Bonnie puts a hand on his shoulder. “No you don’t.”
The man below addresses himself directly to Dr. Sarvis. “Doctor,” he shouts, “can you come down off of there? We need you real bad.”
“Of course,” Doc mumbles, blinking, groping around for the bag. Tied to his rear, he can’t get it free. “Be right there.”
“No!” Bonnie cries. “Tell them you don’t make house calls. Office visits only,” she shouts at Sam.
“Be right back,” Doc mumbles, scrabbling to his feet. He pulls the bag to his side. Eyes clearing a bit now. “George,” he says, “the rope …?”
“It’s a trick,” Hayduke growls, stupefied.
“The rope, George?” Doc takes the running end and starts tying a large granny knot around his belly. Hands still too shaky. Puffing on the cigar. “Be right down,” he mumbles to the man below, unheard.
“Doc!”
“Dr. Sarvis,” the man hollers.
“Be right down. Somebody tell him. George, give me a hand here. We need a nonslip suture, right? Can’t remember how you did that one of yours.”
“Christ.” George moves in close, undoes the granny, whips on a bowline. “Listen carefully, Doc,” he begins. “They can’t prove you were in on this.”
“Of course not.”
“No, you listen to me,” Bonnie cuts in. “This is no good. They’ll put you in jail. I’m not going to let you do this. All we have to do”—Bonnies gestures wildly toward the silent rock above, the blasé brooding monuments of stone; that dead city, that Jurassic morgue—“is get up there. Somehow. Then over into the Maze. Seldom says they’ll never find us once we get in there.”
“Now now, Bonnie,” he says, embracing her, “I’ve got a good lawyer. Expensive but very good. We’ll get together later. Can’t go on much more like this anyway. Then there’s the—Be down in a minute!” he shouts to the waiting man. “—You know, my oath and all that rubbish. Can’t hardly be a Hippocratic hypocrite now, can we? I’m ready, George. Lower away.”
“All right,” Hayduke says, getting ready to belay, “but don’t tell them fuckers anything, Doc. Don’t admit to a goddamn thing. Make them prove it.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Sorry we haven’t time for—well, you know, proper—” Doc nods to Smith. “Good man. Keep these imbeciles out of trouble. Take care, George. Bonnie….”
“You’re not going!”
Doc smiles, shuts his eyes, leans outward and backs off over the brink. Struggling down the wall, bag hanging to his belt, both hands clutching desperately, knuckles white, at the rope, he keeps his eyes shut while Hayduke repeats the routine instructions.
“Lean back. Seldom, you better back me up. Lean back, Doc. Lean back. Feet flat on the stone. Don’t squeeze the fucking rope to death. Relax. Enjoy it. That’s right. Keep going. Keep going, Doc. That’s the way.”
Bonnie stares in amazement. “Doc …” she moans.
Doc reaches or, more precisely, is lowered to the bottom of the wall. Sam Love unties the medical bag, unties the climbing rope and assists the doctor over the rubble toward the canyon floor. Doc waves good-bye to his comrades, then weaves down the canyon side by side with Sam, who carries the bag.
“We’ll see you soon, Doc,” Smith calls. “You be careful and take care of that sonofabitch the bishop and make sure he pays you in cash. Don’t take any checks.”
Doc waves again, not looking back.
“Let’s get out of here.” Hayduke starts to coil his rope, pulling it up.
“Wait a minute,” Bonnie says. “I’m going down too.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Well, shit. Well, holy sweet motherfuck.”
“No obscenities, please. Just give me a good belay.”
“Well, shit, wait’ll I get the rope up.”
“You don’t have to lower me down like a baby. I’ll rappel down.” Bonnie stuffs something—a wadded bandanna for padding—into the seat of her jeans and steps astride the rope. (That lucky rope, thinks Smith.) “Just give me a good belay and shut up.” She passes the rope between her legs, across her back, over the shoulder. “Belay me, goddammit.”
“You can’t do it that way. You don’t have the rope right. Where the fuck you think you’re going anyhow?”
“Where does it look like I’m going?”
“You’re my woman now.” Hayduke’s voice slips a notch, sounding almost like a lover’s bleat. “Shit,” he snarls, recovering quickly. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”
Bonnie turns to Smith. “Seldom,” she commands, “give me a belay.”
Smith hesitates while Hayduke tugs at the rope, now wound around Abbzug’s fragile frame.
“Hell, Bonnie …” Smith says, and clears his throat.
“Good God,” Bonnie says, “what a pair of wishy-washy mealy-mouthed juveniles you two really are anyhow, I mean really.” Rope in corrected rappel position, one end still around Hayduke’s waist, she backs toward the drop-off. “If you don’t give me a good belay you’re coming down with me.”
“Jesus Christ!” Hayduke snorts, stepping back to the solid ledge, planting his boots. “Just a second! Don’t do that.” He glowers at her.
“Really I don’t know how you two are going to survive without me. Or how I am going to survive without George’s brilliant and elegant and oh so refined and tender conversation.” Pause. “Lout! I’m going with Doc!”
“The hell you are.” Pulling in the rope.
“The hell I’m not.” Backing off.
“George.” Smith speaks. “Let her go.”
“You stay out of this.”
“Let her go.”
“You stay out of this, Seldom,” Bonnie says. “I can handle this punk myself.” Yanking at the line: “Testing belay!”
“Belay ready!” Hayduke replies, automatically bracing himself. Half the rope lies coiled at his feet.
Bonnie starts down over the dome of sandstone, the taut rope rasping across her jeans and shirt, the pressure of it bending her nearly double. Ninety feet down. Eighty. Seventy. From Hayduke’s position he can see only her hat and head and shoulders. Then only the hat. Then nothing. Out of sight.
“More rope!” comes a terrified small voice from below.
Hayduke pays out the rope. “Should let her hang there. Stubborn little bitch. Nothing but trouble ever since I met her. Goddammit, Seldom, didn’t I say in the very beginning we didn’t need any goddamn girls in this goddamn fucking organization? Didn’t I? You’re damn right I did. Nothing but trouble and misery.” The rope vibrates like a bowstring in his hand, a straight Euclidean line from his hipbone to the eyebrow of the canyon wall. “Where are you now?” he bellows. No answer. “Seldom, can you see what that crazy ginch is doing down there?”
A weak and piteous cry from far below: “… end of the rope. Gimme more rope, you bastard….”
Smith peering over the edge. “She’s near all the way, George. Let her down another twenty feet.”
“Christ,” Hayduke goes on, tears leaking down his hog-bristled cheeks, gliding like melted pearls along the flanges of his nose and into the hairy underbrush of jaw and jowl, “when you think of all we did for her too, goddamn her, and just when we’re almost there she has to sneak off like this, just because she feels sorry for Doc. Well to hell with her, that’s all I can say. To hell with her, Seldom, we’ll just go on without her, that’s all. To hell with her.”
The rope goes slack in his hands but he seems unaware of it.
“She’s down now, George,” Smith says. “Pull up your line, she’s cast off. So long, honey,” he yells as Bonnie walks out to the center of the canyon floor, hastening after the departed Doc.
Bonnie stops and blows Seldom a kiss, a big triumphant smile on her lovely face. She looks radiant. Eyes sparkling, sunlight glowing in her hair, she waves at Hayduke. “Good-bye.”
He coils his rope, looking sullen. Makes no reply. Manic-depressive psychopaths are ha
rd to please. He won’t even look at her.
“You too, schmuck,” she calls gaily, blowing Hayduke a rosy kiss. He shrugs, coiling his precious rope. Bonnie Abbzug laughs and turns and hurries away.
Silence. More silence.
“Now I remember that third precept,” Smith says, smiling at grim, glum, grimy Hayduke: “Never get in bed with a gal that’s got more problems than you have.”
Hayduke’s face relaxes into a grudging but widening grin.
Or almost as many, Seldom adds, speaking to himself only.
Whock whock whock whock. …
Sunlight flashes on whirling rotor, glances off the Plexiglas bubble, as the recon helicopter passes swiftly, like an afterthought, briefly glimpsed, across the slot of cloudy sky between two towering canyon walls, a mile away. The vibrations sweep toward them, the circles reaching out and closing, a glassy lasso looping down from heaven.
Smith picks up the canteen, Hayduke slings his rifle. They scramble up the stony slope, minute figures on a huge eyeless face of sculptured sandstone, two small human beings lost in an outsize kingdom of towers, walls, empty streets, and abandoned metropolis of rock and more rock and nothing but rock, silent and uninhabited for thirty million years. You can hear their voices in that barren waste from a league away, as they shrink and dwindle far off and far below, buglike micro-busybodies from the vulture’s point of view.
George, says one tiny voice, incredibly remote but clear, goldangit George you know I didn’t think you could do it, when it come right down to the nubbin of it. I thought sure you’d wrinkle up like a mountain oyster and just sort of fold in and pizzle down and leak out and piss away like a sick snake.
Why Seldom Seen you buzzard-beaked Mormon motherfucker I can do anything I want to if I want to do it and what’s more I will and what’s more they’re never I mean never I mean never absolutely NEVER gonna catch me. No. Never. Nor you either if I can help it.
The micro-voices fade but not completely: the gibberish and laughter go on and on and on, for miles….
The vulture smiles his crooked smile.
* * *
“You’re under arrest, Dr. Sarvis. I suppose I ought to tell you that before you look at Dudley.”
Doc shrugs, returning Sam his canteen. “Of course. Where’s the patient?”
“We got him laid out under that cottonwood where those other men are. You too, sister.”
Sister? Bonnie reflects, but only for a moment. “Don’t call me sister, brother, unless you mean it. Also I’m still thirsty and very hungry and I demand my rights as a common legal criminal and if I don’t get them there’s going to be nothing but trouble around here.”
“Take it easy.”
“You’ll get no rest whatsoever.”
“All right, all right.”
“Nothing but heartache.”
“All right. Here he is, Doc.”
The patient is sitting up against the bole of the tree, one large and heavy man with square handsome Anglo-Saxon cattleman’s face. J. Dudley Love, Bishop of Blanding. His eyes glitter, his skin has a parboiled tinge, he looks overenthusiastic, agitated, not quite entirely present. “Hello, Doc, where the hell you been? Sam,” he says to his brother, “what’d I tell you? I told you he’d come. Am I gonna be Governor of the great beehive state of Utah or ain’t I? ‘Industry,’ Doctor, that’s our state motto, ‘industry,’ and our state symbol is the golden beehive, solid gold forty-karat goddamn beehive, and by God we are busy little bees, ain’t we, Sam? Who’s this girl? Am I gonna be Governor or ain’t I?”
“You’re gonna be Governor.”
“Am I gonna be Governor this goddamn state or ain’t I?”
“Sure thing, Dud.”
“Okay, now where’s them other boys? I want them all, specially that turncoat renegade jackrabbit Smith. You got him?”
“Not yet, Dudley. But we’re getting help. We contacted the DPS and the SO and the FBI and just about everybody else with jurisdiction here except the Park Service.”
“No, Sam, I don’t want any help. I can catch them boys all by myself. How many times do I have to tell you that?” The next Governor of Utah watches abstractedly as Bonnie, stethoscope hanging from her neck, rolls up his sleeve and wraps the pleats of the blood-pressure cuff snugly around his upper arm. Blood trickles from the bishop’s nostrils. Doc holds a shining hypodermic syringe against the light, a vial impaled on the needle. “You’re a fine-looking young woman. You a doctor too? What’s your name? It hurts right down my left arm. Right down to the fingers. And least of all we don’t want the park rangers bumbling around in here. They don’t even belong here. We’re gonna transfer this whole goddamned so-called national park to state ownership soon as I’m in, mark my words, Sam. What’re you fellas gaping at? Get out of here. Find Smith; tell him he better show up for the next ward Mutual Improvement Society meeting or we’re gonna revise his genealogy. The only thing worse than a gentile is a goddamned jack Mormon. Are you a gentile, young lady?”
“I’m Jewish,” she murmurs, placing the horns of the stethoscope in her ears and reading the pressure gauge. Systole, diastole, mercury and millimeter. “One-sixty over eight-five,” she says to Doc. He nods. She unwraps the cuff.
“You don’t look Jewish even if you are a gentile. You look like Liz Taylor. I mean when she was young like you.”
“You’re so sweet, Bishop. Just relax now.”
Doc moves in with the needle, laying a large, steady, calming hand on the bishop’s damp brow. “This will hurt a bit, Governor.”
“I ain’t Governor yet. I’m only another bishop now. But I soon will be. Are you the—oof!—you the doctor? You look like a doctor. Sam, goddamn, didn’t I tell you the doctor would come? You don’t get many like this anymore. Sam, I like this little girl. What’s your name, cutie pie? Abbzug? What the hell kind of a name is that? It don’t sound American somehow. Who stole my tricycle? Sam, get on the radio. All-points alarm. Description: dark-complected, greasy, pimple on the ass, scar on left testicle. Baggy pants. Believed armed and dangerous. Alias Rudolf the Red. Alias Herman Smith. Smith? Where’s that Seldom Seen? Wanted for burglary, armed robbery, kidnapping, destruction of private property, industrial sabotage, felonious assault, unlawful use of explosives, conspiracy to disrupt interstate commerce, flight across state lines to avoid prosecution for immoral purposes, horse stealing and rolling rocks. Sam? You there, Sam? Sam, where in the name of Moroni, Nephi, Mormon, Mosiah and Omni are you? What? What’d you say, Doctor?”
“Count backward from twenty.”
“From what?”
“From twenty.”
“Twenty? Twenty. Right. Count backward from twenty. Yes sir. Why not. Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen … seventeen … sixteen….”
29
Land’s End: One Man Left
Obscure and ambivalent gloom of dawn. Sky an unbroken mass of violet clouds, immanent with storm. What they saw, staring from the rimrock above the Fins toward Lizard Rock, looked neither right nor good. A fresh and bigger helicopter by a smoky fire, four trucks, two big wall tents, bedrolls or men scattered about over the sand and stone, either dead or asleep or both. But that wasn’t the whole of the difficulty.
“Why’d they have to camp there?” Hayduke says. “All that empty beautiful clean desert and they had to camp there. Why right there?.”
Oughta get back to my alfalfa and my melons, Smith is thinking. Both of them. Green River they need you. Rains a-comin’. Children miss their daddy. Get started on the Big Houseboat. Seldom’s Ark.
The morning star shines in the east through one window in the overcast. Jupiter Pluvius, planet of rain, beaming like chromium in a sky of ivory, lavender dusk, the twilight of liberty.
“Why right there for chrissakes? Right on top of our goddamn fucking food cache?”
“Don’t know, George,” he says. “Dumb luck, I reckon. We got another up near Frenchy’s Spring.”
“We ain’t going that way. We’re going into the Ma
ze.”
“Don’t know about that Maze, George. It’s mighty hard to find a way down into that Maze. And harder to find a way out. There ain’t no permanent water. No slow elk a-tall. Hardly no game. I’ve been thinkin’, maybe we ought to climb up to the rim, hike north to Green River.”
“You’re crazy. That must be eighty miles. They’ll have your house staked out night and day. You try to go home you’ll find yourself in jail.”
Smith chews on a stem of grass. “Maybe. Maybe not. My old lady there’s pretty damn smart. She can find a way around Bishop Love.”
“Bishop Love? It’s not gonna be just him and the Team anymore, Seldom. It’ll be the state police. Maybe the FBI. Maybe the CIA, for all I know. We’ve got to hide out for a while. At least through the winter.”
Smith is quiet as they watch the camp below, half a mile away. No sign of movement down there yet. Beyond the camp and Lizard Rock are the many shadowy canyons of the Maze. “Well, George, I don’t know. You might make it down in there. If you could get to the river, you’d have a good chance. There’s plenty of catfish in the Green, I mean channel cat, that’s good eatin’, and generally easy to catch, and there is some deer in the side canyons. Not much but some. And some wild horses and a few bighorns, and now and then of course there’ll be a dead cow floatin’ down the river. Maybe I could send one down to you now and then myself. Along with a fleet of watermelons in late August.”
“You didn’t answer what I said,” Hayduke says.
Smith makes no reply to this. Hayduke continues on the other track.
“If I can get one deer a month I’ll survive. I can jerk the meat. If I can get one every two weeks I’ll be fat and happy as a beaver. I’ll build a smoker for the fish. Besides what’s in the food caches—enough beans there for a month. I won’t need any dead cows. A watermelon would be nice, I guess, if you want to float some down to me. But you better stay.”
Smith smiles, sadly. “George,” he says, “I already done that kind of thing. Several times. It ain’t the food that’s the problem.”
“Well, fuck, I’m not worried about the winter either. I’ll fix up one of those old Anasazi ruins or a good snug cave in the rock and keep enough juniper and pinyon pine on hand and I’ll be ready for any blizzard you got. When these vigilantes leave the area I’ll hike back and get my pack and bedroll. Not a thing to worry about.”