Go to hell, she muttered to herself. I can get out of this without any help from you.
He waited. “No? Okay, wiggle out like a tadpole, see if I care. Always did like a free show.”
You bastard, she thought. She took hold of the rope with both hands, a firm grip, pulled her knees beneath her and walked up the curving sandstone, using the line only for support, disdaining his outstretched hand.
He stood there by her pile of clothing, the rope belayed around his waist, grinning at her in the customary way. The way she hated. “Thanks,” she said politely, picking up her underwear.
“What’s the big fuckin’ idea, swimmin’ in my fuckin’ drinkin’ water? Ain’t you got no manners, woman? No desert etiquette?”
She ignored the remark, twitching the hem of the panties over the swell of her buttocks; she slipped into her bra and reached between her shoulder blades to fasten the clips.
He stared, fascinated. “Why do they hook those things in back?”
“Don’t gape. It’s not polite.” She bent for her shirt and shorts. “Reel in your tongue.”
“You’re beautiful as ever, Bonnie, I can’t help it.” Coiling his rope. “You know the last time I saw a naked woman?”
“Why do you always say something nice and then spoil it with something stupid?” Buttoning the shirt, shaking the long wet hair from her eyes, she pinned him with her coolest stare. Those violet eyes. “Anyhow this is strictly a business trip, George. Don’t get yourself all hot and bothered. Strictly business.” She pulled on her hiking shorts. “Anyhow I’m not beautiful anymore anyhow. I’m getting fat. Look at this—” She showed him her plump abdomen. “—stretch marks.”
“Stretch marks, what the fuck. I like stretch marks. Stretch marks are beautiful. You are beautiful, I don’t care what everybody says. You got a beautiful belly. Let me kiss it.” He dropped the coiled line.
“Back off, George. Relax. Go for a swim.” She zipped up the shorts, tucked in her shirt, sat on the rock to put on socks and shoes.
Hayduke looked below at the dark pool. “As a matter of fact that is what I came up here for.” He nudged off his sandals.
“You didn’t come to rescue me?”
“Oh I heard the hollerin’. If I’d knowed it was you I’d have gone back to sleep.” He unlatched his gunbelt, unbuttoned and peeled off his ragged Levi cutoffs. Since he wore no shirt or underwear, that left him naked. He looked around for his rope, planning to tie one end of it around the closest juniper. Bonnie, her back braced against a ledge, planted one foot on Hayduke’s hairy butt and shoved him over the lip, into the pool. Arms and legs flailing with involuntary reflex motions—”Falling!”—he crashed on the surface in a mighty bellywhopper, went under and came up, floating dead-still on his front. Head and arms and legs hanging under the water, Hayduke presented to sky and Bonnie’s eyes the mute, implacable buttocks of the drowned. He made no move, merely rocking gently on the waves.
Bonnie stared. “George?” No response. “George!” she yelled. No answer. “Oh my God …” She took a step forward, about to leap into the pothole, then remembered the rope. Quickly she snatched it up, whipped one end around the trunk of the juniper, tried a bowline knot, couldn’t remember the pattern, compromised on a granny and ended up with two accidental but satisfactory half-hitches. Tossing the coiled free end toward the water, she kicked off her unlaced shoes and prepared to jump.
But George had held his breath as long as he could. Roaring with laughter and snorting for air, he flung up his head, tossed the hair and water from his eyes, took a deep breath and jackknifed under the surface, mooning Bonnie with his small pale rear, his puckered asshole, his wrinkled balls. Not a pretty sight.
She stepped back from the edge. She watched Hayduke emerge from the water again, grinning up at her like a dolphin as he swam toward the rope that lay draped upon the stone, its running end underwater.
Bonnie jerked the rope upward. Hayduke heaved himself into the air, flinging one hand at the rising line. He missed, grunted and slipped back into the water, coming to rest at the pool’s edge. As Bonnie had done he scrabbled about, searching for a handhold, a foothold. As he well knew, there was none. Relaxing, he floated on his back and looked up at her. Coiling his rope, she dropped it at her feet.
“Very funny.” He grinned, but not so heartily as before. “Well, shit … so come on in, the water’s fine.”
“Guess not.” Pulling on her shoes again. “Had enough myself.”
“Yeah, well, okay, throw me the rope. You got it anchored?”
Bonnie’s turn to grin. “Use your tits, big shot.” Lacing her shoes. “If I could do it you can do it.”
He smiled, running a hand over his cold little nipples, his bulging hair-covered barrel of a chest, his flat and muscle-corded stomach. In fact Hayduke was in good shape, despite the beer; no soft tissue or loose suctorial flesh on him anywhere, except perhaps inside the braincase.
Bonnie stood up and slung on her pack, ready to go. “You coming?”
“Throw me the fuckin’ rope, Bonnie.”
“What? Big he-man like you needs a rope to climb out of that little dinky pothole?”
He sighed, feigning boredom, and examined his fingernails. She picked up his belt, massively heavy with its holstered revolver, sheathed combat knife, loops full of extra cartridges. “Want your gun? I’ll throw you your gun …” Using both hands, she prepared as if to toss the whole rig to him.
“No, no, don’t do that, you drop that in the fuckin’ water I’ll spank your … I’ll …”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll kiss it. Okay? Now throw down the rope, Bonnie.”
“What’s the magic word?”
He grinned his broadest fakest homeliest grin. “Please? Pretty please? Pretty please with icky poo?”
“That’s better. But there’s something else you better explain, Hayduke. Who’d you bring here yesterday?”
He looked puzzled. “Here? With me? What do you mean?”
“You left your condom up here, Hayduke. Full of ants and you-know-what, you lousy fornicating litterbugging slob.”
Bewildered, he stared at her. Then light came. “Oh—yeah. Love. That was Love, Bonnie. Day before yesterday. Love and that—”
“Love you call it? I call it whoring around, you bastard. God, you men make me sick, you’re all the same. Worse than little dogs.”
“Bishop Love, Bishop Love.” Sighing with exasperation, he explained.
“You sat over there,” she said, “spying on two people making love? That’s disgusting. I mean that’s really sick.” She started to walk off. “I think I’ll let you drown.”
“Bonnie!” She paused. “For chrissake, Bonnie, that old fart was only a mile from camp. My camp I mean. And that fuckin’ fat pistol-packin’ rangerette with him. They were lookin’ for us. They were the spies.”
“I still think it’s sick. Degenerate. Don’t you have any sympathy, George, any respect for one of the most sacred, holy beautiful things a man and woman can do together?”
“You mean fuck? Well, sure, only … sure. Only I’d rather do it than watch. Any day. Any time. Like right now.”
“You’re out of luck, Hayduke. I’m a married woman.” She flashed her gold ring at him. “And I’m staying that way.”
“Okay okay.” He shivered, gazing up at her. His lips were turning a little blue. “Can I have the rope now? Anyhow? Please? Please, Bonnie? Pretty please with sugar on it? Brown sugar? White? Powdered? Fucking granulated?”
She kicked the coiled line in his direction and disappeared. When he reached the top of the rope five seconds later she was gone, together with his shorts and sandals. Bareassed, barefoot, lugging his military equipment, massaging his chilled, shriveled and retracted organic equipment, he danced over the hot sandstone and caught up with her at the great dome of naked rock that overhung his secret camp. Hayduke’s place, the raider’s roost, the outlaw hideout. Fort Heiduk, as Doctor Sarvis once
had named it.
Bonnie waited by the iron eyebolt driven into the rimrock of the overhang. Smiling at her memories, she squatted on her heels, chin resting on her thumbs, and stared across the labyrinth of canyons below, of pinnacles and needles and arches and fins and balanced rocks and canyon walls beyond, toward Grand Canyon and the maze of buttes, volcanic necks, mesas, plateaus and blue-hazed snow-crested mountains in the distant south.
Hayduke approached, also squatted—the naked ape—and without a word passed his rope through the slick smooth eye of the bolt to the halfway point and tossed the doubled line over the brow of the cliff.
Aroused from her reverie, Bonnie looked at bolt and rope and shuddered. “Oh God, George … do we have to go that way? Abseilen?”
“No, you don’t. Take the fuckin’ trail if you want to. That way’s two hours, this way’s two minutes. Your choice.” He pulled a diaper sling of new white nylon webbing and three locking carabiners, two with brakebars, from the pockets of his shorts.
She stared at the rim, the abyss of insubstantial air below. “I hate going over that edge.”
“Your choice.” He held the ready-made sling toward her; it resembled, sort of, a man’s jockstrap.
“Oh Lord.” Sighing with dread, she stepped into it and drew it up, snug in the crotch and firm around her hips. Hayduke watched, his interest showing. “Put your pants on,” she said.
Ignoring her suggestion, he clipped the doubled rope to the sling with the carabiners, running it over both brakebars, screw-locked the gates, and checked and double-checked, tugging hard, for safety.
“Okay,” he said, “you’re ready. Over you go.”
Her back to the edge, she looked over her shoulder toward the awful drop-off. Fifty feet straight down, a free rappel, and then a sixty-yard traverse across a pitch of steeply sloping slickrock (with aids) to Hayduke’s cave.
“Oh I hate this.” She faced him, her lovely eyes wide, her full red lips trembling. “Will you belay me?”
He grinned. “Say that again?”
“Be-lay, schmucko, be-lay.”
“Only got the one rope here, Bonnie.”
“There’s one in my pack.” She turned her back to him. “Bottom pocket.”
He unzipped the bottom pocket and pulled out her ninety-foot climbing rope. Heavier than needed, much shorter than it should be, but it would do for a belay here. Standing behind her, he looped one end around her slender chest, under the arms, and secured it with a bowline. And then, unable to resist such proximate temptation—and what man could?—he embraced her, cupping her breasts in his hands, and nibbled on her neck and ears, nosing aside her fall of wavy, fragrant, chestnut hair.
She stiffened but did not resist. “George … George … Strictly business, remember?”
“I remember.”
“Anyhow I’m pregnant.”
“Me too.”
“Yeah, well, get that leaky thing out of my back.” She turned in his arms; now it was nosing at the buttons of her shirt, impinging on her bellybutton. “Gross. Will you put your shorts on please!” She started to back away but the abyss lay behind her. “Business,” she repeated, “I’m here on business. Business only.”
He grinned, all teeth and whiskers and crazy eyes and hairy hide. “What kind of business you have in mind?”
“You know what I mean. You said to come. Now belay me, god-damnit, or I’m going home. Stupid to come here anyhow….” She leaned back on the ropes, looking down. “God, this is sickening.” She closed her eyes and started to descend, very slowly, easing the doubled rope through the carabiners and over the brakebars, clutching at the belaying line with her guide hand. Not from necessity but from instinctive fear.
Hayduke belayed her, one leg braced against the eyebolt, Bonnie’s rope around his waist, across his chest and over one shoulder. Both hands on the line, he paid it out as she went down.
“Okay,” she shouted from below and out of sight, “gimme slack. Off belay.”
He slackened the rope and looked over the edge. She at the moment was inside the alcove below, as the course of the ropes revealed, still out of his sight. “Belay off,” he shouted. He pulled up the belaying rope, coiled, tied and hung it over one shoulder, buckled on his weapons, took up the doubled-over rappel rope and prepared to descend. He meant to go down bootcamp style, hand over hand, rather than wait for Bonnie to get out of the seat sling. Absolutely against all safety rules, of course, but with arms like his, his hands, Hayduke didn’t worry about a fall. Also, he avoided the friction and rope burn of a bareass body rappel.
Whoa there, pardner—almost forgot the short britches. He pulled the garment on, not for modesty’s sake but out of vanity, thinking of the spectacle he would otherwise offer to his waiting friend below. Vain as he was of his well-muscled body, he did not want Mrs. Sarvis studying his perineum as he came down. Not really a thing of beauty, in itself. Furthermore and anyhow he needed the five pockets. A man without pockets is like a … like a what? Like a kangaroo without a pouch? Like a man without a kangaroo? without a woman? That’s it: a man needs a place to put things. Grinning and desperate, sweating and happy, absurd and hungry, just his own old normal self, George W. Hayduke stepped off the brink and glided from sight.
Fifteen seconds later that taut rope twitched, began to slide one-way through the eye of the bolt, swift and easy but not too swift. The free end came up, slipped through the eye and vanished, like a long Perlon snake in a considerable hurry but refusing to panic.
Silence. Soft voices.
Then the sound of a faint feminine squeal—then the sequel, feminine laughter—then the warm and happy sound, the reassuring sound, the universal and irresistible and conclusive sound of two laughing voices, male and female, commingled in universal play.
Only the hawks and eagles listened, from the rim above, only the doves and quail and bluejays from the canyon below. Nobody here but us chickens, Doc.
FROM
Earth Apples:
The Poetry of
Edward Abbey
(1994)
Flash Flood
(July, 1956—Arches)
A flick of lightning to the north
where dun clouds grumble—
while here in the middle of the wash
black beetles tumble
and horned toads fumble
over sand as dry as bone
and hard-baked mud and glaring stone.
Nothing here suggests disaster
for the ants’ shrewd play;
their busy commerce for tomorrow
shows no care for today;
but a mile away
and rolling closer in a scum of mud
comes the hissing lapping blind mouth of the flood.
Through the tamarisk whine the flies
in pure fat units of conceit
as if the sun and the afternoon
and blood and the smells and the heat
and something to eat
would be available forever, never die
beyond the fixed imagination of a fly.
The flood comes, crawls thickly by, roaring
with self-applause, a loud
spongy smothering liquid avalanche:
great ant-civilizations drown,
worlds go down,
trees go under, the mud bank breaks
and deep down underneath the bedrock shakes.
Down the River
(September, 1963—Sunset Crater, Arizona)
Let’s go now, boys, down that river
where the blue herons stalk through the cane
and beaver swim against the current,
quiet, strong, steady as the river;
where the slick amber walls of sandstone
lean over the brown god’s flow, rising up straight
into light and a thousand feet of vibrant space—
(withdraw)
That’s for us: sandbars and reedy islands,
deep still canyons leading in
to peace,
glens with clear springs, the plume of tamarisk,
silence, clarity, the sharp prints of deer
on the shore, down from the mesas beyond.
Bring your girls, your bibles, your poems
and children, bring in your souls’ and hearts’ courage
to search and hope, and prepare, and wait,
while the world we knew drowns slowly
but with sure increasing certainty
into its predetermined swamp of madness.
(withdraw withdraw)
Once there we will build on rock
a house of stone that will outlast
all of their wars and furies, their carnivals of despair,
keeping on the hearth a fire of juniper
and wild scrub oak to warm the hall
and praise your eyes, your speech, your hands,
saving some part of the old virtue
(withdraw withdraw withdraw)
until the smoke clears and the time comes
to leave the wilderness and build at last
on the poor black battered plains of man
that visionary city of the prophecies.
A Sonnet for Everett Ruess
(1983—Oracle, Arizona)
You walked into the radiance of death
through passageways of stillness, stone and light,
gold coin of cottonwoods, the spangled shade,
cascading song of canyon wren, the flight
of scarlet dragonflies at pools, the stain
of water on a curve of sand, the art
of roots that crack the monolith of time.
You know the crazy lust to probe the heart
of that which has no heart we could know,
toward the source, deep in the core, the maze,
the secret center where no bounds hold.
Hunter, brother, companion of our days:
that blessing you hunted, hunted too;
what you were seeking, is what found you.