“You know what I mean. You said to come. Now belay me, goddamnit, 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 boot-camp 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.
21
Doc’s Return
Doc’s turn.
Pleading physical, mental, moral and nervous exhaustion (quite justified) and the need, in consequence, for a brief interlude of open space, clean air, stillness, solitude and spiritual renewal, he borrowed her little Suzuki Sepuku jeepette and headed for the desert. As any wise man must, in springtime, in the autumn of his soul, when the need is great. Where all the Hebrew prophets went to regenerate their visions, where the Indian shamans and Hindu mystics found their oracle, where the great Lao-Tzu was headed (Sinkiang) when the border guard detained him for long enough to write his tiny little open-ended giant of a book (the Tao Te Ching).
Told her he’d be back within four five days. But had to have that metaphysical break. She understood, his bonnie wife, and sped him on his way with kisses, homebaked cookies, flowers, a roasted turkey and a final farewell frenzied abbzuggian fuck that shook his teeth, wrung out his loins, fibrillated his heart and left a sweet golden glow of peace upon his mind.
Yes, he had observed a renewed zest for the sexual act (and amplified tenderness) in that woman of his, ever since her return, not long before, from her own vacation solitaire. Wherever that had really been. Doc never inquired into such matters, respecting her private need for whatever it was she needed on such occasions. Possibly an offstage lover? supplemental sex? Very well, he could accept it providing that she didn’t bore him with details, flaunt names in his face, do anything malicious or cruel. He knew that he was no great lover, never had been, and nearly twice her age could not hope to satisfy the legitimate animal desires of a healthy, wholesome, full-blooded woman. Doc despised the notion of what was sometimes called “open marriage”; to him such a practice seemed more dismal and lonely than no marriage at all. But he could understand and live with the idea (or so he thought) of Bonnie enjoying a secret paramour, male or female, so long as she kept it secret. I.e., in good taste.
So he thought. We civilized men — such bloody decent chaps, you know. Passion sublimated to the love and pursuit of intellectual titillation. Honest anger perverted into benign tolerance, joy degraded to mere pleasure, rebellion channeled into … legal procedures, genteel letters to the editor, the political process.
Somewhere south of Panguitch, not far from the Big Rock Candy Mountain, Doctor Sarvis pulled off the lonely highway for a few minutes of rest and recreation. Concealing himself behind a bush of purple sage, like a gentleman, he unzipped and peed upon a small anthill. The ants scurried forth howling with rage, feelers dripping, jaws spread for a bite of flesh.
Doc backed off in time, rezipped, removed a plastic milk jug, a plastic funnel, a can of WD-40 and a pair of gloves from the car, and walked to the yellow front-end loader parked nearby, first in a row of silent, giant, murderous machines, all of them spattered with what looked, at first glance, like dried blood. Red mud, perhaps. He pulled on the gloves.
How many months, perhaps years have I wasted? he thought, besieging politicians, bureaucrats, and the New York Times with letters? … saving the world? …
He withdrew the dipstick from the loader’s engine block, checked the oil. Half quart low. He inserted his funnel, uncapped the milk jug, poured sixty grams of lapidary grit into the crankcase, flushed the dipstick pipe clean with a squirt of WD-40, and replaced the dipstick. He proceeded to the next machine.
… sitting through tedious public hearings? questioning smug affable evasive Senators at cocktail parties? contributing funds to doomed campaigns? …
A car zoomed past on the highway. The driver waved. Doc waved back. Red sun sinking on the west, purple twilight creeping from the east. He pulled the dipstick from the block of a Komatsu sheep’s-foot roller and repeated preceding procedures.
… in quixotic opposition to campaigns funded by Union Carbide, United Technologies, Exxon, Texaco, Getty Oil, Nuclear Syn-Fuels, Bechtel Construction, General Motors, Nissan Motors, Mitsubishi, Komatsu not to mention Dow Chemical, Du Pont, Monsanto, Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhauser, Westinghouse …
He treated a Case road-grader, a Mitsubishi crawler-tractor and a Caterpillar backhoe as he had the others, playing fair, and then — jug empty — returned to Bonnie’s Jap jeep and drove on, southward into the dusk, bound for what he had not mentioned to his wife: Fort Heiduk.
… Hayduke. Heiduk: heiduk (hī’ dūk), n. [Hung, hzei, beyond, outside of
At midnight he drove through the town of Hotrocks — nothing open but a Circle K store, where he refueled the Suzuki — crossed the state line, passed the Buckskin Tavern where two cowboys were puking on their cowboy shoes in the parking lot, left the paved highway and followed a graded dirt road deep into the Arizona Strip. Public land; no man’s land, no, nor woman’s either; a region free of human habitation but not “uninhabited.” Tout au contraire! Inhabited most fully and complete by pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, mule deer, wild horses, desert tortoise, mountain lion, black bear, coyote, fox and badger and a host of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds, bugs, butterflies and obnoxious quite unnecessary arachnids. And the usual seasonal infestation of subsidized beef cattle. Shifting into four-wheel drive, he left the main dirt road for a secondary dirt road, for a tertiary dirt road, for a
primitive trail road, for a jeep track, opening a number of barbed-wire gates en route, and leaving them open. The unwritten rule of the range was “Always leave gates as you find them.” Doc found them more attractive in the open position. Someday, he thought, we’ll drive all these stinking public-lands cattle onto the highways, where they belong, herd them back to Texas, where they come from, feed them to the alligators, where they’ll serve a purpose. Force the ranchers off the welfare rolls.
Weary but excited under the blazing shoals of stars, exhilarated by his sense of an ancient freedom now recovered, however briefly, Doc set up his folding cot among the sand dunes and flowers, unrolled his sleeping bag on the cot and went to bed. Now I lay me down to sleep. His last vision, before the dreamtime overwhelmed him, was of two meteors with intersecting paths, falling across the southern sky. Combatants crossing swords? An omen of cosmic conflict? George Heiduk’s signature?
Old men wake early, no matter when they turn in. Doc’s eyes opened in the gray twilight of dawn. He saw a morning primrose, petals folded, nodding at him in the breeze. Saw beetle tracks like sutures stitching a bank of damp sand. Heard the whisper of wild ricegrass sweeping its arc of dune. Saw the legs of a horse. Many legs.
Horse?
He looked higher, saw the Roman head of an aging gray, the shaggy mane, the dark red-veined bulging eyes big as cueballs mounted in the sockets of a thin-skinned skull. The horse stared at Doc, strands of ricegrass dangling from its flabby muzzle, green drool dripping from a nickel-plated bit.
Bit? Bridle? Reins? A rider? Yes. The Masked Man sat upon his saddle on the middle of his sagging horse. His gloved hands rested on the pommel, holding reins and a lead rope. His huge hilarious Hollywood-cowboy hat, once pure white and stiff as cardboard, now gray with filth and sweat and salt, floppy and frayed around the brim, rested on his small head. He wore the tight pullover shirt, no buttons, with lace-up collar, and the pants and the boots and the two big ivory-handled shooting irons in the tooled and silver-mounted holsters.
A second horse bridled, saddled but riderless, stood behind the first.
Doc raised himself on one elbow, alarmed by these apparitions. The man was obviously mad; was he also dangerous? Doc carried no weapon, never did, nothing in his pockets but a tiny penknife, his lucky crystal, a few coins. He looked around in all directions: no sign of Hayduke, although he knew he had entered Hayduke space. The trouble with the concept of Hayduke space, of course, was that the boundaries of Hayduke space were vague, indefinite, fluctuating, highly variable, resembling in some respects the singular universe postulated by the mathematician Albert Einstein, viz., finite but boundless.
“Morning,” Doc mumbled.
The Lone Ranger stared at him, mounted motionless on a motionless mount. Except for the movement of hairs in the horse’s mane, stirred by the winds of dawn, the rider and both the horses might have been carved from wood.
“Well …” Doc unzipped his bag, swung out his legs, fumbled on his loose khaki trousers, stepped into his loafers. Something wriggled against his bare foot. In sudden horror, thinking of scorpions, he kicked off the shoe. A black beetle fell out and froze rigid on the sand, posterior elevated in defensive posture. Doc slipped the shoe on again. He looked at the man on the horse. “Get down,” he said, “I’ll make some coffee.” He shuffled about, pulled a Coleman stove from the cargo area of the Suzuki Sepuku, set it up on the hood. “Where’s Tonto?” He pointed his nose at the second horse.
The Lone Ranger made no reply to this query. It was indeed a senseless question: if accompanied by Tonto, how could he be, actually, a lone ranger?
“Split the blanket, eh?” But Doc did not pursue the matter. Everyone knew anyhow the end of the saga. Doc poured water into the pot and set it on the gas fire. “So where’s George? He around?”
A faint smile flitted across the Masked Man’s lips. The mask, in this case, had become merely another pair of dark sunglasses. His glance shifted, for a moment, from the tall bulky figure of Doctor Sarvis to the even taller bulkier sand dune at Doc’s side.
Doc opened a small paper sack of his favorite, specially ground Colombian coffee. He’d been boycotting bananas, and table grapes, and Coors beer, and rainforest beef, and then all beef, for years now, but he could not and would not give up coffee, no matter how noble the cause. “I said,” the doctor repeated, hearing no reply, “is George around? You two hang out together, don’t you?”
Sand began to spill from the slipface of the dune. Two big hands appeared, a head with leather sombrero, a grin with whiskers. “What’s up, Doc?”
Sarvis was startled but concealed it well. “Thought I smelled you, George. You still have that jungle rot under your big toenails?”
“Yeah … and I ain’t takin’ no fuckin’ Nizoral neither. What do you got for breakfast, Doc? I’m hungry. My buddy here’s hungry. We’re both hungry.”
“Anticipated, my young friend. Open that cooler. You’ll find everything your redneck heart desires: James Dean sausage, Sowbelly bacon, Canadian bacon, Israeli bacon (kosher), Francis Bacon, Triple-A eggs, cow butter, half-and-half, and of course a case of Dos Equis — breakfast beer. Should not have brought it, I know, don’t want to encourage your kidney stones, but, well, frankly …” Driveling on, talking talking saying nothing, Doc did his best to steady the tremor in his hands, the cold dread in his heart. Why? Why did I come here? Why did I do this? What madness overcame me? Never meant to see this satanic lad again for so long as I lived. …
Hayduke emerged fully from the dune, dripping sand, like Michelangelo’s David from Carrara marble, sort of, when he heard the word “case”. No, won’t do, try again, Doc. Doc thought. He thought, like some rough beast slouching from the sands of Sinai, hitchhiking toward Bethlehem? No, not right. Think again. What creature, mythological or biological, ever came forth from sand? The Sphinx from its ruins? sidewinder? Lawrence of Arabia? whiptail lizard? sand Papago? sand witch? wizard? wog? frog? turtle? tortoise? No go. He measured enough coffee for nine big cups into the simmering water and added one for good measure.
Hayduke tossed a bottle of beer to his companion sitting on the gray gelding — the horse shied, the bottle flew beyond the Lone Ranger’s grasp — and opened one for Doc and one for himself. They touched bottles. “God old Doc. I knew you’d show up.”
“Cheers. Didn’t really mean to, George. Got lost on the road last night.”
Hayduke grinned. “Sure. You betcha. Bring any H.E.? Plastique? gelatin?”
“We don’t touch that stuff anymore.”
“All right, I’ll raid Love’s powder magazine again. Get it free there. How about money? Need about ten thousand.”
“What for?”
“You don’t need to know. Not yet. Got it?”
“Maybe and maybe not, George. You won’t believe this, but Bonnie and I don’t really have that kind of ready cash these days.”
“Never heard of a poor doctor. About as rare as poor fuckin’ beef ranchers, poor Senators, poor land developers, poor corporation lawyers, poor fuckin’ CEOs.”
Doctor Sarvis filled three coffee mugs and passed them around, handing one up to the silent man in the Ray Ban mask. He didn’t seem to want to get off his horse. Maybe, like Seldom Smith, he was at home nowhere but on a horse, rowing a boat or wedged partway inside a woman. He came back to Hayduke. “What’s the plan, George? I suppose I could cash in a few C.D.s, although they don’t mature till August. You have a plan? The Super-G.E.M., I suppose?”
“Don’t even suppose. Yet.” Hayduke dropped his beer bottle, empty already, and sipped at the hot coffee. “What’s a C.D.? What do you mean they ‘mature’? Sounds like some kind of fuckin’ — premature baby maybe?”
“No need to know, George, no need to know. You’ll never need to know that. But if you want me to finance one of your schemes again you’ll have to tell me at least a little about it.” Sarvis glanced at the Lone Ranger; the man had drifted off — coffee mug in hand — toward the summit o
f the highest nearby dune. Keeping watch.
“Don’t worry about Jack,” Hayduke said. “He was cutting fence before I was even born. Before you got out of fuckin’ prep school. Old Jack there, he’s got only one thing on his mind: revenge.”
“Revenge for what?”
Hayduke looked surprised. “What country you live in, Doc? You forget what it was like out here, only forty years ago? Only twenty? ten?”
The good doctor looked about. Sand dunes, flowers, beetle tracks and scrubby little junipers flourishing their limbs from sandstone slickrock. Wolf Hole Mountain to the northwest. Pariah Plateau to the east. Kaibab Plateau on the south. Grand Canyon on the southwest. Hayduke’s never-never land of pinnacles and caves, box canyons, minarets and mighty phallic hard-ons in between. Lost Eden and Radium Canyons with their waterfalls and pools, hanging gardens and cliff dwellings, arches, alcoves and natural bridges. Mountains with real timber and real bear and real snow in the distance.
“You mean here?”
“You know what I mean. The fuckin’ West, that’s all. He wants revenge. And so do I.”
“Still looks good from here.”
Hayduke finished his second beer. “Tell you what we’re gonna do,” he said.
22
Seldom’s Return
Smith hobbled his horse near the stream in the ample shade of a cottonwood. A deposit of dried cowdung attested to the popularity of this particular tree. He looked up and down the canyon floor, listened, heard nothing, then looked aloft at the secret eyrie four hundred feet above on the south-facing canyon wall.
There was a great cave there, under the rim, its roof a royal arch formed by ancient conchoidal fractures. Inside that cave (or grotto or recess) was space enough to enclose the capitol dome of the state assembly building. Shady in summer, mostly sunny in winter, it seemed an ideal site of an Anasazi village, but had never been so utilized. Why not? Because access, up steep pitches of bare rock, was too difficult, and because the vertical distance from the canyon bottom, where the bean patches and cornfields would have been, to the cave made it undesirable. An idyllic place for a desperate last stand; very nice for fighting and killing and dying; but for raising a family, keeping your wives happy, getting along with the neighbors, reenacting tribal traditions through ritual and dance, a place for the kids to play — not practical.