The Monkey Wrench Gang (3 page)

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:

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: one 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.

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?”