Bless the Beasts & Children

by Glendon Swarthout

  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.

  15

  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."

  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!"

  16

  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 a
nd 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.