Bless the Beasts & Children (12 page)

They twisted.

"Look at those buffalo. They haven't gotten the hell away. They're grazing, standing around being big and fat. I thought they'd be gone by now, out of sight, but they're too tame."

"So?"

"Tell it as it is."

"White man speak with hung tongue."

Cotton jumped, and sitting down, put his back to the crossbars. They jumped and squatted close to him. Unzipping his jacket, he fished inside his T-shirt for the dogtags round his neck, and jingling them out, told them with his fingers like beads.

"You got a problem?" asked Lally 2.

"Yup."

"What about?"

"Because we haven't done it yet. We haven't done a damn thing yet." His eyes burned at them, his words were indistinct with passion. "All we did was turn 'em loose and in the morning they'll be rounded up again and slaughtered—those shooters came here for thirty animals tomorrow and they'll have 'em—so we drink booze and dance our asses off and go home and we haven't accomplished a goddam thing!"

Cotton's generation grew up with a war in the house. For them, games of cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians no longer satisfied the senses. A boy had but to turn a control to be totally involved in the violent distension of experience that was Vietnam on television. Cotton became addicted to it. Vietnam was even a portable war. A boy had but to move his personal set to have air strikes in the living room, search-and-destroy operations in the bedroom, naval bombardment in the bathroom—napalm before school, body bags before dinner. Cotton carried a battle map in his brain. His imagination bristled with an arsenal of advanced weaponry. Dak To and Khe Sanh were more real to him than Anzio or the Little Big Horn. His former fantasies, being the first man on the moon or connecting with a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl, he put away as childish, preferring instead to slog through a rice paddy with a decimated platoon, to exhort it to victory, to have a leg lopped off and be decorated in the White House. His only fear was that Vietnam might be over before he could get there.

They lived on the lake in Rocky River, a suburb of Cleveland, his mother and he. One evening after the news, switching channels between the networks to catch the complete war coverage, he slogged into her bedroom and lay in the prone firing position on her bed as she prepared herself at her dressing table for a party. She applied a makeup base, brushed and mascaraed her eyes, then fastened on false lashes. He remembered how, after only one days fishing in Quebec, she had demanded to be flown out to civilization, she was bored. She lined her eyelids with pencil, and penciled a dot at the inner corner of each eye. Her tennis game was slipping, he had noticed. She was no longer a tigress at the net. With
a
brush and color from a silver paintbox she shadowed each lid. She indulged him one day, disciplined him the next. On each cheekbone she dabbed cream rouge, then smoothed it in. It occurred to John how frightened she must be, of middle age and loneliness and social insecurity and, underneath, even of him, because he would soon be a man. She blended two tones of lipstick on her mouth, overlaying the blend with white and kissing Kleenex to blot. To remain a girl, he realized, she had to keep her son a boy. Putting perfume behind her ears she smiled at him in the mirror. "Isn't your mother simply fabulous?" she asked
.

"What're you scared of?" he asked. "Getting old?"

"Don't be nasty."

"I'm not," he said. "I'm fifteen. Try gooping that over. In one year and ten months I'll be seventeen. You want to know what I'm gonna do on my seventeenth birthday?"

"I'm listening."

"Join the Marines. You can if your parent signs the papers."

"Which I won't of course."

"Which you will. You'll be on the booze to celebrate my birthday—you won't even know what you're signing. But if you won't, I'll make a big sign and walk up and down in front of the Cleveland Yacht Club. 'My mother's forty-two years old,' that's what'll be on it."

"I'd kill you," she said.

And then, glaring into the mirror, she went white under her makeup. Behind her, elbows propped on the velvet bedspread, John Cotton sighted her in as though over the barrel of an M-16.

They shivered. The air was colder now, and the dance dried upon their skins. It was that last, impotent hour between darkness and dawn, when men buy truth and sell illusions.

Gentle them, Cotton warned himself, gentle them. They've given about all they've got. More than they even knew they had. They're really only kids yet, and you pop your cork and they'll go ki-yiing into those pens and start tearing hair and eating fingernails and dreaming bad and never come out. But they've almost got it made. Only two more miles. So give it to them easy. A slice of watermelon at a time.

"You know I'm leveling," he told them. "The whole idea was to save those buffalo. And we have almost. And almost is only a couple miles from here. I talked to one of the Game and Fish guys yesterday—it's only a couple miles from here to the fence at the back of this preserve. Other side of the fence is the Mogollon Rim. All we gotta do is take 'em there and drive 'em through. Then they're really free."

Standing up, he stuffed his dogtags and zipped his jacket as though they were going to town to take in a chocolate soda. "Okay, let's move. We've got maybe an hour before daylight, and the tough part's over. This doesn't take hair, just smarts. And think—they'll scatter over a hundred square miles. They'll have the whole state of Arizona for a preserve."

But they stayed hunkered. "How do we get 'em out?" asked Lally 1.

"Simple. The same way Game and Fish brought 'em in. With a Judas truck. There's damn little grass on that range, the guy told me. All they did was feed 'em hay out of a Judas truck and they followed like a flock of sheep. They haven't been fed for three days, they're starving."

"Starving who isn't?" said Shecker. "I don't get the picture yet."

"Oh, come on, let's appreciate ourselves!" Cotton grinned. "We're professionals, we can do anything—we've proved it!" He pointed. "There's the hay—we serve it on a silver platter!" He pointed. "There's the truck—the Bedwetters ride again!" He pointed. "And there's Teft!"

Up shot Teft, the aircraft saboteur. Tilting over them, he came to attention, clicked heels, whipped something from a pocket, and stiffarming a Nazi salute, held the hotwire high. "
Sieg Heil!
"

The night darkened. A cortege of low black clouds lagged over them and let down rain in veils. But they had cat's eyes now and much to do and did not care about the rain.

Lally 2 went into the pens to salvage any usable flashlights or radios or headgear.

Teft inspected the pickup.

Cotton, Shecker, Goodenow, and Lally 1 loaded hay. The bales were heavy, a hundred to two hundred pounds, and even after lowering the tailgate it took a boy on each corner to heave and slide them into the bed.

Lally 2 returned with one transistor which might work. Everything else was wrecked, he said, including the hats, unless somebody wanted to walk around with a pile of buffalo crap on his head.

Teft reported the truck was a state Ford, only two or three years old, with good rubber and plenty of petrol to make two miles, he was sure this time because he could hear it slosh in the tank as they loaded. He was already wired in and ready to roll.

They toiled five bales into the bed, raised the tailgate, added the rifle and, at Goodenow's insistence, the head and horns trophy, and were mounting up when Cotton remembered.

"Hey, the pillow," he said.

"Leave it," said Lally 2.

"Leave it?" said his brother. "Hah."

"You sure?" Cotton asked.

"I'm sure," said Lally 2 with dignity. "And don't make a big thing out of it."

The sibling rivalry between Lally 1 and 2 bordered on the psychotic. Incapable of controlling his impulses, Lally 1 vented his hatred of his brother overtly on still another occasion after his slaughter of the pets. Lally 2 won the barrel race in the camp rodeo. A timed event, each rider spurred from a standing start fifty yards to an equilateral triangle of three upright oil drums, circled each as rapidly and cleanly as possible by leaning from the saddle and guiding with reins, then booted his mount back to the start. Shortest elapsed time took first, and such was the almost mare-and-foal relationship between Sheba and Lally 2 that they clocked a three-second margin over the second-place pair. It was the summer's only win in anything by any of the Bedwetters. Within minutes, someone noticed black smoke funneling from their cabin. The camp took off on the run. Lally 1 had set fire to the foamrubber pillow his brother had brought from home, the one he couldn't sleep without, the one with which he withdrew under beds. By the time it could be doused in a toilet, half of it had scorched and fumed away.

"Hold it," Cotton said. He was just over the tailgate. "How we gonna break this baling wire?" He worked both hands under the wire banding a bale and pulled in vain. "Teft, see if there's a pair of pliers or something in the cab."

Teft said no.

"Damn," Cotton said.

"You weakling Wasps," said Shecker. "This takes a guy from the ghetto." Picking up the .22, he thrust the barrel under a strand and began to twist the weapon clockwise. Under his fat, he was very strong. Presently the wire snapped.

Goodenow would have cheered had Cotton not shushed him. "Cool it, or the shooters'll be down here triggering us. They don't give a damn what they kill, just so it's alive. Okay, everybody set? Teft, no headlights, remember, and when she starts—I mean if—don't gun 'er, take it real slow. Okay, turn 'er over."

They waited.

"Blast off, Teft," Cotton said.

They waited.

Then a long, apologetic arm was extruded from the cab window like plastic. From the fingers, something dangled.

Perfection was required of Lawrence Teft, III. It was expected, too, that he would attend Exeter and Dartmouth, his fathers schools. Since his grammar school record was one of underachievement, his father took him to New Hampshire in March to petition the headmaster personally. Through sleet they strode across the quad to the Administration Building, known to students as the Kremlin. They met the headmaster, were seated, and in the midst of his father's peroration on the justice of shaving admission standards for sons of contributing alumni, Lawrence interrupted with a vivid account of his car theft career, adding that so far as he was concerned, Exeter could shove itself up its own anal orifice. In the respiratory silence which ensued, the headmaster asked the boy to step outside so that the two men might confer. Politely he did. There he found the bowl of apples provided for students by the Principal's Fund. He ate one and fired the remainder out a window. In his absence, the headmaster advised his father to send the boy to a military school or a summer camp far from home. What was needed, in his opinion, was discipline—that and the maturation which would one day enable him to compromise, and hence to adjust to the realities of his environment. He recommended a camp near Prescott, Arizona. That was why, in June, his family put Lawrence Teft, III, aboard the plane at Kennedy like a prisoner.

Keys dangled from his fingers. He stuck his head out the window, an asinine smile on his face. "The keys," he said. "I forgot to look first. They left the keys in. Imagine that."

"For God's sake," said Cotton.

"Here we go."

The engine started at once. But the transmission declaimed, the truck jumped and stuttered, and the five in back were nearly unhorsed.

"Teft, what in hell you doing!" Cotton barked.

Teft's head appeared. "Keep your seats, gents. I never bagged anything like this panzer before. It's got a four-speed shift on the column—I think—and a low and high two-wheel and four-wheel drive stick on the floor—I think —and I dunno what I'm in. There will be a brief intermission."

They waited again. On the second try, Teft got them away equably, easing the Ford around the hay bales and pointing it toward the open range.

Rain ceased. The air was washed. Under a sky void of stars the Judas truck crawled out upon the preserve. It was as though they were setting humble sail upon a crusty sea, for the table of land lifted beneath them in long and glacial billows, cresting into the unknown. There was good grass here in spring, after the snows, and in the autumn, when storms drove moisture deep, but this had been a dry summer and the range was wizened. In the bed of the pickup the five knelt on bales and peered ahead over the roof of the cab. They picked out shapes. The herd was still bunched, nosing for weeds. The truck crept nearer.

A hundred yards off, Teft stopped and periscoped his head. "Pardon me for asking, but I've never associated with buffalo much. What's the plan?"

"Let's get our signals straight," Cotton said. "From here on, I'll tap on the window. One means stop, two means go. Okay?"

"Great. But I mean now, what do we do right now? What's the protocol?"

Cotton hesitated, and even a second's doubt was enough to open the anxiety box.

"What if they charge us?" Goodenow wondered. "What if—"

"Look what they did to that pen," worried Lally 1. "If they can crack lumber like that, they could tip this whole truck over and—"

"What you do is," Shecker began, "go up to 'em and shake hands and say 'Soul Brother' in their ear—"

"Gas 'im," they said.

Cotton dropped the lid. "Can the chatter. The Game and Fish guy said they're practically pets and very hot for hay. And if this is the truck they haul it in, they'll know it."

"They don't know us, though," said Lally 2.

"Well, we gotta try," Cotton said impatiently. "The main thing is, don't bug 'em. They have to trust us. So no jumping around or talking. So listen, Teft, take it really slow, in the lowest gear you got. Head right into 'em."

Teft's ears cocked like a mule's. "Right into 'em?"

"Like we do it every day. When we're in the middle, and I tap once, stop."