Read Online The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey - Free Book Online

Within its gravitational time-space continuum, the billboard’s destiny was predetermined, beyond appeal. The arc of its return to earth could have been computed to within a tolerance of three millimeters.
    They savored the moment. The intrinsic virtues of free and worthy enterprise. The ghost of Sam Gompers smiled upon their labors.
    “Push it over,” he said.
    “You,” she said. “You did most of the work.”
    “It’s your birthday.”
    Bonnie placed her small brown hands against the lower edge of the sign, above her head, barely within her reach, and leaned. Thebillboard—some five tons of steel, wood, paint, bolts and nuts—gave a little groan of protest and began to heel over. A rush of air, then the thundering collision of billboard with earth, the boom of metal, the rack and wrench of ruptured bolts, a mushroom cloud of dust, nothing more. The indifferent traffic raced by, unseeing, uncaring, untouched.
    They celebrated at the revolving Skyroom Grill.
    “I want a Thanksgiving dinner,” she said.
    “It’s not Thanksgiving.”
    “If I want a Thanksgiving dinner,” she said.
    “It’s not Thanksgiving.”
    “If I want a Thanksgiving dinner it’s
got
to be Thanksgiving.”
    “That sounds logical.”
    “Call the waiter.”
    “He won’t believe us.”
    “We’ll try to reason with him.”
    They reasoned. Food appeared, and wine. They ate, he poured, they drank, the hour slouched by into eternity. Doc spoke.
    “Abbzug,” the doctor said, “I love you.”
    “How much?”
    “Too much.”
    “That’s not enough.”
    Charlie Ray or Ray Charles or somebody at the ivories, playing “Love Gets in Your Eyes,” pianissimo. The circular room, ten stories above the ground, revolved at 0.5 kilometer per hour. All the night lights of Greater Albuquerque New Mex. pop. 300,000 souls lay about them below, the kingdom of neon, electric gardens of baby-Ionic splendor surrounded by the bleak, black, slovenly wilderness that never would shape up. Where the lean and hungry coyote skulked, unwilling to extinct. The skunk. The snake. The bug. The worm.
    “Marry me,” he said.
    “What for?”
    “I don’t know. I like ceremony.”
    “Why spoil a perfectly good relationship?”
    “I’m a lonely old middle-aged meatcutter. I require security. I like the idea of commitment.”
    “That’s what they do to crazy people. Are you crazy, Doc?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Let’s go to bed. I’m tired.”
    “Will you still love me when I’m old?” he asked, filling her glass again with ruby-red La Tache. “Will you still love me when I’m old and bald and fat and impotent?”
    “You’re already old, bald, fat and impotent.”
    “But rich. Don’t forget that. Would you still love me if I were poor?”
    “Hardly.”
    “A whiskery wreck of a wino, puttering about in garbage cans on South First Street, barked at by small rabid dogs, hounded by
les fuzz?”
    “No.”
    “No?” He took her hand, the left one, which she had left lying on the table. Silver and turquoise glittered richly on her slender wrist. They liked Indian jewelry. They smiled at each other, in the unsteady candlelight in a large round room that turned, on tracks, round and slowly round above the city of tomorrow today.
    Good old Doc. She was familiar with each bump on his bulbous head, every freckle on his sunburned dome, each and every wrinkle on that map of nearly fifty years they had agreed to designate—jointly—as Doc Sarvis’s face. She understood his longing well enough. She helped him all she could.
    They went home, back to Doc’s old pile of F. L. Wright rock in the foothills. Doc went upstairs. She placed a stack of records (her own) on the spindle of the turntable of the quadraphonic record player (his). Through the four speakers came the heavy beat, the electronic throb, the stylized voices of four young degenerates united in song: some band—the Konks, the Scarabs, the Hateful Dead, the Green Crotch—which grossed about two