Bless the Beasts & Children (7 page)

Cotton clutched the .22.

Goodenow was petrified. His fingers worked at the Hopi headband as though unbeading it.

"Whooooeeee!" Teft hollered.

Shecker was thrown out of four cabins in two days. On the third, Cotton let him in, and on the fourth, regretted it. Shecker was as insufferable as his father, the famous Sid, whose indulged and overdominated mimic and victim he had become. He was the screech of chalk on slate. He was as loud and nervous and nosy and braggart as New York. He nibbled compulsively at his nails, he ate compulsively, he rattled off his father's routines compulsively, he was always "on." And eventually Cotton confronted him.

They took in just about anything in that cabin, Cotton said, but they had to draw a line. They wanted no more of his fathers jokes, no more about the saloons he played or the shows he was on or who important he knew or how much money he made. In short, shape up or ship out. Shecker said he knew what they really meant. It was because he was Jewish. Cotton sighed and said no, it wasn't, and if there was one thing they didn't need around there, on top of everything else, it was a persecution complex. Shecker shouted they were Nazis. That burned Cotton. No, he said, they weren't. They had their own problems and merely wanted a little less yak and a little more peace and quiet in which to solve them. Shecker lost control Why didn't they call this camp what it really was, he screamed, a concentration camp? If they wanted him out, why didn't they just build an oven and gas him? Cotton groaned and made the mistake of turning his hack and Shecker jumped him. He was bigger and forty pounds fatter and soon had Cotton down and lay on him like a lump, pounding him till the others yanked them apart.

The incident cleared the air. Shecker settled down and began to be human. When he did lapse, being Miami Beach or putting on the persecution act, all they had to do was chorus "Gas 'im!" and he cut the comedy.

Large yellow letters against brown wood, the sign on the right side leaped into the headlights without warning. Teft braked and slewed onto gravel and then they were turned and through the open gate and away from fullhouse cams and mechanical bowling alleys and civilization and abruptly, marvelously, back into the night again and the West.

It was two thirty-six. They had left Box Canyon Boys Camp at eleven forty-eight and now, three hours and a bagged truck and some milk and a shoot-out later, they were practically there. The last three miles would be slow going, however, for this road, a dirt singletrack which dipped into gullies and dry washes, was so corduroy that the frame of the pickup chattered with vibration. The sensation here was one of breadth and elevation and the triviality of their vehicle, which, like some quadrupedal insect, explored the brow of the sleeping earth, feeling with the antennae of its headlights for something edible and finding only scrub oak and salt cedar and the manzanita bush. To assert themselves and their importance they turned radios up, producing a cacophony of "The Ten Commandments of Love" by Peaches and Herb and "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die" by Country Joe and the Fish.

They had descended into a dry wash and across a wooden bridge and were grinding over the far lip when the engine sputtered.

It was Shecker's lousy personality, though, that goaded the Bedwetters into their first feat. The fourth week of camp a movie played the Prescott drive-in which they wanted painfully to see. It was
The Professionals,
starring Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. The Apaches got to go of course, they were top tribe, but the Bedwetters had as much chance of seeing it as they had of winning a ballgame. For three nights in a row Shecker, who was accustomed to having his own New York way, swore that after lights out he was taking of and hiking into town and going to the late show. He did not, naturally. But the third night Cotton could bear no more of his mouth. All right, he said, can it and we'll all go, the damn scoring system's unfair so we'll beat it. And they did. After Wheaties was asleep they dressed, slipped down to the corral, saddled up, led horses out of camp and, rode the two miles to the drive-in entrance at the edge of Prescott. The manager wouldn't let them in at first, mounted, but it was a week night and the late show and there were only a few cars of neckers and after Shecker slipped him a twenty-dollar bill he sold them tickets. They rode in, tied horses to loudspeakers, bought popcorn and ice cream bars and hot dogs and corn chips and Cokes and enchiladas and sat down and enjoyed themselves totally. In the last reel the Camp Director drove in like a posse—the twofaced theater manager had probably phoned him—and made some uncharitable remarks about juvenile delinquency. But while he discoursed they took their sweet time mounting up and so contrived not to miss the ending. Back at camp, the Director warned them: pull a similar stunt and he'd expel them. The Bedwetters listened and looked at each other like Lancaster and Lee Marvin.

Teft floored it and pumped the handchoke. The engine responded and they bumped another hundred yards but no further. It conked out again, this time with a last carburetor gasp. Front and back, the six just sat there.

"Don't anybody say it," Teft said.

No one did.

"Don't even think it."

But everyone was.

"Maybe the wire's come unclipped," he said, and getting out, went round to the front of the truck, raised the hood, and extracting a flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, and had a superfluous look. Switching it off, he returned it to his pocket and let the hood down slowly, ceremoniously.

Through the windshield Cotton and Goodenow stared at him. From the bed, Shecker and the Lally brothers stared at him.

As though onstage, Teft stood self-consciously in the headlights. On his cap the silver eagle glittered. He began with a vagabond grin. "How about that?" he appealed. "I just never noticed the gauge. Believe it or not, I've bagged cars before and driven them dry and no sweat. I just wired a fresh one."

He lost his grin. "Destroyed," he said. "This really destroys me."

He gave up. Spreading his long arms he flapped them against his long legs in contrition. He opened his jacket to expose his chest.

"So I now offer myself. As a human sacrifice to the Gas God."

And with a low bow and a martyred expression he draped himself over the white altar of the hood. "You may now cut out my heart," he said, "and eat it."

Suddenly the stage went dark. Teft vanished. Cotton had pushed the headlight knob. It was the most unfortunate thing he could have done. For the night came down upon them. They cowered before it, and before the implications of an empty tank. Except for the ticking sounds of the engine cooling, they sat in a kind of stranded silence, hushed by the dark and this new, blabbering proof of their ineptitude.

"Oh, I am so sorry," Teft said. "I am just Christfully sorry."

"Sorry? You're sorry!" Cotton blasted. "One hell of a lot of good that does!"

Shecker and the Lally brothers jumped over the tailgate and Goodenow slid across the seat and out of the cab. But his lash cracked after them.

"Dings! Dings! Wheaties was right—we are dings! We can't do anything right and we've got no damn excuse for living and—"

He choked in midsentence. Curious, they gathered at the cab window. But he had merely gone into another of his catatonic fits. Cotton sat upright at the wheel, his jaw outthrust under the army helmet, one hand grafted to the gearshift as though he were driving the truck himself, as though by motive power of will and energy generated by rage he could refuel it and propel it onward.
His mother had been married three times and divorced three times and was now keeping a man ten years younger than she. Her favorite among the four was her second husband, a rich, grandfatherly manufacturer of ball bearings, for it was his generous settlement upon their divorce which gave her the house in Rocky River and the membership in the Cleveland Yacht Club and made her wealthy in her own right. The manufacturer was certainly John Cottons favorite, for he belonged to a fishing club in Quebec, and once, when John was ten, took mother and son up there after trout. They flew in from North Bay, Ontario, by float plane and landed on the lake near the cabin. The next morning John and his stepfather went fishing, the boy trolling with a Daredevil, the man paddling the canoe. One after another the boy fought and netted Quebec reds, brook trout so-called because the coffee color of the water stained their undersides a vivid crimson. They drifted near a cow moose and her calf breakfasting on lilypads. It was a serene and thrilling morning. This was the best place he'd ever been, the boy blurted suddenly, and the best time he'd ever had, and he wished it would never end
.

His stepfather smiled. "You're a jimdandy, Johnny. I wish I could keep you."

"Will you and her get divorced?" the boy asked.

"Probably. She needs a younger man. And money even more, her own money."

"I wish you wouldn't."

With the paddle his stepfather carved deep into the black of the lake. "Perhaps she'd sell you to me."

"She prob'ly would" the boy said.

When they returned to the cabin his mother, already bored with Quebec, wanted to fly back to Cleveland in the morning. Her son and husband objected. She made a scene and won.

That night ten-year-old John Cotton took a hammer and an awl, swam naked through icy water to the plane moored offshore, held his breath, ducked, and hammered a hole in the bottom of a float.

In the morning the plane lay over on one wingtip. The pilot had to hike through the bush to Deux Rivieres and phone North Bay for a mechanic. It required three days to make repairs and John Cotton caught another thirty-one trout
. Knowing they could not have pried him loose from the steering wheel and gearshift with a crowbar, the five outside the cab turned away until he was released from seizure.

When he was, when he had come to, the Bedwetters were already isolating. What had been, only minutes before, a functioning unit, had become a rabble. They blew about the pickup like tumbleweeds. Nomads in a wilderness of doubt, hither and yon they strayed, re-absorbed in self, their cause forgotten, each one tending the petty flock of his own anxieties. Cotton could have tied knots with their tensions. Had he been joker enough to honk the horn, they would have taken off for the moon like bigassed birds, sent into gabbling orbit. He listened to them. Here we go again, he sighed, gathering nuts in the night.

"I'm tired," said smaller cowboy hat, pillow under its arm and thumb in its mouth. "After all, I'm the youngest."

Arnold Palmer's golf cap was taking a leak into a manzanita bush. "Geez, I'm dying of malnutrition," it said. "We should've ordered those hamburgers to go. So it shouldn't have been a total loss."

"I'm hungrier than anybody," whined the Hopi headband. "You guys at least had supper and I lost mine."

The Afrika Korps maneuvered in circles around the truck. "I got us wheels and I drove us. Why do I have to be responsible for gas, too?"

"I didn't wanna come on this in the first place," griped the bigger cowboy hat. "Just because I'm stuck with a psycho brother."

"I miss the tube," said the smaller cowboy hat, ignoring bigger. "It's not healthy for you to go without TV too long."

"I wish I was in Vegas right now," said golf cap, buttoning up. "They cut the steaks special for my father in Vegas."

"When I get home," resolved the bigger cowboy hat, "I want a whole week tube time. Got my own color set."

"Hey, didn't I rupture that tire, though? Poom!" boasted Rommel. "How come I can't score on the range?"

"There's one show I like," admitted Hopi headband. "Because the guy's only got a little while to live. He might die any show. I'm sort of morbid that way."

They wearied, they sickened, they gave Cotton a royal pain in the rear. Okay, he said to himself, okay, let's just see. Let's turn off the damn set and see if they can survive on the real thing. Let's stick the horse opera back in the can and see if they're grown-up enough to live in this world. If they aren't, if they poop out now, the hell with the whole operation and the hell with them, too, because if they aren't, after this summer and all I've done for them, they really are born losers, they really are dings. But if they can, if they'll at least try to hack it without me, then they're over the rim, they've won the big game, and when they fly home they'll be okay, they can hack anything, even home.

He left the cab. Going round to the front end of the truck he took off his helmet and cocked a boot up on the bumper. Automatically the squad assembled and hunkered down around him quietly, as they had earlier, in the piney woods.

"I lay it on the line," he said. "Running out of gas wasn't Teft's fault, it was everybody's. But it really louses up the operation." They had only a mile more to go, he said, but now, with no wheels, they had to think about afterwards and consequences. There were two options. Hike back to U.S. 66, hitch a ride into Flag, wire another car and rod back to Prescott and the horses and they'd probably be back in camp and in bed before daylight. No one would know. No one would ever connect them. But go on, carry the thing through and lose that time and they'd surely hit camp in broad daylight, the Director would third-degree them about where they'd been and even if they clammed up, when what they'd pulled off made the newspapers he'd smell a rat—the stolen pickup in Prescott, abandoned out here, the locals in Flagstaff who'd identify it and them—and the Bedwetters would be in trouble, legitimate trouble, with the camp and the law and their folks. So that was it. Head for home now and maybe make it in time or go on and sure as hell get caught and was it worth it?

"So we're gonna vote again," he said. "I told you, I won't be head honcho this time. But before we vote, I want to say something you maybe haven't thought of. Sure, I know what we saw today—I mean yesterday. I know what it did to us. And we think tonight's something we have to do, or we wouldn't be here. But if we think it'll make us heroes or any movie junk like that—it won't. No one else will give a damn but us. In fact, it'll make a lot of people mad enough to shoot us. So what I'm saying is, it doesn't matter to anybody but us. And in three days, don't forget, we break up, camp's over. We'll prob'ly never see each other again."