Standing at the controls Hayduke saw, beyond the clouds of dust, the edge of the mesa coming toward him. Beyond that edge, far below, lay the waters of Lake Powell, the surface wrinkled by the wake of a passing boat.
He thought of one final point.
“Hey!” he shouted back at Smith. “How do you stop this thing?”
Smith, leaning against the door of his truck, cupped his ears and shouted back, “What’s that?”
“How do you stop this thing?” Hayduke bellowed.
“What?” bellowed Smith.
“HOW DO YOU STOP THIS THING?”
“CAN’T HEAR YOU….”
The loader, pushed by the dozer blade, arrived at the verge, wheeled over, vanished. The bulldozer followed steadily, chuffing black smoke from the burnt metal of the exhaust stack. The steel treads kept firm grip on the sandstone ledge, propelling the machine forward into space. Hayduke jumped off. As the tipover point approached the tractor attempted (so it seemed) to save itself: one tread being more advanced into the air than the other, the tractor made a lurching half-turn to the right, trying to cling to the rim of the mesa and somehow regain solid footing. Useless: there was no remedy; the bulldozer went over, making one somersault, and fell, at minimal trajectory, toward the flat hard metallic-lustered face of the reservoir. As it fell the tracks kept turning, and the engine howled.
Hayduke crawled to the edge in time to see, first, the blurred form of the loading machine sinking into the depths and, second, a few details of the tractor as it crashed into the lake. The thunder of the impact resounded from the canyon walls with shuddering effect, like a sonic boom. The bulldozer sank into the darkness of the cold subsurface waters, its dim shape of Caterpillar yellow obliterated, after a second, by the flare of an underwater explosion. A galaxy of bubbles rose to the surface and popped. Sand and stone trickled for another minute from the cliff. That ceased; there was no further activity but the cautious advance of one motorboat across the dying ripples of the lake: some curious boatman drawn to the scene of calamity.
“Let’s get out of here!” Smith called, as he noticed finally, down at the marina, the pickup truck pulling away from the café.
Hayduke stood up dripping dust and jogged toward Smith, a great grim grin on his face.
“Come on!” yelled Smith. Hayduke ran.
They pulled away as the yellow truck ascended the switchbacks leading from marina to road. Smith headed back the way they’d come, across the bridge over the Dirty Devil and on toward the Colorado, but braked hard and turned abruptly before they reached the center bridge, taking the jeep road north around a bend which concealed them from direct view of anyone passing on the highway.
Or did it? Not entirely, for a cloud of dust, like a giant rooster tail hovering in the air, revealed their passage up the dirt road.
Aware of the rising dust, Smith stopped his truck as soon as they were behind the rocks. He left the engine idling in case it became necessary to move on quickly.
They waited.
They heard the whine of the pursuing truck, the vicious hiss of rubber on asphalt as it rushed past on toward the east. They listened to the diminishing noise of its wheels, the gradual return of peace and stillness, harmony and joy.
9
Search and Rescue on the Job
Laughing, Hayduke and Smith slapped each other on the shoulder blades, hugged each other with delight, and opened up a fresh cold six-pack. Ah, that frosty glitter. Oh, that clean snap of the pop top.
“Hah!” roared Hayduke, feeling the first good rush course through his blood. “Goddamn but that was beautiful!” He jumped out of the truck and danced a sort of jig, a sort of tarantella, a kind of Hunkpapa Sioux peyote shuffle, in 2/4 time, around the truck. Smith started to follow but first, out of caution, climbed to the roof of the cab for another look-see. Who knew what the Enemy might be plotting at this very moment.
And he was right.
“George,” he says, “stop your war dance for a minute and hand me them there Jap binoculars.”
Hayduke passed up the glasses. Smith took a long and studious look to the east-northeast, above the humpback rock, straight toward that lovely bridge which rose, like an arc of silver, like a rainbow of steel, above Narrow Canyon and the temporarily plugged Colorado River. Hayduke, waiting, listened to the sounds of late afternoon. There didn’t seem to be any. A troubling calm prevailed. Even the bird, the one bird that lived in Narrow Canyon, had shut his beak.
“Yeah, it’s him,” Smith said. “The horse’s ass returns.”
“Which one?”
“I mean my buddy Bishop Love. Good old J. Dudley. Him and his Search and Rescue Team.”
“What are they doing?” A little more soberly now, Hayduke flips the tab from another can of Schlitz.
“They’re all out there on the Colorado bridge talking with this guy in the yellow truck.”
“What are the fuckers saying?”
“I can’t read lips too good, but I can guess.”
“Yeah?”
“Bishop Love is telling the other guy he didn’t see no green pickup with no gray canopy come by on the highway. And the other guy is telling Bishop Love that that there green pickup sure as hell didn’t double back on him. So the bishop is saying they must of turned off on that Maze jeep trail and that’s where they are right now—and we ought to been out of here five minutes ago.”
Smith jumped down from the cab roof and scrambled into the seat.
“C’mon, George.”
Hayduke thinking. “I should’ve brought a rifle along.”
“Get in!”
He got in. They took off, north into the sandstone jungle, at maximum possible speed on the rocky rutted axle-busting road: twenty miles per hour.
“Listen,” says Hayduke, “they’ve got those V-Eight Chevy Blazers. Don’t panic, but they’re gonna catch us sure as shit. If they don’t call in 104s first. With napalm.”
“I know it,” says Smith. “You got any more bright ideas?”
“Sure do. We stop them. We set a trap. What’s ahead on this road? Any little wooden bridges we could burn? How about a pucker-pass setup we could block with a boulder?”
“Don’t know.”
“Think fast, Seldom. How about if I shoot some of those cows going across the road up there? Block the way. That might slow them down for a minute.”
“You’re the Green Beret, George, you think of something. We got about five minutes’ head start on them and that’s all. There ain’t no little wooden bridges and there ain’t no tight passes on this road for the next ten miles that I can recollect. And you ain’t shootin’ no cows.”
Smith’s truck bounced and rattled over the rocks, in and out of the ruts, across the deadly little gullies, braking, gearing down for a rush through sand and up the other side, gearing up for a sprint across a level stretch, then the rocks again, another gully. Everything loose in the cargo space—and that included cooking pots, iceboxes, shovels, tire irons, an outboard motor, Dutch oven, canteens, tow chain, pick, prise bar, canned goods—danced and dithered, reinforcing the clamor of the truck itself. To their rear a splendid tail of dust towered into the evening, hovering in the blaze of sunlight, each mote, beam and grain of desert earth enhaloed by the sun, enhanced by the albedo-reflectivity of the plateau walls. Visible for miles. A pillar of dust by day, a fire by night. A giveaway; but the dust also concealed.
The road was impossible; it now became even worse. Smith had to stop and get out to lock the hubs, shift into four-wheel drive. Hayduke got out too. He studied the terrain. About two miles behind he saw the dust plumes of the pursuing traffic: three Blazers and a yellow pickup pounding along, hot for action, lusting for the kill. (That’s us.) How’d we get into this mess anyhow? Whose brilliant idea was this anyway?
On the east the elephant-backed sandstone humps and hollows sloped down toward the hidden gorge; on the west two-thousand-foot cliffs; ahead was the narrow benchland between them, on which the
road meandered in its snake like progress northward. Out of the red dust and auburn sand grew nothing but scrubby blackbrush a foot high, a few stunted junipers, a few tough yuccas on the dunes. No place to hide a truck.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Smith rushed back to the driver’s seat.
Not even a side canyon in view. And if there was one, and they drove up into it, they’d find themselves in a dead end, boxed up. Anywhere they drove, unless they could reach slickrock, they’d leave a trail of tire tracks in the sand, crushing the brush, displacing stones. The naked desert is no place for little secrets.
Smith raced the engine. “Let’s go, George.”
Hayduke jumped back in. They roared down the high-centered road, bristly blackbrush and spiny prickly pear clawing at the truck along the greasy perineum of its General Motors crotch.
“George,” Smith says, “I’ve got it figured out. There’s a fence around the next bend. The road goes across an old wooden cattle guard. We could fire that.”
“I’ll pour, you light.”
“Right,” says Smith.
The fence appeared, stretching right-angled across the line of their advance, from cliff to canyon. An opening for the road was formed by a rack or grill of two-by-fours set on edge, resting on a pair of railway ties. Cattle guard. Wheels could cross; hoofed animals like sheep, cows and horses could not. There was a closed gate beside the cattle guard, through which livestock might be driven, but this, like most of the fenceline, was banked thick and solid with years’ accumulation of windblown tumbleweeds. From a distance the fence resembled a hedgerow, brown and tangled.
The truck rumbled across the two-by-fours. Smith jammed on the brakes. Before the truck had stopped Hayduke was out, blinking in the dust, fumbling at a fuel can strapped in a racket on the side. Opening the can on the run, back to the cattle guard, he sloshed generous gouts of gasoline over the old timbers, the creosoted beams, the gateposts and—still running—along the ground under the mass of tumbleweeds, first to the west side then the east, as far as the fuel would reach. Running back to the truck he heard a shooooom! and the snap! crackle! pop! of tumbleweed exploding into fire. Here came Smith running toward him, a dark sweaty silhouette against the barricade of flames, under a mushroom roll of black rich evil smoke.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says.
They heard, already, the sound of the pursuit.
Smith drove, Hayduke looked back. He saw the flames, clear yellow in the sun, tangerine-colored in the shadow of the cliff, and a purple curtain of weed smoke leaning across the sky. On the far side, cut off, came the four pursuing vehicles. Slowing down, no doubt stopping—for who would be mad enough to drive a bright new $6500 Blazer fully equipped all extras (roll bar heavy-duty clutch auxiliary gas tank tape deck steel-belted radiais twin spares spotlights altimeter tachometer tiltmeter chrome-plated Spalding winch factory air two-way radio whiptail antenna 385-cubic-inch displacement four-on-the-floor stick shift) through a wall of fire chasing evildoers in an old pickup on the basis of evidence at best no more than circumstantial?
Bishop Love, that’s who. J. Dudley Love, Bishop of Blanding, Captain of Search and Rescue.
Here he comes that sonofabitch leaping through the flames over the fiery cattle guard, the shining Blazer apparently unharmed. But a fountain of sparks from the fall of a burning timber was enough to make the second driver halt for a moment; he turned eastward along the fenceline to outflank the fire, followed by the others.
“They’re still coming.”
“I see ’em.” Smith stepped harder on the gas but the road was too rough for much more speed. “Did we gain on them?”
“All but the first.”
“Now what?”
“Let me out, Seldom, leave me behind that rock up ahead. I’ll pink their tires with my little hollow points here and run like hell and meet you later in Hanksville or someplace sexy.”
“Let me think.”
“Another beer?”
“I’m a-tryin’ to think, George, lemme think. There’s an old mine road up ahead, leads off to the west, and maybe it goes clear to the top of the mesa. Don’t know for certain. If it don’t we’re sunk. If it does we’ll lose ’em easy up there in the woods. But if it don’t we’re sunk.”
Hayduke staring back. “They’re gaining on us. If we don’t get off this road we’re sunk.” He opened another beer.
“Then we’ll try the other way.”
They rounded the next bend in the cliffs and there ahead, sure enough, was a fork in the road, the right fork all rock and rut, pothole and washout—that’s the main road, the arterial route—and the other somewhat the worse for neglect.
“Here we go,” says Smith, turning sharp left.
Hayduke spilled his beer in his lap. “Oh, shit, I’m drunk already and I sure do apologize for the mess I got you into on this otherwise sound and peaceful afternoon, Captain Smith, and if you’ll stop this fuckin’ truck for a minute so I can get out, I’ll take care”—Hayduke waving his magnum—“of that lovable old bishop of yours.”
“Careful with that golblamed gun, George. We got a problem on our hands right now.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Hayduke slid the revolver back into its pocket.
Smith’s truck meantime was bucking and heaving in low gear 5 mph up this antique trail to the west, a trail about as old as the Federal Mining Act of 1872. It led in multiple switchbacks up the side of a talus slope, among a jumble of rocks and boulders under the foot of the plateau wall. The scenery was magnificent as usual but their situation precarious and exposed. The Enemy, only a few miles behind, out of sight but closing the gap, spurred on with extra vigor by the indignity of singed bottoms, scorched automotive coccyges, seared differential scrota, would soon come round the last bend in the trail and see them—Hayduke and Smith, Inc.—crawling slow and beetlelike up this improbable exit way.
The trail became still rougher; already in four-wheel drive, Smith transferred into low range. The truck ground upward at the rate of two miles per hour toward the possible haven above—if the road went that far. Haven, heaven, maybe salvation.
Carved out of rock by dynamite decades before, the road tended to slope down and outward—the wrong way. The truck leaned in sickening style far off plumb, away from footing and toward the void. Hayduke, on the outside, would never have a chance if the truck rolled over.
“Look here, Seldom,” he says, “stop this truck, I want to get out.”
“What for?”
“I’ll take that bar out of the back and do a little road work. Slow down that Search and Rescue Team.”
Smith considered. “You see them yet?”
“Not yet, but I see dust rising around the bend. The bishop is on the way.”
Smith stopped. Hayduke fell out, clung to the truck, stumbled over the loose talus, opened the back and found the big iron prise bar. He came to the window on Smith’s side.
Smith says, “Now what’s the plan?”
“I’ll lever some boulders into the road. You wait for me on top. Or as far as you can get. Hand me that heavy bluish item out of the back pocket of my pack.”
“All right, I’ll wait for you on top. Or not more’n a couple miles ahead. Hand you what?”
“The gun, the gun. No, don’t stop, keep on going, the sun’ll soon be down, I’m good for twenty miles in this nice weather. The gun and canteen. Drop off my pack at the top.”
“No guns.”
“If them Search and Rescue fuckers start shooting at me I’m gonna shoot back.”
“No, George, we can’t do that. You know the rule.”
“Listen, I’m naked as a baby without that gun.” He tried to reach it. Smith blocked his arm.
“Nope. Here’s your canteen, George.”
“All right. Jesus Christ. Get going. Here they come. See you in a little while.”
Smith drove on. Hayduke took his iron bar and went to work on the nearest movable boulder. Down below and two mile
s away the four pursuing vehicles halted at the fork in the road. Insects emerged: men checking wheel tracks.
They’d be looking Hayduke’s way in a second. Smith in his truck labored up the steep grade, engine whining in high rpm, cargo clattering in the steel bed. The noise flowed out, concentric waves of sound, toward the seekers under the plateau wall. There was no possibility of concealment.
Hayduke, shirtless, shoved a sandstone fulcrum against the rock he wanted to move, strained and levered. The boulder flopped onto the road, came to rest in the center of the way.
Let’s try for something bigger. He dragged the bar upgrade toward a monster block of fallen cliff. After two minutes of struggle he succeeded: the boulder moved, turned, began to roll—to roll with a will all its own.
Hayduke slid down the bank, getting out of the way. The boulder rolled across the jeep trail, over the edge, and down the slope, bounding from obstacle to obstacle in a jackrabbit course toward some point of repose.
Pale faces in the shadows down yonder, looking up. But Hayduke, triumphant, was already searching for his next missile. Let them come. Let them try and come; he’d bombard their asses with a fusillade of boulders. The first rock came to a halt in the rubble at the slope’s foot. He looked for the next.
The Team was coming. Four vehicles in motion, taking the left fork, the path seldom used, following Hayduke and Smith. Hayduke worked two more big rocks onto the roadway and took off for higher ground, carrying canteen in one hand, the heavy bar in the other. Heart pounding, chest laboring, his broad brown and hairy back shining under a film of sweat. Hard labor; he was not in the shape he should be. And barely beyond rifle range. That target point between his shoulder blades tingled with the old familiar cellular dread. He trotted along, searching out likely rocks. Found two more and paused long enough to hoist them off their bases and onto the roadway.