The Monkey Wrench Gang Page 3

  Of course I can’t kill him, Hayduke thought. All I want to do is punch him around a little, give his orthodontist some work. Dislocate a rib, perhaps. Ruin his evening; nothing drastic or irreparable. The problem is, shall I identify myself? Shall I remind him of our previous and all-too-brief acquaintance? Or leave him lying on the sidewalk wondering who the hell and what the hell was that all about?

  He felt certain that Hall would not be able to recall his identity. How could a cop who picked up a dozen drunks, vagrants and loiterers every night possibly remember short, swart, obscure and undistinguished George Hayduke, who had, besides, changed considerably in the meanwhile, grown heavier, bigger and hairier?

  A patrol car, Flagstaff City Police, approached slowly, lights dimmed, and stopped in front of Hall’s house. Good. One man in the car. Very good. The man got out. He wore plain clothes, not the uniform. Hayduke watched him through the gloom from half a block away, uncertain. The man walked to the door of the house and entered without pausing to knock. Got to be Hall. Or else a one-man raid. More lights went on inside the house.

  Hayduke put his revolver into his belt, got out of the jeep, put on a coat to conceal the gun and walked past Hall’s house. Curtains drawn and blinds down; he could see nothing of the interior. The motor of the patrol car was running. Hayduke tried the car door: unlocked. He walked around the corner of the block, under the trees and streetlights, and down a graveled alleyway that led behind the row of houses. Dogs barked among the garbage cans, clothesline poles, children’s play swings. Counting doors, he saw, through a kitchen window, the man he was looking for. Still young, quite handsome, all Irish. Hall the cop was drinking a cup of coffee with one hand and patting his wife’s rump with the other. She looked pleased; he looked distracted. Typical domestic scene. Hayduke’s iron heart melted slightly, around the edges.

  There was little time. He found an unfenced yard between houses and hurried back to the street. The patrol car was still there, motor running. At any moment Hall would put down that cup of coffee and come out, the malingering bastard. Hayduke slipped behind the wheel of the car and without turning on the headlights eased it quietly down the street toward the first corner. The single green eye of the police Motorola glowed from the dark under the dashboard, the speaker conveying a steady traffic of calm male voices discussing blood, wreckage, disaster. Head-on collision on Mountain Street. All the better for Hayduke; the routine tragedy gave him perhaps another minute before Hall could spread the alarm. Turning the corner and bearing south for Main and the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, he braced for the assault. Hall would certainly have a police radio transmitter in his home. Meanwhile Hayduke made his plans. Things not to do tonight. He decided first not to attempt to crash the patrol car into the lobby of City Hall. Second….

  He passed a police car going in the opposite direction. The officer at the wheel gave him a wave; Hayduke waved back. A few pedestrians on the street watched him go by. He glanced at the rearview mirror. The other police car had stopped at an intersection, waiting for a red light.

  There was a pause in the radio traffic. Then Hall’s voice: “All units, 10-99. All units, 10-99. Car Twelve, 10-35, 10-35. Repeat: all units, 10-99. Car Twelve, 10-35. Acknowledge, please. KB-34 remote.”

  Good control, thought Hayduke. How could he forget that voice? That Irish cool controlled hysteria. Good God but he hates me now! Hates somebody, anyway.

  There was a clash of static on the radio as several voices attempted to answer at once. All went silent. One voice came through loud and clear.

  “KB-5, KB-6.”

  “KB-5.”

  “We saw Car Twelve a minute ago, going south on Second Street between Federal and Mountain.”

  “Ten-four, KB-6. All mobile units except Car Four proceed to downtown area immediately; 10-99, 10-99, Car Twelve. KB-34, KB-5.”

  Hayduke grinned. They’re calling Hall. Now he’s on the spot.

  “KB-34, KB-5. Answer please.”

  “KB-34.”

  “Ten-nine?”

  “Ten-two?”

  “Ten-nine?”

  “What?”

  “Where the hell are you, Hall?”

  “KB-34 remote.”

  “So who’s driving Car Twelve?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hayduke picked up the microphone, pressed the transmitter button and said, “I am, you shitkickers. Just having a little fun in your little two-bit town, okay? KB-34, over.”

  “Ten-four,” the dispatcher said. There was a pause. “Who is this speaking, please?”

  Hayduke thought for a moment. “Rudolf,” he said. “That’s who.”

  Another pause. “KB-5, this is KB-6.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We have subject under visual. Still headed south.”

  “Ten-four. Prepare to intercept.”

  “Ten-four.”

  “Ten-four, shit,” said Hayduke into the microphone. “You’ll have to catch me first, you bullet-headed motherfuckers.” He regretted, for a moment, that there was not some way he could receive and hear his own broadcasts. Of course it was all being recorded on tape at the police base station. He thought for a moment of something called voice prints, the audible analogue to fingerprints. Maybe he would hear his broadcasts, later, after all. In an Arizona courtroom. With solemn jury joining. God damn their eyes.

  The radio voice: “Subject is warned that all radio broadcasts are monitored by the Federal Communications Commission and that abuse or misuse of police transmission systems is a Federal offense.”

  “Fuck the Federal Communications Commission. Fuck you, too, Flagstaff fuzz. I piss on you all from a considerable height.”

  Grinning in the dark, speeding quietly through near-empty streets, he waited for a response. There was none. Then he realized that he was still clutching the mike, squeezing the transmitter button, and that as long as he did so he was shutting down the entire channel. He dropped the microphone and concentrated on his driving. The radio traffic resumed, the steady exchange of calm, tough, laconic masculine voices. Tell you what, he thought, let’s drive it up the tracks. Santa Fe Railroad only a block ahead. Sirens behind, destruction ahead.

  Red lights blinked at the crossing. The warning bell clanged. Hayduke slowed the car. Train approaching. The wooden barricades were swinging down. He passed beneath the near one and jammed on the power brakes, stopping the car dead in the middle of the crossing. He looked both ways and saw through the roaring dark the brilliant rotating light of an advancing locomotive, felt the thunder of the iron wheels, heard the bray of the diesel’s air horn. At the same moment he heard the howl of sirens, saw the blue flasher lights racing toward him, less than two blocks away, in his rear.

  Hayduke abandoned Hall’s car there in the crux of the crossing. Before leaving, however, he grabbed a shotgun, a riot helmet and a six-batteried flashlight, carrying them off into the night. As he hustled away from the scene of his crime, arms full and heart beating with joy, he heard—beneath the screech of brakes, the bellow of klaxons—one solid metallic crash, deeply satisfying, richly prolonged.

  He looked over his shoulder. The head locomotive, air brakes groaning, backed up by three extra power units and the weight and momentum of a 125-car freight train, rolled down the rails, pushing at its iron nose the hulk of the patrol car, grinding iron on steel in a shower of sparks. The car rolled once; the gas tank ruptured, exploded into saffron and violet flame, a sliding bonfire which illuminated, as it advanced, a string of boxcars on a siding, the backside of the Montezuma Hotel (Rooms $2 up), some telegraph poles, a billboard (Welcome to Flagstaff Heart of the Scenic North) and the obsolete, forgotten, antique water tower of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, Flagstaff Depot.

  Clutching his prizes, Hayduke jogged through inky alleyways, outflanking the iron, the law, the police cars shrieking through the city like maddened hornets, reached the safety of his jeep and drove away, out of the city into the velvet dark, untouched.

/>   He slept well that night, out in the piney woods near Sunset Crater, twenty miles to the northeast, snug in his broad-shouldered mummy bag, his goosedown sack, light as a feather, warm as the womb. Under the diamond blaze of Orion, the shimmer of the Seven Sisters, while shooting stars trailed languid flames through the troposphere. The sweetness of it. The satisfaction of a job well done. He dreamt of home. Wherever that is. Of silken thighs. Wherever they may lead. Of a tree greener than thought in a canyon red as iron.

  Rising before the sun, in the silver-blue dawn, he made coffee on his tiny Primus stove. “Chemicals! Chemicals! I need chemicals!” he chanted, Hayduke’s morning mantra. Through the lonesome pines he saw an orb of plasmic hydrogen, too bright to face, come up suddenly over the wrinkled ridges of the Painted Desert. A cool flute music floated out of nowhere: the hermit thrush.

  Hit the road, George. Northward. He gassed up at his favorite gas station, the Sacred Mountain Trading Post, signed the petitions (Save Black Mesa; Stop the Strip Miners) and bought RED POWER THINK HOPI stickers for his bumpers, which he plastered over the former owner’s sloganeering:

  HAVE A NICE DAY SCHMUCK

  Down from the sacred mountain into the rosy dawn he rolled, into the basin of the Little Colorado River, the pastel pink and chocolate brown and umbrous buff of the Painted Desert. Land of the petrified log. Land of the glaucomous Indian. Land of handwoven vegetable-dyed rugs, sand-cast silver concho belts and overloaded welfare case loads. Land of the former dinosaur. Land of the modern dinosaur. Land of the power-line pylon marching league on league in lockstep like 120-foot outer-space monsters across the desert plains.

  Hayduke frowning as he opens the first official six-pack of the day (one and a half to Lee’s Ferry). He hadn’t remembered so many power lines. They stride across the horizon in multicolumn grandeur, looped together by the swoop and gleam of high-voltage cables charged with energy from Glen Canyon Dam, from the Navajo Power Plant, from the Four Corners and Shiprock plants, bound south and westward to the burgeoning Southwest and California. The blazing cities feed on the defenseless interior.

  Tossing his empty beer can out the window, Hayduke races north, through the Indian country. A blighted land, crisscrossed with new power lines, sky smudged with smoke from power plants, the mountains strip-mined, the range grazed to death, eroding away. Slum villages of cinder-block huts and tarpaper shacks line the highway—the tribe is spreading, fruitful as a culture bouillon: from 9500 in 1890 to 125,000 today. Fecundity! Prosperity! Sweet wine and suicide, of thee we sing.

  The real trouble with the goddamned Indians, reflected Hayduke, is that they are no better than the rest of us. The real trouble is that the Indians are just as stupid and greedy and cowardly and dull as us white folks.

  Thinking this, he opens his second beer. Gray Mountain Trading Post comes into view, tired Indians resting against the sunny side of the wall. A squaw in traditional velveteen blouse squats by the men, lifting her long and voluminous skirts to piss upon the dust. She is grinning, the men laughing.

  Approaching Grand Canyon Junction.

  Traffic obstructs his impatient advance. In front of him a little lady with blue hair peers through her steering wheel at the highway, her head barely showing above the dashboard. What’s she doing here? Little old man beside her. Indiana plates on their Oldsmobile. Mom and Pop out seeing the country. Driving at a safe and prudent 45 mph. Hayduke snarls. Move it, lady, or get it the fuck off the road. My God, makes you wonder how they ever got the thing backed out of the garage and pointed west.

  Junction Trading Post two miles ahead. Stopping there once for a beer, he’d overheard the manager confide to a clerk, as he showed him a handwoven Navajo blanket, “Paid forty dollars for this. Squaw was going to a Sing and wanted some money right away; we’ll sell it for two hundred and fifty.”

  The road still sank before him, descending into the valley of the Little Colorado River and the Painted Desert. From seven thousand feet at the summit of the pass to three thousand at the river. He glanced at the altimeter mounted on his dash. The instrument agreed. Here’s the turnoff to South Rim, Grand Canyon. Even now, in May, the tourist traffic seemed heavy: a steady stream of steel, glass, plastic and aluminum issued from the junction, most of it turning south toward Flagstaff but some turning the other way, north to Utah and Colorado.

  My way, he thought, they’re going my way; they can’t do that. Gotta remove that bridge. Soon. Them bridges. Soon. All of them. Soon. They’re driving their tin cars into the holy land. They can’t do that; it ain’t legal. There’s a law against it. A higher law.

  Well you’re doing it too, he reminded himself. Yeah, but I’m on important business. Besides, I’m an elitist. Anyway, the road’s here now, might as well use it. I paid my taxes too; I’d be a fool to get out and walk and let all them other tourists blow their foul exhaust gases in my face, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I? Yes I would. But if I wanted to walk—and I will when the time comes—why, I’d walk all the way from here to Hudson Bay and back. And will.

  Hayduke forged straight ahead at maximum cruising speed, in high range, hubs free, bearing steadily north-northwest past The Gap and Cedar Ridge (gaining altitude again) toward the Echo Cliffs, Shinumo Altar, Marble Canyon, the Vermilion Cliffs and the river. The Colorado. The river. Until, topping a long and final grade, he gained a view—at last—of the country he was headed for, the heartland of his heart, spread out before and beyond him exactly as he’d dreamed it all, for three years, lost in the jungle war.

  He proceeded almost cautiously (for him) down the long and winding grade toward the river, twenty miles by road and four thousand feet of descent. Had to live at least one more hour. Marble Canyon gaped below, a black crevasse like an earthquake’s yawn zigzagging across the dun-colored desert. The Echo Cliffs ranged northeastward toward a dark notch in the sandstone monolith where the Colorado rolled out from the depths of the plateau. North and west of the notch rose the Paria Plateau, little known, where nobody lives, and the thirty-mile-long Vermilion Cliffs.

  Hayduke, rejoicing, scarfing up more beer, concluding his Flagstaff six-pack, wheels down to the river on the narrow road at a safe and sane 70 per, bellowing some incoherent song into the face of the wind. He was indeed a menace to other drivers but justified himself in this way: If you don’t drink, don’t drive. If you drink, drive like hell. Why? Because freedom, not safety, is the highest good. Because the public roads should be wide open to all—children on tricycles, little old ladies in Eisenhower Plymouths, homicidal lesbians driving forty-ton Mack tractor-trailers. Let us have no favorites, no licenses, no goddamn rules for the road. Let every freeway be a free-for-all.

  Happy as a pig in shit, that’s Hayduke coming home. Hairpin curves at the bridge approach: SLOW: 15 MPH. Tires squealing like cats in rut, he hangs a four-wheel drift around the first curve. Another. Scream of rubber, stink of hot brake drums. The bridge appears. He brakes hard, gearing down, doing the heel-and-toe dance on brake, clutch, gas pedal.

  NO STOPPING ON BRIDGE, the sign says. He stops in the middle of the bridge. Shuts off engine. Listens for a moment to the silence, to the sigh from four hundred feet below of the rolling river.

  Hayduke climbs out of the jeep, walks to the rail of the bridge and peers down. The Colorado, third longest river in America, murmurs past its sandy shores, swirls around fallen rocks, streams seaward under the limestone walls of Marble Canyon. Upstream, beyond the bend, lies the site of Lee’s Ferry, rendered obsolete by the bridge on which Hayduke stands. Downstream, fifty miles away by water, is the river entrance to the Grand Canyon. On his left, north and west, the Vermilion Cliffs shine pink as watermelon in the light of the setting sun, headland after headland of perpendicular sandstone; each rock profile wears a mysterious, solemn, inhuman nobility.

  The bladder aches. The highway is silent and deserted. Maybe the world has already ended. Time to tap a kidney, release that beverage. Hayduke unzips and sends a four-hundred-foot arc of filtered Schl
itz pouring down through space to the master stream below. No sacrilege—only a quiet jubilation. Bats flicker in the shadows of the canyon. A great blue heron flaps upriver. You’re among friends now, George.

  Forgetting to rezip and leaving the jeep in the empty roadway, he walks to the end of the bridge and climbs a knoll on the canyon rim, a high point overlooking the desert. He goes down on his knees and takes up a pinch of red sand. Eats it. (Good for the craw. Rich in iron. Good for the gizzard.) Standing again he faces the river, the soaring cliffs, the sky, the flaming mass of the sun going down like a ship beyond a shoal of clouds. Hayduke’s cock, limp, wrinkled, forgotten, dangles from his open fly, leaking a little. He spreads his legs solidly on the rock and lifts his arms wide to the sky, palms up. A great and solemn joy flows through bone, blood, nerve and tissue, through every cell of his body. He raises his head, takes a deep breath—

  The heron in the canyon, a bighorn ram on the cliff above, one lean coyote on the rim across the river hear the sound of a howl, the song of a wolf, rise in the twilight stillness and spread through the emptiness of the desert evening. One long and prolonged, deep and dangerous, wild archaic howl, rising and rising and rising on the quiet air.