The Monkey Wrench Gang Read online

  No one ever stopped. Except the Highway Patrol arriving promptly fifteen minutes late, radioing the report of an inexplicable billboard fire to a casually scornful dispatcher at headquarters, then ejecting self from vehicle, extinguisher in gloved hand, to ply the flames for a while with little limp gushes of liquid sodium hydrochloride (“wetter than water” because it adheres better, like soapsuds) to the pyre. Futile if gallant efforts. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating. All-cleansing fire, all-purifying flame, before which the asbestos-hearted plutonic pyromaniac can only genuflect and pray.

  Doc Sarvis by this time had descended the crumbly bank of the roadside under a billowing glare from his handiwork, dumped his gas can into trunk of car, slammed the lid—where a bright and silver caduceus glisters in the firelight—and slumped down in the front seat beside his driver.

  “Next?” she says.

  He flipped away his cigar butt, out the open window into the ditch—the trace of burning arc remains for a moment in the night, a retinal afterglow with rainbow-style trajectory, its terminal spatter of sparks the pot of gold—and unwrapped another Marsh-Wheeling, his famous surgeon’s hand revealing not a twitch or tremor.

  “Let’s work the west side,” he says.

  The big car glided forward with murmurous motor, wheels crunching tin cans and plastic picnic plates on the berm, packed bearings sliding in the servile grease, the pistons, bathed in oil, slipping up and down in the firm but gentle grasp of cylinders, connecting rods to crankshaft, crankshaft to drive shaft through differential’s scrotal housing via axle, all power to the wheels.

  They progressed. That is to say, they advanced, in thoughtful silence, toward the jittery neon, the spastic anapestic rock, the apoplectic roll of Saturday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (To be an American for one Saturday night downtown you’d sell your immortal soul.) Down Glassy Gulch they drove toward the twenty-story towers of finance burning like blocks of radium under the illuminated smog.

  “Abbzug.”

  “Doc?”

  “I love you, Abbzug.”

  “I know, Doc.”

  Past a lit-up funeral parlor in territorial burnt-adobe brick: Strong-Thorne Mortuary—“Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting?” Dive! Beneath the overpass of the Sante Fe (Holy Faith) Railroad—“Go Santa Fe All the Way.”

  “Ah,” sighed the doctor, “I like this. I like this….”

  “Yeah, but it interferes with my driving if you don’t mind.”

  “El Mano Negro strikes again.”

  “Yeah, Doc, okay, but you’re gonna get us in a wreck and my mother will sue.”

  “True,” he says, “but it’s worth it.”

  Beyond the prewar motels of stucco and Spanish tile at the city’s western fringe, they drove out on a long low bridge.

  “Stop here.”

  She stopped the car. Doc Sarvis gazed down at the river, the Rio Grande, great river of New Mexico, its dark and complicated waters shining with cloud-reflected city light.

  “My river,” he says.

  “Our river.”

  “Our river.”

  “Let’s take that river trip.”

  “Soon, soon.” He held up a finger. “Listen….”

  They listened. The river was mumbling something down below, something like a message: Come flow with me, Doctor, through the deserts of New Mexico, down through the canyons of Big Bend and on to the sea the Gulf the Caribbean, down where those young sireens weave their seaweed garlands for your hairless head, O Doc. Are you there? Doc?

  “Drive on, Bonnie. This river aggravates my melancholia.”

  “Not to mention your self-pity.”

  “My sense of déjà vu.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mein Weltschmerz.”

  “Your Welt-schmaltz. You love it.”

  “Well….” He pulled out the lighter. “As to that, who can say?”

  “Oh, Doc.” Watching the river, driving on, watching the road, she patted his knee. “Don’t think about all that anymore.”

  Doc nodded, holding the red coil to his cigar. The glow of the lighter, the soft lights of the instrument panel, gave to his large and bony, bald but bearded head a hard-worn dignity. He looked like Jean Sibelius with eyebrows and whiskers, in the full vigor of his fruitful forties. Sibelius lived for ninety-two years. Doc had forty-two and a half to go.

  Abbzug loved him. Not much, perhaps, but enough. She was a tough piece out of the Bronx but could be sweet as apfelstrudel when necessary. That classic Abbzug voice might rasp on the nerves at times, when her mood was querulous, but kisses or candy or con could usually mellow the harshest of her urban tones. Her tongue though adder-sharp was sweet (he thought) as Mogen David all the same.

  His mother also loved him. Of course his mother had no choice. That’s what she was paid for.

  His wife had loved him, more than he deserved, more than realism required. Given sufficient time she might have outgrown it. The children were all grown up and a continent away.

  Doc’s nicer patients liked him but didn’t always pay their bills. He had a few friends, some poker-playing cronies on the Democratic County Committee, some drinking companions from the Medical Arts Clinic, a couple of neighbors in the Heights. No one close. His few close friends were always sent away, it seemed, returning rarely, the bonds of their affection no stronger than the web of correspondence, which frays and fades.

  He was therefore proud and grateful to have a nurse and buddy like Ms. Bonnie Abbzug at his side, this night, as the black automobile rose westward under the rosy smog-glow of the city’s personal atmosphere, beyond the last of the Texaco, Arco and Gulf stations, past the final Wagon Wheel Bar, into the open desert. High on the western mesa near burnt-out volcanoes, under the blazing, dazzling, starry sky, they stopped among the undefended billboards at the highway’s side. Time to choose another target.

  Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug looked them over. So many, all so innocent and vulnerable, ranged along the roadway in serried ranks, clamoring for the eye. Hard to choose. Should it be the military?

  THE MARINE CORPS

  BUILDS MEN

  Why don’t it build women? Bonnie asked. Or how about the truckers’ editorial?

  IF TRUCKS STOP

  AMERICA STOPS

  Don’t threaten me, you sons of bitches. He checked out the political:

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING RIGHT?

  JOIN THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY!

  But preferred the apolitical:

  HAVE A NICE DAY

  WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

  Dr. Sarvis loved them all, but sensed a certain futility in his hobby. He carried on these days more from habit than conviction. There was a higher destiny calling to him and Ms. Abbzug. That beckoning finger in his dreams.

  “Bonnie—?”

  “Well?”

  “What do you say?”

  “You might as well knock over one more, Doc. We drove all this way. You won’t be happy if you don’t.”

  “Good girl. Which one shall it be?”

  Bonnie pointed. “I like that one.”

  Doc said, “Exactly.” He climbed out of the car and stumbled to the back, through the tin-can tumbleweed community of the roadside ecology. He opened the trunk lid and removed, from among the golf clubs, the spare tire, the chain saw, the case of spray paint, the tire tools, the empty gas can, another gasoline can, full. Doc closed the lid. Across the length of his rear bumper a luminous sticker proclaimed in glowing red, white and blue, I AM PROUD TO BE AN ARMENIAN!

  Doc’s car carried other hex signs—he was indeed a decalcomaniac—to ward off evil: the M.D.’s caduceus, American flag decals in each corner of the rear window, a gold-fringed flag dangling from the radio aerial, in one corner of the windshield a sticker which read “
Member of A.B.L.E.—Americans for Better Law Enforcement,” and in the other corner the blue eagle of the National Rifle Association with the traditional adage, “Register Communists, Not Guns.”

  Taking no chances, looking both ways, severe and sober as a judge, carrying his matches and his can of gasoline, Dr. Sarvis marched through the weeds, the broken bottles, the rags and beer cans of the ditch, all that tragic and abandoned trivia of the American road, and climbed the cutbank toward the object of his fierymania:

  WONDER ENRICHED BREAD

  HELPS BUILD STRONG BODIES

  12 WAYS

  Liars!

  While down below his Bonnie waited at the wheel of the Lincoln, her engines running, ready for getaway. The trucks and cars howled by on the highway and their lights shone briefly on the girl’s face, her violet eyes, her smile, and on Doc’s other bumper sticker, the one that confronted the future: GOD BLESS AMERICA, LET’S SAVE SOME OF IT.

  2

  Origins II: George W. Hayduke

  George Washington Hayduke, Vietnam, Special Forces, had a grudge. After two years in the jungle delivering Montagnard babies and dodging helicopters (for those boys up there fired their tumbling dumdums at thirty rounds per second at anything that moved: chickens, water buffalo, rice farmers, newspaper reporters, lost Americans, Green Beret medics—whatever breathed) and another year as a prisoner of the Vietcong, he returned to the American Southwest he had been remembering only to find it no longer what he remembered, no longer the clear and classical desert, the pellucid sky he roamed in dreams. Someone or something was changing things.

  The city of Tucson from which he came, to which he returned, was ringed now with a circle of Titan ICBM bases. The open desert was being scraped bare of all vegetation, all life, by giant D-9 bulldozers reminding him of the Rome plows leveling Vietnam. These machine-made wastes grew up in tumbleweed and real-estate development, a squalid plague of future slums constructed of green two-by-fours, dry-wall fiberboard and prefab roofs that blew off in the first good wind. This in the home of free creatures: horned toads, desert rats, Gila monsters and coyotes. Even the sky, that dome of delirious blue which he once had thought was out of reach, was becoming a dump for the gaseous garbage of the copper smelters, the filth that Kennecott, Anaconda, Phelps-Dodge and American Smelting & Re-fining Co. were pumping through stacks into the public sky. A smudge of poisoned air overhung his homeland.

  Hayduke smelled something foul in all this. A smoldering bitterness warmed his heart and nerves; the slow fires of anger kept his cockles warm, his hackles rising. Hayduke burned. And he was not a patient man.

  After a month with his parents, he raced off to a girl at Laguna Beach. Found, fought and lost her. He returned to the desert, heading north by east for the canyon country, the Arizona Strip and the wild lands beyond. There was one place he had to see and brood upon awhile before he could know what he had to do.

  He had in mind Lee’s Ferry, the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon.

  Hayduke rumbled up the asphalt trail in his new secondhand jeep, one eye on the road and the other itching with hay fever; he was allergic to tumbleweed, that exotic vegetable from the steppes of Mongolia. He had bought the jeep, a sandstorm-blasted sun-bleached blue, in San Diego from a team of car dealers named Square Deal Andy and Top Dollar Johnny. The fuel pump had given out first, near Brawley, and at Yuma, limping off the freeway with a flat, he discovered that Square Deal had sold him (for only $2795, it’s true) a jeep without a jack. Small problems: he liked this machine; he was pleased with the handy extras—roll bars, auxiliary gas tank, mag rims and wide-tread tires, the Warn hubs and the Warn winch with 150-foot cable, the gimbal-mounted beer-can holder screwed to the dash, the free and natural paint job.

  The desert eased his vague anger. Near the dirt road which turned off the highway and led east for ten miles to the volcanic ramparts of the Kofa Mountains, he stopped, well away from the traffic, and made himself a picnic lunch. He sat on warm rock in the blazing spring sun, eating pickle and cheese and ham in onion roll, washing it down with beer, and opened himself through pore and nerve ends to the sweet stillness of the Arizona desert. He gazed about and found that he still remembered most of the scrubby little trees: the mesquite (great fuel for cooking and heating, beans for hard times, shade for survival), the green-barked paloverde with its leafless stems (the chlorophyll is in the bark), the subtle smoke tree floating like a mirage down in the sandy wash.

  Hayduke proceeded. The hot fury of the wind at 65 mph whistled past his open window, strummed his sleeve, kissed his ear as he drove on and on, northeast toward the high country, the good country, God’s country, Hayduke’s country, by God. And it better stay that way. Or by God there’ll be trouble.

  Twenty-five years old, Hayduke is a short, broad, burly fellow, well-muscled, built like a wrestler. The face is hairy, very hairy, with a wide mouth and good teeth, big cheekbones and a thick shock of blue-black hair. A bit of Shawnee blood back in there, maybe, somewhere, way back in the gene pool. His hands are large and powerful, pale white under the black hair; he’s been in the jungle and then in the hospital for a long time.

  He drank another beer as he drove along. Two and a half six-packs to Lee’s Ferry. Out there in the open Southwest, he and his friends measured highway distances in per-capita six-packs of beer. L.A. to Phoenix, four six-packs; Tucson to Flagstaff, three six-packs; Phoenix to New York, thirty-five six-packs. (Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six-packs help. Speed is the ultimate drug and rockets run on alcohol. Hayduke had formulated this theory all by himself.)

  He felt and shared in the exhilaration of the sun, the rush of alcohol through the bloodstream, the satisfaction in his jeep running full and cool and properly, tooling up the pike toward the red cliffs of the canyon country, the purple mesas, the cliff-rose and the blue birds. All the readings of his complicated nervous system indicated trouble. But then they always did. He was happy.

  There was a special camp of the Special Forces. There was a special sign that hung, along with the Confederate flags, from the entrance gateway to the special camp. The sign said:

  If you kill for money you’re a mercenary.

  If you kill for pleasure you’re a sadist.

  If you do both you’re a Green Beret.

  WELCOME

  Into the high country. The mountains of Flagstaff loomed ahead, the high peaks dappled with snow. Smoke from the lumber mills drifted gray-blue across the green coniferous haze of the Coconino National Forest, the great green woodland belt of northern Arizona. Through his open window came the chill clear air, the odor of resin, the smell of woodsmoke. The sky above the mountains was untouched by a single cloud, like the dark blue of infinite desire.

  Hayduke smiled, flexing his nostrils (isometric yoga), popping the top from another can of Schlitz, cruising into Flag, pop. 26,000, elev. 6900, and remembered a Flagstaff cop he had always meant to get. Unjust arrest, a night in the tank with twenty puking Navajos. Something festering in one corner of his mind for three years, an un-scratched itch.

  Just for the hell of it, he thought, why not now? He was free. He had nothing better to do. Why not now as ever? He stopped for gas at a self-service station, filled tank, checked oil, then checked a phone book and found the name and address he wanted. He had no difficulty remembering that name: the nameplate on the tunic, like the badge, like the flag pins on the lapels, stood before Hayduke’s mind’s eye as vividly as if it had all happened the night before.

  He ate supper in a dark café, then drove to the address and parked his jeep half a block away and waited. Evening, the brief Southwestern twilight; streetlights flickered on. He waited for night, watching the front of the house. Waiting, he reviewed procedures, inventoried the weapons in his possession, in the jeep, illegally concealed, available for use: o
ne Buck knife, the Special, honed to the keenness of a razor’s edge; one .357 magnum revolver, loaded except for an empty firing chamber; one small VC steel crossbow with broad-head darts, made of wrecked American helicopter, souvenir of Dak To (Hoa binh!); one Winchester carbine Model 94, the classic deer rifle, packed in a saddle scabbard; one AK 47 (another souvenir) with two banana clips taped together, loaded; and the basic item, backbone of his arsenal, a staple for any well-equipped death kit, the Remington .30-.06 bolt-action target rifle with Bausch & Lomb 3 × −9 × variable scope, accurate enough to pick off Gook, Greek or your brother’s ear at five hundred yards (high velocity, flat trajectory, etc.). Plus reloading kit, powder, caps, bullets, salvaged casings, the works. Like so many American men, Hayduke loved guns, the touch of oil, the acrid smell of burnt powder, the taste of brass, bright copper alloys, good cutlery, all things well made and deadly.

  Though still a lover of chipmunks, robins and girls, he had also learned like others to acquire a taste for methodical, comprehensive and precisely gauged destruction. Coupled in his case with a passion for equity (statistically rare), and the conservative instinct to keep things not as they are but as they should be (even rarer); to keep it like it was.

  (“Girls?” the sergeant had said. “They’re all the same in the dark. Who gives a shit about girls; you ought to see my gun collection!” Some sergeant, that one, after the accident, awkwardly lumpy in his black body bag, shipped home in a wooden overcoat, like 55,000 others.)

  Sitting in the dark, waiting, Hayduke proposed and discarded a number of options. First, no murder; the punishment shall fit the crime. The crime, in this case, was injustice. The officer, Hall by name, had arrested and booked him for public drunkenness, which constituted false arrest; Hayduke had not been drunk. What he had done, at three o’clock in the morning one block from his hotel, was stop to watch Hall the cop and a nonuniformed companion interrogate a passing Indian. Hall, not accustomed to being overseen by an unknown civilian, came charging across the street, annoyed, nervous, agitated, demanding instant identification. His manner got Hayduke’s back up at once. “What for?” he said, hands in pockets. “Take your hands out of your pockets,” the cop commanded. “What for?” said Hayduke. Hall’s hand had trembled on the butt of his gun; he was a young, neurotic, insecure policeman. The second man waited in the police car, observing, a shotgun held upright between his knees. Hayduke had not failed to notice the shotgun. Reluctantly, he drew his empty hands from his pockets. Hall grabbed him by the neck, hustled him across the street, slammed him against the patrol car, frisked him, smelled the beer on his breath. Hayduke spent the next twelve hours on a wooden bench in the city drunk tank, the one white man in a groaning chorus of sick Navajos. Somehow it rankled.