The boys interrupted with more cheers, not without a sardonic undertone, as the plugs from a few bottles of Wild Turkey flew through the air, and the snaptops from a number of canisters of Coors Lite clicked and clanked, aluminum on aluminum.
“— And the other thing is this, my friends, me and Ginny here, we’re inviting each and ever’ one of you, with your families and with your friends, those as have either, to come to a very special barn dance at the ranch tonight. Yep, folks, it’s true, them rumors you been hearin’ is absolutely true, me and Ginny Dick is a-gonna tie the knot tonight, Bishop J. Marvin Pratt presiding—”
Not again? Hooray for Love! Way to go, Dud! He old but he hain’t dead! God bless our good ol’ Bishop Love!
A fire began, ignited by the children’s posters, the red and black and green and white banners of the defeated Earth First! Somebody topped the kindling with dead juniper and scrub oak, making a cheery blaze in the purple shadows of encroaching twilight. The men tossed their raw steaks directly on the flaming coals, aboriginal style. Love brought a small gridiron from his truck for those who preferred to grill their meat in a manner more ladylike.
The celebrants ate, drank, retold the stories of the day’s battle, tossed their beer bottles and Pepsi cans off the rim and heard them fall, whistling away to nothing, into the darkening abyss.
The sun dropped below the mesas, buttes, domes and pinnacles, the plateaus and mountains on the far west — toward Nevada, the inland basin, the Great American Desert. The fat half moon soared overhead, pure and bright, safe for the moment from human greed, queen of the night, sweet as the desert stillness. Where coyotes howled, a kit fox barked, an airliner droned overhead, scoring the sky with vapor, and vanished.
“I tell you friends,” the Bishop pronounced, “this here’s a great day in American history. This is a day that will never be forgot. This is the day the people of Progress won out over the forces of Selfishness and Obstruction. Them Earth Fist wildmen and Ecological wildwomen made their last stand today and we smashed ‘em. We flattened ‘em. Extreme environmentalism and environmental extremism will never again raise its horrible head in the Arizona Strip country or maybe anywhere in the whole goldang American West, by God, ever again. They asked for a fight, we gave it to ‘em, and we won. You mind my words, boys, ladies too, you come back here five years from now you’re gonna see a Holiday Inn on this Neck, and a eighteen-hole golf course on Eden Mesa, and little blue lakes with real live ducks on them and a beautiful little city of fifty thousand retired folks and uranium miners and nucular engineers living here in their own homes and enjoying God’s fresh air and God’s own backyard and God’s own scenery …” Inspired, waxily eloquent, Love raised his happy, fat, florid face to the new moon and rumbled, “I have a dream, my friends. I have a dream of America for Americans, where never again will a single square foot of our land be locked up for selfish elitist preservationists but where everything will be accessible to everybody in their own automobile and where industry can move in unhindered for the spirit of free enterprise that made America what it is today to provide jobs for everybody that’s willing to work instead of wilderness playgrounds for greedy extreme elitist Sahara Clubbers and other wild dangerous animals. I have a dream, my friends, of America where people come first — up with people! — people and industry and jobs and unlimited opportunity for anybody with the guts and the glory to take advantage of America’s glorious opportunity for everybody. That’s my dream, my friends, and I dream someday that this here America will be the America we all enjoy, not just an elitist handful of greedy selfish wild preservatives and extreme crackpot ecolologists with their pet mountain lions and pet grizzly bears trying to lock up America so the rest of us can’t get in to enjoy it and maybe make a little honest profit too and that’s my dream, my friends, my dream of the America I used to love and the America I expect to love again. That’s my dream, my friends. What’s yours?”
The night watchmen finally arrived, two sober men in Ace Detective Agency uniforms, armed and dangerous. But instead of beginning their patrol of the work area and its idle equipment they were dragged by the jubilant Bishop and his friends into the celebration. Which gave Love another idea: on C.B. He radioed J. Marvin Pratt back in town and invited him, urged him, instructed him to bring his Bible, his Mormon marriage manual, and all the friends and witnesses he could round up on short order and bring them all out to the Neck.
“Yeah,” shouted Love into the mike, “we’ll have the wedding out here, why the hell not, Marvin. Been a beautiful day, it’s a wonderful evening, moon’s up, we’ll make an all-night goldang party of it. Bring more Pepsi, yeah, about ten cases. Yeah, okay, bring more booze for the boys, hell’s fire I might even have a drink or two or three myself, why not, we got plenty to celebrate, Marvin, we had a great victory over the forces of Greed and Evil, we run off them green bigots forever, yep, that coward Hayduke and his Monkey Wrench hoods never even dared show their ugly faces, better bring more steaks, more chips, hotdogs and buns for the kids, we’ll celebrate my second marriage in good old high country style, Marvin, bring Jake Lassiter and his fiddle, old man Wright and his gee-tar, that fella with the gut bucket what’s his name, yeah we’ll have music too, we’ll have a big dance, don’t forget the women, sure, bring my wife, she knows about this wedding, ain’t no secret to her, we’ll keep this here doggone shindig goin’ till sun-up by God. Yeah, Marvin, I know it takes three hours to drive out here. So tell my gal Ellie to fly you out, she got nothin’ better to do, she can bring eight at a time in that new Cessna, takes ten minutes. Land? You can land behind the G.E.M. That thing leaves a nice wide flat airstrip behind everywhere it goes and it’s on the east of the Neck right now. …”
A vast grumbling rumble resounded through the night.
The Bishop paused for a moment, looking up from his radio toward the gigantic form of the walking dragline. He stared. “Now what the hell —?”
All conversation stopped. Every member of the party froze in position, staring toward the great machine. GOLIATH was coming back to life. Its central searchlight, ablaze, came circling about and settled directly on Bishop Love, Ranger Dick, the S. & R. team, the construction crew, the jolly bonfire at their side.
“Rethlake!” the Bishop hollered. “Meeker!”
Two men rose slowly from their squatting position near the fire, the G.E.M.’s chief operator and his helper, each with a beercan clutched in fist.
“Rethlake!”
“Yeah …”
“Somebody’s monkeyin’ around with the G.E.M.”
“I see it, Bishop.”
“Who’s up in there?”
The two men looked around, counting heads, studying faces. “One of the boys, Bishop. Ain’t sure who.”
Shielding his eyes from the violet glare of light, Love bellowed: “You up there, turn them goldarn lights off and get the hell out of that machine.”
His answer was a roar of electrical turbines starting up as someone — or some thing — pushed the starter button. Above the roar of motors came the voice of the Super-G.E.M. itself, thundering from the exterior loudspeakers of the machine’s public address system:
NOW HEAR THIS. NOW HEAR THIS. THIS HERE’S GOLIATH SPEAKING, MEN, MASTER OF THE FUCKING WORLD AND FUCKING EMPEROR OF THE FUCKING UNIVERSE. WHEN REQUESTING PERMISSION TO SPEAK TO OUR IMPERIAL FUCKING MAJESTY, YOU WILL SINK TO YOUR FUCKING KNEES, PLACE NOSE AGAINST GROUND THREE TIMES, LOWER PANTS, AND REMAIN BOTTOMS UP UNTIL RECOGNIZED.
Love stared in amazement. The whole assembly stared in amazement. As they stared, the dragline’s boom was activated by somebody inside the control cabin, hoisted forty-five degrees and swung about 180 degrees from east to west on the Neck. Bull gears grinding, the giant bucket bounced over the rock, smashing trees, flattening a drill rig, knocking a road grader over the rim and completing the sweep by clattering toward Bishop Love and his friends. They ran for their lives, stumbling through the moonlight and shrubbery toward the far west end of the
Neck, beyond reach, they hoped, of the bucket and its iron teeth. The bucket came to rest, awkwardly, on slack cables, about twenty yards to the west of the two idle Mitsubishi bulldozers. There it paused for the time being.
Panting hard, one hand on his chest, eyes bulging and his face a florid purple, Bishop Love gaped at the machine towering in the moonlight. The red lights oozed slowly off and on, off and on, like the blinking eyes of a sleepy spider. The strobe light flashed atop the A-frame, an intense blue-white pulse of lightning that could be seen for twenty miles. The searchlight remained fixed on Love & Co.
Regaining his breath, the Bishop spoke to Rethlake, Meeker, the two-man dragline crew. “You boys slip out there, unplug the trail cable to that son of a bitch.” They hesitated. “Go on now, he won’t see you. There’s some drunk up in that cabin, he don’t know what he’s doing, he’s gonna damage that bucket if we don’t get him outa there. Go on now.” Love patted the revolver on his hip. “We’ll keep you covered.”
“You see that road grader go off the edge,” somebody said. The humans clustered together, in the midst of a clump of junipers, staring up at the black outline of the G.E.M. against the stars, the unlit form of the operator’s cab far above the ground. “You see that thing go over,” the voice continued. “Like a toy. Sixty-ton grader. Like a goddamn kid’s toy …”
Ranger Dick, slipping an arm around Love’s waist, whispered in his ear. “Could be trouble, Dudley. You think maybe we ought to radio the sheriff’s office? The DPS? Get those helicopters headed this way again?”
The Bishop snorted, half laughing. “Naw, naw, Ginny, what’re you talkin’ about? I can handle this. That’s my equipment, them’s my men, I’ll take care of it.”
“… Yeah,” another said, “never even heard it hit bottom neither. How’s far’s it down there anyhow?”
“Two thousand feet on the north side,” a third man said. “About twenty-five hundred on the south. Straight down into Little Eden Canyon. Watched one of them crazy guys with a hang glider sail off here once. Never made it. Took them two days to recover the body. Carried it home in a black rubber sack. Squirrely winds got him, they said. What they found you could put easy into a one-bushel basket. Course they only picked up the main pieces. Like the head, pelvis, thigh bones, asshole and such.”
“Don’t want to hear about it, Melvin, for godsake.”
“So what’re you waiting for?”
“All right, all right, Bishop, we’ll go. But if he comes after us with that bucket …”
“You can dodge it. Dodge the sucker. Keep runnin’.
“You too, Meeker.”
“Sure, Bishop, sure.” The two men started forward, out of the illusory shelter of the junipers toward the base of the machine, 13,500 tons of iron squatting like a frog on solid rock two hundred yards off at the far end of the Neck. The men had advanced no more than a few paces when a second spotlight on the A-frame blazed on, searched briefly to the right, to the left, caught them dead in the open.
HALT, MOTHERFUCKERS.
The men stopped, stiff as stone in the glare of Medusa’s eye. The booming voice — basso profundo deus machina — continued:
YOU ASSHOLES TAKE ONE MORE STEP AND I’LL BRUSH YOU OVER THE SIDE LIKE TWO BUGS OFF A BOARD.
Reinforcing the threat, GOLIATH raised his boom, reeled in the steel drag ropes and hoisted the mighty bucket to an upright position. Sparks flew as iron grated on sandstone. Clumsily, the bucket was dragged back toward the nearest Mitsubishi tractor — the crippled one with the dripping radiator. GOLIATH slipped his prognathous jaw beneath the tracks and belly of the bulldozer, picked it up like a child (the tractor weighed only eighty tons) and lifted it tenderly, right side up within the bucket, about thirty feet above the ground. Tough — but oh so gentle.
One of the Ace security men nudged the Bishop. “We got plenty of firepower here, Bishop. Let’s blast that clown in the control cab.”
The Bishop considered. “Yeah … maybe. In a minute. Hard to see though. Don’t want to damage the equipment.”
“We could knock out those searchlights first. Blind the bastard, rush ‘im, board that thing, find the guy in the cab and put him where he belongs for about six months.”
“Well … hate to damage the equipment. Even one of them lights cost several thousand bucks. And you get all these half-drunk hard-hats firing away —”
GOLIATH again interrupted their deliberations:
ANYONE MAKE ANOTHER MOVE TOWARD THIS FUCKING DRAGLINE I SWING THAT FUCKING CRAWLER OVER THE RIM AND DROP IT LIKE SHIT OFF A SHOVEL INTO LOST EDEN CANYON….
“Afraid of that,” the Bishop muttered. “We got a lunatic at work in that thing.”
They hesitated. Again GOLIATH retracted, swung and lowered the bucket and picked up the second Mitsubishi bulldozer, holding both in his capacious maw and elevating them far above the monolithic stone of the Neck. And again he spoke, in that voice like the rumble of a volcanic and subterranean god: Vulcan speaking:
SAME GOES FOR ANY OTHER KIND OF FUCKING MONKEY BUSINESS. WE’RE WORKING INSIDE TWO-AND-A-HALF-INCH STEEL PLATE UP HERE. GOT REMOTE CONTROL HOOKUPS ON ALL CONSOLE LEVERS. ANYONE TRY ANYTHING FUNNY AND THESE TWO TRACTORS GO ASS OVER TINCUPS INTO DEEP SPACE. I’M TALKING TO YOU, BISHOP J. DUDLEY LOVE. YOU HEAR ME?
The Bishop flushed with anger. “Why you miserable wiseass …” he growled.
Ranger Dick tightened her embrace of his waist. “Easy, Dud, easy. I got an idea.”
GOLIATH swung his bucket ninety degrees, extended the boom, and held the two bulldozers in suspension above the abyss on the north side of the Neck. One-half million dollars’ worth of hostages, hanging above two thousand feet of moonlight and air.
YOU HEAR, LOVE? SPEAK UP. SPEAK UP OR I’M DROPPING YOUR YELLOW TOYS INTO HELL. YOU HEAR?
The first spotlight remained fixed on Bishop Love and his intimates — the ranger, the two Ace security men, the group of hardhats, the Search & Rescue team. At the same time, without waiting for reply, GOLIATH began another operation at the flanks of the machine. With a heavy clanking of cambered gears the monster’s feet — the 130-foot-long steel walking shoes — began to rise.
“My God,” the Bishop said, “what’s he doing now?”
They stared in wonder. The shoes rose seven feet above the ground, rotated backward on the push cylinders for fifteen feet, then sank to the ground again, crushing three junipers, a clump of sagebrush, one hackberry tree, any number of beercans, oilcans and anthills. At this point, instead of coming to rest, the bellow of the 14,000-volt engines soared in intensity, straining with the tremendous effort of lifting the circular base tub— 105 feet in diameter — and with it the entire 4250-W walking-dragline Super-G.E.M., 27 million pounds (Fantastik Fackts!) of steel iron copper grease oil cable Plexiglas and also, apparently, a tiny microblob — somewhere within its intricate labyrinth of control cab, catwalks, gangways, bulkheads, corridors, engine room, fan house — a tiny living micro-organism of human flesh.
They watched. They gaped in amazement, mouths hanging open, as the whole gigantic impossible machine hoisted itself almost seven feet above the surface of the earth, tilted slightly, rocking a bit, and then slid backward, in reverse, for another fifteen feet before sinking once more, with a vibrant and resonant thud, down to solid rock. A cloud of dust and pulverized vegetation swirled about the foundations of the machine.
All present felt the ground tremble beneath their feet. GOLIATH walks. Five points on the Richter Scale. One small step for humankind, one giant step for GOLIATH.
“Holy Moroni,” the Bishop murmured, “he’s gonna hijack the G.E.M. of Arizona. He must be crazy as a … as a … a what?”
“Dudley,” repeated Ranger Dick, “Dudley, listen to me, I’ve got a good idea.”
“Hijack?” the Ace man said. “But where? Where’s he think he’s gonna take it? A baby can crawl as fast as that thing can walk. And anyhow for chrissake he’s headed in the wrong direction. Can’t go far the way he’s heade
d … two, three, four more steps and … Sheet!” the man concluded in exasperation and disbelief.
“Why backwards?” asked one of the Search & Rescuers — a druggist by trade, not a construction worker. “Why’s he walking it backwards?”
“Only way it goes,” a hardhat explained. “It’s a dragline walker, not a power shovel. Not a excavator.”
“Suicide,” the security guard went on, mumbling mostly to himself. “We got a kamikaze pilot running that thing.”
“Will you listen to me, Dudley? Please? Stop worrying about your precious Mitsubishis and listen to me.”
The Bishop blinked, turned his eyes away from the hypnosis of the spotlights, looked down upon the anxious and handsome face of his BLM lady-love. Looked down? Not much. Not more than two inches. She was nearly as tall as he, half his age, twice as good looking and maybe forty points higher on the Stanford-Binet I.Q. scale.
“Yeah, honey, yeah? What’s your —” But again his attention was distracted by the grind and rumble of the walking gears. Squatting on his tub, grunting and groaning like a constipated fullback, GOLIATH was once again lifting up his two big feet.
“Shut off the power.”
“What?”
“Shut off the goddamned power. It’s all-electric, right? Get the power shut off.”
“Honey, we — you saw what happened when — Jesus, Ginny, we can’t even get to the power cable, let alone uncouple it. You heard what he’ll do.”
The shoes rose up, moved back, descended, planted themselves firmly on the bridge of stone. Again GOLIATH prepared to heave himself aloft. The ascending roar of his dynamo heart — that scream of fury — resounded through the desert.