The Monkey Wrench Gang Read Free

efforts. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating. All-cleansing fire, all-purifying flame, before which the asbestos-hearted plutonic pyromaniac can only genuflect and pray.
    Doc Sarvis by this time had descended the crumbly bank of the roadside under a billowing glare from his handiwork, dumped his gas can into trunk of car, slammed the lid—where a bright and silver caduceus glisters in the firelight—and slumped down in the front seat beside his driver.
    “Next?” she says.
    He flipped away his cigar butt, out the open window into the ditch—the trace of burning arc remains for a moment in the night, aretinal afterglow with rainbow-style trajectory, its terminal spatter of sparks the pot of gold—and unwrapped another Marsh-Wheeling, his famous surgeon’s hand revealing not a twitch or tremor.
    “Let’s work the west side,” he says.
    The big car glided forward with murmurous motor, wheels crunching tin cans and plastic picnic plates on the berm, packed bearings sliding in the servile grease, the pistons, bathed in oil, slipping up and down in the firm but gentle grasp of cylinders, connecting rods to crankshaft, crankshaft to drive shaft through differential’s scrotal housing via axle, all power to the wheels.
    They progressed. That is to say, they advanced, in thoughtful silence, toward the jittery neon, the spastic anapestic rock, the apoplectic roll of Saturday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (To be an American for one Saturday night downtown you’d sell your immortal soul.) Down Glassy Gulch they drove toward the twenty-story towers of finance burning like blocks of radium under the illuminated smog.
    “Abbzug.”
    “Doc?”
    “I love you, Abbzug.”
    “I know, Doc.”
    Past a lit-up funeral parlor in territorial burnt-adobe brick: Strong-Thorne Mortuary—“Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting?” Dive! Beneath the overpass of the Sante Fe (Holy Faith) Railroad—“Go Santa Fe All the Way.”
    “Ah,” sighed the doctor, “I like this. I like this….”
    “Yeah, but it interferes with my driving if you don’t mind.”
    “El Mano Negro strikes again.”
    “Yeah, Doc, okay, but you’re gonna get us in a wreck and my mother will sue.”
    “True,” he says, “but it’s worth it.”
    Beyond the prewar motels of stucco and Spanish tile at the city’s western fringe, they drove out on a long low bridge.
    “Stop here.”
    She stopped the car. Doc Sarvis gazed down at the river, the RioGrande, great river of New Mexico, its dark and complicated waters shining with cloud-reflected city light.
    “My river,” he says.
    “Our river.”
    “Our river.”
    “Let’s take that river trip.”
    “Soon, soon.” He held up a finger. “Listen….”
    They listened. The river was mumbling something down below, something like a message: Come flow with me, Doctor, through the deserts of New Mexico, down through the canyons of Big Bend and on to the sea the Gulf the Caribbean, down where those young sireens weave their seaweed garlands for your hairless head, O Doc. Are you there? Doc?
    “Drive on, Bonnie. This river aggravates my melancholia.”
    “Not to mention your self-pity.”
    “My sense
of déjà vu.”
    “Yeah.”
    “
Mein Weltschmerz.”
    “Your
Welt-schmaltz
. You love it.”
    “Well….” He pulled out the lighter. “As to that, who can say?”
    “Oh, Doc.” Watching the river, driving on, watching the road, she patted his knee. “Don’t think about all that anymore.”
    Doc nodded, holding the red coil to his cigar. The glow of the lighter, the soft lights of the instrument panel, gave to his large and bony, bald but bearded head a hard-worn dignity. He looked like Jean Sibelius with eyebrows and whiskers, in the full vigor of his fruitful forties.