Bless the Beasts & Children (15 page)

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.

O twayne me a twim, where the ffubalo jym, where the rede and the telopen zoom; where nibber is nat, a conframitous rat-tat-tat.

He was dead on target. Impacted by grill and bumper at its center point, the taut linkage sheared with a twang and the two halves rolled back with release of tension like a curtain parted violently. The truck poured through and parked itself, since Cotton was evidently unable to locate the brake, on top of a small scrub cedar tree.

The Bedwetters might have managed a last, loco laugh except that Teft the sharpshooter fired again and hit something, because the lead jeep scurried behind a rise and Teft, tearing at the cartridge box, discovered it was empty.

The pickup spun wheels and hopscotched off the stunted tree and circled and came back through the gap like a traveling rodeo and Cotton, who must have found what clutch and brake were for, snubbed up just as Teft stood tall and grabbing the rifle by the barrel raised it over his head and chopped down and smashed the stock into splinters.

"Dings!" howled Teft. "Outa gas, outa hay, outa ammo —dings all the way!"

Cotton smiled. He never smiled. "Hell we are," he said. He lit another cigar and puffed omniscient smoke. Even in their condition they were dumbfounded. They drifted in to him like strays, hesitantly, fearful he had snapped his ultimate cap.

Except for the engine idling, it was very quiet. Cotton had a quick look at the herd, restless now as it nosed among weeds for alfalfa, then one at the pursuit. The jeep and two pickups and the men were five hundred yards away and closing fast.

Then he reviewed his regiment. Long gone and far out they might be, but at least they were not sucking thumbs or biting nails or grinding teeth. He smiled again, every sign of his seizure erased, and for a moment, inexplicably, he reminded them of an old soldier sitting on a bench by the courthouse in Prescott, recollecting his boyhood and watching the world go by and chewing on the idea of eternity.

"Hell we are," he repeated. "I'm proud of us. We said we'd finish and we are. That herd's gonna bust out and so're we. Now. For good."

Avoiding his loose tooth, he got a heroic grip on the cigar with his molars. "You watch, men," he told them around it. "You watch."

He shifted. The transmission shrieked. The truck lurched ahead. When he had steam up he transcribed a wide, slewing half-circle out on the range, the tailgate clanging like a tin can on a pup's tail, and bore down on the herd from the rear at forty mph. They saw him throw the cigar.

Fifty yards from the animals he laid on the horn. That did it.

The herd detonated. Forty-seven beasts and two calves jumped three feet straight up and hit top speed before they came down and tails high tore for the hole in the fence and boomed through it like greased lightning, boy and pickup and horn on their heels. They made a splendid thunder. It pulled down temples. It smote the ears of gnats and governments. It caused an impious planet to slip a cog. It must have been heard in heaven.

The Bedwetters saw the buffalo trophy bounce from the end of the bed. They saw the drover's head out the cab window and listened to him yahoo:

"Dings! Dings! C'mon, you dings, let's go!"

Two bulls led the breakout. Beyond the fence, pivoting at the last possible instant, at the verge of the rim, they split the herd. Half to the right, half to the left, it skedaddled off into the wide open spaces of these United States, where it belonged. But the Judas truck kept true and awful course.

Running and stumbling after it in shock, they did not know whether the brakes had failed or he had ignored them or tried to cut an ignition system which would not cut because it was double-wired or had forgotten the rim or whether he simply did not give a glorious goddam because it was gloriously finished and the buffalo were free, free, forever free, or what. They had a last glimpse of John Cotton's red hair flaming like a torch as the truck seemed to soar and dive and disappear. And that was all, except for the remote but unmistakable concussion of metal and rock and the recognition of its meaning, which, microseconds later, cracked their hearts even as it freed them, too, forever.

O twayne me a twim, where the ffubalo jym, where the rede and the telopen zoom; where nibber is nat, a conframitous rat-tat-tat, and the dils are not icky all doom.

The jeep and two pickups dusted through the break in the fence and stopped abruptly. A dozen men jumped from them, then hesitated.

The morning sun was steadfast now, the air blithe as a cool bottle of cola, and the countenance of the earth was fair. But a sad wind sneaked out of the canyon below, moaning baby, baby, and the blues and trembling through the pines and fanning over the preserve in farewell. It grieved.

Squinting under big hats, the men advanced, their faces grim. Some of them wore state uniforms. Some were sixpack city sportsmen and carried merciless rifles. Then they stopped abruptly.

Before them, standing frightened and defiant at the very jaw of the Mogollon Rim, were five redeye, hay-head juvenile delinquents in dirty boots and jeans and jackets with BC on the backs, one of them hugging the head and horns of a bull buffalo and all of them in tears. Lawrence Teft, III, and Samuel Shecker and Gerald Goodenow and Stephen Lally, Jr., and William Lally were bunched up bawling in their sorrow and jeering in their triumph over what seemed to be the sound of a radio. "Yah! Yah! Yah!" they sobbed and jeered at the men in ridiculous hats. "Yah! Yah! Yah!"