by Edward Abbey
The sun dropped at last beyond the rim of the plateau. A shadow huge as the state of Connecticut crept across the heat-veiled land of rock, heart of the canyonlands. All action slowed to low-gear pace: Smith about two miles ahead, worried, anxious, looking for safety; Hayduke panting in the middle, dragging his twenty-pound cast-iron bar; Bishop Love and the Team, plus the Caterpillar operator in the yellow pickup, closing in from the rear. The Team was not stopped for long by any of Hayduke’s rocks; the Caterpillar man also had a bar.
The chase proceeded, uphill, in slow motion, no shooting, some shouting, rather dull, until Hayduke reached a strategic position three switchbacks ahead and above, where he found what he’d been looking for.
It was a massive chunk of Navajo sandstone, in shape and size like a sarcophagus, nicely balanced on a natural pedestal. Breathing hard and sweating like a horse, Hayduke reached it, groped around for the best fulcrum, jammed the bar in place, put his weight on the free end, tested. The stone moved, ready to roll. He waited.
Above, out of sight, he heard Smith driving upward; a thousand feet below and three switchbacks down, the leading Blazer poked its nose around a corner. The bishop himself. In a moment the target would be in range.
All three Blazers came into view, groaning up the grade, the yellow pickup following. Hayduke pushed. The boulder creaked, tilted over, began to tumble. Though he knew he ought to run, Hayduke stayed to watch.
The boulder rolled down the talus, over the mass of debris, a clumsy but formidable object. It did not gain speed—the line of fall was not steep enough, the friction and interference too great—but it continued to descend, ponderous and single-minded as a steamroller, dislodging other big rocks as it blundered on, acquiring followers, outriders, satellites and acolytes, with the net result that not one rock but a herd of rocks came down to greet and meet the San Juan County Search and Rescue Team. (The Team, incidentally, was beyond the bounds of its proper jurisdiction, having passed the county line when it crossed the bridge over Narrow Canyon.)
The men below, stopped by another obstacle in the road, stared up the talus slope. Some took shelter behind their vehicles; others stood and dodged. Most of the rocks passed them safely by and nobody got hit. But the granddaddy rock, Hayduke’s boulder, bounding straight ahead, smashed to a stop on the lead vehicle: Bishop Love’s. There was an anguished crunch of steel as the Blazer, squirting vital internal juices in all directions—oil, gas, grease, coolants, battery acids, brake fluids, windshield wash—sank and disappeared beneath the unspeakable impact, wheels spread-eagled, body crushed like a bug. The precious fluids seeped outward from the squashed remains, staining the roadway. The boulder remained in place, pinning down the carcass. At repose.
The pursuit was halted, at least by wheel; the boulder and the wreckage of Love’s Blazer blocked the way of the others. Hayduke, delighted, looking down through the swirling haze of dust, saw the glint of gun metal, the flash of field glasses, the movement of men afoot.
Retreat seemed appropriate. Crouching on the inside of the road, dragging the bar, he jogged upward after the distant sounds of Smith’s truck, choking with laughter all the way to the top of the mesa. Smith was waiting for him.
They sat on the rimrock, legs dangling over the edge of a 150-foot escarpment, and supervised from afar the retreat of the Search and Rescue Team. When all were gone they celebrated the victory with a pint of Jim Beam which Smith, that scandalous jack Mormon, just happened to have handy in his old kit bag. When that was half gone they cooked themselves a supper of bacon and beans. After dark they wended their way by starlight (headlights hooded to prevent aerial observation) along the rim of the Orange Cliffs, around the head of Happy Canyon, past Land’s End and on to the junction with the Hanksville road.
By midnight they had reached Hanksville, half an hour later the Henry Mountains. Out in the woods somewhere they crashed for the night and slept the sleep of the just. The just plain satisfied.
10
Doc and Bonnie Go Shopping
G. B. Hartung & Sons, Mine & Engineering Supplies. Hartung’s youngest boy loaded the Du Pont Straight and the Du Pont Red Cross Extra into the back of Doc’s new Buick station wagon. Ten cases, waxed, sealed and stamped. Plus blaster, blasting caps, wire, safety fuse, crimping pliers and fuse lighters. A dramatic-looking cargo. Style. Class.
“Whatcha gonna do with all this, Doc?” the boy says.
“Monkey business,” Doc says, signing the last of the Federal forms. “Out there on the ranch.”
“Seriously.”
“Pretty serious.”
Abbzug scowled. “We have a mining claim,” she said.
“Oh,” the boy says.
“Thirty claims,” Doc says.
“I hear gold is up to $180 an ounce over there in Europe. You’re gonna develop your claims?”
“That’s right,” Doc said. “Now stick this in your mouth—I mean your pocket.”
The boy glanced at the bill. “Hey, thanks a lot, Doc.”
“Think nothing of it, young man.”
“You come back again now, real soon.”
“We will,” Bonnie said. “Nosy little punk,” she added as they drove away. “I was ready to bust him one in the mouth.”
“Now now, he’s only a kid.”
“Only a kid. You see that awful pimply face? I bet he already has VD.”
“That may well be. Half of them do in this state. And half of those have oral clap. We ought to staple a tag on every adolescent penis in New Mexico: ‘Girls: Examine Carefully Before Inserting in Mouth.’ ”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
“Mouth organs,” Doc rants on. “Spirochetes. Gonococci. Treponema pallida. Consider: ‘Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus,’ a poem by one Girolamo Fracastoro, circa A.D. 1530. The hero of this metrical pastoral tragedy was a shepherd named—no kidding—Syphilis. Like many shepherds he conceived a passion for one of his flock, a ewe whose name I forget. I love ewe, anyway, said Syphilis, stuffing her hind legs into his buskins, then his pseudo-pod past her pudenda. Chancres followed quickly, then lesions. He died horribly thirty years later. Thus the origin of the common belief that syphilis began with a bang.”
“I want a raise,” Bonnie said.
Doc broke down into song:
“I need no chancres to remind me
I’m just a prisoner of lu-u-u-u-u-ve….”
“You sound like you’ve got a chancre of the larynx.”
“Throat cancer. Nothing to get alarmed about. When I was a young fella I wanted to be a sheepherder too. But I discovered I liked girls better.”
“I want a transfer.”
“I want a kiss.”
“That’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“A Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone, double-dip strawberry.”
“Would you like to hear my most perverse secret sexual fantasy?”
“No.”
“I want to bugger a Baskin-Robbins girl. While she’s scooping out the last of the caramel nut fudge. Before lunch.”
“Doctor, you need a doctor.”
“I need a drink. A drink a day keeps the shrink away. What’s next on the list?”
“It’s in your shirt pocket.”
“Oh yes. Yes.” Doc Sarvis scanned the paper. Bonnie guided the car through the heavy Albuquerque traffic. The smoke from his stogie streamed through the open window at his side, joining the general smog. “Rotor arms,” he read, “Bosch and Eisemann, three each.”
“We got those.”
“Caltrops.”
“We got ’em.”
“Check. Powdered aluminum, ten pounds. Iron oxide flakes, ten pounds. Magnesium powder, barium peroxide, Ajax cleanser, Tampax—to the alchemist’s.”
“Don’t know any.”
“To the apothecary’s shop. Down Paracelsus Way off Faustus Street just half a block from Zosimus Square, at the house of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.”
“Come on, Doc, talk A
merican. We’ll go to Walgreen’s.”
“Where they burnt poor Bruno on Saint Cecilia’s Day.”
“Skagg’s Drug Store?”
They went to Skagg’s, where the doctor prescribed himself a thermite suppository, then to a hardware store for the flaked and powdered metals plus ten gallons of kerosene. (For the billboard trade.) The station wagon was well loaded by now, reeking of chemicals. (Chemicals! Chemicals! sang Hayduke.) Doc bought a 20-by-30-foot camouflage net at Bob’s Bargain Barn, together with other items on the list and other things they discovered they just had to have, like a flint-stick fire starter (for those rainy days), a pair of fire-engine-red elastic galluses to hold up Doc’s baggy pants, a vast floppy new straw hat from Guatemala for Bonnie, and presents for Hayduke and Smith: an insulated beer can holder and a Hohner chromatic harmonica. Doc covered their cargo with the camouflage net. Then to an engineering supplies and blueprint shop, where they bought certain key topographic maps.
“Is that everything?”
Reading the list and checking it twice. “That’s it,” Doc says. “Santa Claus is coming to town.”
They retired from the heat and glare of the afternoon to the cool decadent gloom of a Naugahyde-padded bar. Even the walls were padded; it was like a good old-fashioned insane asylum. With Muzak. Candles flickered dimly inside little red globes. The bartender wore a red jacket and black bow tie. At four o’clock it was half filled with lawyers, architects, city-hall políticos. Exactly the kind of place that Bonnie most detested.
“What a depressing den this is,” she said.
“Let’s have a tall cool one and beat the rush home.”
“You’re not going home. You’re due at the Medical Center at five.”
“Right. Back to the butcher shop.”
“Dr. Sarvis!” Her mock shock.
“Well sometimes that’s the way I feel,” he said apologetically. “Sometimes, dear girl, I wonder….”
“Yes? Wonder what?”
The cocktail waitress came between them, wearing her barely there see-through flimsy, her barely anywhere expression. She too was weary of it all. She brought their drinks and floated away, Doc watching her depart. Those pale thighs I love.
“Yes?” said Bonnie.
They touched glasses. Doc peered into Bonnie’s eyes.
“I love you,” he lied. At the moment his mind was twenty feet elsewhere. Was a thousand miles elsewhere.
“So what else is new?”
“I hate those Yiddish locutions.”
“I hate phony declarations of love.”
“Phony?”
“Yes, phony. You weren’t thinking about me when you said that. You were probably thinking—God only knows what you were thinking about. But it wasn’t me.”
“Good,” he said. “Let’s have a fight. What a lovely way to steady my nerves for a little meniscectomy.”
“I’m glad I’m not your patient.”
“Me too.” He drank down half his gin and tonic. “All right, you’re right. I said it pro forma. But it’s true anyway. I do love you. I’d be one miserable and lonesome man without you around.”
“Yeah, around. Somebody to keep your appointments straight and wash your stinking socks. Somebody to keep your foot out of your mouth and your head out of plastic bags. Somebody to chauffeur you around town and get your house cleaned up now and then and look good in the swimming pool.”
“Let’s get married,” he said.
“That’s your solution to everything.”
“What’s wrong with getting married?”
“I’m tired of being your flunky. You think I want to make it official?”
Doc Sarvis was a bit stymied by this one. He sipped cautiously at the remaining half of his gin and tonic. “Well then, damn it, what do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “So shut up.”
“But I know what I don’t want,” she added.
“So does a pig, madam.”
“So what’s wrong with pigs? I like pigs.”
“I think you’re in love with George.”
“Not that pig. No thanks.”
“Smith? Old Seldom Seen, so-called?”
“Now that’s a little more plausible. He’s a sweet man. I like him. I think he really cares about women. But he seems to be pretty well married.”
“Only three. You could be Wife Number Four.”
“I think I’d rather have four husbands. And visit each once a month.”
“You already have three lovers. Hayduke and Smith and poor Dr. Sarvis, M.D. Not to mention all those cats and chickens and high school dropouts and hippie degenerates that hang around that plastic igloo of yours down in Sick City.”
“Those people are my friends. They are not what you would call lovers, though I don’t suppose you can understand that.”
“If their pricks are as limp as their spines I can understand why they’re not lovers.”
“You don’t know anything about them.”
“But I’ve seen them. All trying to look different in the same way. The androgynous anthropoids.”
“All they want is a chance to follow their own life-style. They’re trying to get back to something we all lost a long time ago.”
“Wearing a headband doesn’t make you an Indian. Looking like a weed doesn’t make you organic.”
“At least they don’t do any harm. I think you’re envious.”
“I’m tired of people who don’t do any harm. I’m tired of soft weak passive people who can’t do anything or make anything. Except babies.”
“You sound tired, Doc.”
He hunched up his shoulders, scowled and did his George W. Hayduke imitation: “I don’t like nobody,” he snarled.
Bonnie smiled over her half-empty glass. “Let’s get out of here. You’re going to be late.”
“Let’s.” He reached over and took her drink and finished it for her. They rose to go. “And one other thing.”
“What?”
Doc pulled her close. “I love you anyway.”
“That’s what I really like,” she said. “Ambivalent declarations of love.”
“I’m also ambidextrous.” He demonstrated.
“Oh, Doc … not here, for God’s sake.”
“How about … here? There?”
“Come on!” She dragged him out of the well-padded insane asylum up the steps to the sidewalk, into the scalding glare the mad roar the frantic rush of Albuquerque.
Off to the east beyond the towers of steel and glass and aluminum the mountains stood, the rough rock wall of the Sandias, transected now by an aerial tramway and topped with a spiky coronet of TV pylons. Where once bighorn sheep had patrolled the crags now the tourists played, the children potting birds with their BB guns. Westward on the bleak horizon the three volcanoes, quiescent for the time being, rose like warts, black, wrinkled, stubbed, against the haze of the afternoon.
In the parking lot he fondled her from gate to car.
“God you’re horny today.”
“I am a veritable unicorn of love.”
She got him into the car, the bloated station wagon, jockeyed it out of their parking space and pointed it to the freeway. En route, involved with the traffic, she submitted to the caresses of his large and graceful hands, which were indeed as he had boasted each as dexterous as the other. When they reached the freeway, however, she pushed away his lower hand—the one between her thighs—and stepped on the gas.
“Not now,” she said.
Doc withdrew his hand. He looked hurt.
“We’ll be late,” Bonnie said.
“It’s only a meniscectomy,” he said. “Not a cardiac arrest. What’s a meniscus to come between lovers?”
She was silent.
“We are still lovers, aren’t we?”
At the moment she wasn’t sure. A vague oppression filled her mind, a sense of things absent, lost, yet to be found.
“W
e were lovers last night,” he reminded her gently.
“Yes, Doc,” she finally said.
He lit up another cigar. Through the first ragged shoal of smoke, expelled upon then folded over and reshaped by the contours of dashboard and windshield, he contemplated, soberly, the ramparts of the mountain beyond the smog-veiled sprawl of the city.
Bonnie put one hand on his knee for a moment, squeezed, then returned the hand to the wheel as she wove the big car skillfully in and out of the racing traffic, from lane to lane and back again, always keeping a cushion of space between her car and the fellow ahead. God damn him, why doesn’t he move it or get it the hell off the road? As Hayduke would say, she thought. Doc was not going to be late but she was in a hurry. In a hurry, she realized, to be rid of him for a while.
Poor Doc; she felt, for a moment, immensely fond of him. Now that she was dropping him. Off.
He would not stay down for long. “Look at this traffic,” he said. “Look at them, rolling along on their rubber tires in their two-ton entropy cars polluting the air we breathe, raping the earth to give their fat indolent rump-sprung American asses a free ride. Six percent of the world’s population gulping down forty percent of the world’s oil. Hogs!” he bellowed, shaking his huge fist at the passing motorists.
“What about us?” she said.
“That’s who I’m talking about.”
She dropped him off at the Medical Center, Neurosurgical Ward, staff entrance, then sped home via street, ramp and freeway to the “plastic igloo” in “Sick City.” She would have to pick up the doctor again in five hours. I really should get that man a bicycle, she thought—but of course he wouldn’t even know how to park it straight, let alone pedal it safely down a city street.
When she got home she was tense from the strain of the driving. She entered her dome and paused for a minute, looking about. All seemed in order, silent, in place, serene. Om sweet om. Her cat came up with a little whine and rubbed against her ankle, purring. She stroked him for a while, then lit a joss stick, put on her Ravi Shankar record—an evening raga—and sat down on the rug. She crossed her legs, lotus fashion, and gazed at the gleaming phonograph record as it revolved, thirty-three and a third revelations per minute, on the tireless slightly wobbling turntable. The sitar droned from the speakers, set wide and low in this room without corners. From her position on the floor the interior of the dome seemed spacious as a planetarium; the crystalline clusters on the high vault of ceiling glittered like stars. Through the polyurethane walls the late-afternoon sunlight, lucent and indirect, filled the dome with a soft, diffused and cocaine glow.