Doc sighed heavily, thinking about it.
“And where you got this plane, Bonnie?”
Don’t know exactly where he got it, she explained. You know George — probably borrowed it somewhere. You mean where is it now? Up there? She pointed to the top of the opposite canyon wall, about fifteen hundred feet above. It’s up there. George discovered a route. Plane’s parked on an old drilling site. That thing can land and stop in fifty yards.
“You’ll need a lot more than that for a takeoff, honey. You sure you wanta do this?”
No problem, Bonnie explained. George worked out his own technique for a short-run takeoff. We drive the plane off the edge of the cliff, gain airspeed in the dive, climb up the other wall and away we go.
Doc looked worried.
“Bonnie, you sure you wanta do that?”
“We’ll risk it. Better than ten years in prison. Besides, we promised Reuben we’d be home by tomorrow night.”
Doc smiled faintly at the sound of his son’s name.
Hayduke returned with a loaded backpack. He set it on the sand, unzipped the wide bottom pocket and coaxed out his rattlesnake. “Would starve in that cave. …” Buzzing like a maraca, the serpent at first objected to another disturbance but finally slithered away.
“So long, George. Don’t suppose I need to know where you’re a-goin’ next.”
Hayduke smiled happily. “No need, Seldom. But you could say I smell the sea in my hairy nostrils. A sea named Cortez. And you could say, in a few months, you might be getting a kangaroo-type postcard from a bloody bleedin’ dinkum blighter name of Rudolf Herman. So long, Seldom Seen Smith.”
“You be careful, George Washington Hayduke.” They embraced. Neither man wept — both grateful to be free.
Seldom hugged his friends Doc and Bonnie. “See you at the houseboat, pardners. Don’t forget. One week from today. Big party.”
“Dealer’s choice?”
“No, honey. No more poker. Just ain’t fun without good ol’ Oral no more. No, it’s the end of our probation, you recollect? One more week and we all are good ordinary innocent law-abiding meek and humble U.S. of A. citizens like everybody else. Remember? Like a wedding anniversary, you might say.”
Old Seldom Seen smiled at Bonnie Abbzug, at Doctor Sarvis, at the impatient and fidgeting George Hayduke. He winked at each, at one and all. “Now if you folks’ll excuse me I think I better get outa this here playtime costume and get back into my regular rugged he-man cowperson suit. Burn these coveralls and gloves and sneakers, pull on my Wrangler respectable clothes and look like something cute.”
“What’s your alibi going to be?”
“Alibi? Hell, Doc, I don’t need no alibi. I’m all alibi. Nobody ever knows where I am or even where I was including me. And I got three good wives who’ll swear to it, anytime.”
30
End of the Trail, White Man
Hayduke turned east from Punta “Rocky Point” Peñasco, a seashore colony belonging mostly to Phoenix, Arizona and drove for fifteen miles on the wet firm beach into the evening twilight. He seemed to do most of his traveling these days after sundown. He was alone. He drove the antique red convertible, top down as always, at optimum speed, forty miles per hour over the shining sand. Fast enough to keep the wheels from sinking, slow enough to avoid the driftwood, fishing nets, used tires, spiked lumber, whale vertebrae, poisoned sea lions, broken winejugs and other flotsam left ashore by the ebbing tide.
When he saw the ship’s riding lights two miles offshore and a mile ahead flicker on then out four times, he turned on his headlights and responded with the same signal. The ship’s lights blinked on then off twice more. Hayduke answered in the same code. Confirmation. The ship went dark. Hayduke drove ahead without lights, shifting into neutral and letting his automobile slow gradually, so that he’d have no need to use the brakes and flash red warning signals for a mile down the coast.
The ancient Cadillac coasted on and on, slower and slower. He meant to abandon the thing, here on the Sonoran beach, and leave the key in the ignition switch. Let some lucky beachcomber take it away without trouble, if he got here before the tide returned. Would be a small sentimental loss — Hayduke loved machines, even the silliest — but not much loss in a material sense. Until you’ve actually owned a Cadillac, he confessed to himself, you’ll never know how badly designed they are, how shoddily made, how little difference it makes in love or life, in peace or war, in status or in state of mind.
The car rolled a little farther onward, leaving deeper and deeper tracks in the wet sand, and eased to a full stop near the high tide line. Hayduke trying to make things easier for the next thief. He climbed out over the door, pulled his entire supply of luggage from the back seat — a bulging Kelty backpack — and set it on the sand. He unwired and opened the trunk and removed a rolled-up inflatable dinghy, with oars, footpump, lifejacket, two waterjugs.
Hayduke looked out to sea, observed the small ship, black in outline against the pink evening sky, waiting. He unrolled the little neoprene boat, only six feet long, attached hose to valve, and pumped the thing full, taut and semi-rigid. He fastened oars to oarlocks, threw in his baggage, and picked up the bowline. The sea was only fifty feet away, a light surf rolling in and out, but he might have to wade and drag the boat another fifty feet before he reached knee-deep water.
A man shuffled over the dunes and onto the beach about a hundred yards to the southeast, a dark vague shape in the thickening twilight. Hayduke spotted him at once.
He looked inland and saw a second man, tall and thin in a wind-whipped coat, hands in pockets, approaching step by step, quite slowly but directly over the waves of sand, through the waving strands of sawgrass.
And the third man came from the third direction, precisely opposite the first, from up the beach, advancing cautiously on the wet sand, crouching, cradling in both arms a metallic object of indeterminate function but sinister intent. Hayduke saw that one too.
Oh shit. Not now. Not here. Not with my ship a-waiting only a mile offshore, my passage to freedom, a new world, a new life. No. Not fair. Absolutely unsporting. But even as he mumbled these phrases to himself, wallowing in self-pity, young Hayduke was unstrapping the top of his pack, fumbling for his new Uzi machine pistol. (Parting gift from an old friend.) But his. 357 revolver came first to hand. He cocked the action and fired a single shot at the nearest enemy — the tall man in the coat with hands plunged deep in pockets. That man sank from sight. Completing the reflexive gesture, swinging left and dropping flat to his chest, Hayduke aimed with both hands at the second nearest man. At the same moment and in perfect unison the two gunmen on the beach fired at Hayduke, each from the hip with M-16 assault rifle, each triggering a sustained burst of fully automatic fire, each holding down the upward thrust of muzzle as he raked the sand from here to there, directing (not aiming) his spray of fiery dum-dums at the silhouette target turning and falling at the bow of the dinghy; one man shooting from the southeast, the other man from the northwest, in perfect Euclidean alignment. What the Colonel had called an enfilade and/or pincer movement.
A sweet stillness followed, without echoes, in which the only sounds were the murmur of the surf, the breeze at play in the sedges on the dunes, the hiss of escaping air from a fast-deflating rubber boat.
Half buried in the damp sand, Hayduke raised his head and looked about. Night was nearly here, assuming and subsuming rapidly, as typical of a Sonoran shore, the brief lavender fantasia of desert twilight. He looked down the beach and saw a human form, more or less, crumpled like abandoned kelp on the sand. Twisting his head, he looked in the opposite way and perceived, after a moment, the second gunman sprawled in similar disarray, comfortably dead. He looked for the tall slender man inland among the dunes: that man was gone. Apparently gone.
Feeling himself unhurt, not even touched, Hayduke did not hesitate any longer. He rose to his knees, slipped on the lifejacket, stood, ran in crouching position toward the water, expecting each
moment the piercing heat of a bullet in his back. He splashed through the shallow surf, into the warm water, over the hard rippled sand of the sea bottom. Frightened little stingrays scuttled from his path, schools of sunfish fled before him. Sloshing into water more than knee-deep, he flopped forward and began to swim. He swam not fast but steadily, with firm powerful strokes, at a pace good for miles, toward the black figure of his darkened ship.
The full moon rose from beyond the mountains of a distant coast, glowing red as a blood-orange through the sea mist. Silent pelicans, a flapping frigate bird, a flock of gulls flew along the beach, wings weaving invisible patterns in the air. They vanished. Sympathetic dolphins, streamlined and glistening as submarines, swam in parallel with Hayduke toward the ship. The blood-red moon rose higher, clearing jagged peaks, and laid a blood-red track of hammered molten copper across the tranquil, shimmering, mysterious Sea of Cortez.
The Colonel stood on the topmost dune, hands in topcoat pockets, and contemplated the idyll of the dead, the glowing sea, the doomed Cadillac, the birds, the desert shore, and his own blood. The Colonel too was wounded. He watched the slowly receding form of the swimmer — easy target — and his wake upon the moonlight. The man, the men, the birds, the dolphins, now here, now gone. That lightless pirate ship out there would soon be gone as well. This very shore and coast would slide, rise, fall, the sea itself become an enclosed desert lake, turning to salt, shrinking century by century beneath the glare of a pitiless desert sun. All in good time. The Colonel sighed with satisfaction in his vision of time and transience. Of the way things are. De rerum natura. With pleasure, despite the nausea in his bowels, he recalled some favorite lines from a favorite poet. Murmuring, he recited them aloud:
Our terrors and our darknesses of mind
Must be dispelled then not by sunlight. …
But by insight into nature, and a scheme
Of systematic contemplation….
Very good, Titus. Well said. The Colonel advanced over the dry sand and down to the beach, as close as he could get to the retreating prey without getting his shoes wet. He kicked at the sagging, useless boat. He gazed to left and right, at the bodies of his lieutenants dimly seen, spreadeagled in pools of black blood. Poor fools, he thought in silence, poor dumb loyal fools, how could mere hatred have brought you so far, so terribly far, from the innocence of childhood and the sweetness of youth? You have been terribly wronged; you shall be avenged.
The Colonel looked toward the distant swimmer, two hundred yards away but plain to see on the moonlit red water, the converging lines of his wake an infallible guide to his vulnerable, fragile, all-too-human body. Unhurried, the Colonel opened his coat. He wore an extra-long shoulder holster beneath. He drew out a gleaming, chrome-plated, long-range pistol with extended barrel (for accuracy) and telescopic sights mounted on the breech (for precision). He cocked the hammer.
But paused again. The moon, the sea, the quiet surf. He smiled with tragic resignation. The peace and splendor of this scene — his scene — led him to remember another and much later poet, another and much simpler poem:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.
The holy time is quiet as a nun….
The Colonel inserted the barrel of the pistol between his lips and teeth, letting the muzzle come gently to rest against the roof of his mouth. He pulled the trigger.
Hayduke heard the shot, waited, felt no harm, continued stroking forward. He reached the shadow of the dark ship an easy half hour later. He read the name under the bow: Sea Shepherd.
“That you, George?” a voice called down from the rail above.
“It’s me, Paul.”
“About time.” A rope ladder tumbled down the side, barely reaching the water as the ship rocked gently back and forth. “Grab that thing and come aboard. Had us worried, buddy. All that vulgar gunfire. You all right?”
“I’m all right, Captain.”
Hayduke wrapped a hand around the ladder’s bottom rung and rested for a moment. He stared back at the coast of Sonoran Mexico, the dark unpeopled desert, the rising brightening and triumphant moon. He unlatched the lifejacket and caressed his hairy chest. Scratched his belly. Felt the steady pumping of his heart. Alive. He was alive.
The captain’s voice sang out in the night, joyous, jubilant. “Nancy M. — call back that landing party. Ed, Joey, haul in the anchors. …” More orders followed. Bare feet padded over the teakwood decks.
Hayduke smiled, turned, began climbing the ladder.
“And Nancy Z.,” the captain hollered, waiting for his boarder, “run up the black flag.”
“The black flag, Paul?”
“Yes. The black flag, Nancy. The black flag with the red monkey wrench. Party time! George Hayduke’s here!”
31
Resurrection
The former deerpath is gone, obliterated by the hundred-foot-wide trail of the late Super-G.E.M. Where once the wild ricegrass grew, vibrant in the breeze, and bunchgrass, yucca, redbud, scarlet penstemon and purple lupine, is now the broad roadway of nothing but stone, sand, and compacted soil churned to a fine floury dust by the busy truck traffic that has ceased, on this route, only a few weeks before.
A little stream of murky water, dammed here and there by ruts of mud, zigzags this way and that, seeking and eventually always finding the way to lower ground. Where bedrock lies exposed the water oozes across ledges of bluegray limestone, streams through sculptured chutes and grooves, drops from convergent pouroffs into bubbling pools. At poolside the watercress, tules and sapling willow still survive, plotting a comeback. Pale frogs sun themselves on pale stone; dragonflies with emerald wings, with sapphire wings, with wings of ruby-red, dart hover hum above the water; tadpoles, minnows, boatmen bugs, fairy shrimp, mosquito larvae and horsehair worms (from the cattle) and liver flukes (from the sheep) squirm about below the surface, fucking friends and eating loved ones.
Away from the creek and the dusty triple-wide right-of-way, the canyon floor rises on each side toward talus slopes where juniper and a few piny on pine grow among the scree and rubble of fallen rock. Above the talus stands a vertical, sheer, unscalable red wall of Wingate sandstone, soaring upward one two three four five hundred feet to the buff-white caprock on the rim.
A solitary horseman waits on the canyon’s edge, man and horse dark in outline against the backdrop of a salmon-colored dawn. The rider gazes upon the empty road below. Sunrise, under way, can be seen in part from the depths of the canyon, above the purple mesas on the east.
Near the edge of GOLIATH’s trail, not far from a certain half-dead half-alive juniper tree that lifts a twisted silvergray limb toward the sky — a gesture of static assertion, the affirmation of an embattled but undefeated existence — is a disk of impacted earth some twenty inches in diameter that differs somehow from the packed soil on either side. The difference, on close inspection, consists in this, that the circular area is rising, forming a slight but perceptible bulge. The rise is discontinuous: a stir from beneath, a bit of motion, then a prolonged pause. As if even the earth, in its most intimate and miniature crustal movements, must halt from time to time for rest. But only for a time; the tiny disturbance is resumed, the hard soil rises still further, shaping itself into a rough irregular dome, with cracks, that could serve as a geologist’s toy model of a laccolith in process of formation.
The cracks grow longer, deeper, like the breaking of an egg. Another rest. Another stirring of activity under the surface and a tiny foot appears, a clawed scaly tiny foot at the end of a short limber scaly leg. Rest again. The emergent foot feels about in the open air, takes purchase on the earth, digs in, pulls. The second forefoot appears, dripping dust between its toenails, and with it a beaked ancient reptile head, small eyes humorous and wise, the slit of a mouth set in a tight grim resolute determined smile.
Rest. Dig. Climb.
Come forth.
Old man turtle emerges from his grave. The desert tortoise resurrects himself. Covered with du
st but unbroken, uncrushed — uncrushable! — he clambers out, crawls forward, extends his four legs fully from his plated shell and stands erect. He squints to one side, to the other, then straight ahead, blinking. His dim old eyes reflect the gleam of the open sky, the growing light. He stares in wonder. He lifts his head high on its wrinkled neck and takes off, marching toward the invincible sunrise.
The horseman on the canyon rim, missing little that’s alive and in motion, observes the rebirth of the desert turtle and doffs his big hat in salute. He replaces the hat and resumes his vigil, gazing toward the horizon for a sign of the enemy. Nothing this morning. After a while he blows his nose on the ground, wipes a finger on the horse’s haunch, turns the horse and rides away.
Edward Abbey, Hayduke Lives!
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