Bless the Beasts & Children

by Glendon Swarthout

  "Dammit, we're losing our marbles!" Cotton cried. "Teft, you're going in circles or we'd be there!"

  Teft was insulted. "Okay, U-Drive-It."

  "You know I can't!" Cotton jabbed with his cigar. "Get back in that cab and turn on the lights once and see if you can see that fence!"

  Teft grudged through the window and Cotton barked at the others. "Give 'em hay before they come in here and take it! But not too much!"

  They were down to a bale and a pile. Under Cotton's supervision they commenced to pay the hay out in wisps. Teft tried the headlights once but no luck, no fence. Cotton was up and down again, drawing on his cigar, perturbed about goofing off on the hay as they had on gas.

  "But there's more of 'em now," argued Lally 1. "There's a lot more'n thirty out there."

  They strained eyes, counting. Shecker made out forty-one animals, Goodenow forty-two.

  "New customers," said Cotton. "Great. The more join up, the more make it."

  "Hey, and look!" squealed Lally 2. "Little ones!"

  Beyond the cluster of bulls and cows, two buffalo calves skipped on stick legs beside their mothers. Born in May or June, they had no horns as yet, nor humps, and their lambs' tails twitched at the pleasure of reunion with their aunts and uncles.

  "Forty-one and two calves," Shecker said. Then he clapped his forehead. "We're counting! We can see!"

  "Morning!" they cried. "Wow! We've been up all night!"

  They were on their feet in a flash, steadying each other, gaping at the strangers with whom they had shared the long dark hours and danger and fulfillment, at the measles of mud and blood on their faces, at the stubble of hay in their hair. They were a sorry corps of desert canaries, and too tired to chirp.

  Turning from each other, they looked about them. Day had not come. But night was surely gone. They traveled by no map toward no horizon. The world was made of milk. Land and sky were one skimmed gray. And they were in some pinch-me place. It might have been Arizona or Africa or Asia or the barebutt of the moon. But the buffalo were real. Black within the gray, not brown, and mightier than they had been in the pens, they whuffed and bumped and masticated and walked in one black, primordial exodus. And the truck was real, too. The exhaust throated. Spit out from under tires, stones pinged. Guitars thrummed. Drums boomed a big beat. A singer implored.

  "The radio!" they whooped.

  They seized Lally 2 and practically ripped off his jacket getting out the transistor. It worked! Some sweetheart of a station had come on the air, some dear, sleep-drunk DJ had spun the first beloved platter!

  "James Brown!"

  "His Famous Flames!"

  "Let's hear it for the Japs!"

  "Hoooooooray!"

  They turned up the volume. The big beat revived them. Shuffling on stocking feet about the bed and through the hay they snapped fingers and flipped hips.

  "Yeah, yeah!"

  "Sock it to me!"

  "Bitchin'!"

  Shecker raised the transistor over his head and waved it at the herd, saying this was how the nightriders used to lullaby the longhorns on the trail to Dodge City in the good old days, with Jap radios and James Brown and His Famous Flames.

  "Shut up! Everybody shut the hell up!" Cotton hammered with a fist on the cab roof, deafening Teft. "And turn that damn thing off!" he railed. "And get down in here and feed! Whatta you got—beans for brains? Don't you know back there they've already found their truck and herd gone and any minute now that whole sportsman army'll be after us to kick our ass from here to Mexico? Or try us for target practice? They let go with a thirty-thirty and you'll dance, by God, you'll dance till you're on your knees!"

  They settled down immediately. Lally 2 returned the radio to his jacket. They fed again, gleaning from the floor and beginning on the last bale. Cotton turned his back on them, concentrating over the cab, cigar sputtering like a fuse. Once he glanced at his wrist. It was five thirty-four. Twice he ate Teft out for not being capable of driving a straight line for two miles and locating a simple damn fence. Behind him, the rest resigned themselves. His outburst might have provoked a response had they not recognized the familiar symptoms: he was charging his aggressive batteries again, readying himself for the downhill road to one of his uptights.

  The dawn was lavender now. They drifted on a raft through vast and lavender waters. A kelp of creatures followed in their wake, tossing horns impatiently at the scant fare offered them. There were more mouths to feed than ever, for six fullgrown specimens had joined the school, flippering in on lavender tides.

  "Cotton?"

  What he'd said about being on their knees was troubling them, but only Lally 2 dared address him now.

  "Cotton, will we have to go to jail?"

  He faced them. "Prob'ly. For bagging two pickups at least. And blowing a hole in a tire. And being juvenile delinquents, fugitives from camp and our folks. There's enough, that's for sure." He tapped ash over the side.

  "But if we get 'em out, it'll be worth it. If we don't, if we foul up when we're this close—"

  "I mean, what'll they do to us?" asked Lally 2. "The hunters."

  "Who knows? But they're not hunters, they're meatmen. And anybody who'll shoot animals to pieces for kicks the way they did yesterday'll do anything."

  "Maybe they'll put us in the pens instead," said Lally 1.

  "And let us out three at a time," said Shecker.

  "And chase us with horses till we can't run any more," gloomed Goodenow.

  "Cotton!" Teft's head was out the window. "Hey, you guys—the fence!"

  Sliding on socks, falling over each other, the Bedwetters jumped to the lookout over the cab.

  "Oh, no," Cotton groaned. "Oh, no."

  19

  None of them had thought about the fence which must bound the preserve on its south side. They had assumed it would be the four-strand bobwire which enclosed the pens and ranchhouse area. Now they knew better. There, several lines of ordinary wire and sets of cattleguards sufficed to keep the buffalo out of the streets and bars of Flagstaff. But here, where the temptation to go gallivanting off into a paradise of pine and canyon would be considerable, the single restraint must be as sure as scripture. It was.

  Teft had stopped the truck. To galvanize them, Cotton barked boots on, everybody, but the troops had difficulty even matching boots to feet. Then, to hold the herd where it was, he had them scatter half of the remaining bale.

  Color changed. The world blushed. Pink and psychedelic boys served pink and psychedelic beasts.

  That done, he had Teft gun away from the herd and pull alongside the fence. It was chainlink iron, eight feet high and strung taut between iron posts deepset every ten yards. Pieces of shag hung from it where the animals had rubbed to rid themselves of their winter robes. From the truck bed they could see over—a pink sky and a few pines and beyond, the Mogollon Rim.

  "Let's not stand around like turkeys—push!" Cotton put his shoulder to the fence. "C'mon, lay on it!"

  The other three put theirs, but after the first dubious effort, they merely leaned. Seven hours of hyperactivity and a sacrifice of radios and headgear and a final, spastic dance had drained them. Trembling, mouths dry, they called it quits and slumped to the floor too whipped to care what Cotton might say. O twayne me a twim, where the ffubalo jym.

  A raw red sun of August chinned itself on the horizon. A new day dazzled.

  Cotton said nothing. Both arms extended, fingers, claws around the links, legs as bowed as staves, head down, dead cigar vised in his jaws, he fought it out with the fence alone. What the taxes of iron and stress and night and day and life and death and flesh and wish exacted, he would not pay. What a bull buffalo could not do, he must.

  But this time he was not granted surcease. This time he was incapable of compromise. Twisting his body about, he put his back to the fence and braced his boots. The tendons in his neck corded just as light flared over his face and his eyes flew open and the cigar dropped from his mouth and he stared, trans
fixed, then pointed over their heads.

  "Here they come!"

  That reared them staring, too, behind them, out over the preserve. The light of the rising sun had been refracted from the windshield of a jeep a mile away as though by heliostat. The jeep was followed closely by two pickups, both filled with human figures. Boiling dust behind them, the three vehicles topped a rise and dropped out of sight into a trough.

  "Too late, damn us, we're too late!" Cotton sobbed, as though the Bedwetters were to blame for the morning, then yelled: "No, we're not—Teft! Back to the herd—slow—don't spook 'em—go, go!"

  As the truck returned he pushed the others to their knees. Unbolting the tailgate, he kicked it down with a clang and the second Teft stopped, had them sweep the floor of the bed clean of the half-bale and litter.

  "That'll hold 'em! Now take us away, Teft! Fifty yards —over there—but slow! Go, go!"

  He was desperate and sane and improvising and coordinated and stoical as stone and chiggers of excitement ate him alive. The Ford still rolling, he vaulted over the end with the rifle and ordered everybody out, Teft included, and move easy, buffalo would charge a man on foot without reason or warning. But they could no longer move under their own power. Tripped out on adventure and sleeplessness and hunger, they had wibbled away to Disland without saying good-by. They were disoriented, dissociated, discombobulated. He had to pull them and push them and place them a safe distance from the feeding herd. They stood like zombies, splaylegged and deaf and dumb to the proximity of dangerous animals and dangerous men. It was as though they were spectators at a happening which Cotton was creating for their pleasure. O twayne me a twim, where the ffubalo jym, where the rede and the telopen zoom.

  Cotton told Teft to load the rifle and the next time the lead jeep appeared over a rise, to fire. "Don't hit anybody, aim for the radiator," he said calmly. "Just scare 'em, make 'em stop."

  Teft mumbled he couldn't, he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

  "None of us can. Here." He made Shecker sit down and Teft sit behind him and use his shoulder as a rest. "Now you can. Now load."

  Goodenow and the Lally brothers watched the game. Teft fumbled a round into the chamber and pushed the bolt home. The vehicles reappeared, nearer and coming fast over the range, in line and loaded with men.

  "Fire," Cotton said.

  "Cotton, I can't."

  "Fire, goddammit!"

  The .22 cracked. At that altitude they could hear the round hiss. The herd lifted heads, listening, but stayed put.

  "Now keep on firing!" Cotton yelled. "Fire till you hit something and they stop! They'll be here in two minutes and I need three!"

  Teft reloaded and fired again. Shecker cringed and the jeep stopped, the pickups behind it, and men in big hats piled out.

  "Teft, you gotta get me three minutes!"

  Teft looked round, but Cotton was gone.

  Tangled, they were sent into simplicity. Unloved, they were committed to an institution of wind and space and tree sounds and the tonic smells of animals. It was a dispassionate place, the West. Mountains made no demands of them. The sky, wider than any they had ever known, was impartial. They underwent a therapy of sun and cliff and asylum, they were redeemed by a balm of days indistinguishable one from another. And they were healed, or seemed to be. While the Bedwetters might not yet do the merely difficult, they were finding on the hidden staircases of their personalities a compulsion to attempt the improbable—a talent, even, for the spectacular. A movie forbidden them they broke out to see at risk of expulsion. Tokens they could not win in competition they seized by guile, then desecrated with bullets. These exploits annealed them. The climax, the feat which liberated them at last, however, was the Grand Canyon hike. Cotton pulled them through in the end, but it was a very near thing.

  Overnights were an extra attraction of Box Canyon Boys Camp. By twos the tribes went on four overnights during the summer, camping in the Grand Canyon, in Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation, in Oak Creek Canyon, and in the Painted Desert or Petrified Forest. One morning in the sixth week the Apaches and Bedwetters, together with their junior counselors and supervised by a senior, headed in two pickups for Havasu Canyon, a section of the Grand. Parking on the rim, they marched in single file, backpacking food, gear, and chamber pot. Down they hiked, escorted by eagles, down for two and a half hours and eight miles, the first five tortuous and steep, the last three over a lowering trail. Down, down they were let into the epochs, into deer and blinding light and fossil silences and echo. It was hot in the canyon deeps, and it was a bliss of boys to flop in cottonwood shade, then peel and plunge naked into the pool beneath Havasu Falls, to sport like otters in and through and out of mist and tumbling, shivery river. If you clambered up beside the lip of the falls and pushed off with enough force, you could arch over a rock outcrop and dive into the pool, a drop of forty terrifying feet. The Apaches did, they were older and athletic, they won at everything, and after shouts of cowardice the Bedwetters dared, all but Lally 2. When Cottons back was turned, the Apaches lugged the youngster up, swung him by arms and legs, and let him go. His scream, as he hurtled, echoed for miles.

  He screamed again in the night, waking into trauma. To comfort him, Cotton zipped his sleeping bag over his head.

  It rained, too, and the tribes slept fitfully.

  In the morning they explored, swam again, and after lunch made packs and filled canteens from a spring preparatory to the climb. There was a ruckus. Cocksure they'd reach the rim long before the Bedwetters, the Apaches intended, once there, to take off for camp in their pickup rather than wait for the slowpokes. But the senior counselor said to wait, he wanted the expedition back in one piece, and besides, the Bedwetters wouldn't be long after. The Apaches hooted. They offered to bet: their buffalo head, for the last two weeks of camp, against the chamber pot, that they would hit the rim a full hour faster. Cotton took it. Watches were synchronized and the party set out.

  For three miles, over the easy gradient, the Bedwetters kept pace. When the true ascent began they fell back. The air, after rain, was unusually humid. Canyon walls compressed it. They sweat buckets. Lagging behind Cotton, secretly they tipped canteens. With two miles to go they were out of water. Packs galled. They commenced to throw gear away. Granite and sandstone cached heat during the day and now, like lungs, expelled it. The trail seemed to sheer straight up. A mile below the rim they heard brays of contempt. The Apaches were there, watching them, and timing. Suddenly the Bedwetters fell apart. Goodenow and Lally 2 sat down blubbering. Teft and Shecker and Lally 1 crawled into the shade of boulders and lay down wheezing. A disgusted Wheaties ordered them to haul ass, and when they wouldn't budge, went on by himself. They were alone.

  Cotton put down the pot and checked the time. They must make the last mile in twenty-eight minutes. So he shouted at his battalion. He begged them, but in vain. They had met only by chance. They were joined only by jeer and neuroses and futility. Now the delicate membrane which had held them together in their desperation was sundered. He was angrier with himself than with them. He had asked more than they could give. He should never have taken the bet. It was a command failure. And it meant much more than handing over a damn china crock. Lately, for the first time in their lives, they were winning. If he let them lose now, they lost each other. And losing each other, each one lost himself. He saw the entire summer dangle on the side of a damn canyon.

  "God, you guys," he rasped, his throat scratchy, afraid he might whimper himself. "God. You gotta move. I still got half a canteen, you can have that." They groaned. "Okay, I'm gonna tell you. I wasn't but now I will. I heard the counselors talking one night. They said we should be locked up, not sent to a camp. They said our folks sent us here to get rid of us and didn't know how else to unless they dumped us out of a car or shot us." He let them think that over. "What I'm saying is, we are dings. We're in everybody's hair and we don't fit anywhere and nobody wants us. Our folks, the counselors, nobody—and most of
all those loudmouths up there don't want us up there in the next twenty-eight minutes. Okay, we're pooped, but are we gonna let 'em piss in our pot again? Hell we are! So move! If we don't now, we never will!" Tears started. Stumbling from one to the next, he kicked them frantically in the ribs. "So move, you poor bastards, you poor damn useless dings, move!"

  Cotton never figured out which did it, the pain or the shame, but they did move. He passed his canteen and sent Teft to the point and took the rear and chewed them out whenever they slowed. Between them, he and Shecker dragged Lally 2 the last hundred yards. They reached the rim with four minutes to spare and dropped dead.

  When he could, Cotton stood up and walked a crooked line past the counselors to the Apaches, waiting stolidly in their pickup. As soon as they hit camp, he said, his lower lip cracked and bleeding, hand over that damn buffalo head. Then he walked back to the Bedwetters and got them on their feet.

  "You watch," he said. "You watch"

  Taking the chamber pot by one handle, he cocked his arm, crouched, and whirling, as though he were throwing a discus, heaved it over the rim. They were free.

  Teft fired again. Out on the preserve the men leaped into their vehicles and came on.

  "Hey, Teft! Clutch on the left, brake on the right—right?" Cotton was in the truck, head out the window. "So how do I shift—with this whatchy by the steering wheel? Up or down?"

  20

  Teft goggled.

  Started in some inexpedient gear, the pickup buck-jumped. Cotton floored the accelerator and the engine bellowed and they took off. Hunched over the wheel, dropped tailgate clanging, he sighted on a section of fence between two posts.