Bless the Beasts & Children (13 page)

A hundred yards off, Teft stopped and periscoped his head. "Pardon me for asking, but I've never associated with buffalo much. What's the plan?"

"Let's get our signals straight," Cotton said. "From here on, I'll tap on the window. One means stop, two means go. Okay?"

"Great. But I mean now, what do we do right now? What's the protocol?"

Cotton hesitated, and even a second's doubt was enough to open the anxiety box.

"What if they charge us?" Goodenow wondered. "What if—"

"Look what they did to that pen," worried Lally 1. "If they can crack lumber like that, they could tip this whole truck over and—"

"What you do is," Shecker began, "go up to 'em and shake hands and say 'Soul Brother' in their ear—"

"Gas 'im," they said.

Cotton dropped the lid. "Can the chatter. The Game and Fish guy said they're practically pets and very hot for hay. And if this is the truck they haul it in, they'll know it."

"They don't know us, though," said Lally 2.

"Well, we gotta try," Cotton said impatiently. "The main thing is, don't bug 'em. They have to trust us. So no jumping around or talking. So listen, Teft, take it really slow, in the lowest gear you got. Head right into 'em."

Teft's ears cocked like a mule's. "Right into 'em?"

"Like we do it every day. When we're in the middle, and I tap once, stop."

"Stop? In the middle?"

"Okay," Cotton said, "everybody back here sit down right where you want to be for a while. And stay down. And stay loose."

Slowly they settled themselves on hay bales.

"Okay, Teft," Cotton said.

"Holy cow," Teft said.

He engaged low gear and inched toward the herd. The animals stopped grazing. Heads swung. Then they turned, the bulls first, to see and smell and classify. Perhaps they disbelieved what they saw.

Through the darkness toward them crept a monster. On its back it carried its young, a freight of whitefaced whippersnappers. One gripped a stick of steel and wood. Another held by a horn the noble bust of a king of their own kind.

For their part, the closer they came the less the Bedwetters believed what they were doing—entering a herd of monsters whose mood and power no man could assess. Of their own free, foolish will they were laying life and limb on the line.

Hood and bumper of the Judas truck intruded. The animals made way. The herd parted. In the middle, Teft heard a tap on the window at his back. He braked, and shoved the gearshift into neutral.

There was no sound except the panting of the exhaust, the random click of hoof on pebble. The buffalo drew near. Then buffalo surrounded the truck, bulls and cows, fierce horns and shaggy beards and great humps near enough to touch. Cotton, Shecker, Goodenow, Lally 1 and 2 sat on their bales like rigid digits. No one dared bat an eye or scratch an itch. They were truly frightened.

Beasts and boys considered each other. They smelled each other. And suddenly boys of fifteen, fourteen, and twelve were children once more. The breath of innocent animals blessed them. An emotion filled them, a tenderness that none of them had ever known. Peace descended on them, and they were not afraid. For a moment, or moments, it was as it had been in the beginning, before fear, before evil, before death, at the time of the creation, when the earth was new and living things flourished therein, when the earth was fair and all living things dwelt together as kindred. For a moment, or moments, beasts and children were friends, there in the sweetness and silence of the night, there in the calm and lovely fields of the Lord.

"Hello, buffalo."

Lally 2, the youngest, spoke to the beasts as he had spoken to his horse. To the thin pipe of his voice they listened patiently.

"Hello," he said. "Are you hungry? We're going to let you out. Then you can go anywhere and do anything. Just like you used to. We've got lots of hay in here. So come with us and eat. Come with us and nobody'll ever shoot you or hurt you again. Because we're going to let you go."

He pulled a fistful of hay from the unbound bale and dropped it over the side of the pickup. The nearest animal, a cow, lowered her head and began to eat.

The other boys did likewise. Tearing clumps of fodder they tossed them into the herd, and huge heads went down at once for food.

Cotton tapped twice on the glass behind him. The truck moved.

17

And the herd followed, plodding along alert for the next offering of hay. It was exactly as the state employee had told Cotton. These were practically barnyard buffalo, hell on the hoof if riled but born on the preserve and accustomed throughout their lives, when the natural pickings were slim, to being fed from a truck like cattle.

Cotton called down to Teft to keep an eye peeled for the fence.

Using the rifle, Shecker the strongman snapped the wire on all the bales. Then the boys made themselves comfortable, lolling on the bales with backs against the cab, pulling wisps and streamers and dropping them over the sides or sailing them into the air to keep the herd on the go. They pulled off boots, they ventilated feet, they wigwagged ecstatic toes.

"The BC," Goodenow said. Then he giggled. "The Before Christ!" And that gave them the yips. They were ravenous for laughter. They hugged each other, they rolled off the bales, they combed each other's hair with hay. Whether it was the spectacle of thirty Disney animals following them or the residual effects of airline whiskey or the transformation of ripsnort penbenders into contented cudchewers or because it was the first time in hours they could cut loose above a whisper, they had hysterics.

Sid Shecker made $40,000 a week playing Las Vegas. Nightly, after the second show, he stopped in the casino to shoot dice and lose large sums and panic Sammy's mother. "So I lose five thousand, I make a hundred times that a year, I should keep my health," Sid would defend himself. "When you got money in this country," he would say to her and the children, "to the
goyim
you're somebody. So you should remember. Money we got, somebody we are." Sammy's mother, however, was inconsolable. Sometimes she waked the boy at two in the morning and dressed him and sent him downstairs, where he stood in the hotel lobby near the crap tables, a tousled, drowsy reminder, in case his father should see him, of Sid Shecker's indebtedness to family and mortality
.

One night, after Sammy had waited an hour, Sid swept him along to the coffee shop in his train of agents, managers, admirers, and moochers. The famous comic was in a savage mood. He had just lost six G's, and although his retinue did its greasy best to divert him, Sid was inconsolable. Noting that his son was devouring a piece of chocolate pie, Sid Shecker offered a wager: fat his Sammy might be at twelve already, but he would bet a thousand dollars the boy could inhale a dozen pieces of pie in four minutes, or twenty seconds each, not counting the one before him. Those at the table quickly covered the bet. Two chocolate pies were brought and cut. Watches were synchronized, time called, and Sammy dug in, determined to please his father. During the third piece he began to cry. His fingernails needed biting, he wanted to beg for lemon or cherry or coconut, but there was no opportunity between swallows. His belly churned with woe, his cheeks and chin were martyred with chocolate and whipped cream and tears. At the first bite into the eleventh piece Sammy yielded his fork. As the crowd at the table averted its face, Sid Shecker marched him to the elevator. There, on the way up to their suite, father gave son a piece of paternal advice: always play it big. So you gambled. Gamble big. So you were a
fresser,
a pig. Be a big
fresser.

The Bedwetters laughed more than they needed to. Hilarity they perverted into a mechanism of defense, a step backward from the brink of nervous exhaustion on which they teetered. But it betrayed them. It pushed them over. And when they hit bottom they bounced up with the wibbles and came down with the eeks. Their ears turned into ashtrays, their crotches puckered into coin purses, and though they straddled the bales again and resumed tending the herd, they operated out of a trance. Even their conversation was unstructured. Snatches of memory, handfuls of anecdote were dropped over the sides of the pickup or tossed into the night of no moon. Only now and then were they coherent, even to each other.

"What day's it?" someone asked.

It had been years since they galloped out of Box Canyon Boys Camp.

"That book I read," said Shecker. "About the big dance. Also it said they used to stop trains and everybody got out and shot buffalo for the fun of it."

"What were you jokers laughing about?" Teft asked.

They shrugged. He had writhed himself through the cab window and seated himself on the sill, head and body outside, long legs inside. He steered with a boot-heel.

"How can you drive that way?" someone asked him.

"Perfectly."

"Nineteenth of August," someone guessed. "The day it is."

They could scarcely recall stealing the first pickup in Prescott.

Cotton grubbed in his jacket pocket, struck a match, lit another cigar, his second of the summer, and held the match to his wrist. "Geez, it's five-ten. Last time I looked it was three o'clock. We've dinked away two whole hours. Any minute now it's daylight and we're in trouble."

"Relax," someone said.

"Relax! I will when they're through that fence and not before!"

"I mean, what day of the week is it?"

The incident with the gunslingers and their hotrod in Flagstaff was fantasy.

Cotton drew on his cigar. "You guys see why letting 'em out of the pens wasn't enough. When they're out this time, they're really out. After tonight there'll be thirty buff loose in this state. You might see one anytime. A real live buffalo, like in the old days. We're doing something for the West. Which has done one hell of a lot for us."

"Wednesday?"

"I think."

"Saturday we go home."

"Home," they said. The word was meaningless.

"Besides," Teft said. "I was feeling alienated in the cab. From society. What was so funny?"

"I can see some old fud from Joisey driving along," said Shecker. "Look, Myrtle, a buffalo! And she flips."

"My stepfather told my mother, I heard him," said Goodenow. "To make up her mind if I was a boy or a girl."

"I wonder how our horses are," said Lally 2. "I hope asleep."

"Or some real hippies from California," said Lally 1. "On their way East tripped out on speed or something and they see a buffalo. Hey, man, where we at? What we on?"

"Little kids, too, seeing one," said Lally 2. "It'll be better for them than TV."

The truck growled along in some low gear, the herd in its wake, heads bobbing as though in line in some crazy cafeteria. Cotton was up every couple of minutes, searching over the cab into the dark reaches. The fence obsessed him, and the imminence of morning. They must have covered two miles by now, he insisted, they had to have.

"Two mph," said Teft, "is not exactly burning up the track. No sweat. She can't stall and you can't even cut the ignition, because she's wired twice. Mine and Hank Ford's."

"Cotton was right," said Goodenow. "To make us finish no matter what. It's good for our characters."

"It's like Ralph," Teft agreed.

"Who?" someone asked.

"Ralph. My cousin's piranha."

18

"What's a piranha?" asked Lally 2.

"A fish. Only it eats meat."

"Don't mention food," said Shecker.

"I've got this cousin goes to Amherst," Teft explained. "He bought this baby piranha and named it Ralph and took it to school and kept it in an aquarium in his room and every day fed it a fresh goldfish from the dimestore. Goldfish really turn a piranha on."

"Go easy on that hay," Cotton warned.

"There's some little people who live in our sauna," said Lally 2, "under the rocks. They make the steam."

"So Ralph got bigger and bigger and needed more goldfish and my cousin was running back and forth to the dimestore buying goldfish and destroying his academic life. He loved Ralph but this spring he knew they had to part. So he put him in a pail and drove him over to some girls' college around there where they have a goldfish pond and dumped him in. The pond was loaded with these big, gross goldfish."

Goodenow propped the trophy between his legs, holding it upright by the horns. He gazed into the red, ferocious eyes under Teft's bullethole.

"I said go easy on the hay," Cotton said. "In case you haven't noticed, we're down to under two bales. Start rationing them."

"Well, when Ralph got into that pond with those gross goldfish, he went berserk. He turned gourmet. All he ate out of them was their fat bellies. One bite, gulp, one belly, and every morning there'd be dead goldfish floating around with their bellies missing. Which was where old Ralph made his mistake."

"What mistake?" someone asked.

"Tell me," Goodenow said to the trophy. "Did you live up here? Were you Superbull? Do you appreciate what we're doing for your friends and relatives?"

"Because the gardeners at the girls' college knew something was fishy. They took the rest of the goldfish out and poisoned the pond and old Ralph went to his reward. Because he made a piranha pig of himself."

They pondered. To analyze anything made their skulls ache, and the irrelevance of the story irked them. "Teft," they snarled.

"Yup."

"What's the point?"

"Point?"

"I haven't seen the Chicago Cubs play all summer," said Lally 2. "I've been culturally deprived."

"The message!" they bawled. Teft frequently let them hang by their fingernails. "What's the message!"

"Oh," said Teft. "Well, if old Ralph had devoured whole goldfish instead of being picky, the gardeners might not have caught on for a long time. Ralph might be alive and well and living in that pond right now. But he didn't. So the moral is, don't just eat bellies."

"Bellies!"

"I wish I had a whole chocolate pie," said Shecker.