“Are they terrorists?”
“No, Oral. They’re worse than terrorists. These people attack property. Property, Oral.”
“Yes sir.”
“Terrorists we can handle. Terrorism is right down our alley. Leave the TV off, Boyle. Terrorism we understand. But this other thing, this so-called ‘ecotage,’ we haven’t had to deal with anything like that since the A.G. wiped out the I.W.W. back in the twenties.”
“A.G., sir? I.W.W.?”
“Attorney General, Oral. His name was Palmer. And the I.W.W., well, that’s history, Oral, history. Happened over sixty years ago. Ancient history, of course, to you modern college graduates. Ever hear of Joe Hill, Oral? Joseph Hillstrom? Or Joel Hagglung?”
“Ah … no sir. None of them.”
“Curious. All the same man, Oral, folk hero to the American Labor movement, died here in Utah, shot through the heart by firing squad, Oral, by court order, happened only ten miles south of here at a place called Point of the Mountain.”
“You mean the state penitentiary?”
“That’s right, Oral, where the penitent are sent to pay penance for their sins and let that be a lesson to you, Oral, think you’ll remember a word of it?”
“Yes sir.”
“Doubt it. Hands off the TV, Hoyle, for the love of Jesus, Joseph and Mary can’t you take our work seriously?”
Growls of discontent. “… Signed on to fight a war, Colonel. We got real live Communists to kill in Panama, Nicaragua, Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, didn’t join this fuckin’ company to check out Halloween pranks in Za-Boobieland.”
“You know why you’re here, Hoyle. You too, Boyle. Who helped plan the Bay of Pigs? Who predicted the Tet Offensive would hit on Mother’s Day? Who told us Somoza was in for keeps? Eh?”
Silence.
“Now if you’d both lay off the sauce for a while and get this Boy Scout job cleaned up we can all go back to where the real thing is.” Pause: silence. “Right?”
Grumbled assent.
“Now. As for you, Oral, I will say only that I’m disappointed in your work so far. Who was that bag woman you caught talking with this Doc Sarvis’s shack-up job?”
“They’re married, sir.”
“Answer the question.”
“She got away. Woman ran like a wide receiver, up the down escalator, down the up escalator, couldn’t get near her, sir. Darn near killed me with her shopping cart — heaved the whole thing at me on the escalator.”
“What was in it?”
“Garbage.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Was all wet garbage, sir. Stuff from some supermarket dumpster — rotten fruit, rotten vegetables, bloody newspapers, soggy bags, plastic diapers full of baby doodoo.”
Vulgar laughter.
“Doodoo, Oral?” inquired Boyle. “Or poopoo?”
Both men broke down into wheezing hysteria, Boyle rolling on one of the double beds. Hoyle convulsing deep in a sagging armchair.
Young Hatch waited in quiet dignity. The Colonel checked his wristwatch against the digital clock on the sound recording equipment. Outside in the Salt Lake twilight, two stories below, the evening traffic flowed through the slush and grime of Sixth South and State Street. Horns honked in forlorn desperation, anxious for stable, dry straw and feed stall; sirens wailed like banshees from Hell; giant jets screamed through the smog above, their landing lights aglare, the pilots popping pills.
“I’m going to give you one more chance, one more chance, Lieutenant Hatch, to redeem yourself and prove you have the makings of a true undercover agent. I want you to infiltrate this Earth Fist or Birth First or whatever it’s called, find out precisely what they’re up to. We’ll let your friend Orlen shadow the Sarvis family.”
“Yes sir. It’s called Earth First! … Earth First exclamation point. From what I hear you can’t join it because they don’t have members, or officers, or dues or any kind of organization at all. But I’ll hang around if I can find where they … hang out. There is supposed to be what they call a Rendezvous pretty soon, on the North Rim. I’ll be there.”
“Good boy.” The Colonel stood up, terminating, without undue prejudice, this second interview, “I’m going now, boys.” The Colonel had a date, a heavy date, coming up in thirty minutes. A certain United States Congressman from Utah and he had discovered, one evening in the Sam Rayburn House Gymnasium, that they had more in common than merely their imperial politics; from urinals to teak-paneled sauna, romance blossomed.
He checked his tie in the mirror, ran a brush over his silvergray hair. “You boys clean up this mess before you leave; I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
Outside, on the street, in the gloom, striding toward the appointed meeting place, the Colonel passed one hand over his fine, interesting, intelligent eyes, as if to clear away an invisible irritant; he felt the aura of another migraine coming on and had forgotten to bring his Sansert. Never mind, there was no pain he could not surmount by scorn alone. Walking’rapidly, feeling the first twitch in his right cheek, the first tear forming in his right eye, he raised both hands to the gray, leaking, sulfur-smelling sky, and cried aloud, “Man is a useless passion!”
There were few pedestrians on the sidewalk. Very few. But those that heard him stopped, turning their heads to watch the march of the tall bareheaded man in the black topcoat, his face uplifted to the hidden stars.
19
Dr. Wiener
Dr. Wiener (as his I.D. badge asserted) entered the Syn-Fuels computer center at lunchtime, wearing the customary white smock over his white shirt and black tie. A thick blond mustache drooped from his upper lip, dark purple sunglasses concealed his eyes, and a mop-like helmet of blond curls, encasing sides, top and back of his head, gave him the adorable cuddly appearance of another Harpo Marx. He held a fat briefcase in one hand, a stout cane in the other, on which he leaned as he walked. His gait was awkward, a painful spastic stagger that carried him one foot to the side for each three feet forward.
A young woman held a door open for him. The fleeing crowd of clerks and tapers, surging out for lunch, parted respectfully before him. Some looked back at his lurching figure as it disappeared into the central computer rooms; they’d never seen him before, but he had obviously been cleared by Security in the lobby upstairs. Anxious to escape their labors, pushed on by the mob, they promptly forgot the man, and raced up stairways, escalators to street level, daylight, open air (such as it was) and their sixty minutes of allotted freedom.
Dr. Wiener meanwhile, reaching the double steel doors (RESTRICTED! Authorized Personnel Only) that guarded the computer banks, drew a passkey and entered, closed and relocked the doors. The room was large, high-ceilinged and well-cooled by heavy-duty industrial air-conditioning equipment. Ranks of computers enclosed in steel cabinets of gray and blue occupied most of the floor space; the steady murmur of their busy little brains filled the air with an oppressive vibration. At least Dr. Wiener found it oppressive.
Against two walls stood metal desks supporting the computer terminals, their keyboards abandoned for the lunch hour, their video screens blinking in holding patterns of green, red and gray. Dr. Wiener placed his briefcase on one of these desks, opened it, pulled out a pair of cheap cowhide gloves and pulled them on. Taking a two-foot screwdriver with plastic handle from his case, he walked the perimeter of the room (with neither cane nor limp) until he came to the grille that covered the recirculating air vent for the cooling system. He pried off the vent cover and set it aside, then advanced directly to the largest computers and jimmied off the access panels, revealing row on row of glittering, immaculate, intricate circuit boards. When all of the computers had been opened he replaced his giant screwdriver in his fat briefcase and removed two empty one-gallon milk jugs, their caps on tight but their entire bottoms cut off. He entered the men’s room and filled the jugs — holding them upside down by their handles — with clear cool chlorinated ethylene glycol-enriched Phoenix City tap water.
&
nbsp; He hurried on rubber-soled sneakers back to the rank of great computers, their innards now on display like the intestines of a row of surgically flayed mammals. Pitcher of water in each hand, Dr. Wiener was about to continue his work when he heard a key in the lock, the entrance doors opened and a supervisory type walked in. Female, thin, middleaged, she had the haggard face and jerky movements of a woman trapped in a permanent state of agitated irritation.
“What the devil are you doing?”
Dr. Wiener grinned in friendly fashion but gave no answer except to toss the contents of his water containers over the exposed circuit boards. Clouds of steam arose at once from technetronic bowels, scintillating with sparks and glints and zigzag jigjags of bewildered little electrical currents, fizzing like dry ice in a punch bowl.
“You damned fool,” the supervisor screeched, “you’re frying the circuits.”
Dr. Wiener smiled again, nodded, and hastened — with spastic limps — to the men’s room for refills. The woman tried to follow; he pointed to the gender label on the door, grabbed his crotch and lunged clumsily inside. The woman hesitated, stared at the horror of the steaming computers, then raced for the doors.
Dr. Wiener emerged from the men’s room, doused two more open computers with water, moved quickly to the entrance doors and locked them by jamming his heavy ironwood cane through the interior pair of handles.
Not a moment too soon. The banging on the doors began as he completed his treatment of the computer banks, becoming urgent as he ranged with open briefcase before the ranks of keyboards and terminal screens, popping a golf ball through each and every cathode ray tube. Haste was vital but he was determined to do a good job. The room filled with fetid vapors, the buzz of electronic fusion and confusion, the caustic smell of burning circuitry; the floor sparkled with shards of glass from the imploded CRTs.
When the doors seemed about to yield beneath the pressure from without, Dr. Wiener stripped off smock, mustache and wig and stuffed them deep inside a burning computer. He poured cooking oil over the floor, turned off the overhead fluorescent lights, sealed the switches with duct tape, crouched under a desk beside the entrance doors and waited.
The cane cracked apart, the doors burst open, the security guards swept in. Into the dark.
“Lights, lights, turn on the lights.”
“Can’t find the switches, where’s the switches?”
Feet slipped and slid, bodies tumbled to the floor. One man found his Mag-light: a piercing beam stroked through the smoke and fog. He saw the detached vent cover of the A/C duct. “Hey, this way, he’s in the cooling duct, dumb cogsucker tried to get out through the duct, we got him, this way, boys. …”
Four men scrambled on the greased floor, slipping and sliding, struggling for traction. One guard managed to get to his feet, peel the tape from the light switches and turn on the lights. Groping through the dense smog, the others pounded on the cooling vent with clubs and flashlights. “Okay, fella, it’s all over now, come on outa there. …”
Dr. Wiener meantime was strolling down the hallway through the empty offices, decently dressed in tweed cap and his blue serge suit from Goodwill, lugging his big but mostly empty briefcase. Smiling, he passed the lady supervisor standing in the doorway to the corridor, nodded politely and stepped onto a rising escalator. She said nothing but stared after him, watched him floating motionless, in miraculous assumption, toward the lobby. Suddenly she screamed, pointed: “That’s him, that’s him!” She started up the moving stairs in hot pursuit. Dr. Wiener emptied a bag of marbles in her path, tipped his cap, disappeared.
20
Bonnie’s Return
Deep in the outback back of beyond, far into the hoodoo land of naked stone she walked, she walked, she walked and walked. The noon sun blazed down from a semi-clouded sky and there was no wind, no trace of breeze. She stopped often to drink from the canteens she carried in her small backpack and when she came, from time to time, upon a pool of rainwater evaporating silently in a slickrock basin, she dropped to her knees, as if in prayer, cupped her hands and drank from the pool. The water was lukewarm but clean, sweet, pure, inhabited by nothing but mosquito larvae, a few of the strange little crustaceans called fairy shrimp, and the occasional spadefoot toad. Their presence in the pools, far from repelling her, attested to the water’s purity. She carried two liters of city water in her pack but preferred to save that when she could. She remembered this trek as requiring five to six hours of dogged hiking but — but that had been years ago, in cooler weather, and without a fetus in her womb.
The route — not a trail — was difficult to follow. His old cairns were in place, three small flat stones piled vertically, placed on strategic high points along the way so that, from any one, at least two others could be seen. But there were no other markers of any kind and the route led mostly over solid slickrock, following the contours of the ledges, avoiding shortcuts across sandy basins and cryptogrammic flats that would leave a footpath discernible to the eye. Of course, even on stone and especially on sandstone, enough foot traffic would create a trail. But this was a secret route, rarely used, known only to its discoverer and his few friends.
She plodded steadily on, wearing her big straw hat to shade her face, a loose long-sleeved cotton shirt soaked in water to keep her cool, baggy knee-length shorts, good stout lightweight old walking shoes on her feet. She carried a long staff in one hand, for snakes and for descending steep pitches of stone, and a rolled topographic map in the other, large-scale, which she consulted now and then when the way forward seemed doubtful.
She remembered most of the landmarks, for she had named them herself (he refused to apply human labels to natural objects older than humankind and destined to outlast humankind): the Goblet of Venus, a twenty-foot vase-shaped boulder perched on a tall and slender pedestal of Moenkopi mudstone; Candlestick Spire, a thin tapering pillar of sandstone one hundred feet high; Cleopatra’s Throne, a monolith of golden Navajo sandstone about the size of Ayer’s Rock in central Australia; the Playhouse, a winding maze of tunnels, windows and intersecting corridors corroded and eroded through a mass of fractured stone; Manhattan Skyline, a file of blocks and pinnacles high on a ridge; the Spectacles, a pair of natural arches, each big enough to fly an airplane through, set side by side in a free-standing tailfin of Entrada sandstone; Deception Arch, not apparent until you entered deep within it and suddenly discovered the huge skylight beyond, up through which the route led; Seldom Seen’s Often Seen Prick, a massive shaft of purplish mudstone topped by a bulging red knob of sandstone (Entrada member); the Joint Trail, a sinuous crevasse in the rock six hundred feet long, fifty to one hundred feet deep, and two to three feet wide. At the narrowest point, which she had named Fat Girl’s Misery, she had to remove her backpack and turn sideways in order to squeeze through; once beyond that the going was easier. Not far beyond the mouth of the Joint Trail she came to the first of a series of natural watertanks — Salvation Pools — sat down beneath a big juniper, took off her shoes and socks, and lit up a joint. Relaxing, soothed by the stillness surrounding her and the pleasant shade, she was about to lean back against the trunk of the tree, close her eyes and dream, when she noticed, with shock and disgust, the used condom on the ledge nearby, ill-concealed beneath an inadequate stone. Not very old either; a file of little black ants was coming and going at the mouth of the thing, gorging on what remained of its rich contents and lugging them, by the sacful, back to headquarters.
The woman broke a dead twig from the juniper, picked up the condom — “Yuck” — and carried it away from the pool to a clump of brown bunch grass on the edge of a sand flat. Pulling a book of matches from her shirt pocket, she lit the dry grass and watched the condom curl, shrivel, smoke, burn and vanish in the flames.
That bastard, she was thinking, that son of a bitch, he brought some girl out here, to our place, our secret sacred pools, and screwed her right there under our personal special tree. The dirty slut — I wonder what she looks like? prob
ably not even legal age, some stupid little teenybopper barely out of junior high, the rotten bastard, how dare he do such a thing? Here? In our magic fairyland right out of Rudolfo Tamayo and Salvador Dali and New Age Art and the Hearts of Space, how could he do it? that ugly dirty hairy ignorant foul-mouthed two-timing treacherous toad of a no-goodnik.
Her first reaction was to sling on her pack and tramp straight back to the end of the jeep trail and her little Suzuki four-by-four. But when she felt the weight of the pack — like an ingot of pigiron between her shoulder blades — and recalled the six seven eight miles of rock and then sand under the afternoon sun … why then she hesitated, thought again, returned to the shade of the juniper and thought some more.
Why not go on? she asked herself. We’ll give him a piece of our mind, the rough edge of our tongue, drop a rock on his head. Let him know what a bastard he really is, in case he’s forgotten, which is all too likely for a rotten son of a bitch like him.
Besides … it’s closer. He’ll maybe have something good to eat, e.g., poached beef on cornpone maybe. Fresh spring water. I can sleep on his cot tonight (alone of course) and not have to curl up on the ground with the tarantulas and kissing bugs and scorpions and those tiny whatever-they-are that crawl in your ears at night and go rollerskating on your eardrums. And what a delight to tell him what I think of him face-to-face and if he tries to grab me I’ll, I’ll … I’ll what? Run like hell? Climb a pinyon pine? Try to knee him in the balls? Pull out my little .32 and shoot him in his hairy old beerbelly? He’d pick me up by the ankles and whirl me around his head like a, like a …? apache dancer! Guess not.
Smiling unconsciously, she marched on and over, between, beneath and around further marvels of patient erosion and ancient geo-logic until she arrived at the last of the big potholes before his hideout camp. This was no mere ornamental pool like the first, where she’d found the condom, but a genuine slickrock waterpocket ten feet deep, ten wide and twenty long, enclosed by steeply sloping walls of nude sandstone. Two small junipers grew nearby. The water was dark green but inviting, certain to be cool and offering her a final chance to freshen up a bit before descending on the bandit’s lair. She undressed quickly and eased herself toward the water, hunkered on her heels, began to slide, and jumped the last three feet into the pothole. As she jumped she remembered something she was not supposed to forget: the rope.