Bless the Beasts & Children (2 page)

"Get 'im!" Cotton gasped. "Fan out!"

Dodging trees they tore into the woods, chasing this way and that until, emerging from shadow into a clearing, they pulled up short. There was Lally 2, charred, smelly pillow under arm and radio pulsing in a jacket pocket, seated on a boulder looking at them and sucking his thumb. They would have pounced on him had Cotton not ordered them to hold it, he'd talk to the kid alone a minute. He walked on ahead.

"Hullo," Cotton said.

Lally 2 tightened hold on his pillow.

"Nice night, huh?" Cotton asked.

Lally 2 was twelve years old and not talking.
Of the sixteen rooms in his home in Kenilworth, Illinois, his favorite was the seventeenth, the Oom room. It wasn't really a room at all, but a sauna his father had built into the house and forgotten to use. His father and mother were young and beautiful people and had inherited "old money," third-generation wealth. Every year they separated once or twice, began divorce proceedings, then reconciled and jetted off to ski at Chamonix or somewhere or to yacht in the Virgin Islands or somewhere. It gave them a game to play. But while they were gone, the house, except for his older brother and the governess and maids and butler and chauffeur and cook, seemed lonely and empty. When he would have a bad dream and wake in the lonely, empty house, Billy Lally would take his foamrubber pillow and creep downstairs into the sauna and turn the temperature to 160 degrees and curl up on the wooden bench with his head on the pillow. Soon the Ooms, little people who lived under the flat rocks and made steam, would come out, hundreds and hundreds of them, and snuggle with him and help him to sleep safe and warm till a maid or the butler found him in the morning. Frequently he caught a cold from sleeping in the sauna, but to be warm and safe in the night was worth a cold. Billy Lally had never told anyone about his friends, the Ooms.

Cotton hunkered down opposite. What the boy had been exposed to that day had probably hit him harder than any of them, Cotton thought, since he was the youngest, and having withdrawn under his bed at lights out, Lally 2 was still under, even here in these woods. He would have to be gentled out.

"At least turn your radio down," Cotton said, "so you can hear me."

Lally 2 turned it down.

"Listen," Cotton said, "we do stuff together, not by ourselves any more." He tucked his dogtags under his T-shirt. "So let's go back now, what say?"

Lally 2 removed his thumb. "You make me go back and as soon's you're asleep I'll take off again. I mean it."

"What if I order you not to?"

"I don't care."

"You could have got hurt, Lally Two, really hurt."

"I don't care."

Cotton picked up a pebble, tossed it, caught it, dropped it. Looking over his shoulder, he raised an arm and waved the others over. They came and squatted. As perspiration dried on their bodies they shivered and hugged themselves to keep warm.

"Lally Two and I've been talking," he said. "He says if we make him go back he'll just take off again. I tried to tell him it's—"

"Don't you blame me!" interrupted Lally 2, unjustly accused. "We oughta all go! You been thinking about it, too, ever since we got back from there this afternoon. We oughta all go and you know it!"

They knew it. They had been obsessed from the moment Goodenow urped his supper, and later, walking alone, they mulled it, sealing themselves into envelopes of down and wool and nylon they could not hide from it, in sleep it was torn from their lips together with the gibberish of protest. It boiled in a boy's veins. It rocketed a boy's imagination into the outer space of impossibility. But more than a chance, more than a challenge, it was at the same time an obligation they were not sure they were experienced enough, that they had hair enough, to assume. Hunkered down in the piney woods, hugging themselves, they weighed the risks against what they had already accomplished in seven weeks: a midnight movie ridden to, a raid on the entire camp carried off, the race to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

"I gotta admit," said Shecker.

"If we could pull it off," Teft mused, "it would be the biggest."

"Yeah if," said Lally 1.

"We have to!" Goodenow burst out. "And I'm ready right now!"

Cotton stood up. "Hold your water. Let's not go off half-cocked. Use your heads—how'd we get there? Ride? A hundred miles one way?"

"Hitch," said Lally 2. "I was going to."

"Six of us? Who'd pick up six kids the middle of the night?"

"Take a truck," Teft said quietly.

"Hah. Who'd drive?"

"I would."

"You can drive?"

"Yup."

"Have you ever actually?"

"Actually. Give me wheels and I'm the Red Baron."

They were astonished. That anyone fourteen years old should for seven weeks have concealed an ability to drive a car was incredible.

"Oh," Cotton said. "Well. Okay, how long would it take, a hundred miles?"

"Two hours, about, each way."

"Four." Cotton figured out loud. "It must be eleven-thirty. Twelve, one, two, three—and say an hour to do it. Four-thirty we're back here. We have to be back in the sack again by daylight." He began to pace behind them.

"How about it?" Goodenow asked.

"We never miss," Shecker said.

"We have to go," said Lally 2.

"We're professionals," bragged his brother.

"Bullcrap," Cotton said.

Bending, he scooped up another pebble, and winding up, fired a bigleague fastball into the nearest tree. With a squawk and a whoosh, something flew out and over them, flapping wings. It scared them out of a year's growth. They flopped backwards or seized each other or leaped in panic, then recovered themselves and stood about like morons, stubbing the ground and grinning.

"That's what I mean," Cotton said scornfully. "A bird and we blow our minds. I don't know if we're ready for anything this big."

"We're not now, we never will be," Teft said.

"Okay, but compared to this, everything else we've done was peanuts. We could get our ass in a sling on this. I'm serious."

He had a point. They were silent. Lally 2 turned off his radio. Worms of doubt worked in them. They could do miracles now, but Lally 1 could also recall the first powwow, and Shecker, the raid they had flubbed. Cotton would never forget himself on the pitching mound another time. Under the best of circumstances theirs was a tenuous, temporary association. Apply stress, demand a rational decision, flush a bird unexpectedly from a tree, and they came down with a fast case of the fidgets.

Box Canyon Boys Camp enrollment was drawn from the affluent metropolitan suburbs of the East and Middle West and restricted, with rare exceptions, to boys between thirteen and sixteen years of age. The fee for the eight-week session extending from late June to late August was sixteen hundred dollars, plus air fare. "Send Us a Boy—We'll Send You a Cowboy!" was the camp slogan. To this end each camper was assigned his own horse to ride and tend. The real means to this end, however, was competition. Boys they might come—immature, overprotected dudes with television for brains and smog for character—but men in the making they would go. Competition would hone them down and tall them up. Colicky yearlings they might have been, but competition and eight weeks and sixteen hundred dollars were guaranteed to deliver the goods their parents had bought and paid for: three dozen whipthin, deadeye, leathergut, spursharp, button-lip Westerners.

By the end of the first week the enrollment had indeed shaken itself down into six teams in the six cabins. A natural selection of age and cruelty and regionalism and kindred interest had begun the process. Preliminary testing did the rest. Early trials in riding, archery, riflery, crafts, swimming, and field sports soon winnowed the wheat from the chaff, the achievers from the ineffectual. It was to be expected that any summer would single out a misfit or two, an isolate here, an emotionally disturbed there, but Cottons group was unique. They moved in with him because no one else would have them. They were known variously as the Weirds, the Screwups, the Locos. They were the bottom of the barrel.

When they came to bat in their first baseball game, for example, they failed to score. They couldn't hit a bull in the behind with a bushel basket. When they took the field, Cotton pitched, Shecker caught. Lally 1 played first base, Goodenow third, Teft went to left, and Lally 2 to right field. It was the funniest athletic event the camp had ever seen. Behind the plate, Shecker ducked pitches rather than catching them, claiming Cotton threw too hard and hurt his hands. Easy grounders dribbled through Lally 1 and Goodenow as though through a sieve. Teft misjudged a fly ball to deep left, disappeared into the pines after it, and never returned. Lally 2 dropped a pop fly, sat down on the ground, and sucked his thumb. When the score was 21-0 and the stands hooted, Cotton charged into them, attacked two boys twice his size, got a loose tooth and a bloody nose for his efforts, and the game was over.

"This is one show I'm not ramrodding," Cotton told them. "We're gonna vote. Think it over—today's Tuesday, the last week, and we go home Saturday, we go home winners. So if we try this, nothing or nobody stops us. So you be sure."

He gave them a minute, then cleared his throat. "Okay, we vote. Everybody has to be for it. Everybody or we don't go. Okay, all in favor raise your right hand."

It was unanimous.

"What about you?" piped Lally 2.

"Yeah," the others said, "what about it?"

Cotton came among them, holding back, and they bunched up around him in the dark woods, shivering and uncertain until, that close, they could almost smell his pride in them, his excitement and desire. Then he let them have it, his voice low but so charged with passion that it prickled the hair on their heads.

"You damn betcha. Let's go, men."

3

They champed at the bit. They would have double-timed again but Cotton marched them back along the sand road, telling them to save their hots, they would need them before this night was over, with a finger testing his loose tooth and thinking.

On the rise overlooking camp he gathered them. "This is like a guerrilla operation," he said, "or a patrol or something. We've gotta plan it and time it and everybody do his part. First, we get dressed—and dress warm, because it's three thousand feet higher up there, it'll be cold as a witch's tit. Bring your flashlights and anything else you want, I guess, if we're taking a truck. Circle, don't let anybody see us. I'll give you guys five minutes to be in the truck shed ready to go. Any questions? Okay, spread out and move out."

Lally 1 tried to sneak a letter home. It would not have reached his parents in any case, since they had just reconciled and shipped their sons to camp and jetted off for a camera safari in Kenya. Cotton caught him and tore up the letter. Stephen Lally, Jr., had a temper tantrum. Screaming at the top of his lungs he rose from his bed on hands and knees and rocked, butting his head against the wall. The others went to supper without him. When they returned, he had killed all the pets. Goodenow's lizards and beetles and spiders and snake, which he kept in cardboard boxes under his bed, Stephen Lally, Jr., had let out and stomped on the floor. His brother Billy's pets were a hoptoad and a baby rabbit, the latter crippled because one of its hind legs had been partially bitten off, probably by a coyote. The hoptoad he squashed, the baby jackrabbit he cornered and, pretending it was his baby brother, battered to death with a branding iron
.

One by one they deployed through the trees, roundabout the chow cabin to their own. Wheaties sawed wood as raucously as ever. Cotton was first outside again, and chose a route by the cabin of the Comanches, taking cover between pine boughs to evade a boy sleepwalking to the latrine, then behind the crafts cabin to the truck shed where he waited, tugging impatiently at the chin strap of the army helmet liner he had bought in a surplus store in Cleveland. Eventually, one after another the rest lurked into moonlight. They were dressed in what was almost the camp uniform: blue jackets with BC in white letters on the backs, wool shirts under, Levi's slim in the leg and tight in the crotch with concho belt buckles, sweat sox, and cowboy boots. But he could tell them apart by their headgear. It was the fashion that summer to affect freak headgear. Goodenow wore a Hopi headband he had beaded himself; Shecker a golf cap, bass-ackward, given to his father by Arnold Palmer after a round at Palm Springs; the Lally brothers expensive, identical ten-gallons, the wide brims of which, broken by rain and neglect, sagged over their ears; while Teft was made even taller by a billed Afrika Korps cap he had dug up in Greenwich Village.

As soon as Teft joined them, Shecker went as usual into his James Cagney impersonation, hissing, "Ah, you dirty Kraut! You dirty, dirty Kraut!"

Cotton shushed him, then noticed Lally 2 had his pillow, which was unnecessary enough, but also that Goodenow had lugged along the buffalo head, which was stupid. "Do you have to bring that?"

Goodenow pouted. "You said anything we want. And we've only got three more days to keep it."

Cotton shrugged. He asked Teft which pickup to take, the Dodge or one of the two Chevys. Teft whispered it made no difference to him, they all had keys.

"I didn't know they leave the keys in."

"I did. I keep an eye on keys. Anyway, who'd take a truck?"

They settled on the Dodge, stowed pillow and buffalo head and flashlights in the bed, and with Teft in the cab, experimenting clutch and gearshift into neutral, they pushed the truck out of the shed. It was agreed they must push it through the pines and up and along the sand road far enough to start the engine without waking anyone.

It was easy going past the chow cabin and the counselors' cabins and the Director's, and the five of them managed enough momentum to run the Dodge halfway up the rise, but no further. Teft jumped out to help. Grunting, they pushed heads down, twelve hands against the tailgate, boots delving into sand, but could not toil the truck another inch. Shecker advised starting the engine and barreling away and being long gone before anyone could react. Cotton muttered not to be a damn fool, they'd be followed for sure or the police called or something. They strained against the pickup for minutes it seemed, and as they tuckered out, as despair sapped them more quickly, even, than exertion, one by one they dropped out, winded, till only Cotton's intransigence held the vehicle in place.