by Edward Abbey
The 4250-W Walking Dragline.
GOLIATH.
One hundred feet above the buried turtle, the near-dead juniper, the flattened-out canyon floor, the man on the horse sat quietly in the saddle and watched, listened, waited.
The horse was a large old castrated stallion with dangling mottled cock eighteen inches long, like a length of rotten salami, staling with some difficulty on the hard stone of the canyon rim. Prostate trouble. The horse, off-white in color, had mangy patches on flank and shoulder, feet like frying pans, one loose shoe, a Roman nose, long and yellow teeth.
The man seated on the sagging middle of the horse’s back wore wrinkled darkblue riding pants smeared with bacon grease on thigh and hip, high boots with rusty spurs, a dirty baggy once-white shirt of weird design (no collar, double row of buttons up the front), the dusty black scarf (of anarchism?) tied about the neck, dirty white gloves with high gauntlets, and a dirty white ten-gallon comical hat with four-inch brim.
He also packed a brace of silver-plated, ivory-handled, .44 magnum Ruger revolvers, each in its leather holster, strapped to his waist by a broad ammo belt studded with cartridges, some of them empty brass. For reloading.
Dark dense Ray-Ban sunglasses shaded his eyes, looped to his neck by a strap like hotdog skiers wear.
He was a thin gristly man, narrow-shouldered, concave in the chest, not tall, not short. He looked old, older than his horse, three times older than his horse. He needed a shave. He needed a bath. His nose came to a point. His ears drooped. His hair was a greasy brown with streaks of gray. And his eyes, dimly visible behind the sunglasses, did not match. There was something false and alarming about one of his eyes.
In any case he merely sat there on his withered hams, in his worn saddle, on his worn-out horse, doing nothing practical or useful. Only watching, waiting, listening, making a fool of himself, because he was the scout.
Meanwhile, below, the little pink ribbons fluttered on the survey stakes. Old man turtle lay stiff as a stone in his grave. The muddied stream rippled in its channel, gurgling over the fresh mud, and flowed down canyon between the parallel bulldozer tracks, around the bend, through a rocky gorge with springs where pink penstemon and scarlet bugler flowered, around another bend into a broad vale thick with wild Indian ricegrass (no cattle in here yet), where the bulldozer roads diverged at the far end and disappeared up opposite side canyons.
But the stream went on mile after mile, down ledges and terraces of stone, forming clear pools and waterfalls, and descended a deeper more narrow gorge into a daring canyon, a canyon of drama and fantasy, deeper than wide, a thousand feet deep and two hundred feet wide, where the water leaped from chutes in bluegray limestone, passing more springs, acquiring more volume, plunging still deeper, deeper, toward the master canyon of them all.
* * *
A cove at the canyon mouth. Two wooden dories, flat white with gunwale stripes of red and green, lay tied to willows on a sandy beach. The name of one dory was Lost Eden, of the other Paradise Regained. Golden oars at rest, the bright high-riding pretty boats bobbed in the sandy shallows, sterns in the water of the river, their cockpits stacked with Gott coolers, ammo cans, lifejackets, waterjugs, rocket boxes, cases of beer. On the cans and boxes were round stickers, each with its upthrust green fist in a red circle on a field of white. A trail of discarded clothing led from the two boats up a path winding among boulders on the side of the busy, flashing stream. Here lay a long-billed boating cap in desert camouflage brown, and there a white T-shirt, on its back a picture of planet Earth and the legend in green We Stand For What We Stand On. A girl’s halter top. Ragged bluejean cutoffs, shockingly brief. A black bandanna. Another sloganeering T-shirt: Down With Empire!, Up With Spring! A pair of man’s shorts. One flip-flop sandal. Lime-green panties. A black string bikini. A sweat-stained salt-encrusted felt hat decorated with hand-tied trout flies. Somebody’s boxer-style swim trunks. …
The path wound among pastel boulders the color of hardrock candy, under willow trees and fat-trunked cottonwoods, into the creek, across a fine sandbar, and disappeared in the depths of an emerald pool fifty feet wide. The water was agitated, turbulent: the creek poured into the upstream side from an overhanging spout of travertine fifty feet above, creating a bold but strangely pleasing sound, the white noise of waterfalls.
Water nixies played in the pool, three of them brown as Indians, brown all over, with long loose flowing hair, sparkling eyes, buoyant and rose-tipped breasts. One was short and chubby, one slim and tall, one bobbed up between: all were beautiful.
The three boys squatted on the bankside watching. One of them — wearing only a T-shirt — played a tune on a recorder. He grew a reddish beard on his chin; his curly brown hair flared up in pointed tufts above each ear. His mates, naked, darkskinned and hairy river-boatman types, passed a little Zig-Zag placebo back and forth, sucking noisily on the illegal fumes, grinning at the girls and feeling their erections grow to unbidden, unprecedented, unwieldy, unconcealable enormity. Where to hide them, that was the question. No doubt an answer would, at any moment, present itself. They waited, watched, shy as unicorns in a field of maidens, half stunned by the wild primeval clamor of their own blood.
The swimmers leaped in the water, supple bodies gleaming like trout. …
The musician lowered his instrument, feeling the tug of that more powerful instrument below. He looked at his eager comrades. They nodded. He pulled off his T-shirt (“Hayduke Lives!”) and dropped it to the sand. Rising together, primed like torpedoes, the three young men plunged into the water. The girls shrieked in mock alarm, scattered out, backed off, then regrouped and dove like dolphins for the deep center of the pool, flashing glossy bottoms at the hot pulsing leer of the sun.
Everything is better in the out-of-doors.
Everything?
A strand of red mud, iridescent with a trace of oil, appeared in the clear green of the waterfall.
5
The Cleaning Lady
The Suits gathered about the boardroom table, an architectural structure three times wider, near half as long and twice as polished as a bowling alley. Overhead an extravagant chandelier, glowing. … The older men puffed on obligatory cigars (the CEO was a smoker), the younger men chewed their lower lips, the one representative woman — handsome, hollow-cheeked as a fashion model, smartly and soundly costumed in a business suit of checked wool, skirt to her calves, silk blouse with frilled collar, discreet and genuine necklace of cultured pearls — she drew languidly on a slender cigarette of black and gold, thin as a pencil. Her fingernails, painted primrose red, were long, dangerously long, indicating to all who might notice or care that she did no useful work. Labor, that is. Manual, as with the hands, labor. Her male colleagues, some of them younger than she, some of whom might be presumed to be at least capable of pushing a lawnmower from time to time across the lawns of their Longmont estate homes, they too wore their fingernails long. Unpainted but scrubbed, buffed, trimmed, immaculate.
(Pushing a lawnmower? Pushing? A lawnmower? Nobody, nowhere, nobody in all of America, Japan or western Europe pushes a lawnmower. They ride them, pushing levers, buttons, horns. Or their gardeners do. Their children, maybe, sometimes.)
Waiting for the chief, the eleven men and one woman idled about the giant table, stared out the great wall windows at the thick brown air of the city, the streets far below, the dim snow-dappled distant mountains of the Front Range, the eastern plains extending through an infinity of haze toward the darkening East.
The Big Blue Behind was late, they noted, checking chronometers. Unusual for him. Like most great men in the upper echelons of Nuclear Fuels Inc. (U.S. subsidiary of Syn-Fuels Ltd.) he prided himself on his punctuality and demanded it of others. When one’s virtues are singular one makes the most of one.
The twelve vice-presidents glanced at watches, gazed at the familiar scenery through the tinted Thermopane, mentioned certain items on the agenda.
“… Mountain States Legal Fou
ndation?”
“Hell yes. They’ll never get rid of old Wort. He’s the founder.”
“What about the appeal?”
“No problem. The judge understands.”
“I hear he has this weakness for Indians.”
“He’ll go along. He understands the situation. They’re not one of his tribes anyhow. Only two hundred on the whole reservation and half of them are drunks and the other half are children, he’ll go along.”
“They get that thing assembled?”
“Finally. Two months behind schedule. Some asshole trucker kept losing the welding equipment. You have any idea how many welds in one of those machines?”
“You mean the walking dragline?”
“I mean the 4250-W. About ten thousand. Damned welders pulling down thirty-five an hour, too. But we’re working on that. Got the whole southern Utah school system training more welders now. More welders, pipe fitters, plumbers, electricians, diesel mechanics, operating engineers — “
“What the —?”
“Yeah I know what you mean. Operating engineers. That’s what they like to call themselves. Operating — “
“Drives a tractor, calls himself an operating engineer?”
“Herself too. We’re getting girls into the program too. That’ll whip the union into line, get them out there putzing around on Cat D-9s. Good workers, those girls. Take the work seriously. Don’t drink, smoke dope. Really want the job. Put the screws on those rednecks once and for all, teach them a little humility, show them there’s nothing special about running big equipment, nothing special at all, anybody can pull a gearshift, turn a crank, breathe through a respirator can drive a bulldozer, backhoe, fuel tanker, ore hauler, dirt scooper, dump truck, earth mover, core driller. That’s what the boys don’t believe yet. They’re in for a shock.”
“Might be too much.”
“Keep ‘em scared. Bit of affirmative action, that’s all it takes. Hire more girls, blacks, Mexicans, we’ll soon have the union crawling around on all fours begging for a swift kick in the — hello, Mary.”
“Hello, boys.”
“Talking about the strip project.”
“I’m sure you were. Did we get the permit already?”
“No problem with the Feds. No problem with the county. They’re eager to cooperate.”
“Then we’ve already got the permits?”
“They’re in the pipeline, in the pipeline. All routine procedures under way, a few more hearings here and there, usual crap, regulation bullshit, everything’s set.”
“But I heard the machine was already moving.”
“Sure is, Mary, it sure is. We can’t wait forever. Summer monsoons coming, muddy weather maybe, flash floods in the canyons, that sort of problem, had to get started while the time is right.”
“Really? But suppose — “
“You’ll find out, Mary, it pays to jump the gun. Every time. Any hitch in the permit process, any more goddamned appeals, we show the court we already spent seventeen million, seventy million, whatever the hell it is, got four hundred men at work — “
“Men?”
“Men, girls, women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, whole community depending on us, Judge, don’t dare cut off the project now.”
“Show some pity on those poor folks, Judge.”
“Don’t be cruel, Judge.”
“Have a heart.”
“New day-care center, Judge.”
“New school building. New Dairy Queen. New McDonald’s.”
“Seventeen million dollars, Judge.”
“Seventy million.”
“Lecture fees, Judge. Ten thousand a night. All yours.”
“No, no, we don’t mention that. Sensitive point. Never mention the lecture fees.”
“Or Antigua? Cancun? Palm Springs? Honolulu?”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Et cetera?”
“Especially not that.”
“You boys have it all figured out, don’t you?”
“Mary, you must be as smart as you look.”
“Me? Little me?”
“Nobody could be that smart.”
“Except Mary.”
“Why thank you, gentlemen. Really. And where is the big blue behind today?”
“Mary, we always speak that sacred name in capital letters. Italicized. The Big Blue Behind.”
“Reverential, like. With muted awestruck voice.”
“I see. Of course.”
“And — “
“And here — he — comes. …”
They heard the gold key slip into the gold-plated lock. They saw the gold-plated latch handle turn on the massive, planked, hand-tooled, mahogany door. In the sudden silence, all conversation stilled, the eleven big men and one tall woman watched the heavy door swing slowly inward, without the faintest creak or squeak. A well-hung door.
The cleaning lady entered.
She trundled behind her a huge and filthy steel mop bucket on wheels, a bucket brimming with a sulfurous-yellow, slick, foaming sludge. With her free hand she dragged an industrial-size mop, trailing a greasy smear through the open door and into the boardroom. Her own special mop, nobody else’s, with her own initials engraved in the hard ashwood of the handle: H.I.S.
The cleaning lady was a big woman, hips an ax-handle wide, bosoms large as vine-ripened muskmelons. (Those splendid female gourds!) Her belly bulged — pregnant again, obviously, planning to get back on the old public welfare titty, undoubtedly. (Beulah, how come you keep has’n all dese chillun, Beulah? Well suh, Mistah Social Warfare Investigation suh, dat simple as dog-poo on de front walk: de mo chilluns we has de mo money we gits.) Half-concealing the black face, shining with sweat and/or grease, the woman wore granny glasses with blue lenses and on her head a mop, another mop, of thick blond polyester curls, evidently a wig, resembling that of Harpo Marx. Her gown, loose and full in the Mother Hubbard style, a grimy cotton print with dirty roses, long-sleeved, buttoned to the throat, came down to the toes of her large wide flat sneaker-shod feet.
She was a powerful a magnificent an awe-inspiring cleaning lady.
But a bit early on the job? The handsome board members stared. One of the bigger, older, more important of the Suits nudged the younger man at his side. A firm elbow jab to the ribs. The hint.
“Ah, yes,” the younger man began, lowering his cigar and taking a step forward, “pardon me, ah, madam, but we’re, I mean, this is, that is, you’re a couple of hours early, aren’t you? Furthermore —” He looked at the bucket, the mop, the floor with its rich carpeting, wall to wall.
“Where’d you get that key?” the older man asked.
Ignoring him, the cleaning lady dipped her mop into the foul liquids of her bucket, let it soak for a moment, then pulled it out — dripping on the rug — and stood it against the wall, close to the frame of the open door.
“Wait a min … I mean,” continued the younger man, “just what do you think you’re doing, woman?”
The cleaning lady looked at him. Hidden by the blue glasses it was hard to read the expression of her eyes, but judging from the firm bite of her jaw, the prim grim set of her grotesquely overpainted carmine lips, she would appear to be glaring at her interlocutor.
“I mean,” he said, “ah, well, madam, if you prefer, or even, ma ‘am, if you wish …” Glancing aside at his fellow board members (Aryans all), the man allowed himself a slight snigger, a small smirk, and shrugged, helplessly. Receiving no verbal assistance from any of them, plainly stuck with the odious chore of clearing the master boardroom of this curious intruder, he faced her once more. “My dear woman,” he began, again displaying his company manners (M.B.A., Harvard ‘75), “we know you have your work to do, but, as you can see, we are having a meeting here, and besides …”
The cleaning woman glared at him.
Casually, but with shaky hand, he raised his burning cigar to his lips, nearly inserted the wrong end, reversed it hastily, tried again, got it righ
t, took a puff, coughed. “Besides … this room, as you see, this carpet …”
The cleaning lady spoke at last, her voice a high-pitched fake falsetto. “What, boy,” she said, “you jivin’ me?”
“What?”
“Cain’t you talk plain talk? You human or what, boy?”
“Well, sorry but, all I mean is, Jesus, woman, you don’t mop a carpet. Nobody mops — “
“Not here to mop no carpet.”
“What?”
Taking her bucket of yellow slops in her big gloved paws, the cleaning lady lifted it waist-high and stepped toward the gleaming splendor of the boardroom table. “Got a message for you folks,” she said, “straight from the slime pit of you-all’s Moab Utah uranium mill.” She swung the bucket backward — “ ‘Bout five gallons pee-ure liquid radiation” — then forward, dumping the entire contents over the surface of the table. The members leaped away, dabbing frantically, with dainty breast-pocket hankies, at the steaming glop splashed upon their Savile Row suiting.
“What’s more,” the cleaning lady yelled, falsetto falling, failing, “you can keep your bucket too.” And she hurled it upward, with mighty arms — strong woman — at the immense blazing gold-leafed intricate chandelier that hung, like a canopy of radiance, above the table. The bucket smashed through the middle tiers of glass and glitter and jingling incandescence, fell end over end in a shower of shards to the center of the table, bottomside up, steel wringer down. Scoring the table’s mirrorlike perfection with a long scrawl, it skidded to the farther end and plopped like a field goal into the chairman’s discreetly but substantially superior chair.