothers’ grip of mutual aid and a shared fate, whether for good or ill, for life or death. “Sorry, George …”

  Hayduke kept averting his eyes now, apparently unable or unwilling to look his old friend in the face. Staring instead into the darkness, beyond the tamarisk and stream and the horses and the canyon walls, he spat on the trampled ricegrass at their feet, and merely said, merely out of habit, “Well, you know where to find me. Guess I better go, what the fuck.”

  “You still a-hidin’ out there, George?”

  “Sometimes. Why not? It’s a good fuckin’ camp, nobody’s spotted it yet, so long, Smith.”

  He was gone. Silently, abruptly, like a phantom, Hayduke vanished. Smith, listening with care, could hear no sound of booted feet in motion, no swish of grass, no scrape on stone, no slip and slide of gravel on a talus slope. He knew that Hayduke might have a horse out there in the dark, half a mile off, tied to a juniper and waiting, or again he might not; old George, he was like as not to figure on a-walkin’ all the distance to wherever he was headed next. Ten miles in the night, twenty, even thirty, that was nothing but routine transportation for old George. Sighing with relief, faintly guilt-struck but happy to be rid of Hayduke so easily, Seldom switched on his flashlight and turned toward the tents. He sighed a second time, again with relief, to note that the candle still burned in Cindy’s tent.

  But halfway there he saw her silhouetted shape half rise within the tent, a slender arm reach forth — and the candle was snuffed. Out.

  He halted in dismay, a sudden pang of unrequited love coursing from his heart to groin and back again, several times, the effect much like that of an electronic impulse flashing between two points on the screen of a video game. Pac-Man, perhaps.

  After a moment Smith recovered his courage, his resolve; he proceeded on to her tent, shut off his light, knelt at the zippered entrance. Dark inside. The entry was half closed.

  “Honey,” he whispered, “it’s me.” On hands and knees, he waited for her sweet invitation. He could hear her steady breathing but there was no word. “Me, honey, your ol’ Seldom come to check for buzzworms and horny-headed ticklebugs. …”

  Another pause. “You’re late, Smith. Too late with too little.”

  Cold words, striking at the core of his manhood. He cudgeled his feeble brain for an apt reply, but the best he could come up with was, “Reckon small is beautiful too, honey baby.”

  “Don’t call me baby.”

  “Sorry, honey-pie.”

  “I’m not a pie.”

  Holy cow, thought Smith, cain’t say nothin’ right right now. This little gal is mad. “Well doggone, ah, darling, I sure am sorry I kept you a-waitin’. Somethin’ was botherin’ the horses. Had to go look.”

  “You kept me waiting half an hour, Seldom.” At last, she was softening a bit, a touch of sympathy in her tone. “What was it? Snakes?”

  She feared, as she was fascinated by, snakes. Any snake, all snakes — long, short, thin, fat, pink or brown or black, with or without ribbons or rattles, whether rugose as a dry salami, knobby as a cucumber, slick as a mud puppy.

  Inspiration: a bulb clicked on in Seldom’s head — forty full watts. “Honey, there was just snakes a-crawlin ever’ which way all over the ground, it was the most disgustin’ sight you ever seen, couldn’t hardly find a place to put my feet there was so many of them.”

  That did the trick. “Oh, Seldom …” She reached out through the opening, feeling for his hand. “Maybe you’d better get in here and zip up this door.”

  He caught her hand. “Cindy,” he said happily, “I think you got a good idea.” He removed his big hat and lowered his head, preparing to crawl into the tent.

  The hand was jerked away. The canvas panel of the entrance door flapped in his face, accompanied by the snarl of a closing zipper.

  “Cindy …?”

  “Cindy,” she mocked.

  “Cindy …!”

  “My name is Debbie.” Her voice was short and sharp. “As you should — “

  “Debbie …!”

  “As you should very well know. Go find your Cindy now, Mr. Smith. I’d rather sleep with an armful of big fat black wiggly pit vipers than one slimy old sneak of a snake like you. Goodnight.”

  He waited for another minute, hoping for mercy. Not for justice, for mercy. But she would not relent this time.

  Whipped like a dog, Smith crept away on hands and knees toward the mound of saddles and pack saddles under the rotten plastic sheet. He’d brought no tent for himself. Didn’t figure he’d need it. Seldom seldom ever did.

  He glanced up at the sky. Not a star in sight. A mass of black clouds, drifting in from the southwest, flickered with inner lightning. As expected, as he’d predicted, she was a-gonna rain for sure. Sure as God made little blue turdbirds he was in for a long cold wet sonofagun night. Him, not God.

  And what about George?

  Too bad about George.

  16

  Erika in the Woods

  “Clearcut?”

  “Oh yeah, they always clearcut these days. Whole point of the deal. Timber here’s not worth much — old growth yellowpine full of beetles, too much aspen, spruce, scrub oak. Will cost the Forest Service more to build a road in here than the timber’s worth. But that’s normal too, that’s the way they operate now.”

  “Will cost us, you mean.”

  “You a taxpayer?”

  “Not always. I earned twenty-four hundred dollars last year. Got a refund coming, I think. I hope.”

  “Vat you mean iss
ziss vat zey call zee ‘deficit logging,’ no? eh?”

  “Yes. That’s the story. But like I was saying, that’s only part of the story. The Forest Freddies don’t mind losing money on these timber sales, it don’t come out of their agency funds or personal pockets. The real point of the deal is to get all these mixed, old-growth and weed trees, as they call them, cleared out of here, every tree, every bush, every blade of grass, then level the ground, harrow it with industrial-type farm equipment and plant a single, uniform crop of Ponderosa pine or white fir, whatever the market seems to want most, plant it in straight rows, all the same species, like a tree plantation, that’s the real objective behind these timber sales, I mean scientific tree farming, what the Forest Service calls stewardship. Managing the land for the best interests of industrial society and fuck anything else like deer or elk or black bear or red squirrels or people who like to get out in the woods and hunt or make love or hunt something to love or get lost or maybe hide from the government, that’s the real purpose. To make the forests neat and orderly and easy to cut. Like a cornfield, that’s what they want. They want the whole West to look like an Illinois cornfield. Like a farm. We are stewards of the earth, they say, appointed by God to manage the earth (every bit of it) in whatever way seems best (to us stewards). That’s our holy mission, to be good little stewards and keep that old raw cranky smelly unpredictable Mother Nature where she belongs, namely in a zoo. Or a museum. Under glass and behind nice neat paved nature trails.”

  “I looked up that word ‘steward’ one day in a big dictionary. You know what a steward really is?”

  “Rod Steward? Iss rock, yah? Rock star?”

  “Not him, beautiful, not that one. No, a steward is a sty-warden. Look it up. It’s from the Anglo-Saxon stigeweard, meaning guardian of the pigpen. That’s what our noble stewards are — people who guard pigs.”

  “That makes sense.”

  Laughing, they cruised under the trees on a thin frozen crust of snow, short narrow touring skis strapped to their boots. The rare early summer snow, glittering like glass in the sunlight, blue as pale phlox in the shadows, lay a foot deep beneath them. But they were skiing on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, across the meadows and through the glades of the Kaibab National Forest, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. The air was clear as crystal, the sky unclouded, the sun fierce and pure, the stillness unflawed by any sound but that of their small human voices, the swish of skis, the crunch and squeak of their metal-tipped poles pivoting in the dry snow. And oh yes, of course, the sound — now and then, from time to time — of steel striking steel.

  Three young men, one young woman. Four healthy happy vigorous young animals with souls, with minds, alive and jolly in their work, exuberant with purpose, exhaling cloudy syllables of vapor and laughter as they advanced, now one then another, from tree to tree.

  They were not dressed as skiers should be, in fashionable nylon stretch suits of gaudy orange, blazing blue, flashy yellow and hotdog red but in baggy wool pants and loose forest-camouflage coats from Goodwill, Bob’s Bargain Barn, Woolco, K mart and Yellow Front. Each of the four carried a big olive-drab pack on his or her back; two of them — the muscular Apollonian body-sculptor and the longhaired girl — carried green canvas ammo bags slung across one shoulder. The athlete also carried a three-pound singlejack hammer, attached by a lanyard to his wrist; the young woman an ordinary carpenter’s hammer of medium weight.

  At every third tree of saw-timber quality the man with the sledge stopped, pulled an eight-inch helix spike from his ammo sack and drove it into the trunk as high as he could reach, leaving the head protruding slightly. As soon as he moved on the girl followed, driving two 60-penny nails into the same tree, at a lower height, also letting the heads jut forth a bit. Behind them came the young man with another hammer and the bolt cutters. He clipped the heads from the spikes, hammered the spikes deep into and beneath the bark, and disguised the shiny dots of hot metal — where necessary — with a dab of brown ink from a Permo-Marker.

  The fourth member of the party, meanwhile, stood watch fifty yards in advance of the other three, his eyes and ears alert for any sign, any sound of other humans at large in the woods. He saw nothing of the sort: the snow ahead was immaculate, virginal and frozen, untracked by snow machine, snow tractor, snowshoe or any trace of skis. He saw the prints of bird and rodent, hare and rabbit, fox and coyote, but nothing man- or woman-made.

  He did hear, however, from time to time, the faintest hint of the whining wail of a caravan of snowmobiles five miles to the east, disturbing the peace on the old road that led from Hart Meadow to Point Sublime. No danger from that quarter: those goggled helmeted space-suited androids, encased within the screaming uproar of their infantile machines, drove themselves onward sealed off from everything but the red light, exhaust fumes and thrashing treads of the idiot in front of them. And their leader, for all each follower knew, might himself be following the stinking tailpipe of the blinking jerk at the rear of the column. The purpose of snowmobile recreation is not to get anywhere, see anybody or understand anything but to generate noise, poison the air, crush vegetation, destroy wildlife, waste energy, promote entropy and accelerate the unfoldings of the second law of thermodynamics. For this purpose, then, an endless circling round and round from morn to night could be perfectly satisfactory to all participants, requiring only that road signs be shifted here and there, now and then, so as to provide the illusion of linear progress on a European-style space-time axis.

  Everyone knows that.

  The spiking party, meanwhile, proceeded happily through the woods, working steadily but not too hard, not sweating, enjoying themselves, vaccinating the trees for protection against a possible chainsaw massacre in the future. When the Forest Service was informed and interested logging companies tipped off, as they would be, by anonymous communication, about the preventive measures taken here, it was then most probable that the timber sale would have to be canceled and this particular patch of forest saved. There is nothing that the clearcutting timber corporations hate more than a tract of forest defended by direct citizen action: one spike in a log can strip the teeth from a ten-thousand-dollar circular saw, put a crimp in profits, deter further logging, and thus preserve those living breathing respirating trees whose right to continued existence is at least as legitimate as that of any other creature including, but not limited to, the human.

  When the sun became a burning ball of orange music low in the west, peeking at them from among the black trunks of silent pine and ragged spruce and shaggy Douglas fir, they left the woods and skated on their skinny skis down a frozen watercourse, leaving no trail. They hid their tools and made camp for the night deep in a grove of quaking aspen, their four-man dome tent concealed from view, and cooked their supper on a pair of tiny Primus stoves that made no smoke and cast almost no light.

  Yielding however to the ancient human need, they built a very modest wood fire, in a pit in the hard snow within a circling rampart of down trees. Sitting on logs close to the cheery, symbolic, ceremonial flames, removing gloves and warming their hands, they ate their stewed venison jerky (one of the party was a veteran deerslayer and cow poacher) on a bed of wild rice spiced with garlic salt, drank hot cocoa spiked with rum or magic tea (Earl Grey laced with Wild Turkey) and consumed the last of Erika’s Norwegian fruitcake in the flickering blue light of flaming brandy.

  They discussed the day’s work.

  “But if zey no belief zee vorning?”

  “They believe. They know better than to take chances. The Freddies will send a crew out here with metal detectors, spend days and weeks trying to find our nails, find some of them, and try to pull them out with crowbars. But they can’t — no heads on the nails. Or maybe they decide it’s a bluff, let the loggers cut down a stand, haul the logs to the mill. The first log that hits the buzzsaw will clarify their thinking and maybe cancel the timber sale.”

  “Suppose if saw breaks in pieces? If maybe, how you say �
��?”

  “Will anybody get hurt? Get his head sliced off? Well, he shouldn’t, not if OSHA’s on the job, not if the sawmill obeys the law, not if the protective shields are in place, not if the operators are where they should be, not if the metal detectors are functioning, not if the company pays attention to our notice, not if the U.S. Forest Circus stops its deficit timber sales and takes the forests away from the clearcutters and the stripminers and the four-leg maggot ranchers. If they do any one of those things they should do and are supposed to do then no millhand is going to get hurt.”

  Pause. “But if zee company cuts down zee trees anyway? I mean zen so we break zee big saw but zee trees are gone all same, logs viss nails but here nossing only stumps. Explain, please.”

  A moment of thought. The three young men looked at one another, hesitating — Who zee Spoke? — while the young woman with the amazing eyes, the braided black hair, cheeks like wild roses and lips like cherry wine, smiled at each in turn and all collectively. All were sick with love for her; she was sick as well but the shining object of her love, for whom she had crossed the raging Atlantic in dead of winter and Greyhound-bussed the width of an alarming continent from New York City to Salt Lake City, was not present. The Hatch named Oral.

  The golden boy shrugged his splendid shoulders, shrouded now within a goosedown parka. Pete the Piper, twiddling his little recorder in his fingers, red beard sprinkled with snow, gaped at the chunks of burning aspen and said nothing. The third man present, the youngish fellow who’d done most of the talking earlier in the day, took on the task. He was a hollow-cheeked big-boned raw-hided youth, with the keen gray eyes of a hunter. He looked, not as Indians actually look, but as Indians are supposed to look, lean and long and liver-eating. He smiled rarely but when he did it humanized his face remarkably. His name was Nielsen. Carl Nielsen. Like most Nielsens around the world he was a Mormon but not a very nice Mormon. He shot things and ate them. (Cows, lambs, sheepdogs, whatever caught his fancy.) He wore a buckskin shirt with fringes. He never attended the Wednesday evening meetings of the Sixth Ward Mutual Improvement Society in his hometown of Short Crick. He was known (by his few friends) to pour liquid concrete into the smokestacks of hauler trucks, road graders, and crawler tractors. Like the goat-bearded flutist and the muscle-bound weight-lifter he earned a minimal living by rowing boatloads of tourists through the depths and heights of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Like so many of those macho types, he despised Growth & Progress.