Bless the Beasts & Children (5 page)

It was 12:35 by Cotton's wrist. Teft clapped on his Afrika Korps cap and said they could be there in two hours. "Sooner if I gun it."

"Lessee. Two-thirty there, half-hour for the job, three o'clock—home at five a.m. That's tight as hell," Cotton said. "Gun it."

They really rolled. Over a two-lane road as white and true as the part in a dude's hair they traversed range open as far as the eye could see, twenty treeless, houseless, humanless miles of it. But there was much moonlight. Out in the distances the fans of windmills twinkled, turning, and about the base of each, about the drink tank, was a speckle of dark dots, a gather of cattle grazing in moonlight and meditating upon good grass, block salt, impermanence, and love.

Lally 2 fell asleep, hatbrim crumpled on Cotton's shoulder. In his jacket the Temptations wailed.

Propped between his knees, the rifle bothered Cotton. He was too conscious of it. It was too tangible. Only a means to an end in camp, an implement such as a stirrup or a baseball bat, here, on this night, it took on a chill and oily identity of its own. It purported. He wished Teft had not brought the damn thing along. Even more vehemently he wished that they were back in their sacks and that yesterday had never been.

Beside him the sleeping boy stirred, mumbling protest. Lally 2 had returned in dreams to the carnage which had racked the cabin after lights out, to the trauma which had compelled a twelve-year-old to set out by himself through the piney woods. Now all six of them were on their way, over the same road, through the same towns, backtracking physically to the scene of that original horror. They were crazy as hell, Cotton assured himself, but great, too, he assured himself. He must quit swearing. He no longer needed it, nor did they. His mouth was sour, the residue of yesterday's nausea. He closed his eyes. In the gardens of God a unicorn sang, a hippogriff danced, and Goodenow vomited.

Teft tooled up Mingus Mountain. Tires squealed on hairpin turns, and the air near the stars was cold. Below them the Verde River cut a fertile and enormous trench, and downriver, deep in cottonwoods, lay old Camp Verde, where Crook had been commander. Many a redskin had bitten the dust for this valley.

Teft tooled them over Mingus Mountain. He drove like a demon, but all of them were driven. It had been unanimous.

They zigged and zagged down through Jerome, peopled once by fifteen thousand bodies, reduced now to fifty haunted souls. The mountain here resembled the bare abdomen of a woman, a dead, a mangled woman. In her, fathered by Phelps, Dodge, and Douglas, were a hundred miles of shafts, drifts, and stopes, and out of her, by pick, shovel, and caesarian section, a billion-dollar child of copper, gold, and silver had been blasted, stripped, and smelted. Down, down the pickup dropped, exhaust popping, over the ashes of Chinamen and miners, over the graves of whores and gamblers, away from the acid stink of greed and into the innocent night.

"Pull over," Cotton ordered. "They must be buttsprung back there."

When they were off the road, outside Clarkdale, and stopped, and when he hopped out to switch places, what he saw in back made him swallow a lump in his throat. Seated with his back to the cab, Shecker had his arms clasped around Goodenow, who sat between his legs, while Goodenow's arms enfolded Lally 1, who sat between his legs with the buffalo head over his own. They had done it for warmth up on the mountain. From three radios Jimmie Rodgers yodeled about peach-pickin' time in Georgia. They were sound asleep and snug as eggs in a carton. Cotton stood looking at them. He recalled a shot he had once seen on a TV science show for kids: a nest of eggs filmed just as the baby chicks were pecking their shells apart to be born and to see what the hell was going on outside, the eggs wobbling and beaks chip, chip, chipping, then tiny, interested eyes and wet, delicate heads. We've got to do this tonight, he told himself, this last thing. The greatest. But can we. Was our egg rotten. Or were we cracked in the nest. Something chipped at him. A sensation wet and delicate emerged. It might have been mercy. Yes, we will, he told the three asleep, inside himself. We will no matter what, I promise. We'll go home supermen, I swear to God. Angrily he swiped at his nose with a sleeve and whacked the side of the pickup hard.

"Wake up, dammit!" he cried. "Two of you in the cab—move it!"

If you wanted to be Apaches badly enough, the Director had consoled them, you could. If you wanted to avoid the humiliation of being low team on the totem pole of achievement, you might. It was up to you. And it was true, for no matter how awkward or irresolute you might be on first base or with a bow, camp custom granted you a second chance, there was another way you might hoist yourself by the seat of your own Levi's. You could raid. If, in the night, you could steal the trophy of any tribe higher in rank, it was yours until the next powwow, together with the name and rewards.

Initially there were many raids, particularly upon the trophies of the Apaches and the Sioux, hung in places of honor on cabin walls and guarded savagely—unsuccessful raids although the Navajo moved up a notch by bagging the bear head of the Comanches. Without warning, warwhoops startled the canyon out of sleep as attacks were launched and repelled with fists and firecrackers and pails of water and other campers stumbled from their cabins, yawning, to watch the fun. The counselors never interfered. Raiding was good for boys. It taught grit. Into character it built cunning.

The Bedwetters knew they would never need to defend their chamber pot, and also that they could never expect to climb the camp ladder by physical prowess. Disorganized but dutiful they entered the game, attempting a raid the second night. They aimed high. The Apaches had already beaten off one foray by the Cheyenne, and the camp was scarcely settled down again when the Bedwetters stripped to undershorts and barefooted through the ponderosa after the biggest prize of all: the head of the bull buffalo.

Of course they botched it. They had an advantage, for the Apaches, having unposted their guards after the Cheyenne raid, were sacked out in arrogance and snoring. As softly as they could, the Bedwetters slipped from the shadow of one pine to the next. Goodenow giggled once. Lally 2 tripped on a root and fell fiat. They reached the cabin of the enemy, inched the screen door open. Teft and Shecker, the strongest, were to go in first and lip the trophy down, but they were clumsier than cub bears and for some dumb reason Shecker had clipped his radio to the elastic band of his skivs and somehow, in darkness and nerves, turned it on. Music yammered.

They were tackled and captured instantly. Dragged outdoors by the Apaches, the oldest and largest boys in camp, they were roped to a pine trunk while one of the victors brought the chamber pot from their cabin. Goodenow began to cry. So did everyone, even Cotton, everyone but Teft. The other tribes came out in skivs and pajamas to observe and laugh. It served the Bedwetters right. They were born losers. And while they cried and the camp laughed, placing the pot on the ground and taking triumphant turns, the Apaches urinated in it.

They buzzed through Sedona, in the incredible Technicolor country where so many Westerns were filmed and stars like Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford and James Stewart and John Wayne did so many incredible deeds for the camera and a percentage of the gross. Cotton had Teft pull over so that they could switch places again. They put Lally 2 back in the cab with Goodenow, but when Shecker, who had toughed it out in the open both stints, volunteered to tough it out again, Cotton let him. The improvement in Shecker in one summer had been terrific.

Now their cause was hopeless. They could neither steal status nor win respect. They would never have watermelon for dessert, never take in a midweek movie. For the rest of the summer they were doomed by the establishment to be the Bedwetters, the dandiest collection of dings ever to be inflicted upon Box Canyon Boys Camp. The morning after the final indignity at the hands of the Apaches they refused to rise and shine, refused to face the jeers of the other tribes. When Wheaties could not budge them, he went to breakfast. Except for Lally 2, who withdrew under his bed, they huddled in the warmth of their bags, eyes closed, or lay on their backs looking at the ceiling, radios pulsing. The air in the cabin was oppressive with tension and dirty socks and despair and petpee.

Cotton lay thinking. Is this the time? What've I got to work with. A teeth-grinder. A head-banger. Two actual bedwetters. A nail-biter and overeater. And a thumb-sucker and bad-dreamer. And they all sleep with radios and talk in their sleep. I'm the only one normal out of six. I'm the only one who can do it. And if I don't now, it'll be too late. So get the lead out. Get the show on the road.

Feet on the floor, whistling to attract attention, he rummaged in his footlocker. In it were a few items he'd been saving just in case. Round his neck he put a set of army dogtags he had bought in a surplus store in Cleveland. They jingled. Teft and Goodenow were watching. Next he got out an electric razor, plugged it in, and ran it over his cheeks and chin. He was only fifteen and had little need to shave, but he had a razor ready against the day when. Now Shecker and Lally 1 were watching and the head of Lally 2 turtled from beneath his bed. Next, putting the razor away and rummaging further, he brought out a small cigar and one of the four two-ounce bottles of whiskey he'd bagged from the cart while the stewardesses were selling drinks on the plane coming out and having hernias trying to handle Teft, who'd run amuck. He sat down on his bed, broke the seal on the bottle, had a snort, then lit the cigar and puffed sufficient smoke. Their eyes bugged. He had them. This was the time.

Cotton laid it on the line. He told them the mess they'd made of last night's raid was the worst thing that had ever happened to him and he wanted no more of that and neither did they, he knew. Wheaties was off their backs and that was good, but if they wanted to get anywhere or be anybody this summer they had to have a leader who understood their problems but at the same time made them snap crap. He said he might as well be the one. If anyone wanted to fight him for it, he'd fight, but if not, he was taking over. Period.

"Okay, here's my first orders," he said. He had another snort and coughed and tried to blow a smoke ring and coughed but nobody smiled. "From now on none of us writes home or phones home. We're on our own. Our mothers and fathers can go to hell. Second, we call each other by our last names, Lally 1, Goodenow, so on. Anybody calls me John Cotton gets a mouthful of teeth. Now my last order—get our cans out of bed and up to that chow cabin and don't bat an eye no matter what anybody says. Now move it."

They poured through Oak Creek Canyon like tea through a tin horn, then slowed to a crawl as Teft downshifted from drive to third to second and finally to low gear for the climb. They had reached the Mogollon Rim. It was a fault of earth, inconceivable and Paleozoic. It was the sheer limestone scarp at the southern jump-off of a plateau upheaved from sea bottom in the age of dinosaurs and armored fish and forming now vast areas of four of the United States. They must scale it. To and fro and up along the wall the pickup labored, gulping oil and shuddering. From four thousand feet they climbed to five thousand and six thousand and seven thousand, and suddenly the air was rare and cold again and the truck gasped for it and gained speed and they were on top.

Shecker, Lally 1, and Cotton were in back, bundled together. After they had covered ten miles or so of tableland and forest, Cotton unwrapped himself from Lally 1, clamped the strap of his helmet liner under his chin so that it would not blow off, got onto his knees, and raised his head into the airstream above the cab.

The horizon shimmered. Behind it, black against a purple sky, were three cones familiar to him, the San Franciscos, peaking at twelve thousand feet. But the dazzle along the horizon was what made him drop down and drum the cab window and point. Teft and Goodenow snapped to and Lally 2 woke up and peered ahead as Cotton, shouting, made mute syllables with his mouth:

"Flag-staff!"

"I gotta eat," Shecker whined. "Hot pastrami and a pickle and a strawberry shake."

"We're not stopping," Cotton said. "We don't have time and you know it."

"So am I starving," said Lally 1.

"My gut doesn't know it," Shecker said. "Me for food, glorious food." He climbed over the side of the bed and stood in the street, gnawing at a fingernail. "So go on without me and have fun."

"Me, too," said Lally 1. "You can't order us around all the time, Cotton."

Cotton was irate. They had stopped for a red light at the fringe of Flagstaff and now the light was green. "Get the hell back in here!"

"Up yours," Shecker said. "I've sat in back all the way, I should get something."

"We do what we want!" cried Lally 1.

As far as Cotton was concerned, that tied it. Teft and Goodenow had their heads out the cab window. "Okay, leave 'em!" he ordered Teft. "Go on, leave 'em!"

Teft obeyed, and the truck moved away and the mutineers began walking and none of them could quite believe what was happening, that the Bedwetters were breaking up, zap, pow, just like that, over nothing, when they were nearly there. But in less than a block Cotton pounded on the window and ordered Teft to pull over and in a minute Shecker and Lally 1 caught up with them. Cotton said okay, to get in, everybody was probably hungry and would operate better after some food, so get in and hit the floor while he looked for a place, there'd be a lot more fuzz in Flag than there had been in Prescott. He put Goodenow in back with them and slid in beside Lally 2 in the cab and they started again.

Intersecting with the main street, Teft turned right. This was U.S. 66, the central east-west conduit of the nation. In the good old days, guiding on a tall pine trimmed of boughs, known then as a flagstaff, wagon trains had watered at the springs here and bedded down for the night. Now the town was a day's run out of Los Angeles, and its main street, U.S. 66, was a caravansary of ten-dollar rooms, diesel spatter, clogged urinals, tubercular waitresses, anti-sleep pills, yesterday's pastry, flat tires, paper diapers, cigarette butts, and exhausted coffee, as tawdry by night as it was depressing by day. Cotton told Teft to turn off, away from the ratrace, and onto a side street. It was now 1:51 a.m.