“Erika,” he said, “it’s the theory of deterrence. You know — worry the bastards so they keep their damn tree clippers out of our public woods. In order to work, the deterrence has to be credible. God, I sound like Henry Kissinger. In order to be credible, we have to actually pound in the nails and maybe shatter some buzzsaws — sacrifice a few trees in order to save many trees. That make sense to you?”
She looked at him then at the fire, her delicious lips moving, rephrasing his words into her native Svenska. “Ja,” she said, “ja ja, but … iss sad. Iss so sad.”
“Money,” said Nielsen, “that’s what it’s all about. If we can cut down their profits in the national forests the timber corporations will go back to growing trees on private property. Money is the name of the game, the one thing they care about. Those M.B. A.s from Harvard and Yale and Princeton and the University of Tokyo get very emotional about money. So that’s where we hit them — in their hearts.”
A tear leaked from her eye.
“Come on, don’t cry for those swine. You think they’d cry for you? You think they’d cry for the murder of a living tree? or for the massacre of a whole damn forest of living trees?”
“I vas sinking … off somezing else. …”
The boys glanced again at one another, eyebrows lifting. The golden-haired Apollo groaned. “Erika — not him again. Not that goddamn missionary.”
She nodded. “I vant to find him.” Blinking, sniffing, she wiped her fine noble red nose with a half-frozen finger.
“Jeez, Erika, you know how many Hatches there are in Utah and Arizona? About half a million. And half of them are named Oral or Orrin or Orval or Oval or Offal.”
“Opal, Ovary, Overalls, Ovine, Overshoe, Onus, Oviduct …”
“I luff him,” she said simply, gazing at the dying flames.
That silenced them.
A striped skunk padded by on the far side of the fire, half in half out of the light.
“Don’t anybody move.”
The skunk halted, lifting its lovely bushy tail at the sound of the hunter’s voice. The four humans froze, watching the skunk. The skunk waited, then lowered its tail with an elegant rippling movement of fur and sinew, went on, disappeared into the shadows. The humans resumed breathing, mouths opening for speech. The skunk came back.
“Don’t move. …”
Again the skunk halted, tail up, hindquarters elevated in firing posture, eyeing them from fore and aft — two bright obsidian eyes in front, one red puckered eye at rear, or what some folks would later call the Ev Mecham campaign button.
Again the skunk relaxed, assumed a horizontal attitude, padded delicately away over the snowcrust like a housecat with important business elsewhere. Uncontrollably, three of the humans began to giggle.
“Careful,” Nielsen said, “he’s still around.”
The skunk returned, this time hopping onto the log between Pete the Piper and Pretty Boy. It perched there as if invited, like a legitimate member of the company, gazed calmly at the little fire and began to rub its long pointed nose with both forepaws. Itchy.
Nobody dared speak. Each human struggled to suppress the giggles, while pondering at the same time the furtive and traitorous impulse to leap away, to make a solo break for safety and let the other three absorb the punishment.
Somebody began to choke on her stifled laughter, straining not to burst out. The skunk sprang to full alert, handstand position, belly to audience, head turned around and taking aim.
“Don’t … move. …”
A coyote chose that moment to howl, answered at once by other coyotes in other quarters, everyone sounding close to camp. The skunk dropped to all fours, hopped from the log and fled. Rescued, the four young humans stood, hugged one another in tears and laughter, kicked snow on the fire and prepared for bed, crawling one by one, when ready, into the tent and once inside, into their snug and womb-shaped mummy bags, stripping down to long-handled thermal underwear. The dome-shaped tent could accommodate four, but without a square inch to spare. They ranged themselves, therefore, in alternating positions, head to toe, doing it one at a time — no room for a juggling of full-grown bodies.
“Who sleeps with Erika tonight?”
“Everybody sleeps with Erika tonight!”
“Ja, ja,” she cried, the jolly tease, “but nobody zey slip on top of Erika tonight.” Day by day and night by night her English was improving, acquiring elegance and grace. Elegance from need, grace beneath pressure.
And day by day the machine advanced.
17
Love and Ranger Dick
in Love
The big blue Ford Bronco churned through the white sand in four-wheel drive, following the course of an intermittent streambed that led, by serpentine and unhurried route, toward a maze a garden a petrified city of pale buff and rose red domes, turrets, pillars, sky-scraping obelisks, cloud-touching towers.
“Dudley … it’s beautiful in here.”
Bishop Love, clutching the wheel with left hand, his right on the knob of the gearshift lever, gazed with pride at the splendid scene on either side and before them, and nodded in agreement.
“Sure is, honey. See that yellowish-green stratum under the Moenkopi? Carnotite, sweetheart, carnotite, highest-grade ore in the whole United States. See them black beds down there under the Chinle? Coal, honey, that’s genuine bituminous low-sulfur coal.”
Rangerette Dick, out of uniform on her day off, wore a loose partly unbuttoned blouse of pink chiffon (sweetly feminine) revealing the curvature of her generous mammaries, and tight stone-washed acid-bleached designer jeans (from Sears) that shaped her powerful thighs in graceful, swelling symmetry. Her clean petite bare feet, with the scarlet toenails of a designing woman, were perched high on the dashboard of Bishop Love’s bouncing machine. She clung with one hand to the roll bars above her head. “So beautiful,” she repeated, “so beautiful, Dudley. It’s like a fairyland in here.”
“You bet your boots, Virginny. Why, someday we’re gonna have fifty thousand people living here, mining that uranium, digging that coal, building golf courses and swimming pools and condominiums and selling hotdogs and postcards to a million tourists a year. Also there’s tar sands here, and oil shale, maybe potash, and for sure we know there’s a big pocket of C02 under here somewheres.” The Bishop smiled at the view ahead, gratified by the pleasing prospects. “Yessirree bob, this here’s mighty pretty country.”
“This should be a national park,” the woman blurted. And regretted the remark instantly.
“Park?” Love frowned. He scowled. He growled, “Ginny, you know we been parked to death in Utah, Arizona. One thing we don’t need is no more goldang national parks or even state parks or goddamn wilderness pre-serves. Pardon my French but doggone, Ginny, you know and I know a park attracts them environ-meddlers and Sahara Clubbers like a dead horse draws blowflies. Nosir, we don’t need no more parks, we need industry. Jobs. People. I’ll take people over rocks and cactus any day and I don’t care who hears me say it.”
She thought it best to switch the subject, quickly.
“What’s the C02 good for, Dudley? To carbonate Pepsi-Cola?”
He smiled, smug in his superior knowledge. “Pepsi? Lot more than that, honey. We tap the deposit here, ship it by high-pressure pipeline to the oilfields in California and Texas, they use it to pump more oil out of them old dried-up wells. The geologists estimate we got enough carbon dioxide here to force maybe another sixty million barrels out of them old oilfields. Sixty million!”
Sixty million barrels, she thought. Wonderful. Why, that’s enough oil to keep America going for — what’d I read? — nearly eight more weeks. Great. Great thinking, fellas. (What a pack of inbred idiots.) Smiling herself, amused rather than annoyed by the Bishop’s techno-industrial fantasies, which she tended to regard as merely one more example of the comic male lust to always improve on nature, to organize, exploit, design and dominate (even the jeans designers were men too, of a sort), Ran
gerette Dick held to the roll bars, let her right hand dangle out the open window at her side, and tickled the heads of the golden sunflowers, the creamy cliffrose, the purple asters, the cadmium-red Indian paintbrush, the coral-red globemallow, the giant long-stemmed primrose, as they passed, brushing the side of the vehicle. Flowers, flowers everywhere, for as far as she could see, glowing on the sand dunes, shimmering under the junipers, flaring from cracks in the monolithic slickrock. Not only these big ones in this sandy ravine but all those little ones out yonder: sand verbena, blue phlox, purple beeplant, princess plume, alyssum, larkspur, Sego lilies, blue penstemon and scarlet penstemon. … A treasure trove of flowers in a fairyland of sandstone across a wonderland of open space and clean air and untrammeled earth.
More or less, she added to herself; the range would be infested with domestic cattle in a few more weeks, once the local ranchers had bestirred themselves enough to stop drinking Pepsi-Cola with their legislators up in Salt Lake City, got out of bed with the state BLM administrators, and came back home and heaved their big potbellies into their airplanes, $15,000 four-by-four pickups, and radio communication centers. She knew the type; in only six months on the job she’d already met every rancher in her district, heard all their complaints about the government not doing enough to poison wildlife, kill off the ravens, clear off the sagebrush, improve the old roads and build more new roads, install more cattleguards and string more barbed wire, increase grazing allotments and decrease grazing fees — why these poor struggling ranchers were even now paying a head tax of $2.25 per month for each cow and calf (and bull) they turned loose on the public lands, one-fourth what they would have to pay to lease similar lands in the private sector. Outrageous? You bet. And they were outraged, those cow-loving, horse-forking, rope-twirling, cud-chewing, crotch-scratching, fly-slapping, old-timey rugged individualists. Goddamned government wasn’t doing enough for them. Goddamned ungrateful taxpayers letting them down again. Goddamned bureaucrats not paying as much attention to the Cattlemen’s Association as it does to them welfare rights Nigra ladies in their pink Cadillacs.
She knew, Ranger Dick did; she had to listen to it nearly every day. Part of the job. Sometimes she hated her job. But she was coming around, more and more and day by day, to love this queer barren God-forsaken land. There was something here, something in the space and silence, something in the landforms and the cloud formations, that she’d never seen back in Michigan. Or even heard of. Or ever imagined.
The canyon country was not Michigan.
Too bad ol’ Dudley here didn’t understand that. But then ol’ Dudley he’d never been east of Denver, except for important politico-business flights to Washington, D.C. And what do you see from 29,000 feet? Mostly nothing. And in Washington, D.C.? Even less.
She let go of the roll bar. Dudley had stopped the machine. Virginia let her left hand fall from the roll bar and drop casually — and fondly — upon the Bishop’s thick right thigh. Close to the pocket. You got a gun in there, Dud? Or you just happy to be with me again?
It had occurred to Ranger Dick, more than once, contemplating the hefty figure in the floor-length mirror of her BLM trailerhouse in Hardrock, that she bore a flattering resemblance to the late Mae West. To the young Mae West, that is, the charming chickadee of stage and film. A century ago, thought Virginia, with some justice and with mild bitterness, the men would have admired my body. Now I’m the type that men call “stout” and dress designers call “full figured.” Sheet. Where’s the justice in this world? There is no justice in this world. (Even worse in the next.) Life ain’t fair. And that ain’t fair.
But ol’ Dud here, he likes me. He likes his “wimmin,” as he says, “well built,” quote.
“Honey,” he said, coming around to open her door for her (imagine that!), “you step out here. I want to show you something.”
Gracefully, taking his rough mitt, which felt like the forepaw of a crocodile, she stepped out of the Ford (recovered, by the way, in a parking lot in Kanab, Utah, with “Thank You” notes signed in lavender lipstick, but no fingerprints nowhere). Hand in hand, like bashful lovers, they walked through the sand, around the flowerbeds and toward what looked to Virginia like the edge of the world. Beyond the high rim of pale sandstone, sparsely but elegantly decorated with isolated junipers, blooming yucca, and the fragrant shrubs of cliffrose — that scent like orange blossoms — she saw and could see nothing but an infinite expanse of Western sky, winedark blue, upon which, with insouciant nonchalance, a few clouds drifted, in unison like sheep, fat, woolly, unshorn, ephemeral, without significance.
“Got your parachute?” he joked.
“Parachute?”
Fifty yards farther, high on the outermost ridge of rock, she understood what he meant. They stood on the verge of a mighty mesa, hand in hand, and looked down for nearly a thousand feet upon a talus of boulders big as buses, boxcars, bungalows that led in turn to a second dropoff and a second precipitous descent and a second disarray of scattered, shattered rocks, pedestal rocks, balanced rocks, hanging rocks, cantilevered rocks, rocks like mushrooms and rocks like hamburgers and goblin rocks and gargoyle rocks and rocks perched like glans penes upon erect and swollen shafts of Moenkopi mudstone — two thousand feet below.
Beyond lay the red desert and further canyons, the Grand Canyon, the snow-covered Kaibab Plateau, the snowy San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, one hundred sixty miles off by line of sight, two hundred sixty by road, and beyond all this, all that, obscured within the hazy vistas of central and southern Arizona — Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale, Tucson, Nogales, where the huddled masses endured their muddled lives amidst a welter of smog, crime, noise, drugs, police, traffic, disease, heart transplants, sphincter transplants, two-headed babies, hydrocephalic preemies, endless conflict, smouldering hatred, an ever-rising Irritability Level, enjoying the pleasures of Growth, Prosperity and Progress.
“Oh, Dudley …! It’s wonderful! Simply — “
“Ain’t it, though. I was thinking right here’d be the spot for a big deluxe motel, like maybe a Holiday Inn. Once we get the Super-G.E.M. in here we can level off this mesa, put a jet strip over there, a by-God million-dollar eighteen-holer along the rim, how’s that mess down below for a rough, huh? 01’ Sam Snead hisself might shy away from that, hey?”
“Simply wonderful, Dud …”
“Helispot on the roof, nice circular driveway coming up from the gulch, live bands on Saturday night, Sons of the Pioneers or Herb Alpert maybe or Lawrence Welk or that Mantovani fella, they still around?, salad bar, probly a resident physician for the old folks, by God, I tell you, Ginny, it’ll be something. Something else. And you know something? This here ain’t BLM we’re standin’ on right here, this here’s the corner of a section of state land. State land, you get me? Two-thirds of it flops over the cliff there but what the hell that still leaves more’n two hundred acres for development which is more’n twice what they needed for Disneyland, you follow me?”
“Well, sure, Dud, but state land is public land too.”
“It is and it ain’t. State law requires that state land be used for maximum financial return.” The Bishop glanced furtively about for a moment, as if fearing eavesdroppers, though the nearest known or permanent human habitation was the town of Hardrock, twenty miles by helicopter, thirty by mule trail, fifty by dirt road and jeep track — the route that the Bishop himself was pioneering this very day. “That means the state land commission has to listen to any offers it gets, lease to the highest bidder. And if a fella had a forty-nine-year lease, and then we get a good road in here, as we got to get for the uranium pit over yonder in Eden Canyon, well listen, honey …”
“And you’re on the land commission?”
“No but I got friends who are.”
His voice warm and choking with sentiment, rich with the poetry of his passion, the Bishop had to pause for a moment to swallow, clear his throat, regain full and manly control of his emotions. In synchronized but unconscious associat
ion, his broad hand gently disengaged itself from the ranger’s hand and crept around her full waist, coming to rest upon the comfortable jutting shelf of her abundant hip.
Virginia thought it best to change the subject again, divert his mind from what his hand was up to. Why? Well, she wanted their picnic lunch first. She wanted to hear him talk of something other than money. At least for a few minutes. Perhaps pick a flower for her. Perhaps suggest a dip in a pool; he had mentioned earlier the existence of some magnificent natural waterpockets and potholes among that silent rosepink city of capitol domes, Park Avenue palaces, natural bridges, grottoes and buttes and gorges and pillars that lay now, on the horizon to the east, only a few miles ahead. Where also, they both suspected, the outlaw saboteurs hid out between their dastardly, cowardly, bastardly eco-raids.
“What about the Lone Ranger?” she said. “Rudolf the Red and the Earth First! mob? And that Monkey Business Gang?”
The Bishop’s eyes suddenly lost their romantic lustre. Rousing from his daydream, wiping a tear from his cheek, he drew himself erect, stiffened with grim resolution. “Yeah … that’s right. Come on, Ginny, let’s check that place out.”