Cry Wilderness

by Frank Capra

  Lefty: “No. Of course not.”

  Caldwell: (Bearing down hard) “You’re lying. Aren’t you? AREN’T YOU? These are signals for Dry Rot and Bear Bait to come to your help. Aren’t they? AREN’T THEY?”

  Boatcourt: “WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!”

  Lefty: “You’re out of your mind…”

  Caldwell: (Without a break) “Who scribbled these signs? Who nailed them up? Boatcourt? Hoppy? Your wife? Your kids?”

  Lefty rose with clenched fists. “One more word about my kids and I’ll break your neck!”

  Caldwell: “That’ll just add assault to perjury. You’re lying, aren’t you? You’re LYING… Admit you’re lying.”

  Sheriff: “Lay off, Tony. Lefty isn’t lying. He doesn’t know how to lie.”

  Caldwell: “Well, if he isn’t lying, who nailed these signs to the trees?”

  Sheriff: “You know damned well who did. It was me! You demanded that I produce Dry Rot and Bear Bait as witnesses, so I had the signs set up as bait to trap them. And we did. And if I’m not mistaken, that siren outside means my deputies are bringing in Bear Bait and Dry Rot right now.”

  Heads turned and necks craned toward the siren’s whine, which seemed to die at the courthouse entrance. Someone shouted, “It’s Bear Bait and Dry Rot!” The stampede started. An entrance by Gable and Lombard wouldn’t have caused such a rush. “Bear Bait and Dry Rot! They’re here! They’re here!”

  In the communications truck, Marine Colonel Miller sensed a possible riot. Moving fast, he pressed the red button, which activated the alert horn. “Captain Fields, here,” crackled over the intercom. “Bernie, I don’t like it,” said the colonel. “Assemble your platoon on the double and protect that sheriff car. No bayonets without my approval.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Captain Fields’s “assembly” whistle materialized twenty marines. “A double-line wedge. Guns only. Play it cool. MARCH!”

  I pushed my way to an open window, just in time to see a deputy sheriff unlock his car and pull out two of the most ragged, dirty, emaciated, blue-cold, clownish-looking human beings he ever saw. Their feet were wound with clumps of muddy, snow-wet rags. Round the short one there hung a snow-heavy, torn, shapeless, oversized thing that once may have been an overcoat. The taller one was covered with a soggy toga of sewed-together cement sacks. To my surprise, the two shivering, pitiful, bareheaded derelicts were handcuffed together.

  I hadn’t seen Bear Bait for years. The grime on his face seemed thicker. But his features, wrinkled as a raisin, had scrunched together into a perpetual pleading grin, which, accompanied by perpetual body jerks and pitiful little whines, meant the thousand little devils gnawing his insides for alcohol had also become perpetual.

  Dry Rot, the taller, frailer, but still bright of brain, held up one of the pieces of bark with the scrawled words, “Lefty in trouble—Courthouse,” as the reason for their being there. “Where’s Mr. Lefty?” Dry Rot kept shouting.

  During all this, the drunks and non-drunks had pushed and climbed over each other for a glimpse of Mono County’s two legends, whom very few had seen. At first sight, they laughed, then cheered and applauded. “Bear Bait and Dry Rot! Yahoo!”

  The stiff-necked deputy who had picked up Dry Rot and Bear Bait had had a bellyful of this improper procedure. “All right, stand back. We’re coming up,” he barked, pushing the handcuffed misfits ahead of him.

  Little did he know of the mountain of fury that was coming down to meet him. With the suddenness of a desert flash flood, the Monoites sardined on the first floor came hurtling through the open courthouse doors, piling up over the marines and each other. Through the squealing mess strode Lefty, tossing people right and left.

  The two hermits threw themselves into his huge arms. “Oh, Mr. Lefty. Thank God, thank God…”

  “It’s okay, now. I’m here, I’m here.” Then he saw the handcuffs. He looked at the unhappy deputy. “Gabe, you son of a bitch! Handcuffs on two pitiful…” He grabbed the handcuffs and, without unlocking them, he easily pulled out two weakened, shriveled hands. Lefty threw the handcuffs at the white-faced deputy. Then followed by picking him up and throwing him over the marines and into the crowd. Carrying Bear Bait in one arm and holding up Dry Rot with his other, Lefty yelled, “Gangway!” And, man, did those Monoites gang.

  Up in the hearing room there was utter confusion. The apoplectic supervisor (Weather Vane) had broken the handles of three gavels, and was now banging for order with a beautifully carved coat hanger.

  Lefty entered the hearing room with Bear Bait and Dry Rot. He was met at the door by the sheriff. “They’re freezing, Chief,” said Lefty. He saw a coatrack with some fur coats and hats on it. “A couple of those coats, Chief. Quick.”

  Weather Vane and the four other supervisors threw a fit.

  “Here! Here! That’s my best coat. Sheriff, marines. Order! Order! I’m in charge of this meeting. Put those coats back, I say….”

  But Lefty put a coat around Bear Bait and another around Dry Rot, and led them to chairs on the podium. Bear Bait’s body jerked constantly now. He pled with his hands; he cried; he knelt down and grabbed Lefty’s knees. “A drink for him,” pleaded Dry Rot. “He needs a drink, now, now. He may not make it—”

  Lefty asked the crowd, “Anybody got a flask? Any kind of booze—Chuck, you’ve got a flas—”

  “Use mine,” said the sheriff, pulling a flask out of his back pocket.

  While Dry Rot held up Bear Bait by his armpits, Lefty poured bourbon into Bear Bait’s mouth. He let him drink half the flask. The eyes of the pressing crowd bugged out.

  They sat Bear Bait in a chair again. He quieted down and for the first time saw the people, most of whom were standing and gawking curiously at the two derelicts. When Bear Bait grinned at them, they grinned back. And, for reasons not understood, they applauded him. He applauded with them, but his hands didn’t hit each other. Like a child who wants to please, he took another long drink and grinned idiotically. Again they grinned back and applauded.

  Boatcourt had not left his seat at their table, nor uttered a word during all these goings-on. And neither had Hoppy. “Aw, the poor fellow,” managed to escape Lu before she broke into stifled sobs.

  Tony and his wife smugly sat in two chairs behind the distraught supervisors. From there, smiling cynically, they watched the sansculotte, the lunatic rabble called the human race, make asses of themselves. Some laughed at the two hermits, then turned away holding their noses. Others applauded and mimicked their idiot smiles. Others held up their flasks and made scurvy toasts: “To Bear Bait and Dry Rot. They’re beautiful but stink a lot.”

  And the more Tony and Grace saw, the more they smiled. Grace cracked, “People! Scum. Dumb.”

  “There they are,” added Tony. “‘The glory, jest, and riddle of the world,’ Pope called them. ‘Brainless suckers’ would fit them better.”

  Dry Rot sat shivering in his chair, yet he put his borrowed coat over Bear Bait’s feet. Between his legs, Dry Rot’s hands tolled invisible beads. He closed his eyes and said to himself, “Father, not my words, but thy Son’s: ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”

  Lefty gently took the bottle away from the grinning Bear Bait. He was bursting with rage. Addressing himself to Weather Vane, he leaned over the bench, grabbed the supervisor’s tie, and asked, “I want to know from you, you… What inhuman bastard ordered these two innocent souls to be arrested and brought here to be humiliated by these laughing hyenas? Who did it? TELL me!”

  “I did it,” said a well-trained voice. Lefty turned to face Wonder Boy Tony. “It was my idea—and a spectacularly good one, evidently,” said Tony. Then, addressing the crowd, “I brought them here, not for you to humiliate them, God forbid. I wanted you to see for yourself the two human derelicts our opponents were trying to use to smear the integrity of your elected officials. And their
motives were not humanitarian, not idealistic, not a crusade for the ‘rights of man.’ No! Ladies and gentlemen. Their motives were venal and self-serving. A cruel, satanic trick it was, to use these human caricatures as a cause célèbre against me. I want you to know that these two unfortunates chose their own lives. My motive in asking them to move farther into the woods was to save them the humiliation from a growing population. Our opponents fought to enhance their humiliation. But what matters inhumanity if it serves their political PURPOSE?

  “Mr. Gorski spoke eloquently about this: ‘That a drop of madness is needed to spark life; that all martyrs, saints, and poets have it, and surely hermits have it. Mavericks they are, born to seek, to strive, to reach for the stars; rebels, fighting against being herded into the bovine chutes of conformity. Oh, yes, hermits have it.’”

  Then, turning to the idiotic Bear Bait, he said, “Now there’s a man for you. A seeker; a reacher for the stars, or, as Mister Gorski would have us believe…‘a hermit with a touch of madness fighting against conformity.’ What this poor idiot wretch is really seeking is a pint of liquor. Why? Because he fought against conformity, against society, against the traffic lights of red and green. He said, ‘I want to be free of all laws, of all conventions.’ And he succeeded.

  “Look at him….” Bear Bait grinned broadly. “Tears your heart out. But, ladies and gentlemen, he’s the end result of free thought, of anything-goes-but-law-and-order. And there are millions like him—pitiful derelicts with no anchor, no compass, no destination…drifters on the waves of chance. Now think, think with reason on this… Free thought leads to NO thought. And permissiveness leads to regression. Mark this. Permit all our pet dogs, all the purebreds, man’s best friends and companions—permit them to roam uncontrolled…and they will revert back to their common species…the wolf.

  “The evolution and advancement for both Fido and man comes out of conformity to the leash. The nonconformists, given complete license, reverse evolution. The mavericks devolve into Bear Baits. It is the irreversible Law of the God of Nature.”

  Elbows on the table, head in his hands, Boatcourt still sat statue-like—bewildered, hurt, reeling, praying.

  Dry Rot rose and in a cultured voice addressed Tony. “Sir. It is most presumptuous of me, and I ask your forgiveness… But will you be kind enough to grant me the privilege of speaking a few words?”

  There was a hush. Despite the dirt, the wetness, and the cement-sack toga, Dry Rot had a dignity that no rags could hide. His long white hair and white beard practically met at his waist. His face was very thin, his skin like dirty parchment. But his eyes were startlingly blue—a hypnotic blue that riveted attention.

  “I speak not for myself, but for my friend and companion of twenty-five years. Yes, he is now an idiot, an alcoholic idiot. He has not talked for three years, and he hardly hears and barely sees. But he is now a happy idiot. He remembers nothing—a blessing which God saw fit to grant him a few years ago. For this half-man was once a very great man, carrying a very great sorrow which he sought to forget and expiate in loneliness.

  “He did not believe in God. So he sought forgetfulness by depriving himself of creature comforts, and living like a lone animal in the woods. Time and again he was but a breath away from starving or freezing to death. But he could not forget; nor could he die.

  “A stray fisherman left a bottle of whiskey in his shack. He drank it down. His sorrow became easier to bear. Now he needed alcohol. At night I’d get a drop here and a drop there from empty whiskey bottles in garbage boxes in the back of stores. I learned to make alcohol by fermenting rotten fruits and vegetables. I scrounged from garbage cans. Raccoons objected. I carry scars of their fangs and claws.

  “Three years ago, during a blizzard, he went a week without alcohol or food. So intense was his suffering that, glory be, his mind snapped. He couldn’t talk or remember anything, not even my name. And for the first time he smiled and was happy. His past was erased. But he forgot one sorrow and picked up another one—liquor. He had to have it or die. And now he is an idiot for you to laugh at.

  “But once he was a great man. He was Sir Andrew Parks, Canada’s greatest surgeon, who joined the Canadian Army in World War I. He chose to be chief surgeon at a field hospital just behind the lines in Belgium, where he patched up so many torn bodies on a twenty-four-hour basis that he began to crack. He knew that for every young Canadian soldier he saw die in helpless agony, there were four British, six Americans, ten Germans, and fifteen Russian boys with faces shot away, legs and arms hanging in bloody shreds, guts hanging out…young men cheated of life…the monstrous violence…the mad insanity of tearing young lives apart…

  “It was his third night without sleep. He could barely lift the saw he was using on an unconscious boy. And twenty more shattered youths moaned and waited for him—to die or be saved. He sawed off the boy’s splintered leg. His nurse shook her head. The boy died. Like a zombie he glanced at the boy’s face. So young. So young. He cracked. Went berserk.

  “Grabbing the boy’s cut-off leg, he ran screaming into the night. ‘Stop this goddam war! Stop it!’ He beat the nearest medics with the boy’s leg. ‘Stop the war! Everybody’s mad! Mad! Stop it! Stop… Stop…’

  “It took several shaken medics to catch him, down him, and give him a shot.

  “Eventually they sent him to a psychoneurotic ward in Toronto, a broken, silent hulk. One day he walked away and disappeared. Months later he found some kind of peace for his tortured soul in the Jeffrey pines of Mono County; living alone, trying to find God—a God he never believed in. He didn’t find Him.

  “I came to the same woods for a far less noble reason. I was a young Catholic priest, Father Terence McInemy, from a small parish in New Jersey. There was a young girl. I lost my head and my soul. She became pregnant! In my shock and fright, I arranged for an illegal abortion. She died in horrible pain. I disappeared…I met Bear Bait in the woods. Gradually, we became friends.

  “I tried to seek God’s forgiveness in total abstinence and penance and prayer. God has not answered. My sin was too horrible for even God’s great mercy. But I pray for forgiveness. I know nothing else. I have built a tiny chapel in the woods. No one will ever find it. I say Mass every day and pray constantly. Not for myself, for I am beyond mercy. I pray for all tortured souls who have lost faith in God and His infinite Love. Great souls such as Bear Bait; such as our dear friends and protectors—Deputy Lefty and his greathearted wife.” Then kneeling, he continued, “And, dear God, bless the people of Mono County, bless their leaders, and please bless the gifted young man you will soon send to Sacramento. I ask this in the name of my friend…” He gasped.

  Unnoticed, Bear Bait’s head had slumped down on his chest, eyes open, a happy fixed grin on his face. He looked like a puppet with loosened strings.

  Dry Rot crossed himself, closed Bear Bait’s eyes, and whispered, “Requiescat in Pace.” He rose and faced the crowd. “My friends, General Andrew Parks has found the peace he sought. God has called him to heaven to join the small group who thinks that war is the devil’s cruelest masterpiece—invented to kill the young. Pax vobiscum.”

  Dr. Slingsby rushed up, examined Bear Bait’s body, then announced into the mike, “I am Dr. Slingsby. Our friend Bear Bait is dead.”

  Lefty dropped his massive head on his little wife’s lap and sobbed. A murmur went through the crowd, outside and inside. The snow was still falling, the day darkening. Streetlights went on, creating eerie halos around them.

  A perceptible convulsion—as from a stifled sob—shook Boatcourt’s seated body.

  Colonel Miller punched a button.

  “Aye, sir. Bernie here.”

  “Bernie, put Bear Bait’s body on a stretcher, cover it, remove it from the hearing room to the private room, and wait for the ambulance I sent for.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Four marines slipped quietly into the
hearing room, laid the body on a stretcher, and covered it with Weather Vane’s overcoat. “Here! Here! You dullards. Not with Bay coat….” The marines did not look back. They were followed out by Dry Rot, and Lefty and his family; leaving Hoppy, his wife, and me and my wife standing around the slumped Boatcourt. Weather Vane, as usual, was feeling out for the right wind.

  The wind came from an unhappy direction. Breaking the silence with his powerful voice, Hoppy the publisher stood up and demanded, “Mr. Chairman. I ask for the floor for five minutes, without interruptions.”

  “By all means,” said the unsure supervisor.

  Hoppy went to the podium and stood quietly before a microphone for a couple of seconds before he said, “Ladies and gentlemen of Mono County. I, for one, will long remember what we’ve seen here today. First of all, I want to apologize to General Andrew Parks and to Father Terry, hermits that we so jeeringly called Bear Bait and Dry Rot, for being one of the idiots who wanted them kicked out of our county. Oh, how wrong I was, and will say so in my papers.

  “And, oh, how right Deputy Lefty was when he refused an order to arrest Bear Bait and Dry Rot as vags so we could roust them out of the county. And I admire Lefty for accepting dismissal rather than carrying out such an unfair order. And I further admire him for sticking to his demand for a public hearing to explain the battle between his conscience and his duty to his large family. Lefty’s compassion and courage have been unequaled among us. And I will fight very hard for his reinstatement and promotion. Now, that finishes the only business for which we assembled here today: To hear Lefty’s story.

  “Normally, we would adjourn after finishing our agenda. But—but—there is a little unfinished business which I now bring up before you as a newsman.” He took out a folded front page of his Mono Herald, unfolded it, and showed a double-track, huge headline.

  He held it up to those who could read it, and read it into the mike for others. “This is the front-page headline of tomorrow’s Mono Herald. It reads: ‘A MONO TRAGEDY: OUR BELOVED TONY CALDWELL HAS INOPERABLE CANCER, SAID HIS DOCTOR.’ For the first time in minutes, Boatcourt lifted his head.