Bless the Beasts & Children Page 3

  Under his army helmet Cotton reviewed his troops. Under the headband and golf cap and Afrika Korps cap and tramp ten-gallons they gauged him, then glanced at the burnt pillow under the arm of Lally 2, at the head of the bull buffalo between Goodenow's thighs, at the rifle barrel pointed over Teft's pommel, and then, longest, at each other. They were impressed. One was fifteen years old, four were fourteen, one was twelve. But they were tremendously impressed, by themselves and by what they were about to attempt.

  They were mad for western movies. They doted on tales told with trumpets and ending in a pot of gold, a bucket of blood, or a chorus of the national anthem. The finest movie they had lately seen, the only one that summer in fact, was The Professionals. It had been a buster, a dollar-dreadful, a saga of some men expert with weapons, a handful of colorful, heroic characters who rode into Mexico on a mission of mercy—to rescue a voluptuous babe from the clutches of bandits who had abducted her for foul, they were sure, purposes. It was a fundamental film, they knew it in their souls, a yarn innocent and scabrous, brutal and principled, true and a liar, as old as the hills and as new as the next generation. You did not watch it. You sucked on it. For this is the marrowbone of every American adventure story: some men with guns, going somewhere, to do something dangerous. Whether it be to scout a continent in a covered wagon, to weld the Union in a screaming Wilderness, to save the world for democracy, to vault seas and rip up jungles by the roots and sow our seed and flag and spirit, this has ever been the essence of our melodrama: some men with guns, going somewhere, to do something dangerous.

  And so they were.

  They looked at each other. Cotton grinned, ear to ear. Teft, Shecker, Goodenow, and the Lally brothers grinned at him. He nodded and gigged his horse about before them. They battened down their hats. Suddenly, as one man, they lashed with reins and banged the outraged animals in the bellies. Away the Bedwetters went, charging through the gate and over the silver screen and into history like cavalry. "Eee-yah! Eee-yah!" they yelled. "Eee-yah!"

  5

  They booted at full gallop until the nags, unaccustomed to such shenanigans, were near collapse. Lally 2 had also dropped his pillow and would not go on without it. They waited for him near the paved highway into town, thanking their lucky stars they still had arms and legs, then swung right and let the animals weave at a drunkard walk along the gravel shoulder of the highway, blowing hard and slobbering.

  One morning last autumn Goodenow was gripped by a phobic reaction to school. He could not enter his classroom. His breathing was labored, his state one of extreme fright. Interviewed by the principal, he disclosed fear for the safety of his mother, alone at home without him. He was passed on to the school psychologist, who quickly diagnosed the oedipal relationship. When he was four, Gerald's father died, and for eight years he slept with his mother. When he was twelve, his mother married an executive of a machine tool company in Cleveland, an engineer who had adult children of his own. The psychologist recommended therapy for Gerald and both parents. A man too old and preoccupied to be father to a young boy, the stepfather refused, but seen in private the mother revealed major ambivalence, a fragmentation between hostility and love, between the natural needs of a son and a new mate. Gerald's phobia intensified, as did his dependence on his mother. Placed in a special day school for emotionally disturbed children in Shaker Heights, where he lived, he underwent therapy. At the first sign of improvement, his stepfather enrolled him again in his regular school. The problem reappeared. He was unable to remain in the classroom. When his stepfather discovered that he wet the bed, he was severely punished.

  They wrangled about what kind of car to bag. Shecker and Lally 1 were of the opinion that while you were at it, you might as well bag a Caddie or Imperial or Lincoln at least, but Cotton said no, six boys in a big car would stick out like sore thumbs. What they needed was a car nobody would notice, a nothing car.

  "I was talking with the Director, one day after we took off for the movie," he said. "He told me we're juvenile delinquents the second we leave camp without permission. We can be picked up and tossed in the old hoosegow."

  They wanted to know how come.

  "Because by the law, a JD's anybody under sixteen who breaks the law or's a fugitive from his parents. That's the catch. He's our parents for the summer, acting as. If we break out, we're fugitives from our folks. He told me the camp's got it fixed that way with the fuzz. So bloodhounds and stuff."

  A car passed them, and in the glare of its headlights they hunched down into jackets and up into headgear.

  "Damn," Cotton swore. "We gotta get wheels fast."

  He kicked his mount into a trot and the others followed him along the two-lane blacktop coiling in snake curves toward town. The first possibility they came to was a cocktail bar before which three cars were parked. They pulled up to consider.

  "Take your pick," Teft said spaciously.

  Cotton shook his head. "Unh-unh. That bar'll close in an hour. We grab one of those and the guy coming out'll see it's gone and call the cops and we'll have them after us. By radio."

  They went on. Another car approached, this time from the front, and catching them fullbeam in its lights, braked sharply, swerving for a look at the nightmare parade beside the road. When it moved on, Cotton cursed again and ordered everybody off and lead horses, they had to ditch these animals. Trailing after him they left the highway, stumbling into a patch of greasewood and stunted trees. Here they tied up and bade farewell to their noble steeds, which were asleep on their feet anyway, then stumbled out again. Soon they entered civilization, the ragged commercial edges of Prescott, clomping past billboards and antique shoppes and rock shops and gas stations and curio emporiums and junkyards and coming eventually to a motel and its adjunct stable of automobiles.

  "This is it," Teft said, handing over the rifle. "Those cars'll be there till morning."

  Cotton agreed. "Okay, we split up. You bag one and we'll keep a lookout over there, by that Richfield station. And everybody turn off those damn radios."

  They moved across the street and squatted behind a rack of retread tires while Teft sauntered among the travelers' cars, taking his time, appraising the various models with a dealer's cynicism. But as he stopped by a sedan, having a glance at the rubber, a car with a California license putzed out of nowhere and swung into the motel entrance and a man got out and stretched and rang the bell and lights blared on in the office and the man went inside to register, during which sequence Teft disappeared, to stroll a minute later across the street as though out for some fresh air. They huddled behind the retreads.

  "Want to wait?" he asked Cotton.

  "No. He'll have to park and unload and we don't have the time. Damn the lousy luck."

  "We'll find something down the street."

  "We better."

  They did. Traipsing along, in less than a block they walked into a banquet of transportation—a used car lot. This time they accompanied Teft, only to find that the cars were locked and his skills, he confessed, did not include breaking and entering. Up and down the rows they scattered, trying doors, searching for a lowered window, and had worked their way to the rear of the lot when, without warning, the one police car in Prescott poked its hood into the drive and swiveled its spotlight from one side of the lot to the other. They ducked, they dove under cars, they embraced rear bumpers, and when, satisfied, the cop car pulled away, they dashed out of the lot like amateurs, running another block and ganging up under a streetlight. Frightened, angry with themselves because they were, they jumped first on Teft.

  "Some crook!"

  "The big-time car bagger!"

  "You couldn't steal candy from a baby!"

  "Whattaya need? The keys?"

  Anxieties like mosquitoes beset them. And when Teft would not defend himself, they began to come apart at the seams as a team, to divide themselves into individuals, each with his own bulging jacket of concern and idiosyncrasy. It was this disintegrative behavior pattern, this
overreaction to mistake or hindrance or minor misfortune, this rollercoaster drop from assurance to despair about which Cotton worried most. Over the short run, he was certain, the Bedwetters could now cope, but they were not yet prepared, temperamentally, for the long, hard pull. It was his flaw, too.

  "We're great, yeah, we're really great," he sneered despite himself.

  "I'm hungry," Shecker said.

  Goodenow was near tears. He put down the buffalo head. "I can't carry this any more, my arm's tired. It's everybody's, and everybody should take turns."

  "How we gonna do what we're supposed to if we can't even get there?" Lally 1 demanded.

  "I'm hitching a ride," announced Lally 2, clutching his pillow. "Somebody'll give me one, because I'm just a little boy."

  "Thumbtime," his brother taunted.

  "No, bump time," Cotton said. "C'mon."

  It was the magic word. Gladly they followed him out of the light and onto the sidewalk and under the overhang of a supermarket.

  There they formed a circle, joined hands, and tightened themselves into a huddle, excluding the world.

  They closed eyes.

  They clasped arms about waists and shoulders and hugged.

  Heads together, eyes closed, they bumped cheeks and noses gently, touching faces with their fingers.

  Like blind boys they found each other, and confirmed each other, and through the FM of the flesh they sent to one another impulses of courage and affection.

  Bumping was what they often did in an emergency.

  "Hey," Teft said, breaking it up. He faced the street. Opposite them was the low, dark cube of a body shop, and parked beside it, in shadow, a white Chevy pickup perhaps ten years old, a muddy, fenderbent puddle-jumper very similar to those at camp. "Will that do?" he asked Cotton.

  "Hell yes. Anything that'll get us there." He pounded a fist into a palm, challenging. "Let's see you do it, though. We just wanna see you."

  "Roger." Teft passed him the .22. "You gents wait down the street. I'll be along in a trice."

  But they had to watch a car being bagged. Besides, they wanted to believe in Teft, to be astonished by him again, and rather than waiting down the block they scooted behind a Chevron billboard nearby, their heads sprouting from the frame like cabbages.

  Old Teft moseyed across the silent street as though he wore a Colt and a tin star. Idling around the pickup, he made certain it was unlocked and the keys gone. He kicked a couple of tires. Approving, he stepped efficiently to the front end and raised the hood.

  From a jacket pocket he extracted a jumper wire about eighteen inches long, with alligator clips at each end. Head and shoulders under the hood, he attached one clip to the positive terminal on the battery, the other to the battery connection on the coil. Lowering the hood, he opened the cab door and slid in.

  On pickups this old, the starter button was on the dash, to the left of the steering column. His fingers reached it, pressed.

  Teft often astonished them. He was tall, thin, and fourteen, though tall enough to be sixteen, a tilted boy who walked around with a tilted smile and said and did little and then, suddenly, said and did a great deal. There was something culpable about Teft. You suspected him first. He lived a tilted life. It was Teft who freed them from their junior counselor, the overgrown cornball of nineteen whom they called Wheaties because he had been a football hero in some nothing town in Arizona and rode well and was a sureshot with a rifle and attempted to peptalk them into shape—his shape—and in general made a fatuous, all-round horse's ass of himself. He hated them and they hated him, but Teft hated him more. To Teft, authority was tyranny, and one night, while Wheaties was in town on his night off, Teft put a lizard in his sleeping bag. When he returned, around one in the morning, and stuffed himself into bed, Wheaties hit the ceiling. He roared terror, then rage. He turned on the lights. He confiscated their radios. The other counselors said they were emotionally disturbed. He said emotionally bullcrap. What they really were was dings. A ding, he said, was something or somebody which didn't fit anything or anywhere. It used up space but it was useless. Nobody wanted it or knew what to do with it. Therefore it had no excuse for being or living. And the six of them were the pee-poorest assortment of snotnose, bigmouth, crybaby dings ever enrolled in this camp and the only reason he had their cabin was because no other counselor would take it but he had a crawful now and from now on they'd toe his line or he'd disturb their goddam emotions so much the men in white coats would come take them away to the funny farm, where they belonged.

  Hell he would, Teft said. Curling from his sack he dragged the footlocker from under Wheaties' bed and threw it open. Before Wheaties could stop him, he exposed the contents. Besides clothing there was a pint of whiskey, two six-packs of beer, a carton of cigarettes, and a stack of sex magazines. Wheaties yelled his locker was locked and personal. Teft replied he was expert with locks.

  "So this is it, Wheaties," he said. "First, let's have those radios back. After that, you can play like our counselor but you won't be. Unless you want me to inform the Director what a fako you really are, what a bad influence, and how having you around might destroy our morals. And also what's in this locker." Teft smiled that tilted smile. "So from now on, baby, kiss off. You can live here, we'll let you because we're generous, but this is our cabin and we'll run it our way. And if you don't like it, you can shove it up your anal orifice."

  The engine turned over, started, hiccoughed, stopped, started again, and settled down. Listening to it almost medically, Teft hooked a bootheel over the clutch, shifted by guess and gosh and bucked away from the body shop. He preferred automatic transmissions.

  Gunning a full block before he spotted them tearing out from behind the billboard, chasing him, he braked, ground the gears into reverse, backed up to meet them in the middle of the street, braked again, and as they reached him, stuck an arm upright out the window, grinning. "Achtung!"

  They were rapturous. All five tried to climb in beside him.

  "Hey, Teft, how'dja do it?"

  "Ladies first!"

  "The Phantom strikes again!"

  "Let's go to Disneyland instead!"

  "Shut up, dammit!" Cotton cried. "Where d'you think you are? Okay, Lally Two and me in front, the rest in back—we'll change off later. C'mon, hurry up and shut up!"

  They scrambled in, Lally 2 in the cab with him, Shecker and Goodenow and Lally 1 and the buffalo head in the bed. "Now listen, hear this," Cotton told those in back. "Lie down. Flat. We've bagged a car and we're armed—we're in real trouble if anybody stops us. You saw that prowl car. So stay down and no talking till we're out of town. Don't even breathe."

  While they flattened out he ordered Lally 2 off the seat and on the floor, he wanted only a driver showing, and when Lally 2 was down, he laid the rifle on the seat and scrouged beside him, bowing head under the dashboard and closing the door. "Teft," he said, "you really know how to drive this thing?"

  "I'm learning."

  "Well. Take it slow—but not too slow. The thing is to get through town without anybody giving us a second look. A pickup with one guy driving and keeping his nose clean. Oh, and Teft, how about turning on the lights?"

  "Lights? Geez, I forgot." Teft found the control and clicked the dimmer button on the floorboard.

  "You guys aren't so sharp," sniffed Lally 2 under the dash, hatbrim over his nose. "Neither of you."

  "How come?"

  "I can't even see, but I bet Teft's still got that German cap on."

  Teft grimaced and took it off and raced the engine. "Ready, skipper?"

  "Fire one," Cotton said.

  Teft geared the Chevy away smoothly this time, asking Cotton whether to stick to side streets or bluff it out on a main drag. Straightaway, Cotton thought, to save time and because it might look more suspicious if they monkeyed around on back streets. This one was Montezuma. They followed it downtown, to the stretch known in the good old days as Whiskey Row, a block of swing-door bazaars in which hard liquor
was dispensed two drinks for two bits, beer for a nickel, free lunch for indigestion, piano music for an earache, a poker hand for a silver dollar, and a close shave by .44 slugs for nothing: the Kentucky, the Wellington, the Del Monte, Cobweb Hall, and the Palace. It went up in smoke in 1900. Now, when greenhorn campers came into Prescott for an hour's spree every two weeks, they barged into a drugstore, spraddled up on soda stools, and exchanged decadent eastern paper for malts and nut sundaes and milkshakes and double banana splits.

  "Holy cow," Teft said.

  "What?"

  "The law. That prowl car again."

  "Sit tall," Cotton said.

  On the floor they tensed until Teft puffed out his cheeks and whistled relief.

  The pickup paused for a stoplight at the intersection of Montezuma and Gurley. On its right was the town plaza, a grassy square surmounted by the grass mass and clock tower of the Yavapai County Courthouse. A horse and rider reared upon a granite boulder. It was the equestrian monument to Bucky O'Neill, gay blade and sheriff and faro player and mayor of Prescott and captain of Troop A, First U. S. Volunteer Cavalry, Rough Riders, immortalized by Spanish lead at San Juan Hill and knighted now in bronze. The plaza was beautiful, Hawthorne trees cast pleasant shade in summer, and to the benches under the trees old codgers came daily from the veterans' hospital and the pioneers' home. Domiciliary patients, they were called, not ill or maimed or dotty enough to be confined but too infirm to tap with canes through a society which honored them with pensions and forgot to attend their funerals. In hawthorne shade and to the tolling of the courthouse bell they mustered every day, these fragile warriors, sitting on the benches hour by garrulous hour, cussing and discussing an agenda of dentures and generals, surgery and ingrate daughters, taxes and the Old Testament, politics and final resting places—jogging memory with oaths and basing argument upon a bibliography of broken wind. They spat. They whittled. Waving tobacco cans, they cackled at pretty girls. Boys they dismissed with a fine misanthropy. Righteous and grand, they were also pathetic. They were dusty bugles, hungry for new lips. They were notes from the past adrift in cracked bottles, praying fair skies and kindly shores.