Bless the Beasts & Children Read online

  "Dings! Dings! Wheaties was right—we are dings! We can't do anything right and we've got no damn excuse for living and—"

  He choked in midsentence. Curious, they gathered at the cab window. But he had merely gone into another of his catatonic fits. Cotton sat upright at the wheel, his jaw outthrust under the army helmet, one hand grafted to the gearshift as though he were driving the truck himself, as though by motive power of will and energy generated by rage he could refuel it and propel it onward. His mother had been married three times and divorced three times and was now keeping a man ten years younger than she. Her favorite among the four was her second husband, a rich, grandfatherly manufacturer of ball bearings, for it was his generous settlement upon their divorce which gave her the house in Rocky River and the membership in the Cleveland Yacht Club and made her wealthy in her own right. The manufacturer was certainly John Cottons favorite, for he belonged to a fishing club in Quebec, and once, when John was ten, took mother and son up there after trout. They flew in from North Bay, Ontario, by float plane and landed on the lake near the cabin. The next morning John and his stepfather went fishing, the boy trolling with a Daredevil, the man paddling the canoe. One after another the boy fought and netted Quebec reds, brook trout so-called because the coffee color of the water stained their undersides a vivid crimson. They drifted near a cow moose and her calf breakfasting on lilypads. It was a serene and thrilling morning. This was the best place he'd ever been, the boy blurted suddenly, and the best time he'd ever had, and he wished it would never end.

  His stepfather smiled. "You're a jimdandy, Johnny. I wish I could keep you."

  "Will you and her get divorced?" the boy asked.

  "Probably. She needs a younger man. And money even more, her own money."

  "I wish you wouldn't."

  With the paddle his stepfather carved deep into the black of the lake. "Perhaps she'd sell you to me."

  "She prob'ly would" the boy said.

  When they returned to the cabin his mother, already bored with Quebec, wanted to fly back to Cleveland in the morning. Her son and husband objected. She made a scene and won.

  That night ten-year-old John Cotton took a hammer and an awl, swam naked through icy water to the plane moored offshore, held his breath, ducked, and hammered a hole in the bottom of a float.

  In the morning the plane lay over on one wingtip. The pilot had to hike through the bush to Deux Rivieres and phone North Bay for a mechanic. It required three days to make repairs and John Cotton caught another thirty-one trout. Knowing they could not have pried him loose from the steering wheel and gearshift with a crowbar, the five outside the cab turned away until he was released from seizure.

  When he was, when he had come to, the Bedwetters were already isolating. What had been, only minutes before, a functioning unit, had become a rabble. They blew about the pickup like tumbleweeds. Nomads in a wilderness of doubt, hither and yon they strayed, re-absorbed in self, their cause forgotten, each one tending the petty flock of his own anxieties. Cotton could have tied knots with their tensions. Had he been joker enough to honk the horn, they would have taken off for the moon like bigassed birds, sent into gabbling orbit. He listened to them. Here we go again, he sighed, gathering nuts in the night.

  "I'm tired," said smaller cowboy hat, pillow under its arm and thumb in its mouth. "After all, I'm the youngest."

  Arnold Palmer's golf cap was taking a leak into a manzanita bush. "Geez, I'm dying of malnutrition," it said. "We should've ordered those hamburgers to go. So it shouldn't have been a total loss."

  "I'm hungrier than anybody," whined the Hopi headband. "You guys at least had supper and I lost mine."

  The Afrika Korps maneuvered in circles around the truck. "I got us wheels and I drove us. Why do I have to be responsible for gas, too?"

  "I didn't wanna come on this in the first place," griped the bigger cowboy hat. "Just because I'm stuck with a psycho brother."

  "I miss the tube," said the smaller cowboy hat, ignoring bigger. "It's not healthy for you to go without TV too long."

  "I wish I was in Vegas right now," said golf cap, buttoning up. "They cut the steaks special for my father in Vegas."

  "When I get home," resolved the bigger cowboy hat, "I want a whole week tube time. Got my own color set."

  "Hey, didn't I rupture that tire, though? Poom!" boasted Rommel. "How come I can't score on the range?"

  "There's one show I like," admitted Hopi headband. "Because the guy's only got a little while to live. He might die any show. I'm sort of morbid that way."

  They wearied, they sickened, they gave Cotton a royal pain in the rear. Okay, he said to himself, okay, let's just see. Let's turn off the damn set and see if they can survive on the real thing. Let's stick the horse opera back in the can and see if they're grown-up enough to live in this world. If they aren't, if they poop out now, the hell with the whole operation and the hell with them, too, because if they aren't, after this summer and all I've done for them, they really are born losers, they really are dings. But if they can, if they'll at least try to hack it without me, then they're over the rim, they've won the big game, and when they fly home they'll be okay, they can hack anything, even home.

  He left the cab. Going round to the front end of the truck he took off his helmet and cocked a boot up on the bumper. Automatically the squad assembled and hunkered down around him quietly, as they had earlier, in the piney woods.

  "I lay it on the line," he said. "Running out of gas wasn't Teft's fault, it was everybody's. But it really louses up the operation." They had only a mile more to go, he said, but now, with no wheels, they had to think about afterwards and consequences. There were two options. Hike back to U.S. 66, hitch a ride into Flag, wire another car and rod back to Prescott and the horses and they'd probably be back in camp and in bed before daylight. No one would know. No one would ever connect them. But go on, carry the thing through and lose that time and they'd surely hit camp in broad daylight, the Director would third-degree them about where they'd been and even if they clammed up, when what they'd pulled off made the newspapers he'd smell a rat—the stolen pickup in Prescott, abandoned out here, the locals in Flagstaff who'd identify it and them—and the Bedwetters would be in trouble, legitimate trouble, with the camp and the law and their folks. So that was it. Head for home now and maybe make it in time or go on and sure as hell get caught and was it worth it?

  "So we're gonna vote again," he said. "I told you, I won't be head honcho this time. But before we vote, I want to say something you maybe haven't thought of. Sure, I know what we saw today—I mean yesterday. I know what it did to us. And we think tonight's something we have to do, or we wouldn't be here. But if we think it'll make us heroes or any movie junk like that—it won't. No one else will give a damn but us. In fact, it'll make a lot of people mad enough to shoot us. So what I'm saying is, it doesn't matter to anybody but us. And in three days, don't forget, we break up, camp's over. We'll prob'ly never see each other again."

  He dropped his boot. "Okay, we vote. Everybody's gotta be in favor. All in favor of skipping the whole crazy deal and heading for camp and keeping our noses clean, raise your right hand."

  Instantly he raised his right hand.

  He could not see their faces, but the effect upon them, the shock, was almost palpable. He kept his hand high. No one spoke, no one moved.

  "Cotton, you flake-out!"

  It was Lally 2, on his feet, throwing down his pillow. "I was going alone till you talked me out of it—now you get us here and flake out yourself!"

  "Go find a bed," his brother sneered. "Crawl under the truck."

  "You shut up. Let's take another vote—all in favor of going on like we said no matter what!" Lally 2 raised his right hand.

  The other four were whipsawed. Under the two hands they squatted, contemplating their hangups and the rutted road beneath them.

  Lally 2 lowered his hand. Scornfully he picked up the charred pillow, scornfully dusted it off. "Wh
at a bunch of dings," he said. "You can't do anything without Cotton any more. What'll you do when you get home and he's not around?" Tucking pillow under arm, he jerked the cowboy hat firmly over his ears. "Well, I don't need anybody. I started out by my own self and I'm still going and if anybody wants to tag along, they can."

  And away he went, into the dark, down the road as obdurately as he had the road through the piney woods. Cotton's arm was still high, and tiring. He began to sweat. One gone, he thought, and five to go.

  "Wait a sec," Goodenow called after Lally 2.

  "What?"

  "Would you help carry the head?"

  "I might."

  Goodenow moved to the truck bed and came back lugging the buffalo head and horns. "I'm sorry, Cotton," he said, "but he's too little to go by himself."

  Lally 1 spat. "Judas Priest, why'd you have to say that? Now I have to go. Anything happened to him, our folks'd cut me down. You wouldn't believe the way they baby him."

  He joined Goodenow and together they trudged off.

  "Hey, you hear the one about the three storks?" Shecker asked, standing and rubbing his hands preparatory to a monologue. "The mama stork asked the papa stork what he'd done that day and he said, delivered triplets. He asked what she'd done and she said, delivered twins. So the mama and papa stork asked the baby stork what he'd done and he said, not much but he sure scared hell out of a couple of teenagers." He bit a cuticle. "Like the man says, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go." He rocked back and forth on his heels. "Well, see you in the papers. Or jail, heh-heh."

  When he had gone, Cotton lowered his hand. Teft unwound himself, simulated a yawn, faked a stretch, lifted the truck hood, unclipped his hotwire, coiled it into a pocket, dropped the hood, loitered to the cab, eased out the rifle, and lazed back to Cotton.

  "So long, partner," he declaimed in his finest last-reel, into-the-sunset drawl. "We've rode many a mile together, but now I reckon we've opened us two differ'nt cans of peaches." Head bowed, he flicked away an onion tear. "Auf wiedersehen."

  An about-face and he left Cotton alone by the truck, tramping down the road tilted a little on the rifle side, dissolving at length into mist. For a thorn of loss pierced Cotton, and his eyes misted. It was true: they no longer needed him. Standing there, he combed a hand through his red, matted hair. But after the pain a vast, ripe grape of joy burst in him and he had to hold on to keep from bounding after them, whooping and hollering, I didn't mean it, I wasn't flaking out, I was just putting you over a barrel to see what you'd do and now I know! You're great, you guys, great! Now we really can hack it, we can hack anything—because you finally don't need me or anybody any more! We're finally honest-to-God committed to something better than that peepot and we did it ourselves! So let's go, goddammit, come hell or high water or camp or the fuzz or our folks or the Viet Cong, let's go! Instead, he clapped on his helmet and took out after the troops. He marched, he did not run, counting a slow, dignified cadence and fighting down an undignified impulse to whistle. In a minute or two he picked them up by the white BC's on their jackets. He kept going, between and among them, and they cleared their throats in greeting and relief and closed ranks around him and had the grace, for which he was thankful, to leave everything obvious unsaid. But he was embarrassed and so were they and after a while he broke it. Step it up, he said sergeantly, get the lead out. Hup, hup, hup.

  10

  Smartly they stepped out, full of beans again. But in a quarter-mile they halted in consternation. What halted them was the sound of their boots, scuffing, magnified— that sound and no other.

  For there was no other now. Out of pockets they hauled radios, thumping them and twiddling the controls, to no avail. Every station had gone off the air, every adenoid and A-string. They were orphaned.

  To divert them from this low, appalling blow, Cotton flashed his wrist. It was 3.02 in the a.m. Okay, he whispered, they must be nearly there, so no lights from here on out, no chatter or horsing around, and keep close together.

  This last was unnecessary. When he took the point, leading them, they ganged up behind, stumbling over his heels as he slowed and they slowed. Step by step they were turned from volunteers into conscripts. It was more than the loss of communication. In the cold and stillness at seven thousand feet they seemed skinny to themselves, and younger, and more vulnerable. And the presage of the night had changed. For three hours, through woods and towns and over mountains, they had been Godsped on their journey by the moon. It failed them now. It lay down in the west among some aged, August stars. A grumble of clouds blacked it out at intervals. Off the road and on again the Bedwetters yawed, directed this way and that by a senile breeze. They tripped on a secret. Weather might be born elsewhere, it occurred to them, weather might have its way with boys and nations elsewhere, but up here, on this plateau, at this lonesome elevation, it grew old and addled and weak. Up here, on the bald pate of Arizona, weather kicked the bucket.

  Then they were given a cloud gap, and good light. They were there. Another fifty yards and they would blunder into a closed gate. Beyond the gate the dirt road curved past the campground with its motor pool of vehicles, cars and campers and trailers and pickups and jeeps and refrigerator trucks, past smoldering fires, past the tents pitched by those who chose not to sleep in their cars, past the skinning shed and ranchhouse of stone and on into the range. The vehicles were more numerous than they had seemed yesterday, and the small army of lust and murder and indifference which, if aroused, would oppose them, seemed more formidable.

  Cotton held them at the gate. Beyond was the fenced lane to the pens and the killing ground where, in his dream, Goodenow had fallen first, then Lally 2, enclosed by the wire into which he had hurled himself before he recognized his mother's face and her bullet broke his brain.

  He held them until the moon was obscured. Then they climbed the gate, handing over rifle and pillow and head and horns, and left the road to cross the killing ground.

  Suddenly the earth was treacherous underboot. They slipped and reeled. Goodenow fell. Balancing, they waited for him to rise, but he did not. Instead, he began to retch. On hands and knees he was paralyzed by a series of dry, ghastly heaves. Goodenow threatened suicide a second time after Cotton caught him telephoning his mother one night and wrestled the phone away and cut the connection. Goodenow burst into tears, which he did on the slightest excuse. Cotton reminded him of his original orders: no calls or letters home. Blubbering he was going to hang himself, Goodenow rushed off through the dark toward the tack barn. "Go bead a belt," Cotton said disgustedly, recalling how the sissy had stood chin-deep in the tank all day making a fool of himself, and let him go. Ten minutes later, on second thought and also because they were both from Ohio, he went to the barn, to find Goodenow standing on a feed bin with a rope over a rafter and a noose around his neck, ready to jump. Cotton was up half the night convincing Goodenow of the wisdom and equity of his rule. If they were ever to act their age, and Goodenow was fourteen, if they were ever to stand on their hind legs and spit life in the eye, they must begin now, this summer. Goodenow came down from the feed bin finally, and on the way back to bed he told Cotton about a thing they had done in the special school he'd gone to in Shaker Heights. "Bumping," it was called. When everybody was about to crash and burn and needed help, fast, the teacher would have them huddle and close eyes and hug each other and touch each other for a minute, and it really worked. Goodenow said he could use a little bumping once in a while, all of them could, and Cotton said okay, they'd try it. He never knew whether Goodenow would actually have hung himself or not.

  They were unable to get Goodenow off his hands and knees, and he was too convulsed by retching to tell them what was wrong. They knelt about him to help, but in so doing touched earth with their own hands and instantly, reflexively, withdrew them. They had been walking in, had put hands upon, something wet and cold and viscid. They tried to cleanse hands on jackets and jeans but could not. They tried to rise and run away, but slipping, sli
ding, could not. They wallowed. They were like children making terrible mudpies.

  Then the shutter of cloud opened. They saw. They knew. In a lens of unnatural light the Bedwetters posed, kneeling, squatting, sitting in a grotesque of horror, faces contorted, several groaning, all six of them in stasis. One click of moonlight exposed the game and ended the adventure. One look shrieked what it was that smeared their palms and pants and chins and boots. It was blood.

  11

  BUFFALO PRESERVE ARIZONA GAME AND FISH DEPARTMENT ROSCOE RANCH 4 MILES SOUTH VISITORS WELCOME

  This was the yellow lettering on a big brown sign alongside U.S. 66 eight miles east of Flagstaff. They had seen it from the pickup early yesterday morning while headed back to Box Canyon Boys Camp after an overnight camp-out in the Petrified Forest. Wheaties was driving, two boys beside him in the cab and the other four in the bed with sleeping bags and gear.

  The Bedwetters had the idea simultaneously. Those in back hammered on the cab window, the two in front argued they were not due in camp till afternoon anyway, this might be the only chance they would ever have to see a herd of real buffalo, and after a mile or two of debate, Wheaties gave in, chauffeuring them back to the sign and through the gate and down the dirt road across the plateau.

  They stopped at a closed gate. The road on the other side continued past a ranchhouse and a motley of vehicles, most of them parked side by side to form a barricade, and a small army of men, women, and children sat on hoods or fenders or bumpers, waiting. There were horsemen near the gate, mounted, waiting.

  They opened the gate, passed through, closed it, and drove down the road. Wheaties pulled the pickup into line with the other vehicles. Here they faced an acre of open ground, barren except for dark spillings. The acre was wire-fenced on its opposite side, and a fenced lane led away past a little pond. Ten yards in front of the barricade of cars and pickups and campers, a tarpaulin had been spread. On it, a heavy rifle with a telescopic sight in her lap, a young woman in jeans sat waiting.