by Edward Abbey
Busywork. Cutting and snipping, snapping and wrenching. They crawled all over a Caterpillar D-9A, world’s greatest bulldozer, the idol of all highwaymen. Put so much sand in the crankcase that Hayduke couldn’t get the dipstick reinserted all the way. He trimmed it short with the rod-and-bolt cutter. Made it fit. Sand in the oil intake. He climbed into the cab, tried to turn the fuel-tank cap. Wouldn’t turn. Taking hammer and chisel he broke it loose, unscrewed it, poured four quarts of good high-energy Karo into the diesel fuel. Replaced the cap. Sat in the driver’s seat and played for a minute with the switches and levers.
“You know what would be fun?” he said to Smith, who was down below hacking through a hydraulic hose.
“What’s that, George?”
“Get this fucker started, take it up to the top of the ridge and run it over the rim.”
“That there’d take us near half the night, George.”
“Sure would be fun.”
“We can’t get it started anyhow.”
“Why not?”
“There ain’t no rotor arm in the magneto. I looked. They usually take out the rotor arm when they leave these beasts out on the road.”
“Yeah?” Hayduke takes notebook and pencil from his shirt pocket, turns on his flashlight, makes notation: Rotor arms. “You know something else that would be fun?”
Smith, busy nullifying all physical bond between cylinder heads and fuel injection lines, says, “What?”
“We could knock a pin out of each tread. Then when the thing moved it would run right off its own fucking tracks. That would really piss them.”
“George, this here tractor ain’t gonna move at all for a spell. It ain’t a-goin’ nowheres.”
“For a spell.”
“That’s what I said.”
“That’s the trouble.”
Hayduke climbed down from the cab and came close to Smith, there in the black light of the stars, doing his humble chores, the pinpoint of his flashlight beam fixed on a set screw in an engine block the weight of three Volkswagen buses. The yellow Caterpillar, enormous in the dark, looms over the two men with the indifference of a god, submitting without a twitch of its enameled skin to their malicious ministrations. The down payment on this piece of equipment comes to around $30,000. What were the men worth? In any rational chemico-psycho-physical analysis? In a nation of two hundred and ten million (210,000,000) bodies? Getting cheaper by the day, as mass production lowers the unit cost?
“That’s the trouble,” he said again. “All this wire cutting is only going to slow them down, not stop them. Godfuckingdammit, Seldom, we’re wasting our time.”
“What’s the matter, George?”
“We’re wasting our time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we ought to really blast this motherfucker. This one and all the others. I mean set them on fire. Burn them up.”
“That there’s arson.”
“For chrissake, what’s the difference? You think what we’re doing now is much nicer? You know damn well if old Morrison-Knudsen was out here now with his goons he’d be happy to see us all shot dead.”
“They ain’t gonna be too happy about this, you’re right there. They ain’t gonna understand us too good.”
“They’ll understand us. They’ll hate our fucking guts.”
“They won’t understand why we’re doin’ this, George. That’s what I mean. I mean we’re gonna be misunderstood.”
“No, we’re not gonna be misunderstood. We’re gonna be hated.”
“Maybe we should explain.”
“Maybe we should do it right. None of this petty fucking around.”
Smith was silent.
“Let’s destroy this fucker.”
“I don’t know,” Smith said.
“I mean roast it in its own grease. I just happen to have a little siphon hose here in my pack. Like I just happen to have some matches. I mean we just siphon some of that fuel out of the tank and we just sort of slosh it around over the engine and cab and then we just sort of toss a match at it. Let God do the rest.”
“Yeah, I guess He would,” Smith agreed. “If God meant this here bulldozer to live He wouldn’t of filled its tank with diesel fuel. Now would He of? But George, what about Doc?”
“What about him? Since when is he the boss?”
“He’s the one bankrolling this here operation. We need him.”
“We need his money.”
“Well, all right, put it this way: I like old Doc. And I like that little old lady of his too. And I think all four of us got to stick together. And I think we can’t do anything that all four of us ain’t agreed to do beforehand. Think about it that way, George.”
“Is that the end of the sermon?”
“That’s the end of the sermon.”
Now Hayduke was silent for a while. They worked. Hayduke thought. After a minute he said, “You know something, Seldom? I guess you’re right.”
“I thought I was wrong once,” Seldom said, “but I found out later I was mistaken.”
They finished with the D-9A. The siphon hose and the matches remained inside Hayduke’s pack. For the time being. Having done all they could to sand, jam, gum, mutilate and humiliate the first bulldozer, they went on to the next, the girl with them. Smith put his arm around her.
“Miss Bonnie,” he says, “how do you like the night shift?”
“Too peaceful. When’s my turn to wreck something?”
“We need you to look out.”
“I’m bored.”
“Don’t you worry about that none, honey. We’re gonna have enough excitement pretty soon to last you and me for the rest of our lives. If we live that long. How you think old Doc is doing back there all by his lonesome?”
“He’s all right. He lives inside his head most of the time anyway.”
Another giant machine looms out of the darkness before them. A hauler; they chop it up. Then the next. Bonnie watches from her post in the cab of a nearby earthmover. Next! The men go on.
“If only we could start up the motors on these sombitches,” Hayduke said. “We could drain the oil out, let the motors run and walk away. They’d take care of themselves and we’d be finished a lot faster.”
“That’d do it,” Smith allowed. “Drain the oil and let the engines run. They’d seize up tighter’n a bull’s asshole in fly time. They never would get them buggers prised open.”
“We could give each one a try anyhow.” And acting on his words, Hayduke climbed to the controls of a big bulldozer. “How do you start this mother?”
“I’ll show you if we find one ready to go.”
“How about a hot wire? Maybe we could start it that way. Bypass the ignition.”
“Not a caterpillar tractor. This ain’t no car, George, you know. This is a D-Eight. This here’s heavy-duty industrial equipment; this ain’t the old Farmall back home.”
“Well, I’m ready for driving lessons anytime.”
Hayduke climbed down from the operator’s seat. They worked on the patient, sifting handfuls of fine Triassic sand into the crankcase, cutting up the wiring, the fuel lines, the hydraulic hoses to fore and aft attachments, dumping Karo into the fuel tanks. Why Karo instead of plain sugar? Smith wanted to know. Pours better, Hayduke explained; mixes easier with the diesel, doesn’t jam up in strainers. You sure about that? No.
Hayduke crawled under the bulldozer to find the drain plug in the oil pan. He found it, through an opening in the armored skid plate, but needed a big wrench to crack it loose. They tried the toolbox in the cab. Locked. Hayduke broke the lock with his cold chisel and hammer. Inside they found a few simple and massive instruments: an iron spanner three feet long; a variety of giant end wrenches; a sledgehammer; a wooden-handled monkey wrench; nuts, bolts, friction tape, wire.
Hayduke took the spanner, which looked like the right size, and crawled again underneath the tractor. He struggled for a while with the plug, finally broke it loose and let out the oil.
The great machine began to bleed; its lifeblood drained out with pulsing throbs, onto the dust and sand. When it was all gone he replaced the plug. Why? Force of habit—thought he was changing the oil in his jeep.
Hayduke surfaced, smeared with dust, grease, oil, rubbing a bruised knuckle. “Shit,” he said, “I don’t know.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Are we doing this job right? That’s what I don’t know. Now the operator gets on this thing in the morning, tries to start it up, nothing happens. So the first thing he sees is all the wiring cut, all the fuel lines cut. So putting sand in the crankcase, draining the oil, isn’t going to do any good till they get the motor to run. But when they fix all the wiring and lines they’re gonna be checking other things too. Like the oil level, naturally. Then they find the sand. Then they see somebody’s drained the oil. I’m thinking if we really want to do this monkey wrench business right, maybe we should hide our work. I mean keep it simple and sophisticated.”
“Well, George, you was the one wanted to set these things on fire about a minute ago.”
“Yeah. Now I’m thinking the other way.”
“Well, it’s too late. We already showed our hand here. We might as well go on like we started.”
“Now think about it a minute, Seldom. They’ll all get here about the same time tomorrow morning. Everybody starts up the engine on his piece of equipment, or tries to. Some’ll discover right away that we cut up the wiring. I mean on the machines we already cut. But look, on the others, if we let the wiring alone, let the fuel lines alone, so they can start the engines, then the sand and the Karo will really do some good. I mean they’ll have a chance to do the work we want them to do: ruin the engines. What do you think about that?”
They leaned side by side against the steel track of the Cat, gazing at each other through the soft starlight.
“I kind of wish we had figured all this out before,” Smith said. “We ain’t got all night.”
“Why don’t we have all night?”
“Because I reckon we ought to be fifty miles away from here come morning. That’s why.”
“Not me,” Hayduke said. “I’m going to hang around and watch what happens. I want that personal fucking satisfaction.”
A hoot owl hooted from the earthmover up ahead. “What’s going on back there?” Bonnie called. “You think this is a picnic or something?”
“Okay,” Smith said, “let’s keep it kinda simple. Let’s put these here cutters away for a while and just work on the oil and fuel systems. God knows we got plenty of sand here. About ten thousand square miles of it.” Agreed.
They went on, quickly and methodically now, from machine to machine, pouring sand into each crankcase and down every opening which led to moving parts. When they had used up all their Karo syrup, they dumped sand into the fuel tanks, as an extra measure.
All the way, into the night, Hayduke, Smith, they worked their way to the end of the line. Now one, now the other, would relieve Bonnie at the lookout post so that she too could participate fully in field operations. Teamwork, that’s what made America great: teamwork and initiative, that’s what made America what it is today. They worked over the Cats, they operated on the earthmovers, they gave the treatment to the Schramm air compressors the Hyster compactors the Massey crawler-loaders the Joy Ram track drills the Dart D-600 wheel loaders not overlooking one lone John Deere 690-A excavator backhoe, and that was about all for the night; that was about enough; old Morrison-Knudsen had plenty of equipment all right but somebody was due for headaches in the morning when the sun came up and engines were fired up and all those little particles of sand, corrosive as powdered emery, began to wreak earth’s vengeance on the cylinder walls of the despoilers of the desert.
When they reached the terminus of the cut-and-fill site, high on the folded earth across the wash from Comb Ridge, and had thoroughly sand-packed the last piece of road-building equipment, they sat down on a juniper log to rest. Seldom Seen, reckoning by the starts, estimated the time at 2 A.M. Hayduke guessed it was only 11:30. He wanted to go on, following the surveyors, and remove all the stakes, pins and flagging that he knew was waiting out there, in the dark, in the semi-virgin wilds beyond. But Abbzug had a better idea; instead of destroying the survey crew’s signs, she suggested, why not relocate them all in such a manner as to lead the right-of-way in a grand loop back to the starting point? Or lead it to the brink of, say, Muley Point, where the contractors would confront a twelve-hundred-foot vertical drop-off down to the goosenecks of the San Juan River.
“Don’t give them any ideas,” Hayduke said. “They’d just want to build another goddamned bridge.”
“Them survey markings go on west for twenty miles,” Smith said. He was against both plans.
“So what do we do?” says Bonnie.
“I’d like to crawl into the sack,” Smith said. “Get some sleep.”
“I like that idea myself.”
“But the night is young,” Hayduke said.
“George,” says Smith, “we can’t do everything in one night. We got to get Doc and get back to the truck and haul ass. We don’t want to be around here in the morning.”
“They can’t prove a thing.”
“That’s what Pretty-Boy Floyd said. That’s what Baby-Face Nelson said and John Dillinger and Butch Cassidy and that other fella, what’s his name—?”
“Jesus,” Hayduke growls.
“Yeah, Jesus Christ. That’s what they all said and look what happened to them. Nailed.”
“This is our first big night,” Hayduke said. “We ought to do as much work as we can. We’re not likely to get more easy operations like this. Next time they’ll have locks on everything. Maybe booby traps. And watchmen with guns, shortwave radios, dogs.”
Poor Hay duke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul. He had to yield.
They marched back the way they’d come, past the quiet, spayed, medicated machinery. Those doomed dinosaurs of iron, waiting patiently through the remainder of the night for buggering morning’s rosy-fingered denouement. The agony of cylinder rings, jammed by a swollen piston, may be like other modes of sodomy a crime against nature in the eyes of deus ex machina; who can say?
A hoot owl called from what seemed far away, east in the pitch-black shadows of the dynamite notch. One short and a long, then a pause, one short and a long repeated. Warning cry.
“Doc’s on the job,” Smith said. “That there’s Doc a-talkin’ to us.”
The men and the girl stood still in the dark, listening hard, trying to see. The warning call was repeated, twice more. The lonesome hoot owl, speaking.
Listening. Nervous crickets chirred in the dry grass under the cottonwoods. A few doves stirred in the boughs.
They heard, faint but growing, the mutter of a motor. Then they saw, beyond the notch, the swing of headlight beams. A vehicle appeared, two blazing eyes, grinding down the grade in low gear.
“Okay,” says Hayduke, “off the roadway. Watch out for a spotlight. And if there’s any shit we scatter.”
Understood. Caught in the middle of the big fill, there was nowhere to go but over the side. They slid down the loose rock to the jumble of boulders at the bottom. There, nursing abrasions, they took cover.
The truck came down the roadway, moved slowly by, went as far as it could and stopped among the machines huddled at the far end of the fill. There it paused for five minutes, engine still, lights turned off. The man inside the truck, sitting with windows open, sipped coffee from a thermos jug and listened to the night. He switched on his left-hand spotlight and played the beam over the roadbed and the machinery. So far as he could see, all was well. He started the engine, turned back the way he had come, passed the listeners fifty feet below, drove on up the grade through the notch and disappeared.
Hayduke slipped his revolver back into his rucksack, blew his nose through his fingers and scrambled up the talus to the top of the roadway. Smith and Abbzug emerged from the dark.<
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“Next time dogs,” says Hayduke. “Then gunners in helicopters. Then the napalm. Then the B-52s.”
They walked through the dark, up the long grade into the eastern cut. Listening for the bearded goggled great bald owl to sound.
“I don’t think it’s quite like that,” Smith was saying. “They’re people too, like us. We got to remember that, George. If we forget we’ll get just like them and then where are we?”
“They’re not like us,” Hayduke said. “They’re different. They come from the moon. They’ll spend a million dollars to burn one gook to death.”
“Well, I got a brother-in-law in the U.S. Air Force. And he’s a sergeant. I took a general’s family down the river once. Them folks are more or less human, George, just like us.”
“Did you meet the general?”
“No, but his wife, she was sweet as country pie.”
Hayduke silent, smiling grimly in the dark. The heavy pack on his back, overloaded with water and weapons and hardware, felt good, solid, real, meant business. He felt potent as a pistol, dangerous as dynamite, tough and mean and hard and full of love for his fellowman. And for his fellow woman, too, e.g., Abbzug there, goddamn her, in her goddamned tight jeans and that shaggy baggy sweater which failed nevertheless to quite fully conceal the rhythmic swing, back and forth, of her unconstrained fucking mammaries. Christ, he thought, I need work. Work!
They found Doc sitting on a rock at the edge of the cutbank, smoking the apparently inextinguishable and interminable stogie. “Well?” he says.
“Well now,” Smith says, “I’d say I reckon we done our best.”
“The war has begun,” says Hay duke.
The stars looked down. Preliminary premonitions of the old moon already modifying the eastern reaches. There was no wind, no sound but the vast transpiration, thinned to a whisper by distance, of the mountain forest, of sagebrush and juniper and pinyon pine spread out over a hundred miles of semi-arid plateau. The world hesitated, waiting for something. At the rising of the moon.
7
Hayduke’s Night March
Hayduke awoke before sunrise, feeling the familiar pang of aloneness. The others were gone. He crawled out of the goosedown sack and stumbled into the brush, checking the color of his urine as it streamed out, smoking warm, upon the cold red sand. Hayduke the medic didn’t quite like that shade of yellow. Jesus fucking Christ, he thought, maybe I am crystallizing a bit of a urethral calculus up there in the old kidney. How many six-packs from here to the hospital?