They watched the shoes go down, press against the solid Navajo sandstone of the Neck. Loose boulders, crushed to powder by impaction, squirted from beneath the steel shoes in jets of fine pale dust. The shoes pushed downward. The engines strained, groaned, heaved. The entire machine, all but its two big flat jointed feet, rose eighty inches from the ground, rocking, banging, pitching slightly, like a ship on wavy water.
Hayduke and Smith put hands against the cab wall for balance. But they did not fail to keep the searchlights active, surveying the enemy for the first sign of a forward charge.
“What’s the matter with them guys?” Hayduke yelled. He tucked his .357 in his belt, squinting at Bishop Love, Ranger Dick, Teammates and Crew, far below and two football fields away. “They going to let us do this without a fight?”
“They don’t believe it, George. They don’t know what we think we’re a-doin’. Do you? Hain’t too sure myself.”
Feeling the machine slide backward now, toward the brink of the drop-off, Smith tried to see how far they had to go in that direction. Two more steps? Three? The rearview mirror was no help at all nor could he see any better by pressing his nose to the glass door. Ordinarily the swamper, the oiler, would be on the ground in this situation, directing the operator by hand signals.
GOLIATH sank down, six feet eight inches approximately, its circular fundament booming when it hit the ground. Clouds of dust flew up, swirled in eddies, floated eastward on the hot air rising from the canyon below. Grinding on, the shoes began another ascent.
“About time to get outa here, George.” Smith slid open the door on the outer side of the cab and attempted to eyeball-estimate the distance to the rim. The powerhouse blocked direct view to the rear; he could see only off the starboard side in a quartering angle. In that direction the edge lay dramatically near — about twenty feet away. One more giant step for GOLIATH and he — she — it would be perched on the brink, teetering and tottering on the margin of eternity, so to speak. (Not exactly the manner in which Smith phrased the matter but encapsulating the mental image in his head.)
“About time to bail out, George. I’d say about one more cycle of them walkin’ shoes and we crash. I mean take off, you might say, like ol’ Butch Cassidy and the Bunch takin’ that shortcut down off Black Box Point in that there San Rafael Reef country, recall what I’m talkin’ about, George? Up in Emery County?” A pause. “George …?”
Each hand on a searchlight handle, Hayduke was forgetting his lookout duties. Instead he gaped at the vacancy of moonlit space coming closer and closer. Sweating with ecstasy, anxiety, succumbing to the euphoria of the depths, he muttered, “Parachute, Seldom. Goddamn, if only we had our fucking parachutes. What a jump. …”
“Never seen a parachute myself, George. Anyhow, let’s bail off this here mechanical horse.” Smith was also in a lather of sweat but ecstasy, of any sort, was far from his mind. He slid open the portside door of the cab, the opening to the inner catwalk that led to the boom and their escape route. Survival was what Smith had in his thoughts, survival with or without honor, he didn’t actually care much at this point.
“Come on, George, for love of Christ come on!”
The walking shoes went down, they pressed, the engines strained, the dynamos at Glen Canyon Dam far to the east felt the pull of GOLIATH’s need and greed, increased the tempo to provide the necessary peaking power. Lights dimmed for a few seconds in Saint George Utah as the Super-G.E.M. heaved its 13,500 tons six feet clear of the ground.
The G.E.M. tilted, yawed, pitched, rocking backward. Chains rattled, cables boomed. One hand on the doorframe for support, Smith reached in from the catwalk, clutched a handful of coverall sleeve, and yanked Hayduke free and clear, outside into the open air, the screech of machinery, the roar and uproar of power, the hot stink of oil and burning lights and straining pistons. But not before Hayduke, as a final gesture, pushed the PLAY bar on the P.A. system’s recorded-message tape deck.
They saw the cluster of human figures facing them across the long slender peninsular bridge of the Neck. Saw two figures take tentative steps forward, bracing themselves to run. And then they felt, did not hear but felt the crumble and slippage of violated rock at the rear of GOLIATH’s great feet. Saw the beams of the unmanned searchlights swing upward for a few rods, leaving their enemies in the relative obscurity of only moonlight. Felt the earth giving way, the deep resonance of an advancing earthquake, the meaning of Doom.
They leaped from the control cabin’s catwalk — stung by terror into galvanic movement at last, vaulting the handrails — to the catwalk of the boom, raced up the filthy grease-slobbered steps to their rappeling point and the two trusted mountaineering ropes. Very quickly but not quite frantically, yet, they linked carabiners, diaper slings and themselves to the ropes.
The boom, locked in a nearly horizontal position, twitched beneath their feet. Clanged, clanked, clattered, began to rise, cantilevered skyward by the downward tilt of GOLIATH on his eroding fulcrum.
“Rappel,” yelped Hayduke, “rappel!” Face greasy with sweat, he lowered himself through the open webwork of the boom and slid downward at reckless speed on the rope, grateful for the leather gloves on his hands. Smith followed at the side, not quite so fast, not quite so expertly. Looking down, Hayduke saw the end of his rope swinging free of the ground. “Oh no …” He increased speed, reached the terminus of the rope, let go and dropped. Ten feet. Falling, he thought, fall—and hit the blackbrush and mellow sandstone jump-school style, relaxed and limber, rolling with the shock. Unhurt, he jumped to his feet, hearing Seldom’s plaintive bleat of fear. Where was that crazy cowboy? He heard another squeal and looked up: Smith dangled fifteen feet above, swinging in a short arc back and forth, arms outstretched, clinging desperately to the end of his rope. The Super-G.E.M., though canted backward at the rimrock’s edge, was static for the moment, its shoes rotating backward in mid-cycle, off the ground.
“Let go, Seldom. Aim for the juniper. I’ll break your fall.” Hearing somehow, through the howling terror of GOLIATH, the thud and thump of running feet. They’re coming. “Let go or you’re a goner.”
Smith let go at the end of his swing, falling toward a scrubby five-foot juniper. Hayduke arrived at the moment of impact and leaping forward, managed to get both arms under Smith’s arched back, crashing with him into the midget tree. Scratched and bloody but unbowed, uninjured, they staggered free of the juniper’s clutching branches. Wiping blood from his eyes, checking Granddaddy’s revolver — family heirloom — and tugging down the bill of his cap, Smith looked for the right way to run. One man in uniform, far ahead of the others, was galloping toward them, shouting the alarm. Behind him came a dozen more. A quarter mile to the east, enveloped in a shroud of floury dust, five men and three women clambered out of Ellie Love’s airplane, armed with Pepsi-Cola, Seven-Up, Jack Daniels, Wild Turkey, hotdogs, buns, relish, ketchup, flowers for the wedding, a couple of BLM bridesmaids, and the officiating magistrate J. Marvin Pratt.
“Let’s go, George.” Smith ran up the bare slickrock eastward, toward their friends, the hidden horses. But stopped when he became aware that Hayduke was not with him. He looked back.
George W. Hayduke stood petrified, gazing at GOLIATH on the verge, shoes descending for the final push, about to go over.
“George—!”
“Yeah.” George waved back. “Keep going. Be with you in a minute.” And George began to run, not after Smith however but toward the tilting G.E.M., the canyon rim. Smith watched him for a moment, clenched both hands in despair, and resumed his flight. Crazy bastard — am I spozed to do everything for him? Keep him outa jail? Wipe his goldang nose?
Can’t miss this, was Hayduke’s thought. A whole year’s dream — he pounded over the stone, through the moonlight, leaping clumps of sage and prickly pear — and I don’t even see it?
He raced toward the edge, watching the machine’s bottomside come up, exposing not the smooth flat circular surface he’d imagined
but a huge center pintle ringed with a series of concentric steel plates, the whole resembling the symmetric web of the orb weaver spider. Interesting.
He reached the rim, hearing as GOLIATH toppled, a vast medley of noises: crumbling and colliding rock, the screech of wrenching steel, the unabating bedlam of the electrical motors, the hiss of hydraulic pistons sheathed in oil, and above all, loud and clear, the opening strains of our fucking national anthem, blaring out of nowhere, everywhere, anywhere —
HO-HO SAY CA-HAN YOU SEE
He glanced back, feeling for his revolver. Gone. Shit. But his pursuers had halted for the moment, standing at attention, hats and hands on hearts, a lump in every throat, a tear in every fucking eye. Good men. He knelt on the extreme brink of the overhanging rim, sensing the shudder of bedrock beneath his bones, and he watched his enemy go down. That enemy he loved.
Going down, singing as he fell. Falling free the first three hundred feet past the Kayenta caprock, glancing lightly off a protruding ledge below — certain parts detached themselves in a spray of sparks — and floating farther out from the canyon wall, turning in graceful, relaxed, happy-go-lucky slow motion through the carefree medium of air. Beautiful. He saw the two Mitsubishi tractors ease clear of the inverted bucket, not far, sinking through space in precise congruence with the leisurely revolutions of the walking, now flying, 4250-W. Lovely. Accelerating too, of course, in unison, the heavyweight the flyweights, in thrall to the spell of gravity, exactly as Aristarchus, Epicurus, Galileo, Newton and others had calculated centuries before. Excellent. Newtonian mechanics, Hayduke reflected, was no longer adequate for sub-nuclear phenomena, perhaps, or for the ultra-galactic, but still good enough by God for regular fucking government work.
GOLIATH falling, falling, followed by the casual unlooping of his umbilicus, the thick trail cable, like an astronaut and his tether drifting off from Spacelab.
The dragline fell, cleared the base of the great Wingate cliff, struck the Chinle slopes a thousand feet below and bounced rolled skated to the lip of the Moenkopi wall and another free-fall. The bucket flew up and out in an arc of its own, the boom came half unjointed, the twin masts crumpled, the power cable snapped and the lights went out. GOLIATH soared outward again, pinwheeling into deep time, into geological history. The powerline, charged with energy, writhed and twisted like a tortured snake, smoking and sparking, and electrocuted a number of innocent desert shrubs, torched off a thicket of tangled sticks containing a family of pack rats and their guests the kissing bugs, burned up an eagles’ nest. But not the eagles.
The G.E.M. dropped free for another five hundred feet and crashed in to the next talus down, barreling over and somersaulting down. One shoe fell off, breaking in half— then the other. The control cabin vanished in a puff of smoke and debris. Fires flickered in the fanhouse, the engine room. The boom, bent double, broke loose and continued its descent. Something exploded in the engine room and the plated steel swelled outward like a bubble, burst like a balloon. Disintegrating part by part, wrapped in flames, shriveling in magnitude, the 4250-W walking dragline Super-G.E.M. of Arizona, code name GOLIATH, sank down and down into the deep time of geologic history — from Jurassic into late Triassic, from late Triassic into early Triassic, ricochetting off the Hoskinnini Tongue and the Cutler Formation, shattering itself finally upon the floor of Lost Eden Canyon, the unyielding monolithic fine-grained rock of the Cedar Mesa Sandstone deep in the Permian Age, 250 million years ago.
Flames flickered far below among the mangled black ruins of the hulk. Smoke spiraled upward in sooty thermal columns. The rumble, clash and collision of falling rock would continue, slowly fading, for the next three days and nights.
Hayduke spat over the edge. Satisfied at last, he stood up, unbuttoned his coveralls and fondled it out into the open air, letting it breathe. Fully erect he staled like a stallion on the hard rimrock. Thank God I am a man.
“Freeze!” barked a strange voice. “Hands behind your head.”
Oh shit no, groaned Hayduke in his heart. Not now. Not me. Not here. I can’t stand a prison cell. That trapped feeling. Fucking claustrophobia. I’ll die. The government will kill me quick, sure as shit. They know they got to do it, I know they got to do it, they know I know I know they know. But he obeyed instructions.
“Now turn around slow,” the voice continued. “Let’s see what we got here.”
Hayduke obeyed. He found himself facing an oversize shadowy figure in dark uniform: half moon now far down the west, the face was hard to make out but it looked like, yes it was, that Ace security asshole Jasper B. Bundy, six foot four and a room temp I.Q. of around 78. The guard held a short shotgun in his right hand, pointed at Hayduke’s belly, and a snubnose revolver in his left. “You dropped something, buddy,” he said, grinning. “Your Saturday night special.” Craning his potshaped head forward, peering at Hayduke. “Goodwood? Casper Goodwood …?”
Another man stepped out of the shrubbery, face masked in a bandanna, pointing Granddaddy’s .44. “Drop the shotgun, mister.”
The guard faced Smith. “You drop yours.”
“No, you drop yours.”
“I asked first.”
“But I mean business. You don’t. You wouldn’t have the nerve to shoot a snake.”
“I’d rather shoot you, mister, than any snake I ever seen.”
More voices hollered in the distance, coming closer. Bundy, they cried, where are you? In the growing gloom it was getting harder and harder to see anything. Even horses.
The two gunmen faced each other, stymied by the general absurdity of the situation. Both well aware that guns are dangerous, ridiculous, capable of inflicting gruesome and painful even mortal wounds, and that one more moment of hesitation might be fatal for somebody. The Ace man lowered the .357 to his side, concealing it from Smith’s view.
“Watch out,” Hayduke said, “he’s got—”
“Everybody!” snapped a fourth voice. “Drop them guns.”
Startled, Seldom Seen dropped his antique. On his foot. It did not go off. Also startled, the Ace guard turned to face this new intruder, lifting the muzzle of the shotgun toward a man on a horse.
This time somebody pulled the trigger. Hayduke saw a blast of red flame in the dark, heard an explosion and saw the Ace man, Jasper Benson Bundy, stagger back a step and crumple like a sack of spilled meal, half his head blown away.
“Oh my gosh,” murmured Smith, paralyzed by horror.
“Bundy!” someone yelled. “Where are they?”
Hayduke was first to react. “Quick,” he said to Smith, “over the rim with it.” He meant the body. Stepping forward, he grasped an arm and a leg. Sweat dripped from his face. “Hurry up.”
Smith moved, doing the same. “You sure he’s dead?”
“He’s dead. Over the rim. They’ll never find him.”
Sound of running feet, coming this way. The Lone Ranger fired two rounds into the dark. That gave the feet pause. “Got to go, boys,” he said to Smith and Hayduke. “Move fast.”
“On the count of four,” Hayduke ordered. With effort they lugged the large carcass to the edge of things. Sweating, they lifted it up. “One,” said Hayduke, swinging it forward, letting it swing back. “Two. Three. Heave!”
The remains of Jasper Bundy sailed into space. He’d clear the first ledge three hundred feet below, judging from his excellent trajectory, but would probably splatter into a splotch of rags and pulp at the foot of the great Wingate cliff, far short of GOLIATH’S splendid leap. Smith tossed the riot gun after its owner. “Hate guns,” he mumbled. “In wrong hands.”
“Grab your mounts, boys, and let’s get the Christ by Jesus out of here,” the Lone Ranger said. Holstering his dreadful cannon, he swung about on his silvergray, revealing two saddled horses — very spooky — on a short lead rope. Smith unlatched rope from halters and sprang onto his bay; Hayduke climbed aboard the tall Appaloosa; the three men galloped off. Into the dark. Down the rim of the Neck, up the slickrock dome on
the east, into the juniper forest. (Overgrazing.) Gunfire rattled under the stars to their rear and on the right, a noisy but harmless outburst. Unseen, untouched, they raced on, Smith now in the lead, bearing toward the appointed rendezvous with Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug. A light airplane banked and circled overhead, searching, but the moon was down, the night complete, they were not seen. A number of motor vehicles raced along the G.E.M.’s broad track, spotlights beaming left and right, but the three horsemen, out on the big plateau, had by now swung far to the south of that particular route of pursuit.
Feeling safer, Smith slowed his horse to a trot, then a walk. The other two men pulled up to his side for talk, reining now left now right around the little trees, the dense clumps of sagebrush and prickly pear. (Cattle country: overgrazing.) In misty depths to their right lay the meandering course of Lost Eden Canyon, feeling the way by gravitational attraction and storm-sculptured erosion toward its confluence with Radium Canyon, thence to Kanab Canyon and the ultimate of canyons, the master canyon, the grandest of the grand.
“You killed that poor bastard, Jack.”
“I know it. Was afraid somebody’d get hurt. Them overload hollow-points do make a mess.”
“Shot him dead.”
“I know it, boys. The old one-eye hain’t what it used to be. I don’t feel too good about it. Nor too bad neither.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I was aimin’ at that shotgun. Meant to shoot it out of his hand, like the Lone Ranger hisself always done in the funny papers.”
“Good thing you missed. He had George’s .357 mag in his other paw.” Smith looked aside at Hayduke. “Get your shootin’ iron back, George?” He touched his own for reassurance.
“Of course I got the fucker back.” Hayduke grinned, the flash of teeth in the dark and hairy face. “You think I’d let a good old solid .357 go to rust? Sentimental value, Seldom: I stole that gun from a cop in Flagstaff long ago. Never been registered. Not in my name anyhow.”