Bless the Beasts & Children (11 page)

"Can it," Cotton ordered wearily. "I gotta think." He listened. In the pen the buffalo were still milling, but at least the commotion had not roused the Arizona sportsmen from their tents and campers. And he listened to the Bedwetters whimper about no radios and how pooped they were and how cuckoo to attempt this in the first place. They were about to flake out on him again, he knew the signs. If it wasn't one nitpick crisis they overreacted to, it was another—a bird out of a tree, a police car startling them, running out of gas, and now being tossed off a wall by a few emotionally disturbed animals. And if they were nice, normal, cereal-eating, deodorant-using American kids he could slap them into shape—but they weren't. They were always up on a wall waving crazy hats. And crazy beasts were always charging them. He had to come up with a plan pronto. But first they needed the old vitamins and minerals.

"We better bump," he said. "C'mon."

They were doubtful.

"C'mon," he urged. He put his back to the fencepost, held hands out, and slowly, dubiously, they came to him and made the magic ring, then closed it tight, heads bowed.

They closed eyes.

Bracing and embracing each other, they bumped cheeks and noses gently, touching faces.

A minute passed, and two. Deaf, dumb, sightless, but joined in hope and fear and the warm fur of their humanity, they stood guard over what they had created together that summer.

It worked again.

Cotton opened his eyes. "Okay, men, hear this," he said. "We try it one more time."

Separating, they groaned for effect.

"We might as well, it's damn near morning and we're gonna be caught anyway with no wheels. We came close that time, believe it or not. After I opened the squeeze gate, three of them did go through—but they're as shook up as we are and they came right back. So what we've gotta do is, without making noise, some way stampede 'em, the whole bunch, so they'll light out and keep going, and I know how."

What they'd do, he explained, was station two guys, one at the near squeeze gate he'd opened and one at the far. Gate three, to the range, would be left open. Then when the herd was through one and two, the two guys would jump down and close 'em to make sure none of the buff turned around. Burning rubber and with no place to go but out the last gate, they damn well would.

"Who'll be the two?" Goodenow interrupted.

"Me and Teft."

"No. That's not fair either." Goodenow was being ethical again. "Shecker and I will. We haven't done anything. I urped and he made us stop in Flagstaff to eat, so it's our turn to contribute."

With both hands, Shecker wrenched at the dagger in his chest. "Stabbed! Give me a break!"

Cotton clapped on his helmet. "Have it your way. But here's how we panic 'em. The other four of us climb the wall again, together, like before, only this time we flash flashlights at 'em and throw radios and hats into 'em and they'll go, I swear to God they will."

"Radios?" they asked hollowly. "Throw radios?"

"What else?" Cotton's voice hardened. "All of us know we're not just doing this for the buff. This is the last chance to find out what we've really got. What this summer adds up to. So let's find out. Goodenow and Shecker, give us your radios and flashlights and hats and take off. When our lights come on, get set for the action. We'll stay here till we think you're up on the squeeze pen and ready. Okay, men, this is it. Good luck. To us and them."

Shecker and Goodenow surrendered flashlights and transistors and the Hopi headband and Arnold Palmer's golf cap and went thoughtfully off along the wall. Cotton had his three, Teft and the Lally brothers, arrange gear in pockets so that they could throw in this order: flashlights, radios, hats. When he gave the signal, he said, jump up the wall, about three bars up, hang on with one hand and bomb with the other. That would do it, he said again. That damn well better do it.

They waited. On the other side of the wall the animals snuffed and bristled and waited, too. Cotton timed by low clouds covering and uncovering a decrepit star.

Scorned, they scorned. Cast out, they bunched. Impulses to call home they sublimated. The use of surnames became habitual.

Although he was not a natural leader, the authority Cotton had seized by he-man hocus-pocus, with razor and dogtags and cigar and whiskey, he held on to with claws and clamped jaws. If a fight with an outsider seemed obligatory, he fought it, losing invariably to bigger boys but taking his bruises with redheaded stoicism. Within the cabin he was friend and counselor and drill sergeant, coaxing his platoon along paternally at one moment, kicking it with ridicule the next. Deviants and dings they might be, short in the saddle and inept with a rifle and butterfingered before a ground ball, but by the end of the fourth week, the middle of the session, the Bedwetters had turned a kind of psychoneurotic corner. The midnight ride to a movie let air out of their tensions and nailed up their tailbones. Their second raid shocked the entire camp into recognition.

Cotton conceived it. They executed it perfectly. Late one night they opened the corral gate and slapped the string into the pines, then ran hallooing through the camp: "Horses out! Horses out!" Lights went on, campers and counselors cursed and dressed and fanned out to round up the animals before they reached California. Since it had happened once before, someone's carelessness in closing the corral gate, no one suspected. Sticking together in the dark, the Bedwetters doubled back to the deserted camp. One by one they bagged the five trophies from the unguarded cabins, the buffalo, mountain lion, bear, bobcat, and antelope heads, and toting them to open ground, lined them in a row. Teft put a weird cherry on the triumph. Telling them to wait a minute, he loped off to the rifle range, brought back a .22 and cartridges, and standing over the prizes, fired a round between the glass eyes of each head. They scattered quickly then, rejoining the roundup in the woods and staying with it till the job was done and the corral full.

Discovery brought the camp out of its cabins a second time. Apaches, Sioux, Comanches, Cheyenne, Navajo—the tribes were enraged. The Bedwetters had to be the ones. They couldn't raid their rear ends without cheating. There was hot talk of retribution, of bedding them down for the rest of the night under a latrine, for instance. They stunk anyway. They broke rules. But the Director faced the lynch mob down, and ordering the accused to the chow cabin, he interrogated them. They admitted nothing. They sat in uneasy silence, Cotton scowling, Shecker biting his nails, Teft smiling, Goodenow twisting, Lally 1 making fists, and Lally
2
sucking his thumb
.

Finally the Director lost his temper and told them they were sick. They belonged in some sort of institution, he wasn't sure which sort, but it wasn't a camp for normal boys, healthy in mind and body. He would send them packing except that they had only four weeks left and he didn't wish to burden their parents, who were doubtless happy to he rid of them and deserved a respite. Therefore they could stay, conditionally. One more sick trick like this and he'd have them on the next plane out of Phoenix.

It was the bullets between the eyes which stunned Box Canyon Boys Camp. That was an aberrant act, a calculated discharge of hostility. It implied, the senior counselors muttered among themselves, a condition close to paranoia. Despised as usual by the other campers, even hated now, the psychos in Cottons cabin were bullied and tormented no more, however. You dared not say it, but you were a little afraid of them because you never knew what vindictive thing they might do next. They spooked you.

Raiding ceased. It was no longer a game. Its meaning had been altered.

A lock was placed on the rifle rack.

There were no more ritual presentations of the chamber pot at the powwows on Saturday nights. The Bedwetters carried their fetish everywhere with them, as though they were proud of it.

In the darkness, Cotton nudged Teft and Lally l and 2. "Time," he whispered. "Remember—flashlights then radios then hats—and no noise."

Lally 2 extricated his thumb from his mouth. "Cotton?"

"What."

"What'll we do if they, if they come at us again instead of the other way they're's'posed to?"

"They won't," Cotton said. "I promise. Now—really throw hard—pretend you're heaving big, bitchin' hand grenades—here we go now—hit it!"

Two jumps to the wall and one, two, three crossbars up and they were leaning over, Cotton on one end, Teft on the other, the Lally brothers between, over the herd, confrontation of past and future, leaning over for a terrifying second in the stench and desperation of the beasts before flashlights snapped on and six yellow brands sailed into the pen and five radios and a shower of beads and cloth and plastic slapped humps and clattered horns and black shapes reared and bulk smashed against the wooden walls of 4X8's and a roar of hooves went up like a locomotive highballing and the herd was on its way.

They dropped. Wildly the four sprinted along the wall, hearing wood crack and bolts screech as the herd larruped through the squeeze pen. They turned the corner into a sudden vacuum of silence. They slowed, gulping. Goodenow and Shecker met them, arms extended, pointing.

Spent and dirty, the six boys stood bareheaded. What they had done was more immense than they had ever imagined. They quivered. Their toes sang songs. Their hearts beat poetry. Through the tingling gates of their fingertips their souls were liberated. For out on the range, in the last of the moon, leaping and kicking up heels as though at play, the buffalo ran free.

It was the finest moment of their lives. They awed themselves.

"Ahem." Cotton cleared his throat.

They stirred.

"Ahem. In my jacket," he said, embarrassed. "I've been saving it all summer. For when we did something really strong."

He dug deep into his pocket and brought out an object wrapped in toilet paper. "I packed these in the cabin before we left." As they gathered round him, he unwound the paper. Inside were three small bottles of whiskey, the size served on airlines.

"Wow," they said. "Where'd you get those?"

"Bagged 'em. On the plane coming out, while Teft was tearing up the place. It was easy. The stewardesses were having hernias and left the cart right by me. I got four. One I drank that morning after we loused up the first raid, you saw me. But we each get half a bottle now. We deserve it."

He showed them how to break the seal by unscrewing the cap. "Here's to the Bedwetters," he said, "the best damn buffalo cowboys in the West." He tipped the bottle and while they watched, had the first snort.

Cotton shared with Lally 2, Goodenow with Shecker, and Teft with Lally 1. They made a sacrament of it, there in the dark beside the empty pens, the others waiting respectfully while each one drank and puffed out his cheeks and swallowed hard to keep from choking. Goodenow was the most tentative, and when he went into a coughing fit, they pounded him companionably on the back. "
Very studious, prefers reading to other activities. Has few friends. Phobic reaction to school continues and has recently manifested self-destructive tendencies. Roots of problem in home situation, which is still unresolved." Goodenow's stepfather tore up this year-end report by the school psychologist. The bigdomes had shanked their drives, he told Gerald's mother, and now it was his turn to tee off. There was a camp in Arizona—a friend mentioned it at the country club the other day—where boys learned to ride and shoot and dry out behind the ears, and that was where Gerald-baby was going this summer. Gerald's mother wept. Arizona was too far away, Gerald wasn't outdoorsy, he'd be thrown from a horse and crippled. Crippled hell, his stepfather roared. She had to choose. First, between a husband and an infant who still piddled his bed. And second, between what she wanted her offspring to be. Maybe he was only an engineer, not a head shrinker, but he could damn well tell the difference between a left-handed and a right-handed monkeywrench. Between male and female. And one of these days she'd better make up her mind about her home-grown, breastfed darling: either beat him into jeans and boots or buy him a dress and cosmetics.

From the top of the stairs, Gerald listened.

When they had emptied the three bottles, they stood about solemnly and expectantly, sneaking glances at each other. A whole ounce of whiskey was sure to have some combustive effect. Lally 1 produced a belch, but on an empty stomach it was amateur.

Shecker realized he had an audience. Rather than an impersonation or one of his father's routines, he commenced a slow shuffle, bending arms at the elbows, swinging them, shuffling in a circle. They asked what that was supposed to be.

"Buffalo dance. Read it some book. When the buff were gone, the Injuns blew their minds. Tried to dance 'em back. Danced till they dropped." He humped his head down, moving it from side to side, grunting: "Big Chief Shecker—heap firewater—him do dance—bring back buff—to Times Square."

The rest hesitated. And then, since it seemed incumbent upon them to freak out in some alcoholic manner, they fell into line behind him—Teft and Goodenow and the Lally brothers. Bending at the waist, heads down and swinging, forearms pumps, they shuffled in a wide circle, huffing and puffing a guttural chat: "Huh-huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh." They were surprised. They liked to dance. They heard the ghosts of drums, thumping. Old legends they pounded out by boot. Old shame they washed away in sweat. Out of old and bitter herbs they made new medicine. In gene and pride and whiskey they were restored. They stomped, they leaped, they hooked derision with their horns, chanting softly: "Huh-huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh."

They stopped. They missed Cotton. He was up the wall, scouting over the pens toward the ranchhouse and the assembly of vehicles. They climbed up beside him.

"Hey, Cotton."

"Paleface no dance. How come?"

"Look up there," he said.

They did.

"Hour, hour and a half, it'll be light and the shooters'll be awake and loading guns. Somebody's gonna come down here to check the meat." He twisted about on the crossbar. "Now look out there."